Private Life

by Josep Maria de Sagarra

  Maria Lluïsa’s flaws, in the days when she was nearing her twentieth birthday, were hidden under her ever-so-tender skin, her luminous and artless smile, her natural, soaring way of doing things, and her quality of pure blood and distinction that adhered even to the drabbest and most conventional sweater restraining the rigid joy of her breasts.

  It was both the flaws and gifts of that young woman that brought into her life people the reader is already acquainted with. The pages to come will explain how, in human existence, whether by chance, by fate, or by predestination, names that had been separated come to be joined again. An invisible thread of some kind ties their souls together against their wills, and in the end men and women realize that they have staked all their blood on a useless farce of a game. The only thing left of it is a bit of a bad taste in the mouth and a few steps forward on the road to death.

  The name of the friend who had had the two abortions was Teresa Martínez. She was older than Maria Lluïsa, and had been frequenting Rosa Trènor’s apartment for a good while. Since we abandoned Rosa Trènor at the entrance to the Grill Room, after she slashed Frederic’s face and wrapped herself in the balding skin of her beaver coat, her life had taken quite a few turns. She had cloaked her life of revelry and sentimentality in tones of respectability. When she realized that the exploitation of her body was a losing business, Rosa Trènor opted to exploit others’ bodies.

  Rosa Trènor established her business with the utmost discretion. Secrecy and mystery were her accomplices. The friends of her youth and the pleasant clients of her autumn years visited Rosa Trènor’s house on the pretext of having a glass of champagne or a cup of tea. Everything else was up to Rosa Trènor, and her friends were utterly satisfied. The staff she chose for the business were girls from needy homes and even some from good families. From typists to members of the tennis club: a bit of everything. A very small and perfectly reliable staff.

  At the time of the Exposició Universal, Rosa established a great friendship with an extremely important person, a general. Rosa’s every wish was his desire. At that point she expanded other facets of her little business. She bought a few thousand meters of pornographic film and she installed a baccarat table. Rosa Trènor’s apartment was on the second floor of the building, the traditional noble floor, where one would least expect such a place. A plaque on the door that read “La Aseguradora Agrícola, S. A.,” lent the landing an aura of actuarial and agricultural normalcy. The neighborhood watchman knew the score and his palm was well-greased. The attendees at Rosa Trènor’s place were the crème de la crème of Barcelona.

  In that new phase of her life, Rosa Trènor was able to put her entire pretentious grande dame repertoire to use. The way she received her clients was worthy of admiration, and the blasé aristocratic smirk that settled onto her plump velvety cheeks so as to play down the importance of things, particularly when the time came to set a price, was also worthy of admiration. To enter Rosa Trènor’s apartment, one had to meet a goodly number of requirements. But for a gentleman known to some degree for his honorability and for the solidity of his bank account, it was sufficient just to present his card. The pornographic films were one of Rosa’s great ruses for reaching other things from which she could derive fatter earnings, particularly the gaming table. The Dictatorship had prohibited gambling throughout Spain, and the fact was that wagering aficionados would have done just about anything to be able to place a decent bet. Rosa Trènor’s baccarat cured no few neurasthenias among the gentry of the time. She had clients who went exclusively for the pornographic films; they tended to be all false teeth and hair more white than black. Rosa Trènor tolerated the parasites of the industry because among them were some who were considered to be the most gelatinous and influential. When the obscene film sessions in Rosa Trènor’s apartment were over, occasionally a retired general or an ancient marquis and president of a religious association would have to grab onto the banister so they wouldn’t fall down the stairs. The doctors registered many burst arteries among the most illustrious elders as a consequence of those films.

  From time to time Rosa Trènor would organize custom-made sessions that she said were “for the family.” At those times the only people allowed in were certain gentlemen and ladies who were party to a secret pledge. The ladies who had the good fortune to attend one of those sessions would only refer to them with an exquisite vagueness, never going into detail. Some husbands who happened upon the lair never in their lives learned that the night before, their wives had been indisposed by a glass of lemonade owing to the upset stomach produced by the viewing of one of the most positively filthy scenes a commercial imagination can invent. Such tender and mysterious questions of chance in the life of married couples seem to have bestowed some interest on the elegant set of the times.

