“It’s a canal from the Spree,” said the philologist matter-of-factly.
“With these trees it must be pretty in the summer …”
“In the summer all vermin thrives,” he replied, rather wryly, inviting me to pass through the entrance to a house. “Go in, Serafí!” he added immediately, as he shut the front door.
Once in the hallway, we left the main stairs and the philologist opened a side door with a small key. We went down two or three steps into a tiny reception space, with a coatrack, umbrella stand, and glass cabinet, and the small curtains over the two doors leading from it made it look like a puppet theater stage. He pulled back a threadbare curtain over one of the doors to reveal a long, thin passage with a patch of light on white tiles I supposed must the kitchen. We walked silently down the corridor, the only sound being the dog’s nails on the parquet. Tintorer opened the door to a modest, doleful room dimly lit by a flickering bulb. When I went in, I saw a man and woman sitting opposite each other.
I easily recognized Formiguera, even though I’d had little to do with him. I thought he looked quite ill. When he registered my presence, he made an effort to get up, but failed and slumped back on his chair. I saw the philologist wink at me, suggesting no doubt that I should keep quiet and put on a front. After removing the dog’s collar, he approached the dancer with a rather theatrical show of emotion.
“This will soon pass!” he declared, putting his hand on his shoulder. “He’s weak and the climate is hellish. It’s all about leading an orderly life … They wanted you to go to hospital! But when they said that, a friend appeared to bring you home!”
While Tintorer was talking, Formiguera grinned sadly and enigmatically in my direction. He sat on a chair at the foot of his bed, in his overcoat with collar raised. His face was pallid, his eyes tired, and his large, sad teeth cadaverous. Beads of sweat lined his forehead. A bottle of eau de cologne stood on the table. The bedroom reeked of eau de cologne that was far too pungent to be genuine; it seemed to hover disagreeably around the dancer’s body. Now and then the sick man leant his head on the back of the chair, as if trying to shake off a feeling of oppression. His body bent; his chest and belly seemed hollow. He breathed with difficulty but painlessly. He looked smartly dressed. He wore a fine overcoat over purple silk pajamas. His slippers looked comfortable and his hair had been carefully combed.
The lady seated opposite did the honors. She owned the apartment and thus the room which was sublet to Tintorer that Formiguera was occupying for the moment. She spoke a very basic German intercalated with lots of Italian. The room was quite untidy due to the peculiar situation of the two people now lodging there. Formiguera’s luggage filled part of the floor space — poor quality suitcases that were far too bursting-at-the-seams to encourage ideas of order and repose. The suitcases had yet to be opened and their very visible presence was strangely unnerving.
When the philologist finished his warmhearted monologue, he took my arm and led me to the open window on one side of the room. As the room’s angle was slightly askew, the window looked to be suspended there. I could see leafless trees in front of a grandiose, rather dreary building. According to the philologist it was the rear of a mansion that was the Italian Embassy.
“I told you,” he added, “that I like to live centrally … Don’t think it was easy to find. The lady, I mean the owner of the house, works at the Italian Embassy.”
“Is she a typist?”
“Much more important than that. She scrubs the floors and helps the cook.”
Tintorer then looked for a chair, and, as they were all occupied, he sat on one of the suitcases. After sidling around those present and greeting them cheerfully, Serafí leapt to the foot of the bed, coiled his tail over his belly, and made himself as round as a cream sponge cake.
We sat there in silence. I looked from the dancer to the lady to the philologist and back. Before falling asleep the dog gave us a supercilious once over. I noticed Formiguera glance out of the corner of his eye at the window-panes: icy water trickled endlessly down the glass. When he showed the whites of his eyes, he looked frightened and dreadfully weak. The dull sound of the rain falling on the mud between the trees reached the room. Occasionally Formiguera strained to stop his teeth chattering. His lips turned purple. Nobody seemed to have anything to say. The silence was depressing. It was like traveling in a small, shabby taxi which had sprung a leak. We couldn’t think what to do. Tintorer reacted by filling his pipe, putting it in his mouth, and lighting a match. The second he struck the match the lady jumped up, looked daggers and bawled:“Don’t smoke! You know only too well that smoking is banned!”
