The affairs lying on my desk were of little interest, some trivial issues to be handled as we awaited the verdict of the Boquería case. Thus, I whiled some time away, ate some vegetables and breaded red mullet with my assistant at home and, after coffee, allowed myself a relaxing siesta. Then I calmly read some thirty pages of Xavier de Maistre’s Voyage around My Room. Like him I believe that an armchair and a good book constitute the best recourse against the elapsing of time: “the hours slide over you and fall silently into eternity, and you do not even feel their melancholy passing.” At around seven in the evening I slid a carnation through my lapel, donned my hat and, cheerfully whistling, headed uptown toward the Arús Library.
The first thing that caught one’s eye there was the lamp hanging from the façade and the name of the institution engraved in glass. Once inside, a marble staircase led to a reading room, graced with a human-scale replica of New York’s Statue of Liberty. On the ceiling there were paintings depicting libraries, universities, and giants in the history of thought. The elegant shelves in the central reading room were in the Liberty style, and scattered here and there were compasses, stars, and leaves—symbols which left little room for doubt as to the library’s Masonic affiliations. In the back on a plinth was a bust: “Rosendo Arús, Founder.”
I walked past silent tables until I reached the one at which Libertad was seated. She wore her long, flowing hair loose, and she was buried in the pages of a book. When she closed it I saw the title on its cover: The Case for True Pacifism.
Lifting a finger to her lips in a subtle call for silence, she took me by the hand and led me out of the room. The workers studying there watched me with suspicion.
We went outside.
“You’ve summoned me to a genuine Masonic temple,” I said with reproach.
“The Arús Library was founded by a great philanthropist in order to elevate the intellectual level of Catalonia’s workers. It’s true that Arús was a freethinker and a proponent of laicism and public schooling, but the legacy he left encompassed everything from politics to sociology, and even music and the fine arts.
“I don’t think I can take exception to that,” I conceded.
“I asked you to come because I have something to confide in you. A friend of mine, a Spiritualist, has told me that he is certain that Ángel will appear tonight at his group’s meeting.”
“A Spiritualist?”
“Yes, one who believes in the metaphysically transcendent. He’s expecting us in a short while.”
“Libertad, I think I’m going to drop the search for Lacalle. You were right. His sister is not to be trusted. She lied to me on several points, and I now see no reason to continue with the investigation.”
The beautiful anarchist stared at me with her arresting blue eyes.
“My intuition tells me that Ángel is all right, but I also sense that he wants us to look for him and find him. When you entered our commune an inner voice told me that destiny had placed you there to help us. With that look of yours, that of a clever boy who believes himself to be a great man, and your maternal devotion, which makes any woman pale in comparison—everything leads me to believe that your heart is pure.”
“I can’t believe what I’m hearing! You’re analyzing me after seeing me just twice?”
“Vilar, I am a bit of a seer, very intuitive. And you have realized that I am.”
I gave in. “Let’s drop this conversation and head to the meeting.”
* * *
During that era the most implausible beliefs seemed to proliferate in Barcelona. I had heard several times about the activities of Spiritualists, who purported to summon souls from the other side of the Styx, generally through the assistance of a medium. I was not aware, however, that they also used their gifts to summon people who had disappeared.
The place we were headed was located on Alí-Bey Street, in a section of Barcelona’s Ensanche district where the ground floors of the buildings were mostly warehouses and occupied by retail textile businesses, which imbued the area with a buoyantly industrial and industrious atmosphere. Libertad led me inside a building. After a passing through an elaborate Modernist entryway, we took an elevator up to the third floor. We knocked on the door and a maid escorted us to an immense hall with walls of fine wood and lit by heavy bronze lamps. The setting did not exactly accord with the anarchistic spirit of the woman who had brought me there.
“It’s the home of a bourgeois sympathizer. She’s a very remarkable person, you’ll see.”
