Private Life

by Josep Maria de Sagarra

  Before the reformation of the old city of Barcelona, Tia Paulina had never been so far as the Plaça de Catalunya, and had barely set foot on the Rambla, where it meets Carrer de Portaferrissa. The streets she was familiar with were Mercaders, Pont de la Parra, Riera de Sant Joan, Sant Pere més Baix, Carders, Plaça Nova, l’Infern, Ripoll, Catedral, Santa Maria, el Pi, Sant Just and Sant Jaume, and the squares were the Plaça de les Beates and the Plaça Nova. In truth, she could go months and months without leaving the house except to go to mass at the chapel called Capella de l’Ajuda on Sant Pere més Baix. On Sunday she would go twice, early in the morning and for noonday mass. When she went to church she always dragged along her own little folding chair because she didn’t want to sit on the woven rush seats for fear of getting fleas. When white hair and rheumatism began to afflict her, she would have a maid carry the chair. At the noonday mass at l’Ajuda she would stop a while at the door to speak with the few acquaintances she frequented. One of them was Don Manuel Duran i Bas, who attended the same mass, on his wife’s arm. Don Manuel Duran i Bas was Tia Paulina’s lawyer and she doted on him. He was one of the last men in Barcelona to use the top hat in all its splendor. In old age, he had developed a hunchback, and the curvature made him seem very small. His eyes languished under his incredibly hairy and droopy eyebrows, and his moustache – the whitest and thickest in the land – fell over his mouth like a great curtain of sadness. Don Manuel could barely see. He would lift his head, which sank into the stiffness of his crooked back, and through gold-rimmed glasses poised on his nose he would contemplate that toasted almond known as Tia Paulina, puffed up with corsets, underskirts, and petticoats, and the blackest, bleakest fabric the world had ever seen. The four strands of whitish hair she had left had turned yellow as a smoker’s fingers from the potions her hairdresser applied. Atop it all was a timid little mantilla, as forlorn as a hospice.

  Tia Paulina talked with Don Manuel about mortgages and the old days. They would also mention a former friend of Don Manuel’s, a girl who had gone to school with Tia Paulina and had died very young in a cholera epidemic.

  When Tia Paulina felt the need to make an important confession, she would go to the cathedral and work her jaw for a couple of hours behind the screen of her father confessor. This man was a penitential priest, who could stand in as a surrogate for the bishop when assigning penance. When it was merely a question of what she called “making peace with herself,” she would go directly to l’Ajuda and resolve it with any old parish priest.

  The urban reformation of Barcelona had been hard on Tia Paulina. The havoc it had wreaked on her neighborhood obliged her to change her idea of the world’s topography.

  Don Tomàs de Lloberola was always very solicitous of his aunt, treating her with exceptional interest. His counterpart in the business of winning her over was Tia Paulina’s godson, the Baró de Gresol.

  They kept track of who had paid her more visits throughout the month, and who had sent her the best botifarra sausages when the pig was slaughtered in the fall. Or the biggest ring cake on the day of Saint Anthony of the Asses in June. Or the almond confection known as panellets that had most delighted her on All Souls’ Day. Leocàdia would take the children to visit her. When they were small, Tia Paulina had terrified them. Without fail, their aunt would give them six unces, about three ounces, of candies from l’Abella. They were every bit as acidic as she was. This point counterpoint between Don Tomàs and the Baró ended in a fierce hatred between the two relatives that expressed itself in gossip and tales they would take to Tia Paulina regarding the discourtesies that one or the other of the aspirants to her inheritance had shown her.

  Don Tomàs’s two sisters, Clàudia, the spinster, and Anneta, who was married to Don Ramon de Francolí, each plotted while clinging to her aunt’s skirts. Collectively, thanks to all her nieces and nephews, her feet never touched the ground. Despite her terrible avarice, when economic disaster befell Don Tomàs, Tia Paulina helped her nephew out a bit. As Don Tomàs didn’t want to abuse her generosity, what he did was to multiply his acts of solicitousness and tenderness. He would say “Tia …” and “Ay, Tia …” and “But Tia …” as if angels were dictating to him. Don Tomàs would pet her and prance before her like a dog with honey on its tail.

