Private Life (32 page)

It seemed impossible that two hidebound Catholics, two remnants of militant adherence to the Carlist cause, two pallid shades of reaction, one clad in the robes of the father confessor, the other in the stain-spattered jacket of a marquis, could be reduced to the incontinence of a dust-choked highway, to the fury of two bilious coachmen, tongues saturated with aïoli.

Tia Paulina’s will was irrevocable. There was no recourse. This was the opinion of Martí i Beya, the notary, and all the lawyers.

Don Tomàs lost his head. He quoted to the canon from the novels of José María de Pereda and, in a phrase that resounds throughout Spanish literature from Quevedo on, ended up calling him an
inmunda sabandija
, a filthy louse, in Spanish. The canon let out a peal of hysterical laughter. He kept repeating his incessant
bueno, bueno, buenos
, and threatened Don Tomàs with the eternal damnation of hell for the sin of greed and for lack of respect toward the ministers of the Lord. Don Tomàs felt the need to do something. If Leocàdia hadn’t stopped him, he was even considering a campaign in
El Diluvio
, a liberal, Republican, anti-monarchical, and anticlerical publication. His blind rage had reached this extreme.

Everyone thought he would die from the shock, but Providence still had other tests in store for the aggrieved soul of Don Tomàs.

The last of them was the proclamation of the Republic. It is not that Don Tomàs had considered his dreams fulfilled with the Dictatorship. Still, his brand of Carlism was pretty comatose, and in the Dictatorship he perceived, if nothing more, a pact between King Alfons XIII and the Sacred Heart of Jesus, between the monarchy and the Church. The mediator in this pact was General Miguel Primo de Rivera, and its nuances included the elevation of religion and morality and the annihilation of the things that most horrified Don Tomàs, which were anarcho-syndicalism, unionism, communism, and Catalanism. Don Tomàs believed that with a big enough dose of Martínez Anido and Cardinal Segura it would be possible to establish a tribunal in Spain that bore some resemblance to the hoary and Holy Office of the Inquisition.

The fall of the dictator set old Lloberola to trembling and, when he saw the Republic on the horizon, he used his last stores of energy to turn himself into a sea urchin. Don Tomàs remembered the revolution of 1869 and the Republic of 1873. He remembered the soldiers dancing on the altar of the Betlem parish church and all the horrible sacrileges of the 1800s.

What came with the second Republic seemed even more grim to him than the disasters of the first. Since the incident with his aunt’s estate, Don Tomàs had become a listless little chick. He no longer saw anyone. In April 1931, the victory of the Republicans and ouster of the dictator put a little oil in the lamp of his heart. He joined with his closest relatives and his former acquaintances from Franciscan conferences, beneficent societies, parochial councils, perseverance leagues, and priests, rickety Carlists, decrepit piles with all four feet halfway in the grave, and former gunmen from the antiunion strikebreakers of the Free Syndicates, to take part in secret meetings held in sacristies and private homes. With legs that could barely hold him up and
El Correo Catalán
in his pocket, he felt like a conspirator. But the churches and convents that were being burned in Spain were like a dose of hemlock for poor old Don Tomàs. He shut himself up in his office to cry under his grandfather’s effigy. Don Tomàs was vanquished. He didn’t believe in the efficacy of the ultraright wing
penyes blanques
; his only hope would have been lightning bolts from Mt. Sinai. The word went around one night that the convents of Barcelona would be targeted. That night Don Tomàs took two nuns into his home. They were distant relatives from the church
of l’Esperança. Don Tomàs felt like a hero; it reminded him of Hernán Cortés’s renowned “night of sorrows” in Mexico. Don Tomàs’s ears brimmed with lurid fantasies: the groans of the religious martyred in the middle of the Plaça de Catalunya by the anarchists of the FAI and the independentists of
Estat Català
; Bishop Irurita burned to the quick in the house of Francesc Macià, as Dr. Aiguader, the Mayor of Barcelona, stoked the coals with the ferrule of his ceremonial scepter; Lluís Companys, then a member of the Chamber of Deputies, escorting four hundred naked women down the Rambla proclaiming free love and other barbarities. Don Tomàs imagined he heard and smelled these things as he contemplated his two cell-dwelling relatives, eating garlic soup next to silent, desolate Leocàdia. He feared that the monsters of anarchism would be showing up any minute to sack his house and rape the two nuns … but that would be over his dead body.

