Authors: Josep Pla
One day, when he was barely forty-eight, he touched a key with his right hand and felt it was cold. When he touched it with his other hand it seemed neither hot nor cold: it felt somewhere in between, as usual. Soon after he went into a café where the smoke sent his head into a spin, and they had to bring
him round from a fainting fit. The doctor diagnosed poor circulation, acute arthritis, an exhausted heart, extremely high blood pressure, and the risk of a stroke. A man who had always eaten and drunk to his heart’s content, he now found himself restricted to an odiously narrow diet. He became sad and despondent and avoided human contact. His physical strength rapidly waned. The main damage to his state of health was moral. He firmly believed in a destiny shaped by Providence, convinced that he existed as the result of some millenary design – a conviction that constitutes the religious bedrock of this country – so the eruption of this illness threw him into complete disarray. He would often nervously ask me: ‘How can you explain all this? How is it possible? Where did I go wrong?’
It was pitiful. As the years went by, he forged the idea that an incomprehensible, unjust, obscure, blind force was attacking him while Providence that he’d hitherto considered to be positive and wise remained quite indifferent. And obviously, as the illness formed part of his physical make-up and there was no way he could escape it, he turned into a skeptic. The most hardened form of skeptic: a passive, silent, deeply somber skeptic beyond redemption
.
In recent years, I sometimes came upon him contemplating a tree, a landscape or a book. His lips were locked into the rictus of an icy grin
.
I once remember surprising my mother looking at the sea with eyes full of sadness and disillusion. At other times, in difficult, painful moments for the family, I watched her reacting energetically, undaunted. On days when the southern wind blew, she seemed to suffer intolerably and was unable to sit still for a moment. These surges and depressions – usually short-lived so far – have affected and considerably shaped my character. I have inherited my father’s skepticism, arthritis, and shyness. And my mother’s depressive tendencies that alternate with moments of breathlessness and a heart on the flutter
. As
I’m made this way, my inner – and outer – lives fluctuate, are unstable. I
have friends who speak of my cynicism. They do me wrong. I’m not all clear in my own mind. I struggle in the depths of confusion; my real knowledge of things is scant; I’m not sufficiently vain to be able to deceive myself. I find my vast, boundless ignorance distressing. I try to navigate the wretchedness of the human condition with my eyes open and my heart elsewhere … but this is all such nonsense!
The other day, when I was roaming the streets of my beloved old city of Girona, I came across the remains of advertising posters hanging on the down-at-heel walls of a house on Quatre Cantons: they were, in effect, tattered, faded posters advertising a show put on by a crazy band or troupe, when the good weather started and nights began to warm up. In my day the outfit had a Levantine base – and I say Levantine because most of the performers were from Valencia – and their director, a fellow who put the fear of God into you, always received a rowdy welcome that in my humble opinion was hardly enviable.
Over the course of my life and especially in my early years, I lived in an infinite number of lodging houses, pensions, inns, and hotels; literally countless beds have supported my bones, for shorter or longer periods of time: beds of all shapes and sizes, colors and designs, generally cold and
uninviting. A Madrid lodging house where I lived for a long time belongs to this bittersweet collection of residences. It was located on the Calle Miguel Moya, by Callao, the noisy hub for the city’s foreigners.
In fact, it was a large house, though it seemed tiny because the side of the amazing Press Building skyscraper soared up on the pavement opposite. The presence of this monster edifice influenced everything around and even distorted the view of the world embraced by the people in the neighborhood. The lodging house was fully in the Madrid tradition: a central patio, now covered by a skylight, and enclosed all round by the sides of the building. If the skyscraper hadn’t existed, the house would have seemed quite different, as I’ve said; in fact, it felt stuffy and tiny; the rooms had very high ceilings, as they do in many old houses, but the contrast with the steep walls opposite reduced it to dimensions that seemed stifling. The presence of that flamboyant skyscraper made us feel that we were living in a kind of New York, not the genuine item, of course, but a kind of homegrown New York. We tended to put on a New Yorker style. The local young ladies did their best to be mistaken for film stars and the odd neighbor was even involved in heavy-duty business, with a jutting jaw, flashy tie, and hefty square shoulders. They were the Madrid Asturians or Galicians, though they sometimes looked like quite another class of gentleman. I sometimes thought that Providence had placed that impressively vertical skyscraper before my eyes in order to instill in me the need to be an early riser, to work in an orderly way and give my life a regular routine. I don’t mean that in those early days the skyscraper didn’t put me on the right road: in the event, the change was short-lived; I never managed to get up at a decent time. If you feel you are immune to the moralizing influence of a skyscraper, it hardly encourages you to spring into life.
