by Josep Pla
Though these inner exchanges at the Pensione Fiorentina were perhaps not the politest, I found them very helpful in accustoming my ear to the various dialects of the peninsula.
Spadafora’s recommendation turned out to be highly beneficial. The management treated me very kindly and the manager sometimes came into my bedroom to pass the time of day. This gentleman – a German from the south – was in his forties, on the thin side, fair, blue-eyed and sallow-skinned with big, transparent ears that stuck out; his head had been shaved all over, except for over his forehead which was furnished with rather a rakish commercial toupé. He wore the black morning coat and striped trousers managers of such places tend to wear. He spoke very precisely, in a staccato syncopated style to avoid confusion and define the limits of the stream of topics rehearsed. His favorite gesture was to enumerate his statements and arguments by counting them on his fingers and then conclude a subject by moving his hands as if an invisible plumb-line was dangling in front of him. He always held his thumb next to his little finger ready to count and sometimes described a circle in the air, dividing it into angles and sections as if he was slicing a watermelon. Each slice was a topic … His passion for precision succeeded in giving his trivial conversation a grandiose ring, and among his acquaintances – not to mention his clientele – he was thought to be a man of the golden mean with original opinions. One couldn’t deny that he was strong on method.
As I said, the boarding house was international, though the clientele was essentially German. In my time, however, there were lots of Russian émigrés and the language they spoke – as wistful and sugary as jam – was often to be heard in the small sitting room and dismally dark passageways.
Mommsen the historian figured as the most distinguished occasional lodger in the annals of that boarding house. This fact was the Pensione Fiorentina’s crowning glory. The manager boasted how he tied the great man’s shoelaces one day when the sirocco had brought on an attack of rheumatism. After he’d said that, I took the opportunity to put a question to him.
“If you tied his shoelaces,” I said, “you probably noticed his feet. I’ve heard that Mommsen’s feet were huge, very fat and quite extraordinary, the most impressive feet a historian may ever have had. Could you confirm this was in fact true?”
The manager looked at me sternly and refused to answer. I realized that Mommsen was untouchable in that household, that he was a holy of holies, and memories of him were idealized and embellished and simply floated on air.
One day the manager told me an anecdote that highlighted the historian’s character.
When Mommsen was in Rome, he worked in the Vatican Library. One afternoon he was in his usual place in the library when the Pope walked in on the spur of the moment, with none of the rituals of protocol. When his presence was noted, everyone stood up. Only Mommsen remained seated at his table as if nothing had changed. The Pope crossed the vast reading room and entered the Prefect’s office, keen above all to pass unperceived. Within two hours the whole of Rome was talking about what had happened. The manager’s features glowed with the most ardent admiration, as he asked me: “What do you think? Could one have shown finer mettle, been firmer and more single-minded? Oh, what a man that Mommsen was! A proper German of the old school! Don’t you agree?”
“No, I don’t. I think what he did was quite deplorable, an act of complete discourtesy. One can be as anti-Papist as you like but Mommsen, in the Vatican Library, wasn’t in his own home, and when you are in someone else’s and the master enters, good manners require that you stand up …”
The manager stiffened, glared at me, muttered a few unintelligible words and changed the subject.
A few days later, it became evident that the manager championed imperialist ideas, he spoke admiringly to me about the war.
“I never studied military matters,” he said, “and I really regret that, believe me. There’s nothing like war, it is life at its fullest, most instinctive and cheerful. One lives by the day and past and future don’t exist. Now that those effeminate hairdressers in Paris are in charge, how can one expect the world to be right? You know: one … two … three … etc.”
Initially, I found the manager amusing; when he became bellicose, he was a pain. His precise, numbered conversation, his gestures, plumb-lines and rules began to pall. I tried to contradict him – relatively persistently – and not just let him spout on. It was like lighting tinder. He became furious when I raised my first objections and then wilted completely. His method quivered on his lips. Finally he gave me a fierce, pitying look and left my bedroom, slamming the door behind him. From then on I only saw him behind his desk, when I went in or out of the front door. We nodded blankly at each other by way of a greeting.
The boarding house had two very pleasant chambermaids: Ida and Rosetta. Ida was tall and thin and from the Piedmont; she was rather undernourished, with long, slender legs, luscious brown tresses, dry lips and the most beautiful dark, impish eyes that brimmed with life. She lived in a constant state of nervous tension, was astonishingly lithe, and desperate to smoke Macedonia cigarettes.
“A cigarette, a cigarette … Ida would say every two or three minutes peering round my door, a pitiful expression in her bright, mischievous eyes.
