by Josep Pla
We once argued about Catalan cooking in a small restaurant opposite the cathedral in Ulm.
“Our cuisine is remarkable,” I said, “because it is based on a general principle: it is a cuisine that tends very emphatically to serve up meat in an intense, concentrated shape. Subsequently, our meat stew is an exception, possibly an unnecessary form of expansion and evaporation.”
My friend was eating a healthy portion of hare with sauerkraut. He replied as lively and naturally as ever.
“Our cuisine is remarkable,” he said, “for the reasons you have mentioned and for one that is quite contrary. In matters where the result is what counts above all, as is the case with cuisine now, it is childish to theorize. In the field of cooking as in ethics I am more interested in consequences than in principles, in effects rather than in causes …”
Xammar’s intellect probably works the most efficient way possible. He belongs to the school of life and is fascinated by the struggle to understand the contradictory workings of human nature. If he has to choose between the tendency to rationalism in French culture and the acute empiricism of the English, he prefers the latter, because it adapts to life more readily. His forebears – the Xammars are from Ametlla del Vallès – were attorneys and jurists and some even took their love of reality to the point of writing about private law. My friend’s nose, mouth, and eyes came straight out of the great eras of humanism: they could fit perfectly in the Mémoires of Saint-Simon, one of the supreme chroniclers. His head merits a wig and his body, a dress coat. His entire carcass is rich, dense, complex, voluminous, and human. While almost everyone thinks in order to eat, Xammar eats in order to activate his brain. “Dr. Turró maintains,” he told me one day, “that the origin of knowledge is hunger. This is certainly true in terms of everyday knowledge. True knowledge begins when it is time for coffee, after lunch, of that you can be sure.” Perhaps he is basically a skeptic, not a passive, wishy-washy skeptic, but the forthright, enthusiastic variety. His vocation is clear: argumentation, that is, diplomacy. I have often wondered where my friend might have ended up with these traits if he could have worked on matters he felt passionately about rather than on things that didn’t interest him: if he has performed so many miracles with a few pages and a few ideas from other people, what might he have achieved if driven by his own passions?
When he went to work for Auswärtiges Amt, his immediate superior asked him: “Have you ever written a book, Herr Xammar?”
“Yes, sir, I’ve written other people’s books …”
He is a man who will die unpublished, a wanderer, a dreamer out on a limb.
To be schooled by life means one is excessively obsessed by the present. This is a boon and a tragedy. Happiness belongs to those driven by nostalgia or imagination, those who live in the past or the future. They are havens that offer protection and support. Xammar’s mental processes don’t incline him towards these comfort zones. The lessons of experience or lyrical, random anticipations of the future don’t seem to spur him on. He witnesses a constant present that grates on live flesh and the faculties of the mind like sandpaper. If this painful attachment to the present is balanced by an ostentatious display of vanity, it may become tolerable. However, if the cart has to roll in all weathers, time begins to drag. In this case, to avoid being swallowed up, there is only one cure: reach a decent, functional level of intelligent insight. My colleague seems to manage this; perhaps he followed the routine we have so laboriously described.
Conversations with him made me feel things few people have been able to make me feel: I saw him grow physically and soar when confronted by specific declarations. If his presence is pervasive, he expands in conversation. I sometimes felt like grabbing him by the jacket.
“Some people,” I told him, “go for a walk with their stick and their dog. You should go for a ride in a balloon, or at least stroll with a real lion on a lead …”
But he only had a cat. It was a very strange cat. Its name was Mauzi. We all loved it dearly. It was deserved. Tassin the revolutionary socialist Menshevik possibly had his reservations. Perhaps he thought it was a cat corrupted by excessively bourgeois lethargy, a cat that was too eccentric and not cat enough. On the other hand, it won the hearts of us the household’s more understanding souls.
