Life Embitters (45 page)

“This young lady could perfectly well raise her prices and not meet a single objection …” I told my friend Pacheco one day, in a lucid moment.

“If she did so, she’d be in her right!” declared Pacheco firmly, his knightly eyes gleaming tenderly.

Pacheco was the boarder who was most sensitive to the young woman’s presence. And that was only natural.

In any case, there was a strange atmosphere in that house, an atmosphere I’d rarely experienced. Boarding houses with a clientele from different countries are cold places. It’s self-evident – and, moreover, understandable. In these temporary households comprising people from such diverse backgrounds and unknown provenance, conversation never breaks through the routine masks people put on. In this house a special sort of coldness existed that was linked to the presence of Maria Souza. She permanently lived in that atmosphere. Yes. She was agreeable, pleasant, most affable, but at the same time was incredibly distant, distinctly remote from her physical presence, mentally and physically separate from her environment: one always felt in the presence of someone who was a complete stranger. She seemed to be a woman obsessed by her own inner life that was totally unknown and secret, at least as far as I was concerned. At times she seemed to be afraid something might happen at any moment, something she clearly dreaded. It was easy to see. You noted her moments of amnesia in the tiniest detail. It was very apparent in conversation. Srta Souza was present, but wasn’t present. Her face sometimes seemed to betray the effort she was being forced to make to shed an abiding obsession and return to the present. It was a huge, very painful effort.

One day Pacheco sidled stealthily over and said, half worried, half astonished, “Sr Souza was here this afternoon …”

“Sr Souza? Who might that be?”

“It’s her father, you know?”

“So what …?”

“His daughter refused to see him. It was all in vain. The wretched man twisted and turned, wept, wrung his hands, and said he was hungry. He was a pitiful sight …”

“What about the young lady?”

“She was most upset. I suspect we won’t be seeing her for a few days.”

In effect three days went by and the young lady didn’t put in an appearance. At dusk on the third day Sr Souza came back. I saw him climbing the garden steps. I looked at him hard. He was tall, stout, and weary, with a salt-and-pepper beard, and large, bulging, olive-colored eyes that were bloodshot and watery. As he started up the steps, he took his hat off and exposed a substantial, pallid baldpate. He struggled up the steps. A metabolism in decline. His manner of dress particularly struck me. He wore a jacket and pants that were too short all round – charitable goods. He wasn’t wearing a waistcoat. A big white shirt fell over his paunch, but it was off-white, a white that had aged. He wore a celluloid collar and tattered tie. His leather sandals were a faded yellow. He walked as if he was afraid of putting his feet on the ground, as if he had grains of sand under the soles of his feet. It is a well-known fact that gamblers have sensitive feet; even so, that man’s way of walking was strangely unnerving. When he reached the boarding house landing he put on a battered bowler that he tilted over one ear, leaving a sliver of baldpate exposed. The moment he disappeared, my thoughts drifted back to his face: the texture of his face was that of a rotting peach, mushy with dark blotches. A film of weariness gave his features a sardonic veneer.

He climbed up to his daughter’s private rooms on the second floor. He wasn’t there for very long: the time necessary to see that the door was locked. We soon saw him come down head bare, his bowler in his left hand and a
handkerchief of a nondescript color in the other that he was using to wipe his face. He forced a smile as he walked through the door flashing green, yellowing teeth and with a furrow between his forehead and nose that was the legacy of twenty years unctuously sacrificed to roulette and happenstance. He attempted a cynical smile but it came out as the scowl of a man who is miserably poor.

He confronted the concierge on the ground floor.

“It must very sad being a concierge …” said Sr Souza, winking at him like a fool.

“Being a concierge must be very sad, but finding oneself in the situation of the father of the owner of this establishment must be even more so.”

The concierge yanked him by the arm to the road. When they reached it, Sr Souza looked wanly at the house he’d just left and walked off in the direction of Estoril, despondently, walking in that manner I found so distressing – as if he was frightened to put his feet on the ground …

The opening of the casino in Estoril attracted a good number of individuals living on the fringes of society. Sr Souza was one of them. He’d not lived in Lisbon for many years. His situation had marooned him in various provincial dives. Nevertheless, roulette retains an implacable, fascinating appeal for people driven by a passion for gambling.

