Life Embitters Read online




  English translation © 2015 Peter Roland Bush

  Originally published as La vida amarga by Ediciones Destino, 1967 Barcelona

  Copyright © heirs of Josep Pla, 1967

  First Archipelago Books edition, 2015

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or retransmitted in any form without prior written permission of the publisher.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Pla, Josep, 1897-1981, author.

  [Vida amarga. English.]

  Life embitters / Josep Pla; translated from the Catalan by Peter Bush. – First Archipelago Books Edition.

  pages cm

  ISBN 978-0-914671-13-8 – ISBN 978-0-914671-14-5

  I. Bush, Peter R., 1946- translator. II. Title.

  PC3941.P54V5313 2015

  849’.8352–dc23 2014035214

  Archipelago Books

  232 Third St. #A111

  Brooklyn, NY 11215

  www.archipelagobooks.org

  Distributed by Random House

  Cover art by Perico Pastor

  This publication was made possible with generous support from the Institut Ramon Llull, Lannan Foundation, the New York State Council for the Arts, a state agency.

  v3.1

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Preface

  The Central Tavern

  Though We Count for Nothing, Far Be it From Me …

  A Boarding House, Central Barcelona

  A Death in Barcelona

  A Friend: Albert Santaniol

  A Madrid Lodging House

  Counterpoint

  Boulevard Saint-Michel, Paris

  What You Might Expect: Nothing

  A Case Study

  Un Homme Fatal

  A Family in Foreign Parts

  An Adventure on the Channel

  A Lodging House on Cambridge Street

  A Conversation in St. James’s Park

  Meanwood, Leeds, Yorkshire

  Obscure Northern Saintliness

  My First Trip to Portugal

  With the Sun on Your Back

  Memories of Florence

  The Business at the Pensione Fiorentina, in Rome

  THE BERLIN CIRCLE

  Portrait of Inflation

  Roby or Deflation

  Intermittently Moribund

  Preface

  This is a book of narrative literature, the kind I would have liked to write, if I hadn’t been completely taken up reporting the news, that is, if the frantic, disperse life of a professional journalist had allowed me. But it proved impossible. Of course, it is an open question whether I would have had any talent to bring to such narrative. I felt an interest, a pull towards this kind of literature. But that amounts to very little! I believe any – shall we say literary – point of view derives from a personal ability to grasp external reality aided and abetted by long, continuous experience of observing, remembering, and hard work. I have always lacked “non-productive” time. In any case, this is what my attempts have achieved. I say that because it would be wrong to describe them as anything else.

  Journalism has its good sides: it opens up huge areas for scrutiny and leads to a great variety of human contacts, some of which are extremely interesting. This allows people who are inclined to roam, and feel like vague, unsubstantial shadows hovering briefly over this earth – that being my case – to move freely, particularly when the monetary element is reasonably buoyant. In certain periods of my life I have felt almost morosely fond of such gallivanting – I was a wanderer. I was to an extent a product of the value our currency held between the First World War and the Spanish Civil War. In this period, journalism enabled me to wander tirelessly and ingenuously and experience the most diverse situations. I flitted across Europe and tried out many different cuisines, slept in countless beds, and talked to a range of people. I wrote a lot.

  Despite my reputation for being sardonic and flippant fashioned by two consecutive generations who never in fact bothered to get to know me, I’m a complete unknown as a person. I feel obliged to say that I don’t have a very exalted conception of the writer in relation to the times when he happens to be alive. I don’t believe any writer is the bearer of an exclusively individual message. This is the final stance adopted by literary Romanticism – the most pretentious, immature phase Romanticism ever went through. On the other hand, I believe a writer has an overriding responsibility towards the era in which he is living. A writer’s first duty is to observe, relate, and portray this era. That is infinitely more important than futile, barren attempts to achieve elemental or eccentric originality. Literature is the reflection of a particular society at a particular time. This axiom – valid from the remotest times – was coined by De Sanctis, and is one I humbly share.

