It was summertime, there was little doing for a journalist – the month of July is usually Europe’s quietest – so I decided to spend a week in Ostend.
I have a sense that people who visited Ostend after the First World War were deeply disappointed the moment they arrived. Ostend is a gigantic cage, erected in the architectural style of a universal exhibition, with dining rooms and sitting rooms that rejoice in the highest ceilings and mountains of plaster as befits a society constructed on the basis of dovetailing commonplaces and worn-out clichés. The splendiferous size of the edifices seemed to express an optimistic belief in the indefinite growth of the bourgeoisie: they were sizes to suit people who are taller and bigger than normal. Everything seemed a loose fit, perhaps because the cage was too big for its birds.
The Hotel Excelsior gave me a room with sea views, and, as the hotel was excellently situated, there was a wonderful panorama from my balcony. At bathing time, especially, the spectacle was truly stirring and varied. A sulfurous yellow that turned a damp gray when the sun went behind a cloud, the beach was home to every kind of human beast, male and female, dry and wet, young and old. It was a particularly strange ambience because of the preposterous airs people gave themselves. It was an endearing scenario.
Unfortunately I have always been extremely short-sighted, and my dismally myopic vision has never allowed me a clear view of what others contemplated with an enthusiasm they constrained and hid. Additionally, one had to pay over the odds for the bedroom’s prime location, and that led me, for various reasons, to ask for a more out-of-the-way room. To meet my request, they gave me one with no views whatsoever, situated in another wing of the hotel. Thanks to this switch, however, I became acquainted with a family from our country, the Fabregat family, about which the least I can say, now that I have accumulated a number of experiences, is that they were a most typical and representative Catalan family.
Our first contact was the day we went up in the lift together. I was reading a gossipy letter from a friend who was full of promise, the author of a book with a markedly art-for-art’s-sake flavor, entitled The Roast Almond Lesson and Other Prose Pieces. While I read his engaging news, slowly, I gripped the envelope and Sra Fabregat obligingly read on the sly the blurred details of the post mark. The word Barcelona must have made an immediate, unexpected impact, because she suddenly interrupted her husband who was telling her, if I’m not mistaken, about a lady by the name of Antonieta, planted herself in front of me, and with a pretentious flourish of her head and instant blushes she said: “So, senyor, you too are Catalan?”
“Yes, senyora …”
“How nice! Who’d have thought it! Allow me to introduce you to …”
Initially I was rather taken aback, but I then decided the scene was the expression of natural outpourings that were pleasing up to a point. Wherever we go, as people have noted, we are the most open-minded and astonishingly spontaneous of folk. We almost always believe that we have a pressing need to inform others about the trivial ins and outs of our lives – which we inevitably believe to be of paramount importance – never forgetting what goes by the name of ideas, ideas that usually voice our most elemental, highly personal preferences. This often means that, however amenable we try to be, we create a state of reticence and weariness in others.
By the time we had reached the door to the room – or rooms – of the Fabregats, they had already brought me up-to-date with myriad aspects of their lives: they’d told me that they possessed substantial wealth and enjoyed a fine reputation with their vast range of connections, both with friends and acquaintances. At the same time they peppered me with a series of futile, indiscreet questions that I answered as vaguely as I could. When we were saying our goodbyes, the wife informed me, as she shook my hand, that their young daughter was quite poorly because a pimple had appeared on the nape of her neck that had kept her awake all night. I took advantage of that revelation to declare reasonably emphatically that I was there to help in any way I could and that they had in me a true friend who was entirely at their disposition. I also offered a range of advice in terms of hydrotherapy and heliotherapy – sciences that were in their formative stage – and even ventured that the best thing for pimples on the nape of the neck remained a generous application of tincture of iodine. They seemed wholeheartedly grateful for these learned gems and we went our separate ways, after declaring it would be a real pleasure to meet up that afternoon.
After lunch we spoke of vital issues as we strolled along streets and through squares, listening, with due reverence, to a selection of pieces from “Lilies under the Snow,” one of the masterpieces from the Belgian repertoire the town band was playing in the park. We then drank fresh lemonade in the casino.
