The middle-aged woman led them into a sort of alcove, and set eight chairs in a circle. The alcove had been converted into a stage no bigger than a fist, the kind you find in neighborhood cultural centers in the slums. She switched on the battery-operated light, and four women and two beings who must have been men appeared. The actors and actresses were wearing nothing but their natural skin. The scenery was a few filthy cushions. The furniture, a couple of chairs. The middle-aged woman announced the titles of the “pictures.” Some of the titles evoked Versailles, others a public urinal. Before her troupe, the woman of a certain age wore a bitter, maternal expression. Her voice was full of spiderwebs like that of a miniature dog trainer you might see at a circus. Each time she called out an allegorical title, the cast would recombine in a welter of bodies. At times the combination looked like a monster of boiled flesh with twelve arms and legs. It recalled a Brahmin divinity or an Aztec god who had lost his power and walked naked down the road, eating dust and being spat upon. The scene was too hard to bear for anyone who retained even a drop of compassion. The pornographic tableaux those poor women were attempting to reproduce were nothing but the fever dreams of a colonial barracks. The sad skin of those bodies erased any trace of what might have caused excitement. At times, when the troupe was down on all fours to perform a wicked scene, you had the impression that they had lost a ten cèntim coin and were trying to pick it up with their lips. Engaged in the most dulling mechanics of sex, the assemblage performed without the slightest enthusiasm. They had already been obliged to execute all these aberrations a thousand times, before an audience of idiots, towards which they felt absolute indifference. They were artists who acted without feeling, and with no sense of rebellion, their veins watered down by pallid routine, without the slightest spirit of rebellion. The thing was as glacial and inexpressive as the copulation of insects.
The spectacle required silence. Indeed, before a sight like that, even if at the outset there might be a titter or two, soon any secretion of amusement stops cold. Mouths close, cheeks contract, and eyes are sullied with a gray liquid that is either fever, sadness or shame. The troupe would let out a snort or a sigh. One of those poor girls was so close to being a quadruped, or who knows what, that she had a positive reaction. A pong of sweat and of the essences only found in poor whorehouses wafted from the stage.
The four gentlemen were filled with shame, unable to say a word. That little room gave one a sense of the infinite: the infinite sadness of the tears and bestiality we all carry inside. Emili Borràs was glued to this mirror that reflected back to him all the pus in his heart. The count tried to rise above it, but it was impossible. The ladies kept their composure at first, but soon they were overcome. They felt a heinous dizziness, as if a frog were hopping in their stomachs.
The stunt lasted no more than twenty minutes. Bobby gave the middle-aged woman a couple of bills and they went out into the street without taking a breath.
Emili Borràs said to Teodora:
“That was painful. You need the skin of a gorilla to tolerate such a spectacle. Still, it can’t be denied that it’s powerful. A consummate demonstration. Only the piety of a saint can comprehend such a thing. I would like to be so saintly, I would … but it’s beyond me …”
“I don’t know,” said Teodora. “I think you’re being much too philosophical. I just found it repugnant. As for them … well, that’s how they earn their living.”
“What kind of a living do you think they earn!”
“I don’t imagine it’s a place in heaven.”
“What do you know? What do we know of those who truly earn a place in heaven?”
And Isabel added, “So, is this true depravity?”
“No, no, this is just the infinite poverty of the flesh, the infinite sadness of the flesh,” Emili responded. “You won’t find depravity in these neighborhoods. This is not depravity.”
“So,” said Teodora, “do you mean that the depraved ones are people … like us …?”
“Who knows, who knows,” answered Emili Borràs.
They were a bit thirsty, so to round off the night they stopped off at Villa Rosa.
In those days, Villa Rosa was having a moment of splendor. In addition to the last dregs of the nighthawks and the quota from the cabarets, every night there was a group of air force officers who had recently discovered the establishment and went there to soak their wings in manzanilla sherry and raise the boorish ruckus characteristic of the military. They were good kids, tanned and mildly acrobatic, who had great success with the ladies. The German and Scandinavian element, and above all the Americans, looked after the Gypsies who performed there. They would turn red as bull’s blood, and you had the impression their skin might burst. The boiled front of their uniform shirts would get positively soggy. Some of them turned almost gelatinous, like cooked cod tripe. That night there was a magnificent giant in attendance who could balance a glass of manzanilla on his nose, as two streams of liquid flowed down his face. Maybe it was rash to enter Villa Rosa stone sober on a night like that. To adapt to the boiling pitch of those souls, the prerequisite was a prior alcoholic fever and an undiscerning nose.