  With the fall of the dictator, Rosa Trènor suffered serious damages. She was reported by the police and she was fortunate enough to be able to make the baccarat table and the projector of indecencies disappear in time. If she hadn’t, it was quite possible that with all her airs of grandeur she would have ended up at the prison on Carrer d’Amàlia.

  In fact, Rosa avoided any substantial mishaps, and one particularly well-informed gentleman in the most sepulchral ring of a circle prone to arthritis, affirmed that Rosa Trènor had been saved by the freemasons.

  With the coming of the Republic, Rosa confined herself to maintaining her best clients, who came for sentimental reasons. On Sunday afternoons Rosa would go to the Ritz, always in the company of a couple of “nieces.” Even among young men well-versed in the riddles of courtship there were many unaware of the true meaning of Rosa Trènor’s table. In that somewhat hybrid and pretentious Sunday air, Rosa played a very dignified role. Her dresses were even elegant, and her makeup was very appropriate to her forty-five skeptical years of age. When some young man would ask one of her “nieces” to dance, Rosa would cast him a maternal glance of the kind that asks the boy not to get fresh and to be considerate of the purity and excellent upbringing of the young woman who yields to his embrace to take in five minutes of tango.

  Occasionally, a husband who was a client of Rosa’s would attend the Sunday session with his wife and daughters. Generally, husbands who went for tea with their families turned out to be particularly depraved. Rosa knew this very well, and between her and the husband a half hour’s dialogue would take place consisting only of three glances exchanged in such a way that not a single detail was left hanging. Many ladies went to the Ritz with a pure innocence. They were oblivious to the fact that when their husbands offered a chocolate éclair to the blondest girl in that domestic convoy, with a simple blink of the eyes he had just signed off on a conspiracy punishable by law with that dark lady across the table, who picked up a fluted neula wafer with a virginal gesture, as if she were drawing a Madonna lily close to the powdered environs of her nose.

  When she took the daughter of her ex-lover into her home as a patient, Rosa Trènor’s friendship with Níobe Casas had just begun. As a result she had begun to see Bobby Xuclà with some frequency, because Bobby, to the stupefaction of his acquaintances, had taken the disconcerting gypsy woman under his wing. Teodora Macaia had been the one to introduce Bobby, as she had done with the Comte de Sallés. Bobby found the dances, and the people who surrounded Níobe, to be revoltingly stupid, but the belly and the armpits of the dancer had made an unsurpassable impression on him. Níobe accepted Bobby without realizing that she had acquired the most decent, liberal, and polite patron in Barcelona. She took advantage of him in a way that did not give the lie to her gypsy origins, but Bobby didn’t like to argue, and his checking account was fat and prodigal. When she wasn’t onstage, Níobe was a voracious eccentric with a positively efficient conservative and bourgeois core. The surrealist gypsy turned out to be a farce, and Bobby caught on to her right away. Her horror at diamonds was only for public display, and after a while it became clear that Níobe cared a great deal more for diamonds than for the spider wings o
f her cache-sexe. It was precisely for the purpose of purchasing some of those gems that Níobe came to meet Rosa Trènor, because if from time to time a fairly decent deal fell into Rosa’s hands, she wouldn’t say no to it. Even some ladies of unquestionable honor had had dealings with her to acquire a fox coat or a string of pearls at a good price.

  Some nights Bobby and Níobe would go to the Pingouin. Rosa Trènor was a fairly assiduous client of that establishment. She didn’t usually take any “nieces” there; instead, generally, she was accompanied by a gentleman of a certain age. Every so often, even a professional dancer or some very young boy whom no one knew would sit at her table.

  Bobby really liked that early morning haunt, because everything there was to his taste and his way of being. Níobe forgot all about her dances, and curled all her coppery skin up in a corner. Far from her literary admirers, the dancer’s teeth might even risk a sandwich of filet mignon or a portion of Italian pasta.

