HIS EYELIDS OPENED with an almost imperceptible click, as if they had been sealed shut by earlier contact with tears and smoke, or by the irritated secretions that come from reading too long under a dim light.
As his pupils struggled to make something out, he rubbed his eyelashes. He flicked at them rapidly, using the pinky finger of his right hand much like a comb. All he could see was a vague panorama of limp, watery shadows, the kind of scene a man blinded by daylight might perceive on entering an aquarium. Against this murky background, a long vaporous blade the color of crushed oranges on the piers came increasingly into focus. It was a beam of light stealing through the slats of the shutters only to sour in the dense atmosphere of the room.
It must have been about four-thirty in the afternoon. Frederic de Lloberola, the man with the aching eyelids, had awakened on his own. No one had called him, no sounds had startled him. His nerves had had their fill of sleep. They had sapped to the dregs a colorless, absurd dream, the kind that leaves hardly a trace of its plot when you awaken. The kind you have when nothing is going on in your life.
Frederic spent no more than eight seconds surfacing into reality.
On the worn tile floor lay items of his clothing, embarrassed at their own disorder, entangled with chiffon stockings and a woman’s deflated and, frankly dirty, cotton knit nightgown.
All four chairs were piled with her things. The little vanity was weighted down with miniature bottles, powder cases, tweezers and scissors, and the open armoire resembled a funeral procession. The dresses and coats on the hangers, lively with bright colors and appliqués, brought to mind a series of too-thin carnival princesses who had been decapitated and pierced through the trachea with a hook. Atop the armoire rested empty dust-coated hatboxes, keeping company with a stuffed dog. The dog had been entrusted to an inept taxidermist who had stuffed it deplorably, leaving all the stitches visible between the hairs on its moth-eaten belly. His mistress had adorned the dog’s neck with an old-fashioned garter from which three minuscule roses peeped out, like three drops of blood.
Frederic began to notice the smells in the close chamber. One single odor, of spent tobacco, dominated like a bitter medicine.
The trapped smoke impregnated the sheets and Frederic’s skin, mingling with traces of a store-bought cologne and all the vapors produced in the abandon of two bodies, which the night maliciously stores up to proffer mercilessly when the storm has passed and sleep has placed a wall of incomprehension between a somnolence of expectant contacts and a livid, skeptical, and unaroused awakening.
To combat the assault of the odors outside and the bad taste inside his mouth, Frederic stretched out his arm and picked up his cigarette lighter and a Camel from the night table. Only two draws were necessary; the experiment with a fresh cigarette was fruitless.
Frederic ran his fingers over the pink fabric of the pillow that lay beside his own, a slightly damp fabric impregnated with smelly oils. His fingers lingered over the fabric, reposing dumbly, his fingernails scratching out a faint sound on the relief of the embroidered initials: R … T … R … T … Ah, yes, Rosa Trènor. His lips said the name softly, repeating it mechanically … A little grease, a little dampness remained behind on her pillow, along with the hollow of her head. But anything she might have left behind of her dreams had already died a cold death. Frozen, perhaps poisoned, by the smoke and breath of this man, Frederic, alone in bed since she had closed the door, sleeping his brutal, inconsiderate, insatiable sleep, turbulent with hydrochloric acid.
Frederic looked at the clock in fear. In this type of situation, verifying the exact time always provokes a certain panic; one needs a start to face reality. And, yes, it was four-thirty in the afternoon.
Frederic wondered why he had let himself go, why he had allowed this surrender. What had happened was understandable. Frederic had been biding his time for fifteen years. Ever since his breakup with Rosa, he had watched the woman’s evolution from afar with disdain and apparent coldness. Their breakup had been obligatory at the time of his marriage; the truth be told, he had maintained his relationship with the woman out of vanity. It was not that Rosa was so terribly common, as Frederic’s friends thought. But he saw nothing more in her than intimacy with a woman with whom he had a certain history and who could not be classified in the same category as other kept women.
What Frederic appreciated in Rosa was her “class”; he had never appreciated all the woman’s personal characteristics while their bond lasted, before his marriage. Even worse, with absolute insensitivity he had carried on affairs as ephemeral as suited his needs with other women, ladies of the trade. Never in his experience of love, whether the woman in question was Rosa or one of the others, had he perceived the slightest difference among them, or anything that might lend a touch of lyricism to the basic physiology of the act.
Perhaps the very vanity that led Frederic to maintain his scandalous friendship with Rosa Trènor contained a certain taste for anarchy, a feeling of rebellion against the conventions of his own class, even if such a feeling was baseless, because Frederic, like all the Lloberolas, was weak and cowardly, and his youth had been absolutely lacking in imagination.
If Frederic had taken an anonymous woman of unsuitable extraction for his lover, he would have been no different from any other Lloberola. Perhaps the only opportunity life had offered him to be a bit original was to become the lover of Rosa Trènor, a woman who had been on a first-name basis with his own cousins, who might even have prepared for first communion with them or slept in the bed next to them at boarding school.
We have already said that in the period preceding his marriage Frederic’s experiences of love had not gone beyond the most elementary physiology. In the intimacy of love, Frederic was the kind of man who didn’t show the least concern for the female element involved. A woman, for him, was just an inevitable accessory to the complete satisfaction of his instincts. Exceedingly selfish and lacking in the habit of reflection, incapable of the slightest critical thought, and never having observed the need to compare his own sensations with those of others, the truth is that, though he had had dealings with and had come to know quite a number of women, Frederic, in fact, did not have the slightest understanding of what a woman was.
With marriage, though, things changed completely. The very thing he didn’t have the intuition to divine, and would never have taken the trouble to discover, began to come into being as his married life progressed and little by little took shape in Frederic’s consciousness. As a single woman, Maria Carreres had been exciting. Frederic became accustomed to her love, in those moments of tender and tearful rapture that are the domain of garden-variety egotists. With all his banality and moral inconsistency, Frederic had a vague idea of what it was to be a gentleman, and even a few genuine, perhaps atavistic, gentlemanly instincts. So, his gentlemanly façade accepted by everyone, Frederic reached the state of matrimony.
From the very first, though, Maria Carreres showed a detachment, perhaps even a revulsion, toward those moments of shadow and contact in which the nervous and angelic battle of the instincts, of shame and the beast, is fought. Frederic had struck a bad sexual bargain. Maria Carreres had one of those indifferent and inhospitable physiologies that react with the chill of a cemetery and provoke virile dissatisfaction. Frederic bore his disappointment with dignity. He let days and months go by, hoping for a possible solution to his conjugal drama. But after their first son was born, the situation took a turn for the worse. It was then that Frederic realized that women’s sexuality was a more heterogeneous item than he had imagined. Finding himself tied to a person insufficient to his needs, to whom he had intended to offer absolute fidelity, little by little he began to find the idea of such fidelity odious. Frederic took to chancing afternoon adventures that could not compromise him or complicate his life in any way.
Frederic found himself again through these adventures; he found the lost taste for love, as he understood it. And these small evasions brought him vague reminiscences – occasionally precise memories – of what had been his greatest happiness in erotic affairs, his relations with Rosa Trènor.
Six years into his marriage, Rosa had become an obsession for him, but if indeed Frederic was a man of extremely malleable conscience, he was also spineless. He was afraid of his wife, afraid of her name, afraid of her father’s white moustaches, and even afraid of the last button on her father’s shirt that dug into the flesh on his neck. The thought of initiating the slightest negotiation with his former girlfriend produced an understandable alarm in him, because Rosa Trènor, even supposing she would have anything to do with Frederic, would not be one of those inconsequential afternoon trysts. Frederic feared, correctly, that taking up with her again would be his perdition. What’s more, the years had also gone by for Rosa Trènor. Most likely the woman he had known would have undergone pronounced evolutions in the tenuous ramifications of her nervous system, and the fragrance of Rosa Trènor’s heart would be for him like the disconcerting perfume of a boat that has sailed over many seas, picking up the contradictory resonances of all the ports where it has berthed.
Frederic spent fifteen years mulling over these questions. What gullies must Frederic Lloberola’s soul have fathomed to arrive at the spent air of that chamber, facing the glass eyes of a desiccated dog with a garter around its neck?
FOR MONTHS NOW Frederic and Rosa Trènor had been eyeing each other at the bar of the Hotel Colón. Penetrating the discipline she imposed with mascara, he had perceived a gaze that was neither indifferent nor ill-disposed. Seen from a distance, her make-up applied with severity, his former lover’s skin still had its effect. Frederic knew from his friends that Rosa’s situation was dire. She had lost any trace of regular patronage, and only her arts – praised by many who had had dealings with her – and the imperative of the air a woman who has been very beautiful never entirely loses, allowed Rosa Trènor, pushing forty, to risk still playing the role of a lady in the theater of love, retaining her dignity under the benign deference of the half-light.
The habitués and professionals of the demimonde knew Rosa Trènor by heart, and her presence or the memory of it elicited merciless commentaries. Still, from time to time, at her table, in the wee hours of the night or, if you will, in the first hours of the dawn, some gentleman of good intentions, fortified with a relative enthusiasm, would approach the florists of the most effervescent cabarets to choose and purchase, without haggling, the best bouquet of camellias for Rosa Trènor. One of those men who drink in moderation and do not entirely lose all respect at the sight of painted lips. Those admirable gentlemen, generally the object of ridicule in the view of rowdy and raucous youth, who have the distinction of considering that a woman is never, not even in her saddest condition, a beast inferior to a man, who can be brutalized as if she had no soul.
One of Frederic’s most loyal friends, Robert Xuclà, whom everyone knew as Bobby Xuclà – and this pretentious and somewhat gigoloesque name of Bobby was somewhat laughable as applied to a middle-aged bachelor with thinning hair, short of leg and large of girth, in whom all the most inoffensive and homely Barcelona essences came together – was the kind soul who acted as the intermediary between Frederic and Rosa Trènor.
In part because of her brilliant past, and a kind of cynical and offhanded way of behaving, proper to the aristocracy, but even more because of her taste for reading and penchant for argument, Rosa’s prestige as a superior woman was acknowledged among the vaporous clan of kept women who could flaunt their diamonds and even dump a five-star gent with relative impunity. One of these vamps was Mado, Bobby’s erstwhile girlfriend. Not that Bobby had the exclusive; Mado was a girl whose hospitality was luscious, inconstant, ephemeral, and as absolutely lacking in intelligence as a branch of lilac. Fidelity, for Mado, was just as impossible as wearing garters attached to a girdle. Whenever she had tried to put on such garters she had had to give up in the attempt, because they made her feel faint. This is why Mado was constantly pulling up her stockings, a peculiarity that lent her a rather lewd charm, of the kind seen in ports and sailors’ taverns.
Though Mado devoted every evening to humiliating Bobby, he was an understanding fellow, and even as he entered his girlfriend’s apartment, he would often wear the polite and somewhat beleaguered air of a man who is afraid he’s not welcome.
Mado’s little apartment was the place Rosa Trènor favored whenever she felt the irresistible desire to exercise her spiritual ascendancy. Even though Mado loved to deflate, denigrate, and tell horrible stories about Rosa Trènor, she held her in great esteem. More than once the kindness and good heart of Mado or some other girl had got Rosa out of a jam, and whenever she had received a favor from one of those young women, Rosa Trènor would put on such dignified airs and affect such grande dame simpers that no one could ever have doubted that it was precisely Rosa Trènor who had done the favor and was enjoying her own generosity.
Through Mado and Bobby, Frederic was gathering ideas about Rosa Trènor’s soft spots. Once Bobby had half-dragged him over to Rosa’s table, but Frederic had resisted. Under no circumstances did he want this event to take place in public. One of the characteristics of Frederic’s insignificance was that he thought of himself as a sort of central character on whom all eyes converged.
Other times Bobby had tried to bring them face to face, because Frederic was dying of anticipation, but the circumstances had not quite been ripe.
News had been reaching Bobby about Frederic’s irregular situation and his family disasters, but even though their friendship was longstanding, he behaved with the utmost discretion in this regard. Despite the confidence Bobby had always inspired in him, and unwilling, in the way of the Lloberolas, to surrender his lordly airs, Frederic had never said so much as half a word to his friend about what he called “unpleasant” things.
Frederic could tell Bobby about some despicable thing he had done, or reveal an intimate detail about his wife, with the crudity, vulgarity, or ferocity of a feudal lord; he could go on at length with the most boorish remarks about certain things of a physiological nature pertaining to his own person. But never, among all the sad confidences he had entrusted to Bobby, had Frederic told him that his father had mortgaged such-and-such a property or that he himself had been obliged to pawn his wife’s jewels.
And, once Frederic had made up his mind, when the circumstances were ripe for the encounter with Rosa Trènor, he had also hidden the “unpleasant” cause, the immediate and determining factor of his decision, from Bobby. Even though it was, in fact, an extremely unexceptional event. In the preceding years the economic disarray of Frederic and his wife had reached scandalous proportions. Everyone was aware of the situation both Frederic and his father faced. Everyone knew that the Lloberolas had had to sell off a great deal, and curtail their expenses. But Frederic was not about to relinquish his histrionic streak; he had covered things up any way he could, and at the point where this story begins, he was facing the threat of a loan about to come due. It was a personal credit extended to him without an underwriter. Frederic could not make the payment. There had been talk of an extension, but this would not be possible without his father’s guarantee. Naturally, Frederic was incapable of disavowing his signature or risking the consequences of non-payment. But horrible as these things seemed to him, the interview with his father filled him with even greater dread. The amount in question was considerable enough to produce scenes Frederic had no stomach for.
Worries about money had been the dyspepsia of his entire life, but at that point they had become acute. Frederic had been holding on for a long time; for the first time the possibility arose of not holding on, nor wanting to hold on, nor making the slightest effort to hold on.
It didn’t faze Frederic to spin out of control, to plunge into the mud with one foot now that he was mired in the mud with the other, to combine economic disgrace with a daring, glaring fling, or to resolve with weepy, theatrical cynicism what a genuine person would resolve with humility.
The circumstances were ripe. Frederic wanted twenty-four hours of oblivion, or twenty-four hours to hide his head in the sand like an ostrich. One day far from his family and from the overdue promissory note.
It was for all these reasons that Frederic asked Bobby to go with him to Mado’s house, where he was sure to run into Rosa Trènor.
And the day after that decision, stretched out between the sheets, mechanically interrogating the stuffed dog with his gaze and once again lightly running his fingernails over the initials on the pillow, he started reconstructing the scenes of the previous night.
AT HALF PAST ELEVEN, he and Bobby were on their way up the stairs. Mado herself opened the door; she was wearing colonial blue and silver striped pajamas. The satin pajama fabric strained over her breasts, which resembled two boxes of bonbons of the kind you would have seen at the turn of the century on top of the piano of a family of modest means. Frederic took much more notice of Mado’s pectoral ploy than of the explosive kiss the young woman planted on Bobby’s lips, forcing up his nostrils the dregs of smoke that clung to her gums. Frederic ran the nail of Mado’s pinky finger over his lips, and with an almost musical peal of laughter she pushed the two men into the dining room.
Mado’s living room contained the expectation produced by sudden twists of fate; gambling dilated the eyes, producing stinging and natural tears, and causing mascara to be forgotten. Tics, cold stomachs, or cold feet, and a displacement of the jaw and nasal creases disturbed the equilibrium of the features. In such a place, when things were going badly for someone, an atavistic simian air left its bold imprint on the faces there.
Among the players was Reina, a very young girl with platinum hair, her back exposed to below her kidneys, revealing a stretch of bloodless whitish muscles molded into the casing of a more vegetal and decorative skin.
Reina was Mado’s best friend, and there were those who attributed certain predilections to them, because Reina treated the young men who surrounded her as if she always had a fissure ready through which the eel of her soul could make its escape.
When it came time to play cards, Reina’s concentration breached the limits of the most elementary manners: she allowed no jokes, her extremely forced smile revealed teeth with an excessive secretion of saliva, produced by her state of nerves, not unlike that of a group of hyenas that have convened upon the cemetery. More superstitious than the others, when Reina was dealt a card, before looking at it she would press down on it with her index finger until it hurt, leaving behind the slight imprint of her nail. Suspicious minds attributed this to a wish to mark the cards, but this was an entirely false accusation, because Reina had no intention of cheating when she did this. It was a superstitious quirk that she combined compulsively with lifting her chin and staring off into the distance. At moments like this Reina’s eyes took on the alluring artificial brilliance of fake gemstones. As Frederic walked into the dining room, propelled by Mado’s laughter, the first thing his eyes fell upon was that stare. Frederic, who was acquainted with Mado and the other girls in the game, felt repelled by those eyes, which appeared to him as a new and hostile thing. His first reaction was to fall back, not to continue forward toward the encounter with Rosa Trènor. Reina’s involuntary gaze, which bore no ill will toward Frederic, had cooled the temperature of his audacity, and Frederic had felt like a coward again; but before he could formulate any kind of decision, Rosa Trènor’s small, plump hand was covering Frederic’s lips, and he felt bound by the warm, dry silk of that hand.
In Mado’s living room, Rosa abstained from any complicated toilette; she was wearing a simple dress topped by a cherry-colored sweater; the same clothes she would have worn at home, on a winter’s night, with a migraine or the vague beginnings of a cold. Her lack of concern for clothing was considered a characteristic of good taste; when the time came to say good-bye, Rosa enveloped her flesh and the worn clothing that covered it in a great beaver coat, a bit moth-eaten and the worse for wear, with the tender good humor of a person who was going off to rest with no intention of giving anyone cause for alarm.
When Rosa paid this kind of visit to the girls, she carried with her an enormous snakeskin bag, which she opened with the unctuous sigh of a philanthropist of popular lore ready to hand out bread and cheese to a band of raggedy children. In point of fact, Rosa didn’t hand out anything she carried in the bag; she would rummage around inside and extract skeins of multicolored wool and a sweater she had just started. Mixed in with that bit of feminine handiwork, Rosa had books, papers, notebooks, a little bottle of peppermint, the keys to her house, and an entire battery of rouges, mirrors, compacts, and combs. Rosa Trènor’s bag was one of her most personal belongings. She talked about “her” bag in the same way that a hairdresser with fantasies talks about “his” hair-growing elixir.
When Rosa started weaving her web, she would tantalize her admirers with hints and meaningful glances. She would attribute a lie she had just read in a trashy novel to some fashionable fellow – someone from “her world” as she put it – far-removed from the present company of kept women and famous for his wife’s fur coats and infidelities. Rosa had a special gift for twisting gossip and for making tacky, trashy comments without altering her tone of voice or the monotonous movement of her lips. Sometimes her conversation meandered onto paths of tenderness and morality, and she affected dismay at something some honorable gentlemen had told her about a lady of the finest reputation.
Rosa’s natural grace consisted of a sort of careless, authentic Barcelona flair that she, the daughter of a notary, born in the old city center, had not entirely managed to lose despite the bastardization of her contacts and the coming apart of her life.
When the time came to shuffle the cards, Rosa left off pontificating and set to trying her luck, in the flaccid, voracious way of a leech sucking blood from bruised flesh. On those occasions, Rosa would produce a discreet amount of money and lay her bet with the yellowish grimace characteristic of people with kidney problems. In general, Rosa didn’t lose much, but when she did, her sweater turned a deeper red, by contrast, because all the rouge on Rosa’s cheeks was not enough to veil her pallor.
When gambling, the disinterested feelings those bosom friends affected towards one another turned into a miserly and ferocious conduct known only in the world of insects.
The presence of men neutralized the corrosive tension of the game. Which didn’t mean that some of them, like the insignificant and tubercular Baró de Foixà, did not apply an intricate technique to their wagering, or were not intransigent and unwilling to entertain any kind of irony when their money was at stake. The Baró de Foixà was very wealthy and more than once he had settled a baccarat debt by appropriating a diamond or taking a mink coat to the pawnshop himself, taking no notice of the ladies’ tears or the coarse comments of the gentlemen regarding his sanctimonious regard for the letter of the law. There were those who recalled that the baron had once lost the favors of a girl he was head over heels in love with, because of his insistence on collecting an insignificant gambling debt from her.
Rosa Trènor greeted Frederic with a smile of indifference, not looking up from her cards, as if they had been chatting no more than a half hour before. Anyone familiar with Rosa would not have seen anything unusual in her attitude, knowing as they did how she liked to appear eccentric and disconcert her audience.
Even though Rosa had a vague notion of the precarious situation of her ex-lover, she still hoped that Frederic might once again turn out to be a solution. Rosa believed that though Frederic’s fortune was not, by a long shot, what it used to be, he could still not be mistaken by any means for a pauper, and his sexuality, a bit weaker and more disenchanted with age, might manifest itself with a drop of sickly tenderness, which Rosa could use to her advantage. Frederic’s possibilities would be more generous, he would abandon himself with fewer conditions and, knowing him as she did, Rosa would be able to administer his sentimentalism more profitably than a more tender and inexperienced body could.
