Private Life (26 page)

Emili Borràs was just as eccentric as the count. He was a mathematician who took a great interest in the visual arts and in women’s fashion. He enjoyed this elegant and somewhat trashy world purely as spectacle. Cold, evasive, inconsistent, and fragile in a feminine sort of way, he never let down his guard. Some said he had no blood in his veins. He was the purest example of an intellectual to be found in Barcelona society in those years. Emili Borràs was very successful with women because of his special way of being chic, a bit negligent and apparently offhanded. He was well liked because his conversation was never vulgar. It fluctuated between disconcerting naiveté and putrid cynicism. Emili Borràs was Catholic, and he worked for a living.

Pep Arnau was another member of this group, as was Bobby. The reader will remember that we first ran into him playing baccarat at Mado’s. When we recounted the events of that evening, we didn’t pay much attention to Pep Arnau, nor will we do so now, because, as we said at the time, Pep Arnau’s only distinguishing characteristic was to be fat and innocent as a pig.

Those ladies and those gentlemen parked their two cars in front of the Lion d’Or and went on foot down Carrer de l’Arc del Teatre. It was one o’clock in the morning and the street was simmering with milling shadows. It was full of ammoniac gases and from time to time you might step over a dead cat sleeping its eternal nausea atop a bed of orange peels on the ground.

The ladies were a bit alarmed as they stepped into garbage and repulsive liquids, but they were also full of anticipation, and thrilled to discover who knows what. Lost in inky vagueness, the corners and the narrow streets they were scrutinizing seemed less exciting arteries, feverish with vice than sites of dreadful poverty and filth, resigned and humble desolation. On Carrer de Peracamps, that leads to Carrer del Cid, they caught sight of the cheerless pharmacy-red letters of the great neon sign of La Criolla.

They continued down the street and found themselves on that stretch of Carrer del Cid that had been fixed up rather nicely by the Office of Tourism and Visitor Attraction. These neighborhoods were being spruced up for the 1929 Exhibition, and the procurers were busy hunting for Chinese, blacks, rough trade, and women snatched from the hospital morgue halfway through dissection. They would dress
these women up in green skirts and gypsy shawls, pinning a couple of plumped-up chunks of salt cod to their sternums to imitate breasts, then they would hang them with a horseshoe nail to the doors of the most strategic houses.

Mixed in among those women extracted from the morgue, there were others, alive and in one piece, who nonetheless seemed to have visited a salon for dislocation and deformation. Occasionally there would be a sassy wench, or even a pretty one, but her lungs would be soaking in a pool of rotgut. This girl would let out a cry as hoarse as a seal in an aquarium when they toss a rotten sardine in its face. It would tie a knot in your stomach. There were all kinds of men, from perfectly normal sailors, mechanics and workingmen, to pederasts with painted lips, cheeks crusted with plaster and eyes laden with mascara. Among these people whose luck had been shattered sashayed a variety of paupers, cripples and pickpockets who can only be found in that kind of neighborhood. Or maybe it is the neighborhoods themselves that apply a special sort of maquillage. Maybe the very same men set down on the Rambla would be an entirely different thing. In that neighborhood you could see people of humble extraction, such as can be found anywhere, who were not at all picturesque. But there were others, in particular some women attired in smoke, scouring pads, and cats’ skins who you could say might die like fish out of water if you took them away from there. In order to breathe, their veins required a continuous injection of uric acid and rotten cabbage. The taverns were all soaked in tincture of
cazalla
. This anisette moonshine extracted from the festering of stones may be the substance that best
conveys the idea of a perpetual chain on the heart, an irredeemable brutalization. Next to the taverns there were prophylactics stores set off by blue and red lightbulbs, containing rubber, glass, and fabric objects, along with packages of cotton wool. All these things alluded to the catastrophes of sex in a way so vile, so lacking in lyricism, that, combined, they formed a sort of cynical sneer, a repulsive parody of Ecclesiastes, in the heart of the neighborhood. They sang of the vanity of it all, even of the vanity of that sincere, ragged, shameless and poverty-stricken vice.

