Private Life

by Josep Maria de Sagarra

  When the Republic came, and later, when the Jesuit order was dissolved, Ferran was as happy as a dog with a bone, because his family was outraged, and, more to the point, because the Jesuits were his enemies, who had almost led him to perdition. In those days, like many students of his time, he was a communist, and he only liked Soviet films.

  In this period of hatreds and inoffensive vengeances, Ferran was still afraid of women and brothels.

  The day he made his decision, you might say he was perfectly calm. After the afternoon of the murder on Carrer de Barberà, Ferran turned on a dime. He made a series of important discoveries. One of them was the existence of his sister, Maria Lluïsa.

  Indeed, the young man had been too busy inventing himself, first as a mystical farce, and then as a demagogical farce, to be able to experience his natural character in an ordinary way. It took the jolt of contact with a prostitute and the sight of a murdered man to plant his feet on the ground.

  Ferran had never seen his sister. As children, when they played together, Maria Lluïsa was nothing to Ferran but someone a little older, a little more delicate and a little weaker than he was. Then life at school separated them completely, and Maria Lluïsa’s emancipation, and the fact that she treated her brother like a child, did the rest. Ferran found her intolerable, he found her affected and overbearing, a person who did nothing but talk back to their mother over lunch and dinner. Maria Lluïsa and Ferran knew absolutely nothing about each other.

  Ferran was in love with love. He was going through that stage young men his age go through in which a kind of sentimental and erotic desire is latent in every idea their brains can elaborate, and in all the impressions they receive from the outside world. The man is in love, and he doesn’t quite know what he loves, or what he wants. All the subjective elements are mixed up in a tender and confused way, and what is missing is the concrete person who can channel and rearrange those elements. The woman has not yet appeared, but he can sense her perfume, in the daylight, in music, in every girl’s gaze, in an inexplicable melancholy, in nighttime dreams, in cool bathwater, and in the flight of a swallow. The man lives in love with love.

  One evening, in this peculiar state, Ferran looked at his sister, Maria Lluïsa. The life of this young woman was a mystery to Ferran. Her feminine climate was hermetically sealed in a world whose existence Ferran knew nothing of. He sensed, though, that a specific thing united him and his sister: their anti-family spirit, the aversion both of them felt to that apartment on Carrer de Bailèn and to the Lloberola name.

  For the first time in his life, Ferran spoke of these things with his sister. Maria Lluïsa listened with discretion, appearing not to pay much attention. For her, that boy was the child she still envisioned in a sailor’s suit or in golf knickers, and it was impossible for her to take him seriously. It is very hard for a brother and sister to crack the shell of family intimacy, which is precisely the least cordial, least communicative and least human relationship that exists. In a family, affection and coexistence have an inevitable, instinctive cohesion that can be observed in a brood of chicks in a nest or in an ant colony, but the elective affection, that spark of friendship or love, that something that free will and feelings create as they go through the world and sort out affinities and connections, is missing.

  And it is precisely because of that instinctive and inevitable factor in family relations that the betrayal of a sibling is always more painful than that of a friend, even if one believes oneself to be much more identified with the friend than with the sibling. The betrayal of a sibling brings on a pain that is almost physical, and physical pain, despite the poets, entails obsession and prejudice far beyond any moral pain.

  With Ferran, Maria Lluïsa had adopted that very attitude of lack of cordiality and communication. She had no doubt that the very last person who might be able to understand her was that eighteen-year-old whippersnapper. Nevertheless, as the conversation continued throughout the evening, Maria Lluïsa shifted from a state of impatience to a state of attention. She began to see something personal in that young man; above all, the desire to be a man, and the trace of a spirit of inquiry. And what Maria Lluïsa saw, and this was what most surprised her, was the interest he took in her, a tenderness and affection that were not a question of habit, that didn’t correspond to their years of coexistence, or even to their common blood. The very unusual sound of a human voice that speaks to a person well known to it in some aspects but absolutely unknown in other, more important, ones. And all at once the inflection of this voice changes as it addresses those more important aspects, which it has just divined as if by miracle.

