Where the Soil Was Shallow [antikvár]

Darnius is a drab, sandy town in Catalonia, between Gerona and the Pyrenees in the middle of the piain of Ampurdân. Because of its closeness to the frontier it has—or, rather, it had—undergone certain French influence in its customs, clothing, and turns of speech. Many inhabitants of Darnius have spent a certain amount of time in France or even estab-lished themselves there, especially in the cork trade. In the first years of this century, a certain man f rom Darnius, named Serra, quarreled with his family and crossed the frontier on foot, taking with him only a little money. He headed for Perpignan, where he had some acquaintances. He lived with them for a month, somewhat precariously, without pre-occupying himself too much about what he was going to do. At length, one day, tired of this sort of life, he gazed for a while at a map of France and decided on Paris. "What will you do in Paris?" Serra lit a cigarette which he had rolled from dark Spanish tobacco and shrugged his shoulders. He arrived in the capital and gave himself over to Walking the streets, with no thought of how he was going to carry on. In Darnius he had always been the kind of man who concentrâtes his energies; in Paris, on the contrary, perhaps because he had no idea of how much longer he would go on eating, he seemed to enjoy inventing the most imaginative formulas for existence. Nevertheless, he did not forget that in his own town, in addition to being a cork worker, he had also been an amateur musi-cian—he played the double bass in the sardana group—and that his grandfather (owner of a certain number of bonds in the Bank of Figueras) had even composed some musical trifle