In those days Rosa’s head was ruled by her stomach. In the theater of love she would waste no time on the build-up, heading straight for the “bedroom scene.” And here, though Rosa could not wield the weapons she had had at eighteen, she had perfected a technique of turning on and off the switch of pathos, which made her a dangerous woman for a certain type of man. Out of both vanity and the instinct for survival Rosa most definitely subscribed to the rustic aphorism, “The old hen makes the best soup.”
The game of baccarat went on without a hitch with Frederic and Bobby’s contributions; the bets got heftier amidst the electrical vibration of jaws and eye sockets. The women ended up winning, as always, except for Mado, who thought it wasn’t right for the hostess to win all the time, and paid off her losses from Bobby’s wallet. Besides the beverages, Mado offered her friends a bit of caviar sprinkled on salted crackers, which everyone accepted except Rosa Trènor. With her pretensions to being an old-fashioned grand dame, Rosa thought caviar was awful; she betook herself to the kitchen to prepare some toast rubbed with tomato pulp, which she tore into voraciously with an intentionally unsophisticated abandon.
When the time came to retire, Bobby winked at Frederic, and Rosa Trènor showed no desire to envelop herself in her beaver coat. Mado said she was a little dizzy, and Reina offered to stay and sleep with her. Understanding as always, Bobby bade his lady friend farewell with the usual explosive kisses, and the group headed down the stairs, muffling their laughter so as not to scandalize the neighbors. The group was Bobby, Marta, Gisèle, the Baró de Foixà, Ernest Montagut and Pep Arnau, the youngest son of the Comte de Tabartet, a boy as fat and innocent as a pig, who never got beyond the door of his lady friends’ domiciles.
Rosa Trènor had said that she would stay another half hour or so to finish teaching Mado the stitch for her sweater, and everyone found it perfectly natural that Frederic should take the stopper out of a crystal bottle and serve himself a respectable dose of cognac without saying goodbye to anyone.
Then Mado and Reina went into Mado’s bedroom, not before Mado had told Rosa Trènor, “Make yourselves at home, don’t mind us.” On a divan upholstered with silk the color of a turtle dove’s breast, before the half-drunk glasses, the scattered cards, and the occasional inert grain of caviar that had leapt to its death on the tablecloth out of repugnance at dying between Bobby’s teeth, Rosa Trènor and Frederic de Lloberola initiated their dialogue.
After a few exploratory words from Frederic, consisting only of polite remarks and a few inoffensive double-entendres to see how she would react and to try to gain the upper hand, Rosa Trènor, in a vague and apparently cold way, started talking in the blasé tone of “her milieu.”
“Yes, frankly, it was a bit of a surprise …”
Later, in response to an unfortunate question from Frederic,
“Rancor? No, I feel no rancor towards you …”
Silence, a great sigh from Rosa, a fluttering of eyelashes and a natural smile:
“But, now that we’ve said our hellos and we’re friends again … You know what I think? I think you should go home … As for me …”
Frederic began to harbor the terrible suspicion that Rosa Trènor was being sincere. He tried another tack:
“That’s the best thing we could do.”
Fearing this was too strong, though, he added:
“But stop, enough pretending. I wanted to talk with you because I need you …”
At that point Rosa let out a raucous and offensive peal of laughter. Frederic flinched, but he had no choice but to swallow it. Once Rosa stopped laughing, her voice became sweeter:
“You need me, Frederic? Now you realize it?… After … how long has it been?”
Never a good actor, Frederic went for this question like a ton of bricks, and Rosa coquettishly covered his mouth before he could answer:
“No, no! Don’t tell me how long …; it’s rude to talk about age. But, still, it’s been a while, eh? So I guess it’s true that … you really do need me …”
With a maternal air, Rosa knit her brow in mock pity. Smiling, Frederic said:
“Do I look … so bad to you?”
Rosa ran her fingers over his shirt and the knot in his tie and straightened his thinning hair. Like a caged rabbit, Frederic let her do it, and Rosa took a good look at him, cocking her head like a photographer:
“No, you don’t look bad to me at all. But you can be sure I wouldn’t stand for a tie like the one you’re wearing … And now that I think of it, I need you, too, but not for what you think … I need to talk with you about Eugènia D. Yes, yes, your wife’s cousin; you must have heard about it …”
Frederic opened his eyes wide in ignorance. Rosa thought it would be good to stretch the situation out and went back to her foul talk again:
“The other night at the Grill it was all people were talking about. Now, the worst gossips were a couple of drunken urchins like Mado and Kity – who’s running around with that fool, Bonsoms, the eye doctor – wenches whose hands still smell of dishwater.”
It occurred to Frederic, who found the affectation of brazen speech in a woman to be offensive, that one way out would be to pretend that Rosa’s vocabulary was appealing to him:
“Rosa, you’re incredible. When I hear you talk … I just can’t believe …”
“What is it you can’t believe?”
“You make me feel younger by the minute!”
“Oh! I’ve changed a great deal since we’ve been out of touch. I’ve become more ‘refined’ … But don’t you dare make fun of me! Tell me, what have you heard about Eugènia D …? Is it true about the diamond?”
Frederic realized, with some annoyance, that his praise had not had the effect he was hoping for, so, dropping the pretense, he said brusquely:
“That’s none of my business. I don’t keep track of my wife’s relatives. As you can imagine, I haven’t come here to talk about my family.”
Rosa was radiant. Her conversation was annoying Frederic. She went on without batting an eye:
“Oh, aren’t you the babe in arms. Even a dope like Bobby who never catches on to anything knows all about it, and it turns out you … Well, you needn’t worry. I don’t give a hoot, I just mentioned it to pass the time. When push comes to shove, you know very well I won’t be a penny richer or poorer if one of your cousins is giving her jewels away to some piece of trash from the Bataclan music hall.”
Rosa’s chatter about his cousin and the call girl from the Bataclan was of the most indecent and uncharitable kind; Frederic was getting nervous. Rosa didn’t let up and, with a condescension that suggested that the interested party was in fact Frederic, she added:
“What’s more, if you must know … That’s exactly what I said yesterday to those little snipes: as long as they leave me out of it … Because as you well know, I’ve never enjoyed this kind of rubbish …”
Rosa Trènor knew through Bobby and other friends of Frederic’s that Eugènia D. was his wife’s dearest friend, and that, beyond their blood relationship, there was a genuine closeness and affection. She was certain that Frederic would find these conjectures – absolutely false, in point of fact – about some supposed depravity on the part of Eugènia D. offensive. Realizing he had no other recourse, and simply to have something to say about Rosa Trènor’s remark regarding “this kind of rubbish,” Frederic responded in a completely idiotic tone:
“How old-fashioned you are!”
He might just as well have said, “How rude you are!” or “What a piece of work you are!” Rosa Trènor pretended not to have caught Frederic’s tone, and quickly responded:
“Indeed I am! That’s what I always tell these young guttersnipes. We did things differently in my house … A man, oh yes! With a man, the sky’s the limit. But only if he’s well-mannered, a “gentleman.” Don’t you think I’d have diamonds just like Mado if I weren’t so choosy, if I took up with the first young buck who showed up at the Excelsior?”
Even though at the moment Frederic was starting to feel a sort of peculiar pleasure at being drawn into Rosa Trènor’s low, wretched domain, he couldn’t suppress a skeptical laugh.
“All right, go ahead and laugh,” Rosa said. “I don’t mean, of course, that the first guy you run into will come bearing diamonds. But one thing leads to another, and if you have no scruples, before you know it you find a couple hanging from your earlobes. And mine have been in hock for years now.”
Sensing that the sauce was starting to thicken nicely, Rosa took the conversation down a different, slightly more undulating and benevolent, path:
“But I’m being tiresome. Yes, I am, don’t deny it, I’m boring you to tears … Isn’t it funny … It feels as if it were only yesterday that we were talking … I don’t know, what can I say … this all seems so natural … As if we were just as close as before …”
And then she brought the first notes of the aria down to earth with a sneeze, and an anecdote about perfume:
“I have a cold, you know …? Have to keep my handkerchief close by at all times …”
Rosa ran her handkerchief under Frederic’s nose, and, closing his eyes, he relaxed a moment as he inhaled the fragrance, while he searched for a way to broach the big subject.
“So you like this perfume … Oh yes, as you will soon see, I haven’t lost my good taste. Mado and Reina smell exactly the same: an unremitting horror from Guerlain that they consider the height of chic. Sara brought them a sample bottle. Four hundred francs, not counting what they had to pay the customs agents at Portbou. I’m surprised I didn’t pass out today. Lucky for me my nose is stuffy … But, my darling, what a sleepy face! You mind me, grab your hat and go home. I want to look in on those silly girls. They won’t mind. It’s perfectly safe. They’re probably reading some dirty book; Reina, that is, because Mado doesn’t know how to read. Bobby lent them a picture book, a filthy thing … Now, you mind me, go home and sleep; what will your wife say …? You married men have to behave …”
Frederic looked up and burned Rosa’s eyes with an acid smile. She added, in an afterthought:
“Though with me … after all …”
Frederic was starting to worry, but her last words, her “Though with me … after all …”, gave him license to press on, and Frederic said:
“Now, see here, Rosa, don’t you realize what an exciting woman you are? You’re the most delightful, intelligent …”
And here Frederic let out a grotesque, inarticulate moan, something akin to the whining of a dog, because Rosa had placed her hand upon his mouth to keep him from adding more adjectives. Stubbornly, her hand still on his mouth, Frederic tried to continue, and when he was convinced it was no use, he bit gently into the soft flesh of her palm, grabbed her hand violently, and covered it with kisses. Rosa didn’t stop him. Both of them were breathing heavily. Rosa improvised a couple of tears:
“But no, dear boy, no; don’t you see that my mascara will run! Can’t you see the tears in my eyes?… What is this! What is happening? You, too?… Are you really crying, Frederic?”
Frederic confessed as if in a cut-rate melodrama (“I was a dog with you, a dog!”). He confessed as if in an Italian opera (“How could I tolerate such slander!”). Frederic evoked scenes from his past with Rosa, moments of intimacy, he stumbled over his words, he blushed, because those moments included ludicrous or indecent details, which, naturally, he omitted; but omitting them punctured the effect of the phrase a little, and it came out flat. At the end of his confession, Frederic himself was taken aback at his own words: “What we meant to each other, what we had together, has been the only truth in my life …”
Frederic’s speech had the effect of a musical interlude. After hearing Frederic out, Rosa abandoned her crass talk, and adopted the attitude of an abandoned Niobe, bedecking herself in the folds of the most solemn tunic. Rosa played her grand role with an eye to Frederic’s emotional range, to marvelous effect. With a dancer’s grace the abandoned Niobe lifted the solemn folds of her tunic, and Frederic found Rosa Trènor’s calf, warm beneath her chiffon stocking, in his hands. Rosa had been – and still was – famous for having perfect legs. The fruition of those legs had been one of Frederic’s most legitimate sources of pride, and in that critical moment it was her legs that contained the most positive evocative power of the past, with all the consequences of a fierce arousal.
Frederic felt that words were of no use and, while still respecting the border that separates man from gorilla, he attempted to achieve a definitive outcome on top of that silk divan, the color of a turtle dove’s breast; but modestly, yet still strongly insinuating, Rosa objected:
“No, Frederic, not here …”
“Why not?”
“Because …”
Convinced that everything was going perfectly, Rosa stood up all at once, enveloped herself in the beaver coat, and said:
“Let’s go, they must be asleep by now … Little darlings!…”
Frederic obeyed Rosa Trènor without a word, and they started down the stairs of Mado’s house on Carrer de Muntaner. The street was the color of milk and ash. Frederic started to hail a cab; Rosa hinted:
“No need for a cab. It’s just a few steps away …”
Frederic felt all the sadness and cold of the dawning day run down his spine. He no longer had the heart to continue living out his chapter in the Rosa Trènor novel. When they reached the door to her house, Rosa opened her famous bag, turned the key in the lock twice, and took Frederic by the hand. At that point the Frederic of the family worries and the loan about to come due briefly confronted the Lloberola gentleman. He had just heard the screech the wheel of an early morning trolley car makes against the rail the moment it brakes. That little screech that sets your teeth on edge echoed too mechanically in Frederic’s chest cavity, in a painful, yet liberating, way. Frederic felt as if the festering in his heart were being scraped clean. Frederic had had enough of Rosa Trènor. But his pride – perhaps simply the Lloberola weakness and cowardice – wouldn’t let him abandon her. Every convention, every comfort drove him homeward; but the true gentleman – or at least this was the justification Frederic came up with – must reject convention and comfort and follow the path of duty. And his duty at that moment was to go to bed with Rosa Trènor. Rosa, the grand dame, knew how to read a gentleman perfectly. After a look from Frederic, Rosa shrugged her shoulders, smiled – the smile of an eighteen-year-old – and began climbing the stairs arm in arm with Frederic.
The friction of the beaver coat against his suit jacket felt to Frederic like that of a real live beaver, as feral and repugnant as such an animal could be.
Upstairs in the apartment nothing mattered any more to Frederic. The dialogue went on in bed, and Frederic made mechanical promises; projects took shape amid a strange and painful desire to sleep.
Rosa Trènor set the alarm clock for eleven a.m., when she must get up without fail. She had to see her dressmaker. Frederic fell asleep with Rosa Trènor’s mouth stuck to his teeth with the viscosity of a crushed flower, or of viscera. What kind of flower? Frederic wasn’t sure because it was all vague and monstrous, it was all already taking place in the atmosphere of dreams …
LYING BETWEEN the sheets, Frederic had just mentally identified and reproduced these scenes. He concluded that it had all been a terrible mistake.
As for Rosa Trènor’s bedroom, he was making note of the uncomfortable architecture, the airlessness and disorder of the chairs and the armoire. Frederic felt like a man charity has rescued from a shipwreck, who wakes up in someone else’s home whose inhabitants have coarser habits and a harsher and shabbier way of life than he.
Despite her airs, Rosa Trènor was a woman who had been worn down by privation, and by the need to spend the night with men she had known for a half an hour. Like other kept women of her kind, she had no sense of privacy. Just as she entered into all kinds of physical intimacies with the skin of strangers, she found it natural that the stranger should have the same intimacy with everything that was hers: her bed, her furniture, her stuffed dog … And she thought the stranger would find it perfectly natural to wake up in a chamber in which his hanging clothing would necessarily feel ashamed and out of place.
And, fifteen years later, and unfamiliar with Rosa Trènor’s apartment, Frederic was that stranger, that shipwrecked soul lying between her sheets, taking stock of a setting that both cowed and repelled him.
Under the impression that her novel, Frederic: Part II, was in the bag, Rosa had decided to treat Frederic with a conjugal candor, with the lightheartedness and nonchalance of a woman whose husband has just come back from a long journey during which she has been unfaithful and affects a tender and unaffected informality in order to avert suspicion. This was why Rosa had got dressed and unceremoniously left Frederic snoring, like the lord of the manor, convinced that this was the best way for Frederic to become reacquainted with her “essence.” But Frederic was simply overwhelmed by the lordship of that apartment. He couldn’t wait to get out of there, yet at the same time an absolute corporeal sluggishness kept him pinned to the sheets, at that unspeakable hour of four-thirty in the afternoon. Still incapable of making a decision, his hands ran over the damp warmth of his undershirt adorned with the trophy of a few of Rosa Trènor’s tears, tinged with the mascara she had not quite finished removing from her lashes in the last-minute rush.
If the foreground of Frederic’s moral landscape – his night with Rosa Trènor – had had a more exciting hue and a more pleasing volume, perhaps the background would not have gone so dark so quickly. Just as a migraine develops at the temples – following the characteristic signs of such an attack – and one begins to note the actual pain in a weak, insinuating, and treacherous way, in Frederic’s moral landscape Rosa’s image was fading, giving way – with almost the same physical pain as a migraine – to one clear image of a promissory note and to another of Frederic’s father. The foreground had changed completely. It was no longer a bygone chapter of a half-failed novel, but a future anguish of a pressing urgency and a reality that left no room for doubt.
Frederic had to make a supreme effort; the twenty-four hours had elapsed. At the foot of the bed a pair of reproachful socks lay in wait. Frederic began to get dressed with the disgust of having to put on those socks, which had not exactly come fresh from the armoire. Frederic walked straight to the bathroom, but it was of no avail and, besides, there was no more time. He didn’t even know how to turn on the water heater. In the bathtub two fingers of dirty water flirted with a sponge that floated there like a soaking intestine. That small, cramped bathroom, with the red rubber douche hanging on the wall and the expressionless curves of the sanitary devices, had an air that was both criminal and pornographic all at once. Frederic washed up superficially and was furious to discover that all the towels were used and stained with either lipstick or mascara. Frederic decided that Rosa Trènor was a dreadful, neglectful person. Doing up his tie, he felt a sense of humiliation when he caught sight of the wretched smudges on his sweaty collar. It was humiliating not to be able to change his collar. Nevertheless, he tied his tie with a kind of casual coquetry. His ill-shaven cheeks were another source of humiliation. To hide the darkness of his skin he tried some of Rosa’s dusting powder but soon he was scrubbing his face in rage with a terry cloth towel until he left his skin raw, because the powder was of no use. He stared long and hard at his reflection in the mirror. Frederic’s face looked deplorable, but his puerile vanity was compensated by the sight of his tall, full form, with no offensive obesity, and the slight receding of his jaw, which he considered a sign of spent or even slightly degenerate aristocracy. He rubbed at the two small, shiny, symmetrical black triangles that served as his moustache.
Frederic realized there wasn’t a soul in Rosa Trènor’s apartment. Everything had been left to its own devices. One of those women who see to the cleaning of a string of rental apartments had probably come in to tidy up and timidly left for fear of waking him. Or maybe Rosa had left word that no one should disturb him. Frederic looked into the kitchen and saw a cup with the dregs of a coffee with milk and sugar. The ingredients had separated, and a scrawny cat – which must have jumped in through the open window, because it was hard to imagine that Rosa would keep such an unprepossessing specimen – was licking the inside of the cup. When it saw Frederic it started to meow with a sour and resigned rhythm.
The sadness of the apartment was poisonous, and Frederic felt a deep pity for Rosa Trènor, who had to put up a front, who had to cloak herself in the veils of pretension, suffering the brutality of one man or another, all for the upkeep of a miserable olio of perfume and pink sheets. Frederic had some understanding of those humiliations and pretenses; but nothing in his bitter reality was so strained and funereal as that cup in the kitchen, wobbling and weakly protesting, like a frightened animal bleating, as it endured the lashing of the cat’s tongue.
THE STORY OF THE Lloberolas was one of many family histories that come to a distasteful and impoverished end, without even a reaction to lend it some tragic nobility or, at very least, a scandalous or picturesque vivacity. Don Tomàs de Lloberola i Serradell, the head of the family, had seen all the family’s former grandeur melt in his hands until he had become a poor, gray, defenseless man in a massive, unimportant, practically anonymous residence, amid the uniform geometry of Barcelona apartment buildings.
Heir to what, to all appearances, was a grand inheritance but which had already been depleted by the monarchist Carlist Wars of the 19th century and by his father’s follies. Mortgaged to the hilt and obliged to pay interminable spouse’s shares, legacies, and pensions to the other dependents, when he was twenty-eight years old Don Tomàs found himself owning a big old mansion on Carrer de Sant Pere més Baix. He had a university degree that was of no use to him, a fat, fussy wife who was also of no use to him, and a perfect ignorance of everything that matters if one is to fight tooth and nail to turn situations to one’s advantage and, if nothing more, to save one’s own skin from the ferocious attacks or caresses of one’s fellow men.
What Don Tomàs de Lloberola did have to keep him going, in compensation, was a consciousness of his own magical superiority, which flowed directly and legitimately from thirty generations who had never so much as lifted a blade of straw from the ground. The only weapon Don Tomàs de Lloberola could brandish in his defense was his pride of family, without a shred of irony, and without a drop of cunning.
The Lloberolas belonged to the kind of lineage, still in ascendancy at the end of the 19th century, whose profound ignorance of time and space carried within it the termite that would turn it into a harmless ghost: families attached to a not-so-old tradition that formed part of that petty rural aristocracy that acquired its noble titles in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries from the kings of Spain, by occupying some more or less flashy bureaucratic commission in the colonies, obtaining a kinship with more creditable and illustrious names through the grace or disgrace of marriage, and contributing a notable contingent of second and third sons and daughters to convents, the secular clergy, and the military service. Their only contact with their rural roots was maintained through attorneys and administrators, even though, in fact, during the expansion of Barcelona they had built their big old mansions – many of which have now vanished – in the most venerable, ripe, and crusty neighborhoods, those most steeped in the enterprising spirit of medieval trade guilds and the petty bourgeoisie.
Contact with the land, for families like the Lloberolas, was strictly an affair of the belly. Their property allowed them to cling to the reminiscence of their lost dominions, of which nothing remained but the title to the terrace farms and a house equipped with a the most basic comforts. There they could spend the summer months, or shoot, from time to time, a few rounds of buckshot into some hare’s back. Like so many families of their kind, the only thing the Lloberolas loved about the rural landowners who had engendered them was the revenue they received, always skimmed and filtered by the craftiness of caretakers and administrators. They hadn’t so much as set foot on many of their properties, nor had they tried to improve them. Without batting an eye, and to the detriment of the land, they would occasionally order a forest to be brutally cut down to satisfy some urgent need, nearly always the result of vanity or lack of foresight.
