Private Life (2 page)

Frederic spent fifteen years mulling over these questions. What gullies must Frederic Lloberola’s soul have fathomed to arrive at the spent air of that chamber, facing the glass eyes of a desiccated dog with a garter around its neck?

FOR MONTHS NOW Frederic and Rosa Trènor had been eyeing each other at the bar of the Hotel Colón. Penetrating the discipline she imposed with mascara, he had perceived a gaze that was neither indifferent nor ill-disposed. Seen from a distance, her make-up applied with severity, his former lover’s skin still had its effect. Frederic knew from his friends that Rosa’s situation was dire. She had lost any trace of regular patronage, and only her arts – praised by many who had had dealings with her – and the imperative of the air a woman who has been very beautiful never entirely loses, allowed Rosa Trènor, pushing forty, to risk still playing the role of a lady in the theater of love, retaining her dignity under the benign deference of the half-light.

The habitués and professionals of the demimonde knew Rosa Trènor by heart, and her presence or the memory of it elicited merciless commentaries. Still, from time to time, at her table, in the wee hours of the night or, if you will, in the first hours of the dawn, some gentleman of good intentions, fortified with a relative enthusiasm, would approach the florists of the most effervescent cabarets to
choose and purchase, without haggling, the best bouquet of camellias for Rosa Trènor. One of those men who drink in moderation and do not entirely lose all respect at the sight of painted lips. Those admirable gentlemen, generally the object of ridicule in the view of rowdy and raucous youth, who have the distinction of considering that a woman is never, not even in her saddest condition, a beast inferior to a man, who can be brutalized as if she had no soul.

One of Frederic’s most loyal friends, Robert Xuclà, whom everyone knew as Bobby Xuclà – and this pretentious and somewhat gigoloesque name of Bobby was somewhat laughable as applied to a middle-aged bachelor with thinning hair, short of leg and large of girth, in whom all the most inoffensive and homely Barcelona essences came together – was the kind soul who acted as the intermediary between Frederic and Rosa Trènor.

In part because of her brilliant past, and a kind of cynical and offhanded way of behaving, proper to the aristocracy, but even more because of her taste for reading and penchant for argument, Rosa’s prestige as a superior woman was acknowledged among the vaporous clan of kept women who could flaunt their diamonds and even dump a five-star gent with relative impunity. One of these vamps was Mado, Bobby’s erstwhile girlfriend. Not that Bobby had the exclusive; Mado was a girl whose hospitality was luscious, inconstant, ephemeral, and as absolutely lacking in intelligence as a branch of lilac. Fidelity, for Mado, was just as impossible as wearing garters attached to a girdle. Whenever she had tried to put on such garters she had had to give up in the attempt, because they made her feel faint. This
is why Mado was constantly pulling up her stockings, a peculiarity that lent her a rather lewd charm, of the kind seen in ports and sailors’ taverns.

Though Mado devoted every evening to humiliating Bobby, he was an understanding fellow, and even as he entered his girlfriend’s apartment, he would often wear the polite and somewhat beleaguered air of a man who is afraid he’s not welcome.

Mado’s little apartment was the place Rosa Trènor favored whenever she felt the irresistible desire to exercise her spiritual ascendancy. Even though Mado loved to deflate, denigrate, and tell horrible stories about Rosa Trènor, she held her in great esteem. More than once the kindness and good heart of Mado or some other girl had got Rosa out of a jam, and whenever she had received a favor from one of those young women, Rosa Trènor would put on such dignified airs and affect such grande dame simpers that no one could ever have doubted that it was precisely Rosa Trènor who had done the favor and was enjoying her own generosity.

Through Mado and Bobby, Frederic was gathering ideas about Rosa Trènor’s soft spots. Once Bobby had half-dragged him over to Rosa’s table, but Frederic had resisted. Under no circumstances did he want this event to take place in public. One of the characteristics of Frederic’s insignificance was that he thought of himself as a sort of central character on whom all eyes converged.

