Life Embitters (61 page)

Another day he summoned me to one side and whispered rather mysteriously: “What era does your great poet Sagarra belong to?”

I replied that the most one could say was that Sagarra belonged to an era of transition, a transition that was edging its way towards popular neo-classicism.

“There are things in your movement that dispirit me somewhat. At the moment people have a lot to say about this poet Sagarra and seemingly, considering the era when he lived, he is a very interesting figure.”

Speaking of Von Berg, Xammar told me: “Believe me and keep your eye on this fellow. He is a man who knows absolutely everything except what is real and genuine. You could help him no end. These fanatics are usually rich. The only energy you’d need to expend would be to lure him away from his filing cards.”

Boca the baritone was a man of proven worth and talented in a way I found appealing. To survive he’d had to use all the tricks in the book; he’d seen the world and had broad experience of life and people. However, he had refined the most difficult talent of all: he thought coldly and impersonally. When he wanted, he could take an immediate stance on an issue and reach a judgment without any sentimental consideration blurring his vision. He was amazingly pragmatic and objective. Superficial contact with him made no impact; when you got to know him a little, he grew in your eyes into a real character. To this day I still remember maxims uttered by Boca the baritone. This one, for example, will never fail to be relevant: “Only one remedy exists to make sure that married women remain faithful to their lovers: make sure their husbands watch over them night and day.”

Nevertheless, when held up against the light, Maites Boca secreted the
sad melancholy of a man who has fought hard and achieved nothing. In his forties, he was a white-haired man with powerful eyes, a strong, sensual mouth, and a paunch that rode high. The art of
bel canto
, and the high notes it requires, had given his body the shape of a mattress spring one often sees in Milà’s gallery. He wore a fur coat he rarely took off in winter, butter-colored gloves, and a shiny hunter’s hat with a feather on the side. I sometimes bumped into him when strolling in the Tiergarten and he’d look crestfallen and gloomy and I would see him wandering at a loss down dubious avenues.

“Baritone Boca, you are so intelligent,” I asked him once, “why aren’t you a millionaire?”

“What can I say, my friend?” he replied. “I’ve a terrible character and this has held me back.”

It was true that it was difficult to tolerate his friendship. He spent his life searching for cast-iron arguments to sink his rivals. His success in debate had earned him a reputation for being vain and boorish. He’d have starved to death more than once, if he’d not put his dialectic to one side. His emotional life had been long and complicated. A singer’s tightrope existence, the inevitable engagements and cherry-plum tours were the backdrop to the romantic havoc in his life. He voiced bitter opinions of his artistic colleagues and respected only La Barrientos, whom he dubbed that Lady Maria on the Carrer d’Aribau. At the time he said he was recording gramophone records for companies in Berlin; in fact he shared his life with a wealthy, dry old stick who had financially supported many artists and actors. The old lady was jealous and difficult and Boca the baritone had his work cut out to ensure his allowance wasn’t whisked away. He had noted that Frau Schoen only liked people who remained aloof. The man from Tarragona acted as coldly and distantly as he could, and was forced to rein in his
character considerably. Even so, people said the baritone was far too much of a gentleman for that lady.

On Sunday afternoons Frau Schoen organized teas for her friends who were reputed to be an arty set – they were lively occasions. Sr Boca was always insisting we should go. As he never shut up, and it would have been rude not to gratify him, off we went.

It was a fine house. The apartment was rather high up but had marvelous rooms that overlooked a large, open piece of land where masses of youngsters practiced sport during the holidays. When it rained and the curtain of water and low sky blurred the view from that apartment you felt you were outside Berlin, in the middle of the countryside. The interior, however, was very German and was furnished according to that lady’s taste. One room luxuriated in purple wallpaper with complex Cubist lighting painted in every color imaginable. The walls of another were a dazzling canary yellow, with black, spiraling furniture. A big goldfish bowl, home to two fish, stood in the centre, and the window ledges were filled with a large number of tiny pots of those soft hideous plants that are now so fashionable – cacti. It all made your hair stand on end. You’d often seen the clean, shiny shell of a tortoise emerge from under a sofa or the lady would walk in half naked, displaying her goatish teats, red hair, ravaged face, in purple shoes and stockings, and holding a stuffed bird or cheeky monkey on one hand. Some people reckoned Frau Schoen had a room devoted to snakes. I never saw a snake in her house, but it wouldn’t have surprised me if one
had
slithered out from under the furniture.