  Maria Lluïsa saw Ferran progress from the – according to her – infrahuman condition of brother, to the condition of man.

  Maria Lluïsa did not see that Ferran’s feelings for her were the consequence of that state of being in love with love, nor that in a sister like Maria Lluïsa he found reflections of that inchoate thing his nerves were demanding of him. Maria Lluïsa didn’t know anything about these things. If she herself gone through a moment like that, she hadn’t been aware of it and, being more realistic, as befits a woman, she had quickly found other conduits. Ferran spoke to Maria Lluïsa with intense passion, he almost told her intimate details of his life – always with the shyness and politeness with which one speaks to a sister – that Maria Lluïsa didn’t know how to construe. Maria Lluïsa thought that this brother who for her had just become a young man might perhaps be too much of a man, and his language might be too fervent and too casual. A painful thought crossed Maria Lluïsa’s mind. She had a much less nebulous idea of the world than her brother. Maria Lluïsa, at that point in time – she was in the midst of her selfish adventure with Bobby – didn’t know what it meant to be in love with love, but she did know that between brothers and sisters an event condemned by moralists, known as incest, sometimes occurred. Maria Lluïsa considered the possibility that that eighteen year-old creature who was still caught up in a state of sexual confusion and inexperience might, for some strange reason, one of which could very well be Maria Lluïsa’s own grace and beauty, might be the victim of a frankly incestuous inclination.

  When, in the course of one of his confidences, Ferran innocently took Maria Lluïsa by her bare arm, and she felt his slightly sweaty palm molding itself to her cool skin, she flinched. Unable to hide her repulsion or disgust, she pulled away. Ferran was left with his hand hanging in the air in the middle of that room, as inexpressive and incongruous as the wing of a wounded bird. Ferran looked into his sister’s eyes to try to understand that instinctive rejection, that bitter gesture in the face of his candor and enthusiasm. He had taken his sister by the arm and kissed her on the cheek thousands of times, without provoking the slightest shadow or cloud in his or her eyes. And at the very moment when Ferran was breaking the ice, when he was seeking the human collaboration of his sister, when he was asking her to elevate him to the category of a good friend, what Ferran found in Maria Lluïsa was an attack of disgust or fear, or some indefinable detachment.

  Then, despite his innocence, Ferran thought he could divine the explanation for that incongruity in Maria Lluïsa’s eyes. Her monstrous idea in some vague way impressed itself upon the boy’s brain. His explanation seemed as indelicate, as almost monstrous, as the thing itself. Ferran froze. Maria Lluïsa was still terrified, because Ferran’s hesitation, his air of bewilderment at the possibility that Maria Lluïsa might imagine that of him, only impressed the idea more vividly upon her.

  The two siblings remained silent. It was impossible to say anything about something as ridiculous as what had just happened, about such an absurd misunderstanding. Ferran, who was much weaker and much more sincere than Maria Lluïsa, felt the unbearable convulsion of a sob, and he hid his head in his hands, unable to choke back his tears.

  Maria Lluïsa’s distress was intense. The boy’s tears, each nuance of his behavior, served only to bolster the tenebrous idea. Far from feeling repelled, Maria Lluïsa began t
o feel an extremely curious pity for that child, whom she saw as the victim of a sick and deviant affection. But she was unable to come up with so much as half a word. For such a case as she was imagining, she had not anticipated a response. Anything she said might have seemed offensive to him. Ferran, conversely, found himself in a parallel situation. How was it possible that malice or misunderstanding on his sister’s part could have produced an idea of him that was so incompatible with his nature?

  What could the boy say, what kind of clarification could he imagine when, tender and inexpert as he was, with the juvenile and magical idea he had of his sister’s purity, any syllable with which he might attempt to defend himself would seem like a sacrilege? His face still hidden, Ferran hoped he might have misinterpreted Maria Lluïsa’s gesture, but if “that” was not what her gesture was saying, if “that” was not what her eyes, chillingly diaphanous, were saying, were saying, then what was it, in fact, that had happened to his sister?