  Of all the new things produced in Barcelona during the Republic, none was as successful and delightful as the Pingouin. No one knows why, but in those days the habitués of the wee hours felt a great attraction to the blood-red velvet divans and slightly pharmaceutical bar of that outfit on Carrer d’Escudellers. The Pingouin owed its allure to a gramophone with a mute, and to the priceless décor. The walls were hung with wallpaper showing wine-colored flowers against a background dark as squid’s ink that might have been meant for a skilled laborer’s bedroom in 1893. The Pingouin offered a gallery of unreachable boxed seats, where no one ever sat. Decked out in a green lamé fabric, they seemed made to order for a wizard to murder astral bodies or cook up an ectoplasm paella. The ceiling and the columns that held it up still preserved the filthy paint from the former warehouse turned into a dive for night crawlers. From the ceiling hung a naïf decoration. The owner had strung up a few lengths of wire holding wallpaper that showed peach blossom branches in flower. They formed a picture of innocence, a symmetrical green and pink spider web over the gray waves of stale smoke.

  The music at the Pingouin was topnotch. Waltzes from before the war and contemporary rumbas, combined with Hawaiian guitars, Russian balalaikas and Tyrolean ocarinas, and dive-y accordions from Argentina and from riffraff the world over. The music, whatever music it was, picked up the rhythm of the establishment: a rhythm of boiled bones sloughing off their flesh, in lyrical and philanthropic convulsions, and above all a rhythm of silent sloth, distracted and barely conscious, the kind of lazy patience for which a quarter of an hour or an hour are all the same. The kind that watches the roses wilt on the tables as the sun climbs high in the sky and the street-cleaning hoses have used up all the water in the street.

  Women came to the Pingouin with evening escorts already arranged, or with their current squeeze. They were relaxed and unassuming, their makeup often a ruin, with whiskey starting to trickle down hairdos tortured by bleach and marcel waves. Any arrangements made once inside were either a last resort or the result of the influence of the red of the roses and the sickly amber of the gin. Somewhere between six and seven in the morning a woman perched on a barstool, her tongue nebulous with drink, might cling to the arm of a solitary Scandinavian who had probably taken a vow of chastity. At the Pingouin anything was possible at closing time. Conversations there could just as easily be liquid and vaporous as lucid, uncompromising and realistic, without a shadow of mercy. Many couples would drop in at the Pingouin before going off to bed in order to capture a few whiffs of madness or resignation that would add a little greenery to the sad flesh of copulation.

  The audience at the Pingouin was a mix of delicate and austere people, well-meaning poets, and certified drunks, not to mention bilge rats, men who lived off the flesh of women, and boatswains with no strings attached, who had arrived in the morning aboard a cargo ship and were carrying bank notes pressed like dead butterflies between their bellies and their belts. These sailors would hire an interpreter who had most likely been a gunslinger for some union, who would dart quickly in and out, with canine eyes, wearing a cheap suit, to let the sailors know that outside four women, like four phosphorescent mermaids, were awaiting them, when it truth it was only the four most faded souls from the bottom of Carrer de la Unió o Carrer de Sant Pau.

  There were always two or three couples dancing at the Pingouin. Occasionally, revelers full of good humor and good manners would come in and concoct some eccentric dance steps. Other times a refined, but entirely drunk, gentlemen from a Nordic clime would start dancing all by himself, bowing to everyone and bothering no one. The Pingouin’s salient feature was its great tolerance. Only with great difficulty could one come to fists or to fingernails. Within those walls alcohol became metaphysical, full of comprehension and soul. Everything moved to the rhythm of the music, everything was muted, everything had the flexibility of a rumba and the water of the port brewing in the belly of the gramophone.

  Few people grasped as Bobby did the slippery jellyfish delight that floated in the air of the Pingouin. He would greet the better class of kept women, who arrived arms full of fresh roses and hungry as tigers, with a gray smile. Every so often he would order a bottle of Pommery to be uncorked to give the place a little grandeur. Bobby couldn’t stand the stuff; for him champagne was only good for wetting the tips of his moustache. Even when Níobe didn’t come along, Bobby would go to the Pinguoin with a friend, or a select married couple he had picked up at the Hollywood, a high-octane cabaret that had got its start around the same time, where many tender bourgeois ladies of Barcelona would go with their husbands to contemplate the celestial breasts of the Cuban women and dance bawdy, Tabarinesque dances, surrounded by the sultry aroma of the prostitutes.