The management of the enterprise took the necessary natural steps against this undesirable invasion. Entry to the gaming rooms was denied to most of these people. Sr Souza was one of the first to be denied entry. That annoyed him, of course, and he made every effort imaginable to get the ban revoked. But it never came to anything. You bumped into him idling in the vicinity of the casino looking downcast in defeat.

Sr Souza’s visits to the boarding house led to predictable, unpleasant
outcomes. His daughter became more invisible by the day and whenever she did appear she seemed anxious despite her only too obvious efforts to hide the fact. The management of the household suffered and a hint of disorder entered its daily routines. Sr Pacheco was possibly the individual who showed most interest in developments. He even meddled. One of the first things he tried to do was to contact Sr Souza in the hope – I imagined – of finding some solution or other. You wouldn’t have expected Sr Pacheco to react differently, given his deep admiration for the daughter of that human shipwreck.

It wasn’t easy for him. One evening I bumped into them sitting at a table at the back of a small café in the fishermen’s district in Estoril. Pacheco beckoned to me and I went over. Sr Souza shook my hand without getting up from his chair. I gathered that the relationship between the two men had gone beyond polite niceties and they had embarked on a real heart-to-heart. It even seemed that Souza was in some way grateful to Pacheco and felt a degree of respect for him.

“Sr Pacheco, sir,” Souza said after I’d sat down at their table, “you ask me the strangest of questions. This gentleman will understand straightaway … Yes, of course, I too have often asked myself the same question. Why are there men and women who are so incredibly obsessed by a passion for gambling? Come to think of it, though, it’s rather a childish question. Gambling is obsessive precisely because it is a passion. What sense does it make to speak rationally about movements that are instinctive? None at all, in my opinion. In any case, I’d like to attempt to explain, even if only tentatively, this obsession for gambling. From the outside, looking at things on the surface, it seems that the root of this passion for gambling must be a desire to win money … There is, of course, something in that. Money never does any harm … However, that would only be the right explanation
if gamblers acted as bankers and the bank was open. In that case, it would be an excellent business prospect. If they hadn’t banned me from entering this casino, I could have immediately shown that was the case. You’d have seen it straightaway … But the fact is that at a baccarat table, in any game with a bank, the gambler is face-to-face with the banker, and consequently, his prospects are practically non-existent … That’s where the problem starts.”

An empty cup of coffee and breadcrumbs lay in front of Sr Souza. Pacheco begged him to order something else. Souza reacted blankly. He was too preoccupied by his confession.

“I was saying,” he went on, “that the problem begins when we have the spectacle of a man who knows only too well that he is going to lose and yet there is no way he can extricate himself from the very mechanisms that will bring his ruin. This is the psychological mystery – if you’ll allow me to put it that way – behind the gambler, the enigma a gambler poses as a human type. Many have attempted to find an explanation. It has been said, for example, that the cause of the obsession, of the fascination the passion provokes, is located in vanity, in an uncontrollable desire for fame. I’ve heard it said that if gamblers wore masks over their faces and went completely incognito to lay their bets, they’d prefer to spend their time doing other things. The suggestion is that a gambler at a gaming table performs and thus satisfies a natural human tendency to be vain and frivolous. Such tendencies satisfy the human metabolism, prompt feelings of pleasure. In a gaming room, a gambler has an audience before which he affirms his own existence. ‘I also exist!’ he seems to say when he lays a bet, when he wins or loses. Now, I’m not implying that this kind of person doesn’t exist, but I think they are slightly out of fashion. This is the gambler one finds in romantic novels, the happy-go-lucky rake, the appealing, headstrong fool and love object of naïve young women. Bah! Real life is more complex. Please let’s be serious …”

When he reached this point in his monologue, Sr Souza ordered a coffee and seemed to loosen up. Then he continued: “Years ago, when I still lived in the provinces, I had terrible toothache one day. A confirmed gambler came over and said I looked very depressed. He asked me what I was taking for my toothache. I mentioned some sedative or other … He burst out laughing and said: ‘Why don’t you try something that’s infallible?’

