Life Embitters

by Josep Pla

  “Absolutely. We’ve talked about that previously. Do go on …”

  “I tried to get her to tell me the real reason why Roby lived in her house. His presence was important because taking responsibility for strange children, that is, other people’s children, had never entered my plans. But I couldn’t get any sense out of her. I couldn’t tell you whether Roby is Frau Berends’ son, nephew or relative or whether he is completely alien to her. In the countless conversations we’ve had about that child, when I said Roby was lively and intelligent, she pretended to despise or hate him. When I said I found him to be intolerable and naughty, Frau Berends has defended him heatedly – much to my surprise. The fact is that Roby’s presence between me and Frau Berends has created endless friction, rows and petty misunderstandings that, in the end, have led to very unpleasant, wearing tensions.

  “You mean that quite unawares Roby shattered all your plans.”

  “Absolutely, quite unawares. However, that doesn’t mean that I’ve not hated him coldly and spitefully at times, a hatred I could never explain.”

  “Yes, of course …”

  “What then happened is quite straightforward. I arrived home one evening. I had to finish a job that day. I set out my things on the table. I discover something vital has gone missing: a small bottle of red ink that is really necessary in my trade and for that project. I look everywhere. I find nothing. I seek further afield, rummage in drawers, open suitcases, and search every nook and cranny. All to no avail. What’s more, it was too late to go and buy another one. I was livid. In that state I ask Frau Berends if she’s seen it anywhere. We both start frantically looking. I tell her I’d bought a new bottle that very afternoon for the task in hand. I feel she’s helping reluctantly. It lacks importance in her eyes. I say something to stir her up. She replies tetchily. We exchange a few needling insults. At my wit’s end, in a fury, I tell her I’m leaving. I start to pack my cases. Frau Berends is downcast and silent. Two tears tumble from her completely dry eyes. Tears of rage. Her face is contorted. She storms out of my room knocking into furniture and hasn’t the strength to shut the door. Meanwhile I continue gathering my belongings together when I suddenly hear Roby let out a terrible scream. I put my clothes down, stand in the doorway, and listen. How horrible! What a beating she was handing out! I heard two or three muffled blows and thought I then heard the boy’s head bang against the partition wall. I hesitated for a moment. I may even have opened my mouth to shout out, but nothing was forthcoming. Perhaps I took a first step to end that savagery. But I didn’t persist. What a coward! That poor, screaming child! Such a battering! The fact is I thought it would show weakness on my part to shout out or put in an appearance, so I did nothing … I retreated into my bedroom. Horrified, I decided to postpone my efforts to leave that house. I grabbed my hat and overcoat and tiptoed to the stairs …”

  He paused. Took a swig and lit a cigarette with a flickering match. Then continued, increasingly agitated: “When I walked into the street, as the temperature was dropping, I put my hands in my coat pockets. I felt an object wrapped in flimsy paper. It was the bottle of red ink I’d bought that very afternoon – that damned little bottle … My first reaction was to feel disgusted at myself, but I didn’t have the strength to score my heart on glass from that bottle … Unconsciously, almost blindly, but knowing perfectly well what I was doing, I looked for the grate of a drain and threw the bottle of ink into it, making as little noise as possible. Nobody was in the street: I’d made sure of that first. It was vile cowardice on my part, an act of futile, gratuitous cruelty … Once I’d removed the evidence of my cowardly foolishness I thought I’d feel relieved. Liberated. The strength of our mental habits can be deceptive. In effect: I immediately felt liberated and cleansed. I went for a walk around the neighborhood … When I returned home, I tried to fake the expression of a troubled man, of someone who’s just suffered a loss because others have been careless. In fact, my feeling of liberation had melted away and deep down I now felt a terrible need to beg that bludgeoned child to forgive me. But I didn’t do that either! I unpacked my suitcases and started working on my assignment. I worked through the night trying to build up a positive sense of exhaustion. I felt increasingly ill at ease. I took ages to get to sleep, and I am a person who has never suffered from sleeplessness. I thought it was a wretched business. The day after, I drank tea, ate bread, butter and marmalade, and drank a glass of freezing water. That glass of water was so delicious! My mouth was so dry it made a new man of me. I tried to resume normal life, but found the events of the previous night were still obsessively drilling into my brain … I’m not exhausting you, am I?”

