Nevertheless, I did find in the small bundle I was sent a fragment entitled “My progenitors” that could have been the beginning of the planned autobiography. I thought it peculiar, very emblematic, and extremely human. It goes like this: My father, writes Santaniol, was a shy, sociable, naturally courteous man. He was very introverted, unable to show emotional warmth, devoid of any of my theatrical abilities, but had a sense of humor that was vaguely corseted, of course, within the conventional bounds imposed by the leaden-weight bourgeoisie of his time. His gift for irony blossomed when his radical inability to deal with the circumstances he met in life left him economically bereft. He never allowed anyone to say that this painful process was the result of his own shortcomings. He was convinced he was the victim of situations the people around him had created. He was such a dignified man, had such deeply rooted convictions, that he never came to value in the slightest the possible impact of his own character. He never overcame his shyness. When he was at the height of his physical powers, this shyness probably led him to suffer hard times. It is troubling to miss out on the joys of this life by dint of delicacy, doubt, and double standards.
One day, when he was barely forty-eight, he touched a key with his right hand and felt it was cold. When he touched it with his other hand it seemed neither hot nor cold: it felt somewhere in between, as usual. Soon after he went into a café where the smoke sent his head into a spin, and they had to bring him round from a fainting fit. The doctor diagnosed poor circulation, acute arthritis, an exhausted heart, extremely high blood pressure, and the risk of a stroke. A man who had always eaten and drunk to his heart’s content, he now found himself restricted to an odiously narrow diet. He became sad and despondent and avoided human contact. His physical strength rapidly waned. The main damage to his state of health was moral. He firmly believed in a destiny shaped by Providence, convinced that he existed as the result of some millenary design — a conviction that constitutes the religious bedrock of this country — so the eruption of this illness threw him into complete disarray. He would often nervously ask me: ‘How can you explain all this? How is it possible? Where did I go wrong?’
It was pitiful. As the years went by, he forged the idea that an incomprehensible, unjust, obscure, blind force was attacking him while Providence that he’d hitherto considered to be positive and wise remained quite indifferent. And obviously, as the illness formed part of his physical make-up and there was no way he could escape it, he turned into a skeptic. The most hardened form of skeptic: a passive, silent, deeply somber skeptic beyond redemption.
In recent years, I sometimes came upon him contemplating a tree, a landscape or a book. His lips were locked into the rictus of an icy grin.
I once remember surprising my mother looking at the sea with eyes full of sadness and disillusion. At other times, in difficult, painful moments for the family, I watched her reacting energetically, undaunted. On days when the southern wind blew, she seemed to suffer intolerably and was unable to sit still for a moment. These surges and depressions — usually short-lived so far — have affected and considerably shaped my character. I have inherited my father’s skepticism, arthritis, and shyness. And my mother’s depressive tendencies that alternate with moments of breathlessness and a heart on the flutter. As I’m made this way, my inner — and outer — lives fluctuate, are unstable. I have friends who speak of my cynicism. They do me wrong. I’m not all clear in my own mind. I struggle in the depths of confusion; my real knowledge of things is scant; I’m not sufficiently vain to be able to deceive myself. I find my vast, boundless ignorance distressing. I try to navigate the wretchedness of the human condition with my eyes open and my heart elsewhere … but this is all such nonsense!
A Madrid Lodging House
The other day, when I was roaming the streets of my beloved old city of Girona, I came across the remains of advertising posters hanging on the down-at-heel walls of a house on Quatre Cantons: they were, in effect, tattered, faded posters advertising a show put on by a crazy band or troupe, when the good weather started and nights began to warm up. In my day the outfit had a Levantine base — and I say Levantine because most of the performers were from Valencia — and their director, a fellow who put the fear of God into you, always received a rowdy welcome that in my humble opinion was hardly enviable.
Over the course of my life and especially in my early years, I lived in an infinite number of lodging houses, pensions, inns, and hotels; literally countless beds have supported my bones, for shorter or longer periods of time: beds of all shapes and sizes, colors and designs, generally cold and uninviting. A Madrid lodging house where I lived for a long time belongs to this bittersweet collection of residences. It was located on the Calle Miguel Moya, by Callao, the noisy hub for the city’s foreigners.
In fact, it was a large house, though it seemed tiny because the side of the amazing Press Building skyscraper soared up on the pavement opposite. The presence of this monster edifice influenced everything around and even distorted the view of the world embraced by the people in the neighborhood. The lodging house was fully in the Madrid tradition: a central patio, now covered by a skylight, and enclosed all round by the sides of the building. If the skyscraper hadn’t existed, the house would have seemed quite different, as I’ve said; in fact, it felt stuffy and tiny; the rooms had very high ceilings, as they do in many old houses, but the contrast with the steep walls opposite reduced it to dimensions that seemed stifling. The presence of that flamboyant skyscraper made us feel that we were living in a kind of New York, not the genuine item, of course, but a kind of homegrown New York. We tended to put on a New Yorker style. The local young ladies did their best to be mistaken for film stars and the odd neighbor was even involved in heavy-duty business, with a jutting jaw, flashy tie, and hefty square shoulders. They were the Madrid Asturians or Galicians, though they sometimes looked like quite another class of gentleman. I sometimes thought that Providence had placed that impressively vertical skyscraper before my eyes in order to instill in me the need to be an early riser, to work in an orderly way and give my life a regular routine. I don’t mean that in those early days the skyscraper didn’t put me on the right road: in the event, the change was short-lived; I never managed to get up at a decent time. If you feel you are immune to the moralizing influence of a skyscraper, it hardly encourages you to spring into life.
The building where the lodging house was ensconced was new, or at least restored, and, like all the new houses built in our country at the time, it wasn’t a solid construction. The wooden frames of the doors and windows had shifted unusually and nothing actually closed; the walls were thinner than a cat’s ear and the neighbors were a constant presence in our lives; at night you felt you were sleeping with somebody else, with complete strangers; it was hard to talk since everything could be heard; the shutters were in guillotine mode and very showy, but, because of what botanists call wood fatigue, they guillotined nothing: neither the feeble pink light of dawn, nor the glow of the streetlights. The shutters were stuck in the sides of the windows and wouldn’t budge up or down however much you pulled the cord. They were ruined guillotines, guillotines that had suffered the chop. The bathroom was a total mystery. No doubt out of fear that the building’s hydraulic system might bring on a catastrophe, it had been decided to keep the family treasures there. In the tub, you could find a plaster Venus de Milo covered in yellow dust; the portrait of the landlady’s deceased husband in a solemn, serious frame, pure graveyard baroque; sickly, spindly potted palms; volumes of jurisprudence from the Reus publishing house, that had been discovered in the bedroom of a hapless candidate for the civil service exams who had committed suicide; umbrellas with broken spokes. A useless, forlorn umbrella in a bathtub is a sorry sight. The sink was practically unusable: if you turned the tap you heard a windy noise come out of the hole, like a half-hearted whistle that seemed to be mocking your presence. A dressing gown hung on the hanger behind the door for ages and nobody knew who it belonged to, but it was too shabby for anyone ever to want to claim it. It was a bathroom that brought on the melancholy of things that are ill-conceived and absolutely gratuitous.