But anything having to do with a sort of spiritual affection for the land and, at very least, enough industriousness and cleverness to perceive its value and make the most of it, anything that might signify an intelligent and moral contact with a small parcel of the world that was theirs, and that often represented a great treasure, didn’t enter into the reckoning of these families. They looked upon the caretakers and terrace farmers with offensive paternalism, accepting their fawning, and the roast chickens and salads they provided for mid-afternoon picnics, as they would the obligatory affection of a dog. What they did not take into account was that – once the magical prestige of the landowner had been destroyed in our country – those caretakers were their enemies, who more often than not ended up taking over the properties and throwing them out. And if the caretakers didn’t do it, there was never any lack of spiders spinning a web of usury for aristocratic foibles. They would offer a low appraisal to take over a rundown property, and turn it into a first-rate homestead.
Along with this estrangement from the land, dating from the early 19th century, came a Castilianization of the greater part of the Catalan petty aristocracy. They became parasites, who turned their backs completely on the real traditions and all the essential local sentiments that were awakening little by little at the time in our country. The civil wars of the period contributed to the economic and moral suicide of many of these families. And when the wars died down, one could say that the political passion that leads one to risk even his own skin died down as well, and all that remained was a fading anachronistic ferocity, the consequence of discord produced by the wars themselves. Hence, for many of these gentlemen, politics was nothing but the spirit of the lowest form of caciquisme, local machine politics exercised through cronyism and ties to Madrid and the Court. Sometimes, this would serve a utilitarian purpose, perhaps the concession of a highway that would benefit a property; other times it was for nothing more than to satisfy the delusional heart of an insignificant character, who would willingly dismantle his inheritance for a seat in the Senate.
Religious sentiment cleaved to the backs of this aristocracy in the form of the most ineffectual clericalism. Owing to their blood ties with the Church, through a profusion of relatives in the clergy, be they parish priests, canons, or even bishops, the machinery of religion in these families proceeded with perfect rhythm. Each family had its own parish or church where they could put on airs at a specific Mass. They were members of the parish board, the benevolent societies, or the merely religious associations that occupied preferred places in solemn processions, wearing uniforms of extinct grandeur and bearing candles with more blessings than any ordinary candle. Each family had its own specific number of religious orders to patronize, and in the salons of those cold, damp houses whose pomp fell somewhere between sepulchral and carnavalesque, infinite pairs of nuns wearing the most heterogeneous wimples and scapularies warmed the brocade chairs.
Often the only way for one of these aristocrats to highlight his own figure with a color that might stand out against the surrounding gray was a solemn religious event, at which he might be positioned by the side of a bishop, his military coat emblazoned with stripes and his three-cornered hat trimmed with noticeably moth-eaten feathers.
These religious mechanics took the form of a sort of penitent’s parade that discharged its offices in those grand houses from the vestibules to the most intimate recesses of the bedroom. Those dark bedrooms held great canopied beds, in the vicinity of which the bathrooms and sanitary apparatuses had been replaced by all manner of colorful images in pathetic robes standing in glass cages, by the side of holy water fonts or hulking black armoires crowned with escutcheons and filled with never-worn undergarments whose lace trim had yellowed with sadness.
Outward morality was so fastidious in these families that often it was considered scandalous merely to drop the name of a famous actress or dancer, or intelligent author, or the title of a novel. During visits to the lady of the house no lips would ever mention a topic of conversation that might be considered even remotely free, and dialogues centered exclusively on religion, illness, the children’s upbringing, or questions regarding servants or property. And in a very vague way, from a very peculiar angle, politics might be commented upon.
Moral rigidity, strictly external, was no impediment to the secret practice in the heart of the most prim and proper families of the basest imaginable sexual practices, cases of vile degeneration. A respectable white-bearded gentleman, the bearer of candles and canopies in processions, might be inverted with all that such a thing entails, or a sadist might be keeping his tastes under the most cowardly wraps with the complicity of the most sordid people.
AT A TIME WHEN the amorous life of our city was not yet as big and brazen as it is today, some of those aristocrats relieved their sexual inclinations in airless, plebeian surroundings. It wasn’t at all unusual for their excitement to be focused on the stockings of a cook or the fleshy opulence of a hired wet nurse. The aristocrat who gave a diamond necklace to a dancer from the Liceu Opera, or who bedecked a seamstress in a hat trimmed with cloth camellias and the wings of an exotic bird, was considered lacking in moral fiber, a man who brought public offense to his class.
The most outstanding characteristic of houses like that of the Lloberolas was a life of isolation, spent in relations with only a very limited number of families, who attributed to one another all the moral and social value the Catalans could muster. Anyone who did not pay social visits in an open carriage with a coat of arms on the door – even if it was dilapidated – was considered inferior. Likewise any lady who did not dispose of damp and lugubrious salons with sofas upholstered in pearly silk (but with arthritic swollen legs) for her conversations with canons, generals, or seamstresses – often the only counsel available to the lady of the house.
A whole new life was emerging in Barcelona, where pirates, espadrille-makers and fugitives from the factory were becoming great industrialists, where thrifty shopkeepers who counted their pennies found themselves with enough capital to devote to new construction and the expansion of the city. Meanwhile, this unimaginative aristocracy, without a shred of initiative, was becoming deflated, impoverished, and utterly annihilated. A few members of this class of families modernized, made arrangements with those among the industrialists they might once have called common, and the occasional, shall we say, morganatic, marriage turned out to be good business for certain families. Others had the good fortune of a felicitous investment or were favored by very particular circumstances. Others, like the Lloberolas, had no choice but complete annulment, because the decadence they harbored in their blood no longer had the strength to react.
DON TOMÀS DE LLOBEROLA lived in an apartment that occupied a whole floor on Carrer de Mallorca. It was furnished in an incongruous and unappealing way with the last remnants of his time of glory. The occasional dresser or mirror that held pride of place in the history of their former house played the empty, chipped role of a relic in that space. Leocàdia, la Senyora de Lloberola, couldn’t abide seeing mercenary hands touch that furniture, so every morning, when she got home from Mass, she would set to dusting them and caressing them tenderly, as if stroking the cheeks of a paralytic old grandmother who in better days had been a holy terror.
The situation of the Lloberolas was almost invisible; if it weren’t for Frederic, who retained some contact with the upper crust – where naturally a nebulous, irregular, or precarious position is no impediment to retaining such contacts – one could say that, with the exception of their closest relatives, the Lloberolas saw almost no one, were not invited anywhere, and were never seen at any notable gatherings. Many of those who knew Frederic had never heard a word about his family, and they accepted him like any other parvenu. Leocàdia, limited by her husband’s bronchitis, and more and more scandalized by people who just laughed and squandered, acclimated her old age to a sad, pious, and housebound life.
Even though Leocàdia had never been beautiful, and an early obesity had robbed her, even when she was single, of that special excitement men used to find in bustles and leg-of-mutton sleeves, she was still a lady of refinement, delicate and docile. Leocàdia married Tomàs de Lloberola without a whit of passion, but entirely convinced that there could be no other man for her than her husband. Between her innocence and the unremitting moral norms she had bred in the bone, she accepted the bit of recreation afforded her by intimacy with a heavy, graceless, and monotonous man with the tender resignation of Sarah in the bed of Abraham. Still, always full of compunction, she would drone on in the ears of her spiritual directors with the rustling of a pious owl, resistant to pacification. The only thing that mollified her was the persuasive counsel of a prestigious priest, who told her that in holy matrimony the woman must be amenable and have a bit of patience. In time, Leocàdia found it all very natural, and even came to feel genuine love for Don Tomàs. By dint of the sort of mimicry that can be seen in some animal species and some married couples, Leocàdia began to lose her own initial refinement and her family colors, to reabsorb in her soul and display in all their variations the most banal qualities of the personality of the Lloberola patriarch.
Leocàdia adopted Don Tomàs’s family vanity. In this regard she was an old-fashioned lady, the kind who shrink and fade away in the presence of their lords and masters, never showing them up or expressing a contrary opinion. It was only with regard to her husband’s great economic disasters and absurd spending sprees that Leocàdia might timidly protest, advise, or insinuate, with that conservative and practical spirit women generally possess. Still, she was never energetic about it, but always phlegmatic, in keeping with her phlegmatic constitution, and she never managed to avert a single catastrophe.
Believing, in error, that he was at the top of his game, Don Tomàs de Lloberola continued, with an evident lack of intelligence, to make terrible business decisions. Later, in consequence, he would have to take out a loan at a usurious rate, or a second mortgage that squeezed them to the bone. Leocàdia never opened her mouth, crying in secret and chalking up to bad fortune what was nothing more than the consistent ineptitude of her husband.
Despite having served two or three times as President of the Association of Catholics, and on the board of the Committee for Social Defense, which was one of the most bovine and cloying ways of being reactionary, Don Tomàs had passed up no opportunity to be unfaithful to his wife, and the loveseats of the Liceu Opera House served more than once as a cover for certain adventures that the Senyor de Lloberola preferred to keep to himself. The always innocent Leocàdia, believing in the good faith of her husband, had fallen prey on one or two occasions to the torment of suspicion, at which point instead of crying out to the four winds, she preferred to keep her counsel and offer up her devotions to Don Tomàs’s guardian angel.
The hardest blow for Leocàdia was the sale of the family manor, which came about not because it would bring in a great amount of money, but because maintenance of the property occasioned a series of unsustainable expenses. Up to that point, she and her husband had been able to keep up appearances before their acquaintances. The word was that the Lloberolas were in a bit of a jam, but no one suspected that a family with so much history and such an important inheritance could fall apart so suddenly. Their renunciation of past splendors came to light gradually. If Don Tomàs, on realizing his situation, had simply stopped short, unsentimentally cut back, and put his cards on the table for the world to see, perhaps he could have saved a great deal more than he did, and perhaps the Lloberolas could have continued to play a relatively brilliant role. But his stubborn vanity, the centuries-long heritage of the family, and a willful insistence on pretending to have more that they had meant that his transactions and patchwork solutions were always negotiated more or less under the table, in the worst of conditions, and sometimes the Senyor de Lloberola – who saw himself as a real shark – ended up simply being fleeced.
The first cry of alarm announcing to Barcelona society the toppling fortunes of the Lloberolas – a special kind of protestation, containing inflections of laughter muted with phony compassion, like that of a flock of crows the scruffiest and most gossipy of which has happened upon a dead cow – went up on the feast day of Saint Hortènsia. On that day many of the ladies who went to visit the widow Hortènsia Portell saw the Gobelins tapestry that had famously presided over the green room of the Lloberolas hanging in her salon. That tapestry, one of the most magnificent of those possessed by the old families of Barcelona, was so well-known in society, and so familiar, not only to the eyes of the ladies, but even to the neighborhood shopkeepers and mechanics, who had never laid eyes on it, that when they wanted to identify the Lloberolas they would say, “that family with the tapestry.” Hence the general surprise produced in Hortènsia Portell’s salon could not have been more acidic and smeared with gossip. The question was on everyone’s lips, mixed in with theatrical variations on “Well, I never.” Hortènsia, both ashamed and amused, said, “Yes … the poor Lloberolas … you could see it coming for some time now. I got a good price for it because, as you can imagine, I am not in a position to own such a thing. But I didn’t want to let it slip away. Better for it to stay here. If not, who knows where it might have ended up!” Later, in a more intimate setting, and in a lower voice, Hortènsia would drop the tearful tones and pick up the kitchen shears that could rip out the innards of a hake without a hint of compassion.
Back then Hortènsia Portell was still a fresh and radiant widow. Blond, plump, with a lorgnette and too much make-up – elegant ladies were not yet using make-up in those days – she attracted a blend of authentic aristocracy, social climbers, artists, and men of letters. Hortènsia was known for being a free thinker, though she was both very proper and very chaste. Some of the ladies – Leocàdia among them – found her affected, common, and brazen. If indeed they didn’t dare give her the cold shoulder in public, in no event would they ever have invited her to their homes or deigned to set foot in hers. Hortènsia considered those ladies to be “démodé” and called them “old biddies,” and she made fun of their fussiness and their lack of style. Still, the truth be told, their snubs hurt her feelings, and it could be said that in the purchase of the Lloberola tapestry there was as much amour-propre and spirit of revenge as artistic enthusiasm.
The “shock” of the tapestry dissolved into fifty-thousand spoonfuls of nightly soup in the apartments of Barcelona until the shock of other sizeable sales came along, and the final thunderclap when the Lloberolas abandoned their house.
Don Tomàs’s tactic was to hide his head under his wing like an ostrich, and Leocàdia naturally followed suit, as we said before. Out of consideration, people accepted the grandiose and defensive behavior of el Senyor de Lloberola, who continued to speak of his glories in the same tone of voice as before. If at some point he made a fool of himself at the betting table he frequented in the Cercle del Liceu, the regulars pretended not to notice, and el Senyor de Lloberola would clear his throat with his usual leonine roar, convinced that no one had noticed a thing.
His two sons, Frederic and Guillem, and his daughter, Josefina, were Don Tomàs’s torment. Married off to the young Marquès de Forcadell, Josefina had escaped the conflagration and, even though she truly loved her mother, and shared her phlegmatic, dull, and acquiescent nature, her married state and the atmosphere of comfort that filled her lungs made her selfishly set foot as rarely as possible in the apartment on Carrer de Mallorca. Don Tomàs, who never bit his tongue and was an unrepentant and tempestuous pater familias with his children, loosed his harshest fulminations upon Josefina’s ample blubber, considerably sweetened by massage. He spoke of her ingratitude, lack of consideration, frivolous habits, and lack of respect, in the thorny crimson tones a good prophet might use. Josefina would weep and protest, and Leocàdia would play the role of Sarah by the side of her penniless Abraham. All she got out of it, though, was a scolding from Senyor Lloberola that sent mother and daughter fleeing in a damp veil of tears. When she got home, Josefina would tell her husband the tale, playing the part of the victim. The young Marquès de Forcadell would then declare that his father-in-law was a beast and didn’t deserve all the deference they showed him.
Frederic, whom we met in Rosa Trènor’s bed, was the hereu, the heir and firstborn. He was the spitting image of his father, and he had all the family flaws. Yet he didn’t have Don Tomàs’s theatricality or tremolo, and hence, he didn’t have his charm. Because, in spite of it all, Don Tomàs had a certain charm. Since the one had been molded with the defects of the other, Frederic and his father couldn’t stand each other. When Don Tomàs had to name a person in whom every moral calamity converged, the first name he came up with was Frederic; when his son had to conjure up the beast of the Apocalypse, he thought inevitably of his father. In early youth, Frederic had tried to study many things, but he was successful at none. His head full of the airs of the hereu to a fine household, he ended up tossing his books to the wind and deciding to live off the fat of the land. Despite the outrage and reprimands of Don Tomàs, Frederic – who at the time was convinced of the solidity of the family fortune – got his way. Partially in secret and partially in open rebellion, he prevailed over his father’s feeble objections. In his heart of hearts, his father relished having such a brilliant, modern son, with such fine taste in clothes and coveted by no few mothers. The match with Maria Carreres was not entirely satisfactory to Don Tomàs, who aspired to a daughter-in-law from the household of a duke of Madrid. Maria Carreres came from a distinguished bourgeois family, which naturally could not measure up to the shields and traditions of the Lloberolas, but she had a good dowry and seemed like an excellent young woman.
When the time came for his son to marry, Don Tomàs was feeling the pangs of insolvency. The sale of the famous tapestry coincided with the birth of his granddaughter Maria Lluïsa. From that time on, relations between Frederic and Don Tomàs became more and more grim. All Frederic wanted was to save himself. He started a business, got rapped on the knuckles with two or three bad deals, and buried his wife’s dowry on a particularly bad transaction. The Carreres and Lloberola families had a falling-out. Maria Carreres, inexpert and melodramatic, was the Iphigenia of the situation. Frederic hid his discomfort by coughing, though with less of a roar than his father at the card table of the Cercle del Liceu. With no money to throw around, Frederic felt like a cat with a can tied to its tail. Accustomed to spending heedlessly, it was a terrible blow to him to accept a post at the Banc Vitalici, a position that was unrewarding and ill-paying because the firstborn son of the Lloberolas could barely read or write. When Don Tomàs sold the house, the older and younger couples went their separate ways. Having happened upon a decent lawyer, the elder Lloberolas were able to save a sum of some importance on which to live. Don Tomàs was able to pass his son a monthly pension, since his daughter-in-law’s dowry was now nonexistent and the salary from the Banc Vitalici was a pittance. Among the properties Don Tomàs had managed to salvage was the Lloberola estate on the outskirts of Moià. He wouldn’t have given up this estate for anything in the world. To do so would have made him feel as if the imponderable liquid of his nebulous feudal ancestry were being sucked from his veins.
Even though Frederic rejected the stuffy ceremony and traditional airs of his father, and wanted to be a carefree, modern man, he still took pride in his name, his coat of arms, and his estate, which was known as the Lloberola castle. He would take his friends, including the ever-present Bobby, to hunt there as often as he could, even though they never killed so much as a pitiful heron.
Don Tomàs’s other son, Guillem, lived with his parents. There was an age difference of twelve or thirteen years between the two brothers, because Leocàdia was one of those unfortunate mothers who, bending with brutish submission to the insatiable task of procreation, had been cruelly compensated by a fate that conceded her only three children. All the rest were either sacrificed to miscarriages or sickly creatures who ended up in the cemetery before they had use of reason.
Don Tomàs de Lloberola was starting to feel over the hill, and had turned into a toothless lion unawares. His ailments had brought him close to Leocàdia. You might say that when his children were not around, his limp despotism was transformed into a more human and comprehending attitude. He and Leocàdia had done all they could. They had slept side by side for so many nights, they knew each others’ snores and guttural sounds so thoroughly, that from time to time, in those moments of liquid sadness old people are given to, moments empty of passion and ambition, Don Tomàs would take refuge in the winter fruit of Leocàdia’s skin, as if attempting to breathe a bit of joy into his sapped nerves.
Sometimes when the two of them found themselves at table, and Don Tomàs found the oil on the cauliflower a bit rancid or maybe he had choked on a lump in his semolina soup, he would start to spit out words of bile against his elder son or his daughter. Leocàdia would observe the volcanic explosion of her husband’s teeth and the artificial cloud of smoke formed by the scarce and untamed bristles of his moustache, speckled with semolina. As the wick of his anger burned down, Leocàdia’s pupils, veiled by an otherworldly web, would scrub the pepper from Don Tomàs’s tongue and he would finish up with a little cough and bend his head over his plate. After a moment of silence, husband and wife would look at each other in embarrassment, and the bead of a tear would shimmer in the corner of their eyes.
It was then that Don Tomàs realized that of all the fruits he had harvested in this world of vanities, all he had left was that little handful of flesh and bones, that white head, those eyes and those wandering teeth. Don Tomàs realized that, for him, love, friendship, sexual joy, and his most vibrant expectations had all come down to the smile of a whitish lady who could barely draw an easy breath, by the name of Leocàdia …
Leocàdia! That overblown, romantic, inexpressive flower, as full of virtues as an aged ratafia liqueur, whom he had met at a storied ball held in Barcelona to celebrate the first marriage of Alphonse XII. In those days Leocàdia wore a suffocating corset and a pink satin dress with a bustle and a ruffled train, and amidst the combination of stitches and backstitches and the chastity of her chemise breathed the flesh of Leocàdia’s bosom, made of bland white camellias, lacking in fragrance or promise, restrained by her extremely discreet neckline and a great ribbon of sky blue velvet, as tight as a dog’s collar. Leocàdia was escorted by her father, the old Senyor de Cisterer, blind in one eye from a bullet fired by the liberals, taut and plump as a bass viol and having the same deep, hoarse, and solemn resonances as a bass viol. Old Cisterer introduced his youngest daughter, who dared not lift her eyes from the ground, and when the time came to meet the Lloberola heir, who was in those days resplendent, wealthy, and unattainable, a discreet tremor ran over her camellia bosoms in a lyrical and devoted way, as if they were obeying the gentle gust produced by the wing of a dove.
