Private Life (23 page)

And so it was. Rosa took a bit of distance from Mado, on account of the incompatibility between Frederic and Bobby, and she accepted her late night bouquets of camellias more and more infrequently, because Frederic advanced her all the money he could, and more.

Frederic became very familiar with Rosa’s apartment on Carrer de Muntaner. He even came to find some charm in the spectral cat that licked the coffee cup, whose appetite knew no bounds. As Frederic came to discover, she paid her frequent visits by jumping in through the kitchen window. He found it amusing to see her perched on the quilt as he explained to Rosa Trènor, looking grotesque in pajamas the color of a white wine from Alella, some theory he had just come up with on the cultivation of peas or on how to carry out a risk-free abortion.

Frederic interceded on the cat’s behalf. Rosa had the concierge bring her a bit of fish. And the cat got fatter and lost her spectral personality.

One day Rosa told Frederic the story of the stuffed dog. The dog’s master had been a general born in Valladolid, a short, slight man with the voice of an angel, whose wife beat him. The general fell in love with Rosa, and every day they would talk a walk down to the Parc de la Ciutadella, past the monument to General Prim, and visit the zoo. At one o’clock on the dot the general would board the tram. The little dog was a sort of cross between a terrier and a seminarian. It would get ill-tempered and snappy as it walked along beside them. Rosa would bring a couple of sugar cubes for him, which he would catch mid-air, his mouth wide open and his eyes rolling back in his head like an opera singer’s.

Eventually, the general’s wife got wind of the story. The idyll came to an end, and the general died of sorrow. One day at dawn, as Rosa was leaving the Grill Room, she came across the little lost dog
wandering up and down the Rambles. It jumped up and put its two little front paws on her beaver coat. Rosa was appalled at its boldness. She let out a shriek, but when she recognized the general’s dog, she started to cry. She gently picked it up, lifted it into the taxi, and sat it on her lap with motherly affection. The dog lived with Rosa for two years until a car ran over it, leaving it stretched out on Carrer de Muntaner, its open eyes near bursting, with a rivulet of blood on its snout. Rosa was desolate. She kept a few garters she no longer used in a cardboard box, and she remembered clearly that one of those garters was the first thing the pitiful nails of the general had touched when she surrendered to their idyll. Rosa took the dog to a taxidermist near the school of the Brothers of the Christian Doctrine, by the Palau de la Música Catalana. He was an old man who desiccated small animals, and he did it on the cheap.

Once the dog had been stuffed, Rosa draped the historic garter around its neck and gave it a home in the place where she worked and slept.

Frederic didn’t see the humor in that military memento perched on the armoire and he asked Rosa if she would sacrifice her souvenir of the general for love of him. Rosa put up a great resistance. One day when Frederic was a bit more recklessly lavish than usual, Rosa gave in to his entreaties, and the following day the ragman took the dog away.

Thanks to these innocent little larks, Frederic was able to forget his family situation and his wife’s bitter laments. He would spend many
nights away from home without offering any explanation. Maria didn’t care any more. She felt entirely divorced from her husband and by nature made no sexual demands. Maria had everything she needed with the pipes of her mother’s apocalyptic lungs. The children spent the day at school. The girl had just turned fifteen; the boys were dressing in golf clothes and chewing gum.

They didn’t yet have ideas of their own, but Maria did everything in her power to enlist them in a sort of holy war against Frederic. Her mother went even further.

The idyll between Rosa Trènor and Frederic de Lloberola lasted four months and three days. More or less the same length of time as the demise of Antoni Mates, el Baró de Falset.

HORTÈNSIA PORTELL HAD a grand house with a garden on the Passeig de la Reina Elisenda. She had arranged the main floor of the house to receive visitors and accommodate large groups. There was a very spacious entrance hall with three salons and a dining room on the right, and yet another, smaller, salon on the left. On the upper floor were the rooms that corresponded to the more personal life of the house. The architecture was simple, done in rather good taste, but a little bit shoddy. It was one of those mass-produced houses that at first had looked like stage sets for an operetta and are now feeling the effects of film.

Hortènsia had vitrines full of objects inherited from her great-grandmothers: magnificent fans, tobacco cases, music boxes, slippers, ribbons, and items whose usefulness was a mystery to anyone who was not an expert in all the absurd, old, rancid, constipated, and marvelous bibelots that one keeps in a vitrine.

From the days of
modernisme
, or Art Nouveau, if you will, Hortènsia preserved a portrait of herself and her husband having hot chocolate in a garden. They are sitting in a couple of rustic chairs painted watering pot green.

Mixed in with the other paintings, there were fake El Grecos, fake Goyas, and fake Riberas. Not that she had a lot of fakes; lately she had been replacing them with fashionable contemporary paintings. She was the only lady in Barcelona with a Matisse and a Derain of the highest quality. From time to time she would purchase something at a local exhibition, on the advice of friends with some knowledge of the field. She was most pleased with her Picasso. The canvas portrayed a long, thin adolescent nude, which scandalized many of the ladies who came to the house. Hortènsia had given it pride of place.

Presiding over the main salon hung the Lloberolas’ historic tapestry, which, as the reader knows, Hortènsia Portell had acquired quite some years before. It showed a scene from the Bible. Jacob, wearing sheepskin gloves, was kneeling at the feet of an Isaac whose hands were full of the fruits of the earth. Isaac had the aquiline nose of a notary public and hair like spaghetti. Rebecca was smiling at them both, holding a bird that looked sort of like a chicken by its feet.

In the background were depicted the sons and daughters of the chosen people. They were waving their arms in the air and making way for a hairy, ruddy, and corpulent man who carried a boar on his hip. It was Esau.