It had been a long time since Bobby had been to Villa Rosa. His last memory was awful. The Marquesa de Moragues had asked him to engage two chorines who worked there to dance at her house. The deal was done in the early afternoon, when the establishment was empty and the only thing floating there was the dense air left behind by the expansions of the stomachs and the bottles of wine that had been working at full tilt the night before. In the light of the early afternoon, Villa Rosa felt to Bobby like the state of cerebral sorrow and self-loathing that follows a tumultuous bender. By the side of the counter an extremely fat old Gypsy woman was crying. She had one foot propped up on a foot stool, in exactly the same position as Philip II in the Escorial. The woman’s leg was deformed and wrapped top to toe in a dirty bandage. She was weeping because the pain was getting progressively worse. She said the cause of her ills was a bite from a rabid cat. A thin man, whose skin and clothing were both the color of tobacco juice, was inspecting the bandages and saying they might have to amputate her leg.
The sight of the Gypsy with the bandaged leg haunted Bobby for days. When he and his traveling companions entered Villa Rosa he could still see that old crone bitten by a rabid cat by the side of the counter.
Seated at a table with a bottle of solera sherry before them, Emili Borràs was still talking about Jesus Christ.
Hortènsia, who had traded in her good bourgeois egotism for a Russian soul, found the spectacle of the previous establishment artificial and perfectly commendable. She said everything they had just seen was the “pus from society’s wounds.” The Count, a fan of popular science, said that pus was necessary for the organism to defend itself. He mentioned leucocytes and dead bacteria. Isabel begged them to drop the topic of pus and stop talking about such disgusting things.
Teodora began casting insistent glances at an aeronautics officer who was a friend of hers. The officer was sucking on the nape of a twenty year-old hostess’s neck. She was a bit drunk and very beautiful. When the officer realized that Teodora was watching him, he saluted her smartly, blushed and stopped.
When the Gypsies of the house caught sight of their posh guests, they went over to pay their compliments. Two of them, known as La Tanguera and La Mogigonga for their expertise in dancing and burlesque, finished off the wine the guests hadn’t seen fit to drink. La Tanguera dedicated one of her sublime dances to them, duplicating the delicate and fragile tapping of a wounded partridge.
Emili Borràs made a few Germanic and Freudian comments about flamenco dancing. Hortènsia listened with delight. The Comte rattled on for a while like famed racconteur Garcia Sanchiz but the ladies didn’t take him seriously. Bobby rubbed at his moustache, thinking that he and the ladies and the others and the entire crowd were all a bunch of fools.
They left Villa Rosa at four-thirty in the morning. When they got t
o the Rambla and jumped into their automobiles it was as if they were waking from a bad dream to find themselves between peaceful sheets, with a drawn bath. They sank into the upholstery, corroborating that indeed it was truly theirs and that nothing horrible had happened to them. Rafaela ran her fingers over her ears, her neck and her wrists to be sure no one had robbed her.
Hortènsia thought vaguely of Raskolnikov, of inverts, of Primo de Rivera, of the Russian soul, of the act at La Sevillana, of Antoni Mates’s wife … But she was very tired and she rested her head on Isabel’s coat. Isabel still had the energy to refresh her lipstick and powder her rouged cheeks.