In the moments of arid vision that followed his distaste at the adulterated cooking oil or the lump in the semolina, Don Tomàs de Lloberola, his eyes half-closed, was fond of discovering, in the failed pretensions of his inner landscape, the Leocàdia of the rose-colored dress clinging to the rigid sleeve of old Cisterer, beneath the innumerable glass chandeliers with their thousand yellow tongues of gas instinctively following the rhythm of the rigaudon. The music of that dance was in some way reminiscent of a military parade, and it gave el Senyor de Lloberola satisfaction to follow the complicated steps of the rigaudon, because it seemed to him that they evoked a tactical je-ne-sais-quoi. That silly music lacking in spirit or passion, infused with the most colorless mechanical frenzy, filled his heart with the trembling of his adolescent hours, the Carlists in the mountains, the barricades and fanfares of the brass bands (that might just as soon accompany a bishop as a thief being led to the garrotte) or the poor cripples dressed up in grotesque costumes for Carnaval who were paraded past the Lloberola mansion, where he would go out on the balcony and throw them a few xavos, the coins that had been used to pay the indemnization for the African war. Over the tablecloth of the dining alcove Don Tomàs relived that earlier Leocàdia and that earlier Barcelona, in which he still meant something. For Don Tomàs everything had changed. To console himself over his current misery he would repeat continually: “In my day it was not so …”, “I am from another world …” His Leocàdia was also from another world; the young woman with the bustle clinging to the arm of old Cisterer was a poor, insignificant old lady, whom no one respected or held in consideration, who would be given no special treatment in a clothing store. Only at the door of a church in the old neighborhood, when Leocàdia would go back for some particular devotional rite, would she come across a woman as anachronical as she herself, who had been begging for alms there for years. When Leocàdia bent down over her alms plate and dropped a five cèntim coin into it, the poor woman would look at her with glacial and obsequious eyes and effortlessly utter:
“May God be with you, Senyora Marquesa.”
AS FREDERIC LISTENED to the weak, rhythmic tinkling of a coffee cup subjected to the pressure of a phosphorescent cat’s tongue in Rosa Trènor’s kitchen, some curious scenes were unfolding in Dorotea Palau’s dress shop.
Dorotea had once been Senyora de Lloberola’s family seamstress. Leocàdia would have her to her house two afternoons a week. Following the tradition of the ladies of old who preferred, whenever possible, for their clothing to be fabricated at home, Leocàdia invested a great deal of her time in the sewing of underwear for her husband and children, among other things of a more decorative nature. In those days Dorotea was a quiet and retiring girl, with a romantic oval-shaped face, and eyes between green and gray, without sparkle, like the wings of those quiet insects that blend into the leaves of plants. Dorotea turned out to be an excellent worker; she was always in the company of a young man she claimed was her brother, who must have been a couple of years older than she. Everyone was convinced of Dorotea’s modesty and good faith until, one day, without anyone’s ever knowing the reason why, Dorotea stopped serving in the Lloberola house, as a result of which Don Tomàs and Leocàdia wore long faces for a week. Later on, as it appears, it came to be known that Dorotea was the protegée of an important gentleman who spent seasons in Paris, and she had married a French hairdresser. Others said she hadn’t married, but had had a child; still others that Dorotea was dead. But all of this is old news, and most likely a pack of lies.
Twenty years after leaving the service of the Lloberolas, Dorotea Palau was a single woman over forty, rich, generous with others, and the head of her own fashion house, which was patronized by very well-known ladies from the finest set. That afternoon, a man who couldn’t quite seem to decide whether or not to press the doorbell stood before Dorotea’s door. On the door was a plaque that proclaimed “Palau-Couture” to anyone who could read. It was a young man whom no one would have guessed to be more than twenty-three or twenty-four years old, though he must have been past thirty. Dressed in the style of the young men of the day concerned with being in vogue, his garments were clearly refashioned hand-me-downs. Biting down on a dying cigar that was unraveling like an old broom, the young man squeezed his eyes shut and pulled the brim of his hat down over his nose. After contemplating the plaque, he shrugged his shoulders and rang the bell with the puerile force and ill will of a boy crushing an ant’s belly.
IN THE FOYER, Dorotea greeted the young man with a profusion of smiles, and then, to break the silence, she said, in a maternal voice:
“It’s not even five in the afternoon! You certainly have come early today!”
“I was tired of walking around, Dorotea, and as you know we have a bit of business beforehand. I am like a great actor; I need a good bit of time to apply my makeup.”
“Please don’t talk so loud, for the love of God! I have more than twenty-five girls working in the front workshop and two ladies waiting in the dressing room!”
“Oh, Dorotea, always putting on airs!”
“Not airs, my boy; this is work. And in the midst of my workday to have to look after these things that, naturally, are not to our liking, neither yours nor mine.…”
“You need not worry your head about me, Dorotea!”
“But, you must understand, she is my best client.”
“Indeed, and I can certainly say she is my best client, as well.”
“Well, aren’t you the cheeky one!”
“Be that as it may, Dorotea, I don’t think I can spend all day here in this foyer.”
“Yes, fine, go on in. I’ll be with you shortly.”
“Is there anything in the dining room, Dorotea? Because I’m a bit hungry.”
“Go right ahead, you needn’t stand on ceremony.”
The young man stood on tiptoe, as if by doing so he could breathe in more easily the feminine air that emanated from the workshop. He turned his back on Dorotea and went down the corridor to the dark, deserted dining room of the house. He turned on the light and starting rummaging around on the sideboard. Throwing away the cigar that tasted more or less like a crematorium, he stretched out on the divan that Dorotea used for her naps, and started in on an improvised sandwich.
When he was down to the last crumb, and just as he was wiping a bit of grease from the fat of the cured ham off his fingers and onto the dining room curtains, Dorotea came in:
“Time to get started?”
“Just a moment, I’m not sure everything is ready.”
“No need for such a fuss, Dorotea.”
“Oh, that’s easy for you to say. They are very elegant people.”
“You have a strange idea of elegance, Dorotea.”
“What do you mean? I don’t pass judgment on personal tastes … But come along, come along …”
Dorotea led her visitor into a bedroom off the dining room. It was her own room.
Family portraits, an oil engraving of Our Lady of Sorrows, a mahogany bed covered by a great pumpkin-colored comforter, and on top of the comforter a package of clothing wrapped in a kerchief. Dorotea inspected the package.
“Yes, I think everything is here.”
The young man sat down on a low chair and began to undo his tie and take off his clothing piece by piece, replacing it with the dirty, torn and pitiful clothing Dorotea had put in the package on the comforter.
“What most riles me, Dorotea, is that you make me put on this Frégoli the impostor act.”
“If you like, you can come just as you are! No, I haven’t quite lost my mind yet. They think that you … just imagine … if they suspected you were …”
“Uh-huh, sure, any day now we’ll slip up on something, and that will be a show worth selling tickets to.”
“God forbid!”
“Go ahead and look shocked. I can just see myself running into him coming out of the Club Eqüestre on my brother’s arm …”
“Don’t you believe it. Do you think for a minute he would recognize you? Don’t you realize they are both under the illusion …”
“What do you think of this underwear, Dorotea? Patched up all over. Mamà makes me put them back in the drawer because of this sudden obsession they have with saving money. I never wear them except on these solemn occasions …”
“I hear her health is very fragile.”
“Yes, she hardly ever leaves the house … And what about the shirt? Do I also have to change my shirt?”
“What do you think! Don’t you realize your shirt is made of silk?”
“Papà certainly complains enough about it. But, Dorotea, do you really want me to wear this disgusting thing? My Lord, where do you find all these rags? No, no, I am not going to wear that! I’d be afraid of catching …”
“The clothes are disinfected, I swear it. Oh, and the medallion and gold chain, give them here …”
“If my mother wouldn’t die of sorrow, I would tell you to keep the medallion. One day at the beach club I almost threw it into the water.”
“Don’t play the heretic with me.”
“Dorotea, I think you’re going to have to find someone else … because, really, how long can this go on?”
“What are you saying! That’s all I need right now. It’s not easy to find someone …”
“… someone as shameless as I, am I right? Well, I don’t like to see myself all decked out like this. I think I look like a guy about to go out and hunt for cigarette butts and, frankly, even though Papà has gone and blown all our dough, we haven’t sunk that low.”
“Look here, do you think you can get away with those smooth cheeks? Didn’t I tell you to come with at least one day’s beard?”
“I forgot, what can I say? Yes, I do look a little too cute; it’s not easy for a kid from a good family to hide it.”
“Maybe a little dark blue eye shadow …”
“Not a bad idea! This mascara will do wonders …”
“No, that’s too much. Wait, let me do it; this will give you a sort of natural grime …”
“Thanks a lot, Dorotea.”
“No offense intended.”
“And you needn’t be such a perfectionist, Dorotea; nowadays everyone knows that even ditch diggers bathe and wear cologne when they have a date with a lady from the aristocracy. Hygiene has become commonplace … It won’t be such a novelty if they find me a bit too clean.”
“Oh my God, Mrs. Planell must be cursing my name – I’ve had her in the fitting room for an hour and a half!”
“Who is this Planell woman?
“Don’t you know her? She’s Don Enric Planell’s wife, a beautiful, bright young woman. Oh, you would like her, all right.”
“Come on, now, don’t make things any harder. Listen, the doorbell.”
“I don’t think they can be here, yet, but she’s always so keen to …”
“I swear to you, Dorotea … if it weren’t for the fact that … Well, no, I’m not going to tell you, you’re too much of a gossip.”
“No, what I mean is, I’m fed up with all this.”
“Be patient my son … three hundred pessetes are three hundred pessetes. Come back here now … to the ‘scene of the crime’ … and for the love of God, don’t make as much noise as you did last time. You can hear everything in an apartment like this.”
The “scene of the crime” was a room that had been converted into a luxurious bedroom, with a glossy, perfumed, and illicit air, imitating a kind of pomp that is no longer in fashion in homes with good taste, but is very common in certain high-ticket Parisian bordellos, frequented by the scions of South American families. Dorotea Palau had pretty precise knowledge of such places, even if no direct experience.
In the bedroom, the young man from a good family dressed as a ditch digger was left to wait, perusing the suggestive iconography on the walls with a cynical chuckle and flicking his pocket lighter on and off, while at the door Dorotea greeted a lady and gentleman of honorable appearance with affected amiability, leading them into one of the fitting rooms. Even though the moment of pleasantries had been extremely brief and the couple had already vanished behind a curtain, the lady could not avoid being spotted by Claudina C., who had been torturing Isabel, the chief apprentice of the house, for two hours. Having finished up her business there, she grabbed Dorotea by the arm in high dudgeon and said to her, one foot inside the door and one on the landing outside:
“That Conxa can’t seem to go anywhere without that pansy of a husband.”
Not wishing to take sides, Dorotea responded:
“They are an exemplary couple; he expresses his opinion on everything; la Baronessa doesn’t so much as baste a stitch without consulting him. They are madly in love, and bear in mind that he is no spring chicken.”
“Go on, woman, go on! The man is a dolt. He should be ashamed of himself. I assure you that if my husband came to me with this kind of nonsense …! I just don’t know what to think.”
“For the love of God, Donya Claudina, you’re being very mean! Quite a few ladies come here in the company of their husbands.”
“You’re talking about a different kind of ‘lady,’ now … But you have work to do, and I’m in the way … Everything must be ready the day after tomorrow, eh? I’ll be furious if it isn’t.”
“Rest assured, Donya Claudina.”
“Ah! And Isabel showed me that other matter. If you can’t bring it down, just cancel the order.”
“But we can’t, Donya Claudina. You know that was a special price for you only.”
“Always the same story. We’ve known each other too long for this, Dorotea.”
“For the love of God, Donya Claudina …”
“I’ll think about it.”
“At your service, Donya Claudina.”
Dorotea closed the door and stepped into the fitting room where the honorable couple awaited her.
“Have I kept you waiting? Please forgive me.”
“Is the room quite safe? No one will be able to hear us? There are so many girls here, and they can be such tattlers.”
“El senyor Baró can put his mind to rest.”
“Let’s get on with it, Dorotea. Is it the same one as the last time?”
“Yes, the same one. But with the leave of el senyor Baró, it can’t be done for less than a thousand pessetes.”
“This is unthinkable, Dorotea. Dealing as you are with a client of my wife’s category …”
“La Baronessa will understand perfectly. Look at the risk I’m exposing myself to …”
“You mean the risk we are all exposing ourselves to, surely.”
“Oh, no, sir. It can’t be done for less than a thousand pessetes. As el senyor Baró knows, I am under no obligation. What’s more, you have requested something that is quite dear and hard to find. I assure you that if the Baró and Baronessa didn’t have these qualms, another kind of person could be found, let’s say of a more decent class, more well-bred, a fine young man, in a word; and then the price would be more reasonable.”
“But Dorotea!”
“You must understand, there are many possibilities. But who could trust a person like that, a so-called fine young man? What I am offering you is foolproof. He can’t possibly compromise anyone, and what’s more, he’s authentic, the genuine article. This is the truth: it’s hard to find someone like this. You can’t imagine the repugnance one must face, the transactions one must engage in. All of this with kid gloves, for fear someone might have suspicions. What would the clients and even my staff think if they saw a character like that come in my door? I would do anything for the Baronessa, but for God’s sake, you must understand my position!”
“All right, Dorotea, not another word. A thousand pessetes.”
“Believe me, I would prefer not to earn this money. It burns my fingers, senyor Baró. If it were not for the esteem in which I hold you …”
“Enough, enough, let’s get on with it, Dorotea.”
“Just a moment. I am going to make sure everything is in order, and that the passage to the dining room is ‘free,’ so we won’t run into … You know …”
“Yes, yes, we know, Dorotea.”
The couple, now all by themselves in the fitting room, seemed stunned. The man’s features looked boiled, as if sucked in by an inexplicable inner fever. His cheeks had a grayish pallor and his eyes the soft dull stare of a dead hare. They didn’t dare look at each other or say a word, but their lips trembled with the rhythm of a mechanical toy.
In ethnographic museums you can often find those shrunken heads produced by Ecuadorean savages, in which the features appear to have been reduced by a strange force pulling from the center of the cranium, pressing and compressing the external muscles, sucking away the volume of flesh, until only a minimal, but horrifically expressive, amount remains. And there in Dorotea’s fitting room, his head and her head reminded you of those repugnant little heads, because there, too, it seemed as though there were a force pulling and shrinking their faces, making them more expressive. Surely what was reducing and impoverishing their features, minimizing their flesh, and injecting into them the sharp expression of a specter was the moral suppuration forged by their desire.
Her extraordinary beauty and extraordinary elegance vanished. Morality has its own aesthetic, and aesthetic catastrophes are implacable.
When Dorotea returned, the baron and the baronessa stood up, and both of them snapped to. With great effort – an effort perhaps akin to self-esteem – they swapped the grayish pallor on their faces for a more normal skin color. Dorotea ushered them to the “scene of the crime,” and softly closed the door.
If someone had caught Dorotea’s smile at the moment she closed the door, he would have been hard put to say whether it was the smile of an experienced mother-in-law leading the newlyweds to their bedchamber after the wedding dinner, or the smile of an imperial executioner who would sew a man into a sack with a rooster, a serpent, and a monkey.
An hour and a half later, the young man disguised as a ditch digger had taken off his costume and was soaping up his face and neck in Dorotea’s bathroom. Two steps away, Dorotea observed the young man’s bare arms and the soapy water that flowed off his cheeks with no little admiration, as she might contemplate Sinbad the Sailor at the moment he rose to the water’s surface still full of the mystery of an underwater cove. Because the service Dorotea had just provided was not exclusively out of love of lucre. In the woman’s penchant for gossip a series of elements well beyond the ordinary converged. Dorotea was a devotee, perhaps even a collector, of clinical cases. In her inner depths she must be harboring some unsuspected monster, and one of the consequences of that monster was probably the scene that had just taken place in that house of fashion. Dorotea was aware that these specialities and attentions to her clients could be the source of headaches that would truly compromise her, and it was precisely that little frisson of risk and danger that added spice to her original role as a go-between. Some claimed that Dorotea had rented an apartment for the resolution of certain peculiar transactions; this had never entirely been proven, but it was evident that by using her fashion house during regular business hours for that kind of secret, abnormal task, Dorotea gave her own twisted sexuality, or if you prefer, her perversion, an undulating vivacity that could shift from the pearly drape of a length of silk to the pornographic imagery of the “scene of the crime,” or from the vulgar rumor-mongering of a Donya Claudina – before whom Dorotea groveled and scraped with sadistic humiliation – to the conversation with a young man from a good family about to commit the imprudence of leaving a gold medallion hanging around his neck. This is why Dorotea, on seeing the bare arms and soapy hands of the young man, would have liked to have a needle in the pupils of her eyes able to penetrate the mystery. She wanted to hear the whole story, including the most unspeakable parts. So, a bit breathless with this desire, but pretending that nothing was amiss, Dorotea asked one question after another to which the young man responded with evasions and monosyllables, his voice muffled by the Turkish towel with which he was scrubbing his face.
“Listen, Dorotea, all of this is a professional secret. I … I don’t want to … your three hundred pessetes don’t give you the right to anything more.”
“But what about him …?”
“He is a pig, Dorotea, a … it doesn’t seem possible … No, really, I swear! Never again. The last time he was more inhibited … but today …”
“How odd. Such a formal gentleman; such a nice man …”
“They didn’t get a good look at my face, because between the darkness of the room and that trick you suggested with the pillow … And not a single word … There must not have been a bit of noise today.”
“If you could only have seen them at the door when they left: a couple of angels, perfect angels.”
“Never again, Dorotea! Just find a beggar! It’s too disgusting! I have a pretty strong stomach … and for three hundred pessetes one can put one’s stomach to the test, but this is too much.”
“Oh, I almost forgot to return your medallion.”
In the foyer, the young man from a good family, restored to his natural personality, had run into a bright, coarse, and very elegantly dressed young woman on the arm of a gray and proper man, the kind who can never conceal their jealousy. When the young woman saw the false ditch digger she blushed and said, just to have something to say:
“Hello! What are you doing here?”
The false ditch digger smiled and let them pass.
As they went down the stairs, the gray and proper man who couldn’t conceal his jealousy asked his companion:
“Who is that guy?”
“Don’t you know him? That’s Guillem de Lloberola, a boy from a very high society family without a penny to their name, they say. Ah, and if you must know, he’s a perfectly pleasant young man who runs around with a group of fellows who write poems and risqué verses …”
“What do you care about poetry? You’re just a dizzy dame. You know I don’t like you running around with riff-raff.”
“Oh, come on. No need to be so touchy.”
GUILLEM, THE LATE FRUIT OF Don Tomàs and Leocàdia, had developed a tactic completely different from that of his brother Frederic. Some would say that the young man took after his mother’s side of the family. Tales were told about old Cisterer, and about Leocàdia’s brothers – unctuous characters, with incredible escapades. They had a character that was both charming and shrewd, and an egotism disguised as refined solicitude. It seems they had found their echo in Guillem’s ability to stay on both sides of the fence in any family situation.
Guillem had started life at a point when it was no longer possible to conceal the Lloberolas’ economic cataclysm. Guillem’s education, so different from Frederic’s, had met with a feeble and depleted Don Tomàs de Lloberola, a father who in appearance deployed an honor guard of fire and brimstone, but in fact was easily distracted and handily deceived. In contrast with Frederic, Guillem had never suffered his father’s regimen of surveillance, never been spied on every Friday, as if by a detective, to ensure that he had actually taken communion if he said he had. Inspections of his private drawers and the books in his bedroom had been neglected, or perhaps the energy required to carry them out had flagged. When he got home mid-supper on a winter’s night, the paternal interrogation was cursory and in a tone left sort of hanging in the air. Guillem was able to achieve perfection in the art of lying and hiding the truth, the art most easily displayed by children with their parents. As a consequence of his self-important, foolish, and chivalric character – his authentically Lloberola character – Frederic often rebelled openly and provoked stupid conflicts. In the meantime, Guillem, opportunely lowering his gaze, stifling a comment, or murmuring a well-timed “Yes, Papà,” or “Forgive me, Papà,” with a velvety, feminine inflection, averted many conflicts and concealed certain kinds of things of which Don Tomàs lived in utter ignorance. Had he so much as suspected them, it would have been at least enough for his younger son to have suffered some damage to a rib.
Guillem had studied law, just to study something. He took two or three civil service examinations, to no avail, first of all, because he was so apathetic and distracted he had never studied for them, and second of all, because he had had no interest in passing them. Guillem had a horror, now more than ever, of any kind of discipline, anything that obligated him to get up at a particular time or take orders from anyone. He preferred the penury of being the son of a useless family, with pretensions to being a misunderstood man of letters, and feeding himself in whatever parasitic way he could, to having a bit of order and economic independence. Guillem was past thirty-one, yet he practiced the absolute lack of responsibility of the youngest of the household, who can always squeeze a duro from someone’s pocket, with the excuse that they’re still just boys and will always be just boys and never have to concern themselves with the things adults concern themselves with.
The Lloberola way of being, and the conditions in which their ruin had come about – conditions of vanity and disarray – were just the ticket to fostering the kind of juvenile mentality Guillem displayed, and just the ticket for a young man like him to find himself more and more lacking in moral sense as time went on. Guillem had absolutely no respect for his father; Don Tomàs’s presence was observed by his son through a magnifying glass of denatured ferocity. Despite the apparent hatred and incompatibility of character that separated him from Don Tomàs, Frederic still had a core of respect and consideration for the old man, while Guillem could have feigned the tenderest of tears as he watched his father’s death throes, and still been cold as marble inside. Between Don Tomàs and Guillem yawned an abyss of years. All the excellent qualities his father proclaimed for his epoch merely disgusted Guillem. He saw his father as a poor deluded man who had brought him into the world by accident, in his dotage, when his capacity to engender was half-exhausted. He felt that Don Tomàs had done nothing for him. He had not taken an interest in him and had not loved him. In simple obedience to a grotesque and clerical criterion of education, he had deprived Guillem of things he wanted just because. He had imposed religious and moral duties on him that Guillem had never carried out in good faith, which had only served to cultivate his hypocrisy.
