A man like this in the midst of a family, even an impassive family without an ounce of critical sense, ends up filling every room with corrosive vapors. His wife had many of her own defects but in a less strident way, more muted, one might say. She was dull, whiny, sniveling, hypocritical, vague, acidic, but even her acid was diluted with a great deal of water. Frederic’s wife didn’t realize who he was; she rebuffed him for reasons that were not exactly what made him so impossible – his infidelities, reproofs, bugbears, and lack of money – all of which could have been tolerated if Frederic simply hadn’t been such a bore. And the most painful part is that he was no ordinary bore, oh no. If Frederic had been an ordinary man, as normal, sad and insignificant as you like, perhaps he would still have been tolerable. Frederic, in his own way of being, was an exceptional man, an original. An exceptional bore, despicable and gentlemanly, innocent and suspicious, generous and miserly, irresponsible, insubstantial, loud, false, and cowardly. Full of the most quixotic and most sublime illusions, defeated and self-important, he had been disarmed by life like no other.
His influence on his children was disastrous. If ever there was a man who didn’t have the slightest idea of what it meant to educate a child, it was Frederic. When Don Tomàs had educated Frederic, he had believed in a few norms. His criteria might be good or bad, he might cling to asceticism, or morality, or nobility, or to the Sunday parish letter, or whatever, but between hassocks and cuffs to the back of the head, he followed those criteria. The results of his method were terrible, but it was a method. Not Frederic. He had reached the point of having no shame with regard to his children, and he would swing back and forth between punishment, shouting, and violence, and letting them do whatever they pleased. His children had no respect for him; bitterness and conjugal battle were their daily spectacle. Doubtless some of the things that were passed on to the progeny of Frederic de Lloberola and Maria Carreres, which the reader who continues to read this story will hear about, were caused by the terrible education and poor example of a household whose head was a failure as a father and in every other way.
Not that we can have a great deal of faith, in this world, in pedagogy or the healthy influence of parents on their children, because every home is a world unto itself and every technique fails. But what is certain is that, for temperaments like those of the Lloberola family, the pressure of a man like Frederic comes to produce the most absolute demoralization: the demoralization of exhaustion, smothering, and loss of respect. It cannot be said of Frederic that he is a criminal or a thief or excessively debauched, or an alcoholic, or black of heart, or anything like that. Indeed, such vices, when present in the father, have been known to behave as reactants, making the children resistant to vice. Frederic is simply a bore, simply a pain, simply insignificant, simply wretched, and the end result is the desire for the disappearance or death of a person whom by nature one ought to love and respect.
And this is what Frederic’s children felt, spurred on even more by Maria’s sourpuss expression and all the sighs and lamentations of Grandmother Carreres. The one who bore the most guilt for all that disaffection and exhaustion was Frederic. He had brought three children into the world without a drop of enthusiasm because, when he lost his illusions about his wife, he lost his illusions about paternity. It’s not that he didn’t love them, nor that he hadn’t suffered when as little ones they bumped their knees against the corner of a table. But he loved them in a very peculiar way; his distress came more from the annoyance of hearing them cry than from tenderness and compassion for a child who has hurt himself. In truth, they got on his nerves, and he fled the house whenever he could. His children never required any effort, or gave him any headaches. They had their mother, their grandparents, their nannies, and he had plenty to do, gambling at the Eqüestre, or trying out an automobile, or chasing after a woman, or being a monumental pain, or arguing, or sitting around. When things started really going badly for him, when he ought to have behaved with humility, when he had to accept a sad salary at the Banc Vitalici, he would take his cowardly egotism out on his blameless children, depending on the mood he was in.
Since he needed to be seen as the wisest of them all, a gesture made by one of his children in all innocence – a shrug of the shoulders, for example – would be seen by Frederic as proof of a terrible instinct for depravity that had to be corrected. He would impose a disturbing, humiliating and unsuitable punishment on the child. The child would carry it out, not innocently, but rather with a resignation full of hatred for his father, taking note of his father’s wretchedness, showing obedience so that the wretchedness would not go any farther. Children often have more common sense and flexibility than adults.
Clearly when Frederic had his attack of rural melancholy and liberated himself by forgetting about his family, everyone breathed more easily in the apartment on Carrer de Bailèn.
Frederic thought of them occasionally, above all of Maria Lluïsa, his eldest daughter, who was almost twenty. Not that his thinking of her had anything to do with regret for his own behavior, or with baring his soul before his own conscience … Much to the contrary, he believed that his children didn’t love him because his wife had inculcated hatred for their father in them. He was a victim of his children, just as he had been a victim of his father. In his quarrels and fallings-out with Don Tomàs, it never occurred to Frederic that guilt is always two-sided, and that often no one is actually guilty but pure fate, the blind and contradictory biology that creates risible conflicts that, to some eyes, appear to be unassailable mountains. Frederic saw himself as pure, well-meaning, and angelic, and it was others who were his enemies and who were to blame for everything. This was not persecution mania. It was just emptyheadedness.