As if to justify the name
Barri Xino
, at a bend in the street there was an authentic Chinese man. Old and faded, as if his body were made up entirely of layers of onionskin, he carried a tin can in his hand containing an inch of a black substance that looked like coffee. He seemed close to death. Vendors of substances meant to be chewed alternated mid-street with monstrous beggars exhibiting mutilations that burned the eyes, or some half-naked body with a withered arm twisted behind its back. It was the police, paid by the taverns, who brought these paupers here, to give the neighborhood its final touch of color.

Despite this accumulation of the stuff of pathology, the humanity that resided there seemed to make the most of life, in such a natural and oblivious way that it could easily be mistaken for optimism. Walking through those places, one didn’t even feel the need to button up one’s jacket out of caution. Those ladies and gentlemen at the door of La Criolla didn’t stand out in any way. The neighborhood was accustomed to this kind of visitor. There was already quite a
body of literature about the festering quality of the Districte 5è, the official name of the Barri Xino, and both foreigners and curious locals were welcomed at La Criolla with courtesy and normality. Once inside, particularly on the day before a holiday, which was the case that evening, you had to make your way down a compact gauntlet of cotton jerseys, caps, an occasional bowler hat, sailor’s shirts, and even the random elegant trench coat escorting a pair of painted lips with a silver pistol. The visitor’s nose found itself continually cutting through a fluid curtain woven of cigarette smoke, sweat and droplets of rum.

The ladies who had never been to that place before were a little bit disappointed. They had heard such barbaric things about it, and all they saw was a sort of café-club with pretensions to being a dance hall. The establishment was a converted warehouse. The old iron columns that held up the roof were painted to look like palm trees. The ceilings were painted to simulate leaves. The musicians sat in a sort of box. The orchestra was odd and disjointed. The trumpet player was the house eccentric, jumping around the box from one side to the other, and shaking everything up with his metallic convulsions. The eight visitors were given two tables right by to the stage. The dance hall was packed. In the audience there were workingmen from the neighborhood calmly drinking coffee and innocently dancing. They didn’t pay any mind if their partners bumped into a couple of degenerates mid-dance, or into someone who had just stolen a bale of cotton in the port and was celebrating with a plate of blood sausage disguised as a woman. Scattered among the other tables, alongside the anonymous
proletariat, were another kind of customer who cashed in on the prestige of the establishment. There weren’t very many of them that night. Some of them wore intentionally effeminate clothing; others dressed like thugs. Some had sclerotic skin, others were disfigured by rickets or tuberculosis, so unrecognizable that you couldn’t tell if they were women or adolescents, or beings from another planet, sadder and more brutal than our own.

Some of them sat among the women, others among the sailors. With the eyes of an astonished detective Teodora Macaia started picking them out, and then checking with Bobby to see if she was right. Bobby, who had little expertise in the trade, as well as no little disgust at it, gave her vague answers. At a certain point, the white light of the establishment shifted and a play of special lights began: picric acid yellow, methylene blue, permanganate red. All the colors were scandalously pharmaceutical, right out of a clinic for secret diseases. Under these chemical lights, the shady elements of the establishment were thrown into repulsive relief. Some were so expressionless as to make your skin crawl, and they called up thoughts of the gallows, the madhouse, the anthropometric chart. Teodora and Isabel were having the best time. Little by little, they discovered unsettling specimens among the couples on the dance floor. A boy in a trench coat with a red kerchief at his neck was wearing a full face of makeup and a woman’s hairdo. Under the blue light, his image came into focus, and his cheekbones turned the gray-green of grass in a cemetery. He was so lean it seemed as if his bones would crumble or his lungs would collapse from one moment to the next. And his gaze was so
disconsolate, so vague, so otherworldly that Teodora pressed her lips together, doused her perpetual smile, and looked the other way. The count was a bit vexed by the spectacle. Not by these more tenebrous aspects, as he was very modern and liberal-minded, but rather by the squalor, the distress, and the raucous screams and laughter. He had been willing to accompany the ladies to make Hortènsia happy, and because he didn’t know how to say no, but even though he tried to dissemble, he was wracked with nerves.