Mossèn Claramunt, who, as one can imagine, was on the outs with the Lloberolas, didn’t take such a dark view as Don Tomàs. The first days of the Republic, he would say, “
Bueno, bueno, bueno
, as long as they leave the poor priests alone, as long as they don’t attack religion,
bueno, bueno, bueno
.” Later, though, the Mossèn would join in the panic, which led him to attempt a reconciliation. Don Tomàs would not stoop so low.

When el Senyor de Lloberola saw in the rotogravures what had been done to some of the churches and convents of Spain, he said: “This is the end of the Republic! This cannot go on, by any means! This is communism, this is worse than Russia … much worse than Russia!”

A week after he had taken the two nuns in, Don Tomàs could no longer get up from bed. All his innards were failing. He had a high temperature; he was in constant delirium. Dreams of red terror were suffocating him. The communists were pulling off his sheets and stamping his belly with a red iron. Don Tomàs suffered and screamed for three days. A Carmelite priest gave him the sacraments. Leocàdia and his children hovered at the head of his bed. Leocàdia was already somewhat immune to his pain, and his children’s only wish was for their father to finish dying and leave them in peace.

On the fourth day, he was greatly debilitated. He no longer spoke, he was barely conscious. Some time later came the death rattle, and then the final collapse.

The Carmelite brother who comforted him through the end coined this phrase: “A saint has died, assassinated by the Republic …”

Leocàdia wanted to dress him in the habits of the Church of La Mercè. Frederic fought with her and imposed the uniform of the
Maestrant de Saragossa
, the brotherhood of Saragossa cavalrymen. The gold and red uniform was too small for him. They cut the dress coat down the back and laced some ribbons through it to keep the split in the uniform together, turning the coat into a sort of corset, like those worn by chorines in the zarzuelas of the day.

In death, Don Tomàs appeared to be wearing a ghoulish disguise; he had been turned into a macabre doll at the insistence of a cad.

They were still able to afford a bit of pomp for the burial. A handful of people attended: the proverbial “quatre gats.”

Thus ended the life of Don Tomàs de Lloberola i Serradell, de Genís i de Fontdeserta, seventh Marquès de Sitjar and fourth Marquès de Vallromana.

IN HORTÈNSIA PORTELL’S dining room a rather political dinner was taking place. Hortènsia had turned out to be a Republican of the firmest convictions. As her white teeth pulverized the fish course, she told funny anecdotes about the Marquesa de Perpinyà, the Baronessa de Moragues, the Marquesa de Lió, and the Baronessa de Sant Rafael, all the grand dames who used to be her friends. The advent of the Republic had thrown the infinite vacuity of their lives into even greater relief. The Marquesa de Perpinyà was weeping in France with the dethroned kings, following the lead of some of the ladies of the Madrid aristocracy. When she learned that Don Alfons had crossed the border, she fled her mansion and went to live in a modest little hotel under an assumed name. Naturally, everyone knew who she was, and the hotel staff thought she had gone mad.

That lady, like other personalities from her world, could think only of communism, and of selling off houses and estates to get their capital out of Spain. Laws prohibiting the exportation of money destroyed their plans, but they contrived to plot with people who engaged in contraband, and other unscrupulous folk. The Marquès de Puigvert had been among the most panic-stricken, and he wanted to
carry an extremely large amount across the border. Hortènsia Portell told the story of how he had tried to enter France in a third-class car on a train through Puigcerdà, accompanied by a servant. When they were about to cross the border, both master and servant lost their nerve. A barber who lived in a town close by and plied many trades offered to smuggle forty thousand
duros
in bills right under the noses of the police. The marquis, the servant, and the barber, all three dressed in peasant caps and espadrilles, took their seats on the train. Lord knows where the very clever barber was hiding the marquis’s forty thousand duros, but the fact is that neither the police nor the frontier guards intervened. Once they were over the border in France, when the marquis and his servant got ready to take possession of their capital once again, they discovered to their stupefaction that the barber had melted away. He hasn’t been heard of to this day.

