Free Life Embitters by Josep Pla

creatures. Those of us who are at all sensitive find the way pigeons dribble, their mysterious billing and cooing, to evoke ineffable feelings and things … do you follow me, young man?”
    Rather brazen like most young people I diagnosed that Don Natali liked to wallow in syrupy sentimentality. I deduced he was a man whose success was guaranteed among
femmes fatales
.
    At lunchtime, Sr Verdaguer sat with the rest of us boarders, then put an apple or orange to his mouth and transferred to the gallery where he drank coffee with Sra Paradís, in private! He rarely went out in the afternoon and spent the time reading old newspapers and out-of-date page-turners:
The Wandering Jew
,
The Slave’s Surrender
, and
An Unhappy Family
. In the evening he went to the movie-houses on Carrer d’Aribau and their notorious late matinées. At night he ate spicy food, particularly shellfish he bought in the street and carried home in a sugar-paper cornet. Then, as was common knowledge, he donned his purple, tasseled dressing gown when his more or less Provençal nuptial moment was at hand.
    At the time lodgers said that Sr Ferrer – Don Manuel Ferrer – really envied Don Natali. Don Manuel was an insignificant scrap of a man, fair and freckled, with light-green eyes and a gooseberry jam complexion. He looked to be in his forties, was smooth-cheeked, and a great dearth of hair led him to nurture the ones that grew on the nape of his neck, that he combed back over his convex baldpate in a series of undulating waves. What’s more, he sported a moist, twirled mustache – the kind that was the rage when I wasan adolescent and that looked as if it should be used for winding something up. One grasped from the efforts Sr Ferrer dedicated to capillary issues that he was embittered by the paucity of hair Providence had bequeathed him. His head’s extraordinary paneled ceiling and mustache’s mathematical lines were ample enough proof.
    The contrast between Don Natali and Sr Ferrer made up a chiaroscuro interplay replete with intriguing hidden agendas.
    Sr Ferrer was a first-rate assistant in a shop on Portaferrissa: he was orderly, punctual, and exceptionally polite and serious. He’d entered that establishment fifteen years ago, the day he left his village, and had never worked anywhere else: he enjoyed the highest levels of trust. He had imposed an ice-cold order in his boarding house bedroom. His books were beautifully arranged according to size. Pencils and other items were perfectly lined up on the table from small to big. He hung his carefully preserved clothes up in his wardrobe as if to recall the symmetry of a high-class shop window. Nevertheless, that man was secretly envious of Sr Verdaguer, whom – so they said in the house – he was trying to dislodge from the niche the latter occupied in Sra Paradís’s heart. And he deployed a most original tactic to achieve his aim: he became a public apologist for broadmindedness and seemed to suggest that immorality was the best option, as far as he was concerned. This lead people who didn’t know him to think he was devious and capable of all manner of sly maneuvers. The opinions that he expressed forcefully meant he was reputed to be a fellow who lived beyond good and evil.
    At moments when he could most benefit from Sra Paradís’s emotional frailty, Sr Verdaguer, on the other hand, enjoyed playing the role of the warm-hearted, propitiatory victim and spoke of his situation with subtle hypocrisy and perfectly premeditated guile. He described his condition asbeing without cure, as if he had fallen victim to uncontrollable passion, his will destroyed by the surge of feelings her presence provoked.
    Donya Esperança put Sr Verdaguer in charge of what we might call the house’s administrative business. When it was time to be litigious, to talk of rents with a lawyer or resolve a matter at the Town Hall, Sr Verdaguer would see to it. Don Natali took on these tasks willingly and acted