Private Life (22 page)

Two days after hearing the news of Dorotea Palau’s murder, Guillem requested another meeting with Antoni Mates. Flustered and practically jumping out of his own skin, naturally the baron conceded it to him. Guillem was paid a considerable sum. Mates handed it over with relative dignity, considering the panic and rage that consumed him. A short time later, Guillem turned the screws a little tighter. At that point the baron lost control, cried, groveled, threatened to kill Guillem and then begged Guillem to kill him, to free him of this torture. In the end, the baron gave in. Guillem performed
magnificent demonstrations of serenity, cold-bloodedness, soullessness. After he had paid Guillem, the baron attended a very important board meeting. They were preparing for the Exposició Internacional on Montjuïc. Those were the days of the most unrestrained squandering of the dictatorship, and the Baró de Falset anticipated magnificent returns. This was where his brilliant and splendid reality lay; he hid his tortures, his fear and the secret and unutterable reality deep within his breast. The baron wondered if he was the victim of strange hallucinations. When push came to shove, the young man could say whatever he liked. What of it? Who would believe him? And if they did believe him, then what? The baron would recover his serenity for a few days but then, every so often, he would remember the letter he had written and the fear would return. It was the infamous letter that kept him up at night. He could have gone to Frederic and demanded that he return the document, throwing in his face his indelicacy in not having burned the letter, as he had requested. But he would soon desist because that would have exposed him, and muddied the waters, when what he most wanted was for the waters to stay nice and quiet, and for not a word to be breathed.

To understand the intimidation of the Baró de Falset, the acuteness of his panic and the extent of his vulnerability, one must always bear in mind the weakness and cowardice that stemmed from his abnormality. The other thing that must also be kept in mind is the kind of prestige he enjoyed and the kind of people he lived among.

Antoni Mates sought out a famous Jesuit priest. Mates had a reputation as a great Catholic and a great believer, even though at the core
his religiosity was a sham. But he tried. He made an attempt to see whether his religion could be a living, breathing thing, and whether he could find some kind of consolation in it, in the event of a catastrophe.

The Jesuit was an intelligent man, but he felt lost here. The Baró de Falset was a moral wreck. He had no faith, no resignation, no repentance, nothing; he had only the asphyxiating fear of a rabbit, and nothing more. Antoni Mates also realized this was not the path for him.

When a cowardly man finds himself in a blind alley, he is capable of who knows what foul things. So it was that the Baró de Falset had a grotesque, criminal idea. He was in good standing with shady elements of the Ministry of the Interior – the Minister was Martínez Anido – who was in contact with other even shadier elements, more given to, shall we say, “direct action.” The Baró de Falset believed that, if he paid enough, there would be a way to make Guillem de Lloberola disappear, in an apparent accident or – why not? – a murder. So many had disappeared this way in Barcelona, what difference could one more make? He came very close to proposing the idea to a person who very possibly would have welcomed it, but he couldn’t, he didn’t have the guts. He didn’t trust the person he had in mind.

Secure in his power, Guillem initiated a new attack. That day the baron’s nerves were in better shape than usual. Guillem said:

“All right, it’s your decision! I will do as I see fit.”

Before the young man’s resolute expression, the baron proposed a transaction, but then Guillem decided to up the ante, and with appalling aplomb he uttered:

“I don’t give a damn about your money: it’s you I want to ruin. I will risk it all, I don’t care. I wouldn’t keep silent even if you gave me your entire fortune, do you understand? You are contemptible, and since you have no imagination, you can’t possibly comprehend the pleasure it would give me to annihilate a person like you. Even if I had to annihilate myself in the process, even if it meant the death of my father. As you can imagine, the death of a father, or anyone else, is nothing compared to the joy of ripping off a mask as well-anchored as the one attached to your face. What merit is there in destroying a worm, a wastrel, and a ne’er-do-well like me with a scandal? None at all. The merit lies in destroying the falsehoods of an imposter like you, surrounded by priests and bank accounts, flush with credit and consideration. To watch as this hypocritical society you belong to writhes disgustingly with joy and horror on hearing that one of the biggest fish in said society has been tarred with infamy and tossed into the gutter in his underwear. You must understand that if it is in my power to enjoy such a spectacle, I will not be so foolish as to let the occasion pass. I swear to you, everyone will know! Everyone will know who the Baró de Falset is, I swear it!”

Guillem’s words left the baron utterly terrified, his response dying on his lips.

From that day on, Guillem took pleasure in elaborating a sort of cruel torment. He found a way to secure introductions to persons who had frequent dealings with the baron, and to others who were under his authority. He would show up in the company of those persons in strategic places where the baron would be sure to see him
speaking with them, wearing a meaningful smile. He had the nerve to show up in the baron’s own offices, and enter into conversation with his most important staff.

