“Guillem, what is this all about?”
“It means I won the bet. Here’s the promissory note.”
“But what sort of business do you have with Antoni Mates?”
“That’s none of your affair. Tear up the note and you no longer owe anyone a cent. What I mean is, you don’t owe fifty thousand pessetes to el Senyor Baró de Falset.”
Having taken the note Guillem handed him, with a Lloberola air of wounded pride:
“But you understand I cannot accept this …”
“What is it you cannot accept? Let’s see: Antoni Mates, to ‘pay me’ for some services he owes me for, transfers a credit he has against you to me. And, instead of cashing in on the credit myself, I release you, I make a gift to you of the dough. What exactly is it that you can’t accept? Having such a ‘generous’ brother?”
“What can I say, I find the whole thing incredibly strange. I would like to know what kind of services he might have to pay you for …”
“Listen, Frederic. I’m thirty-one years old, you know? I mean I am well past being of age, and you have no right to meddle in my affairs. I don’t ask you what you’re up to, or what you eat, or whether you win or lose at cards, or whether you go to your mother-in-law for money …”
“All right. But now I owe you fifty thousand pessetes. That much is clear.”
“Maybe … But you needn’t worry your head about repaying me … I won’t issue you any more promissory notes, not me … And it seems to me that, rather than adopt this professorial tone, you might think about thanking me. All things considered, I think I’ve freed you from a more than considerable predicament …”
Frederic de Lloberola was not at all convinced. What kind of mystery could there be here? Was his brother capable of some extremely peculiar form of larceny? He knew Guillem; he knew he was an inoffensive philanderer, a good kid, at heart, incapable of anything dishonorable, or anything that had anything to do with the penal code. But why did neither Antoni Mates in his letter nor Guillem right here and now offer a clear explanation?
Even so, Frederic saw his salvation. The document was authentic. Antoni Mates’s letter was, too. His distress of the last few months was dissolving; the shady dramas were fading from his mind; and his savior was his brother Guillem. He gave in to his native cowardice, to his parasitic and self-centered way of behaving in the face of all life’s challenges. Once Frederic had the promissory note in his hand, once he had Antoni Mates’s letter in his hand, justifying the events, however mysteriously, but justifying them in the end, he decided not to delve any deeper. Pretending to find the whole thing “perfectly natural,” like the Baró de Falset himself, he took Guillem by the arm and said:
“I don’t get it, Guillem. I feel as if I were dreaming. I feel as if I had won the lottery, yes, something like that. Guillem, I swear, I will remember this favor you have done me all my life …”
“I’m telling you, it’s nothing. Do you have the letter?”
“Yes, it’s right here …”
Guillem read the letter meticulously. He verified that the Baró de Falset had behaved like a gentleman, but when he got to the end, he wrinkled his nose. “What does he mean, burn the letter?” Guillem thought. And then a wicked idea occurred to him. Guillem thought he had been an idiot to go to so much trouble just to do his brother a favor. Naturally he needn’t desist from exploiting the baron. But the letter to Frederic would simplify things a great deal. In the event Guillem attempted a new attack it would avert his having to have too shamefully “personal” a role in the extortion. Guillem thought, “This filthy pig must really be lost, he must truly not know what’s happening to him, because no one in his right mind would have made the mistake of signing a letter like this and then go on to suggest that it should be burned.” As these things went through his mind, Guillem looked at his brother and grumbled:
“Fine, Frederic, you’re very grateful, that’s all well and good. But what about our wager?”
“What do you mean?”
“The thousand pessetes you owe me … from yesterday’s wager. Now that I think of it, though, you don’t have to pay me the thousand pessetes. Give me the letter from Antoni Mates, and we’ll call it even.”
“Impossible. You can’t keep the letter.”
“What do you mean?”
“Guillem, you see what he says, here, at the end …”
“I will be forever and deeply grateful if you tear up and burn this letter.” Uh-huh. And so?”
“And so it is my duty to burn the letter …”
“That is quite debatable. He says he will be deeply grateful, nothing more. He will be grateful, but he doesn’t demand it.”
“Guillem, I think it’s very clear. Moreover, what do you want it for?”
“I don’t know, it amuses me.”