Guillem never stopped to think that, despite all the defects Don Tomàs might have, the good man truly loved him, had spent sleepless nights on his account, had suffered anxiety for him, had even done truly outrageous things for him. Guillem didn’t even want to suspect what that old man would be capable of to save him. And it wasn’t that Guillem was a criminal, but simply that he hadn’t yet had occasion to meditate a bit on the dramatic situation of parents and children. Guillem lived his life apart, concerned with things that had no point of contact with those of his father. Guillem inhabited an atmosphere that was amoral, weak and selfish and, even though he would never dare admit it, lacking in dignity. Guillem might be a much more intelligent and refined person than Frederic, but his understanding always missed the mark when it came to his father. Inclined to the easy life, he was offended by Don Tomàs’s miserliness, his refusal to give money when requested, and his sermons in response to every bill from the shirt maker or any expense that Lloberola found useless or wicked.
Nothing worthwhile came of that young man. Don Tomàs had undeniably stopped worrying on his account, and his every whim was tolerated. Don Tomàs said to him: “You’ll wise up one of these days, because if you’re counting on the family …” But Guillem never wised up.
Or if he did, it was more often than not in a despicable way because, when he needed some cash, he didn’t waste time on scruples. Of the traditional family ineptitude he had inherited the decadence: an absolute collapse of the will in the face of catastrophe that reached levels of baseness he considered part of the merit and grace of his aristocratic cynicism.
Outside the house, Guillem had another personality entirely. In his dealings with certain men and women, he was considered a brilliant and charming young man, who displayed a combination of nerve and elegance. No one knew better than Guillem how to accept a banknote from a lady’s hand with a smile that managed to be both noble and Franciscan at once, the smile of a good jongleur in the circus ring following a particularly difficult act.
Guillem’s circle of friends ran the gamut from the most select and unconventional people to the kind of individual with whom he could close a deal with a wink of the eye from twenty meters away.
Guillem’s world was completely different from Frederic’s. This had allowed him to have a good relationship with his brother, and even to take advantage of a few breaks that wouldn’t have been possible in a community of acquaintances.
Leocàdia looked upon Guillem with the delicate and tender eyes of a mother, inflamed at once with both pride and ignorance. She felt that all the things that enchanted her about her son – his cheeks, his youthful and somewhat feminine profile, his obsessively manicured hands – had nothing to do with her, even though she had brought him into this world. Nor did they have anything to do with what she would have liked this final exuberant fruit of her maturity to be.
When Leocàdia kissed him, it was a breathless kiss of admiration, respect, foreboding, and the kind of animal tenderness we feel for something we ourselves have created, even if it is monstrous, even if it fills us with fear.
IT MUST HAVE BEEN around six in the afternoon when Frederic started up the stairs of the house on Carrer de Mallorca. It had been a good month since he last set foot in there. The less he and his father saw of each other, the better. Maria, Frederic’s wife, took the children there every so often, so their grandparents could have a look at them. No one derived any pleasure from these purely perfunctory visits. Ever since their parents’ falling-out things continued to worsen, and the daughter-in-law, as inept as she was wronged, was subjected to nothing but bitter words. Don Tomàs, in his skull cap and scarf, just rounded off the unpleasant panorama of her husband’s presence, as Maria saw the complement to intimacy with Frederic in that decrepit, fussy, and reactionary man. In contrast to Leocàdia, Maria was never able by any means to adapt to the mentality of the Lloberolas.
Frederic would hear from Maria about the fluctuations of Don Tomàs’s rheumatism and the situation of Leocàdia’s canaries. But what led the heir and firstborn to his parents’ house that afternoon was a topic of greater importance, a mission he could not delegate to his wife. The odd thing is, even as the most critical moments of his adventure with Rosa Trènor transpired, the figure of his ex-lover began fading from his sight, while the interview with his father and the obligation of the promissory note came closer to his heart. Yet now that the interview was imminent, separated by only fifty-seven marble steps, he could not pry the sight of Rosa Trènor’s kitchen, the spectral cat, and the bathtub with its inch or two of dirty water from his imagination. Distracted by these sad images, Frederic didn’t notice that the door was opening, a door adorned with an image of the Sacred Heart that read I will reign. A sweet voice, a rivulet of water trickling through the grass of the most luminous fields of his childhood, reached his ear, and he heard these words from his mother’s mouth:
“Thank God, Frederic! What a sight for sore eyes!”
Frederic kissed Leocàdia on the cheek, and with a theatrical and affected flourish, as if there had been a death in the house, he asked:
“How is Papà?”
Leocàdia’s response fell somewhere between a sigh and a frown:
“He’s in his office. He had a very bad night, he’s a bit fatigued. For God’s sake, my son, please don’t get him started again … your poor father …”
Frederic ran his hand delicately under Leocàdia’s wrinkled chin, and that tenuous filial massage seemed to reassure Senyora Lloberola, who without another word patted her son on the back and led him down the hallway toward his father’s room.
Don Tomàs spent the whole day secreted away in that place he called his office. The word “office” was most definitely excessive, a product of Don Tomàs’s predilection for exaggeration. In Barcelona’s old mansions, even if the head of the household had never written so much as a single line or counseled a single person, there was always a room designated as the office. The only things that took place there were meetings with an administrator, or signings of rental receipts, or the reading of some journal that spoke of miracles or the parable of the fishes. In his apartment on Carrer de Mallorca, Don Tomàs had wanted to preserve his office, even though by that time anything having to do with his properties, or with receiving or making payments, had been reduced to a minimum. Don Tomàs used his office to dunk the dry day-old biscuits known as secalls, to take naps, to cough his chronic habitual cough, and, once every fortnight, to write a few lines of his memoirs. From time to time, the masover who administered the only property he still owned, or a relative, or some sad priest who had served the Lloberolas as a seminarian, or one of those poor devils without a penny to his name who go from house to house telling tales of illness, would give Don Tomàs’s office the appearance of something that was not quite entirely a coffin.
They lived in a standard neighborhood, whose houses were designed with no imagination and according to geometric principle in such a way that a vertical line traced from the roof to the storefronts would run through five frying pans with their corresponding omelets, or five married couples making love, or five cooks singing the same tango. What Don Tomàs wanted to bring to life in his office was that very personal and slightly wacky decorative mishmash you would find in the old mansions, in which generations of sedimentation had produced clashing styles and stockpiles of absurd pieces. Some of the pieces of furniture in Don Tomàs’s office came from his grandfather, some from his great-grandfather, some he had bought himself, and others had been inherited from a cousin who went off to the Philippines or an aunt whose taste leaned toward aberrations like seashells and stuffed birds. All of this was crammed into a too-small room that twisted like a contortionist to make space for the little paintings, the holy pictures, the documents signed by the king, or the family portraits. And it still had to struggle to make space for the bust of a pope to breathe or for a view of the mountains of Montserrat made of fingernails, rabbit hair, and beetle shells to peep out – this last the work of a slightly crazy Lloberola uncle. Don Tomàs’s furniture was all made of the most accredited mahoganies and jacarandas, with tiles and incrustations, but it was tubercular and worm-eaten, with a patina of tears and disappointments, bloated by the rhetorical wind of two hundred years of Lloberolas. The effect caused by the jumble in that room in the apartment on Carrer de Mallorca was one of overstuffed incongruity.
In the big old house on Carrer de Sant Pere més Baix, all that planed and polished wood engrafted with metals and nacre, gleaming with exotic varnishes and gums, affecting potbellied protuberances or Gothic spires, had a reason to exist and a reason to take up space because the big old house was just like that furniture, and the walls and the decorations supported each other and gave each other meaning. A meaning that was a bit absurd, as we have already noted, but with its elements of grandeur. In that apartment on Carrer de Mallorca, the only thing left was the absurdity, exaggerated even more by the meager space and the agglomeration of the pieces. To the eyes of an outsider who didn’t know what it was all about, every piece of Don Tomàs’s historic furniture, every memory loudly clinging to every stick of wood, would resemble a wretched gang who had taken refuge from a fire in the first convenient place they had found. You couldn’t tell if they were crying, begging, or brazenly showing off their cracks and worm holes because they knew perfectly well that they were done for.
Presiding over the bric-à-brac of tradition hung a painting yellowed with linseed oil that portrayed Don Tomàs de Lloberola i de Fortuny, the Marquès de Sitjar i de Vallromana, stiff inside the uniform of the Order of the Knights of Saragossa. The painter had captured his physiognomy on his deathbed, and though he had done all he could, the portrait came out with the Dies Irae already grazing his lips. Fortunately he had daubed his galloons with silver and his lapels with an impulsive red, and he had lingered over the curls of the gray forelock and turned the sideburns hiding the dead flab of his cheeks into furling escaroles.
The jowls of the Marquès de Sitjar rested uncomfortably on a high, rigid military collar, so stiff you could slice bread with it. It appears that the marquis had only donned this asphyxiating item of clothing on two occasions: the day he was married and the day he was carried to the cemetery.
Beneath that portrait, in a ceremonial friars-chair, sat the grandson of the Marquès de Sitjar, Don Tomàs de Lloberola i Serradell. The grandfather’s braided uniform had given way to the grandson’s colorless, shapeless suit jacket with the odd stain. Don Tomàs’s shirt collar was unbuttoned, and he had sort of swaddled himself in a silk scarf of a hardy and indeterminate shade. He still had all his whitish hair, which he hid under a scholar’s cap. Over his moustache, streaked in salt and pepper, advanced the prow of an enormous red nose with cratered skin and aggressive nostrils. It was the nose of a peasant from the time of the remences, the late medieval uprising of the indentured servants. Don Tomàs’s milky blue eyes defended themselves behind gold eyeglasses, and his long monastic cheeks and receding chin sank with a bit of coquetry into the cool fabric of the scarf that swathed his neck, as if dipping into a silken bath. Don Tomàs was a tall, swollen, apoplectic man, slow to react, whose movements were sluggish and whose breathing was fatigued. An indefatigable cougher, he cleared his throat out of mere habit, because in point of fact, there was nothing there to clear.
Frederic’s visit surprised him in the midst of one of those earthshaking coughing fits. Wiping his mouth with a handkerchief, Don Tomàs peered over his glasses, wrinkled his brow, made a face and then quickly bowed his head, looking askance at his son with an expectant and wary expression. Frederic walked over to his father’s desk, and Don Tomàs extended his hand, which Frederic kissed not with effusion but rather with some repugnance.
“Hello, my boy! One might think you had all been brought up in an orphanage. You don’t seem to recall that you have a father, or that your father has been ill, and very ill at that …”
“But, Papà, I didn’t know anything about it. Mamà just told me right now.”
“Oh, you didn’t know. You didn’t know. Must we tell you everything? Your wife was here just the day before yesterday. Didn’t she have the sense to tell you? That’s right, poor old granddad … Everyone likes to kick a man when he’s down. Father has a headache? It will go away! And your sainted mother, putting up with it all. You only have a thought for us on the day of your monthly allowance. No better than a servant, a man with no love of hearth and home, just waiting around to come into what little you all haven’t already spent on me. Oh, Lord, if I could only …”
“Papà, please, for the love of God, don’t get started. Then you wonder why we don’t come to see you.”
Frederic had said that because he just couldn’t take it anymore, but he realized he had got off on the wrong foot and tried to make a fresh start.
“If you only knew what headaches and worries Maria and I have to face. While you, in all honesty, only complain about unimportant things. I don’t know what has you in such a foul humor. I can assure you, you are looking quite fine, magnificent, in fact. Indeed, my first glimpse of you made me very happy.”
“How would you know if I am looking or feeling well? Do you think you can play games with me? Don’t I know best how I’m feeling? It’s only natural; old people and sick people are a bother. But let’s not get into that. I know very well that gratitude cannot be forced, much less the gratitude of one’s own children …”
“Papà, please, I have children, too. And believe me, I repeat, I have a lot of headaches that you … Right this moment, if you only knew … I came over here expressly to tell you, to confess to you …”
“To confess to me? What could you have to confess to me! What have you done now, eh? What have you done? Frederic, my son, you’re too old for this. Do you understand? Too old! And I would rather not know …”
“Papà, believe me. I feel more alone than you. I have no one. My wife …”
“Your wife, hmm, your wife. There’s a ninny for you.”
“She is the way she is. She is not to blame …”
“All right, son, get on with it, tell me what’s bothering you … But be mindful, child, be mindful! If you want to see me dead … If you’ve had enough of your old father …”
“Please don’t talk that way, Papà. It’s just not right. Do you think I’m made of stone?”
“No, you’re not made of stone. But when it comes to headaches, you certainly have given me your share …”
“Are you starting again?”
“No, no, go on. Go ahead and tell me: what is on your mind?”
“I am very sorry to have to confess this to you, as you can imagine. But there is no other way. The problem is a promissory note …”
“A promissory note? Another wretched promissory note?”
“Yes, just that. A note I accepted, which comes due the day after tomorrow. I have tried to get an extension but the creditor will not agree to it unless I have another signature, do you see? He wants a guarantor.”
“A signature. From whom?”
“Imagine how it pains me to have to say this, to have to bother you with this, especially now, when you are not feeling well. But they have me under the gun. I could go to prison … It is just a question of the signature. I will pay it down the road; I will have the money. I swear to you there isn’t the slightest danger.”
“There will be no swearing, do you hear me? I don’t know what has happened to you young people. You speak without the least bit of respect …”
“Papà, forgive me. But I beg you in the name of what you most love. I am trapped. I am being squeezed. If you could just be my guarantor …”
“And what credit do I have? Who am I, poor devil? You are asking me to underwrite a debt? This is too much, believe, me, too much. I can’t do it, do you understand? I can’t …”
“But, Papà, I assure you there is absolutely no danger …”
“And what is the amount of this note?”
“Nothing out of the ordinary …”
“How much?”
“Fifty thousand pessetes …”
“Fifty thousand pessetes? Have you gone mad? My son, what is to become of you? What is to become of us all? No, Frederic, no. This is all my fault, oh yes, all my fault …”
“But, Papà, I will have the money. This has just come at a bad time …”
“What about your father-in-law?”
“My father-in-law is of no use to me. I don’t have the heart to ask my father-in-law for anything. Can you imagine …”
“So, naturally, the whipping boy will have to be your poor old father. Isn’t it enough to have done everything you’ve already done? You’re not going to stop until I am even poorer than I am now, destitute, begging alms. Is that what you want? That’s what all of you are after! Fifty thousand pessetes! Let’s imagine the note comes due again, and once again you cannot pay. What, then? What will be left of our household?”
“Papà, there will be plenty left! Fifty thousand pessetes is a trifle! I’m telling you again, there is absolutely no danger …”
“No, no, no, and no again. The time has come to turn off the faucet, do you understand? It is pointless to go on: I will not sign the note. Go find one of those rich friends of yours, find anyone, but under no circumstances will I do it.”
“What can I say, Papà? Frankly, I think your attitude is a bit … unfair.”
“Unfair! Unfair, you say? Unfair! Are you not ashamed of yourself, at your age, with three children of your own, to have come to be such a good-for-nothing, a degenerate …”
“Papà, please, you can’t go on like …”
“Can’t go on? Am I wrong, by any chance? Is this what brings you to visit your ailing father? Is this what reminds you of your poor mother? This nonsense will be the death of me. Haven’t you done enough? You’ve been doing this all your life. You will never change, never, it’s no use, never!”
“That’s enough, Papà, enough! Enough sermons! I’ve come to ask for your help, not your sermons. I’ve heard enough sermons …”
“You don’t want sermons, eh? Well, you’ll just have to put up with them. Because I am your father, and I have every right. Do you hear me? They don’t want to hear sermons! What nerve. Spoiled, pompous little brats. Believe me, I would never, but never, have dared to address my father in the tone in which you address me. I know, times change. Today there is absolutely no respect for age. The elderly, let them die. Parents, poor things, don’t count at all. Shame on you! We sacrifice in every way for them, we satisfy all their desires, we give them everything they want and then they dare to raise their voices. Don’t dare say a word, for they’re made of sugar – they might melt! They take offense! Their father offends them! I tell you, I would rather die than see such things, that’s a fact. I would rather die. Yes, may our Lord Savior deliver me soon, I’m not meant to … I’m not meant …”
“Believe, me, Papà, you do not understand. You deserve every respect, but frankly you must take a bit more stock of things. You don’t understand, and when you get this way …”
“When I get what way! I declare! What way? You are so shameless as to come and ask for fifty thousand pessetes because, truth be told, this note is just a bit of nonsense; when the day comes they will be at my throat and to avoid a trial I’ll have no recourse but to pay, you understand, pay and pay again. For forty years I’ve done nothing but pay, and I am an old man who cannot earn a living, and I have no more money! Much less for your degenerate vices!”
“Papà, for the love of God, I beg you! You know, I have a slow fuse, but …”
“A slow fuse! What you have is debauchery! Between the allowance I give you, your earnings from the bank, and the remains of your wife’s dowry, you should be living like royalty! Fifty thousand pessetes! You useless idler! Do you think I don’t know that you spend your days and nights gambling at the Eqüestre, and other things I prefer not to know because my ears would burn with shame. My father taught me that I should die before yielding to such frailties. And I say frailties out of kindness, do you hear? A Christian, a Catholic, a gentleman, a decent man, a family man would not …”
“Enough, Papà! Enough!”
“Enough! That’s not the half of it! You are a bad son. Do you hear what I say? A bad son! Look, look here, this is your great-grandfather. Do you know who this man was? He was a man of conscience. You know the story of Uncle Manuel, don’t you? You don’t? Well, Uncle Manuel committed a heinous act, the kind pious persons refrain from mentioning, and my grandfather, the gentleman you see here in this portrait, who was his father, chose never to forgive him. He didn’t even forgive him on his deathbed. He condemned him! Do you hear me? He damned him to hell. Uncle Manuel spent his whole life with the sting of his father’s malediction in his heart. What do you think of that! And Grandfather was a saint, an upstanding man, of the kind that are no more in Barcelona. No more. Do you understand me? So now, listen closely: what do you want? What do you expect of me? Do you want to be the Uncle Manuel of our family, do you want to be the family disgrace? Do you want your father to condemn you?”
“Enough, Papà. I’ve had enough of this nonsense. I could care less if you condemn me, do whatever you like. You don’t want to give me a hand? That’s just fine! This endless stream of sermons is just mean-spiritedness, the fear of losing fifty thousand pessetes. Very well, sir, very well. You and your saints, and your airs, and your good conscience. When all is said and done, what have you ever done? You lost your fortune in the most ridiculous way! Have you ever so much as bent down to lift a blade of straw from the ground? Have you ever done anything worthwhile? What kind of education and what kind of example have you provided for us? Maybe I am a no-good idler. Whose fault is that? And let’s not get started on debauchery and piety! You have done everything everyone else does, you have not denied yourself a thing. Don’t start in on how virtuous you are as an excuse not to give me your signature. We both know perfectly well what Mamà has gone through with your affairs.”
“Ah, you wicked child! Wicked! My children! Can these be my children …? You are killing me. Just kill me now … I can’t go on!”
Don Tomàs de Lloberola was seized by a terrible congestion. He tried to cough, but he choked. In a word, he was suffocating. Convulsed, he gripped the wooden arms of the chair, and when he could finally catch his breath, he released a sob that could not have been more shattering and intense. Frightened at his father’s appearance, Frederic tried to approach him, but Don Tomàs brushed him away violently.
“Don’t touch me … you want to kill me … let me be … Leocàdia, Leocàdia, I’m dying … they’re trying to kill me …!”
Accustomed to these scenes, Leocàdia walked in at a resigned and practical pace, didn’t so much as say a word, and stood by her husband’s side. He took her hands and, sobbing as he spoke, almost suffocating, he said:
“Mamà … poor Mamà … Now you see it. These are our children … This is what you’ve brought into this world … poor Mamà …!”
Leocàdia cast Frederic a dry and timid glance of reproach, of pity, even of understanding, and still without opening her mouth, helped the enormous Don Tomàs get up. Hobbling and crying out, “Ai …! Ai …! Leocàdia, I’m dying …! Mamà, I’m dying …!”, he vanished into his bedroom. Frederic stood flabbergasted in the middle of the room. Chewing on his lips, he said under his breath: “What a farce …! What a farce …!” as he listened to his father moaning from the bed in which Leocàdia had helped him lie down.
A few minutes later – Frederic could not have said how many – Leocàdia appeared.
“My son! Can’t you see what a state he is in?”
“But, Mamà, there is nothing wrong with him!”
“There is something wrong. You don’t see him as I do! He’s asking for Dr. Claramunt, he wants to see Dr. Claramunt above all else. He wants to make his confession.”
“Mamà, this is absurd. It’s ridiculous! People will say we’ve gone mad.”
“This is how it goes, you know that. It’s the only thing that calms him down.”
“Right now?”