This cat was as serious as an English gentleman and as clean as a polished plate. It prowled around the house, strolled between chairs and through the library – that was tiny, notoriously tiny – and calmly circled the table at a relaxed, never frantic pace. It would sometimes interrupt these promenades opposite a window and gaze at the sky and the urban scene. The light slightly blurred its eyes but the spectacle of the universe didn’t necessarily fill it with joy. It particularly disliked snow-covered panorama. It kept its tail erect when Berlin suffered heavy snowfalls. If this is an indication of cosmic pessimism in the world of these animals, Mauzi was a total pessimist. When the weather improved, it would simply gawp at the sky, with a quick, rude, unseemly grin. For a moment it seemed the tissues of its stiff lips might tear; then one saw the inside of its mouth and a pale pink tongue … It immediately resumed its walk, oblivious to the urban landscape and the planetary system.
Its favorite bed was its master’s clean shirts. It was particular. If clothes that had just been washed and ironed were carelessly left out of the wardrobe, Mauzi wallowed on their spotlessness like an indulgent sybarite. If it couldn’t find any clothes, it would seek out the highest places in the house and take a sprightly jump on to the huge, white-tiled stove or the wardrobes. From such heights it looked down on us wretched humans with extraordinary indifference.
On the other hand, it had very well-rounded ideas. It couldn’t stand shabbiness. If the electrician, gasman, or coal merchant came, it went wild, meowed like mad, and it was a struggle to stop it scratching their faces. In the midst of these fits, occasioned by the spectacle of the proletariat, Mauzi looked at its master with savage contempt as if to say: “And you actually have dealings with these witless tramps?”
This boundless hatred was balanced by the enthusiasm Mauzi felt in the presence of elegant dressers. When its master returned from a press conference wearing his bowler hat, fur coat, black jacket, and pinstriped trousers, it always rolled over on one or other end of his master. If a distinguished lady or an Italian journalist with a monocle and stiff with cold appeared at teatime, the cat quietly jumped off the cupboard, in the middle of the sitting room, and attempted two or three lethal leaps at them. While it returned to its lookout point, Xammar would explain why the cat welcomed his guests in that way. Visitors were initially taken aback but then couldn’t hide that those expressions of trust flattered their egos.
Mauzi had a pleasant quirk: it hated unpleasant noises. One couldn’t talk loudly, whistle, or break into song in its presence. If anyone did, the cat meowed twice, in ghostly fashion, with a lull in between by way of a warning. If you persisted absentmindedly, it approached you on the sly and sank its teeth into your ankle. And then it returned to its place looking at you askance, with the expression of someone who had just reached a regrettable, if necessary, decision.
Around that time, the great contraction took place: the conversion and stabilizing of the mark. When one needed four billion, two hundred thousand million marks to buy one American dollar, they decided it was high time to create a new currency and stabilize it. Nobody seemed in a rush until the mark hit this startling rate of exchange. The new currency was called the Renten-Mark. If at a given time one needed four billion two hundred thousand million German marks (Deutsche Mark), a moment later one needed only four Renten-Marks, twenty Pfennige of Renten-Mark. It was a simple and subtle maneuver.
Given the new situation I asked Xammar: “How do you see things now? What should we do? What opportunities does the new dispensation offer us?”
“The new dispensation offers us very little. I see a country sinking into a sea of margarine and a fantastic accumulation of ersatz products. We shall now see how far Ge
rmany can go along the road of glue and plastic.”
“Are you at all inclined to welcome such plastic possibilities?”
“I’d die first! We must rally our forces. We must create a lobby and oppose attempts made by any form of margarine to infiltrate our bodies. We must hoist the anti-margarine flag and strive to keep to butter and the classical conceptions of fat. Now is not the time to slumber. We must work might and main not to doze off on the sack. I don’t know if dawn will smile on us, to use Sr Clavé’s lyrics. As a matter of urgency we must look for work, reduce our expenditure, and start now! You …”
“Please don’t stand on ceremony, fire away …”
“You’ll have to water down your passions a little, and the cat’s way of life could perhaps serve as an example in this respect. It’s an animal with a positive outlook on life. A sophisticated operator. I’ve never known him to have the slightest romantic inclination; I’ve never seen it fascinated by characteristically childish and absurd nighttime adventures on the tiles. On the contrary, it is ready to use every trick in the book to guarantee high-quality nourishment. That’s most impressive. It differentiates between different brands of frankfurters, eats eggs only if fried, likes tea with lemon, like the Slavs, and is dangerously sweet-toothed. It’s a wonderful, exceptional cat and only lacks one talent to be really man-like: the ability to write newspaper articles.”
