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.
Intermittently Moribund
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.”