The most important piece in the salon, after the tapestry, was a Louis XVI sofa, admirably pure in its lines and fragile as a nymph. General Arbós, a cannibalistic sexagenarian who weighed one hundred forty-three kilos, developed a habit of sitting on that sofa. This caused the lady of the house great distress.

By this time, the widow Portell had gotten extremely fat. Her exaggeratedly blond hair, her tortoise-shell glasses, and her short round figure made her look like a character from one of those German plays that deal with social or pedagogical topics. Except for her somewhat harsh and loud way of speaking, which smacked of Carrer de la Princesa, Hortènsia didn’t seem to be from here at all. Anyone who ran into her would have thought she was a product of international tourism.

Usually once a year, Hortènsia would throw a party in her home. The main attraction might be a tango singer or, from time to time, an artist of great stature, like Maria Barrientos, the soprano. Barrientos was a friend of Hortènsia’s, though of late their relations seemed to have cooled. Sometimes, giving in to the entreaties of a handful of ladies, she would have a flamenco party in the garden, with
bunyols
and
xurros
, fried dough in the form of dumplings or bows, and they would all wear
mantons de Manila
, voluminous silk embroidered
shawls that were a souvenir of the colonial days. This is what they most enjoyed draping over their décolletage, because, the truth be told, the ladies of Barcelona have always had a weakness for flamenco style and all its poses.

The party Hortènsia Portell threw at the high point of the Baró de Falset’s personal persecution complex had no particular artistic theme. In truth, it was mostly an excuse to bring one hundred fifty individuals together to set the leaves on the trees to trembling with their sighs and peals of laughter. The jazz music would exasperate any couples who aspired to continue their conversations as they took a stab at dancing. It was mid-June, and the heat was sticky and tropical.

By eleven the salons were almost full. It was rumored that Primo de Rivera, the dictator, who was in Barcelona those days, might make an appearance. He would be dining at the Cercle de l’Exèrcit, the officer’s club, and had promised to attend Hortènsia Portell’s party afterwards.

A few newcomers, some of them extremely young, situated themselves strategically in the foyer so as not to miss anyone’s entrance.

In the salons, the glow of arms and shoulders was dazzling. A sea of slow, wide waves slightly tinged with blood rose and fell with the rhythmic breathing of creamy rose flesh. From time to time, amid the waves an amphibious medusa would float by in the form of the nape of a neck.

The parade of necklines alternated between the sublime and the abominable. The fashion of the long skirt had not yet taken hold. The
flowering of legs and ankles and the occasional distracted knee, and the gamut of chiffon stockings, brought to mind the image of a bar with light, fizzy, multicolored sodas.

In among legs of exquisite style swelled lamentable arthritic extremities, like the grotesque balloons given to children, or legs that were simply sedentary, deformed by consecutive pregnancies. Some of these legs had reached the point of elephantiasis. Salomé Roca, a heavyset woman in a very short silver tunic showed off everything she could with the aggressivity of a satyress.

Lace dresses dominated, especially in black. There were many splashes of white and pink. The occasional burgundy or pea green accompanied the most agile musculatures, and the slenderest arms and ankles of the “it” girls.

Costume jewelry had not yet been invented, and the gathering did not give off that air of later parties, at which ladies were draped in so much colored glass they looked like extras in a pharaonic operetta. At Hortènsia Portell’s party only strings of pearls and well-set diamonds were admitted.

Many of the ladies on the guest list knew Hortènsia only vaguely. Others had very little contact with the world in evidence that evening. They were a bit lost, taking up positions in the corners of the entrance hall, not daring to display themselves under the lights beside the guests who had taken over the sofas and pillows.

The men were distributed between silk and skin, like little black chunks of truffle amid the pink and white flesh of a galantine. Many wandered off on their own, or a trio would corner a young woman
and proceed to laugh their heads off. Others went off under the trees to have a smoke.

In the smaller salon there was an assembly of abdomens feeling a bit indignant at the strain of the tailcoat and the demands of the wing collar. These abdomens had to make do with the cheeks of sixty year-olds suffering from chronic bronchitis.

Every so often, some old-school gentleman would go and dip his white moustaches into the plump perfume of a more tender cleavage and return with an anecdote fluttering delicately between two fingers, like a butterfly. He would then release it between noses and laughter to spread a bit of honey and cynicism on their arteriosclerotic lack of imagination.

The dance floor was getting crowded, but many young men were not dancing. This was when saxophones were beginning to be intoxicated with the blues and the black bottom. The Charleston had moved on to skid row. This was the high point of the red-hot days of Josephine Baker. Half the men at Hortènsia Portell’s that night had devoured “la Baker” at the Folies-Bergère, as she emerged from her silvery sphere to reveal the most dynamic India rubber haunches ever to be seen.

Many girls felt the same veneration for “la Baker” that their aunts had felt years before for the Virgin of Montserrat, whose image had been blackened by the smoke of centuries of candlelight. It was just a question of directing one’s devotion to one black skin or another, and in Hortènsia Portell’s milieu there were many more advocates in the ranks of colonial paganism. Milans del Bosch, the Civil Governor of
Barcelona, did not share with the tender dancers of the black bottom their veneration for Josephine Baker, and he ordered the removal of a portrait of the Negress on exhibit in a record store, on the grounds that it was pornographic.

Hortènsia Portell allowed her guests absolute freedom of movement. Groups formed according to the magnetic attraction of affinity and friendship. Many bridge partners gathered around a hope chest as if ready to play. Without the table and the cards, lacking an ace of clubs or a king of hearts to pinch between them, some guys’ fingers were at a loss; they couldn’t even manage to smoke. The most desperate fingers would dig into some sweet upper arm and drag it off to the garden to tell whatever latest story wasn’t too corrosively blue to tell, making do with a few drops of curaçao in a glass of water.