  If one supposes I have any human, literary, or other pretensions – something hard for me to confirm – I have clearly used my writing to try to draw up a kind of inventory of some of the more presentable situations that have shaped my existence. I have sometimes said that my work is undeniably a sequence of pages from a vast, private diary – reminiscences, reminiscences of the ashes of life. Various reasons led me to take this road: first, the importance I attributed to writers; then, an individual sense of responsibility; finally, the fact I believed that a quantitative literary experience might be feasible in the Catalan language. However, it’s obviously one thing to try something and another to succeed. I beg you: don’t think I am foolish enough to confuse the two.

  Adolescence and early manhood – these writings are from this period – are marked by the puerile qualities of surviving and making oneself understood with that minimal basic clarity anyone aspiring to normality requires everywhere, especially in this country. I too was young once and perhaps suffered from these failings to excess. Such a statement may, I hope, justify the way these pages have later been subject to manipulation, with a view to rendering the writing less cursory, lightweight, and unwieldy.

  If I had ever revised these pages to make them more understandable, in my opinion it would have been a mistake to eliminate what is ingenuous and puerile or was driven by lack of sophistication or maturity. It would have been more appropriate to throw the whole lot on the fire rather than do that. To have disguised them behind a façade of moderation, ability, and prudence would have been to engage in sophistry. True enough, life is a succession of experiences that are quasi-failures, but they are irreversible and cannot be treated with sleight of hand. Obviously, everything could have turned out more appealing, less embittered, smoother …! Given these faits accomplis, other possibilities one might contemplate are simply delusions of the mind.

  For reasons of chronology and coherence in respect to the way time changes the world, I think I should make one thing clear. This writing comes from a specific period, and the landscapes that make up the backdrop for some stories, especially in the cities, have changed considerably. I have taken great care not to modify them. Some of the urban landscapes in the book today look very different from what they were like in the 1920s, for the same reasons that those of today will be unrecognizable in a few years. Our era has been one of huge, rapid transformations. The process behind these transformations can be found in unsophisticated literary documents rather than in attempts to reconstruct and coldly restore. My ideas about narrative literature have been notoriously influenced by my admiration for the Dutch genre painters. I have attempted to create on paper a series of layered scenes of human life, a variety of very different scenes, where wretchedness and beauty entangle, vice and virtue alternate, and the line of true emotion meets the broken line of insanity. I don’t know if I have been successful. I can’t offer any guarante
es. They are purely and simply attempts …

  November, 1966

  The Central Tavern

  In the course of the spring of 19___ I didn’t feel at all well and my doctor suggested I should spend a while in a quiet village with a dry climate, and not too high up. He added that Cerinyola might be the place. I didn’t think twice and soon made my way there, ready to stay for two or three months.

  It was a place like so many in Catalonia: rural in aspect, quite unsightly, with no visible saving grace, a thousand or so inhabitants, a rather humdrum social life, two or three textile mills powered by the small river that flows through the fields, the predictable crops. A priest, a curate, two doctors – the old and the new – an apothecary, a veterinarian, and a small banking outlet to facilitate Cerinyola’s economic activity. A modest general store, a social club for well-off folk, a community center for everyone else, a café, a cinema, and a bus service to and from the station with rather shabby buses that were reliable to the extent that people rarely missed their trains.

  I discovered all this the night I arrived there, after dining in the Central Tavern, held to be the best in the area. After eating the wobbly crème caramel that was served up, the three or four commercial travelers dining at the next table went to the café. I was left alone in the dining room completely at a loss about what to do next. That very second a lady approached me – the next morning I discovered she was Senyora Vicenteta: a vivacious middle-aged woman with rather glazed, artificially rejuvenated features, namely, the owner of the establishment. After she’d asked if I had eaten well – “Very well, very well” – if I was a commercial traveler – “No, senyora, a visitor” – if it was the first time … – “Yes, senyora, the first” – etc. etc., Sra Vicenteta rattled off the information I noted a moment ago. I seem to remember it didn’t stop there. I think she mentioned the local schools and that a schoolmaster and mistress ate lunch in her tavern, but this detail is a vague memory. “They only have lunch, their pay doesn’t stretch any further …!” she certainly said. She also said something about the nursing Sisters who lived in the village, but I couldn’t pinpoint exactly what.

