Private Life (27 page)

“She’s a hussy,” Teodora jumped in, “nothing but a hussy. All that pretending to be in love with her husband …, all the times she criticized me …”

“Who can say what’s behind all of this …” Hortènsia said. “But why did you think of it now?”

“I don’t know, just a mental association,” said Bobby. “I find Mates very unpleasant. I’ve never been able to stand him …”

“Neither have I.”

“Ha, nor I.”

“Nor I.”

“Nor I, never,” the four woman quickly chimed in.

“But wait, Bobby,” said Pep Arnau. “A mental association? What do you mean? I don’t get it.”

“It doesn’t really matter, Pep. How shall I put it? Aren’t there times when you see a watering can and think of a toothache, or you see a priest and think of a lottery ticket?”

“No, that’s never happened to me,” responded Pep Arnau.

“Well, in that case, never mind,” said Bobby with a smile, not wanting to go any further.

“Why don’t we think about leaving?” asked the Count.

In response they paid and got up from their chairs. But Teodora hadn’t had enough. She wanted more “sensations,” and she asked Pep Arnau a question. His answer was:

“Oh, it’s all right with me, I have no objection.”

They went back down Carrer de Peracamps, which was deserted. Out of the tavern known as Cal Sagristà, the house of the sacristan, came a big man who started to follow them. He was horrible. He must have been around forty. His face was masked in rouge and his hair was impregnated with coconut oil. He came to a full stop in front of them and, moving his hips in a most atrocious way, he began to plead, in Spanish, in a high-pitched tone meant to imitate a woman’s voice, with the unhurried, sibilant lisp of the professional invert: “
No tenéis un cigarrillo para la Lolita?
” The women found him absurd and bizarre, in an indefinable way. But the men, even beyond discomfort and disgust, felt actual panic. That big inoffensive man terrified them, and their fear prevented them from pushing him away or even answering him. The man went on demanding “a cigarette for la Lolita,” as they tried to speed up and get away
from him. But the man kept following them, whimpering and crying “Ay!” into their ears, intolerably, over and over again, as if imitating a female orgasm.

“When you come face to face with a thing like that,” said Emili Borràs, “you don’t know what to say. Your throat tightens up, you feel ashamed, you want to cry …”

“That’s a bunch of poppycock,” said Bobby, though he felt exactly the same shame and the same desire to cry as Emili Borràs.

Once they were back at the Arc del Teatre, they started to feel like themselves again. Pep Arnau said:

“Teodora wants to go to
La Sevillana
.”

When the men seemed to hesitate, Isabel piped up, “You only live once.”

“But you understand that the place is repugnant?” Bobby objected.

“We couldn’t be more certain,” responded Teodora.

“Well, if you all want to go, let’s go, why not …” Hortènsia added.

“You asked for it,” Bobby answered.

Teodora wouldn’t let up:

“Come on, don’t be so stuffy. Didn’t we agree we would pull out all the stops tonight?”

They had barely reached an agreement when Pep Arnau headed straight for a sordid little entryway with neon lights that spelled out “La Sevillana.” At the top of the stairs, a woman of a certain age opened the door. Bobby said a few words to her and the woman, momentarily stunned, caught on right away. It wasn’t the first time
a group from the high society had climbed the stairs to her repulsive brothel to see what was known as “the pictures.”

Since Rafaela was impervious, it didn’t make a bit of difference to her. Hortènsia had been softened up by the memory of Raskolnikov and Primo de Rivera, and by Rousseau and Émile. She wanted to feel more Russian. Teodora, like Isabel, had a different urge. She felt a little depleted, and her senses were dulled. This was a new thing. It was alive, and more graphic than a scene from a
garçonnière
. The thrill they anticipated was at once both childish and sick. The men trailed behind them like sheep.

