Private Life

by Josep Maria de Sagarra

  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 lik
e 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 …”

  “But, Mamà …”

  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 stan
dard 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.