Private Life

by Josep Maria de Sagarra

  With a precision that even he was astounded by, Guillem continued tacking back and forth between a literary cynicism full of anisette and arnica and the genuine and childlike passion of a sardana dancer. After ten months at this game, Conxa agreed to undress in his presence and get into bed with him. For the time being, Conxa was fairly persuaded and Guillem began to come into his own. The fact that the body of the widow baronessa was a magic box, with all the springs and trap doors of the most corrosive voluptuosity in the hands of a talented juggler, would not have been sufficient to make Guillem feel so swallowed up, so evaporated amidst the leaves of that sublime agave. It was Conxa’s disconcerting, bewildering, and tormenting mind that infused Guillem’s cheeks with the burning pallor of an impassioned pilgrim. Conxa was half-persuaded, for the moment, because that was precisely what she wanted: a man in a constant feverish state, a perpetually aroused sexuality, forever initiating more devious snares, aspiring to more effective tricks, like a hunter of impossible monsters, and always with that air of defeat combined with a hope of triumph. Because Conxa always slipped away. There was no way he could dominate that undulating perfumed weakness. If for a moment he sensed he was dominating her, she would elude him through the most impracticable crevices. Sometimes the crevice would consist of all the profound brutality of a monosyllable spoken tenuously with the phonetics of an angel. Sometimes it was simply a puff of air from her lungs that Conxa, closing her mouth, would direct through her nose, accompanied by a vitreous, absent gaze and the mere beginnings of a smile, but it would sink into Guillem’s heart like a ferret’s incisors. Guillem found himself in all of this, because the only justification he could find for the monotonous activity of sex was the anxiety of contingency, the constant playing and losing, the stimulus of defeat, and that stuff of hatred and destruction veiled by a gelatin of tears that makes the skin of male and female creatures interesting. All in all, what each felt at the core of the other was a touch of sadism. Guillem was inured to the life of a successful gigolo. He had aplomb and utter self-confidence. Desperately virile, he was also desperately feminine. He had an unfathomable facility for adapting to the detail and the nuance of all the women he had contact with. An ordinary prostitute could find in him the same base echo of meticulous wickedness and rouged gossip that she could have found in a fellow prostitute. He was the ideal character to dally with a woman and sweet talk her. He never moved too fast, he always sensed the perfect moment. He displayed lovely absences, delicate reluctance, and a cool and tender passivity in awaiting the right move. He wasn’t easily put off, he wasn’t jealous, and he was willing to play roles that a more resolute man who wants to pay and wants to dominate would never tolerate. Discreet and reserved in his triumphs, he had a fertile imagination when it came to lying. And all of this came hand in hand with an unquestionable charm and a reliable and accommodating physiology.

  This aptitude for conquest had given Guillem a very bad opinion of women. All he saw in them was the part that served his selfish ends: their likelihood of succumbing to Guillem’s prestige. All they represented for him was their purely animal aspect of adoration or of jealousy; he appreciated them for their skin and for their intimate reactions, and that was it. Guillem had never been in love, and at times he wondered if he was even capable of falling in love, of feeling that profound luxuriance, lyrical with anguish, enthusiasm, and sidereal scintillation that he imagined love to be. Women had never provided Guillem the opportunity to infuse a little spirituality into his flesh, at least not the women he had dealt with so far. Sensitive as he was, the young man was perfectly aware of all that, aware even of how he had been brutalized by his conquests. He was running the risk of becoming a physiological machine mounted on a dissatisfied spirit. Despite his youth, he already had an excess of experience. The time for great emotional arias had passed him by; his weakness for debauchery and his lack of scruples had shielded his skin with a layer of skepticism. Guillem saw all this with no little melancholy. Another young man would have considered the profusion and diversity amassed in his erotic register to be of inestimable value. And it is not that Guillem derived no satisfaction from it, but he was beginning to feel fatigued, to find no merit in it, and to discover all the gray brushstrokes of monotony. So, the presence of Conxa Pujol renewed him. His fear of failure, his loss of confidence in himself, his need to refine all his powers in order to dominate an elusive skin, his pain at uncertainty, his renewed self-respect, his secret tears, the sensorial density of their encounters, and above all the superior perfume of the inconsistent and contradictory biology he was engaging with his muscles and his breath offered Guillem the possibility of something that, if nothing more, was a reasonable simulacrum of the flaming vestments of a true, pathetic love.