One of the clearest endorsements of Rosa Trènor’s patience or stupidity was her having put up with him as a lover. As we know, it was Bobby’s peculiar temperament and ennui that made him impervious to Frederic’s monologues and effrontery.
Back at Can Lloberola, Frederic was getting a little coarser by the day. He began to enjoy the radio, and the farmhands’ arguments about communism didn’t get on his nerves the way they used to. He would go three days without shaving. He would feel an agrarian tenderness when Soledat untied his leggings, and he would go red in the face if Francisca caught on. The farmers who played cards with him no longer called him Don Frederic; they called him Senyor Frederico, and one of them even called him Senyor Frederiquet, diminishing him with the diminutive. He just kept his eyes on the cards and didn’t move a muscle.
After dinner, when there was moonlight, he would wander around among the old castle stones. His heart bucolic and his belly full, he would listen to the crickets sing with tawdry sentimentalism. The castle stones took him back to the clouds of idealism. Alone, in the evening dew that was beginning to reveal the effects of arthritis, he would stiffen up and adopt the proper bearing of a Lloberola who speaks with the medieval shades of his ancestors. There he was, against all democracy, against all socialism, defending the traditions of a country to which he had never paid the slightest mind. For him, to have been born in Catalonia and to be called Lloberola meant to play bridge, to bring children into the world because that’s what one did, to lose a fortune, and to put on a new tie for the first time. Everything else was a waste of time. In the presence of the ruins, these criteria underwent some modification. He was disgusted by the bridge games, the children, the fortune, and the ties. He was suffused with the solemnity of paellas and salads prepared in the fields, the delightful sight of Soledat’s breasts, the stench of the stables, the chirping of the crickets, and the immutable pale yellow moon that cast a theatrical chiaroscuro over his ancestral ruins.
At nightfall, Frederic would visit the wine merchant’s wife. He was getting a little tired. His abdomen, his gray hair, his wrinkles all gave him away. In the games of love with the wine merchant’s wife he couldn’t be much more prodigal than with his fortune. Frederic was almost finished. Premature impotence was common
among the Lloberolas, and Frederic was beginning to feel the effects of that family flaw. He wasn’t old: he had just turned forty-eight. But day by day in his intimate physiology Frederic began to notice alarming symptoms. The wine merchant’s wife enveloped him in a cheap, tacky sentimentalism. Soledat, with her rouge and her chiffon stockings, and all the young bucks in town pressing up against her in the dance hall, was a finer prey. But Frederic needed to be flattered, and consoled. The wine merchant’s wife knew how to console him, and it thrilled her that a bona fide Senyor de Lloberola would deign to lie in her bed, in a bedroom that smelled of sheepskins, of the brotherhood of the Virgin of Pain, and of cheap cologne.
Frederic’s nose and heart were becoming accustomed to all this squalor. He even reached the point at which he found the appeal in a silk print nightgown the wine merchant’s wife wore. It was a black fabric with a pattern of orange-colored babies that looked as if they had been stolen from an orphanage.
AFTER HER HUSBAND’S death, Leocàdia moved out of the apartment on Carrer de Mallorca. Guillem would just as soon live in a hotel as in a pension, since no one knew where he would be sleeping or keeping his clothes. Leocàdia spent the first few months at Josefina’s house, but the poor woman wasn’t comfortable with the Marquesas de Forcadell. There was too much bustle and noise in their house. Josefina always had guests, the children were rowdy, and the marquis showed no signs of affection to his mother-in-law. Leocàdia was an early riser. She was accustomed to eating promptly at midday and dining early in the evening. In contrast, her daughter’s house was subject to constant disorder. The marquis would keep them waiting until ten p.m. and then telephone to say he wouldn’t be home for dinner. Josefina had developed an absolute passion for golf and many days she would stay in Sant Cugat for lunch. Leocàdia was flustered by all this, and she proposed to her daughter and son-in-law that she would be better off retreating to the abbey at Cluny. The Sisters of St. Joseph of Cluny took into their convent women who had been left alone by manic disorder, widowhood, or earthquake. In the convent, they didn’t exactly find Baudelairian “luxe, calme et volupté,” but they did find order, repose, and discipline, and enough comfort to satisfy their needs. In general, the ladies who retired with the Sisters of Cluny were from good families and highly educated, but wanting in fortune and affection.
