Life Embitters (62 page)

A Catalan led the field against Tomski, a Sr Coberta, a cultured merchant and semi-artist, the son of the distinguished Sr Coberta from the Ampurdan who went bankrupt a few years ago, as is well known, trying to make a quick buck. Sr Coberta was voluble and shameless, prone to astonishing bursts of heart-on-sleeve sincerity. He was a warmhearted fellow easily swept along by an endless flow of words and the pleasure of chatter for chatter’s sake. He’d say of himself that his heart was “open like a barn door.” I can testify to seeing him wipe away tears in the cinema during a scene when children made it up with their father. He was a man of average build, with a freckled face, reddish hair, and rather coarse features behind large American-style spectacles. He was a partner in a large Berlin fruit store and owned a suburban movie theater.

Coberta never argued in an
ad hominem
, specific way against the Russian. Nevertheless, he had a mania: a boundless hatred of Russia and all things Russian. He couldn’t bear the slightest mention of the place.

“The Slavic soul!” he’d snort with a snarl. “You can speak as much as you like about the Slavic soul, its profound mysteries and ethereal charms … Stuff and nonsense! There are no such mysteries, ethereal delights, or depths. They are fantastically brutish and that’s all there is to it.”

One wanted to ask him what devious paths he’d taken to reach such a conclusion. You’d feel that for a second and then you’d look at him and find him to be so full of life and so typical of our country that you understood him perfectly. The most extreme opinions seemed perfectly natural coming from his lips. One can always rely on a Catalan to come out with the most extraordinary, flabbergasting ideas.

Coberta holding forth on Russia and the Russians always reminded me of Disraeli’s dictum on the same topic: “The Russians will always be first-rate as long as they wear their shirts outside their trousers. However, the day they look more civilized, they won’t be nearly so likeable.”

When the conversation turned to Russia, Tomski slipped off and disappeared out of sight. Gerdy backed Sr Coberta, and Ragutini also seemed to rally to the same cry, despite his taciturn silence.

“They are so brutish!” said Gerdy, incensed. “What really riles them most is not being able to pick their noses with their fingers or drink their tea from their saucers …”

“Absolutely!” chimed Coberta, brandishing his fists and launching off. “They are barbarians. Go into a Russian restaurant and see for yourselves. Look at the way they eat. They mix everything up: fruit with meat and coffee, fish with dessert and cheese; milk with vegetables and 70° proof alcohol. Their combinations make no sense, are straight out of the lunatic asylum.
We invented rice and chicken, they invented steak with sugar. They are polar opposites. And what about Russian women? Have you ever seen the like? The most aristocratic among them act as if they were chamber maids only yesterday. Snobs will say that sensually they are complex, literary and fascinating. Wrong. They only
seem
complex because to a woman they wave a fishtail behind and are all glitter and no gold …”

“You’re right!” agreed Gerdy passionately. “We Polish women …”

Sabatini managed to stifle a laugh and Ragutini had enough sangfroid to introduce a diverse, calming note while glancing at her as if mildly bewitched.

“What can one expect from savages?” asked Coberta histrionically. “They are stubborn, inflexible, brutal, and of a piece. They never change, are never wrong, never waver, never give. That’s why they are so cold, objective, and implacable and totally inflexible. They are wedded to a single idea and soon become blindly fanatical. If it suits, they behead and kill coldly, routinely. These people frighten and horrify me and the eternal victim’s pose they’ve turned into the true base of social life fills me with nostalgia for the warmth of the corrupt, sentimental folk of yore. I prefer life to be sociable, though things may be more precarious, than to exist as a cog in a machine that is perfect, just, and brutal. It’s better, if at all possible, for people to wear grimy shirts and be less ruthless. It’s better to be reasonable and tolerant and act against simplistic, brutal, bloodthirsty savagery. There’s something else about these Russians: they are obsessed by history, they aspire to leave their mark on history and thus be perpetuated. To ensure that happens, they are ready to commit the most bloodcurdling feats, to ride roughshod over everything in their path, to execute their mothers and their fathers. They maintain that before their revolution – that simply brought chaos to large swaths of this planet – that men and women’s lives simply erred, were a
whimper, and that truth only appeared on the planet when they appeared. They are capable of anything, are amazingly arrogant. They don’t possess the slightest veneer of wit, sense of the ridiculous, or humane, generous understanding. They are intolerable pedants, and irremediably infantile …”