  Maria Lluïsa interpreted Ferran’s tears and obstructed nerves as his reaction – his noble reaction, of course – to a faux pas. If his tears had been followed by imprecations and revelations, Maria Lluïsa’s situation would have been even more compromised. Any reaction, despite the fact that this was her own eighteen year-old brother, seemed impossible to her. Ferran’s silence allowed her, even obliged her, in a way, to say something. Maria Lluïsa had to offer a response to those tears, to make some comment; she couldn’t remain mute, she couldn’t allow this pathetically shattering and absurd scene to drag on. Maria Lluïsa believed that the best thing she could do was to erase the ill effect her gesture of repulsion had caused, and imply that none of this mattered in the slightest and she hadn’t noticed a thing. Of course this was a farce, and Ferran wouldn’t swallow it either, but women often believe in the efficacy of lies and dissembling right to one’s face. This is the most suitable stance for salvaging catastrophes, and perhaps momentarily the most effective. Later, time and reflection could provide tranquilizers, slow and numbing cauterizers that could heal any wound.

  Maria Lluïsa spoke to Ferran, expressing bewilderment at his tears, asking him what was the matter. She attributed his state to an overabundance of nerves and advised him to go to bed. She said they could continue talking later about all those things that she found so very interesting. Maria Lluïsa even made an effort to give him a kiss – and at that moment, her brother’s skin produced horror in her – and to treat him like a child, the child he had always been, who had begun to entertain the obsessions of a man.

  Ferran calmed down and left his sister alone. By lying and pretending, Maria Lluïsa had released him from a moment of anguish, which he could not have found a way out of. The moment was behind them. Never again would Maria Lluïsa and Ferran make reference to that event, which to an outside observer might have appeared to be entirely insignificant, but which had just opened an abyss between brother and sister. Later, they would be able to pretend, and even to forget, and support each other mutually in a polite and distant way, but it would be very difficult for intimacy and understanding to evolve between the two of them, so long as they were under the influence of the memory of that event.

  Ferran was terribly disappointed. With regard to every aspect of his house and the human relationships in it, the only welcoming sanctuary Ferran had found was in his sister. He sensed in her the most vivid and noble qualities of his family, and the same desire to escape it and to live her own life that he himself felt. That sister, who had always seen him as a child, would have been able to understand him as a man. Little by little, he could have aspired to be Maria Lluïsa’s confidant. He had hopes of being able to help her, and to provide for her, if necessary, through his work. With Maria Lluïsa by his side, her shadow of protective femininity could have projected itself with ineffable sweetness over all his thoughts. Having coupled with a prostitute and repeated the adventure with other women, it could be said that Ferran had become acquainted with the most dramatic and intense aspect of his flesh in the contest with the flesh of women. The taste of Helen had entered his marrow and his belly, but it had left a sordid stain in the bluish liquid of his dreams. Ferran didn’t know where to find a woman with that blend of angel and beast, who would make that visceral sensation even more intense with the compensation of the infinite melody of great emotion.

  Ferran saw his sister as a guarantee. He wanted her by his side, as his confidante. He needed her gentleness, her confidence. Maria Lluïsa’s presence demonstrated to him that he would be able to find in this world a woman like her, with her eyes and her grace, but with a burning sexuality and veins intoxicated with passion for him. Never, though, could Ferran have been able to imagine any feeling of desire or the most remote intention of animal rebellion mixed up with the almost mystical idea he had of his sister. Ferran realized that it was a misunderstanding on Maria Lluïsa’s part, an excess of suspicion, which had destroyed the possibility of such an equilibrium of affection.

  Ferran didn’t understand that when he had opened his heart to his sister, speaking to her of his desires, his doubts, and his melancholy, perhaps he had done so with an unwitting vehemence. Perhaps he had approached her in a way that Maria Lluïsa had not been able to anticipate, and perhaps predictably it had taken her by surprise. Ferran was still a boy, and, heeding the counsel of his own inexperience, he still approached things head-on. He considered this to be the most normal and natural thing in the world. This is why it was impossible for him to assume even a modicum of guilt or responsibility in what had just happened between his sister and him.

