Private Life (31 page)

Ceballos was in love with Tia Paulina, and someone let on about it to el Senyor de Llinàs. This gentleman was jealous in the extreme, more jealous than a tiger. Tia Paulina knew nothing of Ceballos’s great passion, but she noticed that where her husband’s moustache met his jowls it looked for all the world like a Florentine dagger. One day el Senyor de Llinàs said a few choice words to Ceballos. There
was a duel. As luck would have it, Ceballos’s bullet went straight to the heart of el Senyor de Llinàs. He dropped his top hat and pistol on the field of honor and fled like a madman. Not long afterwards, he got himself killed fighting for the Carlists in the Seu d’Urgell, just as Savalls was betraying the holy cause by reaching an accord with Martínez Campos at the Hostal de la Corda.

Tia Paulina was widowed at thirty-eight. She sensed that her husband’s soul was destined for hell, but since she couldn’t be entirely sure, she decided her time would be well spent if she devoted the rest of her life to praying for the eternal repose of el Senyor de Llinàs.

From then on, Tia Paulina’s life could have been considered exemplary if the years had not turned her heart into a dried-up, yellowed and acidic artifact. Many thought she had a lemon where her heart ought to be. Where el Senyor de Llinàs had taken the maids down the path of iniquity, Tia Paulina had them singing the “Holy, Holy, Holy” even as they gutted fish entrails. From break of day till nine in the evening, when everyone went to bed, in Tia Paulina’s immense old mansion you could hear the music of the scrub brush, the broom, the feather dusters, the washing bats in the laundry, and the fans for the kitchen fires, accompanying unschooled, tuneless voices endlessly repeating: “Holy God, almighty God, immortal God.” Tia Paulina filled the apartment with birdcages. She had five parrots that also intoned “Holy, Holy, Holy,” as well as a blackbird that whistled it. But Tia Paulina had to be on her guard, because the birds tended to forget the pious singsong as their hearts
went out to a little tango popular in those days that went “
Cariño, ho hay mejor café que el de Puerto Rico …
”

Tia Paulina kept six or seven maids because she was a fanatic for cleanliness and her house was endless. There was always a lot of drama among them, because she would get jealous of one and develop an aversion to another. The maids used her, bamboozled her, and filled her ears with gossip and bad faith. When a new one arrived from the village, still warm from cows’ breath and the tongue of a young buck, Tia Paulina would subdue her rebel breast with the wool of the scapulary. If she suspected that the girl had a boyfriend, Tia Paulina would shut herself up in a room with the girl and try to charm her like a serpent. If the girl was pliable, she would succumb to asceticism. If she rebelled, she had no choice but to close the door behind her. Tia Paulina cultivated a sort of special service of stunted, colorless and sexless young women: they all wore habits and they only went out at night once every twelve months, to attend midnight Mass on Christmas Eve.

Before the reformation of the old city of Barcelona, Tia Paulina had never been so far as the Plaça de Catalunya, and had barely set foot on the Rambla, where it meets Carrer de Portaferrissa. The streets she was familiar with were Mercaders, Pont de la Parra, Riera de Sant Joan, Sant Pere més Baix, Carders, Plaça Nova, l’Infern, Ripoll, Catedral, Santa Maria, el Pi, Sant Just and Sant Jaume, and the squares were the Plaça de les Beates and the Plaça Nova. In truth, she could go months and months without leaving the house except to go to mass at the chapel called Capella de l’Ajuda on Sant Pere més Baix. On
Sunday she would go twice, early in the morning and for noonday mass. When she went to church she always dragged along her own little folding chair because she didn’t want to sit on the woven rush seats for fear of getting fleas. When white hair and rheumatism began to afflict her, she would have a maid carry the chair. At the noonday mass at l’Ajuda she would stop a while at the door to speak with the few acquaintances she frequented. One of them was Don Manuel Duran i Bas, who attended the same mass, on his wife’s arm. Don Manuel Duran i Bas was Tia Paulina’s lawyer and she doted on him. He was one of the last men in Barcelona to use the top hat in all its splendor. In old age, he had developed a hunchback, and the curvature made him seem very small. His eyes languished under his incredibly hairy and droopy eyebrows, and his moustache – the whitest and thickest in the land – fell over his mouth like a great curtain of sadness. Don Manuel could barely see. He would lift his head, which sank into the stiffness of his crooked back, and through gold-rimmed glasses poised on his nose he would contemplate that toasted almond known as Tia Paulina, puffed up with corsets, underskirts, and petticoats, and the blackest, bleakest fabric the world had ever seen. The four strands of whitish hair she had left had turned yellow as a smoker’s fingers from the potions her hairdresser applied. Atop it all was a timid little mantilla, as forlorn as a hospice.