Coberta’s outburst prompted several protests. The most vociferous came from Herr and Frau Mulhens, a German couple from Breslau. They were a remarkable pair. They had lived as man and wife until the age of thirty in a state of lukewarm marital bliss. He was a bank clerk and she did the books for a restaurant. One day, however, they met a psychiatric doctor with a great future behind him who was moreover an expert practitioner of the occult sciences and so-called manifestations of vital energies. I’m not exactly sure what these highly respectable mental disciplines amounted to. Nevertheless, the fact is that the good doctor hooked up the married couple and the Mulhens suddenly moved on from their previously dull gray existence to a life of violent disarray. He left his bank and she abandoned her restaurant to join the way-out bohemian crowd. Germans bring to everything they do, whether normal or not, the same nervous energy and the same desire for total possession. One saw them attend the soirées of the most radical avant-garde, half-hidden clubs, and other clandestine sensual-cum-scientific dives. Initially, it was a great effort to acclimatize but, instructed by their well-qualified guide they soon saw the light. They explored all the medieval byways that, so they say, have resurfaced in recent years: black magic, the occult, theosophy, spiritualism, expressionism, experiences of rejuvenation and euphoria, not to mention different manifestations of transcendental pornography. At that precise moment they were cresting the wave of psychoanalysis and wallowing in the symbolism of the senses and the unconscious. They heroically survived that tortuous path, but their determination was astounding: they were two scraps of humanity
in the grips of new knowledge. They happily clung to the tightrope of their lunatic obsessions. Frau Mulhens was a small, plump, oily, unattractive, repugnant woman, awash with furs and diamonds. She acted as a medium and read the cards. He was a chlorinated ivory white, medium-built fellow, with a face like a fetus and a big, protruding butt: ravaged, putrefied, and pockmarked. He was an art critic and music-hall songster.

“Why do you speak of such important questions, Sr Coberta” the two halves of the indignant duo retorted almost simultaneously, “if you are bereft of method or any sense of responsibility? If one wishes to attain a certain level of culture, one must set out on a long, difficult road way beyond the simple possibilities of a petty merchant …”

Sr Coberta heard them out, head down, ironically tapping the leg of the sofa with his shoe. Then he looked up and stared at them as if they were a high mountain peak. Everyone anticipated a brilliant riposte. Coberta shrugged his shoulders and abandoned the field of battle.

Every one of Xammar’s predictions was handsomely fulfilled. Those cups of tea bore rapid fruit. Von Berg asked us to collaborate and on very good terms. Xammar almost allowed himself to be monopolized by the Italians and their highly active press services. We prepared a detailed biography of Boca the baritone that Frau Schoen paid for most generously. The same lady – whose connections were vast – put the translation our way of promotional material for the Hamburg American Line: easy, convenient, well-remunerated work. Sr Coberta opened his arms to us. Apart from the business we knew he was in, he had begun a new initiative: the antique trade. The economic recession was highly favorable for this kind of business. A large part of the merchandise traded during the years of inflation re-entered the market. Coberta was flourishing … Thus, what with one thing and another, we managed to rustle up a substantial income. We could
defend the respect due to human dignity in terms of margarine and ersatz products. We could, at the same time, hand the translation of Kropotkin’s
Ethics
generously sent our way by Tassin over to more expert hands. Xammar would come carrying now this, now that new item. The Kantstrasse apartment became more elegant and stylish by the day.

The time came when we began to wonder how much more of an open house we could sustain. The number of visitors increased weekly and I think that was down to the fact that, unlike what happened in many Berlin get-togethers, our gathering didn’t especially center on culture.

“Our gatherings,” said Xammar, “are too entertaining, people are having too much of a good time. If we want to ensure that our guests don’t come too often, perhaps we need to raise the intellectual level in order to clear the air now and then.”