  Ferran was distressed for hours; he could see no way out. Maria Lluïsa would never be able to erase her impression, no one would ever dissuade her from her certainty. She would see any explanation as an excuse, and nothing more than an excuse. A fictional cordiality, thanks to which brother and sister could live as strangers, side by side. This was the most Ferran could aspire to. The dream he had imagined was now impossible.

  Ferran had a lily-white notion of Maria Lluïsa. If he had suspected who his sister was at heart, if he had known only a particle of the true state of moral decomposition Maria Lluïsa was in, perhaps he would have considered all the pain that absurd incident had caused him to be for naught. Ferran’s pain would probably have been different, not so gentle, not so much in love with love, but indeed more concrete, more positive, much more human. He would have had the same taste in his teeth that any skeptical explorer of the acid caverns of life tastes when he bites down on bitter rue.

  AS THE DAYS WENT BY, Maria Lluïsa started thinking that she might have been mistaken. Maybe Ferran’s behavior didn’t mean “that.” Maria Lluïsa treated her little brother with pleasant cordiality, but Ferran maintained a distant and exceedingly polite attitude. Ferran was finding other things down the road. One of those things was the prettiest shoe store clerk to be found those days on the streets of Barcelona. With this girl, Ferran had a hint of the kind of love that moves the sun and the stars. The clerk, who seemed much more natural and kind to him than Maria Lluïsa, smacked of popular taste, unpleasant and slightly tacky, occasionally ragtag and greedy, but she was sincere, uncomplicated, and alive. This was love, with the eternally corny delights of paper lanterns, neighborhood bands, and slices of watermelon. In the armpit of the shoe clerk Ferran the communist found the integral perfume of anonymous flesh with no pretensions to nobility, idleness, or the gold frames bearing the dust of misery that pained his sight in the apartment on Carrer de Bailèn.

  Maria Lluïsa received a letter from her father. With that letter, Frederic was testing the waters. He didn’t dare write to his wife. He was hoping Maria Lluïsa would be the best go-between for a reconciliation. Frederic was beginning to feel very sick. The wine merchant’s wife and the farmer’s daughter had impoverished him body and soul. The doctor in Moià told him his illness was no joke. Proud and inconsistent, Frederic Lloberola had decided to sell at any price what little was left of his estate and prostrate himself at
the feet of Maria Carreres.

  Frederic’s return to the house on Carrer de Bailèn was silly and theatrical. Husband and wife shed tears, and mother-in-law Carreres had to drink great quantities of linden tea for her nerves. In Ferran’s eyes, his father was unspeakably odious and grotesque.

  Old Leocàdia had been flickering like a votive candle in the Cluny convent. They kept Frederic’s illness and any other unpleasant news from her so she wouldn’t worry. Leocàdia lived in that sweet, transparent egocentrism of the old, when they become like children and their only concern is for their devotions and other petty details.

  From the opulence of Conxa Pujol’s bed, Guillem responded to the servile and unlettered missives of his brother Frederic with the occasional banknote.

  The Lloberola anachronism had become a frayed tightrope on which to walk heel to toe, amid admissions of defeat, without principles or dignity of any kind.

  Frederic rejoined the Club Eqüestre. When he fell behind on his accounts, his brother, who was on the board, paid them without a word.

  Frederic did everything he could to ignore his children’s lives and his wife’s bitterness. He was terrified of dying, and the doctors patched up his illness with injections and warnings.

  Maria Lluïsa abused Bobby’s affection, she cheated on him shamelessly, and her name was on the verge of losing what little prestige it had left. Many were aware of the concrete facts of her irregular conduct. Maria Lluïsa even came to question her own comportment. She began to fear that all this living for today and broadmindedness would lead to disaster in the long run. Considering the scope of her ambitions, she couldn’t even have gotten a start on what she earned at the bank.