Life Embitters (21 page)

The restaurant was a real find. I was so hungry! We ate an omelet, chicken legs, and a slice of ripe Brie. We downed a bottle of Burgundy – the best in the world. Then we drank the restaurant’s own cognac, with chasers.

A poorly lit train that took us back to Limoges. The movement of our
carriage was lulling us to sleep. For one last time she placed her head on my chest.

“This is really nice …” she said, her eyes half-closed.

“Are you sleepy?”

“I feel really wonderful …”

A moment later I could hear her breathing deeply and see her chest swelling like the belly of a bird. She had dozed off.

We had to dash out of the waiting room in Limoges. The Paris train had just arrived.

“I’m sorry,” I said to her by the door. “I didn’t find the time to ask you your name …”

“Don’t worry. Just forget me.”

“Why?”

“We’ve spent a pleasant day together. What else do you want?”

“You’re selfish …”

“Why try to complicate life? Do you really think it’s worth it?”

“Won’t we see each other ever again?”

“Who can know?”

“Bon voyage.”

“You too …”

I stayed in love with that woman for over a year. Then, everything gradually faded and her memory disappeared in the gray mists of weeks, months, and years.

It must be some fifteen years since I lost touch with my friend, Romaní, I mean my writer friend Romaní, who once had quite a reputation in Barcelona, a reputation that has been completely lost today. But lo and behold I discovered not long ago that he was a consul living far from the high life in a town in a South American republic. I wrote to him recalling our old friendship and the hours we spent in Paris, dreaming, chatting, being foreign correspondents, and engaging in other notional employment. I even asked him to tell me about his wife, the divine Olga Johansen of my youth, and her love for Romaní that I had the pleasure of witnessing in that now remote era. Romaní’s reply was both lengthy and disturbing. Here you have it:

“My dear, long-forgotten friend, I received your kind letter. I thank you for your good wishes and invitation to tell you about aspects of my life. On various occasions I’ve felt tempted to commit to paper the ins and outs of
my dreadful dramas if only to clear my own mind. I’ve tried a hundred and one times and never succeeded. I don’t know if this fresh attempt will be more fortunate. I’m not optimistic. You should know from the outset that my marriage to Olga Johansen lasted barely three months; we’ve not seen each other for fourteen years and I don’t know where she is now.

I was thirty when I first met Olga. By then the whole panoply of feelings and inhibitions, vanity and fear, deceit and truth that make up what is called character had crystallized into a definitive shape. I was a man of unmistakable, clearly delineated traits. Previous years had nurtured this process of personal development, and one could say that everything had conspired over time to make me a man who was allergic to social life, without a scrap of bonhomie.

By the time I was sixteen or seventeen, first constantly, then sporadically, I began to experience the pressurized though highly fragile nature of family life in our country.

My father was a trader. He was totally obsessed with making money. The only thing that really made him happy – the one and only thing! – was buying and selling. Speculation, in a word. He himself would say that nothing else existed in the world worth wasting his time on. As he was investing in turbulent times – the years of the First World War – he was affected by the considerable ups and downs in the situation. When things were wonderful, he became eloquent, chatty, was cocksure as a rooster on a haystack and ingratiatingly pleasant. Money flowed through our home like water, and we spent with never a thought for tomorrow. It was obnoxious.

When, for reasons I could never quite fathom, there was a sudden downturn, he’d become sarcastic, violent, insecure, and indescribably devious. Our life changed.

I never saw my father speak seriously to my mother about anything. They
were always locked in intricate, allusive exchanges, full of icy reticence, endless deferrals, and constant ambiguities – symptoms of a broken, irreparable situation that nevertheless remained stable.

Given all that, I don’t think you’ll be surprised if I tell you that my respect for my father rapidly plummeted. Indeed, I came to suspect he was one of the silliest, most frivolous men ever. The drama of adolescence derives from the stubborn degree of seriousness that comes with awareness of the onset of full manhood. I was irritated by my mother’s passivity. I couldn’t understand her. I made her cry so often! I made her cry for the pure fun of it, out of an almost intellectual pleasure, out of my complete ignorance of a situation I couldn’t grasp and that was highly complex. I thought I was right! I was a real brute! When I later reflected on these futile acts of cruelty, I decided they must be the root of my present skepticism. I made my mother suffer far too much with my atrociously simple-minded comments, I then thought I was duty-bound to ignore other people’s points of view.