The family comprised four people: Sr Ramon Fabregat and his wife, a sixteen-year old girl, Maria Teresa, and a thirteen-year-old boy, Lluís. They were the salt of the earth, and, as I hardly need to say, the excellent impression they had made in the morning was confirmed in the afternoon. Unfortunately, however, their initial inclinations strengthened as our relationship shed the stiffness that comes with novelty. They were rather too open and forced you to enter their innermost life willy-nilly. Naturally, I thought, it doesn’t really matter because the signs are that they’ll ditch you the day after tomorrow as easily as they’d previously welcomed you inside. They told me lots, all connected to their family, the foibles of their grandparents, conflicts over money and maladies on the home front. They were two thousand kilometers from their country and acted as if they had never left. They inhabited a bubble that was completely impermeable to everything around them.
Aunt Antonieta, a distant aunt of Sra Fabregat, was one of the people who most cropped up in conversation. They described her as an extremely eccentric lady with lots of manias, and spoke of her warmly or extremely tight-lipped, depending on their mood. If I understood correctly, Aunt Antonieta was an aged – seventy-five-year-old? – spinster who lived in Sant Gervasi devoted to her religion and regular coffee mornings. Despite her advanced years, while the danger existed that the good lady might embrace the state of matrimony, the Fabregats lived on a knife-edge. Sra Fabregat was the one who waxed most pessimistic in relation to that possibility. “Who doesn’t do it as a chick does it as an old hen,” she had maintained for twenty years. When people pointed out that this was a saying that could apply to every potential act of human folly, rather than solely to changes in status, she stuck to her guns.
As far as she was concerned, either outcome would be equally catastrophic. In any event Aunt Antonieta hadn’t married, so the Fabregats’ fears eventually evaporated. Nevertheless, as the old lady aged, they were beset by a different, much greater kind of worry judging by the obsessive way it informed their panic-stricken conversations. They didn’t know for sure whether she had or hadn’t drawn up her last will and testament, and, if she had, to whom she’d bequeathed her considerable fortune. They had subjected the problem to a process of elimination, but had finally hit against an unknown factor they could not eliminate: the Curia. The problem of not knowing whether the Curia or Sra Fabregat (as the closest niece) would inherit kept them in a permanent state of deep anxiety.
During our lengthy promenade around Ostend I managed to extract from the family this minute drop of illumination, which wasn’t at all easy, because the nub of the matter was cloaked by exclamations the family kept making about how hallowed they thought respect for the freedom to write one’s own will was. It was right at the end of the stroll, after a statement of that nature made by Donya Matilde Fabregat and accompanied by peremptory, emphatic gestures that the good lady told me that the pimple on the nape of their daughter’s neck had turned yellowish but seemed stable. I then had the pleasure of equitably rehearsing my offers of help to the best of my ability and they were equally pleased to give their thanks and in turn offer me their own services quite unreservedly. The conversation ended, as usual, in a jolly round of mutual backslapping, in the course of which every face beamed with the greatest self-satisfaction.
After a few days of meeting and conversing, the family bloomed like a spring rose and I felt as if I had known them forever. They were intending to spend a month in Ostend. It was their first visit. They had spent previous summers in Caldes. An unpleasant incident had brought about this change. As a result of his renown, Sr Fabregat was years ago appointed honorary president of The Maize, an amateur choral society that was founded in Caldes to combat tedium in the locality. Everything in the group went as smoothly as silk until the day when a Sr Canadell ran off with their savings and a goodly amount of the furniture from the performance hall. Sr Fabregat reacted manfully to this extraordinary act and said in private conversation that he’d be happy to make up the losses. His interlocutor, a fanatical member of the choir, spread the word around town. Don Ramon was held to his word and had to pay out, under protest, to cover the damage wrought by the secretary. He was incensed, came to hate the area, and decided to shift his family to more reasonable, pleasant climes. Years ago – a very few years ago – such a decision would have been unthinkable, but there had been a war, people had made lots of money, and the situation had greatly improved.
