Private Life

by Josep Maria de Sagarra

  In the meantime, Bobby had spoken with Pilar of the Lloberola situation. In his cool manner and his monotonous and apathetic voice, he told his mother about the scene with Frederic in such a way that the widow Xuclà wasn’t certain if he was happy or sad about his situation. Pilar advised Bobby to help Frederic, not because “that nincompoop deserves it, nor because it will change anything, because there will be nothing left of the Lloberolas. But do it for Leocàdia, who is so unfortunate, and has always been such a good friend to me.”

  As we have said, Bobby venerated the widow Xuclà, and he found in his mother’s way of speaking the elegant and unspoiled mercy of a grande dame. He decided to underwrite the promissory note or, if necessary, to hand Frederic a check for fifty thousand pessetes, and put a stop to the whole thing, without setting any conditions for its restitution.

  But the mercy of the grande dame had not been transformed into the mercy of the gentleman in Bobby. Bobby felt like humiliating his friend a bit, to impress on him the favor he was doing him. If Frederic had been a different kind of man, Bobby would have behaved in a cool, indifferent and even elegant way. But twenty-five years of intolerable condescension and vanity on Frederic’s part had peppered Bobby’s tongue.

  When the two friends found themselves face to face, the Lloberola heir, huffing and puffing, smiling, a bit heated, wore the supercilious look of a man who has just discovered America and spies a mouse gnawing at his heels. Slowly he spat these words out onto Bobby’s blond moustache and dead gaze:

  “I’ve come to tell you that you needn’t put yourself out. I am grateful for your generosity but you needn’t speak with your mother. Fortunately, I don’t need to ask favors of anyone. I have resolved the issue of the promissory note. I am only sorry to have taken up your time and to have spoken of disagreeable things … with a person who …”

  Bobby was deepy outraged. His dead gaze took on a special life, as if a wasp had stung him in the eye. His pupil felt engorged with blood and rage, like a mongoose in the presence of a cobra. Bobby was furious, because the scene in which he would humiliate Frederic, and make him pay for twenty-five years of condescension, had come to naught. Bobby would have given half his fortune to make Frederic eat the fifty thousand pessetes like a dog.

  But this burst of cholera took its time in reaching Bobby’s tongue, and he intimated in his usual tone of voice (fully prepared to substitute whatever tone of voice was necessary):

  “I couldn’t be more pleased …, but I assure you – if you wish, I will show it to you – that I had a check for fifty thousand pessetes signed and made out to you …”

  “Thank you, my friend, thank you. That is very generous of you, I won’t be needing it …”

  “Listen, Frederic, I find your tone of disdain offensive. Anyone would think I had done you wrong. You came and regaled me with a string of misfortunes that I couldn’t care less about, do you understand? Not at all. And I was prepared to be generous with you …”

  “Generous!”

  Frederic let loose with a peal of laughter worthy of Rigoletto, and Bobby couldn’t take it any more. He let it all come out, he rained insults on him, calling him ridiculous, grotesque, an ass, not just him, but his father and his whole family. And a joyful Frederic replied at an even higher pitch, dizzy at the opportunity to offend that person to whom he had always felt so superior, whom he had always considered an also-ran. Now, seeing short, pudgy Bobby with his blond moustache, confronting him, tall and stately, a Lloberola from head to foot, he lost control. Amid the coarse invective, he included a reference to the widow Xuclà. “What did you say about my mother?” shrieked Bobby, his voice rising to a squeal, which made Frederic observe him with even greater disdain. Naturally, Frederic thought he was within his rights to say what he wished about her, and he said it all in the most stupid, unthinking and gratuitous way he knew how.

  Bobby dug his fingernails into Frederic’s face. The only reason Frederic didn’t thrash him was that he was in his house, and among gentlemen it is not customary to thrash the master of the house when paying a visit.

  On the most idiotic account, for practically no reason at all, these two apparently inseparable friends quarreled, and never spoke to each other again for the rest of their lives.