Josefina and her husband didn’t find Leocàdia’s proposal acceptable. They thought their friends would be critical. It wasn’t right for the widow Marquesas de Sitjar, with two sons and a daughter married to a well-placed man, to be retiring to a nunnery like a poor widow or an ordinary spinster. When Josefina expressed this opinion, it was not because she had felt any particular pleasure in having Leocàdia under her roof; she was concerned mostly with what people would say. Don Tomàs’s will assigned Leocàdia a number of shares that produced at most a rent of some four hundred pessetes a month. This was sufficient for Leocàdia to pay her board at Cluny and cover her expenses, which were insignificant. Despite the frankly weak opposition of the Marquesas de Forcadell, Leocàdia installed herself in a pleasant cell at the convent, arranged her things there, and lived with more independence and tranquility than in the pompous and obstreperous apartment of her son-in-law.
Some old people, perhaps the immense majority of old people, who lived in harmony during a particular period of their lives, having felt an identification with a fashion or a set of ideas now considered passé, endure the latter years and changes not without protest and incomprehension. In truth, they are the survivors of their times, their fashions, or their ideas.
Old folk who have experienced a good moment in the past maintain a constant controversy with the new life that emerges day by day. If they say that something in the present is bad, it is not exactly for the reasons they adduce. It is bad for them, because the current thing is different from another bygone thing they considered to be good. If an old man affirms that women with short hair are less exciting than women with long hair, it is because back when he was prone to excitement, women wore their hair long. And if an old woman affirms that a man looks better with a beard and moustache, it is because the first man for whom she had feelings had a beard and moustache.
The more intense and fulfilling the bygone age of an old person was, the stronger the controversy, harsher the incomprehension, and more obdurate the protest before the evolution of things.
This criterion, which can be applied to the majority of respectable elders, could not be applied to Leocàdia, for the simple reason that Leocàdia had not lived any period of her life intensely. Leocàdia had always been a mere receptive vessel, without opinions or passions of any kind.
This is why Leocàdia was a delightful old lady. When her daughter was playing golf, not for a moment did she stop to think that between the days of her daughter and the days of her youth there was a notable difference, and she incorporated the word “golf” into her vocabulary beyond time and space. The only objection she had to the sport was that it was the reason lunch was served late or the reason she had to have lunch without her daughter. And she felt the same way about everything else as she did about golf. When her granddaughter Maria Lluïsa showed up to visit her wrapped in a trench coat, alone, after work in an office where she was employed as a secretary, the widow Marquesa de Sitjar didn’t complain or find anything strange in her granddaughter’s situation, even though in her youth no young woman of her class would go out in the street by herself, or wear a trench coat, or take a job as a secretary to earn her living.
If Leocàdia had not enjoyed this sweet numbness, her later years would have been much grimmer, because the same lady who had taken so many pains with all the family furniture and relics of the splendor of the Lloberolas in the apartment on Carrer de Mallorca later sold off most of that furniture with great indifference. This can only be explained by accepting that her earlier pains and care were only a reflection of the importance her husband attributed to the furniture. Once Don Tomàs disappeared, along with the pathetic and grandiose exaltation he applied to anything that made reference to his past history, Leocàdia felt as passive and indifferent to the furniture as she did to everything else. As we have already said in another part of this story, Leocàdia’s marriage had had a sort of mimetic quality, and she had adapted to it and completely annulled herself. As we have also already said, Leocàdia’s protests regarding her husband’s profligacy and wild-eyed notions were very feeble, responding only to a woman’s natural instinct for preservation.
Thanks to this temperament, Leocàdia wasn’t the slightest bit humiliated by living as a boarder in the Cluny convent. And, since in this world the same causes produce morally contradictory effects on different individuals, perhaps it was also as a result of the hereditary transfer of Leocàdia’s temperament to her son Guillem that he too felt no sense of humiliation on accepting three hundred pessetes from Dorotea Palau, the dressmaker, and on later accepting whatever he required from the widow Baronessa de Falset.
The family member to whom Leocàdia was closest was Maria Lluïsa, Frederic’s daughter. Maria Lluïsa loved her grandmother because she never divined in her clear blue eyes the slightest drop of bitterness or surprise. Leocàdia was like a child without enthusiasm. Maria Lluïsa was a passionate child. Leocàdia’s feelings for her granddaughter were exactly the same as her feelings for her son, Guillem: tremendous tenderness, mixed with fear. That twenty year-old girl, as determined as she was reserved, as affectionate as she was elusive, gave her grandmother the shivers. Leocàdia never said a word to Maria Lluïsa, never gave her a sermon or tried to understand her. Leocàdia sensed that nothing would come of it.
Private Life Page 30