“These uncouth youngsters, these discourteous students,” said a livid, trembling, nasal Sr Niubó, “they’ll pay for this!”
Then he walked down the passage and, while turning his bedroom door handle, he’d seethe with rage and shout: “And you, Sr Pastells, are their accomplice, a turncoat …!”
Sr Pastells glanced at Donya Emília for a moment and Donya Emília at Sr Pastells and neither made any comment. They stood there as if they’d fallen asleep.
Sr Pastells was the most pitiful of the trio. He was a little fellow, dripping in rolls of fat, with a hoarse voice, bulging eyes, and a drooping, pencil-line moustache. The gaming tables had given his dead, white skin a greenish patina. Like all gamblers, he thought he could understand things with a sideways glance, but I have never known anyone so limp. It stood out a mile that he’d lived his life amongst blue-blooded people. The man’s body did, nevertheless, possess a single distinguishing feature: soft, plumpish, pock-marked hands that he waved absentmindedly. Over-pliant hands have always put me rather on edge. I detect in them symptoms of excessive deference, and possible smoldering resentment. Sr Pastells was an upstanding fellow, an excellent man, but his hands alarmed me.
At the beginning of June, we had the house to ourselves. The university year was at an end and the students departed. After three noisy, rowdy months, the boarding house enjoyed peace and quiet. Donya Emília could rest; she took the covers off the rocking chair and armchair and the maid then informed me she was often visited by a distinguished gentleman. “A Supreme Court judge,’ the maid said. I resumed work. I’d almost lost the habit. Niubó the registrar, Sr Pastells, and Sr Veciana the debt collector, also seemed to appreciate the relaxing calm. Mealtimes were an oasis of peace. The dubious practical jokes were no more. Sr Niubó missed no suppers. The din the students made at night, the racket in their bedrooms, the continual coming in and out, was replaced by a more orderly life. People tiptoed down the passage in their slippers.
However, one immediately realized it wasn’t necessarily for the best. The uproar in the boarding house, the students’ constant to- and fro-ing, their turbulent, quick-paced lives enveloped them in a hubbub and haze that made them seem almost normal. Now the place was tranquil, the boarders could be seen for what they really were: the smokescreens had gone. They were three hapless, poverty-stricken wretches: demoralized, subdued, and fearful, they tried to shield themselves behind an elemental display of childish vanity. The three were bachelors, had labored with great difficulty to save a little money and were, as the phrase goes, people who scraped by. Their faces bore the unmistakably withdrawn expressions of men who have lived constantly exposed lives without a corner where they could take refuge or anyone to wipe their misery away. They were at once unreal and ordinary, embittered and susceptible, childish and play-actors. I’d look at them during our meals sitting in a row under the print of Romeo and Juliet on their flower-bedecked romantic balcony that adorned the main stretch of wall, opposite a table strewn with dirty plates, knives and forks, and glasses with a drop of red wine, facing a Donya Emília, who chewed unenthusiastically and grimaced with her unsightly mouth. They were pitiful. They didn’t know what to say, what to do with their hands or what pose to strike. Sometimes Veciana looked warily around, then with a rush of Dutch courage made a banal statement or repeated what he had just read in the newspaper. Two words and he’d already slipped up and, trembling and blushing, he spluttered out strange drivel. The landlady would silence him with a withering look. The others dared not laugh or speak. They lowered their eyes in dismay, as if suffering a great calamity.
That trio of human beings represented for me the quintessence of boarding house life, of the tragic lives in the places where I have spent so much of my life. I was very young at the time and very impressionable in terms of everything around me. The presence of those three men, however, made me anticipate a possible path of my own similar to those crocks. I didn’t really know why but the thought horrified me. They were like survivors from a shipwreck. The docile way they looked at Donya Emília was almost revolting. Their weary, dog-eyed looks, at once vile and fawning, were perhaps simply an expression of filial tenderness. They smiled inanely when she ran them down. They would have performed any favor for her. They’d have carried her on the palms of their hands. When she finally left the table, making a rather grotesque display of her contempt, their oily, nodding glances pursued her. They were now alone and taciturn: the silence put years on them, quietude overwhelmed them. A canary trilled, plates clattered in the yard, knife-grinders, barrel organs, and pianos made a racket. Captivated by the spectacle of napkins covered in scraps of food, heads bowed, eyes down, now holding their folded napkins, it was as if they dared not leave the table. Now and then one of them cleaned a gap between his teeth, pursing his lips, and sighing deeply. The others stared half reproachfully, half inquisitively: one didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. Then, all three simultaneously manipulated their own toothpick in the meticulous, systematic fashion that is so characteristic of boarding houses. Toothpicks in boarding houses are a badge of freedom. In the end, Veciana plucked up the courage to get up. His colleagues followed suit and each shut himself up in his own bedroom.
After lunch, profound calm and dank fresh air filled the boarding house. It was time for the judge’s supposed visit. Flies buzzed near the ceiling, and a strip of sun filtered through the shutter and came to rest on the romantic balcony scene. Distinctly dispirited by the visit, the maid left the dishes half washed and moved to the dining room, where she rocked back and forth, half asleep, arms dangling, mouth gaping, in the rocking chair where Donya Emília usually sat. Stretched out beneath the shutter, the cat acted as if it were dead. Notes from a piano hung in the air. Barcelona hummed drowsily, under a glaring, African light. Things in the house imperceptibly secreted the greasy, animal juices with which they were impregnated. The flies, yet again, now flew drunkenly in and out of the dining room. All of sudden, in that silent fug, the sound of someone trying to turn a bedroom door handle.
Sr Pastells appeared in the shadowy passage, glanced mysteriously around, tiptoed towards the coat rack, used two fingers to extract his walking stick, silently opened the door and disappeared down the stairs like a wraith. Later, the tall figure of Sr Niubó walked down the passage in his slippers, bleary-eyed, feeling his way along the wall, an unlit cigar hanging on his lip, and a newspaper tucked in the pocket of his long, light-colored alpaca jacket. A minute afterwards a loud flush from the lavatory sent tremors through the body of the maid, dozing in the rocking chair, her feet dangling above the floor. At half past four, the judge departed. The maid said that Donya Emília accompanied him to the front door, whispered something cheerful in his ear, perhaps an “I’ll expect you tomorrow!” and the man of the law went downstairs with the gruff, frowning, self-important air those wherefore folk favored.
Shortly, at around ten past five, Veciana the debt collector arrived, after a day on the hoof, breathless, stooping, clutching his empty, sweaty briefcase. He hung this item behind the door and went into his bedroom, his face creased, his teeth gritted, and his hands on his hips. The first cool breeze also wafted in, the glaring light seemed to turn to gold, the sun slid off the romantic balcony, the cat prowled under the table, the maid put the haricots on to boil, and Donya Emília made a sudden appearance in the dining room, seated on her rocking chair, reading El Noticiero Universal.