To achieve this aim, it seemed that the presence of Dr Guerrero would be useful: a Madrid-educated Guatemalan philosopher, he was a small, thin, wan young man who carried a walking stick over his arm and spent his life rubbing his hands together. His skull was long and hard, his complexion, earthy and his nose, aristocratic and imposing. At first sight, he looked like a barber by trade who was a fan of bullfighting. Whenever I saw him, he always wore a small white jacket, carried scissors or a knife, with a yellow cigarette butt tucked behind his ear, and talked bullfight talk using convoluted language and gesturing in a peculiarly clockwork manner. He aspired after a university career but was really suffering from terrible constipation and a dearth of fibrous vegetables. Dr Guerrero was a typical example of the intense intellectual: a confused morass driven by a single desire – to enjoy a fellowship or the status of a fellow; to be a professor or enjoy the status of a professor; to have a foot on the ladder, or merit a place on the ladder. Intellectually speaking, any bubble of words sent his head into a spin. His
forte was his almost complete inability to connect with reality, to separate the wheat from the chaff. He constantly oscillated between Byzantine obscurity and a mania for startling shafts of wit and held his ground as long as he could call up an incomprehensible argument or a happy play on words. He was never clear or spontaneous. He brought on that stress engendered by men born to speak without ever knowing what they are saying, men born to pronounce like oracles.

Unfortunately, Dr Guerrero was soon rendered
hors de combat
. In effect, he came up against a systematic brake on his perorations in the person of Sr Mariano Regulado, from the Portuguese colonies, who’d come to town to give a course of lectures on tropical pathology. In our gatherings, Regulado was the spirit of common sense, balance, and normality. He was a paunchy diabetic, the color of faded liquorice, with long, lank, moist hair, and a face veiled in suffering.

That fine gentleman amused himself by standing opposite the budding professor and listening to him with a smile that was enigmatic, though apparently congenial. He stood there as long as was necessary, never losing his patience, always attentive and intrigued. And it was infallible: after a more or less long spiel, the philosopher would lose his thread and start to stumble. Guerrero always tired of talking before Regulado tired of listening. When he saw he was leaking water, the Portuguese man gently cajoled him. “I can guarantee you one thing, Sr Guerrero. You are a really lovely man, I’d say it was almost a foregone conclusion that you will have a distinguished career.”

Gerdy’s sharp eye often helped Regulado in his efforts to keep him on a rein. Guerrero made the big mistake of saying something silly about French wine in the presence of Gerdy, one of many foolish remarks one heard at the time on things that were fully established and recognized.

“Oh, no!” exclaimed the indignant Pole. “I can’t let that remark go. It’s going too far. And tell me, Professor, what kind of philosophy do you teach if you are ignorant of such basic things? This doesn’t mean,” added Gerdy, laughing contemptuously, “that you will never become a fine university teacher …”

Fortunately, our need to strengthen the cultural gravitas of these get-togethers was bolstered by the figure of Doctor Wiener, Privat-Dozent of Metrics at Hale University. He was in his forties, blonde going on gray, gaunt, passive, and absentminded. He looked very much like Nietzsche in the most common portraits of him, with that air of someone suddenly taken by surprise. He was very odd to observe in action. He asked the strangest questions with a deadpan expression and stopped everyone in their tracks. His curiosity knew no bounds and he poked his nose into everything. He asked equally enthusiastically about artistic matters as about the world of finance, about down-to-earth or lofty subjects. His questions seemed even odder when one noticed that Dr. Wiener never listened to any answers. Indeed, sometimes it even transpired his interlocutor was familiar with the subject his question addressed.

Rarely, to be true: the professor was too self-preoccupied to choose his targets successfully and would often talk to young ladies about philosophy and to highly respected faculty about fashion and contemporary dance. But sometimes he got it right, and when that was the case, his target focused his ideas and would launch into general introductory remarks to what promised to be a brilliant speech. After listening for a few moments, the professor’s mind was already elsewhere. If he was on another wavelength, mid-peroration, he would hum a tune out of key or ask a question on a completely different subject, for no obvious reason. These lapses were the weak point in his strong character, though people could never agree on
how to interpret them. Some declared they were clear proof that he was the consummate sage. Others, on the contrary, said he was rude and various levelheaded fellows would have liked to teach him a lesson.