Private Life

by Josep Maria de Sagarra

  Maria Lluïsa had fantasized about a carefree life of limitless freedom. She had thought that the people she kept company with would accept such a moral position. This was an overly optimistic view of society. The literature and the conversations Maria Lluïsa sought out could digest anything. They gave the impression that the people of our country had taken a considerable turn, but even the young men who cited her as the very model of a modern girl and danced with her to the point of collapse as they whispered lewd phrases in her ear, criticized her from head to toe when they were on their own. None of them would have wanted a girl who behaved like Maria Lluïsa for a fiancée or a sister.

  Bobby spoke seriously with her about getting married, and in principle Maria Lluïsa accepted. Bobby didn’t see a thing. He was convinced of the girl’s affection and sincerity. When Maria Lluïsa understood the softening of principles she had brought about in that distant and genteel man, instead of slowing down a bit she became childishly conceited. She saw Bobby as a sort of Lewis Stone. Maria Lluïsa admired that fine American actor who so admirably played the role of the understanding modern spouse. She imagined that Bobby would also be happy to live by her side in a modish film in which Maria Lluïsa would play the role of Greta Garbo.

  Bobby had one of the most solid fortunes of Barcelona, and Maria Lluïsa saw herself sailing on a yacht overflowing with tangos, cocktail shakers, and spiritual gigolos, as she distributed orchids, smiles and fatalities on the arm of a husband who was as imperturbable as the Eternal Father.

  Enthralled, Bobby said yes to her every wish, until one day he started to see certain things. In his dialogues with his conscience, Bobby tried to justify Maria Lluïsa and stifle his doubts. But one evening, a little scandal took place at the sidewalk cafè of the Hotel Colon, and among the many people who heard about it, more than one went off to tell Bobby what had happened in full detail. Maria Lluïsa and two other girls were sitting at a table at the height of the hour of the aperitif. When they were at their most merry, a very well-known lady of the evening who plied her trade at the bar of the hotel appeared at their table and addressed a string of withering insults to Maria Lluïsa. In addition to the insults she tried to get her nails on Maria Lluïsa’s face, and she swore she would kill her if Maria Lluïsa did not leave a certain person alone. According to the experts, it was said that the person in question was an officer in the Air Force, one of the most well-groomed and most alcoholic. Maria Lluïsa was quite vexed, but she more than held her own in the noisy exchange.

  That incident was the straw that broke Bobby’s enamored heart, overflowing with good intentions. He didn’t stage any scenes of jealousy, he didn’t even complain, but everything Maria Lluïsa needed to note to understand that Bobby had tired of her was perfectly clear.

  Rosa Trènor, whom Maria Lluïsa saw on occasion, didn’t despair of finding her a substitute along the same lines as Bobby. But Maria Lluïsa shuddered at the thought of continuing down that road. A second act, following Bobby, would place her on a lower rung, and soon Maria Lluïsa would no longer be able to sustain her equivocal situation. Things would just be too evident, and retreat would be impossible.

  Maria Lluïsa preferred to step back a bit, and manage her adventures with more discretion. She performed a sort of examination of conscience, which left her feeling bitter, practically convinced she was a failure.

  Maria Lluïsa saw that her job at the bank was an unbearable burden that became more and more tedious with each passing day. She had imagined she was capable of feeling the joy of labor and emancipation from the family. She had dreamed of living life à l’américaine within the climate of Barcelona. Maria Lluïsa only knew the movie version of America. She saw it all through “weekends” with strawberry ice cream, exciting bathing suits, and millionaires’ sons, whose naiveté and tenderness were foolproof, who fell in love and signed checks and marriage licenses and divorce papers without batting an eye. Her adventure with Pat had not opened her eyes, much to the contrary. Not only had Maria Lluïsa accepted Bobby’s attentions – and Bobby, in the long run, was a man of parts – but in a most unthinking way, she had gotten involved with other, absolutely deplorable men, who spared no details in explaining intimate particulars about Maria Lluïsa. Since there are always people in this world ready and willing to stick their feet in their mouths, on one occasion Frederic was essentially a hair’s breadth away from hearing right to his face an appalling anecdote about his daughter that couldn’t have left him unscathed.

