Private Life

by Josep Maria de Sagarra

  Some of the ladies from Hortènsia Portell’s clan, such as Teodora Macaia or the Baronessa de Moragues, started paying visits backstage and attending late-night dinners in questionable company. Things that a true lady of Barcelona or a respectable bourgeoise would not have dared to do a few years before without exposing herself to great scandal and absolute disrepute could now be done coolly and casually, as if it were the most natural thing in the world.

  The finest actresses and dancers would go for tea or play bridge with the granddaughters of ladies who had embroidered flags for the Carlist army, ladies who would say an Our Father before fulfilling the intimate acts of the sacrament of matrimony and who saw love as a quasi-sacrifice in the service of the preservation of the species.

  These contacts between different social atmospheres occasionally produced pathetic squalls. Still, in general the disasters they produced were nothing worse than a growing flexibility in certain lovely souls, a more peculiar cultivation of reckless behavior or of the unstoppable pursuit of the latest thing, and a more intense secretion in the glands of gossipmongers.

  Straitlaced ladies, moralists, and priests preached against what had begun to be called the relaxing of customs. During the Dictatorship, with the aid of local authorities, bishops had imposed punishments and prohibitions with regard to women’s clothing, how much skin could be revealed, and what things couldn’t be done on beaches in the summer.

  But despite the prohibitions and the spiritual exercises, what was emerging day by day was the temperament of a more physical, more sporty, more carefree, and, above all, less morally and economically conservative society. And it was not that this represented a rebellious stance, nor was it a rejection of principles. It was just something in the air. It was a system in evolution, and you could even say it happened in good faith. Attitudes and words that entailed a spark of audacity crept imperceptibly into the heart of even the most rigid houses.

  With the advent of the Republic, that freedom of association took on an even more eccentric aroma. It was a potpourri of propaganda in favor of divorce and women’s rights, a respect for personal merits that was not exactly under the control of the confessional, the relative muffling of the vociferations of the clergy, nudist and Bolshevik propaganda that circulated with impunity, the dissolution of the Jesuits, and the sense that adultery was not such a tragedy … Indeed, in certain nuclei, all this activated some very hardened tumors of protest and reaction. However, it gave ordinary, everyday people of lukewarm convictions, whose doctrine was limited to getting by, stronger lungs to breathe in whatever might present itself and a more tolerant retina that inclined them toward the refreshing new notion of keeping an open mind.

  With the Republic, women of the merchant, middle, and petty bourgeois classes, who might have their own intellectual or journalistic leanings, or might be the daughters or wives of preeminent politicians, came to be fodder for community intrigues or the delicate foam of whisperings at five-pesseta tea parties. And these women might mix with some of the odalisques of the fallen regime who had painted their lips fire engine red to prowl the places of influence, either to try and captivate a public figure, or simply to strut their stuff.

  In the society pages of the papers other ladies’ names were added to the list of the two dozen top-drawer names approved by the arbiters of elegance. Having emerged from more modest temperatures, to position themselves for the social success they coveted, many abused the services of beauty institutes, stylists, magazine articles, gigolos, and eccentric cartwheels.

  Ladies who had forsworn tea and taken up gin, would still perform a pantomime of disdain for Republican social climbers. Many ladies of the ancien régime stopped going to the Liceu opera house so as not to run into the families of the Republican authorities. It was a tame and thrifty sort of conspiracy.

  But as we have said, ladies of a more conciliatory spirit, some of them the former clientele of the dictator’s appetites, went over to the Republic. Under the pretext of concerts, art exhibits, charitable balls and cozier, more private parties, the snobberies of old were thrust together with the new.

  All this exposition should serve to prepare the reader for the heterogeneous society that came together at the home of Níobe Casas, the dancer, a few nights after Josep Safont’s debut at Hortènsia Portell’s.

  Níobe was the daughter of gypsies from Tarragona. As a child she had eaten grass and crushed tadpoles’ heads amid the thorny and erotic vegetation that surrounds the Pont del Diable. That ancient aqueduct was known as Devil’s Bridge because only the devil can build a bridge to last a thousand years. As long as she was making camp with the gypsies, she was no more significant than a coppery insect. A cat-eater like the rest of her family, at night she would lift her little pug nose to the stars and doze off in the company of a wicked and romantic cricket that would perch on the toasted parchment of her belly and sing songs to her.