  One night at the Pingouin, Rosa Trènor took the opportunity to speak with Bobby about a little business deal with a smidgen of drama. That motley, absent, and dead ambiance seemed the most appropriate to her for concocting a scene in which she and he would play the role of specters that emerged from another atmosphere. The topic was Maria Lluïsa de Lloberola. By the intercession of her friend Teresa, Maria Lluïsa had confided in Rosa Trènor. Rosa didn’t let her get away. That marvelous creature bore the same blood as a man with strong ties to Rosa Trènor’s history, and Rosa, who was just as silly, romantic, and transcendental as ever, grabbed hold of what chance had placed within her grasp to extricate that chapter that is usually titled “Twenty Years Later,” in which the heart of the protagonist, bloated with memories and emotions, is about to burst. Rosa did not consider the possibility of exploiting Maria Lluïsa for one of her discreet and excellent latter day concerns. The woman’s dreadfully trashy mentality perceived in Maria Lluïsa’s blithe disposition a vengeance of destiny, the final act of a drama in which Rosa Trènor believed she had deposited her heart, when in truth she had deposited nothing but a little bit of stomach.

  The only man who could be of use to Rosa in her perverse plot was Bobby. Another high-class client would have turned the scene into a banal anecdote of no importance. Bobby listened with his eyes half-closed as Rosa told her story. He said neither yes nor no. Bobby was a pretty decent guy. All his life long no one could accuse him of anything malicious or mean spirited, nothing that would sully a man’s elegance. But like most people from his circle, skeptical and disabused, lacking in passion, every so often it amused him to try a taste of something that might seem perverse or even have a touch of evil. Since Bobby had broken off relations with Frederic, he hadn’t thought for a moment of making peace with that smug and tedious man, but neither did he bear him the slightest hatred. Frederic’s affronts to Bobby’s mother were nothing new to him. He was aware of the opinion many ungenerous people had of the Widow Xuclà. Frederic meant nothing to Bobby. His economic disasters, the absurd life he was living on his estate, didn’t affect him in the slightest. But Rosa Trènor’s insinuations piqued his curiosity. Bobby also saw something of a final curtain in the affair at hand, and he realized he could act with impunity, playing the role of a traitor. Unseemly
though it may be, sometimes this is the role a spectator would most enjoy playing.

  Maria Lluïsa had only a vague notion of who Bobby was, but she was aware of the friendship he had once had with her father, and of the reputation that bitter and scrupulously polite bachelor enjoyed among the elegant set. Maria Lluïsa shared the ideas of some young women of her time regarding mature men and callow boys. It had become fashionable to disparage “cute” and athletic boys, with their vanity in their physiques. They were considered lightweights, lacking in interest and discernment. They were attacked for their empty chit-chat and their inability to show a path to the stars. Young women like Maria Lluïsa preferred a man of substance, more polished and more experienced, to a speed demon or a tango dancer with slicked-back hair. Young woman like Maria Lluïsa liked to be taken seriously, to be treated with respect. If they were out to infatuate, they preferred a victim with stature and history to a gigolo whose only concern was how to dress, and how to get undressed in staler latitudes.

  Maria Lluïsa and Bobby met one day at Rosa Trènor’s house, and something happened to Bobby that had never happened to him before: he fell in love like a little kid.

  He swapped the role of the traitor for that of the gallant young man, tender and pure, right out of a romantic love story. Bobby hid his feelings and tried to play the cynic, the paternal yet despicable man of the world who reveals that the whole plot revolves around a superficial fantasy. His behavior delighted Maria Lluïsa. She found him extraordinarily charming. His fifty years of age weren’t the slightest obstacle. Maria Lluïsa wanted to be more and more modern, and his gray hair was a perfect fit for her state of mind. Bobby conducted himself splendidly with her, accentuating his generosity with a cool amiability that allowed her to retreat.