  Even before that period of economic anxiety, every summer the Lloberola nieces and nephews geared themselves up for Tia Paulina visit to their respective estates for some little part of the season.

  When she was at the Lloberola house, Leocàdia was so eager to be the perfect hostess that it would make her sick. Nothing was ever to Tia Paulina’s liking, and she had very special requirements. Every morning a battle raged between Leocàdia and the cook. Tia Paulina always complained of the cold. Even when the heat was asphyxiating, poor Leocàdia had to keep the balconies closed so her husband’s aunt would not catch a chill. They went to the extreme of killing two pairs of peacocks because the birds’ morning squawks were too raucous and disturbed her sleep. When they went for a walk down a country lane and saw a couple of farm laborers coming towards them, they would step to the side or fall back, to avert any unpleasantness for Tia Paulina in case one of the farmers slipped and used a coarse expression.

  The last few years, Leocàdia had had to put up with tremendous rudeness and infinite oddities from Tia Paulina. Despite her extremely advanced age, she still had a clear head and provoked as much torment as ever. Don Tomàs de Lloberola’s last hope lay in Tia Paulina’s inheritance. Shut up in his apartment on Carrer de Mallorca and reduced to utter precariousness, Don Tomàs thought the inheritance might still set things right. His aunt didn’t spend a cent, she simply amassed revenue. According to the Lloberolas’ calculations she had a considerable fortune.

  But neither Don Tomàs, nor his sisters, nor the Baró de Gresol could have foreseen the dark beast that would undo all their machinations. Naively, they did not take into account another person who, without paying visits, or sending ring cakes, or slitting defenseless peacocks’ throats, still held the acidic lemon of Tia Paulina’s heart in his hand. The hand was cold, unctuous, servile, and disposed to do whatever was necessary to squeeze that lemon dry. The person was Tia Paulina’s confessor, Mossèn Claramunt, the penintential priest of the cathedral.

  Mossèn Claramunt had been reared, one might say, on the teats of the Lloberolas, a product of the munificence of Don Tomàs’s father, and of Don Tomàs himself. In Tia Paulina’s final years of existence he exercised an absolute ascendancy over that good lady’s heart. The sagacious priest delicately insinuated to her that all her relatives only loved her for the assets of her inheritance. While he was at it, he revived her fear of the possible damnation of el Senyor de Llinàs, leading her to believe that the life of chastity, devotion and sacrifice she had lived would not be sufficient to expiate the great sins of the deceased. When she made her confessions, the priest instilled terror in her, portraying her as a somewhat ungenerous person, too in love with her money, and lacking in devotion to charity and pious works. Fear spread throughout Tia Paulina’s body. The sagacious priest hinted delicately at a subtle draft of a will and testament. Tia Paulina was so pleased with it, she committed it to memory, but the priest didn’t entirely trust her, and he used her fear to press her further. Tia Paulina was on the far side of eighty and her mind was not what it used to be. She let herself be absolutely dominated by that fear and even came to have visions. E Senyor de Llinàs would appear to her, naked, with a chain around his neck, surrounded by flames. Instead of comforting her, the priest embellished the pathos of the apparition. When Tia Paulina went to the home of Martí i Beya, the notary, to write her will, the canon accompanied her. As if the will were not enough, Mossèn Claramunt started siphoning off money on the pretense of masses and charities, and Tia Paulina surrendered it to him, kissing his hands all the while. All her stocks and securities, and all her cash, found their way to the canon’s bureau. Mossèn Claramunt had taken control, and as custodian he was free to distribute,
as he saw fit and to his liking, an amount that came to more than a million pessetes.

  Tia Paulina spent the last five years of her life completely disabled, in a mortifying state of semi-imbecility. The poor maids had to bathe her and do everything for her. They fed her sips of soup as if she were a child. Leocàdia and her sisters-in-law helped them out. Tia Paulina still recognized everyone. Though she could only speak with difficulty, she showed a great disaffection for all the women who were caring for her. Yet if Mossèn Claramunt ever came to see her, the eyes of that poor dim-witted old woman would show a bit of light and her sunken mouth, monstrously deformed by paralysis, would do its best to mimic a sort of smile.

