Life Embitters (68 page)

This flow of inner life, quickened by physical pain, plunged me into a kind of vacant reverie and for a time – I’m not sure whether long or short – I lost contact with the world around me. What I do remember perfectly is that I came to when I felt someone touch my back. Yes, that was it: I felt a hand slide gently down from my shoulder to my arm. I was aghast and swung round in amazement. A man was looking at me with an expression of mild surprise, an amused-cum-cynical smile on his lips. It was Zorin, a journalist and sociologist, and friend from the Romanisches Café and press bodies, a Russian émigré. When I realized it was him I also smiled, quite
overwrought. We began a halting conversation. However, a few words in, I must have scowled angrily. His presence was an unpleasant intrusion. Why had he turned up at that time, in that place, in that weather, in the circumstances in which I found myself? What did he want? I soon realized that the sociologist wasn’t remotely interested in the expressions on my face. On the contrary, he talked to me as sweetly and politely as ever, and his quiet, gruff voice assumed a wheedling drone. I don’t exactly remember what he said. I have a vague notion that the name of Victor Hugo cropped up and he may even have recited a few lines by the immortal poet. His physical appearance was, on the other hand, etched on my mind. He was a featureless fellow: neither fat nor thin, neither short nor tall. He always wore the same longish hat with a broad blue band and a short coat that struggled to reach his knees; his face betrayed a rush of energy I thought was alcohol driven: his mouth quivered; his beady eyes kept closing above his greenish cheek bones and his hands convulsed almost lustfully. Soon after we started talking I yielded to the influence of his honeyed persistence. It was the charm of the Russians, a cold charm. He invited me to a glass of punch in one of the neighborhood taverns. He attacked twice – to no avail. I gave in at the third – I ought to say that I gave in to get him off my back, and I don’t say that to justify myself, but simply stating the truth. In the meantime, Roby hadn’t budged.
It’s most likely
, I thought as Zorin took my arm,
that he has fallen asleep. You’ve plenty of time to go to the tavern and come back. You can pick him up later
. We went into a sordid, repugnant dive. I couldn’t see a thing at first. An ocher, acidic cloud smothered everything. I didn’t sit down despite the Russian’s constant pleas. I ordered hot toddy at the bar. Once my eyes had adapted to the murk, I glanced round the tavern. There were four or five customers. A begrimed pianist with Roman-style tresses was playing a sentimental waltz. Two women were dancing. In that tepid atmosphere,
after so many hours in the open, my body seemed numbed: my skin was so taut I’d have felt no pain if somebody had stuck a needle into me. The Russian recited lines by Victor Hugo in my ear, and chuckled and chatted. The toddy finally arrived. It was barely hot. It tasted so markedly of chemicals it made my nose shrink. I should have thrown the lot at the sinister character next to me. I freed myself from his smarmy clutches and shot out into the street feeling more drained than ever. It had stopped snowing and the sky had cleared. I ran towards the spot where I’d left Roby. I looked all around. It was hopeless. I couldn’t find him.

The stone was there where he’d been sitting, alongside the prints his huge shoe had left on the frozen mud. Roby had gone. I then saw the implacably fated order of the disaster so clearly it seemed almost natural. Even so a whole wave of emotions swept through my head and I managed to keep running down streets for a long, long time. The description of my state of mind from the moment I discovered he’d gone to the following day when I discovered the outcome to this obscure, anonymous backstreet tragedy is beyond my measly means of literary expression and however much I strain I cannot remember the detail. I searched underneath the railway arches, above and below, perhaps for a quarter of an hour. Then I decided to go down Potsdamer Strasse. I remembered a canal crossed beneath that road and its pavements were usually quite empty in the evening even though it was so central. I’d often been delighted to watch a half sunken barge or small trader float breathlessly by on the canal from the point where the road became a bridge. The canal became an obsession; the mere thought of its murky waters took the ground from beneath my feet. Stumbling, wandering, in despair, oblivious to my body, I continued down the deserted street. Irregular blotches on the snow made me think of Roby’s maimed foot. Once again I thought I caught a glimpse of him in the light from a streetlamp:
the black blob turned out to be a discarded rag. I’d been so full of hope! I stopped in the middle of the bridge. I thought I could see signs of where a body had straddled the parapet. I looked down into the water: I thought there was a slight current pulling along chunks of ice. It was a murky red under the electric lights. Not a single sign. I looked around me completely distraught: everything was snowed under and wrapped in an impenetrable haze of silence.… I took a taxi home.