  That night Bobby didn’t dine at the Liceu. He stayed home and kept his mother company. Bobby accepted the widow Xuclà’s way of thinking. He found her youthful indiscretions to be very human and considered the whole thing fine and dandy, because Bobby was a skeptic and his morality was rotten to the core. But that night, in reaction to the insults Frederic had dared to hurl at the widow Xuclà, he saw his mother as a saint. Above all, he valued more than ever her mercy and her elegance. She was a true lady. In the folds of her lips, her slightly pronounced chin, her wrinkles, her tired eyes, and the white hair of her decrepit majesty, still tall and smiling, he found the full essence of that aristocratic and mercantile Barcelona, popular, proud, and a bit childish, all traces of which were fading.

  And Bobby was right. The widow Xuclà represented all those things, and more. Even more than a man, an old woman who has lived a full life retains the imprint of the past and the sensible permanence of memory. Women have more passive nerve receptors, and more receptive souls, so they do not consume themselves nor do they expend all their energy in action as men do. Women are both more covetous and more foresightful. Between the folds of their wrinkled skin, they have the good faith to collect dreams, to gather up adventures, and to preserve there what cannot be seen and can only be sensed: the perfume of history.

  EL BARÓ DE FALSET didn’t say so much as a word to his wife about how Guillem was blackmailing him. He spent two months in agony. The day after he sent the letter to Frederic, he realized how stupid he had been to write it. Guillem hadn’t approached him, but he feared a new attack at any moment. Two months later, an event occurred that caused a commotion among many Barcelona ladies. It bore all the features of a crime of passion, and eased the baron’s terrible anxieties a bit. The event in question was the murder of Dorotea Palau, the dressmaker.

  Dorotea was found with a dagger through her heart in a well-known meublé. She was in the company of a French individual whom all the circumstances seemed to incriminate, despite his protesting that he had had nothing to do with the crime. The court found him guilty.

  Yet the alleged murderer was entirely innocent. For the reader to have some idea of how things came about, we will have to delve a little deeper into the private life of the Baró and Baronessa de Falset and their chauffeur, and follow certain paths that until now had been secret and unknown.

  The first few years of marriage between Antoni Mates and his wife had apparently been quite normal. Conxa’s husband did not satisfy her in the least, and her own “personal” adventures in that first period of marriage, which we will have occasion to go into at other points in this story, were suspected by no one.

  Antoni Mates made a tremendous effort to overcome something he didn’t dare confess even to himself, something he had hoped was long behind him. But he was powerless before his, shall we say, malady. As its effects inflamed his blood, Conxa became colder and more wooden, so much so that at times Antoni Mates felt he was sleeping with a dead body.

  As we have said, Conxa had a very special and piquant beauty. Antoni Mates was madly in love with her, but it was a strange sort of love mixed with admiration that didn’t procure him satisfaction, nor was it capable of slaking the other thirst that consumed him.

  Neither of them dared confess to the other how cold and empty their encounters were. A pathological sadness, deaf and dumb, crept into the marriage. They kept it out of the public eye by enacting the most delightful of honeymoons.

  One afternoon the couple set out on an little trip, intending to spend a couple of days in a town on the coast. Antoni Mates had a new chauffeur; he had been in their service for just two weeks. He was a sporty young man who looked like a ladykiller. He had a youthful grace, and was pleasant and
attentive. By nightfall the couple and their chauffeur reached the town where they would be staying. The inn was clean and quite comfortable, and practically empty because the summer season had not yet begun. At dinnertime, it was as if the time they had spent together, each keeping his and her respective secrets, had had an effect upon their nerves, as if instinct, or the beast, had revealed what the power of reason had denied. Conxa and her husband both looked simultaneously at the chauffeur, who was sitting three tables away, focusing on his plate of chops and not daring to look at his masters. The gaze of husband and wife must have been very particular and not very subtle because, later, when they realized what they were doing, and when their own eyes met, they both blushed, trembling and disconcerted. But that lasted only a couple of seconds because Conxa, with a great sigh, looked at her husband again with a smile. And her husband smiled back, as a flash of liberation flared in his eyes. Antoni Mates saw clearly that Conxa understood him, and accepted what he would never have dared to confess, just as he accepted her thoughts, in turn. Without so much as a word or the briefest remark, with just that redness of cheek, that discomposure, those sighs and that shimmer in their eyes, they came to a perfect understanding and mutual endorsement. The depravity of each was completely different from that of the other, but it tended toward one same objective, one same desire, that would be enjoyed in different ways.

