Private Life (13 page)

It is very possible that Frederic’s idea of religion was even more flawed than his father’s, because Frederic’s line of reasoning was that of a frustrated illiterate, an egotist who isn’t getting his way, a weak, vain man with no convictions, who would have eaten his father and all his timeworn religious prejudices alive. And yet, when he was in the mood, he would affirm that true aristocrats like himself were a superior race, and he would sing the praises of his family, even being so puerile as to describe his coat of arms to someone who couldn’t give a hoot about coats of arms, and who could clearly appreciate that Frederic de Lloberola was just as ordinary, undistinguished, and insignificant a being as any grocer or tram conductor. Frederic had promised Rosa Trènor that they would meet up before dinner, but he was not at all in the mood to see the woman. It is strange to see the effect twenty-four hours can have on inconsistent men who think themselves extraordinary but are in fact just about able to get by, and no more. Frederic’s brain was in a quixotic lather. At every step reality was revealing his mediocrity and his failure but,
if nothing more, the blood of the Lloberolas was good for fabricating illusions. The day before Frederic had envisioned himself in a novel of scandalous and flamboyant rebellion. It is not that in the intimacy of his marriage Frederic should not have had his reasons for desiring something more. But an ordinary man will do whatever crazy thing comes along, out of pleasure or necessity, without the slightest interference from any concept of chivalrous duty. Frederic believed that even in the wildest or basest things – what people call “bad deeds” – chivalric duty ought to intervene. For him, this duty consisted of seeking out the woman who had been his lover fifteen years earlier, because in this way the plot took on a romantic perfume that disinfected it of the undistinguished whiff of the plebeian in an overdue promissory note. The day before, the memory of Rosa Trènor’s sexual prowess had seemed absolutely incandescent; his disgust with his legitimate spouse had also become infinitely more acute. Paradoxical as it may seem – and with a poor devil like Frederic everything can seem paradoxical – what required the intervention of “chivalric duty,” the quixotic lather that warped his brain, was precisely the possibility of a rebellious and novelesque situation of that kind. Supposing that Rosa Trènor were actually worth it, a man with his feet more firmly planted on the ground might possibly have chosen a more pleasant and opportune moment, one less charged with worries and overdue notes – for the affair, or the reconciliation. To Frederic this would have seemed ill-bred. The more prosaic and obtuse people are, the more they are consumed with the need to shroud their acts in pathetic and literary braggadocio. In certain
situations it is the gossipy concierge who is best able to find the most overblown and melodramatic language. In many ways, Frederic de Lloberola had the mentality of a concierge.

Though a romantic situation can rise very suddenly, it can just as suddenly deflate, and turn into a tame cowardice that advances on foot, no longer dreaming of legendary steeds. This is what was happening to Frederic. Rosa Trènor had been a disappointment, though perhaps not an absolute disappointment. Frederic would go back to her, and she would let Frederic come back, but things would proceed without enthusiasm. The novel had been foiled by the night itself, the conversations with Don Tomàs and his brother, and finally the vision of Mossèn Claramunt. Frederic had filtered the anxiety of the promissory note through the eyes of Rosa Trènor. Later, he could hardly see Rosa Trènor at all, while the very real vision of the fifty-thousand pesseta note, perhaps because it was coming closer, was also the more cynical, placid and resigned one. And in the midst of it all there was still the question of whether his brother Guillem could work a miracle. Naturally, he didn’t believe he could; it was like the hope one placed in winning the grand prize in a raffle. You struggle against it, as the most gratuitous and absurd of hopes, but even so you think: “Well, someone has to win it; who knows? Anything is possible.” And, naturally, the illusion persists.

