Private Life (33 page)

Josep Safont held important posts. He was a volatile young man from a comfortable, bourgeois background, but he had felt like a revolutionary all his life. He had been a syndicalist and a communist, he had been in prison, and he had spent a good bit of time in exile. Once he held a position in the government Josep Safont decided to make overtures to the aristocracy, and he allowed it to be inferred that he had affairs with married ladies from the upper crust. Safont was short and thin and blond, with horn-rimmed glasses and a Levitical voice. He considered himself worldly and irresistible. He would wink an eye, and give only a partial account of his conquests, implying that he was quite the sensation. The ladies would poke fun at him, and, as you might expect, he didn’t catch on. Isabel Sabadell pretended to be soft on Safont, and he declared that when the law permitting divorce was passed, he would probably marry her.

That night Safont was at the height of his brilliance. The ladies listened to him with delight. Hortènsia was the most sentimental of the group, and her eyes rolled back in her head when Safont disclosed the torments the police had subjected him to. He also told tales of struggles and death threats in the days of the pistol-packing union busters. Safont had never been tortured, and even in the midst of the turmoil he had always more or less had a good time. In Paris, his father sent him tons of money and Safont devoted more time to intense love affairs than to conspiring. Safont had the overheated
imagination common to the southern climes, and in the presence of ladies he turned into a peacock.

Rafaela found him undistinguished. Rafaela thought all the men of the Republic were common and ill-mannered, and felt that no good could come of their ilk. She was among those who claimed that the city councilors and the officials of the Catalan government were a pack of thieves who had turned the Plaça de Sant Jaume, where both City Hall and the Generalitat were located, into Sodom and Gomorrah. In Hortènsia’s house, Rafaela contained herself, and in truth she enjoyed hearing Safont go on, because she was curious and loved intrigue. She liked to have a finger in every pie.

Bobby was apathetic, pessimistic and polite. He believed in nothing. Not in the men of the Republic, nor in the ones who came before. He was an absolute skeptic. Politics disgusted him. In Bobby’s eyes, Safont was as much of an arriviste as all the others, and he felt tremendous scorn for Hortènsia and Isabel, drooling over that short, blond man.

Along with the
potins
about the members of the fallen regime, there was beginning to be new and entertaining gossip about the personalities of the new regime. The brilliant folk of Barcelona have always been rather provincial in spirit, and the most stimulating gossip was always the chatter about things happening in Madrid. Rafaela would quote the words of Minister Indalecio Prieto to show what a boor he was; Isabel and Hortènsia found them very funny. Safont brought fresh stories that met with great approval. Of the morsels
that circulated about Barcelona, the most sought-after were the ones about Senyora Casulleres. She was the wife of an important public figure, a beautiful, sassy, and vain brunette who had always lived in the deepest poverty, and was out of her depth with her husband’s new position. Only a few months before, no one had ever heard of this woman, and yet in just days she had become the rage in Barcelona. Monstrous tales circulated about Senyora Casulleres among the ladies of the aristocratic circles that hated the Republic. Some of the things they said about her were true, and some were lies. There was also a lot of talk about Senyora Sabater, a poor, tacky, and grotesque woman who had pretensions to being Madame de Tallien. Senyora Sabater gave tea parties at which she recited poetry before a series of reptilian followers of communism. The prevailing topic among the aristocratic ladies was the debauchery and dirty business of the Republic. In this area, fantasy and calumny achieved the sublime. It was said that the wife of another public figure had purchased and paid cash for jewelry valued at one hundred thousand duros. There wasn’t a single dressing room, confession box,
meublé
, or nuptial bedroom that hadn’t heard the story of these jewels a thousand times over.

Many ladies were convinced that in order to be hired, the typists and secretaries in the offices of the public institutions had had to sacrifice their virginity to a councilman or a deputy. The most wicked backstairs gossip was the daily bread of spurned women and of ladies who believed that communism consisted of allowing traffic to circulate on Holy Thursday.

All these protests against the new regime, all this sadness at the suspension of military and religious parades, exuded an air of boiled cabbage and local cowardice. All in all, the climate had not changed all that much, and the sentimental life of the country was much the same as it had been before.

