Private Life

by Josep Maria de Sagarra

  Maria Lluïsa didn’t stop to weigh the consequences. Her habit of improvisation and living day to day allowed her to accept Bobby’s friendship at face value, without having to think about what would happen tomorrow. All she had to do was pretend, and justify Bobby’s attentions. Maria Lluïsa had achieved considerable independence from her mother, but it was important to her, above all, to avoid any kind of scandal. The rumor had reached Maria Carreres’ ears that her daughter’s ways might be a little too modern, but Maria Carreres felt impotent in the face of her daughter’s power. Frederic, at that point, was completely divorced from his family. He had no authority over his children, nor did he care to. Frederic was a lost cause. When Maria Lluïsa met Bobby, it hadn’t been long since Don Tomàs had died, and Frederic was adrift in the arms of the wine merchant’s wife and the delirium of her black nightgown with the pumpkin-colored babies’ print. Breathing in the dust from the stones of his castle, Frederic had no desire to see his wife or their apartment on Carrer de Bailèn ever again. Nor was he aware of the little temperature he had every evening. The people in the town said he was going mad. What was really going on in Frederic’s body was tuberculosis, which would send him to his grave only a few years later. In Barcelona no one knew anything about this, and Maria Lluïsa didn’t miss her father’s lectures or his baloney a single bit. Without her father around, the air was cleared for her to spin out the golden thread of her dreams.

  One day, Maria Carreres spoke to her daughter about a few things, some rumors she had heard, but Maria Lluïsa played her part to perfection, and her mother had no choice but to exclaim: “God be with you! It’s in your hands now, Maria Lluïsa! You’ll be sorry.” In a word, all the things a mother says when she sees that nothing can be done.

  Not only that, Maria Lluïsa’s mother didn’t allow Grandmother Carreres to stick her nose in these affairs. Economically, the apartment on Carrer de Bailèn depended on Grandmother Carreres. Yet Frederic’s insipid wife, aware of her impotence with regard to her daughter, thought it was more sensible to play along and mask the situation. This was her way of averting scenes by the grandmother that, instead of convincing Maria Lluïsa, would only have strained the atmosphere. Over the years Maria Carreres had become a woman of frayed morals. Like an old garter, her morals applied no pressure and held nothing up. Whimpering all the way, she accepted her mother’s favors and swallowed all the old woman’s foul and contemptuous remarks. She preferred not to see things, letting herself be deceived and convinced for the sake of peace. The woman’s psychology, like the fabric of her dress, had the look of a hand-me-down. The strategy Maria Carreres had learned from the Lloberolas was to keep up appearances and bury her head in the sand like an ostrich. With a happy, shameless smile, she would make her round of visits, giving news of her own as if she were speaking of the Holy Family, when everyone knew about Frederic’s absurd life, and knew that her daughter worked in a bank, and wore a string of pearls – of the kind that bode no good and are fodder for gossip among more pious souls – around her neck.

  Bobby received Maria Lluïsa in the little apartment he kept for affairs of the heart. The girl planted a few fuchsias, some red geraniums and a number of violets in Bobby the skeptic’s small spiritual garden, heretofore lacking in light or water or the slightest drop of hope. Maria Lluïsa’s freshness, her exceptional grace, the way she had of alternating modesty and impudence, were things that Bobby had thought no longer existed in this world. When he rediscovered them in Maria Lluïsa’s skin, he began to fear that he had been mistaken, that his idea of life and of women had served to create a reputation for him among the most elegant and boring sets as a polite man who never gets ruffled or surrenders himself entirely, but had probably ruined him for feeling all the flavor of madness in a pure and simple mouth that besides communicating the warm breath of another’s lungs, also delivers the uncontrollable mystery of a soul.

  In his heart of hearts what was happening was that Bobby was getting old and starting to dodder.