Just about the same time that Hortènsia Portell reached her house on Passeig de la Reina Elisenda, got undressed, wrapped herself in a Japanese robe, and dissolved two aspirins in a glass of water, in the Grill Room on Carrer d’Escudellers two pairs of police patrolmen were breaking up a group of onlookers who were standing at the door. Inside the establishment things were in disarray. The people sitting at the bar got down from their barstools and stuck their heads into the dining room of the restaurant. There you could see an upended table, and on the floor a sizable circle of wine, a broken bottle, half a filet mignon, a dozen potatoes, and a whole bowl of cheese soup which, sans plate and spread out on the carpet, looked pretty repulsive
In a corner, the restaurant staff and two women who had just arrived were holding up a young woman in the midst of an attack of hysteria, while an utterly ineffectual gentleman, his face blanched with dismay, was dabbing a towel soaked in cold water on his forehead to wipe the blood from a wound caused by a wine bottle. Another group of women was trying to calm a lady wearing a bedraggled beaver coat, her face full of scratches, and the polite gray man who accompanied her. Such a scene in the Grill Room of the time was not unusual, and no one paid it much mind. In the match that had just taken place, no bones had been broken, and the police saw no need to arrest anyone or to trouble any of the actors in the drama. All the owners wanted was to put the whole thing behind them, because there were not yet many people in the restaurant, but soon the regular clientele would begin to arrive.
The lady with the beaver coat and the scratches on her face was Rosa Trènor. Quick to recover, she disappeared in the company of the gray man and a young woman. She had gone there to make a scene, and her work at the Grill Room was done for the evening. The man with the cut on his forehead, Frederic de Lloberola, had them apply a taffeta strip to the wound, which was insignificant. The girl with him was over her attack of hysteria. The waiters cleaned the carpet, set the table with fresh tablecloths, and brought over another bottle of wine, another filet mignon, and another cheese soup.
Rosa Trènor wanted to break up with Frederic, but in her own particular way, which in fact would be like not breaking up. Frederic had had no intention of splitting with her because, oblivious as he was, and seeing other women behind her back as he did, he still found some kind of company and solace in being able to express all the vacuous thoughts that passed through his head to Rosa Trènor in conversations and over dinner. From time to time, a night with her was not all that bad. Frederic thought Rosa was perfectly satisfied with this arrangement, and that the money she had recently asked him for and that he had not been able to give her was of no consequence. Frederic thought her asking for cash was just a casual thing. He thought perhaps she didn’t even need it, and even if she did, she could get along without it. He was convinced that Rosa was an altruist who put no price on her gratitude to Frederic for having renewed their friendship and chosen her as a confidante for such an important life as his.
For all these reasons, Frederic had begun to treat Rosa in a rather despotic way. Ever since the garbage collector had carted off the general’s dog, Frederic had stopped being generous. That gesture of sacrifice was enough to give Frederic a perfect notion of his control over Rosa and of her unconditional devotion to him. Once in possession of this idea he allowed himself to relax his solicitude and treacly gallantry.
Naturally, Rosa saw things very differently from how Frederic imagined them. Rosa thought he pined for her and she had him in her grasp. She thought he was being unfaithful out of spite and revenge. It was his proper desperation – because Rosa considered Frederic a gentleman and she believed in “proper” desperation – in the face of her refusal to bestow certain favors that Frederic demanded and she did not allow. These favors existed only in Rosa’s imagination. A month after they renewed their relations, Rosa and he pretended they could maintain an open-minded status quo. But since they were both romantics, Rosa forswore absolutely her early morning bouquets of camellias (so Frederic thought, at least). Before the sacrifice of the dog, they enjoyed two weeks of outright love. This put wind under Rosa’s wings, but Frederic’s refusal to give her money and his latest infidelities (that she, as we have said, considered unimportant and attributed to spite) obliged her to take some violent action, pull off some outrageous stunt. Frederic had not been to her house in a week, and Rosa was beginning to wonder. For the time being, Frederic was of very little use to her, but he could always turn out to be an ace in the hole, and even his economic situation could be susceptible to change. Don Tomàs was a very old man. He could be carried off to heaven in a blink of the eye, and a bit of change would have to fall Frederic’s way.
Rosa thought that if she broke up with him in a boring way perhaps Frederic, less ardent than she thought, would use the opportunity to end the whole thing. But, if she staged a theatrical break-up, with a bloody and scandalous sort of grandeur, she would impress Frederic and awaken a little rumble in his heart. She believed much more strongly in a kick to the head than in a cold shoulder to keep the pathos of love alive.