  Our conversation lasted a good half hour. She did practically all the talking. Sra Vicenteta had cooked dinner, the waitress had served it up, and everything was tidied away. She could now relax and hold forth. She felt like talking. I was surprised. When I arrived in the village, it impressed me the way anything unknown does: it struck me as impenetrable and opaque. I’d felt the first signs of a terrible drowsiness overwhelming me. I’d not considered the reverse effect: I mean the intense curiosity newcomers arouse in village people. The flow of words from Sra Vicenteta’s lips could have been sparked by only one thing: the pleasure she experienced when talking to a complete stranger. Then, just as I was beginning to drowse, I noticed a person who also seemed drowsy – maybe even more so.

  I took advantage of a short lull in the mistress of the house’s monologue to dare to ask which café I had best repair to, in her opinion.

  “The Social Center,” she replied, “will serve you coffee that’s chestnut water and cheap liquor. I wouldn’t recommend Pepito’s café. The people that go there are not exactly flush. Try the Recreational: better class and good coffee. It is, I might add, a Catholic center, though they do own a fridge.”

  “Ah!”

  “Yes, senyor, they own a fridge … and next year, God willing, so will we.”

  “Electric?”

  “No, senyor. Easy does it, an icebox. There’s nothing like the ice this village makes in the summer, you know?”

  Villages in our country always have two or three excellent, unrivaled products. The first was obvious: ice. I discovered the second later: the almond biscuits made by two or three confectioners on the Carrer Major and a little factory. That’s right, a little factory. A sign on the entrance to the building made that crystal-clear: Narciso Soler’s Almond Biscuit Factory. Founded in 1837. The industrialization of the manufacture of almond biscuits might be considered a trivial accomplishment. But the causes were soon revealed: ingredients, climate, water, local labor, everything seemed actively to conspire to create first-rate almond biscuits. That’s right, nature’s mysterious ways. Cerinyola’s almond biscuits are a source of pride for its citizenry.

  Once in full flow on what was dear to her heart, Sra Vicenteta chattered irrepressibly at a merry tilt. She spoke in the village dialect that was perfectly understandable from the point of view of the words she used, but was in fact hardly intelligible, because her value judgments were purely local and referred to facts that were a complete blank to me, a thick fog. However, I won’t harp on, because it’s so common in this country. I’ll simply say that it is one of the wearisome burdens we learn to bear.

  “The new doctor,” she said, “came some three months ago. Roundabout when they buried Sra Rosalia. And what a funeral that was! A rich lady who did lots of charitable work and was related by marriage to old Soler, you know, Sr Tet, the almond biscuit maker, you with me? The doctor immediately struck me as rather dodgy. He ate at the very table where you just dined, senyor, right there, as if you could see him there now. When he told me he was on a diet, I knew he wasn’t up to scratch. How could you credit such a very young man, a qualified doctor to boot, being on a diet? Toast, broth, grilled meat, and lots of fruit … And where will we ever find fruit in winter? Just what the truck driver said: Sra Vicenteta, you must be pulling my leg asking for fruit. Let them eat prunes! Then it was time to give him his bill; you know, two weeks had gone by, and then his excuses started coming, and tomorrow is another day … We could have come to an arrangement, but he was suddenly as thick as thieves with the vet, Sr Daniel, who’s so full of himself, and likes to guzzle and stuff and splash out … Broth and vet, don’t make sense, do they? It’s what my deceased husband used to say: in for a peach, in for a pumpkin … I should have seen it coming, particularly when the goings on with Venus started …”

  “Please, senyora, could you throw some light on the goings on with Venus. Are you telling me that there’s a Venus in this neck of the woods?”