  Maria Lluïsa finally came to realize that, in the end, nothing good had come of all her emancipation and her modern ways. She didn’t have a superior mentality or better taste, or more knowledge than most girls of her class. She was just as common and selfish as Pat. The only science in which she could show a bit of aptitude was one that did her no favors. It was extremely painful to admit that in Maria Lluïsa’s case, her two years of freedom and eccentricity had served only for her to lose her reputation, and a good portion of her personal delicacy and sparkle.

  Even so, Maria Lluïsa couldn’t have been less inclined to make peace with her mother’s standards, or to resign herself to a path completely opposed to the one she had followed to that point. Maria Lluïsa’s case was not unique among her acquaintances. Even if her behavior had been scandalous, most of her female friends continued to spend time with her as if nothing had happened, and perhaps Maria Lluïsa even had in her favor, in contrast to other young women like her, that she had allowed herself certain liberties without hypocrisy, and without going out of her way to keep it all secret. In a word, Maria Lluïsa was frank, and maybe it was asking too much of her frankness to want her to behave with absolute sincerity with Bobby. If Bobby hadn’t had the misfortune of falling in love with Maria Lluïsa the way he had, he would have been able to anticipate that meeting a girl like her in the circumstances in which he had met her did not guarantee him a virgin out of Roman martyrology. But in this world, the most experienced and skeptical of men can also be the most gullible.

  For a time, Maria Lluïsa felt rather sad and benumbed. Her affairs, which she carried on with great caution, didn’t amuse her. She found the fellows more and more selfish, and only interested in one thing, which she was indifferent to. Without a modicum of passion, she found the episodes of the garconnière and the meublé stupid and monotonous. At twenty years of age, Maria Lluïsa was beginning to be tired of it all.

  On the day that Maria Lluïsa, resting her chin on the lapel of Pat’s jacket, said that she was tired of being a virgin as if it were the most natural thing in the world, it is very possible that she viewed with true horror the panorama of ladyfingers and anisette that awaited an unassuming bourgeois marriage, coping with marital flaws and economic constraints. Two years later, a bourgeois marriage along those lines didn’t burst onto her imagination with the sudden flash of a meteor, but perhaps it seemed to be the only practical way out of the dismal impasse she’d reached. Maria Lluïsa had not had the courage to break things off completely with the age-old unctuosity of her family. She had only gone halfway in her freedom and her perversion. If she had resigned herself to living brutally and poetically, for as long as necessary, accepting all the consequences, Maria Lluïsa’s behavior might have seemed suicidal to many eyes, but respectable, in the end.

  When her inner sadness began to be visible on her face, and a slight muscular relaxation in her body revealed the anatomical melancholy of the disenchanted, Frederic received a visit from a young man from Bilbao who had come to ask for his daughter’s hand.

  He was a youngish man, getting on a bit, but tall and well-built, and he seemed like an excellent fellow. Some business with the metallurgical industry had brought him to Barcelona, and he had been staying at the Nouvel Hôtel on Carrer de Santa Anna for three months now.

  The young man from Bilbao had met Maria Lluïsa at the bank where she worked. He followed her, he spoke to her, and he fell in love with her like a lap dog. He was a simple and expeditious man. Maria Lluïs
a found him suitable, and what most enticed her was a change of climate, a change of décor, and a definitive escape from Carrer de Bailèn. The position of the young man from Bilbao seemed brilliant, and the world in which he moved was much more lively and interesting than the office, the family, the parties at the Club Marítim, the officers in the Air Force and the sordid gossip about Maria Lluïsa’s skin and bloodlines. A short time later, Maria Lluïsa emigrated from Barcelona and married as the good Lord intended, her eyes somewhat tinged with the green of hope, and her cheek a bit wet from three tears from Maria Carreres’s eyes.

  Ferran was truly happy about his sister’s marriage. Since the night of their confidences and their misunderstanding, Maria Lluïsa’s presence had weighed on his heart.

  At the bar of the Hotel Colón, a few guys placed bets on the shape and number of horns the young man from Bilbao would end up wearing, with the same good humor with which they wagered three shots of London dry gin as they shook the dice cup.