The middle-aged woman led them into a sort of alcove, and set eight chairs in a circle. The alcove had been converted into a stage no bigger than a fist, the kind you find in neighborhood cultural centers in the slums. She switched on the battery-operated light, and four women and two beings who must have been men appeared. The actors and actresses were wearing nothing but their natural skin. The scenery was a few filthy cushions. The furniture, a couple of chairs. The middle-aged woman announced the titles of the “pictures.” Some of the titles evoked Versailles, others a public urinal. Before her troupe, the woman of a certain age wore a bitter, maternal expression. Her voice was full of spiderwebs like that of a miniature dog trainer you might see at a circus. Each time she called out an allegorical title, the cast would recombine in a welter of bodies. At times the combination looked like a monster of boiled flesh with twelve arms and legs. It recalled a Brahmin divinity or an Aztec god who had lost
his power and walked naked down the road, eating dust and being spat upon. The scene was too hard to bear for anyone who retained even a drop of compassion. The pornographic tableaux those poor women were attempting to reproduce were nothing but the fever dreams of a colonial barracks. The sad skin of those bodies erased any trace of what might have caused excitement. At times, when the troupe was down on all fours to perform a wicked scene, you had the impression that they had lost a ten cèntim coin and were trying to pick it up with their lips. Engaged in the most dulling mechanics of sex, the assemblage performed without the slightest enthusiasm. They had already been obliged to execute all these aberrations a thousand times, before an audience of idiots, towards which they felt absolute indifference. They were artists who acted without feeling, and with no sense of rebellion, their veins watered down by pallid routine, without the slightest spirit of rebellion. The thing was as glacial and inexpressive as the copulation of insects.

The spectacle required silence. Indeed, before a sight like that, even if at the outset there might be a titter or two, soon any secretion of amusement stops cold. Mouths close, cheeks contract, and eyes are sullied with a gray liquid that is either fever, sadness or shame. The troupe would let out a snort or a sigh. One of those poor girls was so close to being a quadruped, or who knows what, that she had a positive reaction. A pong of sweat and of the essences only found in poor whorehouses wafted from the stage.

The four gentlemen were filled with shame, unable to say a word. That little room gave one a sense of the infinite: the infinite sadness
of the tears and bestiality we all carry inside. Emili Borràs was glued to this mirror that reflected back to him all the pus in his heart. The count tried to rise above it, but it was impossible. The ladies kept their composure at first, but soon they were overcome. They felt a heinous dizziness, as if a frog were hopping in their stomachs.

The stunt lasted no more than twenty minutes. Bobby gave the middle-aged woman a couple of bills and they went out into the street without taking a breath.

Emili Borràs said to Teodora:

“That was painful. You need the skin of a gorilla to tolerate such a spectacle. Still, it can’t be denied that it’s powerful. A consummate demonstration. Only the piety of a saint can comprehend such a thing. I would like to be so saintly, I would … but it’s beyond me …”

“I don’t know,” said Teodora. “I think you’re being much too philosophical. I just found it repugnant. As for them … well, that’s how they earn their living.”

“What kind of a living do you think they earn!”

“I don’t imagine it’s a place in heaven.”

“What do you know? What do we know of those who truly earn a place in heaven?”

And Isabel added, “So, is this true depravity?”

“No, no, this is just the infinite poverty of the flesh, the infinite sadness of the flesh,” Emili responded. “You won’t find depravity in these neighborhoods. This is not depravity.”

“So,” said Teodora, “do you mean that the depraved ones are people … like us …?”

“Who knows, who knows,” answered Emili Borràs.

They were a bit thirsty, so to round off the night they stopped off at Villa Rosa.

In those days, Villa Rosa was having a moment of splendor. In addition to the last dregs of the nighthawks and the quota from the cabarets, every night there was a group of air force officers who had recently discovered the establishment and went there to soak their wings in manzanilla sherry and raise the boorish ruckus characteristic of the military. They were good kids, tanned and mildly acrobatic, who had great success with the ladies. The German and Scandinavian element, and above all the Americans, looked after the Gypsies who performed there. They would turn red as bull’s blood, and you had the impression their skin might burst. The boiled front of their uniform shirts would get positively soggy. Some of them turned almost gelatinous, like cooked cod tripe. That night there was a magnificent giant in attendance who could balance a glass of manzanilla on his nose, as two streams of liquid flowed down his face. Maybe it was rash to enter Villa Rosa stone sober on a night like that. To adapt to the boiling pitch of those souls, the prerequisite was a prior alcoholic fever and an undiscerning nose.

