We arrived in the City on the twelfth of January of 1884, with much on our minds and little in our pockets. In ten weeks we had spent the considerable sum of one thousand six hundred duros, in other words, everything we had been given for the sale of the pine forest. The olive harvest looked meagre and all that could be done to pay the interest on the mortgages was to draw up a new one. All these misfortunes did not seem to bother Dona Maria Antònia, who seemed more optimistic every day.
‘You’ll see, Joan; with one good year it will all be solved, and you’ll be able to cancel this last debt. How much did you say we had to borrow? More than one thousand pessetes?’
‘One thousand duros, Senyora. Five thousand pessetes.’
‘Well, then, ask for a good crop and that’s the end of that.’
The Senyor looked up: ‘Ask for a good crop? From whom?’
‘Oh, Tonet, sometimes you ask the strangest questions!’
And that was the end of that.
Their niece and nephews had come to wait for us at the pier, and despite the distance between them and the Senyors, they treated us most cordially. However, their smiles were insincere. Dona Magdalena had lost her husband. She lived with her two unmarried brothers in the old quarter near the Cathedral. Since I had always heard they were penniless, I was surprised to see that they lived quite well, and the dining room where they served us a cup of hot chocolate was full of silver. Dona Magdalena was elegantly dressed, perhaps a little excessively so; despite her mourning (it was still not three years since her husband’s death) all she talked about was the opera and the aristocracy. As soon as we had finished our breakfast, the two brothers excused themselves, claiming they had some matters to take care of. We then discovered that they were working for the Agricultural Bank.
‘They were tired of doing nothing, and they were asked to join, so…’
‘Work is not dishonourable,’ said Dona Maria Antònia, implying that she felt it was so to some extent.
‘For years I’ve been saying,’ added Don Toni, ‘that the nobility is on its way out.’
To show off her importance, Dona Magdalena started talking about the Marquis of Collera.
‘Last week he arrived from Madrid. Sometimes he has coffee with the boys. He’s asked me several times how your audience with the Holy Father went.’
‘The Holy Father treated us very well,’ said the Senyor, ‘but Jacob has a big mouth. Well, it makes sense that he should be considered Spain’s foremost orator. What on earth is the point of claiming I’m a great publicist when I haven’t published a thing in my entire life?’
‘Tonet,’ replied Dona Maria Antònia, ‘that’s hardly appropriate just now. As a matter of fact, it would be nice if you went to thank him.’
At that moment the door opened and the Marquis himself appeared. He was the very image of a gentleman.
‘My dear relatives,’ he said with assurance, thinking he was flattering the Senyors (in fact, they were not related). ‘My dear relatives, I just heard about your arrival. Tell me, tell me.’
‘I was just thinking,’ said the Senyor, ‘of going over to thank you and scold you a little, too. Why did you tell Leo XIII that I was a publicist?’
The Marquis laughed.
‘Don Toni, do you really think that just because you’re locked away in Bearn we don’t find out about your endeavours? Your Honour will go down in history as the foremost writer on the Island and perhaps in the Kingdom. You can be sure of that.’
I was taken aback by his benevolence, for I realized it represented some sort of protection. The Senyor also noticed it and smiled.
‘That may be, but you’ll have to wait for me to die first.’
‘What morbid thoughts!’ the Marquis exclaimed, embracing him with the joviality of a worldly man. ‘Your Honour will live to a hundred. You’ll see us all dead.’
‘Don’t be so sure. Politicians and parrots never die.’
‘Excuse him, Jacob,’ his wife intervened. ‘You know how he is. He’s in one of his wild moods.’
‘The day before we left,’ the Senyor continued, ‘I wrote a commentary about you. I quoted that speech of yours that begins, Poetry, poetry, If only I could dive into the magic world of poetry…
The Marquis had taken the comment about politicians and parrots very well, but when he heard Don Toni quoting his speech he lost his sense of humour. I think he was more intelligent than people believed him to be. He suddenly changed the subject.
‘I didn’t want to tell him,’ said the Senyor when the visitor had left, ‘that the Pope asked about the etymology of the word Collera…’
‘The etymology of Collera?’ asked Dona Magdalena.
‘Yes. As you know, a Collera is what you put on hors…’
‘Rome is lovely,’ the Senyora rapidly interjected. ‘The Galliera Museum…’
‘The Galliera Museum is in Paris, Maria Antònia.’
‘There’s the Capitoline Museum…’
‘That’s more like it.’