I gave her one and she lit up. She smoked like a child, staring hard at the flame. Two dimples came to her cheeks. Then, surprising herself, she exhaled the smoke through her nose, with an expression of ineffable delight, gripping the cigarette in one hand and supporting the back of her neck with the other, elbow in air, like a picture postcard odalisque. Ida felt passionate about her smokes and liked to live inside a fleeting pinky blue cloud.
“Well then, Ida,” I’d ask, “are you deeply in love?”
“Oh, l’amore!” she’d go, grinning suddenly, her arms aloft, turning round, swinging her head back, her hair in a tangle, showing off her white, warm bosom. Then she’d come over and whisper softly: “What do you think? I think love is irresistible …”
“The wife of a friend of mine is of a similar mind …”
I said that frivolously in keeping with the situation, but she seemed to think I was being spiteful.
Ida and Rosetta weren’t what you could call friends. Perhaps at root they couldn’t see eye to eye. They spied on each other and the manager had achieved a fine equilibrium in the service on the first floor via their bickering.
Rosetta came from Venice. She was thirty-five, tall, well-built, wore dark clothes and had gray eyes, a small nose, and red hair. Ida was like quicksilver. Rosetta was the quiet, placid sort. Ida was noisy and nervy. Rosetta walked down the passageways without making a sound.
“Just imagine!” said Ida talking about her. “She’s separated from her husband …”
“Can’t you understand that?”
“I can understand everything except a woman who leaves her husband. What does Rosetta have that other women don’t?”
“I know, I know … but life holds so many mysteries …”
“I think she’s an evil woman and that her husband is right. She is hypocritical and selfish, cattiva.”
“How can you possibly know? Has she ever hurt you?”
“No, but that red hair of hers can only mean trouble. Besides, she’s tedesca …”
Rosetta said her companion was apensierata and perfidious, though she said that so calmly, so imperturbably she might have been talking about the weather.
Ida tried to treat me with a degree of complicity. She’d come into my bedroom, ask for a cigarette, light it and sit on a chair. If I didn’t feel like talking or was working, she smoked in silence and gave me the occasional quizzical look, as if she was in the presence of a rare, harmless but sizable animal. The sight of my table strewn with books and papers was probably what most inspired respect in her.
When people in Italy see a gentleman behind a table full of books and papers, they exclaim gravely and pityingly, “È un signore che lavora col cervello!”
“You’re
always reading …” Ida said one late afternoon. “Do you like reading so much?”
“Less by the day. What about you?”
“I’ve never liked reading. I don’t have the patience, reading bores me. Books all say the same things …”
“Do you like Rome, Ida?”
“No, Rome is all churches. There are one or two in my town, Asti, naturally, but there they organize first-rate afternoon dances and the wine is frizzante and really good …”
Ida was aware of everything that happened in the boarding house, of when people came and went: she was an alert nosy parker and could keep you up-to-date on all fronts.
“Today,” she said one afternoon, “the Viennese lady received a wonderful bouquet of flowers!
“Which Viennese lady?”
“The one living opposite your room in number eleven. She’s young and beautiful, but very delicate …”
“Is she ill?”
“She’s not left her room for a month. She has a nurse. She spends her days reading on the sofa.”
“So who is this lady? Is she married? Is she single?”
Ida shrugged her shoulders and then replied: “She comes from Vienna. She receives a large bouquet of flowers every day and lots of presents. Yesterday she was brought a wonderful gold ring.”
“Doesn’t she have visitors?”
“Not one. Her nurse never leaves her. She sees the doctor. Sometimes the Monsignore who lives on the fourth floor pays her a visit … perhaps he’s her confessor.”
“So why does she live here? She could probably afford to live in a grand hotel.”
Ida didn’t reply.
After that conversation I began to feel vaguely curious about the lady who lived in number eleven. When I walked down the passage, I’d glance at her door. It was almost always shut and I never heard a noise inside. Once it happened to be open and I took a brief look. A few days later, at dusk, the door was open wider still and I saw the lady in question.
At the back I saw a large window that let in the dull light from the cul-de-sac overlooked by that part of the building. The lady was lying down, as if in a fainting fit – her forehead lolling backwards on an ottoman, surrounded by cushions, eyes shut and arms dangling down, as if they were tired. Diluted by the gray glow from outside, the blue electric light fell on her face, blurring her features. I thought she looked like a woman in her thirties, tall, svelte, and in her prime. Her ethereal, transparent gold hair seemed particularly magnificent.
My café in Rome has always been the Caffé Greco, Via Condotti. It is a quiet, peaceful café, with customers – especially at certain times of day – accustomed to making the least noise possible. In that sense it seems more like a northern European café, and if rain streamed down the windows more often, the illusion would be perfect. But Rome in fresh watercolors isn’t the norm. Piranesi is more in abundance.