  One day, when the air held the peculiar pungent aroma of foxtail amaranth, she was carried off in a sack. She spent days upon days confined in long indistinguishable rooms containing pianos, trapezes, horizontal bars, and other instruments of torture. When she was fifteen, not knowing where she came from or how, not knowing anything at all, she found herself dressed up in a tutu and dancing the “Dance of the Hours” in La Gioconda, at the Teatro di San Carlo in Naples.

  But Níobe had ideas of her own, and an ambition that was as hard, red and shiny as a dove’s heart cherry. It didn’t take her long to find a Russian painter who ate mussels while listening to the guitars of Posilippo and hunted little scamps at a lira a head to replicate the intimate proclivities of the Emperor Tiberius. Níobe cast her tutu to the winds and coiled herself around the Russian’s neck. He did her no harm, and he showed her how to twirl her spaghetti around her fork, and, en passant, the path to glory. Níobe made the leap to Moscow, and from Moscow to Paris, always coiled around the neck of someone who frequented fine restaurants. In Paris she became saturated with surrealism. The Countess of Noailles made her a gift of a pipe, and a woman from the Madrid aristocracy gave her a man’s suit.

  One day she realized that Paris was not good for her biliary secretions, and she ensconced herself in a cove on the Costa Brava to practice a little nudism in the company of two poets and two Pomeranians. From the Costa Brava she leapt to the Passeig de la Bonanova in Barcelona, where for four years now she has owned a bar, an operating room, and a swimming pool. At this point she began to host the heterogeneous society we recently mentioned.

  Níobe Casas wasn’t exactly sure why she was called Níobe, or why she was called Casas. As she tumbled from place to place she had used nomenclatures taken from botany, perfumery and distillery. In Barcelona she called herself Níobe Casas, and these two names were probably suggested to her by a professor of archaeology whose skin was as deeply tanned as his soul – much like the sand in the Swimming Club, to which the archaeologist was inseparably attached.

  Physically, Níobe was sublime artifact. She was brown as a smoke-blackened pipe, with dark eyes that shone like a beetle’s carapace with a near-violet metallic gleam. She had a brazen, somewhat brutish nose, broad at the base, a mouth from deep within a Gauguin painting, and hair like a great shock of platinum silk, as firmly disciplined by the comb a gigolo’s. All of which made of Níobe’s head an effigy to behold with squinting eyes, in a game of thrust and parry, while sucking in the rouged extract of heavenly savagery that radiated from her cheeks.

  Níobe’s body had nothing to do with humanity. Diminutive, compact, as tightly wound as a ball of twine, it bore a zoological kinship to a mongoose or to the mythical Madagascar maquis, half-human, half-ape. To a normal man’s eyes, her arms and hips served up a paradox of attraction and repulsion. The fingers of her hands, long, black and slender, ended in ten silvery nails, a gaudy, horrible, offensive silver. Níobe wore a variety of clothes around the house. She was just as likely to wear pajamas pants with a nude torso, fastening around her breasts a pair of sporty goggl
es meant to be worn in a convertible, as a mechanic’s overalls, or a long skirt paired with a discreet neckline. The décor of the apartment was done exclusively in glass and nickel, except for the piano, which was a standard Steinway. Her kitchen was the bar. Only cold food was served and drinks didn’t stray from the Rips Bar book of cocktails, with illustrations by Paul Colin. As the reader can see, she lived and ate worse than a member of a chain gang. She spent many hours each day feeding tiny morsels of foie gras to her fish, or she sat by the swimming pool, wrapped in a terry cloth robe, wearing espadrilles with laces, blowing soap bubbles, chewing gum, or lying stretched out on the ground with a hot water bottle on her stomach.

  Níobe spoke Catalan with a peculiar lisp, pronouncing her esses more like shushes, mixing in Gypsy expressions and French from la Villette. She didn’t practice any known religion and she made love exactly like an amoeba.

