Life Embitters (34 page)

“Did you ransack his papers?”

“A suitcase full. The crucial thing was to get into his safe, and after a couple of days his keys were in my hands. Port came in very useful. I opened the safe, when the professor was asleep, feeling really excited. Pure childishness, you’ll probably say.”

“No, not childishness at all, mademoiselle …”

“Whatever! I found several things in the safe, in particular the code to the most recent messages. That will be highly useful, will save us time. In the meantime, I tried to pick up a suitcase. I didn’t want one that was too new or high quality, because suitcases can attract attention, you know, depending on who is carrying them. I found one in an antiquarian’s, that was strong, if well-worn, and that’s where I put my booty. I took the night train to Calais – the same day I opened the safe. Everything ran very smoothly and as normal.”

“Did you find anything really serious?”

“I think there were papers to do with the Navy, I think … from Plymouth, to be precise.”

“But you know, papers can come in all shapes and sizes.”

“I heard he was only starting out as a secret agent. He had begun in the
classic way for this kind of agent: through politics. In fact, he’d been seduced as a result of his political inclinations. He was an old man who was out of his mind and out-of-kilter.”

“This all explains why the poor man doesn’t find himself behind bars.”

“Yes. What I just said explains it and also because I described the professor exactly as he was. From the human point of view, he was no enemy. He was simply unhappy in himself.”

“So how can you explain his involvement in activities that were so little in keeping with the way he is?”

“If such activities were perfectly executed, they’d be invincible,” replied Marta, casually. “Everything in life has its flaws.”

“I’m sure that all this has left you, how should I put this, with a bitter aftertaste, perhaps …”

“Yes, but don’t think I dwell much on the past. Besides, that’s life … What can we do about it?”

As darkness fell, we talked about a few other matters. Marta was very lethargic. Just after five Mr Panaiotis put in an appearance with friends who looked like Naval officers. The aperitif crowd arrived soon after. The room was filled with the aroma of anisette. That was when Georges came over bringing us both a plate of
escargots à la bourguignonne
. He said they were a present from Mr Panaiotis. Marta looked at them wistfully, but the snails were delicious.

The person who recommended it sounded both serious and sure: “It’s a lovely house, I tell you! An excellent place!”

And a moment later he energetically underlined how sure he was: “What’s more, it’s downright puritan!”

As I had some experience of the level of puritanism a boarding house in Kensington needs to start to be entertaining, I decided there and then. Within two days I’d been given the right to occupy a first-floor room in a brick house with a wrought-iron fence in that famous neighborhood.

A few hours later I met two compatriots at supper in the dining room: one was a Tàpies and the other a Niubó. I’ve had a fair amount of contact with them ever since. I thought they were two excellent lads, two perfect
friends. They had been living in London for several years. They had adapted perfectly, but had occasional bouts of nostalgia. Every now and then, for some reason or other, they had severe attacks of nostalgia. It was Catalan-style nostalgia: emotional, visible, and weepy. That was when they were unbearable.

Tàpies sported a trim mustache and his ideal was to save. I never knew and still don’t know what paths had led him to such a conclusion or what mechanism had brought him to profess such an ideal. He was a good saver, in the sense that he saved prompted by his own unconscious, I mean he never had to think about it. When giving him a kick in the butt – at the moment when his physical combustion started, as the materialists would say – the Eternal Father probably wagged a stern finger at him and said: “Save, Tàpies!” The excellent friend began to roam the streets and squares of this world as naturally as could be. He still roams and saves abiding by the agreement imposed by the mysterious law that regulates the inner lives of human beings.

At the time, he was a tall, thin lad, who sported, as I said, a trim, blandly colored mustache, and wispy hair that didn’t quite make for a baldpate, whose features would have been completely normal and easily forgotten, if he hadn’t possessed a small, perfectly delineated mouth, one of those mouths that the previous generation, the ladies of a previous generation, believed was really lovely. He spoke Catalan with a Barcelona accent and thus said “
aixinss
 …” rather that “
així
.” The word seemed to flow through his mouth like a wave.