  “Not at all … Do go on if it helps …” I answered with a look of deep repulsion.

  “Yes, of course. I really do want to. I was saying how I tried to resume normal life. However, when I went into the street, something strange happened: I entered a bar like this and ordered a glass of kümmel … I’d never previously felt the need to enter this kind of place, particularly in the morning. You could say I’ve not had a clear head since … A subtenant is such an evil beast! And it’s strange that you said exactly the same at the beginning! We share the same ideas in this respect; we think ab-so-lu-tely the same …”

  He said a little more, but I could see his features dipping and darkening and that he was straining to keep on. He took another swig of curaçao and his head slumped on to his arms that were folded on the table.

  I left that dive and struggled home: I was shivering with cold yet my head was on fire. My hatband felt icy on my forehead. As soon as I arrived, I went to bed and put out the light, feeling tired and disgusted.

  Winter in Berlin was harsh and desolate and Frau Berends’ house seemed curiously dark and remote. There were two or three heavy snowfalls. I was getting over the flu and was unfortunate to catch a cold. That forced me to spend several days indoors. I spent hours behind windowpanes where the rain splashed endlessly and left a yellowy-green film; I contemplated the inner yard of that half-barracks, half-factory where the flat was slotted. The flat windows looked over the garden. Twenty or so square meters of sparse pale green grass were home to three spindly, pallid trees and in the middle, to a leaning, down-at-heel wooden trapeze with a few large dangling rings and two frayed broken ropes. I never saw any children climb it, not even when it was fine, and sometimes, in the evening, I’d imagine the trapeze was an abandoned guillotine. Snow and mud were piled up in the corners of the garden; there were white patches on the sparse grass, and the flakes on the thin tree branches looked like newborn, yellow and white chicks. The mud in the garden was black and icy; everything was lifeless and dreary. The silence in the house was strangely shocking. It was like living in a submerged diving bell or enclosed cistern. You heard nothing: no laughter, no shouts, no excited conversation. You opened the window a crack and the only sound you heard was the rain falling on the grass, mud, and sleety snow. People went vaguely in and out and seemed to leave no trace.

  Especially in the afternoon that intense quiet brought on a repeated feeling of fatigue and I sank into a state of unconsciousness with a raging temperature. Sometimes, a wave of nervous disenchantment flushed my cheeks. Long hours of morose lethargy followed. I’d adopted an infantile attitude to everything, relapsing intermittently into dread triggered by a vision of the way things seemed linked logically together, by a sense of the fated naturalness of the greatest catastrophes. My heart thudded and leapt and stiffened my legs. An apparition almost always floated before my eyes of a voluptuous, grotesque figure – a woman in a blouse and a gentleman with a small topper and large mustache – or I’d imagine some physical sensation. Even so my mouth felt parched, my head fuzzy, and my joints couldn’t sustain me. Most astonishingly, children never cried. They must have been born already briefed. They had never stopped in my family. These were afternoon moods. In the morning, a poor man occasionally drifted into the yard, leaned on a tree, and sang a song that sounded like a mournful psalm.
I heard him from my bed, a potassium chloride pill on my tongue. I’m not familiar with the kind of songs the poor of Berlin sing: the Lumpen-proletariat. They are what you call songs of the poor, of poverty without hope. Many couldn’t rise to a song and didn’t dare look up at the windows for alms. They’d harangue in blurred, mumbling voices, with startling highs and lows. Now and then, an exasperated neighbor would angrily fling open a window and a black arm would emerge: the coin fell with a plop into the mud. Other poor people came with a young boy carrying a trombone or flugelhorn. The brass introduced absurdly desperate, explosive blasts into the yard. However, this group didn’t seem as poor as the others; the instruments in their hands, their hungry fervor and play-acting amused, brightened, and sustained them. The occasional rag-and-bone man with a booming voice passed through. One carried a briefcase under his arm and wore a hat tilted over the back of his neck, a purple cravat, a pink celluloid collar and a good quality dark suit that sagged slightly as posthumous garments generally do. You’d have said that man, an Israelite in looks, was probably a trade-union secretary.