  On occasion, powerless to unravel her mystery, in the face of her unceasing battle, Guillem had suspected that Conxa Pujol would never entirely surrender herself to him or to any man. Physically, this woman’s case was not one of coldness or indifference; quite the contrary. Guillem sensed volcanic possibilities in her that he, however, had not managed to ignite. Nor could he accept the thesis that the baronessa belonged to that species of women whose sensibilities have been drained by constant and varied brutalization. A woman who was married at such a young age to the man she had been married to, and who until now had not been known to have a lover, led one to suppose a more or less undamaged temperament. Guillem would have liked to connect their present intimacies with those two shameful episodes in which he had taken part, but those episodes did not offer any pattern. One would have had to know the extent of the baronessa’s intention in all of that. One would have to separate her responsibility from her husband’s with great care, and that was impossible. In moments of obfuscation and defeat, when Guillem thought his desire was unattainable, he came very close to confessing to the baronessa. He tried to explain his double personality with perfect cynicism, but he realized that such an explanation would probably have closed all doors to him. As unusual as the baronessa was, Guillem was not certain how she would react on learning that this Guillem de Lloberola was the very same derelict her dressmaker had procured for her. Later on, when Conxa yielded, when an absolute intimacy had been established between the two of them, in moments of depression Guillem once again felt the desire to produce a dramatic effect by recounting to the baronessa the details of Dorotea’s “scene of the crime.” But then, too, he held back, and was assailed by yet another doubt: what if what he had accepted in good faith, his certainty that the baronessa had not recognized him, were just an illusion? Guillem came to fear that Conxa, much more astute than her departed husband and with a sharper memory, had been dissembling, had turned a blind eye, on recognizing Guillem de Lloberola to be the same subject procured by her dressmaker. This aspect of Guillem’s fear was groundless, because Conxa Pujol never recognized him nor did she suspect for a moment that Guillem had been a party to those secret events.

  As we were saying, Guillem imagined that Conxa would never truly surrender herself, to him or to any man. Guillem began to fear that in the mystery of his lover there was another woman, and that all her fissures and evasions and the unassailable integral possession of her body, her soul, her will, and even her unhappiness could only be understood as a natural or acquired corruption of her temperament. He feared Conxa was a lesbian, and that the fullness of her passion would never belong to him, because Conxa was saving it for a woman.

  The fear of lesbianism in the life of “ladykillers” is one of the most ludicrous and unfounded. When a man who considers himself irresistible sees that a woman does not utterly give in to him, and retains a mystery that he cannot divine, he soon accuses the woman of an abnormal vice. The pride or vanity of men often leads them to see things, and in the case of the baronessa, Guillem was definitely seeing things. Conxa was bizarre and perverse, with a perplexing temperament, but she considered intimacy with another woman to be unequivocally disgusting.