  Níobe’s dances had a relationship with the death penalty across climes and cultures. They were akin to industrial mechanics and the customs of insects. They required a minimum of music, a couple of South African chords and nothing more. She asserted that Stravinsky was a twit, and only barely tolerated Schönberg. She didn’t wear any clothes at all when she danced; she would camouflage her skin, as they did with ships during the war. She did it with lively, matte colors, and more or less pre-Columbian motifs. If the audience required discretion, she would don the tiniest possible cache-sexe decorated with the wings of the Spanish fly. But if the audience was made up of regulars, she wore nothing.

  All these delights made Níobe a powerful magnet for devotees of communism and transcendental nonsense. Níobe had two female friends: one was Amèlia Nebot, a young bourgeois woman who had left her husband to go off and study bel canto in Milan. She gave concerts at the Palau de la Música Catalana, wrote articles on feminism for radical weeklies, and attended a penya, a youth group devoted to cultivating cacti and to Soviet poetry. Among the members of that penya were two young sketch artists not precisely known for their virility. Amèlia Nebot was fat and common, and she practiced spiritualism. Níobe’s other female friend, more an admirer than a friend, is already known to the reader: Teodora Macaia.

  Teodora pressed for an invitation to one of Níobe’s intimate gatherings, and never left. Teodora went to dinner with Níobe at the Colón and the Hostal del Sol. Níobe wouldn’t touch anything but caviar and canned asparagus. Teodora wolfed her food down and, while she was at it, provided Níobe with new admirers. She introduced Níobe to Hortènsia Portell, but the widow didn’t want anything to do with her. To her, the gypsy from Tarragona seemed like an overly crude tango.

  With the coming of the Republic, Teodora let go even a little more than she had before. She had been separated from her husband for a long time now. She had an official lover. Not only that, when she went to Paris she spent her time chasing down chauffeurs. As Teodora came from one of the finest families, these things were no obstacle to her appearing at the forefront of all cultural and elegant solemnities. Teodora still had a welcoming voice and the bearing of a true lady. She was one of the few women left in Barcelona with whom a slightly skeptical gentleman could feel right at home.

  For Teodora, admiration for Níobe was way to pass the time; for some of her female friends and relatives it was a reason to skin her alive.

  Níobe kept an eclectic stew of admirers simmering. First among them was Professor Pinós. Pinós had studied Romance philology at Halle, and did a lot of work for the Fundació Bernat Metge for classical literature. His was the sappiest and most venal kind of erotic temperament. He was known to have some half dozen lovers, all forty or older. He spent all his time traveling to international conferences and eating at indigestible banquets. With the excuse of dancing a chotis, typical in Madrid, he would spend Sunday afternoons at the Ritz smelling every folkloric Spanish armpit that showed up. He attended all the rhythmic gymnastics festivals, was married to a nymphomaniac from Aragon, and had a son who wanted to be a priest.

  Doctor Pinós compared Níobe Casas to the Orphic dancers, pre-Doric civilization, and Dionysian phallus worship. Níobe listened to him as if she were hearing a dog bark. He had tried to gain entry to the intimacy and delights of the gypsy woman, but Níobe would shrink back into her shell like the Pagarus bernardus crab; the only favor she would concede was to allow him to dive naked into her swimming pool and fish for a sponge with his teeth.

  Her second admirer was Miquel, the essayist. Miquel was another academic full of twaddle. He made his living training typists in the ways of culture. Miquel was at the antipodes of an honorable man. Irascible and pedantic, he brooked no humor. Grafted onto his Catalan were strains of Homeric dialect and Argentine tango. Those who knew him asserted he was the most grotesque man in Barcelona.

  Miquel adored Níobe, and had written fifty-two articles establishing parallels between the gypsy woman and Santa Teresa de Ávila. More than one young nincompoop who ventured to read this Molieresque charlatan would cut out his articles and read them to the poor wenches who went out to bare it all onstage at the Bataclán or the Moulin Rouge. Miquel the essayist also frequented the afternoon sessions at these places in the company of his wife, the daughter of a usurer, who had become more artful than her husband. With his wife’s money, Miquel the essayist found a way to become a man of refinement without ever having to bend a single vertebra.