Sr Fabregat was a man of mature years, a hardworking, active man who wholeheartedly embraced moderate ideas, was one of those fantastic if mediocre individuals who had not only managed to amass a fortune, but had, at least for the moment, successfully held on to it. He found Ostend extremely wearisome, and, if it hadn’t been for the continuous correspondence he conducted with his office, I doubt that he would have withstood the indolence in the air. He was obsessed with the post, whether there were any letters – “Hasn’t the postman come?” he would ask at the most unlikely moments. He was a man whose mental potential was all spoken for: his labors as an industrialist fulfilled his love of what was tangible, his passion for detail, the pleasure he found in undoing knots and sorting out messy, labyrinthine situations. He had the outlook of a mechanic, was fascinated by the way the countless cogs of an engine synchronized, and infatuated by machines in motion. Conversely, his involvement with the Stock Exchange satisfied his imagination. He had invested part of his fortune in the safest, rock-solid stocks, but he wasn’t a passive shareholder awaiting inevitable meltdown. He didn’t believe anything was definitive or stable in this area of his life. As far as he was concerned, being a good investor meant keeping one’s capital in constant circulation. He bought and he sold. What were his criteria when decision-time came? I never did find out. He never showed any sign of being abreast of the news, or of seeking advice from someone or other who might be thought to be well-informed. I never saw him read a newspaper, or any specialist publication, and he never mentioned anyone he confided in. He operated, I imagine, on the basis of pure intuition, and perhaps the fact that he had no advisors meant his antennae were always on alert, and that was always handy when it came to avoiding pitfalls from suggestions that were never going to be disinterested. As an investor, he allowed himself to be guided by the pleasures of his imagination, and, for the moment at least, his method seemed to be producing the goods. A most extraordinary fellow!
At first I found it quite surprising that I’d never seen him read a newspaper, but then, as I got to know him, I realized it was entirely plausible. One only ever scratches the surface of the mysterious enigma that is a human being. There will always be unimaginable surprises. Sr Fabregat had read the Spanish translation of The Three Musketeers every day of his life since he turned thirty – and this was his only verifiable reading matter. He ingenuously confessed to me that he’d read the immortal book twenty-two times and never tired of it. As the leaves fell from the trees, he would lick his lips in anticipation and the first cold spell always coincided, as far as he was concerned, with the voluptuous pleasures of a fresh rereading. The book had perhaps contributed to his peculiar demeanor. He was a short man, driven by a mania about being tall. His whole body had an arrogant swagger, generated by his puny stature. Moreover, he was a man whose face always looked disgruntled, not because his health was poor but because he always looked ill-tempered. His forehead was rather narrow and depressed, his large ears stuck out, his bulging, bloodshot eyes floated in yellowish lymph, his mustache was a handlebar, his jaw slightly jutted, his skin was pallid though his nose and mouth were normal – jarring with the general makeup of his face and thus peculiar, his legs were bandy like brackets. He was a man who looked irascible and I found it amusing to imagine him asleep in that state. But his downfall was his mustache, and if I’d felt sufficiently in his confidence, I’d have told him to shave it off, because a small man with a high-profile mustache looks a real clown.
Once you’d made his acquaintance Sr Fabregat was easygoing and proved to be pleasant and charming. I realized he had one or two hobbyhorses and I tested them out, to see if he was a man of character. One of his manias was animals. He couldn’t understand why the world needed cats and dogs, chickens and hens, lions and elephants. He said he thought that the Creation was amazing enough to be able to do without these irrational creatures. One day when he was outlining his convictions in this respect, I replied that, in my opinion, the existence of cats, hens, and elephants was based on reasons of natural philosophy that were as powerful as anyone might use to speak of human beings. As I spoke, I could see him surveying himself as if he was deeply perturbed by the idea that he might have said something truly idiotic. The next day, however, he spelled out his zoological ideas in similar terms: I deduced that he was a man with deeply rooted convictions.
Sra Fabregat told me that same afternoon that the pimple on the nape of her daughter’s neck did seem stable but was apparently taking on a pinker hue, which might be a sign that, in the near or far future, that it would probably become poisoned. I told her I preferred to wait patiently and resignedly and let nature run its mysterious course and had always found this philosophy to be highly soothing: it would be rash to claim that I convinced her. She seemed worried and anxious. That blemish seemed to unnerve her in an extraordinary way. Human understanding has worked miracles in the field of engineering and technology, but we will always find this simplest of facts to be incomprehensible: that one of the reasons why the nape of the neck exists is to enable pimples to flourish. But I didn’t dare spell out this obvious truism. I’m sure she would have hit the roof.