Our friendship with the correspondents of Italian daily newspapers in Berlin meant that two in particular often visited our apartment on Kantstrasse.

Ragutini was from Naples, and one of the saddest men I have ever met.
In his mid-thirties, he was short, with a toupee, a nose like a billiard ball, round, with shifty eyes, broad, red cardboard cheeks, and a tiny, trimmed mustache. He acted like a dejected clown and seemed eternally sorrowful. He usually wore light-colored clothes and Xammar argued that the sadness emanating from him came precisely from his light-colored attire.

Sabatini worked for an important Turin daily, was from the Mantuan nobility. His freedom of movement in high society was astounding. He was a thin, dark, curly-haired person whose svelte body shimmied sinuously. He had a penchant for rather effeminate black and white check three-piece suits. He wore a monocle he constantly fiddled with, because he was always fidgety. Sometimes, for no apparent reason, he’d get up from his chair, leave his interlocutor in mid-sentence and stand in front of the first mirror he could find.

Then he tightened the knot of his tie and started singing a fragment from an opera or a ballad.

He had a soft spot for the immortal:

that he rendered with arms outstretched, elongating his words as if they were made of rubber, with a half cynical, half sentimental glint in his hypnotic eyes. He could also deliver a patriotic song and many others in the genre, whether rousing or lyrical, mournful or amorous, accompanied or solo.

When his colleague was singing, Ragutini blushed, smoked compulsively, opened his eyes and mouth as if he’d realized he’d just blundered badly, and then, when the song was sung, he would snigger on the sly. Sabatini took note.

“
Sei un infarinato, tu, Ragutini …! Non ti piace l’Italia …!
” he’d say, giving the final touch to the knot of his tie.

One immediately noticed how Sabatini stirred up the ladies. His eyes devoured them and he lapped up their patter like manna from heaven. He treated them with Olympian contempt and told them of his affairs, never sparing a detail. He did it so calmly that he often seemed to be speaking quite spontaneously.

When one heard them for the first time, Sabatini’s amorous feats were amusing enough. He was so fluent and voluble you’d have thought a brightly colored streamer was ticker-taping from his mouth. Subsequently, one tended to glaze over and drowse off.

While he was speaking, Ragutini tried to position himself conspicuously. He’d follow his spiel and back it up with incredulous little chuckles. The two men were complete opposites. Ragutini was the intelligent fellow out on a limb, shunting his melancholy rancor about the world like a suitcase. Sabatini, on the other hand, was the born idiot for whom life was an open-doored Paradise, ever new and ever renewable. So discreet and always striving to understand things, Ragutini never made any headway. Sabatini would make a stupid remark, fall head over heels and doors opened wide for him.

A young Polish woman sailed with the Italians. She had some post or other in her country’s telegram agency. She was Gerdy, or at least that was the rather un-Polish name she went by, was petite, lively, and cheerful: a glittering jewel. Gerdy must have been in her early twenties. Her fine brown hair gleamed voluptuously and she wore it cut very short; she had a vivacious
expression and her skin was firm and pale. She was the kind of person who brings movement and freshness to everything she touches, and she made a big impact in that world of decomposing marooned monsters. She was always smoking Russian cigarettes in a white holder. She dressed in a wonderful, unfussy style and, in the leather raincoat she wore, was quite delightful.

Ragutini was in love with her. Sabatini treated her any old how. Ragutini tracked her with his sad clownish eyes, his mouth dried up when he spoke to her, leaving him tongue-tied. His attitude showed he was prepared to make whatever sacrifice that woman demanded of him. Sabatini often shrugged his shoulders most rudely when Gerdy asked him a question. Moments later, nevertheless, he’d give her an ever-so-knowing wink on the sly, in a well-rehearsed gesture that had the Polish lady hooting like a lunatic for five minutes.

One day I quizzed her about the Italians.

“Sabatini is a perfect fool, but I find him hugely entertaining,” said Gerdy pensively, exhaling a wisp of smoke through a crack in her lips. “Ragutini is more intelligent and safer, but I find him a boor and wearingly sentimental. You feel as if you are wasting your time when you speak to him.”

“Would you marry Sabatini?”

“Why not?”

“Even though he’s so stupid?”

“So what? You need so little to get married … Perhaps you need just a little wit and nous
not
to marry.”

“Come, come! If you don’t want to marry, you simply need to be a touch more naïve.”

