Life Embitters (58 page)

“It’s proceeding normally,” he replied stiffly, and added, “My presence here has nothing to do with that. I’ve come to defend the outraged honor of a most respectable lady …”

“You mean the business at the Pensione Fiorentina?”

“Exactly.”

“Do you know the woman from Vienna?”

“She’s a former student of mine, a most distinguished student. I taught her Italian, the little or large amount she knows, do you see?”

“I see. But tell me, do you have a clear idea of what happened? Perhaps you have a more substantial explanation than the various versions that have reached us?”

“I don’t know the facts, but that is of no matter. She is someone I love. I have come to defend the honorable reputation of a lady who is worthy of the greatest respect …”

“I understand … I totally understand …”

The following morning, the magistrate told me no further statements would be necessary and, consequently, there was no point my being in his office. I was delighted to hear that. I would be spared a lot of bother. However, a few days later I discovered Don Antoni was being summoned, repeatedly. Simple eyewitness accounts were replaced by statements of opinion. It was a good sign: it showed the business was now on the right track. Nothing is more pleasing than to see things on the right track. Sometimes, three yards from where you live there’s a huge hue-and-cry and you have a wretched night. However, that’s of no matter. What’s crucial is that everything is on the right track, the indispensable right track

Before bidding farewell to the examining magistrate I dared ask him a few questions. He was an affable, good-hearted, skeptical, stout fellow with great maturity of vision, who smoked cigars in a holder.

“Was there a robbery, your honor?” I asked.

“I don’t think so.”

“Is there a convincing explanation of what took place?”

“Perhaps it was simply a love scene that became rather entangled and far too melodramatic …” the magistrate replied with a vague smile.

My face must have revealed how curious I was to know more. The magistrate gave me a weary look and cheery smile. He then said quite blankly, as if he was talking about the weather: “I think one thing has been established for the moment: the lady in no. 11 and the so-called thief were in a relationship. She had succeeded in finding love. I suspect it was a rather self-interested love. Love cost the lady dear. For a time the relationship developed positively: the suitor was imaginative, knew how to cherish the object of his passion, was intriguing. But, obviously, a moment came when a third person appeared and took control of the situation. The lady had no choice but to let herself be loved by someone else, whom we shall call X, to be brief. The first relationship, where she had more purchase and that was more visible, had to be tucked away. Then what often happens did happen: it transpired that the marquis had really fallen in love. This was the great novelty, the unexpected factor. In short: desperate and at the end of his tether, he decided to go and declare his love. He entered room 11 using his old key. He made an enormous kerfuffle when she refused to renew the old relationship in the manner he’d described. He said, “It’s all or nothing!” like a young fledgling. A peculiar, ridiculous, inexplicable stance. Fortunately the kerfuffle was harmless: he threw papers in the air, opened drawers, pushed chairs over, forced suitcases open … It’s a very Latin way to demonstrate one’s love. Nevertheless, something catastrophic might have occurred, and that’s why childish, scatter-brained folk shouldn’t have easy access to weapons. Then he used the balcony and guttering to reach the street …”

“So what about the person who left via the passage?”

“Let’s simply say it was the gentleman we dubbed X to avoid being longwinded …”

“Did the scene at least serve some purpose?”

“I think so. The lady has rid herself of a nuisance. The suitor reacted positively. You’ll understand: they wanted to pass him off as a thief … A degree of dignity still remains in this world …

A few weeks later, when it all seemed to be over and done with, I met Don Antoni in the Caffé Greco. As I’d nothing more pressing to talk about, I commented on my conversation with the magistrate.

“His is a very bold, not to say rash point of view …” commented my friend after reflecting for a moment, “I was the young woman’s teacher. She was an excellent student. She was punctual, studious, and well organized. She’d had a solid bringing up …”

“Of course!”

“You know I always act in good faith, with my heart on my sleeve.”

“Don’t place yourself under any strain … Would you like a smoke?”

This business at the Pensione Fiorentina was one of my first engagements with the complexities of life. I don’t know if I understood very much, but I learned a lot. Much more than in my years at university, those languid years …

My stays in Berlin are so linked to the figure of my friend Eugeni Xammar that I find it difficult to separate out the two strands of simultaneous memories. I spent so many hours in the apartment on Kantstrasse! I experienced the whole process from when Xammar arrived in the apartment with only one suitcase to the time, years later, when it was fully furnished and lived in, with a real lady, dog, and cat. Nothing could be more agreeable than to see a home set up in good taste and with a true sense of hospitality.

In the era of rampant inflation, with a currency that fluctuated so, we travelled far and wide throughout Germany. We could as easily be in Frankfurt as in Danzig, in Breslau as in Essen. We worked as special correspondents. In Munich we witnessed Hitler’s first attempts to take over the beer cellars and make the leap from such places to head of state. In the course of these journeys I came to know and admire my colleague. I was a rookie, with
scant experience. Xammar had already spent five or six years in Paris and six or seven in London; he was in his prime. Our conversations were lively and never-ending, as a result of this contrast. As a newcomer to the profession I tended to view the world as an out-and-out rationalist; I projected symmetrical, tidy schema on to it, and, though I had by then overcome a childish trust in verbal logic, I still expected things to reveal life’s logic. Xammar would smile at me enigmatically, a glint in his beady little eyes.

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.