Private Life

by Josep Maria de Sagarra

  ON CARRER DE BARBERÀ a man has just been killed. He saw how two policemen carried the man off to the clinic. Amid the cobblestones, the man’s warm trampled blood was transferred from the valves of a heart to the soles of anonymous shoes and espadrilles. The desecration of human blood is a thing the civil codes of modern countries do not punish. That day, on Carrer de Barberà, there was no little blood to be desecrated, as criminals often use bullets with no sense of decorum. The faces of the people at the door to the clinic wore that common, yellowing, and congested expression the Barcelona public adopts when a man has been murdered in the middle of the street.

  He had heard the shots as he went down the stairs, the well-worn and despicable steps that had the elasticity of rubber to the soles of his feet. To hear shots at that moment seemed impossible to him. He didn’t even suspect that was what they were, and he continued down the stairs. When he reached the doorway, he found himself before the vision of a dead man suspended between two policemen, and the running, gesticulating and rubbernecking people.

  Any other time, a spontaneous show of that sort would have punctured his flesh like an unconscious bite with no wish to hurt him or do him harm. But in the situation he found himself in, he felt as if the crime were premeditated, timed precisely so that he would find himself face to face with the dead man’s eyes and the ochre cheekbones of the policemen on going out that door.

  He was eighteen years old and had just left a brothel. It was the first time he had been with a woman.

  He had had enough of the spectacle in the street; what he had seen was that a stain from such acids is not easy to wash away. But fifty meters from the clinic, the mobile indifference of the faces, the shoes, the hats and the shirts was reconstituted. As he walked toward the Rambla, the walls and the storefronts took on a gray and reserved air, like a man who adjusts his sleeves and cuffs after a fight. At the corner of Carrer de la Unió the tables of the venerable Orxateria Valenciana, where four generations of Barcelonans had sipped on tigernut milk, exuded the sugar, xufles and modesty of its comforting legacy. It was seven p.m. and, under a tent of fog, a sudden June heat was in the air.

  On the Rambla, the carnations bursting out on the stands of the flower vendors and the round bellies of the sparrows plumped in the forks of the tree branches seemed more human and all-embracing to him.

  At least these creatures didn’t spit the aggressive egotism of the passing eyes in his face. Thousands of eyes. The Rambla was full of them. Eyes full of selfishness and lack of compassion and the tendency to hear only their own voices that walking on the Rambla at any time of day tends to produce. No one was to blame if they saw him as just another guy, with no interest in who he was or what had just happened to him.

  He sat down at a sidewalk cafè and ordered a beer. He had twenty cèntims left in his pocket: just enough for the beer and a tip.

  In every man’s life there is a moment that is usually hidden in a fog of fear and shame or, if word gets out among his cronies, tinged with insincere, infantile and rude blustering. Years go by, and the negligent man, either unconscious or full of himself, manages to store the moment we are alluding to in the zone of infelicity, in a place where actions lose their flavor and color and are accepted as the bland eventualities of our existence. There is no record of any illustrious academic, solemn professor, or fashionable speaker who has chosen this moment as the topic of a dissertation before a select audience. And despite this, that guilty moment contains so much festering poetry, condensed melancholy, or naked joy that it would be difficult, if one were sincere – if men can, indeed, be sincere – to find any equal to it in intensity. It is the moment when a young virgin boy overcomes his fear and delivers himself up to all the consequences of a brothel.

  It is useless for the straightest of straitjackets, the most metaphysical of conversations, the darkest of Soviet enthusiasms, or the most terrifying of hymns from the hereafter to try and separate us from the millenary vibration of sex. It is pointless for intellectual or ecclesiastic good breeding to evoke the images of a panther, a pig, a serpent, or a frog with regard to the question of sex. The naked flesh of Siegfried will always leap over the flames when the time comes to pursue the flesh of the sleeping Brunhilde. And this will always be the axis on which men of all climes – the weak, thinking reed, as the sublime ascetic of the ruined bowels with a passion for abstract ideas put it – will spin.