When Rosa learned that Frederic was pursuing a young girl from the Excelsior, a French girl who had just arrived in Barcelona, she organized a little police detail and surprised them at the Grill Room. So as not to go alone she had picked up a notary from Manresa whom she had captivated at the Colón, and she had him buy her a half dozen oysters and a chicken leg.
The scene was incredibly tawdry. Verbal abuse on the man’s part; hairpulling on the woman’s. The little French girl proved to have the claws of a cat and after the obligatory scratches she went into a hysterical fit. Frederic said a few harsh words to Rosa, and she decided to scrape his forehead a little with the neck of the previously broken wine bottle, taking great care not to hurt him too badly.
Frederic had found the scene very unpleasant, and the cut on his forehead was throbbing. Even so, once Rosa was gone, he was actually rather pleased. This was great publicity for a man of his age; it gave him a sort of gigolo’s cachet, and infused him with dignity in the eyes of the staff of the restaurant. “Rosa is in love with me,” he thought. “The proof is in the pudding; if she weren’t hurt by my behavior, if she weren’t utterly smitten, she wouldn’t have risked such a scene. One thing is clear: this is the only way to deal with women.” Thinking these optimistic thoughts, he sank his teeth into the filet mignon, which ceded to the pressure of his mandible, and swallowed the first slice of meat with cruelty. With another bit of cruelty, he lightly twisted the short hairs at the nape of the little French girl’s neck, which triggered a voluptuous shriek from the girl and sent the first spoonful of cheese soup spurting from her pouty lips.
“This must have something to do with menopause,” thought Frederic. “The last gasp of passion, the swan song. But I’ve had enough. It’s not worth my while to be embarrassed or put out by an old bag like her.” This was the chivalrous way in which the good gentleman of Lloberola referred to love. In the end, he wasn’t entirely wrong and, in point of fact, he had had enough of Rosa Trènor. Their novel had come to an end.
People from the Excelsior were beginning to pour into the Grill Room. The florist at the door was selling bouquets of roses and work was piling up in the kitchen.
Two young men had just sat down at a table near the door, across from the bar. The waiter set down two whiskeys without so much
as a word. He looked at them in a bitter, condescending way, as waiters do with unimportant clients who often neglect to bring enough money to pay the check.
One of the young men was a bit worked up and, though he was usually not excitable, that night the words tumbled out quickly and chaotically. His buddy followed him with bored, drooping eyelids. The excitable one said:
“I want to write a novel about a situation I’ve seen from close up and in detail. A really big deal …”
“Look, in Barcelona there are thousands of tall tales. I don’t know what case you’re referring to, but it would be enough for me just to tell my mother’s story. The plot is the least of it. The real thing is to know how to write it. How to put things down, how to make them interesting and alive. I’ve tried it many times, but I’ve given up. I’ve found a simpler way to earn a living …”
“I’m not ready to give up yet. If I ever publish something, I know they’ll say I’m resentful and deceitful, when in truth it’s reality that’s resentful and deceitful.” When a novel states a fact that ties into another fact and another and another, as the chain goes on, the events begin to seem more and more extraordinary, and the characters take on a chiaroscuro effect without grays, and the melodrama builds, most people reading the novel will think it’s a bunch of lies, and that such things are impossible in real life. And the truth is exactly the opposite: if you just wrote down the characters and the ‘permutations’ you can find in a city like ours – right here in Barcelona – and even within our own circle, you would be called an idiot. Believe me, there’s no need to wait for a dark, sensational crime, the kind that scares concierges stiff when they read about them in the newspapers. These splashy, absurd crimes and criminals are not at all important, you see. But, if you could look inside the high society gentlemen and ladies who appear to lead perfectly gray and proper lives, whom no one would ever suspect of a thing, who appear incapable of a violent gesture or of any slightly spectacular and interesting act … If you could follow in their hideous footsteps, you would have more plots than you could ever know what to do with. And I’m talking about plots of the sort you couldn’t spit out in public without running the risk of being drawn and quartered and banished from society like an undesirable villain.”
Private Life Page 21