The topics that awakened the greatest passion were feminism, female suffrage, and, above all, divorce. As soon as the divorce law was passed, women in the kind of circles that formed around Hortènsia Portell started predicting likely imminent divorces. This led to tremendous conversations and arguments. Hortènsia was in favor of divorce, of women’s suffrage, and of woman in government and anywhere else they might be useful.

A couple of young women asked Hortènsia to give a lecture, but she didn’t have the nerve. They wanted her to talk about fashion and the Republic. When Rafaela heard about it she spread the word far and wide, maintaining that Hortènsia had accepted the invitation. For a few days Hortènsia was a laughingstock among her closest friends.

Isabel Sabadell, quite the Republican and quite a friend to Joan Safont, had not yet given up her old ways. Whenever she could she would seize the opportunity to speak Spanish and cozy up to a ring of young aristocrats who got together in a little apartment to conspire and play the royal march on a gramophone. The poor boys passed the time shouting
“¡Viva el rey!”
in Spanish at closing time in the cabarets, and proselytizing among prostitutes and bootblacks. Truth be told, they were utterly irrelevant, but since their families were very wealthy and had been prominent during the Dictatorship, Isabel Sabadell and
other ladies like her couldn’t help but have a soft spot in their hearts for them, even if afterwards they would delight in explaining their shortcomings.

Hortènsia, who wanted to be a pure Republican, reproached Isabel for this frailty, while Isabel was annoyed by Hortènsia’s cruelty, because in the presence of Safont she presumed to being the most radical of them all, even a communist sympathizer.

Many ladies and many young women, spurred on by boys still wet behind the ears, spoke of Russia with grotesque enthusiasm. Most of these women had no idea what a five-year plan was, but it was considered to be a topic of the most chic and elegant conversation. They discovered their passion for Russia through the Soviet films that were being shown in those days in Barcelona. The local authorities were very open-minded about programming and they coddled this snobbish desire to be
à la page
. These special sessions where people came to see the most important films of Bolshevik propaganda were showcased by the Cinaes group. The audience was a mixture of the elegant set and those known as intellectuals and artists, but above all it was married ladies accompanied by athletic young men from good families, who applauded wildly at things that were sometimes childish and sometimes deplorable. They considered the monotony and doggedness of Soviet film to be the last word in good taste and refinement.

Despite all their talk, in the world of Hortènsia Portell and other fine ladies like her, everything that was going on in the country, all the changes, which were considerable, were viewed as spectacle. Deep
down, none of it really mattered very much to them. Naturally they had a fear of strikes, and a fear of losing their money and their peace of mind, but even this fear was only relative. The sheer full-bellied optimism of these people was hard to subdue. That night at Hortènsia’s house, Josep Safont was a spectacle. Even Isabel saw him this way, for she knew very well that this man was neither of her world nor of her atmosphere. Josep Safont just didn’t fit in, in that air tainted by a bourgeoisie too steeped in the
ancien régime
. What truly concerned Hortènsia and those ladies was the world of tittle-tattle that unfolded in fifty Barcelona mansions. Still and all, Hortènsia had to be given some credit. She was an honest and generous woman. Her age precluded affairs, and in truth she didn’t desire one. Hortènsia just needed to fill her life, and she did so by pretending to be extremely concerned about politics and the world of the intellect. She would apply a coat of three or four extremely unremarkable ideas to her skin, and the perfume of those ideas accompanied her wherever she went. At that point in time, she felt Republican, because that seemed to be the more intelligent choice and in Barcelona it was beginning to be fashionable for women to lean a bit toward the side of intelligence.

Hortènsia took no risks. If her aristocratic circle criticized her for having had Josep Safont and other revolutionaries and atheists to dinner, she would absolve herself, attributing the invitations to curiosity, the same curiosity that had steered her to the cabarets or the perverts at La Criolla. Hortènsia was Catholic, but very much in her own way and very little in the way of the priests. She believed that she was not a sinner, and that someone like her was beyond all
that and could be exposed to all of life’s spectacles. Hortènsia was a self-centered, conservative bourgeois lady. She had nothing to lose if at some point she appeared to espouse divorce and even free love. These questions didn’t affect her in the slightest. Just as in other days she had had actresses with shady reputations, flamenco singers, and generals like Primo de Rivera to her house, now she could indulge herself by inviting a Communist or a Republican like Josep Safont over. Her virtue was not compromised at all.