Life in our family thus lacked any sense of mutual support, and that’s so common in our country I’ve sometimes wondered whether our people, who at street-level seem just like any other, aren’t a primitive tribe in disguise at home.

By the age of ten I’d left home to study for my high-school diploma. If you asked me why I started to study for this diploma, I’d be in a quandary. I can only confess that I was one of those designated by Divine Providence to pursue such esoteric studies. I became familiar with life as a boarder at a religious school. Like almost the whole country, we abided by the official state religion, which brought certain social commitments one had inevitably to fulfill. There was more leeway with regards to others. But that was the least of it. Children are annoying and if one wants a quiet life, better keep them at a distance when the time comes. We were all sent away to school,
so my father could devote himself wholeheartedly to his fascinating, passionate life as primitive man. He became involved in a frantic round of activity and apparently experienced an excellent, most worthwhile phase. He earned lots of money. It was such a good period we were able to travel with my mother and a maid on long spells of holidays. That must have been the best part of their lives.

I became a solitary soul. At boarding school I learned a few things that gave the final touches to my character. I learned to be self-reliant, to make my bed and not trust other people. Whenever I became involved in other people’s business or offered to help strangers, I came off badly. Everybody plowed his own furrow and did so with lucid single-mindedness.

When I was ill, I made every effort to stop them from telling anyone. I thought they’d pay me a dutiful visit, and their polite smiles would hardly hide the annoyance the journey and visit had caused. If my mother had come – and she most certainly would have – she’d have been deplorably upset when I started to argue the moment my temperature went down. My liking for loutish behavior is beyond words. Nonetheless, at the age of sixteen, my solitude led me to believe wholeheartedly that it was a grave error to fall ill and that physical pain is an outrage.

In the meantime, things led me naturally to find pleasure in a detached life of contemplation and the spectacle of the countryside. That coincided with the crisis of adolescence that was dramatic, if short-lived. I remember how when I was at boarding school, during a trip to the mountains, three friends and I escaped and ran for three hours in order to beat the others to the scary scenario of the sleazy walls of a filthy brothel. The inevitable upshot soon came, and I was expelled at the age of fifteen for various reasons, for being irreligious and other less acceptable attitudes. At any rate I have to say that three-hour chase was the pinnacle of my sporting life.

I started university in Barcelona, amid frightful chaos and uproar. I chose one degree rather than another, because I thought it would give me more time to do whatever I felt like doing. You need to idle a lot to acquire a proper level of sensitivity. I must say that I guessed right. I turned into a Lord Nelson of lethargy. The enormous freedom I enjoyed at the time so went to my head it prevented me from making the most of it. I met no obstacles and nobody crossed my path able to interest me in anything in particular with convincingly clear arguments. I let myself go and spread myself around – without provoking dramatic crises – as if I’d been living through a shipwreck. I hardened into a young man who couldn’t think what to do with himself. I became a kind of orchestrated fool.

At the time I read somewhere – perhaps it was Stendhal – that vanity was a powerful fillip, a kind of universally valued corset for people with a bad stoop. I tried it but the ridiculous figure I cut made me a laughing-stock, and I doubt anyone could have laughed so much at himself as I did. Meanwhile, I saw so many women, heard so much money chinking about, and watched so much mediocrity pass by, that I came to feel that social life wasn’t at all important. I’d sometimes hear someone talk, their pockets brimful of books and papers, about taking over society and I’d laugh in their faces. Others told me – guffawing or in tears – of their spectacular entrances or shameful retreats in society at large. What nonsense! They all seemed the same, all wore the same expressions. I gave them a wide berth and kept my lips sealed. Vice couldn’t budge me, nor could much-praised virtue. My state of mind might have led me to try out firsthand the life of a Franciscan, concretely, by dispatching me to a seminary. I lacked various qualities: imagination, faith in culture and systems, and perhaps my health wouldn’t have survived such an orderly life. I lived like a saint, and if I occasionally kicked at the traces, it was because I was afraid of being too Spartan: I was too fond of all
that. My spirit craved the rigorous exercise of returning home exhausted, indignant, and ashamed, after a night’s debauchery. But for that, it was as if I lived outside society and couldn’t have cared less what other men got up to.