Other times Bobby had tried to bring them face to face, because Frederic was dying of anticipation, but the circumstances had not quite been ripe.

News had been reaching Bobby about Frederic’s irregular situation and his family disasters, but even though their friendship was longstanding, he behaved with the utmost discretion in this regard. Despite the confidence Bobby had always inspired in him, and unwilling, in the way of the Lloberolas, to surrender his lordly airs, Frederic had never said so much as half a word to his friend about what he called “unpleasant” things.

Frederic could tell Bobby about some despicable thing he had done, or reveal an intimate detail about his wife, with the crudity, vulgarity, or ferocity of a feudal lord; he could go on at length with the most boorish remarks about certain things of a physiological nature pertaining to his own person. But never, among all the sad confidences he had entrusted to Bobby, had Frederic told him that his father had mortgaged such-and-such a property or that he himself had been obliged to pawn his wife’s jewels.

And, once Frederic had made up his mind, when the circumstances were ripe for the encounter with Rosa Trènor, he had also hidden the “unpleasant” cause, the immediate and determining factor of his decision, from Bobby. Even though it was, in fact, an extremely unexceptional event. In the preceding years the economic disarray of Frederic and his wife had reached scandalous proportions. Everyone was aware of the situation both Frederic and his father faced. Everyone knew that the Lloberolas had had to sell off a great deal, and curtail their expenses. But Frederic was not about to relinquish his histrionic streak; he had covered things up any way he could, and at
the point where this story begins, he was facing the threat of a loan about to come due. It was a personal credit extended to him without an underwriter. Frederic could not make the payment. There had been talk of an extension, but this would not be possible without his father’s guarantee. Naturally, Frederic was incapable of disavowing his signature or risking the consequences of non-payment. But horrible as these things seemed to him, the interview with his father filled him with even greater dread. The amount in question was considerable enough to produce scenes Frederic had no stomach for.

Worries about money had been the dyspepsia of his entire life, but at that point they had become acute. Frederic had been holding on for a long time; for the first time the possibility arose of not holding on, nor wanting to hold on, nor making the slightest effort to hold on.

It didn’t faze Frederic to spin out of control, to plunge into the mud with one foot now that he was mired in the mud with the other, to combine economic disgrace with a daring, glaring fling, or to resolve with weepy, theatrical cynicism what a genuine person would resolve with humility.

The circumstances were ripe. Frederic wanted twenty-four hours of oblivion, or twenty-four hours to hide his head in the sand like an ostrich. One day far from his family and from the overdue promissory note.

It was for all these reasons that Frederic asked Bobby to go with him to Mado’s house, where he was sure to run into Rosa Trènor.

And the day after that decision, stretched out between the sheets, mechanically interrogating the stuffed dog with his gaze and once again lightly running his fingernails over the initials on the pillow, he started reconstructing the scenes of the previous night.

AT HALF PAST ELEVEN, he and Bobby were on their way up the stairs. Mado herself opened the door; she was wearing colonial blue and silver striped pajamas. The satin pajama fabric strained over her breasts, which resembled two boxes of bonbons of the kind you would have seen at the turn of the century on top of the piano of a family of modest means. Frederic took much more notice of Mado’s pectoral ploy than of the explosive kiss the young woman planted on Bobby’s lips, forcing up his nostrils the dregs of smoke that clung to her gums. Frederic ran the nail of Mado’s pinky finger over his lips, and with an almost musical peal of laughter she pushed the two men into the dining room.

Mado’s living room contained the expectation produced by sudden twists of fate; gambling dilated the eyes, producing stinging and natural tears, and causing mascara to be forgotten. Tics, cold stomachs, or cold feet, and a displacement of the jaw and nasal creases disturbed the equilibrium of the features. In such a place, when things were going badly for someone, an atavistic simian air left its bold imprint on the faces there.

Among the players was Reina, a very young girl with platinum hair, her back exposed to below her kidneys, revealing a stretch of bloodless whitish muscles molded into the casing of a more vegetal and decorative skin.