Dona Magdalena asked us to stay for lunch, but the Senyors decided to leave. Tomeu had come to fetch us with the carriage. We arrived in Bearn after four, when the sun was beginning to set. On the way there, Tomeu told us the latest news: an Englishwoman had just rented a house in the village. They asked her for eight duros a year, but she thought it was a weekly contract and gave the owner eight duros every Saturday. It was the talk of the town. All she ate was lean meat and she did not like anything cooked in oil. She was a painter…
‘And she’s painting me,’ Tomeu added, not without some vanity.
Tomeu was about seventeen at the time, and we had always considered him an ugly boy. He had been born in the house, a dark child with big ears. Accustomed to his shabby state and rude manners—he was only used to talking to animals—we did not realize that this savage was becoming a rather handsome young man, proud and determined, even though his scant intelligence kept him from defining the object of his determination. The painter, who had been recommended to the Senyors, saw him in a different light. Instead of judging him from a past she did not know, she did so based on his present self, which no one, with the exception of Catalina, had known how to appreciate. I have already mentioned the scandal caused by her painting in which the boy appears surrounded by nymphs. The strange thing is that she had sketched only a portrait of his head and part of his chest, and covered in an undershirt at that; but since these artists know so much, in the painting she depicted him completely naked. Tomeu, who is a good lad, was so embarrassed when he found out that he hid in the hayloft and did not eat for a day and a night. The priest came to see us and complained about our having given our consent—we who were so innocent—and even though we did manage to convince him as to the truth, others were not as easily convinced. I happen to know that Dona Magdalena was among those who objected the most.
‘Since he was just in Italy and thinks she’s such an artist…’
The painting had already been finished when we arrived from Rome, and the author exhibited it a few days later, but there is no stopping a nasty rumour. Six or seven years later, the baneful attraction Tomeu was to elicit, this time with no artistic excuse, in an unlucky woman, would unleash a mental seizure that contributed to her death and, in a haphazard manner, to that of the Senyors, as well as to the ultimate fall of the House of Bearn.
Miss Moore, as the Englishwoman was called, was a slightly deranged lady with a head full of strange ideas who appeared at the estate carrying a letter for the Senyors the very same day we arrived. Dona Maria Antònia had a pot of tea brewed and Miss Moore talked all afternoon long. To make a long story short, which she certainly did not do, she had come to explain that she had been very modest and shy until the age of forty-five and then visited Florence and felt transformed.
‘The Piazza della Signoria!’ she exclaimed with a cynical candour that I found astonishing, ‘Oh, sir, those phenomenal statues, those naked nymphs and athletes in the sun, with all their attributes in full view! It was the month of May. May in Florence, sir…Flowers and butterflies…’ (She always addressed the Senyor; fortunately, Dona Maria Antònia had nodded off in her armchair.) ‘I had gone there from London, where it was always raining…I fell ill when I returned to the hotel. A few days later, in Naples, I experienced a most extraordinary adventure. I hope you’ll understand. Next to my albergo, located in a small square with a flower market, there was a tobacconist where I used to buy postage stamps from a young lady. That morning—the air was warm and the roses in the flower stalls looked like a red waterfall—the lady wasn’t there. At the back of the store sat a man of about thirty. His hair was black and curly’—as she said that, she looked at me—‘he was wearing a green shirt unbuttoned at the collar; he was strong and tanned. I looked down, asking after the lady. “Signorina…è un maschio,” the man replied, and laughed, showing his white teeth. Indeed, an old man appeared to wait on me. Oh, sir, you’re an educated, sensitive man; I’m sure you’ll understand. At forty-five I was still a modest young lady from a good family. I had never heard an incongruity the likes of that one. The bold smile and the word maschio established a sort of complicity between that young man in his prime’—and upon saying this she looked at me again—‘and me, a faded, wilted Englishwoman. My eyes only grasped bright colours: green, red, white…Red roses, white teeth on dark skin, the metallic green of his open shirt…I felt intoxicated. The doctor they sent for at the albergo asked me if I had spent much time in the sun. It had not been the sun, but one sentence…A few brash, banal words that opened up an entire new world to me…and I was forty-five years old! Forty-five years, lost forever. I resolved not to return to England, and ever since, sir…’
Don Toni nodded. I felt embarrassed and sorry for her. In the course of the conversation I had tried to leave the room discreetly, but she asked me to stay.
‘Please don’t leave, if you don’t mind. I find your presence so soothing…Now, do you understand why I paint?’ she asked, addressing us both. ‘I’m a late-comer to the world. I can only be a spectator…’
‘Carpe diem,’ exclaimed the Senyor when we were left alone. ‘Puritanism has done a lot of harm, Joan. I have known people to go straight from chastity to utter folly with no transition. Protestants ought to read Horace.’