We were welcomed by a pudgy, elegantly dressed lady in her forties. Her freckled face and childlike appearance did not seem to concur with the mysterious mission which had drawn us to her door. Her name was Diana, and she guided us through a series of dimly lit zigzagging hallways lined with hefty pieces of furniture to a rectangular chamber in the center of which was an oval table.
Sitting at the table was Floreal Gambús; an austerely dressed lady with white hair and an incongruously youthful face, introduced to me as Angustias; a young redheaded girl named Igualdad, apparently my guide’s cousin; a man by the name of Jorge Antonio with the coarse and cocky appearance of a civil servant who had come into money; and a truly peculiar character named Volodia, who was apparently Slavic, with vacant blue eyes, gaps between his teeth and a rather silly-looking smile. He was the medium.
He greeted me lifting his hand to his forehead, as if giving a military salute.
“Hello, Colonel, ha, ha, ha.”
“I’m not a colonel, but a civilian, and my name is Vilar, Pablo Vilar.”
“Of course, Colonel, ha, ha, ha.”
“Are you the one who said he was in contact with Ángel Lacalle? Can you get him to come?”
“He shall come, he shall come here like an angel, like an emissary of the gods. Like a genuine incorporeal herald of Providence, to mediate between the heaven of the superior spirits, where harmony reigns, and the hell of common men, driven to misery and violence.”
The session began. We had sat down at the table, all of us in a circle, with our heads down and our hands outspread on the table, touching those of the people next to us, which in my case were Libertad and Igualdad. Volodia had placed some white paper and a few pencils before him.
The medium began to whisper.
“We have gathered here to convoke our friend Ángel, and we shall now summon in our souls and hearts the energy necessary for him to appear. Ángel … Ángel …”
Nothing happened.
“Ángel, Ángel …”
Nothing happened.
“We are now going to intensify our efforts. We shall concentrate and traverse every corner of our bodies in our minds until we draw to the surface that spiritual substrate we need.”
“Ángel, Ángel …”
The curtains along the wall had begun to softly flutter. The table began to move, almost imperceptibly.
“Ángel, Ángel. Unfurl your ivory wings and fly to us. Bring to us the beauty of paradise, and announce to us the good tidings of your survival.”
The table began to move more visibly. The others at the table seemed immersed in a state of ecstasy, and I felt progressively more intrigued. The table legs began to rattle against the floor: clack, clack, clickety-clack.
“Ángel, Ángel.”
I swear that at that moment I heard something like a loud whistle, which gave me goose bumps.
“He is here. He is here … I can feel the connection. Ángel, show yourself … If you cannot reach us, tell us where we can find you.”
The whistling grew louder.
“He’s in a trance,” Libertad whispered to me.
“Ángel, if you cannot come, guide my hand,” implored the medium.
Volodia suddenly grabbed a pencil and began to scribble something quite frantically on the table as his face contorted into a strange grimace.
“I can feel the connection. Continue to inspire me, continue to inspire me … Lighten your vibrations, activate our own … Touch our spiri
ts … Share our harmony …”
And then, in an instant, everything ceased. The lights came on all at once, Volodia’s hand stopped moving, and the whistling had ceased. We all looked at each other as if we had just awoken from a dream.
I looked at the drawing on the table. It was of a tree.
“Ángel tells us that he is in contact with nature,” Volodia announced, his face a little pallid.
“That doesn’t say much. Eighty percent of the planet is covered by nature,” I objected.
“You are very skeptical, Colonel.”
“It was my understanding that Spiritualism was based on communicating with spirits, but those disassociated from their bodies; that is, the spirits of dead people. How on earth, then, can one contact the spirit of someone who is still alive? They told me that we could find clues here to locate Lacalle. Is this all you can offer us?”
“I have offered you his actual presence. What more do you need?”
“It is getting late,” I snapped. “Are you coming with me, Libertad?”
We took our leave of the house’s owner, who seemed pleased with the event held there, and stepped outside, where the Ensanche’s dim streetlamps bathed the street in a faint light.