  Tia Paulina died two days after the inauguration of the Exposition on Montjuïc. She was eighty-eight years old and for four months she was nothing but a skeleton under a scrap of skin. All that was left of her was a fragment of lung that went through the motions of breathing, and bowels that couldn’t digest a thing.

  The priest anointed her with the holy oils and Leocàdia closed her eyelids. Her nieces, Clàudia and Anneta, took charge of dressing her in the habit of the Third Order of Saint Francis and placing the rosary from her first communion between her fingers.

  When Martí i Beya, the notary, read Tia Paulina’s will, Don Tomàs had a fit of ferocious rage. Then he simply crumpled. He could never have predicted this. He couldn’t have imagined that Mossèn Claramunt would do such a thing to him. He could imagine it from his sisters, or from that finicky cold fish, the Baró de Gresol, but never from his priest. Tia Paulina had left everything, absolutely everything, for pious works and beneficence. Doctor Claramunt was the sole heir of confidence with absolute liberal faculties. Not one miserable legacy, not one mingy thought for anyone in the family, nothing. The poor maids who had sacrificed their lives for her, the unfortunate Carmeta who had served her for forty years – a dumb martyr to the brazen disrespect of the departed – there was nothing for them either. Fortunately Tia Paulina was already in her grave because the maids were so enraged that they would have spit upon her cadaver and cut out her heart to feed it to the cats.

  Never has a dead woman gone to the other life to such a litany of shattered voices or such raw and direct indignation.

  Claramunt the canon merely said: “Bueno, bueno, bueno, such a holy lady, such a pious lady, bueno, bueno, bueno …”

  There was no way Don Tomàs could take it in. It was too much. His only hope, his only lifeline, wickedly burned, destroyed by a scheming clergyman dominated by the desire for money, by utterly sordid avarice!

  The meeting of Don Tomàs and the priest was sublime. Never had such liturgical smiles and grimaces concealed such moldering hatred. Never had anyone seen the likes of the priest’s gall and the marquis’s indignation. It was the battle of the sea lion and the crocodile, an encounter between the ice of the Antarctic and the hot mud of African rivers.

  It seemed impossible that two hidebound Catholics, two remnants of militant adherence to the Carlist cause, two pallid shades of reaction, one clad in the robes of the father confessor, the other in the stain-spattered jacket of a marquis, could be reduced to the incontinence of a dust-choked highway, to the fury of two bilious coachmen, tongues saturated with aïoli.

  Tia Paulina’s will was irrevocable. There was no recourse. This was the opinion of Martí i Beya, the notary, and all the lawyers.

  Don Tomàs lost his head. He quoted to the canon from the novels of José María de Pereda and, in a phrase that resounds throughout Spanish literature from Quevedo on, ended up calling him an inmunda sabandija, a filthy louse, in Spanish. The canon let out a peal of hysterical laughter. He kept repeating his incessant bueno, bueno, buenos, and threatened Don Tomàs with the eternal damnation of hell for the sin of greed and for lack of respect toward the ministers of the Lord. Don Tomàs felt the need to do something. If Leocàdia hadn’t stopped him, he was even considering a campaign in El Diluvio, a liberal, Republican, anti-monarchical, and anticlerical publication. His blind rage had reached this extreme.

  Everyone thought he would die from the shock, but Providence still had other tests in store for the aggrieved soul of Don Tomàs.

  The last of them was the proclamation of the Republic. It is not that Don Tomàs had considered his dreams fulfilled with the Dictatorship. Still, his brand of Carlism was pretty comatose, and in the Dictatorship he perceived, if nothing more, a pact between King Alfons XIII and the Sacred Heart of Jesus, between the monarchy and the Church. The mediator in this pact was General Miguel Primo de Rivera, and its nuances included the elevation of religion and morality and the annihilation of the things that most horrified Don Tomàs, which were anarcho-syndicalism, unionism, communism, and Catalanism. Don Tomàs believed that with a big enough dose of Martínez Anido and Cardinal Segura it would be possible to establish a tribunal in Spain that bore some resemblance to the hoary and Holy Office of the Inquisition.

  The fall of the dictator set old Lloberola to trembling and, when he saw the Republic on the horizon, he used his last stores of energy to turn himself into a sea urchin. Don Tomàs remembered the revolution of 1869 and the Republic of 1873. He remembered the soldiers dancing on the altar of the Betlem parish church and all the horrible sacrileges of the 1800s.