Sra Fabregat was a Matilde – as I mentioned a moment ago – and her husband called her Tita. She was a slight, rather dumpy lady, with neat rolls of fat, a rather pert nose, bluish black hair, and magnificently white skin that showed off the stylish freckles on her cheeks. She used lipstick, was free-and-easy, and liked to cause a stir. When you conversed with her it was as if someone was shaking you up and down and turning over your insides and putting you in her thrall, like a bottle of medicine being shaken by a chemist. I remember how I would arrive back at the hotel after my conversations with her feeling at the end of my tether, physically exhausted and in a mental fog. It was really difficult to cope with. I occasionally had to splash water over my face to calm down.
It was impossible not to imagine her in the gallery of her flat on the Carrer de Girona, at ten o’clock, when skivvies have migrated to the market and noisy tykes are having a lie-in and the Eixample has become almost an oasis of peace. At that time of day flats still vaguely reek of the greens cooked the previous night. A pleasant breeze wafts in through the wide open gallery. The ladies of the house, their infamous housecoats wrapped around their ample, docile curves, with pink cheeks and curlers in their hair, maneuver beneath the canary’s cage between furniture perpetually under wraps and paintings by Russinyol, Mir, and Cases. Sra Fabregat was from Mataró and felt a love for this city that she expressed in strident hoots if anyone dared to level the slightest criticism. It was admirable in every way.
Matilde Fabregat had been brought up properly and though her conversation always took on a rather peremptory, bossy tone, it could have its pleasanter sides. A full member of the Royal Academy of Fine Literature, the author of various poetic efforts, inspired by obscure episodes in our country’s ancient history, had for many years visited the Fabregats on a Saturday to drink coffee and smoke a cigar. His assiduous visits hadn’t left any spectacular traces, but neither had they brought no benefit whatsoever. Sr Fabregat used to sum up his wife’s potential with a graphic phrase, namely that she was a person who could listen to a lecture without dozing off. And how true that was!
The good lady undoubtedly dominated the family. Sr Ramon’s life was locked in the manic vice of his business interests – not that he ever jealously defended the territory as exclusively his. If Matilde didn’t interfere, it wasn’t because her husband had barred her, she simply had no interest in that side of life. Matilde proposed and disposed in every other matter without right of appeal. And it was curious that they’d reached that situation – at least on the surface – without it upsetting Sr Ramon one iota. As a husband he did indeed seem rather pleased by the absolute authority wielded by his wife. I didn’t know them well enough to be able to say whether Ramon Fabregat’s stance was simply a case of taking the easy option or a case of resignation before a fateful fact of life. Perhaps it was a bit of both. The truth is that I never heard him try to voice the faintest objection or engage in the slightest criticism of his wife’s opinions or actions. She often made the silliest slips a child would have noticed. Don Ramon never said a word. Silence wasn’t his way of protesting, however. He almost always accompanied his silences with a facial expression or gesture that revealed his total support of her. As far as Don Ramon was concerned, Matilde was always right, everything she did and said was precisely what the occasion demanded. I imagine Matilde found her husband’s monotonous support rather trying. Particularly in the presence of others she must have thought his supine lack of character looked ridiculous, and that she could be blamed. Nonetheless, despite all her efforts, she never succeeded in getting him to pipe up, not even when she made a show of having a tiff with him. Don Ramon didn’t like controversy, and family ones even less so. He accepted marriage to the letter. He was one of those men – who are more common than you would think – who finds freedom to be futile – something that serves absolutely no purpose. Don Ramon indulged any instinctive longing for freedom he had in his business affairs and that probably exhausted his reserves. He didn’t need freedom for anything else.
Their son – Lluís – was a tubby boy who wore a pea jacket and short pants. He was very delicate. He had his father’s face but his mother’s rivers of pallid flesh, his eyes were narrow and swollen with a touch of the Tartar about them. He cut a rather strange figure: round like a little badger, sallow with patches of suntan, with a short neck, gawping mouth, and thin, curly hair. Nevertheless, he’d always received very good marks, was meek and obedient and had an infallible memory. He recited long chunks of poetry without making the tiniest slip.