Josep Safont retreated from the after-dinner conversation at eleven-thirty, on the pretext that he had a party meeting to attend. As soon as he was out the door, Rafaela began to tear him apart. To be contrary, Hortènsia defended him to the hilt. Isabel found him amusing, because she could see the self-importance and puerile vanity in the man’s eyes. She didn’t find Josep Safont at all attractive, physically, but she felt he was neither as foolish and common as Rafaela thought, nor as sublime as Hortènsia made him out to be. Within the governing Republican Party, Isabel thought there were more intelligent and spectacular young men than Safont, and she mentioned a couple of names.

Hortènsia didn’t know any of them, and she was a bit put out, asking Isabel why, instead of Safont, she hadn’t brought some of those men she thought were more remarkable. Bobby was satisfied, as always, to be in the midst of the ladies’ conversation because, between the squabbles and the henpecking, he never had to express an opinion. He made a bit of cruel fun of Hortènsia, telling her that now she had no choice but to invite the two or three fellows Isabel
had mentioned, and her devotion to the Republican cause was going to cost her a lot of money in dinners.

Bobby only spoke of politics when he was among his lady friends, out of courtesy to them, and nothing more.

Many of Bobby’s aristocratic friends from the club had gone over to Alejandro Lerroux, the populist, anti-Catalanist leader of the Radical Republican Party. Bobby found this attitude ignoble. One aristocrat best known for how he had worshiped the monarch and kowtowed to the bygone dictator proposed to him that he join the radical party, because Senyor Lerroux was the only guarantee of their oysters on ice and their poker games. Bobby didn’t want to argue. With just a stiff smile and a slow blink of the eyes he left him frozen in place.

There were some truly abhorrent elements in the
Cambra de la Propietat
, the real estate authority, and the
Foment del Treball Nacional
, a regional chamber of commerce. These individuals considered Mr. Lerroux to be such a good fellow that if they asked nicely enough he would bring back the king, reduce salaries to pre-war level, and send them a priest and a civil guard to rub their tummies on nights when they had indigestion.

During the Dictatorship, families that obstinately adhered to a strong morality had been shaken to the core by a kind of social contact that had already taken hold in Barcelona. In those days the world of the demimondaines had been admired only for its natural beauty and for its shamelessness, or for the stories brilliant playboys and disabused artists would tell. Now it was admired, tolerated and
appreciated first-hand. A scandalous dancer, who once had merely been applauded from a theater box, would be received years later, not as a sensational number at a private party in someone’s home, but as a close friend of the lady of the house.

Some of the ladies from Hortènsia Portell’s clan, such as Teodora Macaia or the Baronessa de Moragues, started paying visits backstage and attending late-night dinners in questionable company. Things that a true lady of Barcelona or a respectable bourgeoise would not have dared to do a few years before without exposing herself to great scandal and absolute disrepute could now be done coolly and casually, as if it were the most natural thing in the world.

The finest actresses and dancers would go for tea or play bridge with the granddaughters of ladies who had embroidered flags for the Carlist army, ladies who would say an Our Father before fulfilling the intimate acts of the sacrament of matrimony and who saw love as a quasi-sacrifice in the service of the preservation of the species.

These contacts between different social atmospheres occasionally produced pathetic squalls. Still, in general the disasters they produced were nothing worse than a growing flexibility in certain lovely souls, a more peculiar cultivation of reckless behavior or of the unstoppable pursuit of the latest thing, and a more intense secretion in the glands of gossipmongers.

Straitlaced ladies, moralists, and priests preached against what had begun to be called the relaxing of customs. During the Dictatorship, with the aid of local authorities, bishops had imposed punishments
and prohibitions with regard to women’s clothing, how much skin could be revealed, and what things couldn’t be done on beaches in the summer.