Antoni Mates thought he was done for. When he ran into someone who greeted him, when he chatted with someone else, he was utterly subject to suggestion. He thought he could sense that the person was already in on everything, that it had all been explained to him. He thought every word was an allusion; he perceived a double meaning in the most innocent things. In his office, on his most sensitive missions to the most notable members of society, on his many boards of administration, everywhere, he would discover imaginary eyes examining him, laughing at him, looking down on him as the lowest and most repugnant of perverts. And this fear, this terrible fear, began to leave its mark on his face. It altered his voice, his gestures, his way of walking. People who ran into him often, and, even more, those who had not seen him in a while, detected a bizarre uneasiness that they couldn’t explain. As the days went by, the situation became darker and darker. In the end, everyone was aware, everyone realized that something very serious was wrong with him, and no one could figure out the cause. Only Guillem de Lloberola secretly reveled, silent as a dead man, as he contemplated the slow martyrdom of that poor man laden with millions, with stature, and with cowardice.

In their conjugal life the situation was even more unsavory. Conxa asked her husband what was happening to him. Since Guillem’s first attack, Antoni Mates had manifested to Conxa his remorse for everything
he had done, for the lengths he had gone to in degrading himself and degrading her. Conxa didn’t understand. She was made up of a combination of cynicism and other things the baron couldn’t suspect. She thought her husband had gone soft in the head, which for her, in truth, had long been true. But when his fear took on the dimensions of madness, Conxa became frightened. Antoni Mates didn’t hint at Guillem’s role in his disgrace and, naturally, Conxa didn’t know a thing, nor would she ever know, about how Guillem was undermining her husband.

Conxa called in two or three doctors. Perhaps it was a case of
surmenage
, a temporary breakdown; perhaps it could be cured with a bit of repose. The more they treated Antoni Mates, the worse things got. He hadn’t the slightest doubt that everyone was in on the story, and that he inspired disgust and pity. He once again considered the idea of making Guillem disappear, but by then it was too late. What good would it do? The death of that young man couldn’t heal a thing, and would only compound the horror that was stalking him with the horror of a crime.

Antoni Mates was a total wreck. In three months, a man who had been famous for his aplomb and his sagacity in business, for his unassailable social position, had turned into a sort of drooping puppet, powerless to clear his lungs of the pus of imaginary infamy that kept him from breathing.

IT TOOK FREDERIC a long time to realize it, but in the end he understood that he had done a foolish thing. Bobby had been a good and trustworthy friend to him. A man as unsubstantial and overwrought as Frederic needed a passive and patient foil. Not everyone could treat him with Bobby’s calm, cool nonchalance. If Frederic had been a thinking man, if he had been able to see himself in the mirror with critical good faith, without the passion and vanity that dominated him whenever his affairs were in question, perhaps he wouldn’t have needed others so much. Above all he wouldn’t have needed Bobby so much. For a man like Frederic, lacking in imagination and any kind of inner life, it is more troublesome to lose a friend of Bobby’s caliber than it is to lose a lover, no matter how smitten he may be. Because people like Frederic see women as creatures who fulfill them and satisfy them on given days or hours, in their spare time, beyond the ordinary, gray hours of everyday. To the man who is experiencing it, a bond with a woman who makes your head spin can seem like a one-of-a-kind thing, tinged with a pearly suggestiveness, a red-hot eagerness. Oftentimes – indeed, most times – this suggestiveness, and this eagerness, can simply be replaced with another woman. It can even happen – also quite frequently – that for the moment there is no need to replace them. That is, they can be compensated for with a feeling of calm, of liberation, of repose, and of clarity. Gray everyday life can continue precisely on its way, perhaps a bit more transparently. Once eliminated and in the past, those moments of private life, of incandescence and lyricism, do not by a long shot possess the same lyricism and incandescence. On the contrary, they are
perceived as an oppressive imposition that we have been fortunate to free ourselves of, and if we just persist a bit, it will not be at all difficult to pick up another imposition that will have the same lyrical and incandescent effect.