  Sexual life, depending on the person, can either be colored the gray of lymph or have an intense and hallucinatory polychromatic muscularity. But when even the most imaginative and skillful man reaches his plenitude and maturity, it will have an air of habit and routine. The poetic grandeur of sexual life, the place where it retains all its unpredictability and its dramatic interest, resides in the moment of initiation and discovery.

  Poets, preachers, and aging pettifoggers speak of adolescence as the golden core of our path through this world, an enviable time, and they look at the human soul at that point when it is a green grape with all its juice still to be defined and channeled, as if it were a suit more full of flowers and hope than any we wear upon our bones. Where there is neither experience, nor a sense of responsibility, nor economic loss, nor calculated and mature incisions with a knife, there can be no pain. This is accepted by academic literature and by the heads of families. The definition of the imberbis juvenis as defined by Horace is still current when it comes to observing the sad university student, the sad rugby fan, the sad detector of brothels, the sad utter hypocrite up against paternal interrogations. When this sad creature is only seventeen he carries around a red and black confusion in the form of a monster that never leaves the zone of the pubis, the zone of the heart, or the zone of the brain.

  Adolescents laugh and leap and dance, but no one wants to admit the adolescent’s sexual sadness. He himself is embarrassed by it, and he will never confess it to anyone else. And when the years have gone by, he will assert that that sexual sadness is a lie.

  In the solitary hours of adolescence, discoveries comes little by little. In our innocence and limitations – more pedantic at that age than at any other – we prefer to twirl the moustaches of wickedness, prefer to pretend we fear nothing, while our hearts tremble like poplar leaves. Reading allows for the morbid efficacy of masturbation; dreams are more full of alcohol than at any other time of life, and the only brutally poetic dreams are those of adolescence. Dreams that take direct revenge on the cowardice of unexplored flesh, icy spines and disgust at nocturnal pollutions. Pollutions without enthusiasm, without joy, that often even feel like a punishment. Nec polluantur corpora, says a bitter liturgical hymn that Catholic priests intone at the approach of spring.

  Neither swimming pools, nor sports, nor maternal kisses, nor the four black peaks of the biretta worn by those who administer spiritual exercises are sufficient to combat the savage erection. When shameless friends come along – because among adolescents, too, there are the purely gastric types, who digest such preoccupations as if they were a basket of cherries – the shameless friends laugh their shameless laugh at the fear, the cowardice, or the voluntary chasteness of the shameful. Often, remorse accompanies the delirium of imagination, and time slips by without a decision. The champagne goblet modeled on Helen’s tremulous breast is a cup that serves all drinks. The teeth of adolescent boys collide at every turn with that non-existent perfect goblet. The phallic totem of the most remote tribes is the very same totem of today’s high schools and universities. The adolescent has been made to believe in the existence of sin. The case is presented to him factually, with its horrible material consequences. Some pedagogues employ convincing images. They have no compunction about projecting the catastrophes of secret maladies, with all their repugnant secretions and deformations and all their unbearable pain. But it is all for nothing: at some point shame and cowardice are gone. Temptation is too cruel, and the naked flesh of Siegfried will leap over the flames.

  To reach this point, the adolescent has drunk the bile o
f sadness and confusion. No one has prepared him for this moment with solemn veils, or crowns of roses, or magical incense. He will arrive in secret, as if committing a crime, affecting indifference, but with his insides pulsating like the clapper of a bell. There will be no sublime figure for the adolescent to choose, no Venusberg mountain. He may squat among the orange peels and the stench of ammonia on the vilest street corner. He may have no choice but to pierce the shadow of whatever staircase corresponds to the limited sum of money he holds in his fingers. It is very sad, but this is the way it is. These are the pathways to the revelation of Helen’s vulva. We all know it. It is so very common that to carry off the pretense that we don’t give a damn, we make sure to tie a perfect knot in our neckties and we write a few poems that will move the more gelatinous ladies to tears.