Lluís did, however, possess one defect that several doctors had examined, though for the moment no clear diagnosis had emerged. He was a child who couldn’t bear to be angry, or upset, or subject to the slightest mishap. If natural precautions taken by the family to avoid that happening failed, he’d have terrible tantrums. It must be difficult to grasp what I am trying to describe, and that is an indication of how strange his malady was. In effect, whenever he was upset, he turned a greenish purple, as if his acids were seeping through his skin, and threw himself on the ground in a bizarre rage and if he’d been contradicted further, would have committed real violence. That meant his every whim had to be indulged: he had to be fed the juiciest chicken, you could say, and constantly supplied with high-quality comic books, sugared almonds, expensive toys, notebooks for sloping writing, and all manner of lovely little treats.
They told me how scared the maids were that he might throw a tantrum when they took him for a walk. The child seemed like a typical case of a spoilt brat brought up too close to his mother’s skirts. I wouldn’t deny there was a hint of that, particularly at the start. However, his condition was much more serious. Lluís was simply a sick child.
The afternoon when the Fabregats told me about this, our conversation drew to a dismal end. Nature is all pervasive: consideration of its monstrous sides produces deep depression. Of course, I did wonder what led these fine folk to reveal such things to a person they’ve only known for a few days and who, in the end, could be of no help. I decided the family must live in a constant state of repressed anguish as a result of their son’s condition. And that perhaps they went out of their heads when they decided so hastily to treat me as a confidant. At the last minute Sra Fabregat informed us that the pimple on the nape of her daughter’s neck had become poisoned and looked nasty. This news rounded off our depression.
Maria Teresa was almost seventeen and her face expressed that Romantic spirituality and vagueness that albuminaria – protein in the blood – sometimes gives youngish people. Yes, she was a very mild case of albuminaria. The insidious pimple and restless nights had in the end given her a divine air. She was in the grips of the first imprecise moments of female change, and was delightful. An almost imperceptible down covered her languid limbs. Gently undermined by an unconscious waywardness and involuntary over-eagerness, her graceful manner was quite charming. When she sat still and glanced at you in that vaguely purposeful way, her body adopted an antique pose that was fantastically elegant. She was tall, full, with a hesitant profile; her flesh was honeyed, tremulous, and a warm pinkish white that was firm and terse. She was auburn haired with heavy blue-gray eyes, delicate features, and lips that were often moist. They still dressed her like a young girl but her curves moved under her tight dress, like a trapped bird that wants to spread its wings. Imagining her knees was an unforgettable experience. I never tired of considering, with philosophic precision, the luscious beauty of young forms that were so eloquent and inspiring.
She was the ideal young lady, but possibly nothing besides. She was a young lady ripe for that moment, because each moment brings a specific kind of young lady. Her main trait was her absolute dearth of interest in anything. She lived a passive life of the purest indolence. She didn’t know how to do anything and never showed any inclinations or feelings of any depth. She possessed that element of envy, greed, vanity, and guile that a human being requires for their presence to be at all perceptible. However, the qualities and defects she might have had were present to such a mediocre, neutral degree, were so supine, that she found everything bland, and anything that wasn’t became a source of annoyance. She liked nothing, but passively, not actively. Her imagination and fantasy were non-existent, she was totally unable to express any emotion. She was sixteen but felt more like forty. Her taste – the only aspect of her personality that stood out at all – combined pretentiousness and reserve, embedded habits and feeble clichés: it was simply other people’s taste. She acted like a picky brat from a well-off family and, quick to scorn the pleasant things life brought her way, would sound off rudely. She was perhaps frustrated by her domineering mother or was the product of a particular kind of upbringing or perhaps didn’t know how to behave any differently. On the other hand, how pretty she was! Her purely passive life increased the charms of her splendid body. That afternoon, Sra Fabregat summoned me by phone. Don Ramon and their son had gone to Brussels to see the changing of the guard in front of the Royal Parliament. Matilde and her daughter were alone in their bedroom. I went there only to find them in a desolate state. The pimple was swelling and the girl was in pain and most distressed. She was lying on her bed: dressed, half laid low, half fretting. She was holding a handkerchief she kept clenching between her teeth and then wiping over her lips. The moment I arrived, her mother blurted out: “My dear!”
“Mommy!”
“Show the gentleman your pimple!”
The girl looked scared. I was astounded. However, I immediately saw that Donya Matilde was worried stiff. She whispered, “You never know, do you?”