  AS BOBBY SMOKED HIS last pipe after lunch, he was hard put to understand how he could have been so foolish as to fall in love with Maria Lluïsa. Bobby smiled and wanted to put on a good front, but the truth be told his disappointment in that love affair had left him pretty crushed. The people who had supper with him at the Cercle del Liceu noticed a touch of intemperance and a bitterness they were not accustomed to. Bobby spoke of the youth of this country, and the young fledglings just starting out, with a scorn that was perhaps a bit self-serving. For him, the tone of Barcelona had become about as flimsy and flighty as it could be.

  Bobby spent a lot of time at home, reading. The only things that interested him, though, were history books. Conservative and skeptical as he was, he savored the tales of the most derelict and critical periods, and the most contemptible characters, all mixed in with the smoke from his pipe.

  When Bobby left the Cercle del Liceu, he liked to wander lazily through the neighborhoods of Barcelona he most loved. He would turn onto Carrer Ample and breathe in the air that drifted over from the docks. The Passatge de la Pau and the streets that led to the Plaça Reial, which in those days was called Plaça de Francesc Macià, after the current President of the Catalan government, revived in him the flavor of a Barcelona devoted to commerce and decked out in posh velvet. A Barcelona made up of dignified and thrifty people, who had an audacity and drive he didn’t find in the people of his day. What’s more, Bobby appreciated the capacious and seigneurial taste in everything his grandparents had done, with no pretensions to originality and without a shadow of impertinence. Those cobblestones impregnated with drugs and colonial merchandise held the breath of the sails that set out for America to seek sugar and coffee, and of those other ships that came back from the port of Liverpool freighted with cotton bales. The the gray air that clung to their wood had transmitted a polite sort of British morality to the commerce at home.

  Bobby would confer with the palm trees of the Plaça Reial and the Passeig d’Isabel Segona. He didn’t understand how the men of his generation had developed an antipathy toward palm trees. He thought that one of Barcelona’s lovely qualities was the possibility of sustaining in its natural climate a tree of such legendary symmetry and such a gently rocking swoon as to have been the pride of the gardens of all the gentlemen of the country. To Bobby, palm trees felt like a living reminder of the lost colonies. Bobby, the skeptic, was an enthusiast for things with an elegiac air. He found a thousand flavors on the Rambles. Bobby’s Barcelonism was entirely soft on the Rambles. He couldn’t even be a skeptic there. He believed with all his faith that in no other city in the world was there a street as original, as alive, and as human as the Rambles of Barcelona.

  The state of the Palau de la Virreina caused him some distress. He would have liked to see even a religious respect and consideration for that palace. The story of the Virreina was related to his mother’s family history. Don Manuel d’Amat i Junyent, the man who built that palace, was the brother-in-law of his great-grandparents, the Comtes de Sallent, and he was related to the Castellbell and Maldà families. Bobby knew the life and miracles of el Virrei Amat, and all the tricks and energies he put into being the Viceroy of Peru. He knew about the relations the Viceroy maintained with a dancer called Micaela Villegas, whose nickname was “la Perricholi.” Immortalized by Offenbach as “La Périchole,” she seems to have been a dominant and extraordinarily beautiful woman. With the money he salvaged from her kisses, Viceroy Amat built the noblest house in Barcelona.

  Bobby imagined La Perricholi with the eyes and skin of Maria Lluïsa. His relative, Amat, less skeptical than he, probably dragged her home to the docks of Barcelona and locked her up in that palace on the Rambla, not realizing that, in the ship that had brought her from Peru, the dancer had been unfaithful to him with a young man from Cadiz or Cartagena, experienced in the ways of women and the sea.

  Though Bobby was almost always silent, when the topic of Barcelona came up he liked to show off his erudition regarding the old stones and history of our city. Bobby’s ennui, his passivity and his smile were not unlike a pleasant cemetery, where at a given moment the shades of the dead would promenade bedecked in their wigs, their egoism, and their deliquescent escapades. This is why Bobby was so averse to sports, affirming that they were the most corrosive, demoralizing, and plebeian thing in this world. In the wee hours, when he carried his little moustache, glued above his lip like a bit of chlorotic brush, off to bed, he would run into troupes of hikers dressed in white – sometimes dirty white – desecrating the Rambla. Bobby was absolutely certain that the country had no chance of salvation. Sports had killed off slow-cooked and tenderly-seasoned love. Girls on the beach looked to him like androgynous animals.