Tia Paulina talked with Don Manuel about mortgages and the old days. They would also mention a former friend of Don Manuel’s, a girl who had gone to school with Tia Paulina and had died very young in a cholera epidemic.

When Tia Paulina felt the need to make an important confession, she would go to the cathedral and work her jaw for a couple of hours behind the screen of her father confessor. This man was a penitential priest, who could stand in as a surrogate for the bishop when assigning penance. When it was merely a question of what she called “making peace with herself,” she would go directly to l’Ajuda and resolve it with any old parish priest.

The urban reformation of Barcelona had been hard on Tia Paulina. The havoc it had wreaked on her neighborhood obliged her to change her idea of the world’s topography.

Don Tomàs de Lloberola was always very solicitous of his aunt, treating her with exceptional interest. His counterpart in the business of winning her over was Tia Paulina’s godson, the Baró de Gresol.

They kept track of who had paid her more visits throughout the month, and who had sent her the best
botifarra
sausages when the pig was slaughtered in the fall. Or the biggest ring cake on the day of Saint Anthony of the Asses in June. Or the almond confection known as
panellets
that had most delighted her on All Souls’ Day. Leocàdia would take the children to visit her. When they were small, Tia Paulina had terrified them. Without fail, their aunt would give them six
unces
, about three ounces, of candies from l’Abella. They were every bit as acidic as she was. This point counterpoint between Don Tomàs and the Baró ended in a fierce hatred between the two relatives that expressed itself in gossip and tales they would take to Tia Paulina regarding the discourtesies that one or the other of the aspirants to her inheritance had shown her.

Don Tomàs’s two sisters, Clàudia, the spinster, and Anneta, who was married to Don Ramon de Francolí, each plotted while clinging to her aunt’s skirts. Collectively, thanks to all her nieces and nephews, her feet never touched the ground. Despite her terrible avarice, when economic disaster befell Don Tomàs, Tia Paulina helped her nephew out a bit. As Don Tomàs didn’t want to abuse her generosity, what he did was to multiply his acts of solicitousness and tenderness. He would say “Tia …” and “Ay, Tia …” and “But Tia …” as if angels were dictating to him. Don Tomàs would pet her and prance before her like a dog with honey on its tail.

Even before that period of economic anxiety, every summer the Lloberola nieces and nephews geared themselves up for Tia Paulina visit to their respective estates for some little part of the season.

When she was at the Lloberola house, Leocàdia was so eager to be the perfect hostess that it would make her sick. Nothing was ever to Tia Paulina’s liking, and she had very special requirements. Every morning a battle raged between Leocàdia and the cook. Tia Paulina always complained of the cold. Even when the heat was asphyxiating, poor Leocàdia had to keep the balconies closed so her husband’s aunt would not catch a chill. They went to the extreme of killing two pairs of peacocks because the birds’ morning squawks were too raucous and disturbed her sleep. When they went for a walk down a country lane and saw a couple of farm laborers coming towards them, they would step to the side or fall back, to avert any unpleasantness for Tia Paulina in case one of the farmers slipped and used a coarse expression.

The last few years, Leocàdia had had to put up with tremendous rudeness and infinite oddities from Tia Paulina. Despite her extremely advanced age, she still had a clear head and provoked as much torment as ever. Don Tomàs de Lloberola’s last hope lay in Tia Paulina’s inheritance. Shut up in his apartment on Carrer de Mallorca and reduced to utter precariousness, Don Tomàs thought the inheritance might still set things right. His aunt didn’t spend a cent, she simply amassed revenue. According to the Lloberolas’ calculations she had a considerable fortune.

But neither Don Tomàs, nor his sisters, nor the Baró de Gresol could have foreseen the dark beast that would undo all their machinations. Naively, they did not take into account another person who, without paying visits, or sending ring cakes, or slitting defenseless peacocks’ throats, still held the acidic lemon of Tia Paulina’s heart in his hand. The hand was cold, unctuous, servile, and disposed to do whatever was necessary to squeeze that lemon dry. The person was Tia Paulina’s confessor, Mossèn Claramunt, the penintential priest of the cathedral.

