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 usefuclass="underline" 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 intellectuaclass="underline" 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.