Life Embitters (28 page)

“Mommy!”

“Show the gentleman your pimple!”

The girl looked scared. I was astounded. However, I immediately saw that Donya Matilde was worried stiff. She whispered, “You never know, do you?”

And energetically to Maria Teresa, “Come, come! Show the gentleman your pimple …”

“But, mommy …”

“You know two pairs of eyes are better than one and that we’re a long way from home. I don’t want to be the only one held responsible.”

I thought her distress was a trifle forced. I tried to tell them, quite unsuccessfully, that Ostend was a city in Belgium, a country that was no savage, remote wilderness. I also informed her that I had no special knowledge of the subject and that I always thought it was best to be patient and let things run their course. In the end, I had to stand my ground.

“Senyora, what you’re asking of me is ridiculous. If you like, we can get a doctor. What’s the point in my looking at that pimple?”

But Sra Fabregat wasn’t used to being contradicted. She gave me an extremely withering look considering we’d only known each other a few days. It was probably years since anyone had rebuffed her. This was as obvious as the fact that, while the girl remained as frightened as ever, her mother had turned a bright red.

There was a moment of hesitation that Matilde abruptly ended. She blurted in my direction: “You keep in that armchair!”

Then she went over to her daughter and caressed her face.

“My dear, don’t you worry. We’re all from our beloved country …!”

Then she took her arm, eased her out of bed and walked her over to me. The girl moved slowly and meekly, keeping her hand over her pimple.

“This gentleman will take a look,” said Sra Fabregat, “and it’s not going to hurt at all …”

I felt delirious. Sra Fabregat, in fully imperious fashion, was acting stupidly once again. What sense did it all make? She carried out her decision to the letter. She placed the nape of her daughter’s neck right before my eyes, separated out her hair and out popped the humble, inoffensive little pimple. I noted that Maria Teresa had the loveliest, beautiful, firm, supple, shimmering neck.

“Well, what do you think?” asked Sra Fabregat a moment later.

“Senyora, what on earth do you expect me to say?”

“She seems to have a slight temperature. Do you think that’s important?”

“Senyora, I know nothing about such matters! Nothing whatsoever!”

However, I soon realized I was on the wrong track. My repeated, most reasonable protestations at my lack of knowledge only prompted an even more unpleasant, withering look. I reflected that she’d conclude that I was refusing to help my compatriots in foreign parts. “In foreign parts, just imagine, in foreign parts!” Sra Fabregat would tell her friends the minute
she walked into her flat on the Carrer de Girona. I had no choice but to call on the usual clichés. In any case, it was true that my words had a visibly therapeutic, medical vagueness about them.

“If you want me to speak frankly,” I said solemnly, “this isn’t at all serious. However, we’d lose nothing if we took her to see a doctor.”

“So then … It is really nothing,” said Sra Fabregat rather edgily.

“I have nothing further to add,” I opined blankly.

“Put the thermometer in right! You heard what the gentleman said, it won’t amount to anything.”

The girl withdrew, as meek and passive as ever. A little shamefaced, perhaps.

The following morning, Maria Teresa observed when she woke up that the tiny pimple had burst and barely left a trace. Everyone was rather surprised, including Sra Fabregat, who wasn’t expecting such a swift outcome. In view of this
fait accompli
, she was rendered speechless. A drop of boric acid was applied to the negligible scar and it was all sorted. When I paid them my usual afternoon visit, the girl reacted shyly, and simpered. Matilde Fabregat seemed in a jolly mood. Sr Ramon and the boy had decided to stay an extra day in Brussels. They had surely been captivated by the changing of the guards.

With that, my holidays had come to an end and it was time to go back to work. We said goodbye. We promised to go on holiday together the following year and to send each other countless postcards.

“And if you ever come to Barcelona,” said Donya Matilde, “you know where … Girona, etc.”

We’ve not seen each other since and happenstance has yet to bring us together. In my heart of hearts, however, I feel that they must be all out there, enjoying the best of health and getting on with life.