The day after somebody spotted a shoe floating in the canal. They pulled on the shoe and found Roby’s bloated, mud-covered body, with a bruised temple.

Sitting on a bench in Le Jardin du Luxembourg while Tintorer the philologist was discussing the vitae of Formiguera the dancer from Granollers, I was thinking how I’d met the two men (the philologist and the moribund young fellow) in Berlin months before, in the period after the slippery fat of inflation gave way to a hardening German mark.

Both Formiguera and Tintorer had visited the circle around my friend Eugeni Xammar. I’d met them at the occasional tea party in the Kantstrasse flat that the journalist’s wife put on for their friends and that were so useful when it came to sidestepping margarine and other ersatz products. However, it’s also true that neither Formiguera nor Tintorer were regular attendees. I imagine there’d been some unpleasant spat between Xammar and Formiguera. I witnessed a brief and extremely unpleasant exchange between the dancer and journalist.

One day, in the café, Formiguera said he’d been offered a contract to dance in a Prague cabaret, but the trip seemed very expensive.

“How much does it cost?” asked Xammar.

“Forty gold marks.”

“Do you have such an amount?”

“Of course.”

“What more is there to say then? I reckon it’s a bargain. When you want to buy something and have the money, it’s never expensive, If, on the other hand, they were charging you forty marks to go to Prague and you only had thirty-seven, the price would seem prohibitive. Prohibitive equals super-expensive: prohibitive!”

Formiguera gave him a withering look and gritted his teeth. Then he retorted, “I’m surprised you’ve not become a millionaire with these ideas of yours. What are you waiting for?”

“I’m waiting until I’m expert enough to be able to dance in cabarets …”

We intervened and the cut-and-thrust went no further. But their relationship remained brittle and the hostility manifest. Formiguera remarked that the day Barcelona discovered that economists existed we’d not have another worry in the world and could devote the rest of our lives to games of dominoes.

In any case, these scenes between ex-pats from the same country create a special kind of grief. They tend to be very common. Far from home, our sense of solidarity crumbles and corrodes.

One early evening in late December I went to the Romanisches Café to see if I could converse for a while with an acquaintance. I glanced around the room – suffused with Teutonic-Gothic darkness in that establishment’s modernist style – and spotted Tintorer the philologist in a distant corner.
From afar he looked downcast and anxious, though the hazy light made everything seem permanently unreal. I went over, and, the moment he saw me, he looked bemused and delighted.

“I was just about to write to you …”

“Really. Nothing serious, I hope?”

“Well, yes, it is. The unfortunate Formiguera is poorly and they’ve thrown him out of his lodgings.”

“Did he stop paying his rent?”

“No, they saw he was ill and told him: ‘Get off to hospital?’ ”

“Is he in hospital?”

“No, he’s in my lodgings, in my bedroom. Can you imagine? The lad’s very weak and this country’s climate is harsh.”

“Your room isn’t that big, I imagine …”

“What do you expect? It’s a poor student’s bedroom … though it is central. I like living in the center.”

“Has he got anything serious?”

“He is de-vitaminized, to use the latest barbarism that’s been coined.”

That was indeed the first time I’d ever heard about vitamins.

“So where does the barbarism come from?”

“It apparently originates from Sweden.”

“It’s bound to be successful then.”

“These things always are.”

“Well, then, what’s really wrong with the young man?”

“You know the kind of life he leads. Cabarets. He earns money but must work hard for it! The poor boy doesn’t enjoy the best of health. He has his male and female admirers. Love would be lovely if it were only about strolling under trees and holding hands in the moonlight. But sometimes one has to make the most of a bad job, and that can be exhausting. In
that respect Germany is a perilous place. Luckily I don’t think my philological studies arouse as much passion as the Argentine tangos Formiguera dances.”

“So why won’t he go to hospital? Berlin’s hospitals have a very good reputation.”