  Conxa mentally put the final touches on the idea. It didn’t alarm her in the slightest. She found it eccentric and quite chic. And since she found her husband disgusting, this could not be any worse.

  She had read novels that told of similar permutations; in Paris, in the great world of the disabused, such practices were an everyday thing. The fact is, if “that” was what her husband was, and she had already suspected it – in fact, she had been certain of it, for quite a while now – Conxa was much less concerned about it than her husband had been.

  When the time came to go to bed, everything happened as if by design. The couple was given the best room at the inn and the chauffeur was to sleep two doors down. Antoni and Conxa left the door ajar. She began to undress, as did her husband. The chauffeur was whistling softly. In a state of exceptional excitement, his voice trembling, Antoni Mates called for the young man. He responded pleasantly, as always. Antoni Mates ordered him to come and the poor boy responded that he was about to get into bed. “It doesn’t matter, come right away,” Antoni Mates responded, his voice more and more subhuman. The chauffeur pulled on his pants and stopped in the doorway. “Come in,” said Antoni Mates. Distraught, the boy went in. He was barefoot, wearing pants and a sleeveless undershirt. Conxa was lying almost naked on the bed. Antoni Mates took the chauffeur by the arm; the boy didn’t understand; his head was spinning. But he didn’t protest. Stupidly, he let himself be swallowed up by the same wave, and the three of them fell onto the bed.

  From that time on, Antoni Mates was a happy man. Conxa tolerated, and even enjoyed, the absurd combination. The chauffeur, a bit horrified, soon understood, however, that this was a gold mine, and that it was in his interest to be discreet.

  Their idyll lasted four years. During this time Antoni Mates became a sweeter man, more religious and more reactionary than ever. It was at this point that the couple began to give off that air of perfect unity, and husband and wife were joined like Siamese twins. The chauffeur lived like a prince. He exploited his masters and sang the praises of his position. He told his buddies that el Senyor Mates – the title of Baró had not yet been conferred on him – treated him like a son, and that his wife was the loveliest woman in Barcelona. And he said it all with a wink and an air suggesting that something or other might be going on between him and the lady.

  The boy was careful not to compromise himself or anyone else. But four years, in he was beginning to feel not only disgusted but in truth even a bit sick.

  Antoni Mates planned little trips and arranged things so that no one could suspect a thing. Blinded by his obsession, it would have been easy for him to be careless. But no one, absolutely no one, caught on.

  The chauffeur’s condition alarmed his masters. One day the poor boy vomited blood, and within four weeks he was in the cemetery.

  A few days before the seizure that did Antoni Mates’s chauffeur in, he had got together with a few other boys his age in a bar on Carrer d’Aribau. This usually happened on Saturday, and this was when he would usually boast of the marvels of his post. But that night, perhaps having drunk more than usual, or perhaps in a bad mood that presaged his imminent death, the boy, who was already quite ill, sang a little more than usual. He didn’t tell the whole story, but he got very close. His friends didn’t pay him much mind. They supposed it was a joke or a lie his drunken imagination had come up with. At the next table sat a shabby, gray and insignificant little man, who opened his ears as far as they would go. That little man was up on a great many things that went on in Barcelona. That night in the bar on Carrer d’Aribau, the only thing that mattered to him was to catch a name that he didn’t know. He wanted the chauffeur to sing a name, and when he did, the man needed to hear no more. What the other fellows took to be a joke or a lie was an incredibly valuable revelation for the little gray man.

  The reader will remember that when we spoke of Dorotea Palau’s beginnings, we noted that in the days when she worked at Leocàdia’s house, she used to be accompanied by a young man, a little older than she, whom Dorotea introduced as her brother. The little gray man who was listening in on the conversation of the chauffeur and his friends in the bar on Carrer d’Aribau was the very same young man who used to accompany Dorotea Palau twenty years earlier to the house of the Lloberolas.