  The adolescent who pierces the shadow for the first time in his life may laugh at our poems and our neckties. He accepts as a celestial grace the smile of a woman who earns her living at the most despicable trade that exists. This woman is the guardian of the treasure. It is she who escorts him to the foyer of the brothel and she who presents the three goddesses to him. One in a green slip, one in a yellow slip, and one in a red slip. Then, in one of the fifty thousand disgusting brothels of the world, the judgment of Paris is reenacted. The apple this tortured Paris brings to offer to the most beautiful of the three is the whole mystery of his adolescence, all his desire shamefully compressed. Paris’s choice is quick and feverish; he has blood-dark circles under his eyes. In an hour of mercantile physiology, in which she deposits a soul as indifferent as the roasted viands meant to kill the hunger of the impassioned pilgrim, he, the adolescent boy inexpertly and innocently hears for the first time the fateful symphony of sex, which the devil’s coarse bow plays on the tense strings of our nerves.

  As the years go by, the adolescent boy may become more demanding, may become cruel and idiotic with these women and with himself. But the temperature of the first time does not allow for anything like this. On that occasion, the most pitiful prostitute’s womb might as well be composed of the most tender petals of the most tender roses, like the womb of Chloe under the inexpert thrusting of Daphnis.

  And perhaps – because these useless paradoxes are the stuff of the spider web from which we all hang – the last prostitute, when faced in the most mechanical and primeval way with the latest inept Daphnis of all epochs, will exude a core of human mercy and an apparently wicked diligence, mingled with a blend of servility and maternity, a blend of angel and beast, in whose embrace the feverish adolescent will feel so close to the stars that never again in his life will the love of any woman be able to offer him a higher plateau.

  As time goes by, the adolescent boy made man will not want to think about this; he will forget about his first Chloe, his anonymous Chloe of however many (naturally very few) pessetes. He will consider it to be the vilest dishonor to value the intensity of his first adventure over the intensity and pomp of later, much more literary, loves. Yet it is possible that what he considers to be a dishonor is the truth, a truth men never want to confess because their pride does not admit useless paradoxes.

  The young man who had heard the two shots that killed a man on Carrer de Barberà, and who later devoted all his capital to the foaming topaz of a sad beer, had just experienced this shady and poetic moment of his existence. Like Paris, he had chosen from among the three goddesses a sordid Italian girl of twenty-five, the kind whose lungs live in a cistern, breathing in only the vegetation of the sewer, but whose continual ephemeral contacts had not managed to crush her siren’s breast, nor had they burned the two moist and delicately hospitable violets out of her eyes.

  He was eighteen years old and he was embarrassed to admit the truth, but she understood him perfectly. If the young woman had not been in a hurry, she would have done him all the honors, but in that house on Carrer de Barberà there was work to be done and there were people waiting. The prostitute limited herself to giving free rein to the boy’s rapture, without protest, and to anointing his lips with the kind of cold, servile tenderness found on the snouts of ruminants.

  The fact of having a woman all to himself, in a room with a door, without witnesses, without censors, without limits, drove him wild. His two years of hesitation and, above all, fear of a repugnant illness, howled like a dog atop a cushion of devastated flesh in the form of a woman. The selfish creature sought vengeance on moral pieties in pursuit of the revelation of pleasure. He said nothing, he simply listened to his sensations, noting the secret nervous harmony that begins to blossom into a fierce rhythm, till it reaches the desperate violins of a spasm that expires in a slow, flat and deflated chord. Biology coldly explains these things that the most fundamental modesty silences. But with his nails sunk into Helen’s flesh and his eyes sinking in the well of her eyes, in that crescendo that for the first time in his life made his lungs bounce off the wall of his ribs, electrified by the unexpected sensation, nothing shamed him, and his only desire was to cry out long and hard, for everyone to hear him, to hear the joyous bellow of an eighteen year-old male who has a woman all to himself, even if it is a woman who clings at night to the threadbare jacket of a day worker, even if it’s just for an hour, even if it’s in a brothel, none of that mattered. None of that was enough to water down his cry of joy. The filthiest bed sheet, the flesh of the most enslaved body, can reproduce any myth.