“Guillem, this whole affair is very strange …”
“Are you going to start that again? What an ass! Look, I’m keeping the letter and that’s that. The worst that can happen is that he will not be ‘forever and deeply grateful.’ ”
Guillem kept the letter, and Frederic didn’t insist. He had no doubt that he was an accomplice in a very murky affair. His brother appeared before him in a disconcerting light. Frederic didn’t say another word and shrugged. As we have already said, the Lloberolas are a weak and cowardly clan.
THE XUCLÀS WERE descended from Jews. Bobby’s ancestors had goat’s hair beards and thin, dirty, mercantile fingernails, and lived in the Barcelona neighborhood that nowadays is still known as the Call, the ghetto. But even in the 18th century these Barcelonans were already considered honorable and somewhat ennobled people, and they infused blood of the highest quality into their matrimonial alliances. Bobby’s father had been one of the most elegant roués of Barcelona. Still, instead of squandering his inheritance, he had derived great profit from the last ties to the colonies. He was on good terms with the Comillases, the Arnúses, and the Gironas, and with all the other households that in those days held the purse strings of commerce. He was also a shrewd and diligent man, a man of the world with an eye for the fine print. As a result, he held a solid and extremely brilliant position in society, which continued only to expand and to grow in prestige. In old Xuclà’s personality, the banker, the voracious shark, varnished with a generous flexibility, stood side by side with the gallant ladies’ man. The art of the elder Xuclà lay in knowing how to have his cake and eat it, in such a way that his adventures and scandals never put his business at risk, and could be seen by his friends with amusement, and sometimes even with admiration.
His widow was considered by some to have been a victim. “Poor Pilar,” was the plaint, because all her wealth and elegance could not compensate for her husband’s having shown up every month with a new acquisition extracted from the demi-monde, whom he would materially smother in pearls. Nor did they compensate for the famous banker’s long sojourns in Vienna during which, under the cover of business, he sowed the wild oats of his temperament between a gypsy violin and a rose of Bulgaria.
Old Xuclà had imbibed the entire epoch of the waltz and the square sideburn. This is why when he was in Paris his heart yearned for Vienna, because the women there were taller, whiter, blonder, more animal, with easier laughter and a more primal sexuality. Above all, they had a more docile and lyrical flesh, accustomed as they were to being brutalized by the shiny despotism of military officers and the hands of country bumpkins.
In truth, “poor Pilar” couldn’t have cared less about all this. She had never loved her husband, and it was far more pleasant to have at her side a pompous, spiritual philanderer who lavished all manner of attentions upon her, than to be saddled with a reactionary Tomàs de Lloberola, brimming with uncomprehending egoism, who, between processions and intonations of the Tre Sanctus would have given her a horrible life.
Pilar de Romaní i Miralles was the youngest daughter of the Comtes de Sallent. She had rejected her family’s proposal that she marry a young man from Madr
id, a nephew of the Duques de Medinaceli, because, besides being Castilian, the man was dull and had green teeth. After rejecting three or four more proposals, she leaned, against her parents’ preferences, toward Xuclà, the banker. He was a bit past his prime, but he had a perfect command of the use of gardenias and of double-entendres. For Pilar – who at the time was the prettiest and most elegant young woman in Barcelona – this preference for a man of Semitic extraction was the sign of a special temperament at odds with the tenor of her family. Like their cousins, the Lloberolas, the Comtes de Sallent made much of the tawdry vanity of their blue blood. What they wanted in a son-in-law was a rheumatic subject with the heart of a rabbit who would offer no risks and be faithful to tradition. If the title they picked up was from Castile or Aragon, all the better – no matter if there was a touch of syphilis along the way. In contrast, Pilar was an unconventional young woman, with a delicate anarchic streak, and by one of those biological miracles that can never be explained, the daughter of the Comtes de Sallent had turned out to have personality. That personality was a throwback to the Barcelona that preceded the Universal Exhibition of 1888, sensitive to the fragrance of colonial breezes, factory greases, the efficiency of cotton spinners and the broad populist humor of Serafí Pitarra. As a girl, she had been roundly castigated by her mother for her insistence on speaking Catalan, which was the language of the cook, the coachman who cared for the household’s horses, and the poets who gathered at the Cafè Suís.
Pilar had a democratic mentality and, without her realizing it, her heart took part in the air of rebirth that was becoming more and more accentuated in Barcelona.