The building where the lodging house was ensconced was new, or at
least restored, and, like all the new houses built in our country at the time, it wasn’t a solid construction. The wooden frames of the doors and windows had shifted unusually and nothing actually closed; the walls were thinner than a cat’s ear and the neighbors were a constant presence in our lives; at night you felt you were sleeping with somebody else, with complete strangers; it was hard to talk since everything could be heard; the shutters were in guillotine mode and very showy, but, because of what botanists call wood fatigue, they guillotined nothing: neither the feeble pink light of dawn, nor the glow of the streetlights. The shutters were stuck in the sides of the windows and wouldn’t budge up or down however much you pulled the cord. They were ruined guillotines, guillotines that had suffered the chop. The bathroom was a total mystery. No doubt out of fear that the building’s hydraulic system might bring on a catastrophe, it had been decided to keep the family treasures there. In the tub, you could find a plaster Venus de Milo covered in yellow dust; the portrait of the landlady’s deceased husband in a solemn, serious frame, pure graveyard baroque; sickly, spindly potted palms; volumes of jurisprudence from the Reus publishing house, that had been discovered in the bedroom of a hapless candidate for the civil service exams who had committed suicide; umbrellas with broken spokes. A useless, forlorn umbrella in a bathtub is a sorry sight. The sink was practically unusable: if you turned the tap you heard a windy noise come out of the hole, like a half-hearted whistle that seemed to be mocking your presence. A dressing gown hung on the hanger behind the door for ages and nobody knew who it belonged to, but it was too shabby for anyone ever to want to claim it. It was a bathroom that brought on the melancholy of things that are ill-conceived and absolutely gratuitous.
It was a Valencian establishment, and the lady lording over it was proud and had grand ideas. Her menus were based around the inevitable dish of
rice: black rice, paella, and rice in succulent sauce. I still remember the filaments of saffron that floated in those yellow juices. It was a perpetual flow of rice that I strained to digest for days on end. The skyscraper took us to New York, the persistent rice to China. Nonetheless, our landlady was an excellent sort; when it was time to pay, I never saw her adopt a truculent stance. I am convinced our imposing matriarch believed that rice was so important she would have cooked it for free for the whole of humanity. Her generous conception of economics meant that the house was always crowded out. Apart from the usual lodgers, the kitchen was always full of citizens from the ancient kingdom of Valencia who were panting for a plate of rice, and you could always find them there from ten
A.M.
to midnight.
Apart from this, the place was a great home to bullfighting. Some huge, genuine, terrifying heads of famous, historic, and listed bulls were nailed up in the four corners made by the passages that went round the patio. If you went down one of these corridors, you would see at the end the head of a noble animal, imbued with a frighteningly real, appallingly live presence. Obviously you became inured to the bulls in the end, because life leads one to adapt to the strangest, unsuspected things, but I never met anyone who could hide a feeling of dread before the eyes, horns, snouts, and magnificent necks of those wild beasts. The main wall of the dining room was dominated by another kind of head, above a gilt inscription, the head of a reddish bull that inspired the same fear as the others in the passageways. The pension was overrun, especially in the winter, by people who were renowned in the bullfighting world. The visit by Don Vicenç Barrera was remembered in the pension for years afterwards. The rice that poured out of the kitchen that day was unbelievable. Two hours after Don Vicenç had disappeared, people were still eating rice at one end or the other of the boarding house, and I even saw one gentleman standing in a passageway eating his plateful.