Reina was Mado’s best friend, and there were those who attributed certain predilections to them, because Reina treated the young men who surrounded her as if she always had a fissure ready through which the eel of her soul could make its escape.

When it came time to play cards, Reina’s concentration breached the limits of the most elementary manners: she allowed no jokes, her extremely forced smile revealed teeth with an excessive secretion of saliva, produced by her state of nerves, not unlike that of a group of hyenas that have convened upon the cemetery. More superstitious than the others, when Reina was dealt a card, before looking at it she would press down on it with her index finger until it hurt, leaving behind the slight imprint of her nail. Suspicious minds attributed this to a wish to mark the cards, but this was an entirely false accusation, because Reina had no intention of cheating when she did this. It was a superstitious quirk that she combined compulsively with lifting her chin and staring off into the distance. At moments like this Reina’s eyes took on the alluring artificial brilliance of fake gemstones. As Frederic walked into the dining room, propelled by Mado’s laughter, the first thing his eyes fell upon was that stare. Frederic, who was acquainted with Mado and the other girls in the game, felt repelled by those eyes, which appeared to him as a new and hostile thing. His
first reaction was to fall back, not to continue forward toward the encounter with Rosa Trènor. Reina’s involuntary gaze, which bore no ill will toward Frederic, had cooled the temperature of his audacity, and Frederic had felt like a coward again; but before he could formulate any kind of decision, Rosa Trènor’s small, plump hand was covering Frederic’s lips, and he felt bound by the warm, dry silk of that hand.

In Mado’s living room, Rosa abstained from any complicated toilette; she was wearing a simple dress topped by a cherry-colored sweater; the same clothes she would have worn at home, on a winter’s night, with a migraine or the vague beginnings of a cold. Her lack of concern for clothing was considered a characteristic of good taste; when the time came to say good-bye, Rosa enveloped her flesh and the worn clothing that covered it in a great beaver coat, a bit moth-eaten and the worse for wear, with the tender good humor of a person who was going off to rest with no intention of giving anyone cause for alarm.

When Rosa paid this kind of visit to the girls, she carried with her an enormous snakeskin bag, which she opened with the unctuous sigh of a philanthropist of popular lore ready to hand out bread and cheese to a band of raggedy children. In point of fact, Rosa didn’t hand out anything she carried in the bag; she would rummage around inside and extract skeins of multicolored wool and a sweater she had just started. Mixed in with that bit of feminine handiwork, Rosa had books, papers, notebooks, a little bottle of peppermint, the keys to her house, and an entire battery of rouges, mirrors, compacts, and
combs. Rosa Trènor’s bag was one of her most personal belongings. She talked about “her” bag in the same way that a hairdresser with fantasies talks about “his” hair-growing elixir.

When Rosa started weaving her web, she would tantalize her admirers with hints and meaningful glances. She would attribute a lie she had just read in a trashy novel to some fashionable fellow – someone from “her world” as she put it – far-removed from the present company of kept women and famous for his wife’s fur coats and infidelities. Rosa had a special gift for twisting gossip and for making tacky, trashy comments without altering her tone of voice or the monotonous movement of her lips. Sometimes her conversation meandered onto paths of tenderness and morality, and she affected dismay at something some honorable gentlemen had told her about a lady of the finest reputation.

Rosa’s natural grace consisted of a sort of careless, authentic Barcelona flair that she, the daughter of a notary, born in the old city center, had not entirely managed to lose despite the bastardization of her contacts and the coming apart of her life.

When the time came to shuffle the cards, Rosa left off pontificating and set to trying her luck, in the flaccid, voracious way of a leech sucking blood from bruised flesh. On those occasions, Rosa would produce a discreet amount of money and lay her bet with the yellowish grimace characteristic of people with kidney problems. In general, Rosa didn’t lose much, but when she did, her sweater turned a deeper red, by contrast, because all the rouge on Rosa’s cheeks was not enough to veil her pallor.