Rafaela and Hortènsia were hanging avidly on Emili Borràs’s comments. The mathematician looked upon it all with the eyes of Christian mercy. He was still sensitive, though, to the effects of color and volume and to the bizarre and literary bitterness of the ambiance. The only allure of those seamen, those inverts, and those prostitutes was the deeply desperate sexual sadness buried in their bones. Emili Borràs saw in them a gallery of the sincerity of human instinct, without the mask of cosmetics or perfume to make the horrid grimace of the beast more bearable. To Emili Borràs, this was what was truly authentic. The laughter, the sweat, the frictions and the encounters came about in a primary way, without shame or regrets. To Emili Borràs, the smiles of those pederasts – some of them former gunmen, many of them thieves by profession, yet others simple brothel fodder – were innocent, almost childlike, and their deviance was of no account in the face of a naturalness and unselfconsciouness more proper to madmen and children. Emili Borràs saw in this the quality of an etching. He quoted from Russian novels. Above all he quoted the Church fathers; he spoke of Jesus Christ … “It is essential to be
able to comprehend these things, along with the
Confessions
of Saint Augustine, because neither Augustine nor Thomas à Kempis is precluded here. This is a profound human truth, an exemplary document, a practical lesson in spiritual exercise. I find it profoundly ascetic … And that mint-green kerchief is fascinating, simply fascinating …”

The conviction and pathos Emili Borràs infused in his words left an impression on Hortènsia, already so impressionable and susceptible to the lure of the literary. She listened to Emili’s ideas and felt true sorrow, enormous pity for all those people who were entertaining themselves as best they could. Hortènsia had the heart of an angel. She would have chosen the most bedraggled, most syphilitic prostitute, called her over, and had her sit down at her table. Then, with the theatrical gesture of a princess in a children’s play, she would have placed her necklace around the woman’s neck! Hortènsia thought of Raskolnikov from Dostoevsky’s
Crime and Punishment
, when he kneels at the feet of Marmaladov’s daughter, who has become a piteous prostitute. She remembered the explosive monologue Dostoevsky puts in his criminal’s mouth and she found a series of analogies between the world of vomit, mercy and suffering of the Russian author and the methylene blue light that made the faces in La Criolla more livid and the depravity more entomological. Hortènsia thought about the party the night before, and the money she had spent on champagne to water all her grotesque and pneumatic guests. She remembered that
saladísimo
that the Marquesa de Lió kept repeating to Primo de Rivera’s abdomen. Hortènsia was miserable, and her eyes were misty, but she didn’t say anything. She listened to Emili Borràs, who,
in the midst of his own excitement, was making incisive points with considerable sensitivity.

Rafaela’s only passion was poker. Accustomed to making hospital visits, she had a thicker skin in general, and she saw that world as so distant from her own that she didn’t share a single iota of Hortènsia’s tenderheartedness. Her greatest concern was that, as the dancing became more lively, no couple should come too close to their table and soil her skirt. The count was speaking of Verlaine, of Oscar Wilde, of Gide and of Proust, as he said:
“Dégoûtant, dégoûtant, tout à fait dégoûtant.”
Pep Arnau was whispering into Isabel’s ear, and Isabel laughed and cried out, “My boy, you are a monster, a perfect monster!” Bobby was putting up with it all with his usual forbearance. When the mathematician had finished his speech, who knows what a mental association led him to ask the widow Portell:

“By the way, Hortènsia, what did Conxa Mates have to say yesterday? Did she mention her husband?”

“No, not really,” responded Hortènsia, “she just said he was fatigued.”

“You’ll understand why I asked,” Bobby went on. “I’ve heard that Conxa is going to get a divorce. Uh-huh. That’s why I was so surprised to see her at your house, because it seems that poor Antònio is really in a bad way.”

“That’s what everyone says,” Hortènsia said, “but, you know, maybe not all that bad. It seems he’s developed manias.”

“It’s a bit more than manias.” Bobby said. “The situation is very serious, and I heard this directly from Lluís. You know he and Lluís
used to be inseparable. So, the other day he called for him and he made a big scene. He cried, he said it was over, it was all over. And when Lluís said to him, ‘My God, Antònio,’ and tried to take him by the arm, he screamed like a madman and said, ‘Don’t touch me, please don’t touch me, I bear the stigma of iniquity, of the most shameful iniquity of them all,’ and he started to cry like a baby. Then he calmed down and it seemed as if he didn’t remember a word of what he had said. Lluís found the whole thing very strange. Conxa is losing hope, and the worst thing is that the doctors say there’s nothing wrong with him, he just has this strange and senseless fear. And it’s only getting worse. That’s why I was so surprised to see Conxa at your house. Either she’s a heartless hussy … or I don’t know what to think …”