“I’m sorry. It didn’t yield the results I had hoped,” Libertad said.
“It seemed to be a bizarre situation overseen by a charlatan,” I responded. “Nevertheless, at least I wasn’t asked to disrobe, which is what Floreal wanted me to do the day I went to visit the Community of the Sun. I never know what to expect with you people.”
“That’s a facetious remark worthy of an oppressors’ lackey,” she kidded me. “As for the Spiritualism, it had to be tried. Ángel still hasn’t surfaced, and there is no way to get in touch with him.” Her expression had grown serious.
“Where are you going? May I accompany you?” I asked.
“I’m going to the Community.”
“But it’s late and there are no streetcars running. You don’t mean to walk for over an hour to get there?”
“And why not? It wouldn’t be the first or the last time.”
“I’ve got a better idea. Let’s go to Plaza de Cataluña and I’ll get a car for you. I’m sure that it will be a more pleasant mode of transportation.”
We walked for a good while along the empty sidewalks as Libertad spoke to me of her happy childhood among the activists, and of the influence the writer and agitator Teresa Claramunt had on them. Thirty years before, she had urged women to “tear off their blindfolds” and dare to lift their voices and express their needs, overturning the workers’ tradition of considering them weak beings who couldn’t have their own freedom and who had to be cared for like children. Beautiful and arrogant, Teresa Claramunt was a great crusader against prostitution—that “social gangrene” that affected, above all, the daughters of the common people. She had lost five children to ill-fated pregnancies, and her only daughter, recorded in the civil registry with the name Proletaria Libre, died of pneumonia at just one year old.
“I, like her, believe that women’s ignorance must be overcome through education. And, just like her, I believe that the abolition of private property will lead to the emancipation of women, free love, and egalitarian families, liberated from oppressive patriarchy. Where I don’t agree with Teresa is when she argues that our main opponents are men,” Liberty explained. “Are you familiar with Oriental thought? Have you heard of the yin and yang, the two vital, complementary principles upon which the universe rests? Well, we men and women are the same. Complementary.”
I spoke to her of my childhood in Cádiz, of the marvelous bay which, tracing a striking arch, reaches all the way to the Puerto de Santa María; of my grandfather the diplomat’s Christmastime visits, with his silvery beard; of when he brought a nativity scene inside a glass box, and whose figures came to life at the press of a hidden button; of my arrival to Barcelona, high school, and how I began college, studying law at just fifteen …
Our walk was long but pleasant through that Barcelona in which the smell of jasmine still hung in the air, and when we reached Plaza de Cataluña there were no taxis there. I offered to escort her to San Martín de Provensals, retracing part of the route we had covered.
“That sounds like a good idea,” Libertad said, “though I can think of another. Didn’t you tell me that you live alone in a large flat, with a maid who has her own quarters? Well, if you offer me a room, just for tonight, as any good friend of the cause would do, I think I could accept.”
Stunned, I looked into her eyes.
“What are you really proposing?”
She tenderly caressed my cheek as she gave a hint of a warm and delicate smile.
“I am proposing that we open up to each other. Come on, Pablo, your house is not far.”
Hand in hand, we set out down the road, which would lead to my bedroom, where we would experience a few marvelous hours of much-needed and unexpected bliss. Before Lucinda was up and about preparing the house and office, as she did every day, and before the maid could detect her magical presence, Libertad had silently and stealthily slipped away after a delicate final kiss, abandoning my residence in Plaza Medinaceli.
11
Juan Antonio Güell López, the third Marquess of Comillas and the second count of Güell, had invited me to his home in Pedralbes. This aristocrat, who a few years later would serve as Barcelona’s mayor, was a charming character whose company I very much enjoyed. His father had been a patron of Gaudí and the poet Verdaguer, both of whom my friend had known during his childhood. As an adult, the Count of Güell was a bon vivant and an educated and sophisticated gentleman accustomed to having a behind-the-scenes hand in every political event of any importance transpiring in Spain. A major industrialist and large landowner, his struggle to reconcile his regional sentiments and loyalty to Catalonia (which was very moderate, it should be noted) and his allegiance to the monarchical government constituted a leitmotif in his career.