“ ‘I beg your pardon, is there really something infallible?’

“ ‘Yes, sir: gambling. Have a go. Try it. Play … I assure you that you won’t feel any pain as long as you sit at that table. It is the only solution I know that’s infallible.’

“ ‘The truth is I’m a very bad gambler …’

“ ‘That doesn’t matter. I don’t mean you should play to win. I mean you should just play, foster the obsession: gamble to win or lose. I repeat: you’ll be quite astounded.’

“Despite that gentleman’s assurances and the increasing pain from that tooth, I couldn’t make up my mind. In fact, at the time I’d yet to start gambling, shall we say,
systematically
. However, I did notice something strange: the mere thought of the ridiculous figure I’d cut at the gaming table seemed to reduce the pain slightly … Now, years after that peculiar conversation took place, I can tell you one thing: I now believe that man was right. By exercising a passion for gambling one is relieved of the burden of moral and physical misery. When you begin to bet, memory disappears, and so does imagination. Every tension vanishes. That bet is pure present, an absolute fascination with the present. The only pity is that gambling is a medicine that does more damage than the original sickness …”

Sr Souza paused to sip his coffee. Then he hoarsely resumed his monologue.

“And now I will tell Sr Pacheco and you, sir,” he adding turning to me,
“why I was and still am a gambler. I think you’ll soon understand. Like other gamblers, I’m suffering from hypothesis mania. I’ll be brief because it’s late and we’d never get to the end of this. I’m obsessed by what might happen to me at any moment. It is literally a horrible feeling. When I walk down the street and see a lame man, a blind man, a beggar, when a funeral crosses my path, when I read that this person or that has committed suicide or is in the middle of great crisis, when a disaster or catastrophe takes place, I tell myself, almost routinely:
That could so easily have been you, you know. There are equal possibilities for or against it happening to you. Consequently, there is no absolute reason why you aren’t lame, blind, crippled, or a corpse, like the corpse in the hearse you just watched go by
. In other words, I am permanently obsessed by the idea that my physical, moral, spiritual, economic, and social state hangs by a thread, and that my existence teeters on a tightrope that is completely insecure. Now you will say: ‘Sr Souza, sir, you are a man without a scrap of deep biological confidence in yourself.’ I couldn’t say … I understand nothing. I don’t know what lies behind these obsessions. I only know that they are intolerable and horrible. That’s why I’ve gambled and would gamble, if I could, Sr Pacheco: to rid myself of these obsessions that continually depress me, to escape from their suffocating effect.”

After a brief pause, Sr Souza laughed stupidly – his lip sagged and his eyes bulged – and he got wearily up from his chair.

“That’s enough for now …” he said, “these personal things make hardly any sense …”

We said our goodbyes in the café doorway. Sr Souza walked in the direction of the casino. Pacheco and I walked to the main road and headed towards the boarding house. A bright moon splashed golden light over the pine trees. Lit up by the pale glare, the river seemed to flow mysteriously by, which I found rather disturbing after the scenes in the café. I would have preferred total darkness.

It seemed that that was the end of that, but a few days later we witnessed scenes that revealed how the efforts being made by Sr Pacheco hadn’t borne the slightest fruit. Indeed, two or three days later, Sr Souza appeared outside the boarding house’s front gate accompanied on this occasion by a man and a woman. Souza was carrying a large cardboard suitcase.

These two crossed the garden unchallenged – the concierge must have been away – climbed the steps, opened the main door, and walked down the passage. The first person they met was Pacheco, who was about to go out.

“Oh, Pacheco!” said Sr Souza, laughing and putting his case on the floor. “So pleased to see you. Don’t look so astonished, I beg you. Yes, it
is
me, Souza! No doubt about that … By the way I wanted to tell you something the other day but it completely went out of my head. I was very well acquainted with your father, Sr Pacheco. I’m talking about years ago, evidently. We thought along the same lines, were in the same party, out-and-out, ultramontane monarchists, the pair of us. We met in Lisbon. When you’re young, you believe such nonsense! We were awful … However, we can discuss that another day at our leisure. Now I just want to say that I own this house and have come to live here. These people accompanying me are a family, a family like any other, naturally, and are the family that looks after my things …”