One day a huge bus pulled up outside the entrance to the house, painted a canary yellow and upholstered in Cubist style. A large number of individuals tumbled out, clad in their respective overalls, weary and downcast as if they had just been released from jail. A large number of instrument cases were hauled down from the bus roof. They were the personnel and artistic tools of the band, the posters for which I’d seen the other day when strolling down the streets of old Girona. The bus attracted a lot of attention and a large number of spectators gathered outside the doorway. The bystanders’ curiosity soared when they saw two extraordinary characters emerge from the artifact: a giant and a dwarf – genuine items. Both managed a warm smile for the crowd, even if it was a rather tired one after their long journey. Then they walked through the door and settled into the lodging house. The landlady was waiting for them when they walked in: she was radiant and her eyes were shining. It was evidently a great day for her.
A few hours after this invasion, the house throbbed with their musical outpourings. From one room, the notes of an oboe; from another, of a trombone; flutes, violins, and piccolos flooded the passageways; the trumpets were a boisterous presence; string instruments weren’t in great supply, but the few there were charged the sound waves with their melodious tunes. Although they languished rather – it was late spring – the cornets seemed to give the atmosphere a glow with their bolts of lightning.
That intense musical activity was initially most pleasant, because sensitive people always aspire to have music in their own homes. However, the days went by and the dense manifestations of music, particularly the plethora of variegated, disconnected exercises, started to pall. The artists were almost all, as I’ve said, from the east coast and as such very fond of eating rice in one shape or form. Pale and feeble when they arrived, they quickly bucked up after the array of differently flavored rice that the establishment
offered. The color returned to their cheeks and the sparkle to their eyes. I soon registered how their musical enthusiasm rose in parallel with the improvement in their physique.
I already knew that Valencians were a tenacious crowd: I now discovered that they expressed their tenacity the minute they clutched a trumpet or clarinet. Thus, the establishment was subject to such a musical onslaught, that was so systematic and continuous the air within its walls filled with a gluey syrup of totally jarring musical effluent where the rippling waves from the strings seemed to love to swim. The time came when we lodgers felt that we were living in another dimension: in a heavy, compacted, and rarified dimension where there seemed room for nothing else. It was as if music invaded everywhere and exerted pressure over everything contained within the pension, a pressure that reduced your living space, that invaded you and drove you from your usual life as if you were a mere object and as if you were gradually being displaced.
It was plain that there was only one path to take: to move out voluntarily and spend the daytime out in the hope that nightfall would bring a more benign environment. And this is what most lodgers did, apart from three or four delicate souls who couldn’t resist the onslaught and left the pension for good.
I tried to instigate concerted action with those who resisted with a view to setting out the objective situation to our landlady. My initiative aimed to inform her that if she continued serving those huge quantities of rice, life in her establishment would become literally impossible. I joined forces with a captain from the Cavalry Depot, an Arts student and a second tier civil servant surplus to requirements. The formulating of any critical opinion as to the prowess of the band could have backfired on us, because aesthetic issues are always difficult and thorny. After all, it was their livelihood and
that always demands respect. The only option was to take the roundabout route and to manage a reduction in their enthusiasm by gradually decreasing the portions of rice that seemed to guarantee such good results.
Our landlady, however, was not convinced. I had to emphasize that the pressure was really painful for anyone who wasn’t a complete Valencian. But she was in a state of bliss. The presence of so many artists in her house brought her nothing but joy. As far as she was concerned, it was a matter of sensibility, of whether you had any art in your soul. In that light it was a favorable environment. Favorable
and
fascinating. It was entirely natural that people devoid of sensibility, and dead to art, should feel rather frayed. That was so natural …! We might as well have whistled till the cows came home … So a dividing line was drawn up: on the one hand, dull vulgarity and on the other, the divine flame of art.