“He won’t go to hospital because we all come from a country where people don’t want to go to hospital, a country that is allergic to hospitals. We think they are all like the hellhole on Carrer de Tallers.”

“So what’s the solution? Perhaps the most sensible thing would be to leave for warmer, sunnier climes.”

“He’s in no position to leave …”

“So what can we do?”

“That’s precisely why I was about to write to you. If you help me, we can fix it. I really can’t do much more myself, though I’m very fond of young Formiguera. You might very well ask what a man like me, devoted to philological studies, totally incapable of frivolity, broke, and unattractive to boot, finds to admire in this piece of cabaret fodder. Well, there you are! I feel most warmly disposed towards him. The way you do with people who are perfectly transparent.”

“I understand!”

“Wait a minute! I said that Formiguera has his male and female admirers. That’s undeniable. It’s a fact. From my point of view such a situation is quite extraordinary, and is continually on my mind. I can’t stop thinking about it. It’s so important! To have at hand people who, when the time comes to pay, show self-respect, a desire to do things properly, who don’t dilly-dally and reach straight for their wallets. You must admit, it is an ideal situation to be in, and not so usual in life. All the people I’ve known – and I’ve known a number – have shown a tendency to throw in the towel at the moment of
truth. They’ve been driven by autarky rather than by philanthropy, to use the
mots justes
.”

“You’ve deployed them perfectly.”

“So then, I particularly like Formiguera because he’s a good sort. I have friends, who have the same resources as Formiguera but even on a good day they’d never enable their friends to draw on them. He does. I feel at ease with him. He is generous and never refuses a friend. I’ll go further, I find his type, I mean, his social type, and individual style fascinating. I sometimes think a study of the way he behaves would be exceptionally rewarding.”

“So are you thinking of changing your research focus?”

“Of course, he is completely transparent, strikingly so, but he has his interesting sides. A moment ago, I said the situation where he finds himself is a consequence of what he does, but that’s not entirely accurate. He is largely to blame. If he did things differently, he’d be in a much better state, and this conversation of ours now would be quite pointless. I mean, he’s an unbearable show off.”

“That’s hardly surprising!”

“Yes, he’s a show off, and a very
sui generis
one at that. I sometimes wonder at his intuition, the quick way he grasps things. From this perspective he’s unusual. Wouldn’t you like to pay him a visit? I’d be really grateful.”

“If you like …”

Tintorer paid for our drinks and got up from the table, and when he started walking away I saw he had a dog between his feet.

“Tintorer, you’ve a dog, I see?” I asked.

“Yes, I do! He’s Serafí.”

“Oh!”

“He was a present from Formiguera. Remember what we just said! That’s typical of him … Now the dog keeps me company.”

“You don’t miss a trick, dear philologist, do you?”

“We poor people are like that: we irresistibly complicate our lives. What can we do?”

As soon as we were in the street and in the grip of that unfriendly freezing December twilight, the philologist peered at Serafí, who responded equally affectionately. The pavement was covered in slippery slush, the air was cutting and raw and the sky very low. The outline of the city faded into the wet haze that the bright lights in the foreground suffused with a sticky, abrasive, mottled yellow. Our mouths began to exhale dense puffs of steam, but, after that interchange of glances between one man and his dog, our overcoats seemed more resistant. It must have been their strength of feeling – that was real enough, though too transitory to be effective.

Serafí was a German Bassett, and in terms of the canine seriousness that typifies this race he seemed very lively. The temperature didn’t appear to affect him at all and he was particularly happy if he spotted a remnant of snow on the pavement where he could trample and rummage with his snout. It was the kind of dog that had become fashionable in Berlin and you saw them in the poshest of places on exquisite leads attached to smart, highly self-satisfied ladies and gentlemen. The dogs also seemed cock-a-hoop to have swapped the countryside for a city life with such good prospects. That race had lived a rural life till then, raiding badger dens or rabbit burrows, killing rats and chasing all manner of reptiles. They were prized for their good nose, their tracking and pursuit skills, and their supple bodies for entering lairs. Such a sudden transfer from country life to sophisticated city districts must have impressed them at least initially. Indeed, they had progressed from sleeping on the ground to lying on the sofas of the wealthy entirely naturally, as if they had lived there forever.