Sr Fabregat, richer by the year, must have reread
The Three Musketeers
three, four – or five times – more. I don’t think his ideas will have changed one iota. Matilde will have put on weight, accrued the odd gray hair, but she won’t have shed her disturbing, domineering manner. Maria Teresa will have married extremely well, a marriage that won’t have turned out for the best, for reasons that everyone will interpret as they think fit. And the boy will be behaving like Sr Fabregat’s son, which, in fact, is exactly who he is.

I found these jottings among the papers belonging to Santaniol, my deceased friend, and I think they are of interest. Santaniol’s family decided to give him an education that would prepare him to join the diplomatic corps. Their aim was met, but my friend’s temperament suffered immensely as a result. We, his university friends, felt he was a ‘
lletraferit
,’ or a man wounded by letters. The word ‘
lletraferit
’ is one of the most distressing in the Catalan language. The idea that someone who likes literature is somehow wounded implies a stock of primitive barbarism that is at once popular and demented. It doesn’t mean that the people actually invented the word. The word was invented by the Cyclopean might of those in this country who have hindered the development of a properly civil, absolutely pagan culture. The people
and families have joined forces to give the word its dramatically pejorative weight. And that’s how things were, and how they still are.

Santaniol filled lots of paper. He tried to describe everything he clapped his eyes on in the course of his short life, or at least to create lively vignettes. He injected more curiosity and passion into this activity than into his career as a bureaucrat. He died prematurely, when he was a consul in a city in central Europe. Here are the jottings I just mentioned:

Calais is a city through which an inordinate number of travelers have passed, never stopping more than the seconds required to comply with Customs. It is a city that isn’t like Dunkirk, or even Boulogne, where a traveler feels like staying longer than the time permitted by the departure of the next ferry – despite the somber stonework and gloom of those two northern French cities. Besides, nobody ever stops in Calais. Perhaps it’s because the ferry port is rather a long way from the town, perhaps because it looks so cold and nondescript from the train. Whatever the reason, though hundreds of thousands of people pass through Calais every year, it is most unusual for anyone to linger there: everybody bypasses the place.

The fact that I
did
become acquainted with the place is easily explained. I was dispatched to London when I was very young. Too young, perhaps, to adapt to the English way of life. I think it’s a mistake for us Latin folk to go to England before we have had a broad experience of life. Or rather: one should go to London as a youngster or adolescent, to study or become passionate about sport or, after one’s first phase of youth, when one has begun to shape a specific vision of life. I went there at the age of twenty-one, which is a critical, incoherent age that can be both painful and unstable. As a result, my first contact wasn’t at all fruitful, in fact I thought everything was inaccessible and off-putting. I thought the lodging houses were dismal, the
food tasteless and the streets – apart from the ones in the East End – were icy. London – a haughty city – is an almighty giant determined to kill off all popular wit and transform everyone into respectable bourgeois. I was too young to appreciate the charms of people’s politeness and good manners: I felt that their good manners were their way of being stand-offish, a stiffness designed to avoid being disturbed. I thought that everything was too big compared to the dimensions I was used to. It isn’t that London overwhelmed or humiliated me, in the way I later experienced in New York, a city where human beings are indescribably derisory, insignificant little microbes. London didn’t humiliate me, London froze me. In any case, I don’t think these experiences do any harm, they have to be lived and lived to the full because they help one to become rational and know what one is. They are unpleasant experiences, nonetheless, that in the long term one can overcome. In this world, it is vital to come to terms with reality.

So I lived my first three months in London only thinking about returning home. I was bored, desperate, found everything stringy, tough, and hostile. What an innocent abroad! I never managed to understand that I was engaged in terrain that was wholly relative. Perhaps if I’d been receiving six pounds sterling a week rather than a wretched three it would all have seemed much more agreeable. One’s view of reality is frequently conditioned by one’s financial, economic possibilities. The key role played by money in people’s intellectual and sentimental lives is immeasurable.

