To cut a long story short, we’ll say that Sr Peret was in his vineyard, as on so many afternoons. It was late September. The weather was damp, windy, and overcast. A year has two remarkable days: the winter day when, intuitively, one feels the good weather beginning, and the summer day when, using the same antennae, one notes the bad weather starting. That day in the second half of September was precisely such a day. It was dusk and Sr Peret was getting ready to take the path back to the village when, all of a sudden, he felt his back shiver. Then he felt a vague tickle up his nose. He quickly raised his handkerchief to his nose. He wasn’t quick enough. He sneezed and it seemed to thunder round his head. Then he sneezed again and felt deeply alarmed. He tried to plug his nostrils with his handkerchief. All a waste of effort. The third sneeze came quickly, right on cue …
Sr Peret was deeply upset. He stood there for a long while, though he was visibly wilting. His face seemed thoughtful and his neck twisted slightly. He felt his arms were about to drop off. He looked like a man who was depressed. He sat on the ground, next to a vine. His vineyard was enjoying the most flourishing moment in its yearly cycle. The vine-leaves were large and green. He sat motionless on the ground for ages, feeling ever more terrified. Then he made a strange movement, as if he felt the need to hide away: he went on all fours and dragged himself along until he was curled up under a vine. The things that can happen to a human being at certain moments in life, when nobody can see what they are doing, are astonishing and quite ineffable.
The family was surprised when they saw he’d not come home for dinner. It was so unusual they thought nothing of it and sat around the table without him. Such a situation had never arisen without prior warning ever since the family had existed as a family. They supped in silence, but when it was time for desserts, their alarm and nervousness was all too obvious. The elder daughter was sent to the casino and returned with the news that daddy hadn’t been sighted there. Sra Ametller thought for a second that she should inform the Civil Guard. They summoned their neighbors, and one of them suggested — one of the few who kept her cool — that, before doing anything else, they should take a look in the vineyard. Several people went, and when they reached the plot, the gardener joined them. They shouted out, but nobody replied. They searched every inch and finally found him sprawled under a vine. They questioned him but he didn’t respond. They lit a lamp and saw how wan and frail he seemed. Someone placed a hand on his forehead: it was still warm. The gardener ran off to get a stretcher where they lay Sr Peret. They knew it was urgent to take him home. So the stretcher set off, bearing sturdy Sr Peret under a blanket the gardener had rapidly supplied. The gardener and his son carried the stretcher. The group of people — sisters-in-law, neighbors, etc. — followed a few steps behind on what was a pitch-black, drizzly night.
When they reached the village and the place they called the Cross Roads, the gardener’s son asked his father which way they should go to reach Sr Peret’s home.
“Do you want to go by the top road or the bottom?” he asked.
The gardener looked at a loss for a moment. In the meanwhile, something extraordinary happened. Sr Peret pushed away the blanket from his face and said in a perfectly normal tone of voice, “Take the top road. That’s the way I always go.”
The gardener and his son looked at each other completely taken aback. It seemed for a second that his response had annoyed them. As a matter of fact, everyone walking back from the vineyard was certain Sr Peret was dead or as good as. His sisters-in-law were crying. The neighbors walked along, pale-faced, heads on chests. Reacting to the words they’d just heard, gardener and son were almost on the point of bursting into hoots of laughter.
They went on walking and when they reached Sr Peret’s front door, the people huddled sorrowfully around the ominous stretcher. As they might have to carry Sr Peret up to his bed in their arms, the gardener thought it best to see how he was. He removed the blanket from his face, an act that sent a tremor of curiosity through those present. Sr Peret lay there, eyes shut, pale and still, as if asleep. The gardener went over and asked: “Well, Sr Peret, what’s the state of play? Are you alive or dead?”
“Far be it from me …” piped up Sr Peret faintly.
Given his reply, they had no choice but to carry him up to his bed — an action carried out with great expenditure of effort by the gardener, his son, and another person present at the scene.
All in all, his reply came as a great relief to all and sundry.
A Boarding House, Central Barcelona
I have always thought that the problems of inheritance — especially the financial sort — are extremely important and one of the most reliable and decisive paths to an understanding of the lives and characters of others.
The behavior of my friend Veciana, for example, immediately became crystal-clear when one learned that his father, who inherited a considerable fortune, bankrupted himself playing cards. Sr Veciana senior’s manic obsession with gambling meant he lived his final years in a quite disastrous, regrettable manner. He spent them — and he lived into his seventies — begging food from his friends and bothering charitable institutions, and then died in the workhouse.
His only son — the Veciana I knew — would have met a similar end, if his youthful carry-on was any indication, had it not been for his father’s catastrophe. That saved him, and saved him just in time. He abandoned his university studies because his father, dazzled by illusions of grandeur like so manic gamblers, wanted him to become a lawyer — a profession Veciana junior felt no affinity towards — and went to work as a debt-collector for a commercial enterprise, and a few years later for a bank. Veciana junior subsequently developed into a debt-collector who was noteworthy, discrete, conscientious, and completely honest. He scaled prestigious heights in his profession, to the extent that he invented the idea of the gradual redemption of the figure of the debt collector, an idea he often explained to me when we drank coffee together in the Tupinamba, and that consisted, if I understood him correctly, in a system that would eliminate the debt-collector by raising his status.
But inheritance isn’t the answer to everything, and I never did fathom the source of the close bonds that existed between my friend Veciana and Sr Pastells, the son of the renowned nineteenth-century Barcelona croupier Don Tomás Pastells, the great Pastells who had operated in aristocratic circles. His son also followed this trade for many years, though he never succeeded in emulating his father’s style and distinction. In the years I’m referring to, Sr Pastells had retired from gambling, was gradually eating into his capital, and led what he called a Cuban life: he went for a stroll, went to the movies, and read the daily papers.
One would more easily have understood — if understanding ever entered into it — his close friendship with Niubó the lawyer and registrar, because both were very knowledgeable. The registrar was tall, thin, and sallow, dressed in black and, though he had retired from the High Court a good five years ago, he still reeked, no doubt reluctantly, of wax-sealed paper and cigar butts. A recalcitrant bachelor who professed little interest in real life, he had apparently reached an age when it was time to become more human and open to the frailties of others. In fact, Sr Niubó and Sr Pastells were irreconcilable, because if Sr Pastells represented for the registrar the world of necessary evil and toleration, in the eyes of the croupier, Sr Niubó was born to embody unto death the majestic rule of law that, as everyone knows, is inexorable. The debt collector provided the terrain for dialogue between the two men. They both admired my friend Veciana and experienced in his presence the ancient, hallowed terror that parasites feel when confronted by people who work. That drew their two characters together, because, though in public they detested manual work, they were secretly aware they couldn’t have lived the life of Riley, that their lives would have been completely different, but for the existence of a few million Vecianes.