  “MY HUSBAND EXHAUSTED all his available kindness on me. If he didn’t do more, it was because he simply didn’t have the wherewithal. He was not to blame for his medullary disease; he was a specter who fell in love with me, never suspecting his condition. Everyone lied to my husband; I was the only one who didn’t lie to him. My mother was not the kind of woman who could understand what I was doing, what she practically obliged me to do. Our marriage was just one of the many marriages of the time. It was also not my husband’s fault that on our return from Venice, one month after we were married, I, who was living in a dream, had to resign myself to being a nurse to a dying man. My husband had a nobility that I have not sensed in any other man. With his gaze he asked me only one thing, always the same thing: he asked me to forgive him for having married me, to forgive him for having turned me into a nurse. Perhaps the only worthwhile thing I have done is to understand that request for forgiveness and to feel grateful for it, more grateful than for any of the embraces of an irresistible seducer. At that point to be anything less than true to him would have been the greatest ignominy, in my eyes. If I had found myself by the side of a healthy, dominant husband, the kind who kill a woman with kindness but basically keep her in her place, I might very well have been unfaithful. At this stage, I don’t think so, but I couldn’t swear to it. What I can indeed swear to is that it never even remotely occurred to me to offend my husband. I find that for most women, nothing can be more compelling than a pair of impotent, supplicating eyes that see in us the prestige of a mother, that feel the confidence our hand bestows when we place it on a forehead for the sole purpose of transmitting our disinterested womanly spirit. My husband’s gaze was that of a sick child, a child fifteen years older than I, and I was only twenty at the time. I felt an obligation to those eyes.”

  “I am writing these lines to console myself a bit. To remember that at twenty I wasn’t an entirely stupid girl, and I knew how to capture all the mortified adoration in the gaze of a sick man.”

  “When my husband died, I put on an act. I didn’t know you could produce tears without feeling anything. But I realized it was possible. The funereal faces of everyone around me, in addition to my own nervous exhaustion, made it easy for me to behave accordingly. I cried, I cried a lot, but it was entirely artificial. I would be lying if I said that I didn’t feel great tenderness toward my husband. But I would also be lying if I tried to pretend that I wasn’t hoping for him to die. What I don’t understand is why I wanted it so badly, if in the end it didn’t solve anything for me. As long as my husband was alive, his gaze kept me company, it even satisfied my ego to discover I was useful and to offer that poor sick man consolation. Once he was dead, even that was gone. I confess that when they carried him off, it seemed as if they were removing a bad dream from my heart. But years later, I must also confess that I missed that bad dream.”

  “I was never beautiful. I was never one of those women men find exciting. I don’t want to kid myself. I’m certain of this. In my youth, I had enough intuition and enough presence of mind to realize it. Since my husband died, I have had thousands of opportunities to realize that my material fortune was of no little consequence, much more than my natural endowments. By twenty-five I was a widow and completely free. My mother was dead and I held one of the most brilliant positions in Barcelona. In those days, I had an obsession. I thought no one liked me, and I made every effort, I even humiliated myself, to be nice to people. But I could see it was all for nothing. They would show kindness in many different ways, they would flatter me to excess, but it all seemed fake to me. Now that I’m sixty years old, I think maybe I was imagining things. It’s possible someone might have fallen in love with me in all good faith, if I hadn’t been so standoffish with men when the time came for a tête-à-tête, and even more so if I hadn’t been the victim of that peculiar melancholy that obliged me to distance myself from people. Now that I’m looking back with a cool head, the air I adopted seems frankly stupid. Not that what wa
s happening to me at that point was my fault. Since my first marriage had been a disaster, I didn’t want to expose myself to a second. In those days I couldn’t help but think that my great fortune was sufficient for any man to have faked the most vivid love without a second thought. I don’t think I was so mistaken about this. Despite the opinion of most of my friends, I am rather gullible; even now anyone can take me in. Nowadays, naturally, I couldn’t care less, because I have nothing to lose, but at age twenty-five I had more than enough reasons to be mistrustful and to be protective of my own innocence. Since I had started to know myself a bit, I was afraid that if I allowed myself to risk being deceived, they would almost certainly deceive me. And this was why, on the one hand, I made such an effort to be nice and to conquer the dislike I believed I inspired in others, and on the other, if I started a conversation with a man, I did my best to avoid any insinuations.”