“I don’t agree. You could never see things through my eyes and I could never share your ideas, however hard we tried. Everyone see things from
their point of view, especially women. In any case, we do almost see eye to eye on this.”

I looked at her quizzically.

“Don’t you like women who are ever so slightly foolish, rather than complete fools? If you don’t,” rasped Gerdy, lifting her hand to head off my reply, “you don’t have much in the way of taste.”

Gerdy spoke nonstop. She would almost always stay in the center of the room, a cup of tea in one hand and a slice of thinly buttered toast in the other. Conversations and huddles came and went around her. She circulated. She had a word for everyone and laughed tirelessly, saying whatever she felt like to whomever. Sometimes general hilarity or a real din struck up around her that turned every head at the party. It was precisely on one afternoon when Boca the baritone had bought Frau Schoen to the house – it was her first time – that Gerdy sparked one of those tremendous hullabaloos she was famed for. Frau Schoen blanched and we were afraid there’d be a violent scene. We were greatly surprised when she countered in a distraught, though almost familiar, tone of voice. Standing straight-backed in a corner of the room, she grimaced and replied loftily: “You know, Gerdy, I’ve a terrible headache. I simply must take an aspirin this very minute.”

The Pole would then take a rest, what Maties Boca, called her feline interlude. She asked the maid to bring her the cat of the house and lay beside it on a sofa. She opened its mouth with great difficulty and fed it a few drops of lemon tea. The animal bristled, performed extraordinary routines, looked to be in a rage, sneezed, wiped its whiskers with a paw, and capered over the carpet. Gerdy found all that most entertaining, and it would climax with the cat scratching her face.

Gerdy had a soft spot for a life of glitter and her dream would have been to be filthy rich and live in Paris.

“If Ragutini promised to take you there, would you marry him?” I asked her jokingly.

“Quite possibly … I would so love to be in Paris!”

“Why do you say that?” Gregori Tomski the Russian sociologist and moralist would then ask. “You are so gracious, why would you want to experience firsthand the vile madness of the Western world? Gerdy, why does it appeal to you? Isn’t Germany bad enough?”

Gregori Tomski was a chronic Russian émigré who maintained that everything outside the frontiers of the Slav world was perverse, sinful and anti-human. Tiny and bald, he looked perpetually crestfallen with his huge mouth, protruding pale ivory cheeks and glassy, almost green eyes. He always wore a bowler hat with a broad mourning band and dark shabby suits with shiny, baggy knees. His angelical, tender-hearted demeanor came as a real surprise. He spoke in soft, elusive tones, and silently came and went, like a weightless shadow, as if floating imperceptibly through the air. It wasn’t at all hard to imagine him traveling the world, mouth agape, arms open to welcome someone, his cheeks ever expecting a slap and his heart permanently on his sleeve. Later, his politeness, sinuous charms and all-around lightweight presence seemed rather disturbing. You realized that his angelic ways were different from what you’d observed in other men. You found a subtle undercurrent, an almost invisible thread of sarcasm, a tiny, chill tremor, a hidden, slippery
je ne sais quoi
that alerted you to a psyche one couldn’t quite fathom. The deadpan mask of his face was disconcerting, but even in his warmer moments, you felt you could see a tail waving like a miniature snake’s, its triangular head erect, in his glassy eyes. Who was he really? A hapless wretch? An impostor with a dark, tragic history? Who knows?

That sociologist was a source of argument and several people were visibly
repelled by him. Nobody knew what he did or what he lived on. Some said he translated sociology books from German to Russian, but nobody could vouchsafe such serious endeavors. Others maintained that his wife, who was a dentist, ran a renowned practice in a working-class area and that allowed him to lead a somewhat idle, whimsical life. Malicious gossips pointed to him being a wily, undercover agent for police of every kind. Others, on the contrary, reckoned he was a sad maniac on the loose. I heard people say strange things about him: they said you could find him in the oddest of places and that when you were least expecting it, he’d tap you on the back in that oblique, elusive way he had. I experienced that myself and was really shocked. One morning I had to pay a business call on a gentleman who lived in a distant neighborhood and I passed the émigré Russian sociologist on the stairs. Another day, when waiting for lady friend in an out-of-the-way corner of an empty park, I saw him walk by under the trees, holding a newspaper; he showily doffed his hat at me. If I’d been at all superstitious, that fellow would have had me worried.