Niubó was quite a different character. It was he who, on the day we met, introduced me to Mr Morton, a retired colonel with a stoop and an impressive military record, a thin, pinkish man with a huge head of white hair. The most important thing fellow boarders knew about Mr Morton was that he drank a dozen bottles of Scotch – White Horse to be precise – every
week without ever creating a fuss or doing anything out of the ordinary. He seemed to have only a passing interest in anything else. If someone he acknowledged said, “You drink a lot, Mr Morton …”

He would reply, “Yes, sir, absolutely …”

If, on the other hand, someone said, “Mr Morton, you don’t seem to drink that much …”

He would answer, “Yes, sir, quite right.”

Mr Morton was an honorable English gentleman who had spent almost all his life in distant lands and seemed to be weary as a result. He appeared altogether resigned and indifferent in his reactions. At any rate, he had the rare merit of knowing how to express his opinions as if they were completely unimportant. His only wish – apparently – was to adapt, as best he could, to the needs of the person asking him questions. In that sense, his interests seemed to coincide admirably with those of humanity in general. He was a remarkably altruistic individual.

What was my friend Niubó’s ideal in life? I find it a hard question to answer. He probably had no thought through ideal and simply voiced routine ones. What he most certainly did like was to live with his friend Tàpies. Both were bachelors, but were very different in character, apart from this common denominator. One always had a pile of money stashed away, which gave him security. The other never had a cent and that meant he tended to drift. However, they in fact complimented each other. It was as difficult to work out why Tàpies had emerged as such a saver as it was to discover why Niubó was almost continually flat-broke. They led the same lives, lived in the same boarding house, both worked in the City, for the same bank, one was really – to the point that they almost always went everywhere together – the shadow of the other. They earned the same money: four pounds a week. Nonetheless, there was nothing anyone could do: the outcomes were totally opposed.

As I thought about those two lads I came to the conclusion that they were perhaps brought together by a mutual feeling for the other’s wretchedness. Niubó could clearly see that Tàpies, with his reasonable pile, was a man worthy of imitation, and wanted to keep that positive image by his side as an example, as a moral incentive. Tàpies could see how Niubó embodied all the drawbacks of having a hole in one’s pockets, which meant he saw him as a stimulus, as a negative image whose presence it was in his interest to preserve. Niubó was also tall and thin, but his eyes were brighter than Tàpies’s and his hair in particular was thicker and hardier. But what most distinguished them was Niubó’s mouth, which was, shall we say, much more commonplace.

A few days after I’d come to the boarding house we decided to eat supper at the same table. They ate lunch near their office and never put in an appearance. It was in the course of one of those suppers we ate together that I felt compelled to raise a little matter I’d just noticed. I did so in a rather roundabout manner. Why do we become so roundabout when we are with two people? As soon as the moment seems opportune our shyness brings our vanity into play almost unconsciously.

“My dear Niubó and Tàpies,” I told them, “I heard a very strange conversation this evening. Just imagine, I was reading the paper, lying on the chaise-longue in my room, when I thought a conversation started up in the neighboring room … it was, might I say, poor me, an interesting conversation. You know that my room is at the end of the passage. I don’t know who is next door. I’m not, thanks be to God – either indiscreet or nosey. But it can hardly be news to you that brick walls in London are very thin …”

“Are you saying that walls in London are thin?” Tàpies objected, with a cold, reticent smile, pleasantly intrigued.

“That’s my impression at least …” I said slightly bewildered. “Am I wrong?”

“Explain yourself, please!” said Niubó, in a more reasonable tone.

“I do really think that the walls are thin and that, though they may be English people speaking, one can hear every word. They are so thin that one would not only hear an Englishman talking, but also a lord eating. I think a man and a woman were in conversation …”

“If you heard them speaking, the fact is you were listening!” said Tàpies with a chuckle that was his attempt to curtail the conversation.

“I don’t know. It’s probable. The fact is I heard them talking.”

“Surely, but if you heard them talking, it was because you were making an effort to listen in. That’s beyond doubt!”

“I don’t see why it’s so beyond doubt. My feeling, based, I agree, on scant experience, is that with this kind of building discretion is almost out of the question … and this must be why forgetfulness is so common.”

“You are wrong, quite wrong!” said Niubó, returning to his stiff and serious mode. “Do you know why the London police are considered the best in the world?”

“I have no evidence at hand to answer that.”

“I’ll answer for you … The London police is judged to be so good because crimes here are hugely complex.”

