“So then … It is really nothing,” said Sra Fabregat rather edgily.
“I have nothing further to add,” I opined blankly.
“Put the thermometer in right! You heard what the gentleman said, it won’t amount to anything.”
The girl withdrew, as meek and passive as ever. A little shamefaced, perhaps.
The following morning, Maria Teresa observed when she woke up that the tiny pimple had burst and barely left a trace. Everyone was rather surprised, including Sra Fabregat, who wasn’t expecting such a swift outcome. In view of this fait accompli, she was rendered speechless. A drop of boric acid was applied to the negligible scar and it was all sorted. When I paid them my usual afternoon visit, the girl reacted shyly, and simpered. Matilde Fabregat seemed in a jolly mood. Sr Ramon and the boy had decided to stay an extra day in Brussels. They had surely been captivated by the changing of the guards.
With that, my holidays had come to an end and it was time to go back to work. We said goodbye. We promised to go on holiday together the following year and to send each other countless postcards.
“And if you ever come to Barcelona,” said Donya Matilde, “you know where … Girona, etc.”
We’ve not seen each other since and happenstance has yet to bring us together. In my heart of hearts, however, I feel that they must be all out there, enjoying the best of health and getting on with life.
Sr Fabregat, richer by the year, must have reread The Three Musketeers three, four — or five times — more. I don’t think his ideas will have changed one iota. Matilde will have put on weight, accrued the odd gray hair, but she won’t have shed her disturbing, domineering manner. Maria Teresa will have married extremely well, a marriage that won’t have turned out for the best, for reasons that everyone will interpret as they think fit. And the boy will be behaving like Sr Fabregat’s son, which, in fact, is exactly who he is.
An Adventure on the Channel
I found these jottings among the papers belonging to Santaniol, my deceased friend, and I think they are of interest. Santaniol’s family decided to give him an education that would prepare him to join the diplomatic corps. Their aim was met, but my friend’s temperament suffered immensely as a result. We, his university friends, felt he was a ‘lletraferit,’ or a man wounded by letters. The word ‘lletraferit’ is one of the most distressing in the Catalan language. The idea that someone who likes literature is somehow wounded implies a stock of primitive barbarism that is at once popular and demented. It doesn’t mean that the people actually invented the word. The word was invented by the Cyclopean might of those in this country who have hindered the development of a properly civil, absolutely pagan culture. The people and families have joined forces to give the word its dramatically pejorative weight. And that’s how things were, and how they still are.
Santaniol filled lots of paper. He tried to describe everything he clapped his eyes on in the course of his short life, or at least to create lively vignettes. He injected more curiosity and passion into this activity than into his career as a bureaucrat. He died prematurely, when he was a consul in a city in central Europe. Here are the jottings I just mentioned:
Calais is a city through which an inordinate number of travelers have passed, never stopping more than the seconds required to comply with Customs. It is a city that isn’t like Dunkirk, or even Boulogne, where a traveler feels like staying longer than the time permitted by the departure of the next ferry — despite the somber stonework and gloom of those two northern French cities. Besides, nobody ever stops in Calais. Perhaps it’s because the ferry port is rather a long way from the town, perhaps because it looks so cold and nondescript from the train. Whatever the reason, though hundreds of thousands of people pass through Calais every year, it is most unusual for anyone to linger there: everybody bypasses the place.
The fact that I did become acquainted with the place is easily explained. I was dispatched to London when I was very young. Too young, perhaps, to adapt to the English way of life. I think it’s a mistake for us Latin folk to go to England before we have had a broad experience of life. Or rather: one should go to London as a youngster or adolescent, to study or become passionate about sport or, after one’s first phase of youth, when one has begun to shape a specific vision of life. I went there at the age of twenty-one, which is a critical, incoherent age that can be both painful and unstable. As a result, my first contact wasn’t at all fruitful, in fact I thought everything was inaccessible and off-putting. I thought the lodging houses were dismal, the food tasteless and the streets — apart from the ones in the East End — were icy. London — a haughty city — is an almighty giant determined to kill off all popular wit and transform everyone into respectable bourgeois. I was too young to appreciate the charms of people’s politeness and good manners: I felt that their good manners were their way of being stand-offish, a stiffness designed to avoid being disturbed. I thought that everything was too big compared to the dimensions I was used to. It isn’t that London overwhelmed or humiliated me, in the way I later experienced in New York, a city where human beings are indescribably derisory, insignificant little microbes. London didn’t humiliate me, London froze me. In any case, I don’t think these experiences do any harm, they have to be lived and lived to the full because they help one to become rational and know what one is. They are unpleasant experiences, nonetheless, that in the long term one can overcome. In this world, it is vital to come to terms with reality.
So I lived my first three months in London only thinking about returning home. I was bored, desperate, found everything stringy, tough, and hostile. What an innocent abroad! I never managed to understand that I was engaged in terrain that was wholly relative. Perhaps if I’d been receiving six pounds sterling a week rather than a wretched three it would all have seemed much more agreeable. One’s view of reality is frequently conditioned by one’s financial, economic possibilities. The key role played by money in people’s intellectual and sentimental lives is immeasurable.
One day I saw an advertisement on the façade of a branch of the Midland Bank in Victoria Street — it was inviting people to spend the weekend in northern France. I read it three or four times on the trot, quite fascinated. That invitation seemed like the perfect way out of an intolerable situation — the most pleasant escape imaginable. Only one problem remained to be resolved: the money question, what the great and good refer to as “one’s possibilities.” Nothing could be sadder in this world than to be all set to do something and to find oneself miserably short of the wherewithal. However, that led me, in the very same important branch of that bank, to review the latest rates on the Stock Exchange for the currencies circulating on the planet at the current time. I discovered that one peseta was worth four francs. A fantastic discovery! I had always thought money problems were gritty, sterile, and thirst-provoking. For the first time in my life I realized they could have their pleasant side. It wasn’t that I had a good supply of money. If I were to be frank, I would say that money tends to come my way in short, not very sharp bursts. All in all, however, I had enough to cross the Channel and spend a few hours in France without damaging my human dignity. The crux was not to go too far into the country. Paris was, naturally, out of the question. Driven by the spirit of caution that has always characterized me and after a decent crossing, despite the inclement weather that can often rage over the Channel in the spring, this was how I came to alight one day in the ferry port of Calais and, rather than take one or other of the numerous trains waiting in the station, I headed off to the town with my small suitcase.