I could and I couldn’t, I should add. I say this because there was this driving force within me – my egotism – a hidden, invisible chain that bound me to reality. If I could speak to you at all clearly about my egotism, you’d soon see what an unpleasant person I am. My over-righteous attitude towards the outside world constantly edged me in the direction of pessimism, and made me quite unable to collaborate or interact socially. One might say that everything was wonderful, but keeping well away was what turned me on. My singular ability to do nothing, to spend hour after hour smoking cigars and sitting around like a man on the verge of suicide – this turn of phrase was a success in its day and even today is apposite – was in response to my instincts. Men work because they find pleasures there that inactivity and sloth cannot bring. I’ve never felt those pleasures and it has made an unlucky man of me. You see: I never joined in, or allowed others into my life. The very thought that someone was approaching me with that in mind made my blood pressure shoot up. The countless advantages that social contact brings are nothing, to my mind, compared to the discomforts and conflicts that social intercourse brings. My basic education and superficial hold on culture probably enabled me to channel all my mental potential in a single direction. The doctor whose hearing is twice as sensitive as other doctors tends to reduce all pain to diseases of the heart. I have enjoyed a real talent when it comes to highlighting the tiniest stupid detail and picking up on strange habits, absurd situations, natural conflicts, and offensive attitudes to the point that I can say that this all mighty, almost unconscious receptivity of mine has manufactured the grotesque, unpleasant situations I have often encountered.

Not to mention, of course, my awkwardness in social life. I have the thickest skin for certain things but then can’t stand the slightest friction. I’ve almost always existed amid the most awful moral and intellectual chaos, but contrived to be annoyed by a late-running train. I was so naïve! And I only just managed to survive clashes of my own making. What I couldn’t tolerate were rifts caused by others – particularly when sparked by sheer thoughtlessness. After all this, I think I probably don’t need to tell you that I’ve never experienced what people call ambition, pride, the pleasure of giving out orders, or what poor, overweight, preposterous poets call the desire to fly. I would be lying if I said that I’ve ever wanted anything enough to want to possess and control it. Nothing has ever appealed sufficiently to dazzle me or make me overlook its less attractive sides.

Please forgive the extremely confessional tone this letter is assuming. However, as we have taken this route, you might as well know that I’ve carried these ideas of mine to an extreme, particularly in matters of love. One might say that I’ve always made myself available for the ladies, but I’ve never demanded anything they couldn’t give. Perhaps you will say I’ve been generous. I couldn’t say. However, it is undeniable that I’ve been most hurt by my right not to suffer friction of any kind. I’ve been generous in the hope that I would be left in peace. I can say, then, that if my combative individualism has been
de facto
nonexistent, my spirit of self-preservation has been elemental, rough-edged, and brutish. I’ve asked for nothing and dominated nobody, but I have defended myself with every noble and ignoble weapon there is when people have tried to dominate me or force me to take a step in their direction. I grant you this is all very paltry: I only ever wanted to get on with my life. The laws of state increasingly encroach on us and the day may come when we have to fill in a form in order to grow a mustache. I’ve always preferred to have maximum freedom within the constraints of the
law, and if I could stretch them, with or without sleight of hand, I’ve never given it a second thought. I’ve always thought unwritten laws were vague, and if I’ve never worked to discredit them, I can’t say they’ve ever excited me. If you want to grasp the ferocious nature of my instinct for self-preservation, you only need remember the expressions on the faces of our millionaires when you ask for five pesetas. They turn green as lizards and secrete the best salamander veneer you’ve ever seen. Transfer this to a broader, more philosophical field – to a stance respecting life – and you have some idea of where I stand. It would probably be interesting to find out the source of my savage intensity on behalf of the right to be passive. I’ve attempted to and have found so many blemishes in individuals and nations that their abundance has prevented me from ever reaching a conclusion.