The philologist looked at Formiguera who shrugged his shoulders. Then he looked at me. I sat there like a stuffed owl, my face unflinching. When the lady placed her butt back on her chair, she drawled, “Voglio tanto bene al signor Darsonval!”
Darsonval was the nom de guerre of the dancer from Granollers, the one he used in the cabarets on Kurfürstendamm and Leipzigstrasse. It was a petulant, rather Gascon name he’d adopted in Montmartre that had shown itself to be useful in a number of different German localities.
The lady, introduced to me as Ada Piccioni, was a tall, mature middle-aged woman with luminous black hair, a dumpy, downbeat face, dark, smoldering eyes, moist lips, warm yellow skin and plump flesh. Her legs were rather the worse for wear, but she was still in good shape in terms of the taste of the day. She had a fluent, engaging way of talking, but — as shown by the scene over the pipe — her temper could get the better of her and then strident fury drove her words.
I was shocked by Tintorer’s obedient, submissive reaction to Sra Piccioni’s silly nonsense. In the course of my life I’ve had the opportunity to meet lots of subtenants, almost all the older ones I’ve known have shocked me with the canine docility they displayed towards their landladies. The philologist was still relatively young — I don’t think he could be over thirty-three — and that led me to grant him a certain independence of spirit as a subtenant. However, when I saw how speedily he extinguished his match and stuffed his pipe in his pocket, I realized he was a typical subtenant. I’ll go further: the ban Sra Piccioni had formulated so crudely would have infuriated most people, but he merely winced and smirked complaisantly in her direction, as if trying to highlight how quickly he had fallen into line.
The philologist was rather small and short in the leg, with an inchoate, egg-shaped paunch and a tiny, vigorous head. His face was almost hairless and his baldpate incipient but inevitable, his yellowish skin veering from mauve to the color of brown stew. His beady eyes sparkled, and his pencil mustache sat above thin lips and a dearth of teeth while his ears flapped like two large vine-leaves. He dressed negligently, in shabby garments that contrasted with the ironed collar he always wore and the tie with a pearl pin. His shoes were big and heavy. His was that mixture of the lurid and eccentric that expressed the general indifference towards dress that set in after the First World War.
Although Tintorer was a man very marked by the studies he’d devoted years to — philological studies in which, as he himself admitted, he’d introduced not a single original idea, but several interesting critical perspectives — he had more or less picturesque, eccentric value. In the first place, he was clever at lots of things: he boasted that he was an excellent photographer despite the poor quality camera he owned. He was able to repair the electrical breakdowns that occasionally took place. He’d been a subtenant for long enough to know how to patch clothing and darn well — the invisible darn. He was generous and well-disposed, with a special talent for doing favors for the person under whose roof he was lodged. It was obvious that Sra Piccioni could get him to do everything she suggested, and that was why his friends from the café had often seen him with a shopping bag, going from the baker’s to the butcher’s or buying canned fish, potatoes, or a bottle of wine. He was reputed to be a good cook, but never of the dishes of the countries where he had lived in turn. His culinary skills were limited to offerings from our country, but, as cuisine isn’t for export and it’s practically impossible to cook good paella in Berlin, whenever he tried to practice them abroad everyone departed waving their hands in the air, feeling deeply skeptical. He was also fond of commonplaces, catchphrases gifted with the power to end an observation or close down a conversation lock, stock, and barrel. The ones he preferred were: it’s one big show; don’t fiddle while Rome burns; once bitten twice shy; less haste, more speed; in for a penny, in for a pound. That meant that for almost instinctive reasons, in every exchange characterized by the philologist’s presence he inevitably had the last word. On first impression, his peculiar strategy seemed effective, suggesting as it did a depth of insight on the part of the person employing the commonplace. But when people saw through bitter experience that it was simply a reflex action, the philologist’s ready-made clichés simply exasperated.