“I can never tell whether you speak in jest or are serious …”
“Don’t get me wrong. I have spoken and always do speak seriously; out of politeness, to avoid boring my interlocutor, I try to say things as amusingly as possible. The upshot would be horrendous if we were to use monotones, solemn, gloomy, longwinded language, whenever we spoke to a friend. I am so happy to find you own a dog and are on such good terms, so much so I sometimes think it’s not as cold as it was.”
“I’m not so sure, you know … Serafí’s friendship is perhaps due to the fact that he hopes one day I’ll take him to live out of the city when the weather improves, to a proper environment where he can raid the dens of badgers and every other sort of animal. The specific purpose of this kind of dog is badger killing. If they’re moved to another location and appear to be ready to understand all the languages their masters use it’s in the hope that they’ll soon be rewarded with a badger hunt.”
“Are you suggesting that you suspect the dog is only pretending to be friendly?”
“Who doesn’t pretend in this world? Everybody is out for himself and the world is one big show. What I’m saying is while this dog dreams of badgers, I dream of philology. Apart from that, nothing makes any sense …”
I think we walked across the Tiergarten for a while. The large park had soaked up huge quantities of wintry water and was relatively attractive. If the avenue where we were strolling hadn’t had a layer of Portland concrete, we might have imagined we were in inhospitable virgin forest in Scandinavia. Large patches of frozen snow lay between the trees. You could hear water dripping on to the ground. Icicles hung from branches. The trees had an impressive phantasmagoric presence with the reddish glow emanating from the surrounding urban sprawl. The dull hum of the city droned monotonously over us. The bitterly harsh cold seemed to bite even deeper when passed through the moisture in the air; it was more difficult to fight off, more insidious. In the meantime I was just thinking how I’d come to hear that Tintorer was very sensitive to the cold. Gossip had it that his nose had frozen once, precisely when he was walking through the Tiergarten and that restoring his nose to a proper state had been an onerous business. I looked out of the corner of an eye and concluded that his overcoat was nothing very special. As I seemed to recall he’d had a cold the day his nose froze, I asked, “My dear philologist, I hope you’ve not caught a cold?”
“I don’t think so. Why do you ask?”
“For no reason in particular. It can hardly be pleasant to catch a cold in this country …”
“When it’s winter here I’d give a large part of the country’s culture for a decent fur coat … and I beg the cultural folk’s pardon.”
Apparently — at least this was what they said in our conversations in the Romanisches Café — the outside of his nose first turned a blue to mallow hue. Its tissues hardened and the passage of air through the philologist’s nostrils became blocked and extremely painful. They took him to a pharmacy, but the pharmacist alleged his establishment wasn’t the most appropriate, given the specialization in modern life, to deal with the frozen noses of humble strangers. It was decided the experience of Xammar the journalist might come in useful, so they drove the invalid to his flat in a taxi. The journey was disturbing because of the danger that what experts dub “progressive freezing” might set in. The flat was centrally heated and that immediately aroused our hopes. Nevertheless, after examining the nose’s egg-yoke hues, the journalist didn’t seem wildly optimistic.
“This kind of freezing,” he declared, “can quickly be overcome if tackled from the inside out. A rush of blood or a twist of the neck the patient prompts from deep within his guts can be highly effective. If the philologist had one of those gorgeous romantic girlfriends that are so thick on the ground in this country, the best thing would be to summon her, give them some discreet time alone, and problem solved. What? You say you think he doesn’t have one? Bad news! In that case we must act from the outside in, a method that, apart from being unpleasant, offers no guarantees of success.”
“Excuse me, but what does acting from the outside in actually mean?” inquired the man accompanying the philologist, a brawny, forceful man who sold produce from the peninsula (tomatoes, oranges, etc.) in a working-class district.
“You’ll see what it means soon enough … Do you usually hold up your trousers with a belt? You do? Then unbuckle yours immediately. I’ll be back in a moment.… It’s crucial to deal with this quickly …”
In effect, the journalist re-appeared a few seconds later brandishing an umbrella and looking like a man who wanted immediate action.
They left his office and found the distraught philologist rubbing his nose against the radiator that heated the passage.
“Tintorer, please come over here!” said X, sounding self-important and masterful. “Come, I beg you!” He headed towards the kitchen. “This method is fairly primitive, but it’s all we have for now. Make an effort, be brave and above all don’t scream, because if you do, my wife will turf us out of the house.”
Tintorer was so depressed he didn’t react: he uttered not a single word.
Once the kitchen door was closed, the journalist with his umbrella and fruit merchant with his belt gave the philologist a tremendous drubbing. Initially, no doubt taken by surprise, his eyes bulged out of their sockets and he seemed indignant. But even if he’d reacted, he wouldn’t have had time. X alternated swipes with the umbrella with loud slaps to the back of his neck. When the umbrella took a rest from his back, the muscular merchant belted it. After five or six minutes of that battering, the philologist came out in a sweat, something that made his righteous, redoubtable saviors redouble their efforts.
“Hit him hard, it’s going well!” shouted the fruit seller gleefully. They hopefully watched his nose lose its equivocal bruised purple and recover a pinkish tinge. When they thought it was its normal color, they dropped umbrella and belt, exhausted.
“These are sad, if tried and tested methods …” said X, wiping his face with a handkerchief.
“You must forgive us, philologist, but it was the only way to defrost you. Do you feel better? Drink a shot of cognac, and you can return to the university this afternoon, though it might perhaps be better if you took to your bedroom and looked after that cold. You can’t play with this climate. I imagine that summer philology would suit you better than winter philology — in this country, that is.”
After the first depressing effects of his therapy had passed, Tintorer looked at his friends somewhat suspiciously. A rather mistrusting individual, as evidenced in his fondness for the phrase “It’s one big show!”, he wondered whether the beating he’d just received wasn’t just another tactic his friends had invented to pass the time. At any rate, when he felt the air circulating freely through his nostrils and realized his frozen secretions had melted, he was duty bound to show polite gratitude. Thus, with a small, not entirely innocent smile, infused with melancholy restraint, he told his friends: “Your application of the theory of the lesser of two evils was harsh but efficient. We’ll make sure it’s the last time …”
I remembered all that as we crossed the icy gloom in the park, worrying that his nose would freeze again. However the truth is we left it with no sign of a relapse and entered a part of the city I think I’d never visited before. They were narrow, deserted streets where blocks of flats alternated with detached residences surrounded by gardens.
We immediately began to walk along the towpath of a stagnant canal which reflected the diluted glare from streetlamps.