In contrast, if we are lazy by nature, once we have had as a friend, without realizing his worth – because we thought it was a natural thing, like having healthy teeth or clear eyes – a person who will put up with all the humbuggery of our particular way of being; who will go for a walk when we feel like it or sit down when we don’t feel like walking; who has sufficient lack of initiative to go to the theater we want to go to, or not to go to the theater at all, if we fancy the Forty Hours’ Devotion; a person who has the distinction of listening to us and of knowing how to listen, who contradicts us when we wish to be contradicted and is silent when we require silence; a person who never says no, but has the grace often to pretend to say it; a person with whom we have lived for years and years and who is as useful as a pair of old slippers to rest the feet after a very long walk; as soon as, by whatever chance, we find that this person disappears from our everyday dull routine, then what happens is that time becomes interminable, and our walk, our club, our confidences, our aperitif, our leisure time, and even our boredom are not what they used to be. They are missing the wedge that propped them up. Our life is like those annoying wobbly coffee tables on which no drink can be enjoyed. Someone who has been a friend since adolescence cannot be replaced by just anyone. The obstacles are much more difficult in nature than when it is simply a question of replacing one lover with another. The time
of love, the life of the emotions, is always easy to resolve. In contrast, the dreary hours, life without rewards, the slow digestion of minutes stripped of pain or glory, or cloaked in the shadows of the sadness of desire, these are the hours that cannot be resolved just any old way. These are the hours when we most require, and hence most value, a disinterested collaboration.

Bobby was not precisely this ideal friend to Frederic, but of all his acquaintances he was the one who came closest, the one who gave him that feeling of repose, calm, and companionship. Frederic would never have given any thought to the value of friendship. Bobby offered him nothing more than patience and good manners, and Frederic absorbed these things – which came very easily to Bobby – as if they were the elements of a true friendship. Both as a single and a married man, Frederic had fallen out with everyone. Companions didn’t last long with him because, in general, in order to take Frederic seriously you had to be just as trivial and oblivious as he was. Squabbles were common and intemperance was shared equally. Only Bobby, by virtue of being so different from Frederic, and so incapable of passion, abandon, or a vivid interest in anyone’s fate, allowed Frederic, who was no psychologist, the gratification of believing that he was a faithful friend. At the same time, Frederic could indulge in the pleasure of considering himself far superior to Bobby.

After their foolish falling-out, Frederic thought he had lost the company of a first-rate fellow, the only one he considered a good friend. And for a ridiculous reason, in which the greater part of the fault lay with him. He discovered that he missed a number of
things. He discovered that when he left the Banc Vitalici to take up his position at the sidewalk café of the Hotel Colon, he had no one to listen to him when he said the world was a mess, and this country was a piece of sh …, and Catalans were impossibly vulgar and ill-mannered people, and his neck was itchy, and marriage was absurd, and love didn’t exist, and gentlemen here don’t know how to behave like gentlemen, etc., etc. He discovered that, when he ran into a woman and winked at her, he couldn’t run and gush into patient ears that he had just seen the most “stunning” woman, and he was the only man who knew how to deal with women like her, and she was a sure thing, and there was no one like him at flirting and leading them on. Frederic found that when his arms were itching for a string of caroms in a good game of billiards, he couldn’t come up with a couple of intelligent and comprehending arms willing to let him win, if such was his mood. Or when someone had passed on some piece of juicy gossip, there was no sponge to absorb it all without protest, even managing to evince interest and curiosity. He discovered that when he just wanted to fool around, shooting bread balls at his friend’s nose, sticking a toothpick into his ribs, or just calling him a “nincompoop,” this guinea pig for his experiments in banality, silliness or conceit had fled his cage. The cage was just empty. His bridge partners were only good for bridge and nothing else; his officemates simply disgusted him; his family poisoned the very air he breathed; and the mere thought of his father made him hate life. There was only one door left through which he might escape, but the effects of his escape were unpredictable. The only door he had left was
Rosa Trènor. Why Rosa Trènor, in particular? The nocturnal adventure on Carrer de Muntaner had been a failure. It had been entangled with the anxiety of a promissory note, with an imminent battle with his father, with the fictional illusion of recovering his life of fifteen years before. Naturally, not even glue could hold all this together. Like everything concerning Frederic, it was skin-deep, and came and went without rhyme or reason. But after his falling-out with Bobby, Rosa Trènor’s presence had neither sentimental nor erotic interest, nor the thrill of rebellion and scandal within the routine of a false and nauseating family peace. Rosa Trènor now represented the possibility of companionship and perhaps even friendship. When they had been lovers, years before, Frederic had turned Rosa into the repository of his egotism. He trusted her. He would consult her on anything from the color of a tie to guidance of a moral order on some issue he was looking into. Rosa knew him, she tolerated him, she understood him perfectly. Rosa was what Maria, Frederic’s wife, had never known how to be. With the passing of time, she was spent, exhausted, and less demanding, and he was worn down, defeated, less fussy, and perhaps more indulgent with humiliation. So, perhaps, once she was stripped of her
femme fatale
patina and he was resigned to putting up with a few pains in the neck, they might achieve a sort of idyll without phony violins and with a merciful abundance of poultices.