When she married Xuclà the banker, her personality became more refined; bit by bit, it was honed. In her, a traditional and popular Barcelonism was united with natural elegance and perfect beauty. Pilar was the least affected, most natural lady one could ever hope to meet. The somber timidity of the black armoires, the doleful chiffarobes, the lady’s bustles, the lack of hygiene, and the cone-shaped cucurulles worn by penitents in Holy Week processions could be summed up, in a word, as the provincialism that would convert the Catalan aristocracy of the turn of the century into a sort of shabby and reactionary extension of restoration Madrid. Against all this Pilar offered up, unabashed, a seamstress’s little snub nose and the kind of laughter you might hear among the carts of the greengrocers and the red breeches in the soldiers’ garrisons.
Once they were married, a state of polite coolness did not take long in manifesting itself in the marriage. Xuclà the banker was quite satisfied with his wife, because she was intelligent, she was decorative, and she was the most dazzling person in Barcelona. But Xuclà the banker had other kinds of tastes, and his polygamous temperament led him on the chase for fresh quarry. Pilar surrounded herself with a motley circle and showed utter scorn for her parent’s circle of relations. Out of obligation, she would take up her position in the front seats at the grand parades, and her place there was never in question. Yet her sense of humor and her offhanded way of speaking scandalized certain segments of the circle of the Comtes de Sallent, and word began to get around that Pilar had a wandering eye. Another segment of the aristocratic sphere maintained, through thick and thin, that Pilar’s behavior was beyond reproach. This was the plaintive segment that wept for “poor Pilar” and accused her husband of being perfectly vile.
As always, there was truth and untruth on both sides of the question. Among her detractors, some crusty and unbearable marquesa would claim that Pilar Xuclà was worse than a cocotte, that a dozen lovers were too few for her and that her husband was within his sacred right to seek distraction elsewhere. This was a great exaggeration. Pilar didn’t share the compunctions of the other grandes dames. She had had actresses over to her house on Carrer Ample, and in particular she had been quite friendly with a ballerina who had danced for two seasons at the Liceu and was famous for being brazen and for having blackmailed a prince from the house of Orleans. The day this dancer performed before a select audience at one of Pilar’s salons, a panic not dissimilar to a run on the stock market rippled through many Barcelona families. The scandal was sublime. There are those who remember it even today. So as not to have to break off relations with their daughter once and for all, the Comtes de Sallent pretended not to have heard a word about it. To avoid comment they spent four months away from Barcelona.
Pilar stood her ground. Three of the most prominent ladies of the day assembled to discuss whether they should continue receiving her in their homes. It is said that this conference – according to people who remember this, as well – broke all records in terms of feminine ferocity. The attempt by the three ladies was a fiasco. Pilar was too pretty and too brilliant. And her husband had too much money and was too enmeshed in the interests of many of her detractors. All la Senyora Xuclà had to do was don a floor-length ermine coat to distract the ladies’ tongues away from the pecadilloes of the lady who wore it.
Of all the improprieties attributed to Pilar, the only one that might have had some substance involved Sebastià Ripoll, the artist. This painter, a friend and disciple of Martí Alsina, died a miserable death in Paris in the days when artists of means like Ramon Casas and Santiago Rusiñol were striking out to discover Montmarte. In Pilar’s youth, though, he had possessed the most exciting black beard in Barcelona. Sebastià Ripoll was no bohemian, but the son of a manufacturer, and a friend to opulent chorus girls and idle fellows with artistic leanings. He had a place at certain privileged tables and a chair in the penyes of the men’s clubs, bull sessions at which the topics of the day were discussed.
Sebastià Ripoll was an easygoing and agreeable painter, of a piece with the bourgeois tastes of the moment. He painted Pierrots, indigents and odalisques. He also painted portraits by commission, in which he dissolved flesh into caramel and redingotes into squid’s ink, applying a theatrical grace between the lips and the eyes that even today is not entirely obnoxious on one wall or another.
Aside from his paintbrushes and his juvenile erotic vanity, Sebastià Ripoll was a delicate bon vivant. Pilar selected him from among all her friends to be the artistic dictator of her home. The banker gave him cigars worthy of breaking out on the high holidays, and Ripoll the painter declared that the most velvety coffee of Barcelona could be had on Carrer Ample, where there was a lady who could be tenderly spiritual, with manners redolent of pepper and cinnamon, while not looking down on authentic homegrown garlic.