“Whenever I find myself entangled in the debate over Catalonia and Spain, I feel like a child whose parents will never get along well. In this affair, both sides tend to be very irritating,” he once said to me.
Güell was an expert in the very particular field of Spanish polychromatic sculpture, especially its virgins, and when he surfaced at social functions he usually arrived in the company of one of the great beauties of the day. He was driven around in an impressive Rolls Royce full of cushions upon which he would recline in order to meditate, and when traveling along the dusty Spanish highways of the period he had the habit of picking up lone wayfarers and accompanying them to their destinations. “I advise my friends to do the same. It is a way, at times, of doing someone a great service with just a small effort.”
On one occasion, returning along the road to Sitges, which he often plied, he picked up a man who had come on foot from Valencia, bound for Barcelona in search of work. He sat the man next to him and discreetly opened the window (the poor man reeked, as it was almost summer and he had been walking for days). He had no money and no food, and had not even thought about stealing any fruit, out of fear of the Guardia Civil. In all those days nobody had stopped, offered to give him a ride, or made any part of his journey more bearable. The traveler, however, did not bemoan his fate nor did he rebel.
“I was struck by the man’s submission to fate. Half starved, at no point had he thought of lashing out and taking something from all those who had passed him along the road wrapped in luxury. So I asked him, ‘Do you believe in God and the afterlife?’ He paused a few seconds and, after a weak cough, responded, ‘There must be something.’ And then he added, ‘I never had any schooling, so I don’t know anything at all … but I figure … that there must be something.’ ‘There must be something!’ How about that, Pablo?” he said to me. “A man who had nothing at all. Sometimes I think I really understand those who put Marie Antoinette to the guillotine.”
Güell was an avid traveler, with impressive contacts everywhere. Hi
s Barcelona home inevitably welcomed all the era’s leading figures in Catalonian and Spanish society. At age seventeen his father had taken him to Bavaria, to Munich, to visit Queen Isabel in the Palace of Nymphenburg, where she lived in exile. That was his first visit to a royal palace.
“I was fascinated,” he told me, “by the immense, solitary corridors, the successions of chambers, the servants and footmen, frozen like statues, the solemn, distant voices announcing the king’s arrival. And in that same building, under the same roof of gray slate, was a set of small doors. Disguised as damask panels, they opened onto some narrow corridors in which one could hear the rustle of silk from elusive skirts. That continuous mix of the private and the public, of the heart and all the marble, is what makes these royal palaces irresistible.”
He had met Prince Yusupoff, Rasputin’s killer; in Tetuán he was warmly received by the city’s dignitaries, such as Muhammad Ziuziu; and when he went to Rome his hosts were the Archduchess Margaret and Princess Nieves Massimo. Juan Antonio knew everyone everywhere, and wherever he went he moved with the finesse and the naturalness of one who believes that works of charity and art are the only ones that make life worth living.
That morning, wearing a silk robe that barely covered his corpulent physique, he led me to his terrace, where a couple of servants in tails and white gloves served us coffee. Stretching out before us lay the great city and, off in the distance, we could make out white sails against the blue horizon. Under the shade cast by the great mulberry and chestnut trees in the mansion’s garden it felt like no ill could ever befall anyone in such a haven.
“The world was created for life, and life for pleasure. Don’t you think so, Pablo?”
“I am not a hedonist like you and you know it, my dear Count. Original sin has sealed our lives with a tragic dimension, however we struggle to forget it. That said, your garden is a delight, and the morning, wonderful.”
“You paint me as an unbeliever, which I’m not. On the contrary, I think religious passion is, along with that for the monarchy, the only root of our social and political structure that is actually embraced by the people.”
A Barcelona Heiress Page 15