  What came with the second Republic seemed even more grim to him than the disasters of the first. Since the incident with his aunt’s estate, Don Tomàs had become a listless little chick. He no longer saw anyone. In April 1931, the victory of the Republicans and ouster of the dictator put a little oil in the lamp of his heart. He joined with his closest relatives and his former acquaintances from Franciscan conferences, beneficent societies, parochial councils, perseverance leagues, and priests, rickety Carlists, decrepit piles with all four feet halfway in the grave, and former gunmen from the antiunion strikebreakers of the Free Syndicates, to take part in secret meetings held in sacristies and private homes. With legs that could barely hold him up and El Correo Catalán in his pocket, he felt like a conspirator. But the churches and convents that were being burned in Spain were like a dose of hemlock for poor old Don Tomàs. He shut himself up in his office to cry under his grandfather’s effigy. Don Tomàs was vanquished. He didn’t believe in the efficacy of the ultraright wing penyes blanques; his only hope would have been lightning bolts from Mt. Sinai. The word went around one night that the convents of Barcelona would be targeted. That night Don Tomàs took two nuns into his home. They were distant relatives from the church of l’Esperança. Don Tomàs felt like a hero; it reminded him of Hernán Cortés’s renowned “night of sorrows” in Mexico. Don Tomàs’s ears brimmed with lurid fantasies: the groans of the religious martyred in the middle of the Plaça de Catalunya by the anarchists of the FAI and the independentists of Estat Català; Bishop Irurita burned to the quick in the house of Francesc Macià, as Dr. Aiguader, the Mayor of Barcelona, stoked the coals with the ferrule of his ceremonial scepter; Lluís Companys, then a member of the Chamber of Deputies, escorting four hundred naked women down the Rambla proclaiming free love and other barbarities. Don Tomàs imagined he heard and smelled these things as he contemplated his two cell-dwelling relatives, eating garlic soup next to silent, desolate Leocàdia. He feared that the monsters of anarchism would be showing up any minute to sack his house and rape the two nuns … but that would be over his dead body.

  Mossèn Claramunt, who, as one can imagine, was on the outs with the Lloberolas, didn’t take such a dark view as Don Tomàs. The first days of the Republic, he would say, “Bueno, bueno, bueno, as long as they leave the poor priests alone, as long as they don’t attack religion, bueno, bueno, bueno.” Later, though, the Mossèn would join in the panic, which led him to attempt a reconciliation. Don Tomàs would not stoop so low.

  When el Senyor de Lloberola saw in the rotogravures what had been done to some of the churches and convents of Spain, he said: “This is the end of the Republic! This cannot go on, by any means! This is communism, this is worse than Russia … much worse
than Russia!”

  A week after he had taken the two nuns in, Don Tomàs could no longer get up from bed. All his innards were failing. He had a high temperature; he was in constant delirium. Dreams of red terror were suffocating him. The communists were pulling off his sheets and stamping his belly with a red iron. Don Tomàs suffered and screamed for three days. A Carmelite priest gave him the sacraments. Leocàdia and his children hovered at the head of his bed. Leocàdia was already somewhat immune to his pain, and his children’s only wish was for their father to finish dying and leave them in peace.

  On the fourth day, he was greatly debilitated. He no longer spoke, he was barely conscious. Some time later came the death rattle, and then the final collapse.

  The Carmelite brother who comforted him through the end coined this phrase: “A saint has died, assassinated by the Republic …”

  Leocàdia wanted to dress him in the habits of the Church of La Mercè. Frederic fought with her and imposed the uniform of the Maestrant de Saragossa, the brotherhood of Saragossa cavalrymen. The gold and red uniform was too small for him. They cut the dress coat down the back and laced some ribbons through it to keep the split in the uniform together, turning the coat into a sort of corset, like those worn by chorines in the zarzuelas of the day.

  In death, Don Tomàs appeared to be wearing a ghoulish disguise; he had been turned into a macabre doll at the insistence of a cad.

  They were still able to afford a bit of pomp for the burial. A handful of people attended: the proverbial “quatre gats.”