Pilar and Sebastià Ripoll enacted a novella in which it cannot be asserted that bedrooms, quilts and physiology played an exclusive role. The banker was unperturbed by the novella. A broadminded independence reigned in their marriage and he continued to treat the painter with generous liberality. And when he went abroad, he didn’t lose a moment’s sleep knowing that as his best friends sipped on an orxata or sniffed a carnation, they would be categorically affirming that his wife was cuckolding him.
As Xuclà the banker had inherited from his ancestors a good Hebrew complexion, regarding virile honor he had very clear and intelligent ideas. Pilar agreed with her husband’s ideas, but she made sure not to abuse them. Not out of any respect for the capricious kid-gloved satyr she was married to, but because Pilar, a good daughter of the nineteenth century, still believed that a lady with any self-respect didn’t go around losing her corset in any old corner, like a butcher woman coming down from an Ash Wednesday tryst on Montjuïc.
A portrait by Ripoll the painter of the Pilar of those days has been preserved in the home of D., the collector. Even if you observe the canvas with a hint of skepticism, abstracting the element of personal passion on the part of the black-bearded man, you cannot help but take in all the perfume of an extinct Barcelona that touches the heart of those who appreciate such things. In the painting, Pilar is standing with the smiling immobility of a Juno. Her neckline reveals bare arms and a rather generous triangle of flesh under her neck. Her skirt, made of mulberry satin, has a very long ruffled train and clings gently to her hips and thi
ghs. She is wearing gloves the color of polished white bone that reach to above her elbow, and she holds a silk mask between two fingers of her right hand. A set of silver dominoes and a great bouquet of camellias bursting from a striped paper cone rest upon a strategically-placed sofa.
Ripoll’s ambition had sucked so deeply into her face that blood would have surged to the most academic lips. Her nose, chiseled slightly upward, seems still to be breathing in the sweat and fragrances of a masked ball. Her eyes reveal nothing but the great discretion hidden in her irises, green as the impenetrable gray green of the flounder’s slimy skin. And her hair, part gold, part ash, has something of a storm and something of the moss on a stone, a sort of geological romanticism reminiscent of the verses of Verdaguer’s Atlantis.
But the Pilar Romaní of the portrait precedes by many years the initial events of the story we are writing. When Bobby escorted Frederic to Mado’s house, the widow Xuclà was a matron well into her seventies; she and Bobby, the only child she had with the Semite banker, still lived in her house on Carrer Ample.
In her dotage, the widow Xuclà had been seized by the intransigence of social caste regarding the growing materialism and loss of control of Barcelona society. This genuine lady, who had caused such scandal as a young woman with her democratic and slightly uncouth attitudes, brandished the very same rigidity of which she had been the victim in her day against the loosening of principles that affected the beauties of the present day. When they told her Senyoreta X had taken as a gigolo a store clerk whose only merit was to have built up his biceps a bit at the Club Nàutic, or that Senyora R. had mortified her husband by word and deed before a gathering of young men at the golf club, and that yet another lady had taken a taxi to a meublé on the Diagonal, or that the Baronessa de T., in the midst of her divorce proceedings, had made an appearance at a cabaret only attended by prostitutes and the occasional inexperienced married couple from the provinces, Pilar Romaní was filled with indignation. Not in the tone a lady of Leocàdia’s temperament might have used, but in that of an old fox who has seen it all, but who still demands a bit of etiquette and a bit of dignity even in unavowable affairs. Though Pilar Romaní had been broadminded and paid little heed to the morality of her times, there were some lines she had been very careful not to cross. She had been careful to drape even her vices or caprices in a romantic gauze, revealing only a delicate silhouette of poetry and distinction. Even though she and Ripoll had caused tongues to wag, still the painter had been no vulgar passion, and Pilar Romaní had taken care to embroider the letters of a sentimental, mentholated novel on their relationship. When she spoke of these outrageous young women, the widow Xuclà would use her own very picturesque and somewhat crude way of speaking, which in time had turned rather bitter. Sometimes a phrase uttered by Pilar would subsequently be reported in a half dozen places, commented upon, laughed at by the men and sharpened to a fine point, whereupon inevitably it would reach the ears of the woman in question. Behind Pilar Romaní’s back, her humor was considered the “tantrums of a doddering old witch,” but no one dared say such a thing to her face.
Private Life Page 13