“Yes, my dear son, I’m asking you this favor. Do it for me, my son … for your poor mother.”
“For the love of God, Mamà, let’s not get all worked up.”
“Please do me this favor. Go and fetch Dr. Claramunt – you’ll find him at home. Tell him what’s going on. Dr. Claramunt knows him well.”
“All right, Mamà, all right. But, frankly, this is too much …”
“Right away, my son. Don’t be too long.”
For many years now, there had been two indispensable figures for the Lloberolas: one was Dr. Josep Claramunt, the spiritual confessor of the cathedral. The other was Don Ignasi Serramalera i Puntí, who was a medical doctor, a full professor at the University, an academic, a director and member of the board of several hospitals, and the Lloberola family doctor. These two persons, when spoken of by a Lloberola, received dual consideration. In the first place, the consideration due to a magical and sublime eminence. In the second place, the kind of consideration, selfish and condescending in equal measure, that traditional families develop for an object, an animal, or a person who belongs to them, whom they have the exclusive enjoyment of, whose excellences are known only to them, and whom they can squeeze to the bone. When Don Tomàs spoke of the family doctor or the family priest, he did so with the conviction with which he would speak of a medicine to which he owed his life. For Don Tomàs there was no better doctor than Dr. Serramalera, nor any wiser, more prudent and more virtuous priest than Mossèn Claramunt. If anyone dared to touch a hair on the head of one of these two men, Don Tomàs would fly into a rage. Needless to say, the immunity, the prestige, and the superstition they enjoyed was comparable only to the effect produced by a witch doctor with animal blood in the heart of the most pagan tribe of Africa. Anything one of these two individuals so much as hinted at was considered an article of faith. They were the definitive arbiters of both the temporal and the eternal health of the family.
When some distant relative died, Don Tomàs would say: “They got what they deserved, for being stubborn. They didn’t want Dr. Serramalera to visit them and naturally they have a doctor who’s not up to the task …”
But those two eminences were two poor old men of crushing ineptitude and ordinariness. All their value proceeded from the Lloberolas, who had either made them or imposed them on others. The pride of the Lloberolas lay in the fact that both their doctor and their priest were like those linen underpants that Don Tomàs’s mother used to cut out and sew: solid, invulnerable underpants, insured against splitting and laundering. It was because they wore this kind of underpants that the Lloberolas held themselves to be superior to the rest of the Barcelona gentry. Mossèn Claramunt had been in residence with the Lloberolas since his years as a seminarian, and the old Marquès de Sitjar had paid for Dr. Serramalera’s studies. What’s more, since both one and the other had breathed the air of the old mansion on Carrer Sant Pere més Baix, they held the key to the Lloberola foibles. They could read their minds. They would contradict them when a contradiction was what the patient’s subconscious demanded. Often they would not show up for a requested visit because what the Lloberolas desired for their peace of mind was precisely for the doctor to pay no heed to the supposed illness and neglect to pass by.
Even a person as entirely simple and lacking in imagination as Don Tomàs can offer a psychologist willing to lose a few hours the most novel of wrinkles and the most mysterious of hollows. And a man who knows all those wrinkles and hollows by heart can achieve the most complete domination of the person under study. What Dr. Serramalera or Mossèn Claramunt had not come by through keen perception or psychological skill, they had acquired through practice, routine, and years of contact with the furniture, the dust, and the vanity of the Lloberolas.
For Don Tomàs and for Leocàdia these men had yet another virtue, perhaps the most important one; but this virtue was appreciated unconsciously, because Don Tomàs and Leocàdia never realized it was there: of all the people who had had dealings with the Lloberolas, the doctor and the priest were the only ones who continued treating them in their decline exactly as they had in their days of splendor. The same respectful and familiar smile Mossèn Claramunt had worn in the salons of the old house as Don Tomàs held forth on how his stable was the best in Barcelona, he wore on entering the little dining alcove of the apartment on Carrer de Mallorca, as Don Tomàs gnawed on a hazelnut with a tear trapped in each eye. On the reverend’s lips, the marquis was just as much a Senyor now as before, and even though, as we said, he was not conscious of it, for Don Tomàs this was tantamount to maintaining an illusion. It meant he could extract from the priest’s sanctimonious pupils the delicate gleam of a white lie that lengthened his life.
After a series of detours that poured drops of hot wax on his heart, in a state of compressed rage and desperate impotence, Frederic managed to get Mossèn Claramunt into a taxi. Not two hours had passed since his obsession with the stuffed dog with the garter around its neck in Rosa Trènor’s bedroom. Though the comparison was not entirely fair, that monstrous and ill-stitched object appeared to him again, on finding himself in the taxi next to the priest. Doctor Claramunt seemed not wholly human to him, like an ill-stitched creature. To the Lloberola scion those cheeks – over which the father confessor scraped a straight razor every morning, as if on tiptoe, as if it were a metallic virgin stepping timidly over the stumps of a holy field – looked like the stuffed viscera from a museum of anatomy that a perverse biologist had powdered over and wound up. The cheeks of the father confessor quivered nervously, as what little remnant of facial muscle supporting his flabby and pendulous skin jerked up and down. The priest’s lips stretched tightly and his pointy chin thrust forward or shrank back against his Adam’s apple, as if he had such a painful inflammation of the gums that he could not avoid this grotesque maneuver.
Frederic discovered that one can have the same clinical sensation, the same desire to escape when facing a respectable confessor or a bathtub with two inches of dirty water and a floating sponge.
In the taxi, Doctor Claramunt was talking to himself. Frederic had given him a vague idea of what was going on. His eyes glued to the nape of the driver’s neck, the priest was emitting a string of very empty, slightly honey-coated words:
“Bueno, bueno, bueno,” he said in Spanish. “So, el Senyor Marquès. Bueno, bueno, bueno,” – now he switched from Spanish to Catalan, “Of course, of course, of course! Yes, yes, yes, naturally. I understand, I understand. Bueno, bueno, bueno …” “An argument, at his age, eh? An aggravation? Bueno, bueno … His heart, of course, his heart! Bueno, bueno, bueno … Yes, of course, he is feeling anxiety. All the Lloberolas suffer from anxiety. Bueno, bueno, bueno …”
The father confessor rubbed his hands together, as if detecting the smell of the cards and the partners for a game of tuti, a courtly precursor to bridge. The gesture betrayed a touch of the pure, dispassionate concupiscence that is the province of theologians.
Frederic’s untimely visit to the father confessor had actually put him out. He was a methodical man with a strict routine and, indeed, if it had not been at the behest of Don Tomàs, the priest would never have left the house at the very moment he devoted to his prayers and to the classification of his herbariums. Because, in fact, Claramunt was a reputed botanist. He had begun his studies of plants because they were not unlike his idea of chastity, and what he had started in some sense out of morality and lyricism ended up turning into a proper scientific vocation.
When they reached the apartment on Carrer de Mallorca, after a brief word with Leocàdia, Dr. Clarament went into the patient’s room, and Frederic went into the dining room, to smoke a Camel and swear under his breath.
He did not swear alone for long, though, because Guillem had just rung the bell. When he heard that Don Tomàs was doing poorly and the father confessor was in house, he headed straight for the spiral of smoke curling out from under the lamp in the center of the dining room. Elbows on the table, his head hidden between his hands, Frederic was letting the minutes tick by, without even enough drive to take a puff of the Camel that was burning out on its own. When he heard his brother’s footsteps, he lifted his gaze and looked at him with utter indifference. Guillem took three hundred pesseta bills out of his pocket and examined them in silence. Smiling the forced smile one adopts on leaving the dentist after he has extracted a molar, Frederic said to Guillem:
“You seem to be flush?”
“Yes, a little business, very minor, nothing much at all, three bills. Blue bills, the pale blue of the month of Mary. I don’t know why they tint money such an innocent shade of blue. Look, King Philip II – what a face, huh? Don’t you think Papà bears some resemblance to Philip II in the portraits of him as a youth? He has the same mouth and protruding chin, and eyes that always seem to be watching a Corpus procession. If Papà had been Philip II he would already have had me killed, just like the Infant Don Carles. Speaking of which, I hear he’s not well, and Mossèn Claramunt is in there humoring him.”
“We had an argument, yes. Let’s say I’m responsible.”
“I don’t know when you’re going to learn how to deal with Papà. Don’t you see there’s no point in arguing? We will never be able to get along with him.”
“I assure you, if it weren’t out of pure necessity, I wouldn’t say as much as half a word to our father.”
“You take the wrong approach. The two of you don’t get along because you’re as alike as two raindrops. You are just like Papà … a little bit more modern, at best.”
“Look, Guillem, I don’t want to hear this cr …”
“Watch your words, brother dear. If Mamà should hear you …”
“Guillem, I tell you I’m in no mood, eh?”
“All right. What’s the matter?”
“It’s none of your business. It’s not as if you could do anything about it.”
“You never know, my dear brother. I take it you argued about money?”
“Look, Papà has a way about him that’s just not right. I asked him to co-sign a promissory note. There is absolutely no danger to him, for now, at least. A year from now is another thing. And he flew into a rage!”
“It’s entirely natural. I don’t know how you dare propose such a thing to him.”
“I’m not joking, you know.”
“Neither am I!”
“You must understand, even if you’re just a kid, that there are moments of gravity in life, and I …”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean that if he doesn’t want to sign, he is perfectly within his rights. But for him to say by way of justification that I am this or that, and to threaten me with damnation …”
“Just a bunch of words. Does any of this matter to you?”
“Well, even if he is my father, he has no right to say such things. And I didn’t bite my tongue either. I gave him an earful. I’ve had enough of all his virtue and saintliness and …”
“For God’s sake, Frederic, stop shouting. And enough of this offensive rubbish. You have no sense of diplomacy, my boy. One more episode like this and he’s a goner, and then it will be even worse. Ludicrous as he is, there are still a lot of things that don’t collapse because he’s around – don’t you realize that?”
“You know what, I just don’t care anymore. Let it all go to rot!”
“Listen, how much is this note for?”
“Fifty thousand pessetes.”
“And do you know anyone who would still lend you fifty thousand pessetes?”
“Don’t be an idiot! Of course I can find someone. I can get an extension, they just want Papà’s signature.”
“And who is this very … cautious person?”
“You don’t know him. He’s one of my card partners at the Eqüestre.”
“And his name cannot be revealed?”
“Oh, yes, sure. It’s Antoni Mates, the cotton dealer …”
“Antoni Mates? Oh, this is just too rich! Ha, Antoni Mates.”
“What are you talking about, Frederic, you’re too young to know him. What’s with all this silly laughter? He’s a friend of mine, you know, a perfect gentleman.”
“Antoni Mates! The one who bought his title – el Baró de … what was it?”
“Yes, yes, El Baró de Falset.”
“And you spend your time with pigs like him?”
“I am telling you, he is a perfectly respectable person, who did me a great favor. I abused his generosity, and now the man naturally wants some security.”
“All right, Frederic, all right. Congratulations on the friendships you keep.”
“Listen, Guillem, do you realize you’re being a jerk?”
“I do. But, look, let’s speak frankly now, man to man.”
“Don’t get all uppity on me now.”
“Frederic, I assume you do not have fifty thousand pessetes.”
“Of course I don’t.”
“Nor will you have them a year from now.”
“That’s very likely.”
“And Papà wants nothing to do with it.”
“Nothing at all.”
“And there is no one you can go to with your sob story.”
“No one.”
“So now what?”
“I don’t know.”
“Will Antoni Mates swallow the debt?
“How naive can you be?”
“You’re the one who’s naive, thinking he’s such a gentleman and such a good friend. Now let’s imagine Antoni Mates wants the debt to be paid, and this takes precedence over your friendship and your bridge table. Do you think Antoni Mates is capable of such a thing?”
“Not only do I think he’s capable of it, I’m certain that’s exactly what will happen.”
“And your great friendship …?
“Well, friends, maybe we’re not friends … when there’s money at stake, there’s no such thing as friendship. In any case, Antoni Mates is under no obligation to me. He must have been in a generous mood. Maybe he had had a little too much whiskey. Lately our relations have changed a bit …”
“Listen, Frederic. Do you want to get this note you signed back? Do you?”
“Guillem, unless I pay, I don’t see any way for the note to come back to me.”
“You’re being obtuse. If it were a question of paying so much as a penny I wouldn’t have asked the question.”
“Do you mean I should steal it?”
“Steal? What an inelegant word.”
“Then I don’t get it.”
“Your ‘good friend’ owes me a sort of favor that could obligate him to a an act of absolute generosity. Do you understand now?”
“Listen, I like to play clean.”
“Will Antoni Mates play clean if you don’t pay up?”
“I don’t know, but he will play legal.”
“And to hell with you?”
“All right, that’s enough. If you want to play games, you can play with someone else.”
“I’m not playing games. I want to save your skin, don’t you get it? If you want to play the gentleman, you can pay your debt to Antoni Mates, if you feel so inclined, when you are able. But for now, allow me to speak in our self-interest. I am just as much your father’s son as you are, I carry the same ‘illustrious’ name as you, and, understand me, Frederic, I will also suffer the ill effects of your ‘irregularities’ if the Lloberola name is left at the mercy of the first Antoni Mates who comes along.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean that it is in my interest for you not to pay off this note and for Antoni Mates to send it to you as if he were sending you a box of cigars. I do this not only for you, but for me, as well, and for Papà, and for my own personal business dealings.”
“Go on, Guillem, you must be kidding. I assure you Antoni Mates will not be so generous. It’s impossible, I tell you. Impossible.”
“What do you bet?”
“A thousand pessetes.”
“All right. On one condition. If I lose, I pay nothing, because I don’t have a thousand pessetes. But if I win, you will pay me.”
“That is a ridiculous condition, but I accept. Listen to me, let’s stop talking nonsense, because I don’t believe in miracles … or in your little games …”
As the brothers went on like this, Doctor Claramunt let his voice be heard from the corridor:
“Bueno, bueno, bueno, now that he is reconciled with the Lord God, el Senyor Marquès has found some peace of mind. Bueno, bueno, bueno, yes, a bit of peace. It was nothing, really nothing, nothing at all … Anxiety, a bit of aggravation. A shame, a shame, that such pious families … Bueno, bueno, bueno,” he trailed off in Spanish.
Frederic escorted the good father out and Guillem slipped off unobtrusively to his bedroom, so as to avoid Father Claramunt’s tiresome theology.
When the name Antoni Mates fell upon Guillem’s ear, he felt a voluptuous and utterly depraved fingernail softly trace the surface of his medulla. Guillem had hid this inexcusable sensation from his brother with a glacial and almost imperceptible smile. Guillem had combined this sensorial gangue, which not everyone can feel, even if he wants to, with a tender, noble, almost childlike sentiment. Because Guillem was not precisely a bad person in the strict sense of the word. He was just a weak, amoral, and selfish person, a man lacking in dignity. A product of the family degeneration, hapless, in a way, capable at certain moments of affection and pure sentiment, and above all capable of that biological bond that exists between two fruits of the same tree.
It is not uncommon for two brothers to be indifferent to each other, or to dislike or even hate each other. Fratricides are relatively frequent events. But all this is no obstacle to the existence of a very special sentiment that is only registered in fraternal relations. This is the sentiment that leads one brother to help another, and in a moment of danger even to give preference to his brother over everything else. We know of families in which two brothers do nothing but insult each other, between whom the physical and moral differences could not possibly be stronger, and in which each aims his life toward a different or even opposite path. But in a moment of true danger – true dangers almost always involving the physical or economic health of a person, because in the face of such dangers, emotional health takes second place – these brothers come together, and they do what they would not do for anyone else. What’s more, the sacrifice made for a brother doesn’t bear the weight of a sacrifice made for a friend, because it is seen as something natural, biological, a fateful obligation they share with each other. In these moments of danger a family apparently dispersed by circumstance contracts to become a defensive, homogeneous mass. The memory of the maternal entrails that created a series of apparently distinct individuals becomes imperative and turns into a solid cord that binds the hearts of brothers in mutual aid.
We have known families that, even after the most inhuman quarrels, have erased their differences and their distance and their pride in the face of death, a difficult operation, or economic disaster. Thus brother could stand by brother, in such a way and with such expression as perhaps to be the only integrally disinterested and loving sentiment in the world. Because, as we have said, brotherhood does not obey the will, or affection, or any other kind of sentimental fancy. No, it is a purely biological product that falls into the category of the instinct for preservation that all human beings share.
Guillem certainly didn’t have any feelings for his brother. He kept his distance from him, just as he kept his distance from his parents. In ordinary circumstances, they were two brothers united by indifference. But when he heard the name Antoni Mates, Guillem saw the chance to save his brother. It is possible that in his circle there might be some fellow for whom Guillem felt great affection, but it is also possible that if this fellow found himself in a similar situation, Guillem would not have come up with such a rapid, imperative, biological plan to save him. And since in this world good feelings are so often entwined with awful feelings, besides seeing a way to save Frederic, Guillem also saw a chance to do some mischief. The kind of mischief that would require unbelievable sangfroid to pull off. It was a despicable chantage. Naturally, the object of this extortion was by no means immaculate, at least not in Guillem’s eyes. But even so, the act the young man was prepared to carry out was certainly repugnant and, depending on the circumstances, perhaps even risky.
As he evolved in the world, Guillem had turned out to be an inoffensive and cowardly person, like all the Lloberolas. His dissipation had occurred by degrees, in the kind of effortless decline that allows the moral sense to disappear gradually and painlessly, with no active resistance. Guillem considered himself an ordinary man within the unprincipled gray mass of society that sustained him. He had never yet struck a bold and violent blow, hewn to perfection, with artistic flair and a coherent narrative and mise-en-scène. Now, the occasion had arisen, and it did so precisely as a way to save Frederic. Naturally, Frederic didn’t suspect a thing, nor would he ever know what had gone on. And the secrecy and mystery in the transaction that Guillem believed would assure his success only added pleasure and piquancy to the wickedness of his plan.
Shut up in his bedroom, Guillem meditated. He plotted a precise and delicate strategy. The vanity and satisfaction Guillem would feel when he saw his brother’s face in the instant in which he gave him a “gift” of fifty thousand pessetes would be transcendental. The lies Antoni Mates would have to tell and the lies he himself would have to tell in order to justify it all left him breathless with joy.
As he thought and plotted, Guillem realized it was nine o’clock and he was late for dinner at the Cafè-Restaurant Suizo on the Plaça Reial, known to everyone in Barcelona as the “Suís.” Furthermore, he had not yet found the time to go in and see his father. Timidly, he opened the door to Don Tomàs’s room and found him sitting up in bed, swaddled in an enormous frayed woolen shawl, eating his usual semolina soup, happy as a clam.
“What do I hear, Papà, are you not feeling well?”
“No, indeed I am not. And I think you might have …”
“Papà, I just this minute got home, and I’m having supper out.”
“You just arrived and you’re leaving again? What about your poor mother? Will she have to dine alone?”
“They’re expecting me …”
“Go on, go on. Just keep this up, my sons, keep this up, and you’ll see what happens. Oh yes, you’ll see …”
“If I had known, but I am really expected. It would be terribly impolite at this point …”
“Yes, yes! I said yes! Do as you wish, boy, as you wish!”
“Good night, Papà.”
And Don Tomàs de Lloberola and Serradell, swaddled in his tatty woolen shawl, in which he looked like a beggar at a Sant Vincent de Paul conference, slurped his semolina soup in his great-grandfather’s bed, a grand bed of mahogany and gold metal from the time of the Reign of Terror. It had come from Paris in a stagecoach, like those gentlewomen who fled the guillotine only to end up in the old Fonda of the Four Nations alongside some Italian fan dancer, destined for the bed of the Captain General or the President of the Barcelona Justice Tribunal.
ONE MIGHT HAVE thought Guillem was fleeing the family soup, Swiss chard, and omelet repast for a revelry of skirts, sauce anglaise and depravity, but the supper Guillem was bound for was as conventional and honest as they come. The truth is the young man was having dinner at the Suís with a married couple. The fact that he seemed destined to consort with married couples did not mean that the collaboration always had to be unpalatable. In this case, the husband was a young lawyer, a lifelong friend of Guillem’s, by the name of Agustí Casals. Agustí Casals was of humble extraction. His father, an exemplary working man, had reared a good brood of children, sent them all to school, and given each one a start in life. Agustí’s wife was an intelligent young woman who, though she was no beauty, had personality and charm. Agustí Casals earned a comfortable living and had a large apartment furnished with taste and grace. His books were well chosen, he had a horror of appearing extravagant, and his intelligence, and even natural modesty, precluded so much as a whisker of snobbery. Agustí Casals, with his varnish of ordinariness, was in fact a rather spiritual and broadminded young man, especially when you took into account that life had dealt him a difficult hand, that his field of vision had always been limited by work, courtship and family, and that his knowledge of the world had not been influenced by colorful affairs or voyages or complicated sentimental relations. When it came to women, in fact, he knew only one, because his bachelor indiscretions hadn’t allowed him so much as time for reflection. Agustí Casals made an effort to be well-read and up on things as he made his way. But all in all he had a fresh-faced innocence that he didn’t attempt to hide and wasn’t ashamed to admit. In some aspects of life his criteria were primary and narrow-minded, and with the brutal optimism of a healthy man with no dependencies, Agustí Canals would impose his opinion by laughing, shouting, or getting red in the face and cursing like a longshoreman.