“I see … That’s clear enough.”
“I think it’s a pattern to follow. It may be that some friends, Tassin in particular, will think we are flippant, superficial guys with little in the way of refinement. Too bad …”
With that we heard the doorbell, and shortly Sr Tassin in person walked in through the office door with a bundle of papers under his arm. He usually resided in Vienna, but frequently came to Berlin, which was the main center for Russian émigrés of every stripe. Politics brought him here, though he also had his own small lines of business. We’d first met him in Madrid where he translated Russian novels for the 30-cent Espasa Calpe series.
Tassin had come to suggest a business project. It was the first on our horizon after the creation of the Renten-Marken. He had come to suggest we translate Kropotkin’s Ethics for a big publisher in Buenos Aires. Xammar winked and grinned at me
As Tassin insisted on maximum professionalism, the job wasn’t as simple as it seemed at first. We had a trial run to test our way of working. Tassin sat in front of the Russian edition of the book and began to translate out loud using a mixture of French and German. Xammar sat in front of the typewriter and turned the verbal flow from Tassin into South American Spanish style and grammar. I was responsible for ensuring that the work’s philosophical vocabulary was accurate and, to an extent, for bolstering the content. It was a complex method of working but was the only solution if we were to attain the degree of authenticity the Argentine publisher required. It was a method that created really comic situations. When Tassin came across a thorny problem, he opened his mouth like a child and seemed as innocent as a lamb. When this happened, he inevitably looked up at the cat sleeping on top of the cupboard. Equally, Xammar sometimes struggled to find the right turn of phrase and the typewriter would stutter to a halt. Then his eyes also turned towards the cat. Of the three translators, my task was the most taxing, both because of the intrinsic difficulty of my role and my lack of experience. I would often grind to a halt, and, guided by the same mechanism driving the others, I’d stare at the cat. It was strange to see the three of us intermittently silent, perplexed and pensive, staring at the dozing, aloof cat.
“Yes,” said Tassin, “it is a rather long-winded, difficult method. I expect we’ll spend a lot of time staring at this cat. However, we don’t have any choice. Above all, our translation must be clear. This renowned author has written a book that is extraordinarily infantile. He has written an anti-Darwin ethics. The Russian is defending a thesis contrary to the idea of natural selection and the struggle for survival. He finds the lives of animal species display a constant effort to help each other and an astounding degree of selfless generosity. Do you see, the translations of books of this nature, that are infantile and dangerous, must be transparent, because even minimal obscurity will prompt a disproportionate number of bombs to be thrown …”
Sr Tassin advanced a good sum of money on account and we thus had almost solved our first month under the Renten-Mark. It was a positive outcome.
Now we had secured this first phase, Xammar decided it was imperative to strengthen our social standing. To that end he bought a top-rate pedigree dog. His hunch was that a person owning a pedigree dog in a city earns lots of kudos, and particularly in a German city where dogs are held in such high esteem.
“You’ll soon see what I mean,” Xammar would say. “After three or four days taking the dog for a run under the trees and round and about, everyone in the neighborhood will know a gentleman with a wonderful dog lives here. When you walk along the street, people will say, “That’s the gentleman who owns that wonderful, intelligent dog.” When you go shopping, the shop assistant or the young lady will say: “You, sir, are the man who owns that dog, that fantastic dog …” And they will give you a fetching smile. You have become that gentleman who has that dog, etc … and your standing goes up a number of notches. If one day you buy a pound or two of butter and don’t have enough money, they’ll turn a blind eye. I mean, how could they not trust a man who owns such a fine dog, etc …? A single prerequisite. It must be a great dog, must look in every way the genuine, certified pedigree item. It must be a pure-blood.