  It wasn’t true that they were brother and sister. They had only a vague, distant kinship. The boy had grown up in the creepy, servile atmosphere of a cabaret, doing the duties of a servant and, to some extent, of a go-between. He was sickly, puny, and, according to the other service staff, totally impotent. Polite and accommodating to a fault, the useful little snoop inspired a particular sort of repugnance. He had been getting by without any particular success when he happened upon the conversation with the Mates’s chauffeur. At that point, he had been working as a night porter for quite a few years at one of the most popular and comfortable meublés of Barcelona.

  The man’s name was Pere Ranalies, but he was known by his peers as “The Monk.” Perhaps they came up with this name out of sarcasm, because no one had ever seen him with a woman. Pere Ranalies seemed to function with the cold, bitter head of a bar cat, the kind that, as if it were not enough to have been spayed, are only allowed to polish off the herring bones even the wagoners refuse to eat. Pere Ranalies had done great service to his relative Dorotea Palau, when she was a young woman with no connections and just muddling through between needlework and the labors of love. The Monk took particular pleasure in following both Doro tea’s prostitution and that of others in which he had had a hand, unfailingly playing a despicable role. When Dorotea went to Paris, they had a falling-out that lasted years. On her return, they made peace, but the dressmaker was starting to feel her oats and she found conversation with her relative a bit repulsive. Still, she would tolerate him in certain places and at certain times of day, when the man’s presence wouldn’t jeopardize her, and Dorotea could squeeze out a little business and Pere Ranalies could pick up a good commission.

  The Monk had gathered a considerable archive on the private life of Barcelona. He was on to the scandals and pecadilloes of many important gentlemen and no few notable ladies. His position in the meublé was one of utmost confidence. Everyone knew that his obligation was to keep silent and never lose his composure. The couples who were entrusted to him when they came for a room looked at him with the same serenity with which a murderer looks at a dog as he commits the crime, never doubting that the dog is mute and ignorant of the judge’s address. Ranalies did not discharge his duties with the indifference of one who is simply making a living and doesn’t care one way or another. He deposited in his w
oeful office all the sick voluptuosity of his impotence. He was a connoisseur of erotic slander but kept it all to himself. He enjoyed it in secret, and only used it for the sake of business. He became such a cold-blooded authority in this domain that certain gentlemen of Barcelona would seek him out to pull monstrous pranks. Ranalies, both on his own and in association with a cadre of adept middlewomen, found ways to supply what no one else could. The frigid heart of Pere Ranalies was the magical engineer of aberrations and deeds that defied belief, not precluding even the tenderest of morsels. He knew all the most rotten neighborhoods and slums by heart. He was the perfect cop, whose operations hinged on misery and the flesh of monsters. His silence, his honeyed smiles, and his acrobatic reverences had always been his salvation. The confessable part of his existence was that of an exemplary man of few means. He rented a room in a rooming house on Carrer de la Riereta in the heart of the Barri Xino and the landlady, who was a good woman, looked upon him as one of the family. He went to Mass every Sunday; he never got drunk. Thrifty and neat, he never caused a fuss. He was easygoing, his voice was unctuous with humility and veiled with resignation, and even in his speech he employed no interjections or bad words.

  If on occasion a bit of important business came up that required preparation and expert collaboration, Pere Ranalies would seek out his relative, Dorotea Palau, for the dressmaker was also a voluptuary of such viands, with a special talent for their elaboration.

  When Ranalies learned of the death of the chauffeur in the bar on Carrer d’Aribau, he went straight to Dorotea Palau and told her the whole story. The name Antoni Mates didn’t appear on the Monk’s list and he – who knew everything – had not till that moment had any suspicions regarding that well-known and well-respected gentleman. Ranalies thought that if the story were true – and he didn’t doubt for a moment that it was – there was big money to be had. But it was an extremely delicate operation that would require great tact. Perhaps Dorotea Palau would find a more deft, natural and efficient way of navigating it. Dorotea thought it was superb, and clever as she was, and skillful as she was beginning to be, it wasn’t hard for her to come up with a plan of attack.