  For a moment I thought I’d entertain myself observing the windows of other high flats. I was soon disabused. The houses seemed dead, and if anyone ever budged behind those panes of glass, they seemed at a loss. It was only in the afternoon, if it didn’t rain, at dusk, that a window opened and a woman with her hair in a bun emerged to beat a mattress with a stick. The whiteness of the snow highlighted the actual color of the blocks: reinforced concrete covered in a layer of cheap pebbledash the color of burnt cork. Towards the top the cement was cracked and large dirty patches stood out, stains from leaking liquids the frost studded with lurid twinkles. The shapes and figures were unspeakably alarming. By the evening, the flats livened up. Darkness fell abruptly. There were days we had to switch on the light at three o’clock. When the bulb lit up I’d feel a hazy, childish sense of relief. I looked at the other houses: a light with a green shade; the weary glimmer of a bulb hanging from a bare, white ceiling; a pale glow on a stretch of wall that must be gaslight. One rectangular window secreted a purple-yellow beam that died a death on the snow in the yard with the hesitant charm of moonlight. I could see the corner of a freezing kitchen in one flat; in another, an old man reading the newspaper, his head a blur in the bright light; and a dining room sideboard in yet another, a fruit bowl with two oranges standing there – that exuded a misty glow that suggested they were plastic. All that absorbed you and there was no escape: anonymous, characterless misery; immersed in the house’s cold silence, it was hard not to believe the world was a place of bitterness. Yet something pleasant did exist in Frau Berends’ block: the sound of a distant piano, one you sometimes heard late at night. I never discovered where that piano was or where the notes came from. It was like a wave of gentle quivering, liquid music that penetrated through walls and dissolved. It was ethereal, shadowy, a pure sound, at once soft, velvety, and profound. Nothing transcendental, naturally! I often imagined that piano; I’d see a young gentleman and lady playing: four hands. She wore a plum-colored dress that was slightly too big. He was fair, had a clerk’s small nose and wore a tuxedo that was perhaps too tight. Now and then, when it was time to turn the page, they looked into each other’s eyes, enraptured. Then rested and ate a slice of cheese. I imagined them swathed in warm, discreetly lit comfort: they were symbols of social progress. I could have spent a lifetime listening to that piano, and the nights they didn’t play I missed their delightful idealism as keenly as if I’d missed my supper. The program they played was my program. It’s most likely that had I lived in a suitable environment, my feelings would have readily appreciated their sublime nobility. My responses have, in fact, always been commonplace and ordinary. They played exquisitely prosaic Italian pieces, Handel’s sumptuous largo, and several Vienna waltzes from the year ’12: waltzes with monocles for generals and diplomats, and several French and Russian pieces. I like everything bourgeois, pleasant, and digestible, and the taste of these distinguished homespun pianists met my needs exactly. My room was the one in the house where you heard them best, and Frau Berends sometimes tiptoed to my door and put her ear to the keyhole.

  At this point Frau Berends was quite upbeat. Every day she was visited by a man they said was a retired army lieutenant. He was small, stocky, fair, pink, and featureless, and spoke with a quiet, nasal twang. They would shut themselves in the kitchen and mumble for hours on end. As it was hard to imagine they were talking about anything of any importance, it was most likely they simply kept each other company opposite an empty sink and rows of dishes. He’d often come after supper and they always stayed in the kitchen except for the odd day when they sat in the sitting room listening to a military march on the phonograph. They’d switch off the electricity. A long gas flame burned under the jug of water for the tea. A dull fluorescent glow flitted over things, and, seated opposite each other, their loose skin drooped. They looked deflated. No one bothered to find out who he was or why those two met. Frau Berends had visibly changed and one could say that she lived her life as if we didn’t exist. We’d pass in the corridor and I’d have a pleasant word for her but she never deigned to reply. She was absentminded and remote. I noticed how they would go out after lunch on days where there was a sunny spell. She dressed up: a heavy black dress and a hat strewn with tiny purple flowers. They looked like a family portrait from twenty years ago. Generally they strolled across a park, and their favorite spot seemed to be a distant park in Wilmersdorf. The lieutenant had a friend who was its lifelong concierge. They’d walk slowly back at dusk holding a sprig of fir. They crossed large, undeveloped areas, dotted with tin huts and cabbage and radish patches over which wet imperial flags flapped. Then they’d go down various dark, solitary streets and arrive home on their last legs. Even so one day the lieutenant suspended his visits. The postman started to leave letters and postcards. It was a short excursion, probably a family tragedy. In effect the letters had mourning edges. Frau Berends read them anxiously; her back to the door, she ripped the envelopes open in a tizzy.