  “Now there are times when I think that all the pains I took in those days were quite unwarranted, and perhaps I might have done better to let myself be deceived. And other times I think exactly the opposite, and I believe I behaved perfectly, because, living alone as I have, with such independence, I have been able to see the word and take advantage of opportunities that I probably wouldn’t have had if I had married. Still, one thing or the other, it’s all the same, because I’m sixty now and there’s nothing I can do about it. I find it very idiotic when people spend so much time worrying about the things they’ve left behind and the mistakes they’ve made. I think things turned out this way because this was the only way they could turn out, and that maybe my reasons for not marrying are entirely different, and have nothing to do with the way I explain things to myself.”

  “It’s strange, though. By the time I was thirty I had completely abandoned the idea of a new marriage. I’ve had plenty of opportunities to do what a number of my friends of mine have done, but I’ve resisted. Maybe I’ve been cold, but I’ve always felt that unless there is real love, the other part is disgusting. As for real love, I doubt I’ve inspired it in anyone. If I haven’t done what so many other women have done, I don’t think it was out of any moral scruples; I think I could have overcome all kinds of scruples, because in other respects I haven’t had any at all. That’s just the way it was, and clearly this is how my life was supposed to turn out. I have it on good authority that all kinds of lies are told about me. People don’t believe that a person as free as I am, who has always done whatever she wanted, who has traveled half the world and not been religious or a prude, has denied herself the pleasure of sleeping with a man. Everyone who thinks this about me is mistaken: I haven’t known any other man than my poor husband, and I can even swear that I knew him very little, almost not at all. A few friends and a few books have explained to me what love in its most secret intimacies is like. I can affirm that I know nothing of all this: I am almost as innocent as a child before puberty.”

  “Nor has any religious idea been behind this. Because I believe in the religion my mother taught me, but I have never wanted to give it much thought. I am certain that if I started to think too hard about it I would end up losing my faith; the faith I have today is just as weak as it was when I was twenty. I have kept it this way all my life. Perhaps my chastity has allowed me to continue going to confession twice a year. I have very little love lost for priests, and if I had found myself under compulsion to tell them certain things, it’s possible I would have stopped practicing. Since I’ve never done anyone a bad turn, my confessions are very brief, and I make it a point to find a priest who doesn’t know me and will make quick work of it.”

  “Not all the things I have accomplished in this world have been exclusively out of vanity. I know that vanity is my worst defect, but I feel that I have often invested my actions with generosity and even idealism. If my life has any grace at all it is in not having succumbed to the routine of the majority of women of my class. I know people have considered me a snob. Maybe there is some truth in it: maybe I have been a slave to fashion. But I like to think that I have been sincere much more often. And, above all, that my actions have obeyed a natural impulse. Perhaps the circumstances of my life and the freedom I have always enjoyed have helped me be exactly who I am.”

  “What interested me were books and traveling and people with a certain spirit, just as what interested me in fashion and human relations were their most ephemeral charms and their most sensitive details. In my home I have sought to arrange things so that an intelligent person can find corners on which to rest his eyes. And I have sought out the conversation and company of these intelligent people, just as I confess that I have sought out the company of people who are no less brilliant for having been the worst idiots in the futile life of our country. There have been times when I have not wanted anyone to get the better of me, which has left me open to accusations of being an eccentric or even a madwoman, and even of being what I have never been: an unnatural woman.”

  “I believe that a woman who is not very feminine has no place in the world. It is true that in one essential sense of life I haven’t been at all feminine: I mean I have not been a mother. But in all the other ways, externally, spectacularly, I have wanted to be more feminine and more exigent than the rest. I have looked at myself in the mirror many times, and I know perfectly well how to separate beauty from elegance. Perhaps it is also my particular sin of vanity to believe that elegance is more important than beauty.”