And energetically to Maria Teresa, “Come, come! Show the gentleman your pimple …”
“But, mommy …”
“You know two pairs of eyes are better than one and that we’re a long way from home. I don’t want to be the only one held responsible.”
I thought her distress was a trifle forced. I tried to tell them, quite unsuccessfully, that Ostend was a city in Belgium, a country that was no savage, remote wilderness. I also informed her that I had no special knowledge of the subject and that I always thought it was best to be patient and let things run their course. In the end, I had to stand my ground.
“Senyora, what you’re asking of me is ridiculous. If you like, we can get a doctor. What’s the point in my looking at that pimple?”
But Sra Fabregat wasn’t used to being contradicted. She gave me an extremely withering look considering we’d only known each other a few days. It was probably years since anyone had rebuffed her. This was as obvious as the fact that, while the girl remained as frightened as ever, her mother had turned a bright red.
There was a moment of hesitation that Matilde abruptly ended. She blurted in my direction: “You keep in that armchair!”
Then she went over to her daughter and caressed her face.
“My dear, don’t you worry. We’re all from our beloved country …!”
Then she took her arm, eased her out of bed and walked her over to me. The girl moved slowly and meekly, keeping her hand over her pimple.
“This gentleman will take a look,” said Sra Fabregat, “and it’s not going to hurt at all …”
I felt delirious. Sra Fabregat, in fully imperious fashion, was acting stupidly once again. What sense did it all make? She carried out her decision to the letter. She placed the nape of her daughter’s neck right before my eyes, separated out her hair and out popped the humble, inoffensive little pimple. I noted that Maria Teresa had the loveliest, beautiful, firm, supple, shimmering neck.
“Well, what do you think?” asked Sra Fabregat a moment later.
“Senyora, what on earth do you expect me to say?”
“She seems to have a slight temperature. Do you think that’s important?”
“Senyora, I know nothing about such matters! Nothing whatsoever!”
However, I soon realized I was on the wrong track. My repeated, most reasonable protestations at my lack of knowledge only prompted an even more unpleasant, withering look. I reflected that she’d conclude that I was refusing to help my compatriots in foreign parts. “In foreign parts, just imagine, in foreign parts!” Sra Fabregat would tell her friends the minute she walked into her flat on the Carrer de Girona. I had no choice but to call on the usual clichés. In any case, it was true that my words had a visibly therapeutic, medical vagueness about them.
“If you want me to speak frankly,” I said solemnly, “this isn’t at all serious. However, we’d lose nothing if we took her to see a doctor.”
“So then … It is really nothing,” said Sra Fabregat rather edgily.
“I have nothing further to add,” I opined blankly.
“Put the thermometer in right! You heard what the gentleman said, it won’t amount to anything.”
The girl withdrew, as meek and passive as ever. A little shamefaced, perhaps.
The following morning, Maria Teresa observed when she woke up that the tiny pimple had burst and barely left a trace. Everyone was rather surprised, including Sra Fabregat, who wasn’t expecting such a swift outcome. In view of this fait accompli, she was rendered speechless. A drop of boric acid was applied to the negligible scar and it was all sorted. When I paid them my usual afternoon visit, the girl reacted shyly, and simpered. Matilde Fabregat seemed in a jolly mood. Sr Ramon and the boy had decided to stay an extra day in Brussels. They had surely been captivated by the changing of the guards.
With that, my holidays had come to an end and it was time to go back to work. We said goodbye. We promised to go on holiday together the following year and to send each other countless postcards.
“And if you ever come to Barcelona,” said Donya Matilde, “you know where … Girona, etc.”
We’ve not seen each other since and happenstance has yet to bring us together. In my heart of hearts, however, I feel that they must be all out there, enjoying the best of health and getting on with life.
Sr Fabregat, richer by the year, must have reread The Three Musketeers three, four – or five times – more. I don’t think his ideas will have changed one iota. Matilde will have put on weight, accrued the odd gray hair, but she won’t have shed her disturbing, domineering manner. Maria Teresa will have married extremely well, a marriage that won’t have turned out for the best, for reasons that everyone will interpret as they think fit. And the boy will be behaving like Sr Fabregat’s son, which, in fact, is exactly who he is.