  “There’s a girl people call Venus.”

  “Is she a rural or industrial Venus?”

  “On my way out from Sra Rosalia’s funeral, the day when it was so windy (a curse on us here), Sra Quimeta, from the sewing shop, said to me: ‘You know who Venus is? She’s a nasty piece of work, no two ways about it …’ ”

  “Please, senyora, be more precise. Who is she exactly? Is she from farming folk or weaving and textiles?”

  “I really couldn’t tell you, honest I couldn’t … A tavern keeper’s work is never done! I’d only remind you …”

  Just when Sra Vicenteta was about to launch into another endless, nonsensical monologue – her opening line was already striking panic – a door creaked and in walked a man in his sixties. He was on the thin side, pleasantly dressed and seemed affable enough. As he walked past the electric switches, he flicked one and darkness descended on half the room. That’s the master’s touch, I thought. Then he came slowly toward our table, smiling warmly at Sra Vicenteta. Once he was next to us, she knew she had no choice but to introduce him.

  “Agustí Vinardell,” she announced rather shamefacedly. “He’s a gentleman who lodges here.”

  “Delighted to make your acquaintance …”

  But, as she didn’t know my name (at the time guest forms didn’t exist) she couldn’t complete the introduction she’d just begun. That little drawback put a stop to our conversation.

  Sr Vinardell smiled continuously, as if the smile were embossed on his face. In the meantime he rubbed his hands together, occasionally muttering: “Well, well!” And the three of us exchanged affable smiles in the silent dining room – rather stupidly perhaps, but pleasantly nevertheless. Given the general silence, and particularly (for me) the tavern keeper’s surprising silence, in contrast to her previous chatter, Sr Vinardell finally broke the ice, “Senyora, we ought to be off to bed,”
he said. “It’s almost eleven. It is very late.”

  “Of course …”

  And so we said goodnight, after agreeing that for breakfast next morning I’d be served lemon juice with sugar lumps, and tap water.

  I had the pleasure of meeting Sr. Plàcid Comes at the Societat Recreativa, a kind of incipient, rural gentlemen’s club. We struck up a conversation after watching an enormously long and tedious twilight game of chess. We put on our raincoats at the same time by the cloakroom. While he was buttoning up I heard him clearly say, “The anxious expressions on the opponents’ faces were quite exaggerated. Pure pantomime. Completely fake …”

  I replied that I could only agree with his perceptive remark. We talked as we left the club and headed leisurely up the High Street, smoking. It was rather a misty, coldish, dark April night, deserted as well, agreeably so.

  We soon walked past the pharmacy and Sr Comes said, “I work in that hut. The apothecary and his wife live in Barcelona. Their daughters are at primary school and their sons at high school. That way they can keep an eye on them and keep the nest warm. Ha, ha! I look after the pharmacy for them … You’ll visit me in due course. It’s an old-fashioned village institution with an intense odor cannon fire couldn’t disperse.”

  Sr Comes spoke clearly, modulating his sentences. He looked poor and underfed, but was smoothly shaven and wore a cheap, shiny tie under a dubiously clean collar. A lively wit, small and excitable, he was the kind of villager who is endlessly resourceful.

  When I told him – as we walked past – that I lived in the Central Tavern, he chuckled mysteriously, and I couldn’t decide if that signaled praise or disapproval.

  “This tavern,” he said, “is duly renowned. The food’s just about decent – especially if one doesn’t expect too much. I lived there for six years and know what’s what. The rooms perhaps aren’t that ventilated these days. Villages have so much fresh air, people think everything is very well-aired. Ha, ha! Rather, it is just the opposite. They love stale fug. Then you have Sra Vicenteta, who is a true angel, of the elemental sort. Sra Vicenteta is a widow, and I gather, from absolutely reliable sources, that she now enjoys the company of Sr Vinardell. This gentleman is a remarkable member of the species. He’s been living happily in the tavern for the past ten years without paying a cent. What do you reckon? He has never paid! What has the world come to …?”