  Roby, Frau Berend’s son, was completely neglected. By day, he was never in the house. He played on street corners or roamed. When he came back, he was a chloride yellow, as stiff as a brush, and his big wooden shoe clattered over the floorboards. After his supper of a slice of smoked herring and a slice of bread and greasy margarine, he’d call the cat and they’d go off to play. I sometimes looked him up and down: his spotty face, his pigeon chest, his pointy shoulders piercing his jacket like over-long stakes, his large round blue eyes, almost always blank and gawping, his fraught, faded fair hair, and skin covered in rough down. Tattered long underwear poked out from the legs of his pants. The huge hard black shoe hung off the rickety spindle of a leg, making his whole body look lopsided. You couldn’t look at it without your hair standing on end: it seemed a monstrous artifact that might snap at any second. His life went in fits and starts: he was sometimes swept up in frantic activity, he blanched and shook and beads of sweat dotted his forehead and nose. Then he seemed driven by a mixture of fear, anguish, and daring. His ears glowed while his hands felt icy cold. That phase passed and he sank into docile torpor. He couldn’t take his dreary eyes off the shiny things he could see and his mouth sagged blissfully. From my bedroom I heard him play with the cat. Now and then an incoherent word reached me. However, I never heard him laugh. I’d hear his wooden shoe clump intermittently over the wooden floor when he stumbled down the passage. The bangs echoed morosely. Yet again I thought the bone in his leg must have broken. But you’d suddenly hear his short, croaky coughs, see his translucent chest, or hear the cat’s furious squeals and Roby’s cruel, perverse gleeful whoopees. That’s how they whiled away their time.

  One night I caught them playing with paper balls. I suspected they were the lieutenant’s letters and thought it didn’t augur well. By this time the lieutenant had returned. He now wore a blue suit and, in contrast, his hat was such a sour chemical green it brought the taste of acid t
o one’s lips. I wasn’t mistaken: the paper I’d see in Roby’s fist was from the letters edged in black. The next morning they were strewn along the passage in the shape of balls and scraps of paper. Frau Berends let out a frightful howl the moment she set eyes on them, a tragic silence filled the house. Roby was out all day. The cat disappeared and was nowhere to be seen. Frau Berends had bounced it off the wall in the morning with a massive kick. I heard it: the sound of a slightly deflated ball being booted with gusto and encountering an obstacle in its path. The cat meowed miserably for a time and was never seen again. That evening Roby hobbled through the door, whistling. The lieutenant was at home and had been shut up in the kitchen with Frau Berends for ages. When I heard the boy come in, I switched off my bedroom light and half-opened my door to watch what was inevitably going to happen – without being noticed. Roby hadn’t taken a couple of steps down the passage when I heard the kitchen door swing open – Roby was in the rectangle of light in the dark passage, a sudden swath of light that hit me like a bolt of lightning – and a hand grabbed his shoulder. Taken by surprise, Roby turned his head, a look of unspeakable terror on his face. He had no time to do anything else. A brutal thwack lifted his body up and sent it flying through the door as if blasted by a gust of wind. Then the door shut silently and for the moment I heard nothing more. Nonetheless, I tiptoed down the passage, scared stiff. I soon heard words being whispered and the clatter of a chair falling over. A second later a muffled crash shook my whole body. It was obvious something had smashed against the wall – probably the boy’s head. I heard other blows. Anguish took my breath away. They were blows in concert and on target. I walked to the kitchen door, put my hand on the handle, set to go in. I didn’t dare. My legs were shaking and I had to keep my head up to stop myself from falling. It was horrific! I don’t remember how long I stayed like that by the door, full of indignation and pity.