I sat at the back of the café, in the rectangular room under the skylight. In the early afternoon a ghostly, rather tense, sour light penetrated the thick glass panes in the ceiling: the dawn light of late-risers, a rather sad, empty dawn, without a hint of pink. The scant customers using the café at that time tended to be foreign clerics. Once they’d sat down on a red velvet bench, they’d light up a heavy clerical pipe or cigar in a holder opposite an espresso and glass of cold water.
My companion in that café was usually the Count de Logotete. Don Antoni Logotete – for that’s what he called himself – was a slightly built old man, who was beginning to wrinkle, with an almost imperceptible hint of a hunchback. He dressed superbly and always looked fresh out of the box. He had a few wisps of white hair, blue eyes, thin lips and nose, an insect’s hands, large transparent ears, and a nasal voice that quivered like a kid-goat’s.
He had lived in Madrid for many years and was married to a distinguished Madrid lady, a very silent person who seemed to prefer a life of solitude and memories to mingling with the madding crowd. The lady’s temperament was much appreciated by her husband who repaid her silence and the freedom she gave him with trite, tender clichés.
Logotete spoke Spanish with an elegant, ceremonial diction and the grammatical perfection of a paper-bound academic. His phrasing was sometimes so perfect there was no way one could understand him. It was a language devoid of character or the charm of exceptions and irregularity; it was enameled and embalmed. At any rate he seemed to cherish good memories of our country and, as he said, his final expectation in life was to die in the country house his wife owned among the pine groves in the province of Cuenca. Though gossip had it that the house and its pine groves were a pure fantasy of his own making, since the countess, in terms of property, had barely ever had anything grander than a Madrid boarding house to her name.
He was a genuine Palaiologos, a pure Greek from Byzantium, related to Maurice Paléologue, the famous French ambassador, who held that position in Saint Petersburg at the tragic time when war declared in 1914. His father had been the Greek minister in Paris and knew Lord Byron and Capodistria. He had received an outstanding education in France and Germany and was a man who belonged to an extinct species: a one hundred percent European. He possessed the most intricately elegant Latin that has ever been constructed in this ignorant era, a Latin the Monsignori in Rome found too perfect in a layman and thus suspected him of being a follower of Voltaire. His polyglot knowledge of living languages was almost criminal, and, apart from European languages, his family languages were Turk and Modern Greek – though he could never speak them to his wife. He had received a legal training, and his French and German universities had accepted his famous theses on the Pandects when he was a student. He belonged to the historical school and venerated Savigny and Fustel de Coulanges as his masters. Though an adept of a particular school, however, the count never tried to resolve his problems by following the principles he theoretically considered to be definitive and set in marble. He was an empiricist in practice and was fond of saying that principles are only of use when one is ill or has lots of money.
When he came into his substantial inheritance, he purchased a stable of racehorses he took to Ostend. That led him to enjoy a markedly mundane life of leisure that was notoriously at odds with the traditionally conservative principles he advocated as an academic. The truth is his mind swung between contradictions that he found impossible to resolve for many years until the German invasion in 1914 swept away like a deluge racetracks, stables, horses, bookmakers, and top hats. He then began a vagabond life trying out fresh options. In Spain he met the person who became his countess. In Argentina he devoted himself to cattle-breeding. He was Greece’s commercial attaché – with little in the way of commerce – in Portugal, until he fetched up in Rome as an old man with little in the way of cash, which is where I made his acquaintance.
From the very first I was under the impression that Logotete’s material problems in the Eternal City had been stressful and various. Nothing is grimmer in this kind of city than pressing problems of that nature. He lived in a room – with the right to a kitchen – in a dingy, down-at-heel palace on Via Borgogna, a labyrinth of a place owned by Prince Colonna. He lived by giving private lessons. One day advertisements appeared in shop windows on Corso in which the count offered the citizens of Rome and foreign communities lessons in Sanskrit, Turkish, Greek, and Latin. It was depressing to see a man who had professed such affection for purebred horses and beautiful women transmuted into a teacher of dead languages. The roast-chicken hue of the venerable stone of ancient Rome made the spectacle even more woeful, because ancient stones provide an incentive to get on with life. Be that as it may, his teaching, though not a failure, didn’t allow him very much leeway. Enough to visit twice a day one or other of those Italian bars that are so metallic and shiny, with shelves full of green, yellow, pink, or orangey aperitifs, eat two chicken croquettes, and drink a small glass of cherry-colored wine. These croquettes were always the target of fierce criticism in Italy, their chicken content being held to be dubious, and, in an
y case, most deficient.