Agustí Casals knew perfectly well who Guillem de Lloberola was. He had known him since they were children, and the friendship of this boy had seemed to him like the friendship of an ambassador from a completely unknown land, who had come to bare his soul in a new environment.
The world of the Lloberolas and the world of Agustí Casals’s family were at opposite poles. Agustí Casals was the child of the democratic shopkeeper’s class ruled by savings: the saving of space, the saving of time, the saving of money, and the saving of clothing. The apartment he had been born in had no personality. His education, the kitchen in his house, his shoes – purchased ready-made, like the ready-made shirts he had worn – absolutely everything had been as lacking in personality as a ten cèntim coin. Agustí Casals had frequented the variety shows on the Paral·lel, the amusement park at the top of the Tibidabo, the picnics at Les Planes, the beaches at Banys Sant Sebastià, the cafès on the Rambla, and the commonest brothels, in the most anonymous way, just like thousands of students and apprentices and hired hands by the name of Casals, like him, who had no pride of family nor even much of an idea of who their grandfather had been. This was why, beyond being a flesh-and-blood boy like himself, in the person of Guillem de Lloberola, Agustí Casals saw the representative of another race. And since Guillem was a talkative, brilliant and friendly guy, Agustí Casals (and once they were married, his wife, even more), derived great enjoyment from hearing Guillem’s stories about the grandeurs and disasters of his family, his childhood memories from the house on Carrer de Sant Pere més Baix, his picturesque perspective on his relatives, and the interminable tales Guillem had picked up from his father about the 19th century aristocracy of Barcelona and the Carlist Wars fought over the return of the Bourbon monarchy. Agustí Casals listened to his friend’s stories with genuine tenderness, because even though his blood had no connection to that antique bric-à-brac, when as a student he had ventured into the old neighborhoods, more than once he would stop before the courtyard of a house bearing an illustrious name. He felt a delicate admiration for this select and useless world that nowadays has failed so miserably, and of which Don Tomàs de Lloberola was a particular example.
Agustí Casal’s wife was a healthy young woman, satisfied with and utterly enamored of her husband. Though she herself had a somewhat dizzy and spontaneous way of talking, she enjoyed Guillem’s conversation. He would tell stories about some of the most well-known ladies of the brilliant leisure class, whom Agustí Casal’s wife never dreamed of mixing with, though within her own discreet position she was a refined young woman with an unaffected natural quality, who could have fit in anywhere. Guillem was aware of this soft spot of hers, and he would make things up and exaggerate, sometimes in good fun, sometimes spurred on by his own literary pretensions. Without ever betraying himself, or transmitting too much passion, he managed even to relay certain things of which he had professional experience.
From time to time, Agustí Casals enjoyed inviting his friend to dinner at the Suís because this restaurant imbued with the palm trees and noble architecture of the Plaça Reial (known nowadays as the Plaça de Francesc Macià) retained some of the essence of the final throes of the Barcelona he wanted to discover in the weak and amoral person of Guillem de Lloberola. The Cafè Suís, nowadays a bit run-down, despite the pre-war renovations, used to retain, and still retains, a touch of the air of the tony old cafès and restaurants. It retained the prestige of a good chef and servers who appeared not to have heard of communism. Agustí Casals liked to eat well; the taste for fine cuisine was something he had discovered recently, and when he found himself before an excellent dish he felt a bit of the shivering emotion of a parvenu.
Fine cuisine was part of his sentimental and somewhat literary attachment and devotion to the Barcelona of yore. Thanks to Guillem de Lloberola he knew that the Cafè Suís had seen parades of good gourmets enamored of opulent French women wearing agonizing corsets and picture hats with birds of paradise, trailing endless boas made of ostrich feathers dyed indigo blue. And in the winter the same women had hidden their tiny diamond-encrusted hands inside cylindrical beaver muffs.
Agustí Casals was sorry that the restaurant, either because of the crisis, or perhaps the changing fashion, had seen the migration of its old clientele of flamboyant playboys and Olympian nymphets. At suppertime, with his wife and Guillem, the Suís had the peaceful air of a convent. At the other tables sat the occasional foreigner, who had heard of the restaurant’s reputation before coming to Barcelona, or the regulars, gentlemen who were faithful right down to their tables. But, all in all, it had the air of a Monday night.
After dinner, time stretched on and the conversation got lively, with the natural excitement produced by drinks, coffee, and smoke. It was the sort of oasis of happiness that comes of the digestion of a good filet mignon accompanied by a genuine cognac. The two friends had brought up a topic that made Senyora Casals simper and pretend to fuss, though that didn’t keep her from offering her two cents every so often, in a sort of affected, yet inoffensive way.
They must have been halfway through the topic and halfway through the cigar; Agustí Casals was speaking with his characteristic vitality, the aplomb of a man with no complications.
“What can I say, Lloberola? I find this all a bit comical. The thing is, in Barcelona people like to grandstand, but it’s all just hot air. You can’t convince me that such things actually go on among these people you call ‘the aristocracy.’ Frankly, there is no aristocracy here. It all has the shriveled air of a highfalutin middle class. Just imagine that I decided to behave like a marquis. It would be quite silly, no?”
“No, Agustí, no, don’t get carried away. These stories have nothing to do with the aristocracy. You’re right, it’s all just middle class, bourgeoisie with new money, if you wish, with a lingering whiff of lint and machine oil that could make your eyes tear. What I was saying has nothing to do with any kind of refinement or decadence. It just exists. It exists here as it does everywhere. Sometimes it’s the most insignificant and gray of men, or the most apparently ordinary and decent married couple.”
“What can I say … what can I say.… You run around in a world of tarts and idlers, and, well, you see things that aren’t there. This is what’s in vogue now. After a war, people will do anything to wallow in the low life and try to seem interesting. The sort of respect people used to show one another is gone. You know that better than anyone. We’ve all become a little bit more shameless. Right now we’re talking in front of my wife about things I am certain my mother never heard of in all her life. This is not distinction, or anything of the kind. This is just pure nonsense.”
“Who said anything about distinction? This is a fact, a flaw, a sickness of our times …”
“No, no, I’ll have none of that. Foolish fantasy, literature for the blasé, like you.”
“Dear, you’re getting all riled up! Lower your voices, both of you! That man with the bandage on his cheek thinks you’re arguing and he hasn’t taken his eyes off you.” (Naturally, it was Agustí Casals’s wife who said this.)
“Mind your own business, do you hear? We’ll speak as loud as we like. What we say is no one else’s affair, and after working all day long, I can certainly be allowed to shout a little. All right? So, Lloberola, to get back to what we were talking about, this is more a literary obsession than anything else. Proust and Gide are in fashion these days, along with that foolishness about Freud that Dr. Marañón is publishing in Madrid. You’ve all read Proust, and you want to discover mysterious bonds and unnatural societies everywhere. I agree that these things exist in Barcelona just as they do everywhere else, and that there are as many degenerates here as you like. These people live in broad daylight, it’s written on their faces, they are part of a perfectly demarcated world. But these married couples, these strange combinations, these respectable and respected people …”
“Well, yes, in fact, all of this exists.”
“Why do only some people know about it? Why, above all, does only a certain type of person talk about it? No, my friend, no. Anyone can be tarred by a story like this. Anyone who has been the butt of gossip can … But where is the proof? Have you ever seen such a thing? Do you have positive evidence?”
“Casals, there’s just no reasoning with you. Listen. Don’t you have a nose?”
“A nose, why?”
“To sniff things out, to connect the dots, to reach conclusions …”
“As you can imagine, I have better things to do. I have other kinds of dots to connect. In my world, if you do no evil, you think no evil.”
“You see, you see, what a dope you are? Do you see why there’s just no reasoning with you?”
“You know, Lloberola is right. He knows more about these things than you. He knows these people …” (This, too, was Senyora Casals.)
“Did you hear that, from my wife? Always against the husband! What do you know about what Lloberola knows? You would be better off keeping quiet and pretending not to listen …”
“I can’t imagine why …”
“That’s neither here nor there, we’re talking about something else. I’m telling you this, Casals, because I know you’re interested, because you have a bit of the soul of a novelist, and what I’ve heard about this couple is a truly horrifying thing.”
“So who is this couple?”
“Look, as you can imagine, the person who tipped me off is someone with an interest in the affair and he didn’t mention any names. Some people think I’m a blabbermouth. But he swore they were very well-known …”
“All right, but get to the point, what’s the story? Because you still haven’t been very clear …”
“For God’s sake, Casals! You want me to tell you all the details? You know that your wife is here …”
“I assure you I understood perfectly what was going on.” (Once again Senyora Casals was speaking, laughing, but blushing a bit.)
“Well, I haven’t understood perfectly. That is, I can’t get it through my head … it seems too preposterous … You said … what did you say?”
“You want me to repeat it? It’s the wife, the husband, and … let’s say, a hired man … Not a friend, you understand. Someone who earns a fee.”
“Yes, yes … I get it …”
“Well, the husband … the husband plays a role … let’s say he’s passive with regard to the wife … and active (if you can call that active, because it’s a little complicated), with regard to the other … And the other and the wife … you get it …”
“Yes, yes, of course, I get it.”
“But the strange thing is that, to do this, the man needs for the wife to be there … and the wife …”
“The wife needs for the husband to be there …”
“That’s right! What do you think?”
“I think it’s perfectly disgusting. And you say the wife is a beautiful woman …”
“Beautiful …! Well …, that’s what they told me. And the strangest part is that this gentleman has no other outlet than this. I mean, he doesn’t go off on his own, not at all. He’s not one of these ordinary perverts, you understand? Unless his ‘legitimate’ wife is present, nothing happens …”
“And what about when he and his wife are alone?”
“Nothing, nothing at all.”
“But this is monstrous!”
“Monstrous, indeed. Who could deny it.”
“What I don’t understand is that there could be a person who can provide such details, who knows things firsthand, who could know, for example, that there is nothing going on between him and his wife …”
“Look, Casals, I’m telling you exactly what they told me; I didn’t see it myself, as you can imagine.”
“And the guy who agrees to play this third-rate little game?”
“It seems there are more than a few guys like that in Barcelona …”
“But you have to have a lot of nerve …”
“That’s it exactly. I would say you needed unimaginable nerve.”
FREDERIC WAS CERTAIN his brother was a nobody. “What kind of relations could Guillem have with Antoni Mates? Hah! I don’t think they’ve even met …! If I could find a way to get it over on that Jew.… Because, ultimately, what could actually happen to me? So what if I don’t pay? Will they put me in prison? Would my father go so far as to allow his name to be dragged through the courts? And, even if he is a son of a b …, if I don’t pay, Antoni Mates won’t have the guts to sue me.” This is what was going through Frederic’s mind, this is what he was muttering to himself, after he dropped Mossèn Claramunt off. The scene with his father didn’t matter to him at all. It wasn’t the first, and it wouldn’t be the last: “Father always overacts. He’s just a poor old fool.” Perhaps as a distraction, Frederic started thinking about the role the priest had played in the whole affair. Frederic had derived a negative, arbitrary opinion of priests from observing their behavior in the family enclave. Frederic’s anticlericalism was cowardly and shameful, like everything else about him. He would never dare confess to his mother that he had not been a practicing Catholic for many years. Curiously, he would never even have confessed it to his wife. With his children Frederic always affected a great respect for things religious, and, in the days when they lived in the big house on Carrer de Sant Pere més Baix, he had not been averse to bearing the canopy in Corpus processions wearing the uniform of a Knight of the Mestrança. Later on, he would joke about it with his friends, and say whatever entered his mind, but a strange sort of fear had kept him from ever touching a rib of beef on a Friday during Lent. After the failure of his latest business, he had become a bit more brazen with his conscience, even to the extent of formulating ideas that would have terrified him years before. He was so furious and so cornered that his impotence drove him to take out his rage on the nose and cheeks of Mossèn Claramunt. That decrepit charlatan, whom he had been putting up with ever since he had the use of reason, seemed to him to be the vilest of farceurs. He imagined the scene of the goodly priest hearing his father’s confession. “How hilarious! My father calling for this crank to soothe his conscience, for fear of going to hell. And what should he be confessing for? For having dragged us all to ruin, for having been the most egotistical of men. For having threatened to condemn me to hell. To hell! What was the poor man thinking? Does he think I’m going to lose a moment’s sleep over his malediction? He doesn’t want to co-sign a promissory note, so he calls for his priest! He doesn’t want to help his son, so he requires the church canon! And he’s afraid to die! He’s a fool, a hypocrite! What does he need the money for? Whom should the few bills he has left be for, if not for me? And that idiot priest must be sitting down to dinner now, thinking he’s done something grand. He went to hear el Senyor Marquès’s confession. No, but this one is cleverer than my father; he knows exactly what he’s doing … And they will both sleep peacefully because they have complied with the law of God. As if God didn’t have better things to do than watch over these miserable failures. Meanwhile, his son can drop dead. That’s what religion means to them …”
It is very possible that Frederic’s idea of religion was even more flawed than his father’s, because Frederic’s line of reasoning was that of a frustrated illiterate, an egotist who isn’t getting his way, a weak, vain man with no convictions, who would have eaten his father and all his timeworn religious prejudices alive. And yet, when he was in the mood, he would affirm that true aristocrats like himself were a superior race, and he would sing the praises of his family, even being so puerile as to describe his coat of arms to someone who couldn’t give a hoot about coats of arms, and who could clearly appreciate that Frederic de Lloberola was just as ordinary, undistinguished, and insignificant a being as any grocer or tram conductor. Frederic had promised Rosa Trènor that they would meet up before dinner, but he was not at all in the mood to see the woman. It is strange to see the effect twenty-four hours can have on inconsistent men who think themselves extraordinary but are in fact just about able to get by, and no more. Frederic’s brain was in a quixotic lather. At every step reality was revealing his mediocrity and his failure but, if nothing more, the blood of the Lloberolas was good for fabricating illusions. The day before Frederic had envisioned himself in a novel of scandalous and flamboyant rebellion. It is not that in the intimacy of his marriage Frederic should not have had his reasons for desiring something more. But an ordinary man will do whatever crazy thing comes along, out of pleasure or necessity, without the slightest interference from any concept of chivalrous duty. Frederic believed that even in the wildest or basest things – what people call “bad deeds” – chivalric duty ought to intervene. For him, this duty consisted of seeking out the woman who had been his lover fifteen years earlier, because in this way the plot took on a romantic perfume that disinfected it of the undistinguished whiff of the plebeian in an overdue promissory note. The day before, the memory of Rosa Trènor’s sexual prowess had seemed absolutely incandescent; his disgust with his legitimate spouse had also become infinitely more acute. Paradoxical as it may seem – and with a poor devil like Frederic everything can seem paradoxical – what required the intervention of “chivalric duty,” the quixotic lather that warped his brain, was precisely the possibility of a rebellious and novelesque situation of that kind. Supposing that Rosa Trènor were actually worth it, a man with his feet more firmly planted on the ground might possibly have chosen a more pleasant and opportune moment, one less charged with worries and overdue notes – for the affair, or the reconciliation. To Frederic this would have seemed ill-bred. The more prosaic and obtuse people are, the more they are consumed with the need to shroud their acts in pathetic and literary braggadocio. In certain situations it is the gossipy concierge who is best able to find the most overblown and melodramatic language. In many ways, Frederic de Lloberola had the mentality of a concierge.
Though a romantic situation can rise very suddenly, it can just as suddenly deflate, and turn into a tame cowardice that advances on foot, no longer dreaming of legendary steeds. This is what was happening to Frederic. Rosa Trènor had been a disappointment, though perhaps not an absolute disappointment. Frederic would go back to her, and she would let Frederic come back, but things would proceed without enthusiasm. The novel had been foiled by the night itself, the conversations with Don Tomàs and his brother, and finally the vision of Mossèn Claramunt. Frederic had filtered the anxiety of the promissory note through the eyes of Rosa Trènor. Later, he could hardly see Rosa Trènor at all, while the very real vision of the fifty-thousand pesseta note, perhaps because it was coming closer, was also the more cynical, placid and resigned one. And in the midst of it all there was still the question of whether his brother Guillem could work a miracle. Naturally, he didn’t believe he could; it was like the hope one placed in winning the grand prize in a raffle. You struggle against it, as the most gratuitous and absurd of hopes, but even so you think: “Well, someone has to win it; who knows? Anything is possible.” And, naturally, the illusion persists.
So after Frederic de Lloberola dropped Mossèn Claramunt off, he decided to go home instead of going to see Rosa Trènor. Frederic’s house was an apartment on Carrer de Bailèn. The staircase smelled of chicken wings, garbage cans, and the cheap local cigarillos known as caliquenyos. It was an odor peculiar to some apartment houses in the Barcelona Eixample, which everyone puts up with and whose source no one can determine. Residents are subjected to it five or six times a day, and they complain to the concierge, who complains to the manager, but no one does anything about it. And alongside the natural whiff of the house there is a whiff of whining, ill humor, rancor, and feeble protest. Sometimes the smell comes from the laundry room; sometimes from the apartment of a German man who deals in drugs or specialized straps, and the smell coming from the German man’s apartment mingles with a repugnant codfish boiling in the concierge’s house. At that point, the chemical reaction in the entryway is reminiscent of the beard of the knights who traveled to the Holy Land or the nightgown of the paramour of an ancient king of Castile. Occasionally the smell proceeds from the souls of the ladies on the first floor, which are completely dead, and give off an odor of dead soul that not even carrion crows would have anything to do with.
Frederic’s apartment had an air of neglect. When the time comes to cut back, people accustomed to spending freely and living with a certain pomp adopt a kind of elegiac disregard that softens their bones and extends to all the details surrounding them. It drapes itself over the furniture and over the cooks’ hairdos. You can detect it in the chipped glassware, in the dining room chandelier missing two bulbs that no one bothers to replace, in the sad figurine that has lost a hand, and in the rug that is losing its pile and revealing its veins and bald spots. In the most intimate spaces, the bedrooms and the bathroom, this negligence exposes the cavities in their teeth and their dirty undershirts. The water heater never quite works, the water never flows properly, the towels are always damp. When someone is ill, and a stranger has to come into the bedroom, the lady of the house agonizes over how to conceal the details, the flaws in the room, the peeling wallpaper, or the chair with the broken seat. In the small salon of the house, a bit of proper decorum is maintained, and care is taken to keep everything in order so that the ladies who come to visit can rest their eyes on a serene view as they take their tea, and not feel an uneasiness that would be just as bleak as the shame of their hosts.
In Frederic’s house, this feeling of neglect was even sadder because the furniture was in bad taste but of good quality, and too large for the apartment. Frederic had crammed the foyer with shields and coats of arms and even the occasional fake suit of armor. The same was true of the dining room and the salon: grotesque, incongruous and overbearing heraldic insignias shared the space with awful picture cards and paintings purchased who knows where at ridiculous prices, hung without a particle of discernment.
Maria, Frederic’s wife, was a person without initiative, whiny, bitter, and peevish, who little by little had also taken on the dusty sluggishness of Frederic’s family. Maria lived outside her time. She had adopted all the modifications introduced into the lady’s toilette after World War I: she patronized good hair stylists, manicurists and masseuses. But she followed their regimens in an unenergetic way, never getting any fresh air, never taking into account that in order for the work of the beauty salons to be effective it requires the constant collaboration of the client. The day after she had her nails polished, her hands already looked unkempt. When she tried applying makeup, it only made things worse, as she had no instinct for it. She had lost the desire to be attractive, to be interesting, to breathe a smidgen of charm into the air around her. Maria’s friends affirmed that this was not a recent thing, that she had always been this way; moreover they said she was dirty. Maria’s bad taste was evident because she was incapable of putting together a serviceable outfit. Sometimes she would ruin an elegant evening dress by wearing misshapen old shoes whose leather or silk was worn from use. Like all slovenly people, Maria spent money absurdly. She was hopeless at saving or at the art of making do. Over the years she had been seized by a strange piousness, characterized not by religious fervor or faithful observance, but rather by the sneering and general disapproval born of self-righteousness and moralism.
Maria had pretty hair and nice skin; despite her children, who were now getting big – her daughter had just turned fourteen – she conserved her slim waist and didn’t need girdles or orthopedic wiles to prop up her somewhat abundant but still fresh body. With a different temperament Maria could have been a first-rate woman, but it seemed as if she were bent on killing any positive effects, on limiting herself to being a person without the least bit of sex appeal.
