After lunch we spoke of vital issues as we strolled along streets and through squares, listening, with due reverence, to a selection of pieces from “Lilies under the Snow,” one of the masterpieces from the Belgian repertoire the town band was playing in the park. We then drank fresh lemonade in the casino.
The family comprised four people: Sr Ramon Fabregat and his wife, a sixteen-year old girl, Maria Teresa, and a thirteen-year-old boy, Lluís. They were the salt of the earth, and, as I hardly need to say, the excellent impression they had made in the morning was confirmed in the afternoon. Unfortunately, however, their initial inclinations strengthened as our relationship shed the stiffness that comes with novelty. They were rather too open and forced you to enter their innermost life willy-nilly. Naturally, I thought, it doesn’t really matter because the signs are that they’ll ditch you the day after tomorrow as easily as they’d previously welcomed you inside. They told me lots, all connected to their family, the foibles of their grandparents, conflicts over money and maladies on the home front. They were two thousand kilometers from their country and acted as if they had never left. They inhabited a bubble that was completely impermeable to everything around them.
Aunt Antonieta, a distant aunt of Sra Fabregat, was one of the people who most cropped up in conversation. They described her as an extremely eccentric lady with lots of manias, and spoke of her warmly or extremely tight-lipped, depending on their mood. If I understood correctly, Aunt Antonieta was an aged — seventy-five-year-old? — spinster who lived in Sant Gervasi devoted to her religion and regular coffee mornings. Despite her advanced years, while the danger existed that the good lady might embrace the state of matrimony, the Fabregats lived on a knife-edge. Sra Fabregat was the one who waxed most pessimistic in relation to that possibility. “Who doesn’t do it as a chick does it as an old hen,” she had maintained for twenty years. When people pointed out that this was a saying that could apply to every potential act of human folly, rather than solely to changes in status, she stuck to her guns.
As far as she was concerned, either outcome would be equally catastrophic. In any event Aunt Antonieta hadn’t married, so the Fabregats’ fears eventually evaporated. Nevertheless, as the old lady aged, they were beset by a different, much greater kind of worry judging by the obsessive way it informed their panic-stricken conversations. They didn’t know for sure whether she had or hadn’t drawn up her last will and testament, and, if she had, to whom she’d bequeathed her considerable fortune. They had subjected the problem to a process of elimination, but had finally hit against an unknown factor they could not eliminate: the Curia. The problem of not knowing whether the Curia or Sra Fabregat (as the closest niece) would inherit kept them in a permanent state of deep anxiety.
During our lengthy promenade around Ostend I managed to extract from the family this minute drop of illumination, which wasn’t at all easy, because the nub of the matter was cloaked by exclamations the family kept making about how hallowed they thought respect for the freedom to write one’s own will was. It was right at the end of the stroll, after a statement of that nature made by Donya Matilde Fabregat and accompanied by peremptory, emphatic gestures that the good lady told me that the pimple on the nape of their daughter’s neck had turned yellowish but seemed stable. I then had the pleasure of equitably rehearsing my offers of help to the best of my ability and they were equally pleased to give their thanks and in turn offer me their own services quite unreservedly. The conversation ended, as usual, in a jolly round of mutual backslapping, in the course of which every face beamed with the greatest self-satisfaction.
After a few days of meeting and conversing, the family bloomed like a spring rose and I felt as if I had known them forever. They were intending to spend a month in Ostend. It was their first visit. They had spent previous summers in Caldes. An unpleasant incident had brought about this change. As a result of his renown, Sr Fabregat was years ago appointed honorary president of The Maize, an amateur choral society that was founded in Caldes to combat tedium in the locality. Everything in the group went as smoothly as silk until the day when a Sr Canadell ran off with their savings and a goodly amount of the furniture from the performance hall. Sr Fabregat reacted manfully to this extraordinary act and said in private conversation that he’d be happy to make up the losses. His interlocutor, a fanatical member of the choir, spread the word around town. Don Ramon was held to his word and had to pay out, under protest, to cover the damage wrought by the secretary. He was incensed, came to hate the area, and decided to shift his family to more reasonable, pleasant climes. Years ago — a very few years ago — such a decision would have been unthinkable, but there had been a war, people had made lots of money, and the situation had greatly improved.
Sr Fabregat was a man of mature years, a hardworking, active man who wholeheartedly embraced moderate ideas, was one of those fantastic if mediocre individuals who had not only managed to amass a fortune, but had, at least for the moment, successfully held on to it. He found Ostend extremely wearisome, and, if it hadn’t been for the continuous correspondence he conducted with his office, I doubt that he would have withstood the indolence in the air. He was obsessed with the post, whether there were any letters — “Hasn’t the postman come?” he would ask at the most unlikely moments. He was a man whose mental potential was all spoken for: his labors as an industrialist fulfilled his love of what was tangible, his passion for detail, the pleasure he found in undoing knots and sorting out messy, labyrinthine situations. He had the outlook of a mechanic, was fascinated by the way the countless cogs of an engine synchronized, and infatuated by machines in motion. Conversely, his involvement with the Stock Exchange satisfied his imagination. He had invested part of his fortune in the safest, rock-solid stocks, but he wasn’t a passive shareholder awaiting inevitable meltdown. He didn’t believe anything was definitive or stable in this area of his life. As far as he was concerned, being a good investor meant keeping one’s capital in constant circulation. He bought and he sold. What were his criteria when decision-time came? I never did find out. He never showed any sign of being abreast of the news, or of seeking advice from someone or other who might be thought to be well-informed. I never saw him read a newspaper, or any specialist publication, and he never mentioned anyone he confided in. He operated, I imagine, on the basis of pure intuition, and perhaps the fact that he had no advisors meant his antennae were always on alert, and that was always handy when it came to avoiding pitfalls from suggestions that were never going to be disinterested. As an investor, he allowed himself to be guided by the pleasures of his imagination, and, for the moment at least, his method seemed to be producing the goods. A most extraordinary fellow!
At first I found it quite surprising that I’d never seen him read a newspaper, but then, as I got to know him, I realized it was entirely plausible. One only ever scratches the surface of the mysterious enigma that is a human being. There will always be unimaginable surprises. Sr Fabregat had read the Spanish translation of The Three Musketeers every day of his life since he turned thirty — and this was his only verifiable reading matter. He ingenuously confessed to me that he’d read the immortal book twenty-two times and never tired of it. As the leaves fell from the trees, he would lick his lips in anticipation and the first cold spell always coincided, as far as he was concerned, with the voluptuous pleasures of a fresh rereading. The book had perhaps contributed to his peculiar demeanor. He was a short man, driven by a mania about being tall. His whole body had an arrogant swagger, generated by his puny stature. Moreover, he was a man whose face always looked disgruntled, not because his health was poor but because he always looked ill-tempered. His forehead was rather narrow and depressed, his large ears stuck out, his bulging, bloodshot eyes floated in yellowish lymph, his mustache was a handlebar, his jaw slightly jutted, his skin was pallid though his nose and mouth were normal — jarring with the general makeup of his face and thus peculiar, his legs were bandy like brackets. He was a man who looked irascible and I found it amusing to imagine him asleep in that state. But his downfall was his mustache, and if I’d felt sufficiently in his confidence, I’d have told him to shave it off, because a small man with a high-profile mustache looks a real clown.