  That night Miquel was going to read a longish essay on the thighs of Níobe Casas and the philosophy of imminent states. With all Miquel’s philosophy, the most he came up with were garbled and unamusing obscenities that Amèlia Nebot found sublime.

  Salazar the banker, whose parents were Castilian, was born in Roda. Rich, carefree, fat, and prone to laughter, he attended the session not so much to see the dancer as to see if he could get something going with Senyora Casulleres. One of Níobe’s admirers was Renom, a deputy in Parliament, who was a lean, gray, and silent man. He had once secured funding for a dance recital that Níobe had done in the Palau de Projeccions theatre. He never lifted a finger after that, but he felt that gave him the right to spend hour after hour lying at Níobe’s feet, with the face of a dessicated lion or tiger converted by the capitalist system into an expensive rug.

  There were half a dozen poets at the session, too. Some of them were fine young men, unpretentious and full of good faith, who had no other defect than that of taking seriously the most poetic poet of them all, by the name of Sabartés. What Sabartés shared with Níobe was her blackness, but his was confined to his shirt, his cuffs, and his fingernails. Sabartés was a member of the penya of the desperate. He had pulled off forty-cèntim scams. Women would buy him half a cafè au lait. You could say he was the Barcelona equivalent of the kind of poetic bohemians who still frequent the Café Universal or the Café Colonial in Madrid. Sabartés performed in establishments off the Rambla; midway down Carrer Sant Pau, Carrer de la Unió, Carrer Nou, or Carrer d’Escudellers. However, he didn’t dare pontificate as yet at the sidewalk café of the Lion or the Cafè del Liceu, or La Granja, or Gambrinus. The world of intellectuals who couldn’t quite make it to the Rambla was quite sizeable at the time. Many had been to jail, and not precisely in the section reserved for political prisoners. Sabartés had not yet suffered this fate. In a word, he was a poor devil whose tongue and heart were made of pus. Two of the poets in Sabartés’s orbit were members of the Swimming Club and owned a car, but they never let him ride in it.

  Cascante, the musician, and Corminola and Saladrigues, the sketch artists, completed the one hundred per cent transcendental sector of the meeting. Saladrigues did lead pencil reproductions of well-known pornographic postcards at a very good price. Corminola only drew gas burners. The two of them were famous for something else, but they were both excellent young men. Cascante played exclusively for Níobe, and in the summer he played the saxophone under the tents at neighborhood and village fairs.

  Alongside all those characters there were people like the Comte de Sallès. No one could eve
r have imagined how that delicate man would react to the Republic. When he saw the royal disaster, the count, who had been a close friend of the deposed king, and of the few kings still standing in Europe, had adopted an intelligent and tolerant attitude. Instead of making a fuss and rushing to dry the tears of the Marquesa de Perpinyà at the Portbou border crossing, the count betook himself to the Hotel Formentor in Mallorca in the company of a young Chilean woman. There he meditated copiously on love and politics, and after mulling it over a good while he decided that things weren’t going all that badly and that the best thing an aristocrat could do was to aid in the consolidation of the Republic and advocate for full-blown Catalanism. Naturally he did neither of these things. On his return from Mallorca, he settled into an armchair at the Club Eqüestre and tickled his beard, just as he had always done. On the occasions when he took a break from his armchair, he would water the orchids in his garden and tend to his scientific correspondence. Teodora Macaia convinced him that Níobe was just the thing for him. The count, deferential and extremely polite to all the scoundrels and paupers who congregated around Níobe, opted for enthusiasm, wiping his British nose with a handkerchief and assuming a cosmetic smile that lasted all night long.

  Another of those society admirers was Senyora Sabater, the wife of the prestigious politician of the same name who, as we said in previous pages, gave communist teas and recited her own poems between cookie and cookie. This woman had a very large head and was such a font of idiotic conversation that the two lovers she’d had didn’t have the heart to extend the relationship beyond a month.