It had been a long time since Bobby had been to Villa Rosa. His last memory was awful. The Marquesa de Moragues had asked him to engage two chorines who worked there to dance at her house. The deal was done in the early afternoon, when the establishment was empty and the only thing floating there was the dense air left behind by the expansions of the stomachs and the bottles of wine that had
been working at full tilt the night before. In the light of the early afternoon, Villa Rosa felt to Bobby like the state of cerebral sorrow and self-loathing that follows a tumultuous bender. By the side of the counter an extremely fat old Gypsy woman was crying. She had one foot propped up on a foot stool, in exactly the same position as Philip II in the Escorial. The woman’s leg was deformed and wrapped top to toe in a dirty bandage. She was weeping because the pain was getting progressively worse. She said the cause of her ills was a bite from a rabid cat. A thin man, whose skin and clothing were both the color of tobacco juice, was inspecting the bandages and saying they might have to amputate her leg.

The sight of the Gypsy with the bandaged leg haunted Bobby for days. When he and his traveling companions entered Villa Rosa he could still see that old crone bitten by a rabid cat by the side of the counter.

Seated at a table with a bottle of solera sherry before them, Emili Borràs was still talking about Jesus Christ.

Hortènsia, who had traded in her good bourgeois egotism for a Russian soul, found the spectacle of the previous establishment artificial and perfectly commendable. She said everything they had just seen was the “pus from society’s wounds.” The Count, a fan of popular science, said that pus was necessary for the organism to defend itself. He mentioned leucocytes and dead bacteria. Isabel begged them to drop the topic of pus and stop talking about such disgusting things.

Teodora began casting insistent glances at an aeronautics officer who was a friend of hers. The officer was sucking on the nape of a
twenty year-old hostess’s neck. She was a bit drunk and very beautiful. When the officer realized that Teodora was watching him, he saluted her smartly, blushed and stopped.

When the Gypsies of the house caught sight of their posh guests, they went over to pay their compliments. Two of them, known as
La Tanguera
and
La Mogigonga
for their expertise in dancing and burlesque, finished off the wine the guests hadn’t seen fit to drink.
La Tanguera
dedicated one of her sublime dances to them, duplicating the delicate and fragile tapping of a wounded partridge.

Emili Borràs made a few Germanic and Freudian comments about flamenco dancing. Hortènsia listened with delight. The Comte rattled on for a while like famed racconteur Garcia Sanchiz but the ladies didn’t take him seriously. Bobby rubbed at his moustache, thinking that he and the ladies and the others and the entire crowd were all a bunch of fools.

They left Villa Rosa at four-thirty in the morning. When they got to the Rambla and jumped into their automobiles it was as if they were waking from a bad dream to find themselves between peaceful sheets, with a drawn bath. They sank into the upholstery, corroborating that indeed it was truly theirs and that nothing horrible had happened to them. Rafaela ran her fingers over her ears, her neck and her wrists to be sure no one had robbed her.

Hortènsia thought vaguely of Raskolnikov, of inverts, of Primo de Rivera, of the Russian soul, of the act at
La Sevillana
, of Antoni Mates’s wife … But she was very tired and she rested her head on
Isabel’s coat. Isabel still had the energy to refresh her lipstick and powder her rouged cheeks.

Just about the same time that Hortènsia Portell reached her house on Passeig de la Reina Elisenda, got undressed, wrapped herself in a Japanese robe, and dissolved two aspirins in a glass of water, in the Grill Room on Carrer d’Escudellers two pairs of police patrolmen were breaking up a group of onlookers who were standing at the door. Inside the establishment things were in disarray. The people sitting at the bar got down from their barstools and stuck their heads into the dining room of the restaurant. There you could see an upended table, and on the floor a sizable circle of wine, a broken bottle, half a filet mignon, a dozen potatoes, and a whole bowl of cheese soup which, sans plate and spread out on the carpet, looked pretty repulsive

In a corner, the restaurant staff and two women who had just arrived were holding up a young woman in the midst of an attack of hysteria, while an utterly ineffectual gentleman, his face blanched with dismay, was dabbing a towel soaked in cold water on his forehead to wipe the blood from a wound caused by a wine bottle. Another group of women was trying to calm a lady wearing a bedraggled beaver coat, her face full of scratches, and the polite gray man who accompanied her. Such a scene in the Grill Room of the time was not unusual, and no one paid it much mind. In the match that had just taken place, no bones had been broken, and the police saw no need to arrest anyone or to trouble any of the actors in the drama. All the owners wanted was to put the whole thing behind them, because
there were not yet many people in the restaurant, but soon the regular clientele would begin to arrive.