Private Life

by Josep Maria de Sagarra

  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 …”