And that was how he came to buy the renowned Pekingese that was to bewitch the bourgeoisie of a good slice of the Kantstrasse. In an era of inflation everyone with the means bought whatever they could: dogs, cats, walking sticks, dollars, houses, and ties. When the currency became scarce, most of these purchases were put back on sale. The renowned Pekingese belonged to a married couple who would later become our close friends. They sold their dog because they had no choice. They were amenable on the spot. It was agreed we could take the dog immediately, but that we would pay for it in installments. The Pekingese belonged to the type known as the Maltese or Peke-a-tese and was absolutely charming. The dog was tiny, snub-nosed, and irascible with bulging round eyes that were so fierce they made you tremble and a head of hair worthy of a great, misunderstood man of letters. Its instincts were completely spontaneous and he had a worldview yet to be softened by any notion of warmth or tenderness, the ingredients necessary for leading a communal life. Rare was the day when its owner didn’t have to compensate one or two humble citizens whose pants had suffered from the terrible Peke-a-tese’s sharp white teeth. He did so without protest, because he knew that with every incursion his dog’s prestige grew. Some citizens found it quite natural for the dog to shred their pants, considered it to be such a pure expression of his pure blood that they refused to listen to apologies or accept payment for repairs to their pants.
“That’s what you call a real, genuine dog,” they would say, “and it would make my day to own one like it.”
They were completely calm and objective, at least in relation to the canine race in general and to the Pekingese in particular.
However, I used to tell my friend that, as he did have to pay out now and then, he might prefer to own a lion or at least a leopard. He replied in a melancholy tone that he had already tried that but had fallen foul of municipal regulations.
When I walked into the flat, the dog sniffed me, looked at me rather rudely, but decided to let me breathe in peace. My colleague told it in German that I was the uncle of the house. It didn’t react. It walked anxiously round the office, jumped on to an easy chair and lay there. A few seconds later it was sleeping as if nothing was amiss. A short while later the cat came for a leisurely prowl, in a withdrawn, absentminded, distant frame of mind. When it saw me, it looked up at me with an air of voluptuous disdain and its eyes surveyed me from head to toe. This idiot’s back, it must have been thinking. Time flies and li
fe is ever the same dreary dream …
Cat and dog lived under the same roof, but their interactions were extremely standoffish. The dog didn’t want to know the cat. The cat just about tolerated the dog. The Pekingese was the ice-cold aristocrat that never came off its perch. Mauzi was the skeptical, enlightened, hectoring democrat. It watched the dog disappear after it had walked by with the contempt intellectual superiority brings. Keen to preserve its area of influence, the cat had no choice but to tolerate the dog’s renown. However, it brooked no interference and ensured it was respected. In the event, the two animals always found coexistence a challenge.
The Pekingese, who could be reasonably violent and yappy when awake, led an extremely active subconscious life. When it was asleep, its dreams made it toss and turn, and it sleepwalked with amazing ease. It was a real palaver. Then you felt for it: it jumped off its chair, all excited, but completely asleep, and started barking with a feverish glint in its eyes, making strange somersaults on the carpet. In this state, it sank its teeth into the maid’s ankle, bit table legs or – in its deepest dreams – threw itself upon clean clothes piled on a chair. The cat, of the opinion that clean clothes were part of its remit, would under no circumstance have allowed anyone to usurp its right to sleep on its master’s spotless shirtfronts. It puffed itself out, flashed its eyes, and the hair bristled along its backbone. However, it was rarely forced to intervene. Deeply immersed in its dream, the dog deflated as easily as it had entered that state of fury. Then zigzagged back to its easy chair like a being in a trance and sat as still as ever.
Ownership of the Pekingese resulted in the anticipated social and economic outcomes. In the neighborhood generally, but in the grocery store in particular, our credit-worthiness was immediately boosted, which meant that whenever there was a shortfall it was glossed over. “A trifle, considering the spirit of derring-do that imbues this tale …” the odd reader will say. But life is but a collection of trifles. If one fails, they can give rise to genuine headaches, sometimes veritable disasters, that don’t cease to be so because they are private and personal, quite the contrary, in fact. On the other hand, this spirit has no soft spot for derring-do. The protagonists of these stories have always believed that the biggest adventure in life is to be paid and is to pay up on time.