One day I saw an advertisement on the façade of a branch of the Midland Bank in Victoria Street – it was inviting people to spend the weekend in northern France. I read it three or four times on the trot, quite fascinated. That invitation seemed like the perfect way out of an intolerable situation – the most pleasant escape imaginable. Only one problem remained to be resolved: the money question, what the great and good refer to as “one’s
possibilities.” Nothing could be sadder in this world than to be all set to do something and to find oneself miserably short of the wherewithal. However, that led me, in the very same important branch of that bank, to review the latest rates on the Stock Exchange for the currencies circulating on the planet at the current time. I discovered that one peseta was worth four francs. A fantastic discovery! I had always thought money problems were gritty, sterile, and thirst-provoking. For the first time in my life I realized they could have their pleasant side. It wasn’t that I had a good supply of money. If I were to be frank, I would say that money tends to come my way in short, not very sharp bursts. All in all, however, I had enough to cross the Channel and spend a few hours in France without damaging my human dignity. The crux was not to go too far into the country. Paris was, naturally, out of the question. Driven by the spirit of caution that has always characterized me and after a decent crossing, despite the inclement weather that can often rage over the Channel in the spring, this was how I came to alight one day in the ferry port of Calais and, rather than take one or other of the numerous trains waiting in the station, I headed off to the town with my small suitcase.

It’s a good quarter of an hour’s walk from the ferry port to the city. The road runs through wasteland, across a rather windswept, lugubrious landscape, with very few trees, a typical English Channel panorama. However, it was twelve o’clock on a very clear spring day – in early May. It was so clear that from a steep point on the road I could see the shiny white, soft plaster-like cliffs of the English coast. A fresh, lively breeze made walking a pleasure – a fresh breeze that in France makes you want to stop off at successive taverns on the road for a glass of white wine.

I was intending to head straight to the Hotel Metropol that I’d been recommended. This establishment is on the other side of the city – although that wasn’t quite true, as I later realized. Once I’d walked the length of the
road that, as I’ve said, cut through wasteland, I came to a walled city. I then understood that Calais lives with its back completely turned on its international ferry port. How can I put it any clearer? Calais lives with its back completely turned on England: the result of historical events that are difficult to grasp today but which have created the present situation. So you reach the wall. Then walk down dismal side streets that lead to the Place d’Armes. A quite new city begins beyond this square: cold, provincial, and very extensive. Consequently, when you reach Calais from the ferry port, everything seems as if it’s on the other side of the city.

The Hotel Metropol is built in a very exposed area where the walled city ends and the sprawl of provincial Calais begins. It is near a railway station – Calais-Ville – which is generally unknown to those traveling on international express trains because they never stop there; conversely, for people who live in the town, people who come from France, this is the only station that counts.

On first impressions, the Hotel Metropol seemed like an end-of-the-line hotel – one of those places you finish up in, by force of circumstance if you like, because your journey has come to end. A perfect, freezing terminus. They gave me a room on a top floor – because unlike the houses that backed on to the wall, the hotel was a brazenly high affair. In one way or another people had to understand that times had changed. The view from the room I’d been given was, nevertheless, very pleasant. A fascinating landscape: the striking contrast between the old and the new. I could see geometrical expanses of blackened stone wall, where small, anachronistic cannons lined up that, though practically unusable, looked pompous to the point of being comical. Beyond the military glacis, covered in lovely fresh grass that had been admirably mown, was a clump of thick, glistening trees that must have been giving shade to a cemetery. The station was next to the hotel, and I was
often entertained by the grotesque childish sight of shunting trains puffing out smoke. At night the powerful beams from the town’s lighthouse hit the green windows on the platform and the mushy yellow glow from the glass panes lit up my bedroom’s window frame.

The outcome from my first trip was next to none. But any alternative was more pleasant than my depressingly tedious weekends in London whose lack of humanity was akin to a graveyard’s. Even the cinemas – the only spectacle that seemed to be tolerated – were a dead weight: I found their silent respectability and glumness stifling. I thus repeated my trips to Calais and they became frequent over a long period. It was all about getting by with very little money – and that’s relatively easy as long as you don’t expect others to serve you on a silver platter. The change did me good. It was really curious: I stepped on French soil and immediately felt lighter, more curious and eager for life. I couldn’t give a precise, rational explanation for the sudden transformation. Though it was real enough … Many things played their part: for example, a sense of inner release, tastier food, a certain ineffable chaos, perhaps those little glasses of white wine, that were so refreshing and went down so well. After a number of such trips I succeeded in writing a few pages that now follow. They are pages that fully express my own naïveté.