So after Frederic de Lloberola dropped Mossèn Claramunt off, he decided to go home instead of going to see Rosa Trènor. Frederic’s house was an apartment on Carrer de Bailèn. The staircase smelled of chicken wings, garbage cans, and the cheap local cigarillos known
as
caliquenyos
. It was an odor peculiar to some apartment houses in the Barcelona Eixample, which everyone puts up with and whose source no one can determine. Residents are subjected to it five or six times a day, and they complain to the concierge, who complains to the manager, but no one does anything about it. And alongside the natural whiff of the house there is a whiff of whining, ill humor, rancor, and feeble protest. Sometimes the smell comes from the laundry room; sometimes from the apartment of a German man who deals in drugs or specialized straps, and the smell coming from the German man’s apartment mingles with a repugnant codfish boiling in the concierge’s house. At that point, the chemical reaction in the entryway is reminiscent of the beard of the knights who traveled to the Holy Land or the nightgown of the paramour of an ancient king of Castile. Occasionally the smell proceeds from the souls of the ladies on the first floor, which are completely dead, and give off an odor of dead soul that not even carrion crows would have anything to do with.

Frederic’s apartment had an air of neglect. When the time comes to cut back, people accustomed to spending freely and living with a certain pomp adopt a kind of elegiac disregard that softens their bones and extends to all the details surrounding them. It drapes itself over the furniture and over the cooks’ hairdos. You can detect it in the chipped glassware, in the dining room chandelier missing two bulbs that no one bothers to replace, in the sad figurine that has lost a hand, and in the rug that is losing its pile and revealing its veins and bald spots. In the most intimate spaces, the bedrooms and the bathroom, this negligence exposes the cavities in their teeth and their dirty
undershirts. The water heater never quite works, the water never flows properly, the towels are always damp. When someone is ill, and a stranger has to come into the bedroom, the lady of the house agonizes over how to conceal the details, the flaws in the room, the peeling wallpaper, or the chair with the broken seat. In the small salon of the house, a bit of proper decorum is maintained, and care is taken to keep everything in order so that the ladies who come to visit can rest their eyes on a serene view as they take their tea, and not feel an uneasiness that would be just as bleak as the shame of their hosts.

In Frederic’s house, this feeling of neglect was even sadder because the furniture was in bad taste but of good quality, and too large for the apartment. Frederic had crammed the foyer with shields and coats of arms and even the occasional fake suit of armor. The same was true of the dining room and the salon: grotesque, incongruous and overbearing heraldic insignias shared the space with awful picture cards and paintings purchased who knows where at ridiculous prices, hung without a particle of discernment.

Maria, Frederic’s wife, was a person without initiative, whiny, bitter, and peevish, who little by little had also taken on the dusty sluggishness of Frederic’s family. Maria lived outside her time. She had adopted all the modifications introduced into the lady’s toilette after World War I: she patronized good hair stylists, manicurists and masseuses. But she followed their regimens in an unenergetic way, never getting any fresh air, never taking into account that in order for the work of the beauty salons to be effective it requires the constant collaboration of the client. The day after she had her nails polished,
her hands already looked unkempt. When she tried applying makeup, it only made things worse, as she had no instinct for it. She had lost the desire to be attractive, to be interesting, to breathe a smidgen of charm into the air around her. Maria’s friends affirmed that this was not a recent thing, that she had always been this way; moreover they said she was dirty. Maria’s bad taste was evident because she was incapable of putting together a serviceable outfit. Sometimes she would ruin an elegant evening dress by wearing misshapen old shoes whose leather or silk was worn from use. Like all slovenly people, Maria spent money absurdly. She was hopeless at saving or at the art of making do. Over the years she had been seized by a strange piousness, characterized not by religious fervor or faithful observance, but rather by the sneering and general disapproval born of self-righteousness and moralism.

Maria had pretty hair and nice skin; despite her children, who were now getting big – her daughter had just turned fourteen – she conserved her slim waist and didn’t need girdles or orthopedic wiles to prop up her somewhat abundant but still fresh body. With a different temperament Maria could have been a first-rate woman, but it seemed as if she were bent on killing any positive effects, on limiting herself to being a person without the least bit of sex appeal.