  This was not where danger lay. Conxa assented
to Guillem’s fever, in part just because, and in part because Guillem seemed different from her other admirers. The rudeness of Guillem’s first dialogue allowed her to glimpse a “case study.” A “case study” like those she had pursued through her own deformation and her adventures between abject sheets. Conxa dreamed that perhaps Guillem could provide for her what she had achieved by “slipping into someone else’s skin” – that is, by doing precisely what Guillem had proposed she do in his monologue – without any need for her to undergo a metamorphosis, and accepting her as the widow of a millionaire cotton merchant and baron. Conxa realized, though, that despite his bookish cynicism, when push came to shove he was just as inexpert as the other pretty boys who infected her environment. What’s more, the baronessa was able to perceive in her intimate dealings with Guillem that he had only been involved with women who were utterly lacking in substance. In her logbook of adventures, Conxa had recorded a night in Hamburg, in the company of a fascinating savage, on which she had experienced the complete detachment of body and soul and the most fiery of spasms. Each of the savage’s gestures was unforeseeable and a work of art. Conxa had not had many experiences like that. She was not so foolish as to believe that this was something that could be found around any corner, or, even more, that a person from Guillem’s environment and education could provide such a thing. She didn’t demand this of him, but, if nothing more, she did want him to discover her, to feel his way with her. Since Guillem didn’t make her feel the way she hoped, the baronessa always maintained the upper hand with him. She disconcerted and humiliated him, and laughed at him in moments when a man is incapable of laughing, in those intimate moments when laughter is worse than an insult and exposes all the grotesquerie of an incandescent physiology. Desperate, Guillem could not by any means shake off his fascination with Conxa Pujol. He was unrecognizable. His apprehensions began to draw blood. And Conxa sustained this unbearable state with feigned tenderness and facile concessions, only to retreat to aloofness and withdrawal, baring the most inhuman teeth of the femme fatale, all in the hope that Guillem would find his way to where she hoped he would go, instinctively and under his own impetus.

  Something even worse made it impossible for Guillem to get to where Conxa would have liked him to go. It was his adoration of Conxa’s beauty. She was so marvelously assembled, the quality of her skin and her countenance were so otherworldly, that Guillem was left feeling openmouthed and unworthy in her presence. When he embraced her, the emotion Conxa produced in him suffused his nerves with all the vacillations and clumsiness of a novice. And so, what for a normal and tenderly feminine woman would have been cause for absolute surrender and an exchange of panting and secret melody between the man and the woman, was, in the case of Conxa Pujol, a disgusted desperation and a cause for laughter that shamed the disappointed lover.

  To the eye of a cold observer, Conxa could have appeared on those occasions to be a pure and simple vixen. In truth, Conxa’s suffering and desire were just as strong as Guillem’s. If she had confessed her erotic ideal, and Guillem had attempted to satisfy it, perhaps then Conxa could have experienced moments more to her liking, but they would have come about artificially. To satisfy her, Guillem would have donned a disguise that she had suggested. Conxa, to her own recollection, was too good a collector of authentic brutalities to be content with the dramas and farces of a luxury bordello. To confess would be unworthy. Conxa possessed the romantic kind of dignity that required that a woman never reveal anything, allowing herself to be ravished with closed eyes and clenched teeth. Any other way was not amusing.

  At the start of their intimate relationship, Conxa and Guillem saw each other at most once a week, in a secret place no one would ever discover. Neither he nor she offered any reason to suspect their liaison. This state of affairs went on for at least two years after the baron’s suicide. Always unsatisfied and more and more enamored of Conxa Pujol, Guillem underwent every imaginable torment. He always affected great dignity in her presence; he spoke very little of his family and his life before her, and this made it easier to keep her from learning about the sad economic situation they faced.

  After those two years of battle, Conxa began to be aware of Guillem’s failure. At the outset, Guillem had been in his element because the anxiety Conxa produced in him was the only justification he could find for the monotony of sex, yet he also realized his anxiety was to no avail, and Conxa was, indeed, unassailable.

  At this disappointing juncture, an exceedingly ordinary event changed things absolutely. In even the most abnormal or absurd erotic dramas, a decisive role is often played by an element as pedestrian and unliterary as money.

  A diffuse ill humor suffused Guillem’s digestive system, assaulting his head and giving him no quarter. For days now he had abandoned the fantasy of possessing Conxa. She had become inured to his constant adoration and he knew all the hospitable facets of his lover’s skin by heart. Guillem required a large amount of money. Not because he was in debt or otherwise compromised, but for the pleasure of having it and spending it. He got it into his head that it was precisely that woman, with whom he had always been unfailingly polite, who ought to give it to him. It amused him to stand before Conxa in the guise of an unscrupulous profiteer. Maybe this would be the pretext for a definitive breakup that would put an end to their misery.

