Free Life Embitters by Josep Pla Page B

all of a sudden. I see a man behind a rectangular column, peering round the edge as if he were scrutinizing or spying on something. I’m intrigued and stop to take a look. Can he be a policeman? Or a criminal? Is some evil deed about to be carried out right here? I position myself behind the man on the look-out and observe him for a second … Then all at once, in a rapid sequence of images, I see that it’s Sr Ferrer. The fact he was wearing his hat slightly skewed over the back of his neck made me doubt for a moment … But no doubt about it! It
is
Sr Ferrer. The light-colored striped suit, the tight, bulging jacket that’s slightly short all the way round, the orangey shoes, the milk coffee hat with a blue band … It’s clearly Sr Ferrer!
    But
, I wonder,
what on earth is Sr Ferrer keeping an eye on, oblivious to how stupid he looks?
He looks like a man with a mission and cuts such a grotesque figure peering round the edge of the column, as if nothing else around him exists.
    The situation is intriguing … Besides, it’s still pouring down, people are dashing on to trams; it is very early … I stand behind Sr Ferrer and try to follow his line of vision round the edge of the column. I can see his nervous beady eye focusing on a doorway at the back of the square. From afar, the doorway seems immersed in a poor yellowish light, but if you watch carefully, you can vaguely glimpse the silhouettes of two people: a man and a woman talking. Or rather: he is talking excitedly and she is motionless,head bowed, apparently attentive … In any case, they make few gestures. I wonder:
Who are these people Sr Ferrer finds so fascinating?
Unconsciously, or almost, I wonder:
Could it be Sra Paradís? If it is,
I think,
Sr Ferrer is in a really bad way … And who can he be?
    Back in the shelter of the arches, I slowly roll a cigarette, light up, and decide to walk past the doorway like a casual passer by. As I draw nearer, I notice a diffuse light floating inside the half dark that’s coming from an oil lamp burning behind the thin curtains of a concierge’s cubbyhole. The woman had her back to the square. However, I easily identified her. It
was
Sra Esperança Paradís. She was wearing her large black velvet hat with a white feather that fell over her back – as was fashionable then – her rabbit-skin boa, brown made-to-measure two-piece, its skirt clinging to her tight butt, black stockings (the ones Don Natali found the most decent and becoming) and shiny gilt shoes. Sra Paradís stood stock still, and was not her usual talkative self: the slope of her shoulders betrayed her deep anxiety. Soon after, when I was opposite the doorway and casually looking in, I recognized the man talking to Sra Paradis. It was Don Joaquim Riera, the man we lodgers called the Neurotic. I was astounded. What were Sra Paradís and Don Joaquim Riera discussing at such an hour, in that gloomy, dubious doorway?
    Sr Riera hailed from Castelló de la Plana, where he had once run a successful tobacconist’s shop. In the meantime, he’d won a prize in the lottery, and that coincided with the death of the wife he so adored (his very word). Sr Riera’s wife hadn’t borne him any children but she did own orange groves that were highly productive. As he was forty-eight and alone in that crossfire of misfortune and consolation, he decided to sell up and come to live in Barcelona. He loved the theater and assumed he would find plenty of scope there to satisfy his rabid curiosity.
    Riera was a tall, bony, and rather round-shouldered man, with fair to white hair, thick eyebrows, a big, fleshy, red mouth, and somber, deep-set eyes. His prominent forehead created, to the right and left of his parietal bones, snow-white, receding hairlines. He was a forthright fellow, inclined to be sententious, and this seemed linked to his appearance by a broad black sash he wore over his belly – to avoid cold draughts getting to his kidneys, he would say –