Life Embitters

This is a book of narrative literature, the kind I would have liked to write, if I hadn’t been completely taken up reporting the news, that is, if the frantic, disperse life of a professional journalist had allowed me. But it proved impossible. Of course, it is an open question whether I would have had any talent to bring to such narrative. I felt an interest, a pull towards this kind of literature. But that amounts to very little! I believe any – shall we say literary – point of view derives from a personal ability to grasp external reality aided and abetted by long, continuous experience of observing, remembering, and hard work. I have always lacked “non-productive” time. In any case, this is what my
attempts
have achieved. I say that because it would be wrong to describe them as anything else.

Journalism has its good sides: it opens up huge areas for scrutiny and leads to a great variety of human contacts, some of which are extremely
interesting. This allows people who are inclined to roam, and feel like vague, unsubstantial shadows hovering briefly over this earth – that being my case – to move freely, particularly when the monetary element is reasonably buoyant. In certain periods of my life I have felt almost morosely fond of such gallivanting – I was a wanderer. I was to an extent a product of the value our currency held between the First World War and the Spanish Civil War. In this period, journalism enabled me to wander tirelessly and ingenuously and experience the most diverse situations. I flitted across Europe and tried out many different cuisines, slept in countless beds, and talked to a range of people. I wrote a lot.

Despite my reputation for being sardonic and flippant fashioned by two consecutive generations who never in fact bothered to get to know me, I’m a complete unknown as a person. I feel obliged to say that I don’t have a very exalted conception of the writer in relation to the times when he happens to be alive. I don’t believe any writer is the bearer of an exclusively individual message. This is the final stance adopted by literary Romanticism – the most pretentious, immature phase Romanticism ever went through. On the other hand, I believe a writer has an overriding responsibility towards the era in which he is living. A writer’s first duty is to observe, relate, and portray this era. That is infinitely more important than futile, barren attempts to achieve elemental or eccentric originality. Literature is the reflection of a particular society at a particular time. This axiom – valid from the remotest times – was coined by De Sanctis, and is one I humbly share.

If one supposes I have any human, literary, or other pretensions – something hard for me to confirm – I have clearly used my writing to try to draw up a kind of inventory of some of the more presentable situations that have shaped my existence. I have sometimes said that my work is undeniably a sequence of pages from a vast, private diary – reminiscences, reminiscences
of the ashes of life. Various reasons led me to take this road: first, the importance I attributed to writers; then, an individual sense of responsibility; finally, the fact I believed that a quantitative literary experience might be feasible in the Catalan language. However, it’s obviously one thing to try something and another to succeed. I beg you: don’t think I am foolish enough to confuse the two.

Adolescence and early manhood – these writings are from this period – are marked by the puerile qualities of surviving and making oneself understood with that minimal basic clarity anyone aspiring to normality requires everywhere, especially in this country. I too was young once and perhaps suffered from these failings to excess. Such a statement may, I hope, justify the way these pages have later been subject to manipulation, with a view to rendering the writing less cursory, lightweight, and unwieldy.

If I had ever revised these pages to make them more understandable, in my opinion it would have been a mistake to eliminate what is ingenuous and puerile or was driven by lack of sophistication or maturity. It would have been more appropriate to throw the whole lot on the fire rather than do that. To have disguised them behind a façade of moderation, ability, and prudence would have been to engage in sophistry. True enough, life is a succession of experiences that are quasi-failures, but they are irreversible and cannot be treated with sleight of hand. Obviously, everything could have turned out more appealing, less embittered, smoother …! Given these
faits accomplis
, other possibilities one might contemplate are simply delusions of the mind.

For reasons of chronology and coherence in respect to the way time changes the world, I think I should make one thing clear. This writing comes from a specific period, and the landscapes that make up the backdrop for some stories, especially in the cities, have changed considerably. I have taken
great care not to modify them. Some of the urban landscapes in the book today look very different from what they were like in the 1920s, for the same reasons that those of today will be unrecognizable in a few years. Our era has been one of huge, rapid transformations. The process behind these transformations can be found in unsophisticated literary documents rather than in attempts to reconstruct and coldly restore. My ideas about narrative literature have been notoriously influenced by my admiration for the Dutch genre painters. I have attempted to create on paper a series of layered scenes of human life, a variety of very different scenes, where wretchedness and beauty entangle, vice and virtue alternate, and the line of true emotion meets the broken line of insanity. I don’t know if I have been successful. I can’t offer any guarantees. They are purely and simply attempts …

November, 1966

In the course of the spring of 19___ I didn’t feel at all well and my doctor suggested I should spend a while in a quiet village with a dry climate, and not too high up. He added that Cerinyola might be the place. I didn’t think twice and soon made my way there, ready to stay for two or three months.

It was a place like so many in Catalonia: rural in aspect, quite unsightly, with no visible saving grace, a thousand or so inhabitants, a rather humdrum social life, two or three textile mills powered by the small river that flows through the fields, the predictable crops. A priest, a curate, two doctors – the old and the new – an apothecary, a veterinarian, and a small banking outlet to facilitate Cerinyola’s economic activity. A modest general store, a social club for well-off folk, a community center for everyone else, a café, a cinema, and a bus service to and from the station with rather shabby buses that were reliable to the extent that people rarely missed their trains.

I discovered all this the night I arrived there, after dining in the Central Tavern, held to be the best in the area. After eating the wobbly crème caramel that was served up, the three or four commercial travelers dining at the next table went to the café. I was left alone in the dining room completely at a loss about what to do next. That very second a lady approached me – the next morning I discovered she was Senyora Vicenteta: a vivacious middle-aged woman with rather glazed, artificially rejuvenated features, namely, the owner of the establishment. After she’d asked if I had eaten well – “Very well, very well” – if I was a commercial traveler – “No, senyora, a visitor” – if it was the first time … – “Yes, senyora, the first” – etc. etc., Sra Vicenteta rattled off the information I noted a moment ago. I seem to remember it didn’t stop there. I think she mentioned the local schools and that a schoolmaster and mistress ate lunch in her tavern, but this detail is a vague memory. “They only have lunch, their pay doesn’t stretch any further …!” she certainly said. She also said something about the nursing Sisters who lived in the village, but I couldn’t pinpoint exactly what.