The marquis, desperate and ashamed, both by the loss of the money and by the swindle they had fallen prey to, was silent as a tomb. Not enough, however, to keep the news from Hortènsia Portell’s ears.

The Marquesa de Lió was the subject of more delightful incidents. At the time of the revolutionary coup, the marquesa was true to her principles. She was prepared for the revolutionaries to come and rape her. She put on provocative pajamas and even left the door to her apartment ajar. She felt like a martyr for the monarchy. She didn’t want to flee, she wanted to give her blood and her honor for the cause of the king. When the marquesa realized no one was coming to rape her, and the Republicans were a peaceful lot, she saw that she was making a fool of herself. She had her suitcases all packed to go
to France when she was visited by a great friend, Don Lluís Figueres, one of the most brilliant minds of the Dictatorship. The marquesa thought Don Lluís would flee with her, but Don Lluís was very calm, and found the whole business of the Republic rather amusing. So the marquesa stayed on in Barcelona and within a few days was discussing feminist politics and her belief that women should play a role in the new regime. She even wangled an introduction to a member of the Parliament from the Republican Left party, and ended up thinking Niceto Alcalá Zamora was rather charming.

It was the hippopotamic senyora Valls-Darnius, though, who broke all records. We already met her at Hortènsia’s party, precisely when she had sworn never to say another word in Catalan, as a consequence of her husband’s great windfall thanks to his dirty dealings with the Dictatorship. To assure that the deal her husband had made would continue to render the same benefits under the Republic, she claimed to have felt Republican all her life and dated her Catalanism to before the 1892
Bases de Manresa
, the cornerstone of the Catalan regional Constitution.

La Baronessa de Sant Rafael, who was more romantic than her poor husband, fled to eat the bread of exile with the other aristocrats. This is how she put it to her acquaintances. While the poor baron went and trawled for lipfish and sawfish in Palamós, the baronessa ran off to Biarritz with her gigolo to dance the tango. When her money ran out, she went home to shed her last monarchical tears.

As a rule, in fact, the local aristocracy didn’t go very far, and didn’t sell or cash in all that many assets. Most stayed home, biding
their time, and many even adopted the Republican label. What they wanted, though, was a moderate, Catholic Republic, and when faced with what they called the demagoguery of the Constituent Courts, the response was a Homeric chorus of caterwauling. From the pulpit, the clergy saw to inflating their howls, preaching the apparition of the Beast of the Apocalypse in the land. Carlists and devotees of the dethroned king united in the common cause of opposing the Republic and celebrating solemn masses. When Don Jaume de Borbó died, they dedicated a magnificent funeral in the Barcelona cathedral to him. That funeral was one of the most brazen demonstrations of monarchist sentiment. In the aftermath, a few worshippers murdered a poor boy who was passing by, so that the solemn funeral would share in the prestige of shedding innocent blood. It appears some religious monarchists favored human sacrifice.

All the public and private events that took place throughout those days were of tremendous interest to Hortensia Portell. She was in her element in the Republic. It wasn’t that she had fallen out with the opposition or the desperate; she felt the tears of those afflicted by the new regime, and occasionally she even humored them, but in both form and substance Hortènsia felt like a Republican. She believed in progress and evolution, and where modernity was concerned, no one was going to get the jump on her. This was why Hortènsia wanted to meet and get to know the Catalan Republican personalities, and that night Josep Safont would be coming to her house. She had also invited Rafaela Coll, Isabel Sabadell, and Bobby Xuclà. Isabel was already
friendly with Josep Safont; she claimed to be even more Republican than Hortènsia.