Having thrown in her lot with a family that had not known how to hold on to its wealth, and had exhausted her dowry as well, Maria started rolling out her instinct for unabashed complaint and unmotivated sniveling. While Frederic didn’t want it said that he was ruined, and childishly clinging to the Lloberola airs, he continued to talk in the thousands of thousands like a grand gentleman, Maria did quite the opposite. When a friend praised the fine points of an overcoat, a refrigerator, a dog, or a device for piercing an egg for drinking, Maria would start with the ohs and ahs and roll her eyes back in her head. After this she would put on a sad face and shrug her shoulders, always with the same comment: “Lucky you! None of these things for poor me. With all our household expenses, just imagine! We have to save! Even now we’re getting along with just one maid. When you’ve had the problems we’ve had …” If Maria’s name came up, the ladies would always say, “Poor Maria.” This ostentation of poverty reached irritatingly grotesque proportions. If she went to visit friends who were close enough to receive her in the dining room as they ate, she would comment on every course: “What beautiful asparagus! Of course, you can enjoy such a delicacy. It’s been a long time since we’ve seen asparagus like these in my house. The way prices have risen!” These comments made the friends who were eating the asparagus want to say: “Here, Maria, be quiet and have some asparagus.” Naturally, this didn’t usually happen, but it made her friends feel bad, and they would end up getting no enjoyment out of the asparagus. When she was invited to a party she was dying to attend, she would snivel, just to play hard to get: “Impossible! X and Y will be there, and I don’t have a dress. I would have to wear my black georgette again, and they’ve seen me in it three times.”
This behavior reached funereal heights in the family circle. Her lack of skill at avoiding avoidable things, her sadistic delight in continually pointing out the mended patches and placing the blame on her husband – never with violence, but with the slack demeanor of a beaten-down cat – and a mewling singsong full of bitterness and apparent resignation made her an odious woman. If the compensation of tender and passionate interludes, of something visceral and alive, had existed, perhaps a man could have found her relatively tolerable. But she was cold in intimacy, with a rigid and imperceptible sensuality, full of vengeful sighs of aversion.
The only person she got along with was her mother. Senyora Carreres, flush with money and diamonds, seemed to dissolve with voluptuosity when she contemplated the precarious situation of her daughter and son-in-law. She felt a sort of joyous middle class bad blood on seeing how the Lloberolas had squandered their fortune, right down to her daughter’s dowry. When Maria married, Senyora Carreres had learned that the Lloberolas found the Carreres family undistinguished and had wrinkled their noses at the match. Years later, Maria’s mother felt as if she were bathing in rose water on seeing herself so full of life, so well-fed and well-positioned, just as Frederic de Lloberola had had to lower himself, and beg clemency, often for ludicrous sums. Senyora Carreres cultivated her daughter’s tearful incontinence, inflaming her against her husband’s family, and creating an unbearably tense situation. It had been years since the in-laws had seen each other, and Frederic tolerated his wife’s parents out of pure necessity. Instead of keeping a bit of distance so as not to call attention to their contrasting fortunes, Senyora Carreres spent the entire day at her daughter’s side, saying “My poor dear! What misfortunes we must bear, dear God!” And she wasn’t good for a cent. Sometimes when Frederic got home he would find the two of them sitting in a corner of the dining room. When he came in they barely said a word to him. Maria would bow her head, and Senyora Carreres would glare at him with eyes that appeared to want to cry. She would move her head with the cadence of a disappointed cow, like the ones that secretly lived in the heart of the densest and most impoverished neighborhoods of Barcelona. Frederic would take in the viscous gleam of those ruminant eyes and then, pretending not to have noticed a thing, begin to tell them tales of grandeur or bits of piquant gossip that he knew his mother-in-law would find offensive. Senyora Carreres would adopt an increasingly acidic, passive, and abused attitude, scratching her cheeks with her little doll’s nails. And Frederic would finally take off, wishing he were one of those despotic medieval Lloberolas who could have had the pleasure of sealing the two of them behind a wall, alive.
WHEN FREDERIC HAD dropped the priest off and decided to go home, he realized it had been twenty-four hours since he had last set foot there. Even though relations with his wife had attained a glacial chill, he had had to come up with a story and invent a trip with Bobby in order to spend the night away. He thought about seeing his children again, along with the same tablecloth and the same oil and vinegar cruets and perhaps even the same anemones from two days before. They would now be in a state of withered decomposition, because his wife was so neglectful that it wouldn’t be at all strange if she had not seen to changing the flowers.
Returning once again to the promissory note, and to Antoni Mates, Frederic went so far as to think that if things looked really bad he would have no choice but to flee. Then the melodramatic side of Frederic’s nature began to see that night as the possible prelude to a tale of emigration. Twenty-four hours earlier, his wife, his entire family, had seemed intolerable to him; Rosa Trènor had been his liberation. After dropping off the priest, he had breathed in the bouquet of his family from afar with a nose of bathos. Just a moment before, like some barroom thug, Frederic had given his father a tongue lashing that left him limp as a doll. Then, erratic and weak, he had come to entertain the idea that it was all his own fault. The fifty thousand pessetes had not all gone to covering up urgent debts. Frederic knew full well that twenty thousand of those pessetes had been spent on an affair that had momentarily obsessed him, but had turned out to be a disappointment, like all the others. And that was just around that time that his wife had been whining because she couldn’t buy a coat that cost only four thousand pessetes, and Frederic ignored her and had the gall to say that she must be out of her mind, and the coat was out of the question. Maria never knew a thing, and still didn’t know a thing, about the damned promissory note because Frederic had done everything possible to keep it from her, trusting as he did that things would work out favorably in the end, and Antoni Mates would agree to renew the loan on the same conditions.
Selfish as a spoiled child, Frederic always found a way to justify himself and to play the victim. Still, he also had his moments of wretched mea culpas, as exaggerated and contemptible as his moments of conceit. In just twenty-four hours the change had been radical, and the closer he got to his house, the more desperate and purple the idea became of emigrating, abandoning his family, and sullying forever more his illustrious family name.
A moment ago he was saying, “Hah! Even though Antoni Mates is a son of a b …, he wouldn’t dare bring a case against me.” He would take a position of resigned cynicism, adopting an attitude of having seen it all. Later, without rhyme or reason, something he had seen on display in a shop window, or a simple incident on the street, would bring about a change of heart. The reactions of a man like Frederic can have the most absurd causes. He didn’t know if he should confess everything to his wife or if he should let fall, in some vague way, the idea of a troubling situation and a possible trip. Or if he should do it coldly, as if in passing, or strike a more declamatory air, his gestures combining desperation and repentance. How he behaved would depend on the mood his wife was in, the dinner she served, the vinegar cruets, or the wilted anemones.
When Frederic walked in the food was on the table. Maria barely commented on the false trip, showing an absolute indifference to anything that concerned him. In the presence of his children Frederic couldn’t say a word. As he crossly swallowed his soup, he dropped his melodramatic projects and his intention to confess. “With a wife like this, what’s a man to do,” Frederic thought, as Maria scolded Lluís, their youngest son, for no reason. “Let him be, Maria, let him be, don’t be on his back all the time,” said Frederic. Then Maria, losing control and paying no attention to the children, launched into one of those aggrieved monologues that Frederic listened to without a word. Maria completely lost her appetite with her crying, and dinner came to a disastrous end.
Frederic thought, “What a wretched life.” He opened the newspaper and pretended to read. The truth was he didn’t see a thing. He felt a desire to flee the house, not only because of the promissory note, or the danger he was in, but for everything. He wanted to flee without explanation. Once again he had become the victim. Once again Rosa Trènor turned into a glamorous odalisque. Once again his father’s image appeared before him with all the flaws that cruelty, repugnance, and incomprehension can expose. Bobby would probably be at the Eqüestre; his other friends would be there, as they were every night. The only thing he feared was having to see Antoni Mates’s face. But, what the devil, the note wasn’t due for two more days, and a lot can happen in two days. Just a moment ago he had been thinking of going to America; after dinner, this solution seemed ridiculous. Maybe Bobby, maybe it would be more practical to do what his Lloberola pride had never allowed him to do, to test Bobby’s friendship … who knows …
After dinner, Frederic didn’t say so much as a word to his wife. He changed from head to toe and fled from his family, feeling the same disgust and pity he had felt in Rosa Trènor’s kitchen, with the scrawny cat’s tongue licking the dirty coffee cup …
CONXA PUJOL’S GRANDFATHER, l’avi Pujol, had earned a lot of money in Cuba in the days of the slave trade. His family were sailmakers from Sant Pol de Mar, respectable, dignified people. Conxa Pujol’s grandfather had given up the sails and the ovens and joined a trading company, with a few duros he managed to steal from someone, a pipe, three jerseys, a knife, and a pistol.
In no time, l’avi Pujol was a well-known figure in the factories on the Guinean coast and the ports of the Antilles. He was a man of good fortune. Later he would convert the business of coffee-colored skin into the business of actual coffee, and he held government office in the colonies. When he was a bag of worn-out bones with a biblical beard, he turned up in Barcelona, carrying a sweet young mulatta piggyback, and built himself a house of stone on the Rambla de Santa Mònica. The mulatta blossomed in the rocking chairs of the house on the Rambla like a languorous, undulating dahlia, under a buttery silk peignoir that exhaled all the overseas perfume of her skin.
L’avi Pujol died of gall bladder cancer, leaving behind a sickly, squirrelly boy who in time would get into all sorts of mischief. He ended up an extremely rich and respectable gentleman, the manager of a famous shipping agency.
Conxa Pujol was the daughter of that gentleman and a certain Sofia Guanyabens, who proceeded from the dreariest middle class. She died in childbirth. Conxa Pujol had been a dark, magnificent creature, with imponderably dewy skin, and the phosphorescent eyes of a tropical beast. Everyone in the family said that Conxa took after her grandmother, the sweet young mulatta old Pujol had carried home piggyback. Conxa had the aura of a lazy pearl, but not without her moments of malaise. In Sant Pol de Mar, where her father had expanded the old family home and provided every comfort, Conxa spent the summers of her adolescence amid vaporous nights full of shooting stars and vanilla perfume. In that house, el Senyor Pujol kept souvenirs of the old family trade and of the grandfather’s navigation, business, and customs. Conxa Pujol’s hours of leisure within the white walls of the summer house were made up of dreams of sailing ships, Puerto Rican prints, black men in red-striped white cotton pants whose sweat was whisked away with bullwhips, and birds that flew in loop-the-loops, as if their bellies were full of rum. An entire rhythm of water and rumba, a whole sensual world of madrepore and coral reefs.
Conxa Pujol leafed through books with incredible engravings, navigation diaries, letters, and family portraits. On the beach she would toast her skin with the patience of a slave. She would find a place tucked away between sharp dry canes so no one would see her, where she could lie nearly nude on the sand and watch as her perfectly proportioned breasts took on the sweet amber glow of the fruit of the palm tree.
Bogged down in the opulence of his business, Conxa Pujol’s father only half-remembered her. Conxa’s only censor in her adolescence was Madame Pasquier, an ugly, depraved Frenchwoman from Toulon with a penchant for the literary.
Madame Pasquier allowed Conxa to do whatever foolish thing crossed her mind, and she encouraged her in the development of modish affectations. Conxa felt no attraction at all to boys of her own stripe, but when she saw the young fishermen pulling their boats along behind pairs of oxen or setting out in the evening for sardine trawls or night fishing, her phosphorescent eyes cast off doleful cinders. Conxa had the heart of a hysterical medusa. She would have liked for those burly, brutish, and inoffensive young men to dive naked into the sea, knives clenched between their teeth, and bring her back a slimy, fascinating sea monster. Conxa would have aspired to other things, too, and one of those brutish and inoffensive boys captured those aspirations perfectly, flashing his extremely white teeth at her one day when “the young lady from Can Pujol” wandered perilously close to those undershirts enhanced with sweat and salt. Conxa gave in to her own private democratic impulses, and an evil tongue assured that one night among the boats she had been seen arching her back like a grouper out of water, beneath the unrefined attentions of a young man who was known among the sailors as “Plug Ugly.”
But none of these things had been verified. In Sant Pol they circulated with some acidity, but by the time they reached Barcelona they were completely watered down.
Even so, el Senyor Pujol came to realize that marriage was as necessary for his daughter as their daily bread. Enigmatic Conxa, with the tropical insouciance she had inherited from her grandmother, didn’t protest at all when Antoni Mates, a man twenty years her senior, but a peerless match in both economic and social terms, asked for her hand. Nor when the marriage took place, with insulting and baroque pomp, in the Basilica of Our Lady of Mercy, known popularly as La Mercè.
Once married, Conxa – who was still what one might call a child – took up her place at the forefront of the women of Barcelona with the greatest success in attracting yearning glances and sighs. La Senyora Mates produced an effect of original and disconcerting elegance that only she could carry off. Other women tried to imitate her, but they could never find the right balance, nor did they possess Conxa’s skin, that exotic and irreplaceable accessory that could achieve whatever Conxa wished to achieve.
When the most sought-after stylists wanted to fob off some overpriced hat on a customer, they would claim it was a model that la Senyora Mates had chosen, and put aside, for one of those reasons stylists could always come up with. This happened everywhere: “We’re making one just like it for la Senyora Mates,” “La Senyora Mates has just ordered three.” “La Senyora Mates is on her way in to try it on.”
It goes without saying that Conxa had been besieged by the crème de la crème of lady-killers, living as she did in the midst of a corps of sweet panthers who saw no incompatibility between the sacrament of matrimony and the existence of a gigolo, or even of a gentleman who at some point might pick up some little tab. But despite the approaches of some and the fabrications of others, no one had gotten anywhere with her. This was odd, because it would have seemed natural that a woman who had been the stuff of legend when she was single might have continued to be the source of stories once married to a man who wasn’t exactly a head-turner. Sad as it may have been for some, the Mates’s seemed united, as if by some anatomical mystery, like Siamese twins. There was not a woman in Barcelona who spoke more glowingly of her husband or affected more constancy to the vows she had taken, and, moreover, behaved accordingly. Conxa had given up golf because her husband’s occupations didn’t allow him to accompany her. She had given up a great many things, and she put up with being criticized for it and taken for a fool by the other married ladies.
Conxa’s attitude was all the more rare in the world she lived in and all that much more opposed to the modern conception of “elegance” when you took into account that her marriage had produced no children, and the maternal tasks that justify so many things could not be adduced in her defense. What no few mature men, devotees of the current market value of adultery, asked themselves was this: “What the devil does a woman like her see in a wet blanket like Mates?”
That “wet blanket,” the Baró de Falset by the grace of the Dictator – because the Mates clan came from Falset, and he had paid to build some schools in the town, and invited General Primo de Rivera to the inauguration – had a history that didn’t go beyond mediocrity. Antoni Mates was the son of a rag merchant and of a woman who had butchered hens in the Born Market. The ragman had been a member of the inner circle of Planas i Casals, a famous local boss, and the fact that he had paid for the construction of two convents in the exclusive Bonanova district without any ill effects upon his fortune, is a perfectly natural thing, which everyone in Barcelona takes in stride. Antoni Mates was a cotton merchant of the highest order. His father had sent him to England for a few years and, despite his unpromising physical complexion for sport, it was said that he had been a good hockey player. In Barcelona, before the war, he had acquired some notoriety for his bright red bowler hat and for a little black horse he would spur on full speed down the Passeig de Gràcia.
Once married, Antoni Mates left horses and bowler hats behind, and turned into a sweet, dull, reactionary, and extremely religious man. His ragman’s fangs only came out at the office and at the meetings of the infinite boards on which he served. Lacking in political convictions and entirely skeptical about life, he had lain down like a dog before Primo de Rivera’s military Directory. Occasionally, of an afternoon, he would go to the Eqüestre to play bridge, and when he was thirsty he would order a Johnny Walker. These were the only two vaguely British things he still clung to. In contrast, if, on the occasional Sunday he accompanied his wife to the golf course, he would stretch out, bored to tears, and listen to the birds sing.
As he did every morning, the Baró de Falset had risen at eight-thirty. While he was still in the bathtub, oblivious to the spectacle of a body that would not have stood up well in a nudist camp, the servant knocked on the door.
“Senyor Baró, there is a young man here who says he must see you.”
“I don’t receive anyone at this time of day.”
“He says that it is quite urgent. He says it is of great interest to el Senyor Baró …”
“What is this young man’s name?”
“Guillem de Lloberola.”
“Guillem de Lloberola? Oh, yes! All right. See him into the parlor; ask him to be kind enough to wait.”
Twenty minutes later, Antoni Mates and Guillem de Lloberola were exchanging the usual pleasantries. When he heard Guillem’s voice, Antoni Mates had a moment of panic, of horrible panic, which he disguised as best he could. The young man’s voice had reminded him of another voice. Oh, yes, Antoni Mates was familiar with that voice, or another that was practically identical. He remembered having heard it recently, in a feverish, or drunken, or dream-like state, in a moment of sweat, of nervous contortion … an inexcusable moment. But, of course, that was impossible. It was mere chance, one of those idiotic and utterly illogical resemblances that crop up in life. The young man’s air, his physique, also gave the Baró de Falset an uneasy feeling, but he couldn’t pin down the memory. There had been so little light, he had been so beyond himself … No, the cotton merchant had fallen victim to a gratuitous attack of panic. It was impossible, absolutely impossible. Guillem de Lloberola … Guillem de Lloberola … He was perfectly familiar with the name, and the boy’s clothing and demeanor reassured him. All these thoughts had run through his head in under three seconds. The moment of panic had passed.
“I do not have the pleasure of having met el Senyor Baró personally, but I believe you are a very good friend of my brother’s.”
“One of my very best friends, indeed. Don’t you ever go to the Eqüestre? Are you not a bridge player?”
“No, no, sir, I’m not.”
“Well, I don’t want to give you the wrong idea, I don’t play very often. It is quite a waste of time, and I have a great deal of work! I would be delighted to while away the hours as your brother does. But we working men, you understand … So, tell me, what is it that brings you here? How can I be of assistance?”
“It is precisely about a question affecting my brother that I have come to see you. And it doesn’t only affect my brother, but also my poor father. Father is in very delicate health, and any unpleasantness could kill him. Just yesterday he gave us an awful scare. My brother Frederic is a bit frivolous, as you are probably aware …”
“Oh, not at all! A delightful, elegant man, your brother is; a first-rate companion, first-rate …”
“Well, on the social scene he can be very pleasant … and even elegant; you are very kind and have an undemanding concept of elegance … Well, Senyor Baró, I realize that I am robbing you of your precious time. What I have to say is extremely distasteful to me; I find myself in the obligation, not so much for him, but for my poor father …”
“Please, speak, whatever is in my hands …”
“I believe you have in your power a promissory note you extended to my brother …”
“Excuse me, my dear sir; just the day before yesterday we discussed this question of the note, that is, he discussed it.… This is a question between your brother and me.… Frankly, it is hard for me to understand how you have become involved in this affair … Or how your brother has …, well …, has brought you into it …”
“Forgive me, Senyor Baró. As I have already said, my brother is of very little concern to me. If I have come to see you it is on account of my poor father …”
“All right, young man, all right; tell me what it is you want …”
“I simply want you not to demand my father’s signature; I don’t want my father to know that Frederic … Understand me: my father’s situation is rather critical … Relations between my father and Frederic are quite strained …”
“You are very young, my dear sir; you are a child, and perhaps you are not aware of the significance of some things … I did your brother a favor; I trusted him and two other persons I considered good friends. What your brother has done with me is something, how should I put it … not entirely decent. Your brother has cheated me. I could take him to court, do you understand? I don’t know what explanation your brother has given you, but the truth is that his behavior is an abuse of confidence. Naturally, you can object that the amount is not astronomical, and that my position and my home do not depend on the fifty thousand pessetes that your brother owes me. But you must also understand that I am under no obligation to allow myself to be swindled. I am aware of your family situation. I know perfectly well that the grandeur and pomp your brother has the nerve – forgive me – to go on about are a sham. But I also know that your father can answer for the fifty thousand pessetes – which are mine, after all – without risking death.”
“But couldn’t another person be found to answer for the debt, someone other than my father?”
“Of course, as long as it is someone who offers me some guarantee. But this is up to your brother. As you can imagine, it is not up to me to provide him a guarantor on a silver platter! That will be the day, my friend! You bloodline “aristocrats” (because, you must know and understand, your brother always brings up his blue blood) are a bit too blasé or distracted … What can I say, I’m sure you follow me.”
“But if my brother can’t find this person …”
“Well, of course, because no one trusts your brother. He’s charming enough, full of jokes, with lots of friends when the time comes to buy champagne. But when things get difficult, my friend, people … how can I put it … prefer someone with his feet on the ground …”
“Well, then, let’s get our feet on the ground, Senyor Baró. I mean, let me get my feet on the ground …”
“I want nothing more than that, my son! Nothing more!”
“Senyor Baró, I am under the impression that you give a great deal of weight to material credit. What about … moral credit?”
“Naturally, to moral credit. Above all, to moral credit. It is for this moral credit that I was willing to lend your brother those funds, in the belief that I was dealing with a gentleman, and not – forgive me, I realize the word is a bit strong – with a swindler.”
“Precisely, Senyor Baró. With a swindler, you couldn’t be more correct. Well, not exactly correct, because my brother has not yet swindled you out of anything, and as you understand, my father would never allow such a thing. He would beg for alms before he would allow it to be said that one of us …”
“I am certain of it! I have never for a moment doubted your father’s honor!”