Having thrown in her lot with a family that had not known how to hold on to its wealth, and had exhausted her dowry as well, Maria started rolling out her instinct for unabashed complaint and unmotivated sniveling. While Frederic didn’t want it said that he was ruined, and childishly clinging to the Lloberola airs, he continued to talk in
the thousands of thousands like a grand gentleman, Maria did quite the opposite. When a friend praised the fine points of an overcoat, a refrigerator, a dog, or a device for piercing an egg for drinking, Maria would start with the ohs and ahs and roll her eyes back in her head. After this she would put on a sad face and shrug her shoulders, always with the same comment: “Lucky you! None of these things for poor me. With all our household expenses, just imagine! We have to save! Even now we’re getting along with just one maid. When you’ve had the problems we’ve had …” If Maria’s name came up, the ladies would always say, “Poor Maria.” This ostentation of poverty reached irritatingly grotesque proportions. If she went to visit friends who were close enough to receive her in the dining room as they ate, she would comment on every course: “What beautiful asparagus! Of course, you can enjoy such a delicacy. It’s been a long time since we’ve seen asparagus like these in my house. The way prices have risen!” These comments made the friends who were eating the asparagus want to say: “Here, Maria, be quiet and have some asparagus.” Naturally, this didn’t usually happen, but it made her friends feel bad, and they would end up getting no enjoyment out of the asparagus. When she was invited to a party she was dying to attend, she would snivel, just to play hard to get: “Impossible! X and Y will be there, and I don’t have a dress. I would have to wear my black georgette again, and they’ve seen me in it three times.”

This behavior reached funereal heights in the family circle. Her lack of skill at avoiding avoidable things, her sadistic delight in continually pointing out the mended patches and placing the blame on
her husband – never with violence, but with the slack demeanor of a beaten-down cat – and a mewling singsong full of bitterness and apparent resignation made her an odious woman. If the compensation of tender and passionate interludes, of something visceral and alive, had existed, perhaps a man could have found her relatively tolerable. But she was cold in intimacy, with a rigid and imperceptible sensuality, full of vengeful sighs of aversion.

The only person she got along with was her mother. Senyora Carreres, flush with money and diamonds, seemed to dissolve with voluptuosity when she contemplated the precarious situation of her daughter and son-in-law. She felt a sort of joyous middle class bad blood on seeing how the Lloberolas had squandered their fortune, right down to her daughter’s dowry. When Maria married, Senyora Carreres had learned that the Lloberolas found the Carreres family undistinguished and had wrinkled their noses at the match. Years later, Maria’s mother felt as if she were bathing in rose water on seeing herself so full of life, so well-fed and well-positioned, just as Frederic de Lloberola had had to lower himself, and beg clemency, often for ludicrous sums. Senyora Carreres cultivated her daughter’s tearful incontinence, inflaming her against her husband’s family, and creating an unbearably tense situation. It had been years since the in-laws had seen each other, and Frederic tolerated his wife’s parents out of pure necessity. Instead of keeping a bit of distance so as not to call attention to their contrasting fortunes, Senyora Carreres spent the entire day at her daughter’s side, saying “My poor dear! What misfortunes we must bear, dear God!” And she wasn’t good for a cent. Sometimes
when Frederic got home he would find the two of them sitting in a corner of the dining room. When he came in they barely said a word to him. Maria would bow her head, and Senyora Carreres would glare at him with eyes that appeared to want to cry. She would move her head with the cadence of a disappointed cow, like the ones that secretly lived in the heart of the densest and most impoverished neighborhoods of Barcelona. Frederic would take in the viscous gleam of those ruminant eyes and then, pretending not to have noticed a thing, begin to tell them tales of grandeur or bits of piquant gossip that he knew his mother-in-law would find offensive. Senyora Carreres would adopt an increasingly acidic, passive, and abused attitude, scratching her cheeks with her little doll’s nails. And Frederic would finally take off, wishing he were one of those despotic medieval Lloberolas who could have had the pleasure of sealing the two of them behind a wall, alive.

WHEN FREDERIC HAD dropped the priest off and decided to go home, he realized it had been twenty-four hours since he had last set foot there. Even though relations with his wife had attained a glacial chill, he had had to come up with a story and invent a trip with Bobby in order to spend the night away. He thought about seeing his children again, along with the same tablecloth and the same oil and vinegar cruets and perhaps even the same anemones from two days before. They would now be in a state of withered decomposition, because his wife was so neglectful that it wouldn’t be at all strange if she had not seen to changing the flowers.