“As complex as they are anywhere …”

“No! The complexity here is labyrinthine, for a very simple reason: because nobody bothers about anyone else or even wants to, they’re not interested and don’t even think they’re worth worrying about!”

“Do you mean to say that this huge city is an enormous concentration of loners?”

“We’d have to define what we mean by the word ‘loner’. If you understood it in the literal sense of failed, would-be nosey-parker, we’ll never see eye-to-eye. An Englishman is a genuine, real loner, completely uninterested in the lives led by the people around him – provided they’re not irritating him.
An Englishman is a hand-hewn loner. That’s why crimes are so inexplicable: because people have seen nothing, heard nothing, and haven’t the slightest idea of what’s happening around them … The police have to be good precisely for this reason: because people in this country always have their minds elsewhere.”

“I don’t know what to say.”

“It’s of no matter …” said Niubó ratcheting up his pleasant tone. “You’ll tell me what you think when you’ve been here for a time. It’s hopeless trying to understand this country on the spur of the moment. One requires rather a long experience …”

“That’s true of any country. It’s a truism.”

“I won’t deny that …”

“So what are you attempting to do, dear Niubó, with such comments? Do you want to defend crime novels as such?”

“Not at all! In any case, crime novels, that are so abundant in this country, demonstrate that the English aren’t in fact nosey. The crime novel fills the void left by people’s habit of always having their minds elsewhere. The lack of individual curiosity leads people to be interested in a pre-fabricated nosiness. The crime novel is the most innocent, inoffensive form of nosey-parkery imaginable. But … let’s cut to the quick. What did you overhear from your bedroom last night? Have you uncovered a crime, some evildoing?”

“No, it was completely banal. My grasp of English is extremely shaky. The phonetics of the language is barmy. They talk like birds … If they’d spoken English, it’s very likely they’d not have distracted me from my newspaper. But they spoke French and that’s what really thinned out the partition between the two bedrooms.”

“ ‘I’ve come,’ I heard a man’s voice say, ‘to beg your forgiveness …’ ”

“Good God!” said Tàpies, suddenly riveted.

“Perhaps we should let him finish!” rasped Niubó unpleasantly.

“ ‘What’s the matter? What’s wrong?’ ” asked a woman’s voice quite concerned.

“ ‘I drank too much yesterday,’ answered the man’s voice. ‘It’s miserable to confess, but please allow me to release tension by way of a confession. I really don’t know why I got drunk: there are times when one goes off the rails and everything turns dark. It’s very odd. It’s absurd. It’s lethal. Then one cops out using the first excuse at hand …’

“ ‘You’ve said all this so often!’ said the woman’s voice with a weariness that didn’t seem, in my view, totally unsympathetic.

“ ‘It’s true. I’ve said that so often! But there’s very little that’s new in life! You’ll call me an animal, a hopeless wretch, tell me it lasts a minute and the outcome is always negative … Perhaps you’ll even add that what seems like a release for a few seconds can become a deplorable, oppressive vice … But what can we about that? A man is such a paltry thing; loneliness is so vast in these huge cities …’

“A longish pause followed. I’d like to be able to give you some idea about how long, but when I glanced at my watch, I saw it had stopped. In these enormous cities you have to do so much, time is always at a premium, that you always commit an oversight: it turned out that your watch had stopped. In any case, the pause came to an end. I heard the unmistakable noise of a loud, invasive, eager kiss. The woman’s voice said. ‘I completely forgive you, but make sure it’s the last time!’

“ ‘Really?’ asked the man’s voice, restraining his emotion.

“ ‘Really. Take off your shoes!’

“I didn’t hear another word. Two shoes fell on to the floor that seemed fairly weighty. And nothing else happened. It seemed as if nightfall descended
once again in the distant, muffled rumble of the large city. The vague rumble made by large cities is very different to what night brings in the countryside. It is like nervous panting in the city. Outside, in the countryside, it is a thinner, calmer, less agitated sound. Now, my dear Niubó and Tàpies, I’d like to ask a favor of you: as you’re familiar with this household, I’d like you to tell me something about the protagonists of this vulgar, banal exchange, because I really believe that when one lives in a boarding house it’s always a good idea to know who is round and about.”