Private Life

by Josep Maria de Sagarra

  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 s
ome, 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 to
o 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!”

  “Excellent, Senyor Baró. ‘Moral credit!’ ‘Honor!’ These are precisely the cards I am missing …”

  “Missing, what do you mean? I don’t follow you.”