  With utter sangfroid, and in the presence of her nudity, he asked Conxa for money. Conxa eyes lit up, and she said she would be delighted to give him whatever he asked, and he shouldn’t deny himself a thing. Guillem found strange not only Conxa’s excessive generosity but also the fact that she considered his request to be so natural. Soon, though, Conxa’s attitude shifted, and using language Guillem had never heard from her before, she launched into a sarcastic monologue. She informed him that his style of lovemaking was too puerile for him to be asking for money for his services, but despite this she didn’t mind giving him whatever he needed, and even keeping him, and paying for shirts and socks for him that were more elegant than the ones he usually wore. She said she looked upon him as a boy, for whom she was beginning to feel a kind of maternal affection, but as a gigolo he was a dud.

  Guillem had suffered this kind of humiliation before, but never with such ferocity and malice. And that day, Guillem was incensed. So, when Conxa finally ran out of steam with her immoral tatters, Guillem rose to his feet before her. All his muscles were tense and flushed with blood. Conxa summoned him with an icy smile and, without so much as by your leave, he gave her two slaps in the face with all his might. Conxa blanched, but she resisted the blows without the slightest peep of protest, just a deep sigh that dilated her ribcage and made the erect tips of her breasts stand upright. Guillem saw a mysterious breath that resembled her soul begin to emerge from between her lips. The glass of his lover’s eyes was no longer hard; her pupils had a more liquid, more human consistency; her cheeks had turned a cadaverous white, and her rouge marked a rough discontinuous patch on her bloodless skin. Guillem was furious, and he followed the first two slaps with a direct blow to her mouth; her lips contracted in pain, but then immediately reacted with a weak and exceedingly tender smile of complete beatitude. Conxa sank back onto the bed, and Guillem, his spine rigid as a cat’s, felt a burning liquor running through his medulla, perhaps the contained rage of his two years of failure, perhaps the atavic memory of a Lloberola who in days of yore had eaten human flesh.

  Guillem sank his teeth into her shoulder. Conxa howled with a bestial enthusiasm, and both he and she experienced the most important erotic moment of their lives.

  Conxa’s night in Hamburg had had nothing on this. Like a marvelous sea anemone found at water’s bottom, with wary contractile antennae full of corrosive viscosities that open up at a given moment and expand in a multicolored swoon that brings to mind perfectly denatured chrysanthemums and perfectly artificial orchids, so was the soul of that woman, and her sex and her ferocity and her joy and her enthusiasm and her tenderness began to liquefy, released and rend
ered in a gelatinous mystery of effusion, in a sighing melody beyond physiology, in a perspiration perfumed with the whole gamut of ultramarine atavisms and dark nights lit by the glow of shooting stars. Her skin, till now dry, insatiable, and cold as the belly of an iguana, was now softened, porous, hot, drenched by the thousands of internal arterioles that follow the rhythm of sincerity, that hold fast to the skin of men, and communicate from one heart to another all the anguish concentrated in the moments of sterile orgasm and unsatisfied desire.

  Guillem and Conxa got up from bed certain of their triumph. Without a word or a comment. Everything that had just happened to them had nothing to do with the world of logic. Nor did it have anything to do with the world of physiology. It would be very sad to have to stop believing that in the skin of men and women there is occasionally something like a flash of divinity, in which gods mingle with monsters, and the gods laugh delicately at morality and reason.

  The following day Guillem received double the amount he had demanded of his lover. Guillem did not attempt to refuse it, or even to say thank you. He kept the money, just as a wolf would have done.

  From that time on, Guillem was Conxa’s absolute master. Little by little her temperament and his underwent a change. Conxa began day by day to feel more tender, more feminine, more inferior; Guillem, in contrast, felt more and more self-possessed, he recovered his aplomb, his coldness and his hard surface. Guillem’s disdain distressed the baronessa, but she could no longer do without him. After the first inebriation, Conxa no longer had the strength to judge or analyze. In her eyes, Guillem became more worthy of adoration by the day. Conxa tasted the bitter effects of jealousy and came to know the entire gamut of tears.