  After the desire to shout, after the great discovery, he began buttoning his shirt, with trembling fingers, wishing he could respond to her tawdry words with his own tawdry words, the words of a real man, a character who has seen it all before. But his heart, still bursting with the wine of enthusiasm, spoiled his words with a child’s luminous and inexpert syllables.

  On the staircase, he heard the shots, and he saw that dead man carried by the two policemen, at the very moment when he, generosus puer, thought he had just taken possession of life. Later, his pockets empty and his lips white with beer foam, his childish brain superimposed contradictory images: chiffon stockings, the patent leather of the policeman’s cap, the blood on the cobblestones, a toothbrush stained with blood-colored toothpaste, the soapy inexpressiveness of the water in the bidet, the man’s dirty jacket hanging from the arms of the two guards, the woman’s sex and the dead man’s mouth, and all of this projected onto the moving curtain of the Rambla, onto that backdrop of mechanical faces, rubber cheeks, eyes with a nebulous destination: onto anonymous, ordinary, inexplicable life.

  Life and death side by side, as in the prelude to Tristan. An incomparably cheap and shameful love; an insignificant criminal murdered by another criminal; all of this in a festering neighborhood and in his eighteen year-old heart, protected by a castoff jacket dyed black because he was still in mourning for his grandfather. Only six months before he had seen him laid out in a uniform let out in the back, with moth-eaten red satin lapels. His grandfather! A being from a very distant clime. His dead grandfather was a wax figure, a repulsive old doll, who left no impression on him. But that dead man on Carrer de Barberà, he was the real thing, with his open eyes and his hair full of blood.

  He paid for the beer. In an apartment on Carrer de Pelai, a classmate was waiting for him with the notes from Mathematical Analysis. Because that eighteen year-old boy was a student at the School of Architecture, a communist, by the name of Ferran de Lloberola.

  IN ONE YEAR MANY thoughts had run through Ferran de Lloberola’s mind.

  When he graduated from the Jesuit high school, he was a tender, affectionate boy, of inordinate vanity and innocence. Ferran didn’t realize what kind of house he lived in. He had never given a thought to his father or his mother, nor did he have the slightest idea about Don Tomàs and the family catastrophe. Ferran had lived the life of a boy into whom the fathers of the Company of Jesus, finding fertile ground, had injected their whole system. Ferran made off with the highest honors at school. With a normal intelligence and a prodigious memory, he left everyone else behind, and as one grade fo
llowed another, his position as a model student was a sort of sinecure that no one disputed. As for discipline, he carried the rule book at sword’s point and only on very rare occasions had he been subject to punishment. He was the prefect of the Congregation of Sant Lluís and a brigadier in three different brigades. Though he didn’t tend to fawn, nor was he particularly given to the virtues of spying, Ferran’s mentality had been malleable to the Ignatian fingers, heirs to the rigid ratio studiorum.

  Ferran’s faith was fairly skin-deep, and he was about as chaste as a normal healthy boy can be when puberty blooms. It had never occurred to Ferran to doubt what the Jesuits taught him in their conversations, readings and, above all, retreats. Ferran didn’t find the sort of theological indoctrination that occurred at the beginning of the school year – against a great black backdrop, to the lugubrious wheezing of a harmonium and a “Veni Creator Spiritus” sung in the teary drone of boy sopranos – particularly upsetting. The science in the sermons spat out by the father who conducted the operetta of the pain of adolescent boys was a science Ferran was accustomed to. The conversations on death, on eternal damnation, on the horrible vision of carnal sin, streamed through the brain of that young boy with the freshness of an idyllic spring. He agreed wholeheartedly with everything, and he already knew that in order for those things to have any effect on the distracted, the rebellious, or the devil’s disciples they had to exaggerate a bit. Ferran’s humble, tender eyes looked at the sunken cheekbones and ascetic shadows under the eyes of this father or that without any malice, as if to say: “You and I are in on the secret and we understand each other perfectly. You can push as much as you want, and I will take communion with the minimum of faith and minimum of enthusiasm required to be a perfect student.”