  “If I have not had children, if I have not been able to love a man as I had dreamed of doing, I have made sure to do innumerable favors and to be a true friend. At sixty years of age, I realize exactly how naïve I have been and how far I have taken my lack of cynicism …”

  “With all the favors I’ve done, I am sure none has been met with gratitude. The women I have felt closest to and had the most affection for, the persons I have aided morally and materially, are the ones who have criticized me the most and invented the most lies about me. I know that my society and my class is the least imaginative and most malicious of them all. If I have tried to play a more active and personal part in works of culture and beneficence than most of these ladies, they have only seen in my actions the desire to stand out and be praised. On occasion, and in all innocence, I have traveled in the company of men, good, discreet friends of mine, because I find that I can talk about anything with men, and it doesn’t get boring, as it does with my close women friends. And some of these men, while still dispensing all the attentions a lady deserves, have come to treat me in the cordial and evenhanded way they would any companion. The long journeys I have made in these conditions have been some of the loveliest moments of my life. Later I learned how the most spiritual and refined ladies I received in my home had criticized me. I’ve had one good fortune: I have not been very affected by what people said or thought about me. I get this spirit of independence of from Mamà.”

  “I know my culture is very shallow, and there have been those, more sincere or less pleasant than the rest, who have made it clear to me that I am a perfectly ordinary woman whose ideas are sadly banal. I have never pretended to be wise, and I do not envy anyone his talent. I have enjoyed life in my own way, and I have felt great emotion. Even if I was not a person one might call sensitive, I have endeavored to listen to people I found sensitive, in order to modify my taste, and I have learned to enjoy things I felt impervious to by nature. If artists and men of letters have had some regard for me, it has been owing to my inclination to listen and learn and my willingness to modify my own criteria. I know I have been considered grotesque, ridiculous, and pretentious. But by behaving as I did, I have saved myself from boredom and, along the way, either with my name or my money, I have done a bit of good for my country.”

  “What has most harmed me has been my lack of discretion, particularly in conversation. Though this has been interpreted as duplicity on my part, I am convinced, sadly, that it is simply the fruit of my ingenuousness and my belief that others are as well-meaning as I. My friend X has said so
many times; naturally, I protested. Later, with the passage of time, I have concluded that my friend X was absolutely right. I have been and continue to be nauseatingly innocent.”

  “At sixty years of age, I find myself desperately alone. My fortune has dwindled greatly, and I must make an effort to save. Many people have left my side, but I still have a weakness for wanting to know what is going on, in particular for the latest thing, and for what can bring about a change in my country. Many of my friends criticize me for supporting the Republican government. They say I’m an old woman and I should be ashamed of being so juvenile, and I’d be better off shutting myself up at home. The truth is, I’ve been shut up in my home for years, and I am never so happy as when I am sitting by the fireside, surrounded by my memories and in the company of my thoughts. When someone comes to take me out for a little trip, or some escapade, it embarrasses me to confess that I’m no young woman any more, and I get tired, or that I’m in no mood to be disturbed, and out of vanity, pure and simple vanity, I still go out as if I were twenty-five. But I’m less and less in the mood.”

  “I would have liked to know how to write. I would have liked to be of use to my world by writing my memories of everything I’ve seen in this life, because in my position, I have met many people, and seen much grandeur and much misery. Writing a memoir is a constant temptation for me. Some people have urged me to do it, in good faith, I think. Today I’ve written down these things about myself to see if I am inspired to continue writing what I know of others. I have tried to start a story with a series of disorderly confessions. I am only at the start and I’m already fading. I wonder if, in the little bit I have written so far, I have been honest with myself. Maybe I have portrayed myself as too much of a victim, maybe I have neglected to say that both at heart and on the surface I am nothing but a selfish woman …”