Private Life

by Josep Maria de Sagarra

  “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.
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  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.