Mossèn Claramunt had been reared, one might say, on the teats of the Lloberolas, a product of the munificence of Don Tomàs’s father, and of Don Tomàs himself. In Tia Paulina’s final years of existence he exercised an absolute ascendancy over that good lady’s heart. The sagacious priest delicately insinuated to her that all her relatives only loved her for the assets of her inheritance. While he was at it, he revived her fear of the possible damnation of el Senyor de Llinàs, leading her to believe that the life of chastity, devotion and sacrifice
she had lived would not be sufficient to expiate the great sins of the deceased. When she made her confessions, the priest instilled terror in her, portraying her as a somewhat ungenerous person, too in love with her money, and lacking in devotion to charity and pious works. Fear spread throughout Tia Paulina’s body. The sagacious priest hinted delicately at a subtle draft of a will and testament. Tia Paulina was so pleased with it, she committed it to memory, but the priest didn’t entirely trust her, and he used her fear to press her further. Tia Paulina was on the far side of eighty and her mind was not what it used to be. She let herself be absolutely dominated by that fear and even came to have visions. E Senyor de Llinàs would appear to her, naked, with a chain around his neck, surrounded by flames. Instead of comforting her, the priest embellished the pathos of the apparition. When Tia Paulina went to the home of Martí i Beya, the notary, to write her will, the canon accompanied her. As if the will were not enough, Mossèn Claramunt started siphoning off money on the pretense of masses and charities, and Tia Paulina surrendered it to him, kissing his hands all the while. All her stocks and securities, and all her cash, found their way to the canon’s bureau. Mossèn Claramunt had taken control, and as custodian he was free to distribute, as he saw fit and to his liking, an amount that came to more than a million pessetes.

Tia Paulina spent the last five years of her life completely disabled, in a mortifying state of semi-imbecility. The poor maids had to bathe her and do everything for her. They fed her sips of soup as if she were a child. Leocàdia and her sisters-in-law helped them out. Tia Paulina
still recognized everyone. Though she could only speak with difficulty, she showed a great disaffection for all the women who were caring for her. Yet if Mossèn Claramunt ever came to see her, the eyes of that poor dim-witted old woman would show a bit of light and her sunken mouth, monstrously deformed by paralysis, would do its best to mimic a sort of smile.

Tia Paulina died two days after the inauguration of the Exposition on Montjuïc. She was eighty-eight years old and for four months she was nothing but a skeleton under a scrap of skin. All that was left of her was a fragment of lung that went through the motions of breathing, and bowels that couldn’t digest a thing.

The priest anointed her with the holy oils and Leocàdia closed her eyelids. Her nieces, Clàudia and Anneta, took charge of dressing her in the habit of the Third Order of Saint Francis and placing the rosary from her first communion between her fingers.

When Martí i Beya, the notary, read Tia Paulina’s will, Don Tomàs had a fit of ferocious rage. Then he simply crumpled. He could never have predicted this. He couldn’t have imagined that Mossèn Claramunt would do such a thing to him. He could imagine it from his sisters, or from that finicky cold fish, the Baró de Gresol, but never from his priest. Tia Paulina had left everything, absolutely everything, for pious works and beneficence. Doctor Claramunt was the sole heir of confidence with absolute liberal faculties. Not one miserable legacy, not one mingy thought for anyone in the family, nothing. The poor maids who had sacrificed their lives for her, the unfortunate Carmeta who had served her for forty years – a dumb martyr to the
brazen disrespect of the departed – there was nothing for them either. Fortunately Tia Paulina was already in her grave because the maids were so enraged that they would have spit upon her cadaver and cut out her heart to feed it to the cats.

Never has a dead woman gone to the other life to such a litany of shattered voices or such raw and direct indignation.

Claramunt the canon merely said: “
Bueno, bueno, bueno
, such a holy lady, such a pious lady,
bueno, bueno, bueno
 …”

There was no way Don Tomàs could take it in. It was too much. His only hope, his only lifeline, wickedly burned, destroyed by a scheming clergyman dominated by the desire for money, by utterly sordid avarice!

The meeting of Don Tomàs and the priest was sublime. Never had such liturgical smiles and grimaces concealed such moldering hatred. Never had anyone seen the likes of the priest’s gall and the marquis’s indignation. It was the battle of the sea lion and the crocodile, an encounter between the ice of the Antarctic and the hot mud of African rivers.