  The only thing that ever superficially modified Bobby’s point of view was his brief relationship with Níobe Casas. When Níobe Casas moved to Paris, Bobby reverted even more to a mentality that could be captured in a meerschaum pipe with an amber stem.

  At that point, it could be said that Bobby lived only for his mother. She was his only positive affection, the only person he admired a bit, and Bobby awakened every morning with fear in his heart, anticipating the catastrophe, sensing that at any moment her lungs could stop like a tired clock.

  The widow Xuclà was just about to turn eighty, but her head was perfectly clear and she could still marshal some degree of energy. In those days of change and upheaval, Pilar was a grande dame who belonged more to an immovable ether than to the bubbling cauldron of the day-to-day. She managed not to take an interest in anything or to comment on any events. Her salons in the house on Carrer Ample, full of anachronisms, never breached by either the dust or the air of the street, were shining pendulums unvaryingly marking the seconds in a coffin of crystal and aromatic woods. Every morning, Pilar would have great sheaves of roses of every color delivered from the flower stands on the Rambles. The roses were the only thing that had not changed. They gave off the same perfume and the same grace that they had fifty years before. Pilar shared her life with the specters of her world, resting her arthritis on the pearl and garnet-colored sateen covering her intact sofas. Almost all the women of her time had disappeared. The Marquesa de Descatllar had been dead for three years. Lola Dussay, her sister-in-law, the Comtessa de Sallent – they were all inhabiting the land of ashes now. She almost never saw Leocàdia Lloberola, because both of them were pained by the present reality. As her forces waned, Pilar became more refined, more original, and more interesting. In Pilar’s conversations, a good hunter of nuances could have found shades of green, blue, and rose that are no longer manufactured, and the formula for which has disappeared.

  The person who visited Pilar most often was Hortènsia Portell. Hortènsia, much more refined than all the ladies who criticized her, recognized the worth of a true lady who had outlived an extinct fauna. Some evenings, Hortènsia would dine at the Widow Xuclà’s house, and in that exceedingly severe dining room, painted the color of a Capuchin hood, with the precise accents of a silver ser
vice, Pilar and Hortènsia evoked a scenario without gas engines and polychrome bidets, smelling only of the natural fragrance of gardenias and the pomade of men’s moustaches.

  His eyes half-closed, affecting his usual air of ennui, Bobby let the ash of his cigar grow long, pretending not to be following the two ladies’ conversation. In truth, though, he didn’t miss so much as a syllable his mother uttered. He sensed that the music of Pilar’s fatigued and rheumatic conversation was like a first-rate alcohol, of which extremely few drops remained, which had to be savored scrupulously and conscientiously.

  One evening after dinner, Pilar felt a particular discomfort, as if someone were pressing delicately on her heart. The Widow Xuclà serenely caressed her son and gazed at him with eyes that betrayed the vicinity of death. Pilar was not mistaken; that was the annunciation of the angina pectoris that would carry her off definitively a few hours later.

  Bobby acted as if it were nothing to be concerned about. The day had had to come, but he couldn’t stand the thought. That night, Bobby was overcome with a weakness, an impotence, and an unhappiness that made him ashamed even to get up from his chair and look at himself in the mirror.

  He escorted his mother to her bedchamber. She wanted especially to brace herself on Bobby’s arm. Her memory, which was becoming cloudy, made an effort to sort out her sweetest images of herself and of that child who was now on the verge becoming an old man. Pilar held back her tears so as not to destroy a silence in which neither she nor Bobby had the stamina to say a single word. Bobby patted her twice on the cheek, and with a forced laugh advised her not to let herself be overcome by foolish apprehension.

  Bobby went to his room full of dread. He wanted to believe it was for naught, that his mother was in no particular danger, and that perhaps she would still last a bit longer. Despite these reflections, Bobby sat glued to his armchair unable to open a book, waiting for he knew not what, as if he were on guard against the danger of some invisible thieves.