Private Life (36 page)

“Sir, do you pull this trick with the fifty-pesseta bill with all the ladies?”

Guillem raised his eyes and, facing her with the full brunt of his insolence, responded:

“Not all of them, no. If I think they are worth less than fifty pessetes, I show them a twenty-five pesseta bill; and if I think they’re worth less than five duros, I take care not even to notice them.”

Right up until the last word, Conxa hadn’t recognized him, but the fact was, they had been introduced. What was his name …? Not losing her composure, and even being rather pleasant, she added:

“Listen here, I know you … your name is …”

“Yes, senyora. My name is Guillem de Lloberola. I had the pleasure of meeting you the day …”

“Do you mind telling me what angel inspired you to attempt something so crass with a lady you …”

“It was no angel! I have done this thing you call crass in the hope that you would not recognize me, wouldn’t remember me at all. It was within the realm of possibility not to be recognized. The dark, the suddenness of my approach, worked in my favor. And I thought … well, that you, a lady whom everyone knows, and everyone is familiar with, might perhaps, how shall I put it, enjoy running into a man who not only didn’t recognize her, but even took her for a …”

“How bizarre …”

“No, senyora, it is entirely natural. It’s so normal, in fact, as to be embarrassing, because your opinion of me … I mean, I have no interest in your taking me for a big shot or for an idiot. Your opinion doesn’t matter to me at all …”

“Well, then, what it is you’re after? I don’t understand this whole business. Why have you taken the trouble to …”

“It was an act of kindness, senyora, pure kindness …”

“Kindness?”

“Yes, senyora, to give you a little thrill, a moment of distraction …”

“I don’t understand.”

“Naturally, senyora. I said it was a ‘kindness,’ and I am not backing down. I didn’t do it in my own interest, but in yours, yours entirely. It’s quite simple. I can imagine how unbearable it must be for a person like you to play this incessantly passive role in the game of admiration and enthusiasm. To be known to everyone, and now, after your husband’s suicide, even more well known, and more highly esteemed. I imagine it must be a torment for you (well, perhaps torment is an exaggeration, but it must be tedious, at very least) to realize that you can never stop playing this one role, and that when you meet someone you have no choice but to put on this mask that others have assigned you. Because, if you are beautiful and interesting, and I am not denying that, of course, your interest and your beauty and your elegance become a sort of cliché, something everyone takes for granted, and this voice of everyone and general admiration and popularity – even if no aspect of the term ‘popular’ is exact or apt, in your case – are the elements that make up your way of being, or the role you play. And you are a slave to it all, to what you are and to what others have added to your innate prestige. There is absolutely no escape for you. At first, when one becomes cognizant of this power, of the power of this kind of stature, I have no doubt it must be rather amusing. But later, a person with all your gifts has to tire of it, and lose all pleasure in it, in this constant enthusiasm, in the acclaim and desire you see in everyone’s eyes. Look here, Baronessa, I am sure that a king, for example, or an eminent man, who enjoys extraordinary popularity, must feel the desire to evade his majesty or his fame and one day have the pleasure of not being recognized by anyone, or respected
or admired by anyone, of being just an anonymous person walking down the street. Do you see? And a woman like you is a player in this prestige of royalty. Most of the men who approach you, do so from below, like dogs, one could say, the same way they would approach a king or a genius, the same way they treat men who have such a public, notorious figure that they cannot escape their own skins, no matter how much they would like to. Baronessa, since I consider you to be a sensitive person, I imagine this is to some extent the way you must feel as well. And hence, believe me, my motive was not to be crass, but to be monstrous, to be atrocious, in pretending that I didn’t know who you were. It was out of kindness, senyora, that I wanted you to have the delight (perhaps I am mistaken, my dear senyora, but I think there must be some delight on your part) of seeing that a man like me, a man from Barcelona who doesn’t seem to be some kind of hayseed, not only doesn’t recognize you, not only offers you the thrill of ceasing to be la Senyora Baronessa, Viuda de Falset (please note, senyora, that I have called you ‘widow’), but rather takes her for a woman who can be bought, whom I think I can buy for fifty pessetes. In doing this, senyora, I am doing you the kindness, the immense service, of allowing you a change of personality, of granting you a way to leave behind that skin beautified for the admiration of all who know you to be the Baronessa de Falset, so that you can put on the skin of a common prostitute, in a world as far away as possible from yours, breathing an air that you will never, ever, be able to breathe. Never! Do you see? By saying that crass thing I said, I was opening a new door for you. Your curiosity would have shown me whether the door was tempting
or not. I know that you, and not your curiosity, will say that never in this life could a door like that be tempting, and as a favor to me you will say I’ve gone mad, that is if you are forgiving or merciful enough not to say right off the bat that I am a scoundrel, or simply indecent. But that’s what the lady playing her role would say, not what sincerity would say, don’t you see? Not the intimate truth of a woman obliged to act in a play, and who finds this act to be a burden …”

“Excuse me …”

“Yes …”

“Well, this is all very … bizarre … and, indeed, it is all very interesting …”

“I haven’t quite finished, senyora.”

“But it’s getting late, you know. I would be pleased to go on listening, but …”

“Well, when you are not in a hurry, I am at your disposal to finish my explanation …”

“Tomorrow at five?”

“Perfect. Where?”

“On Gran Via, at the corner of Carrer del Bruc … Is that all right?”

Guillem de Lloberola kissed the baronessa’s hand, and she noticed a slight dampness on her skin. Even though it was now quite dark, when Guillem raised his head, the baronessa could see that his eyes were full of tears.

Guillem was quite pleased with himself. His relatively Pirandellian monologue – Pirandello was in vogue in Barcelona in those days – very possibly may have made an impression on the baronessa.
If Guillem’s vague knowledge of Conxa Pujol’s flesh of had included a few of the tidbits of information that came up as we told the tale of Hortènsia Portell’s party in the first part of this story, if he had known of the forbidden escapades and whoring pursuits of his idol, perhaps he wouldn’t have played up that bit about the world “as far away as possible from yours” or that other bit about the “new door.”

If Conxa Pujol had not been something more than a mere dilettante, or a simple chlorotic tourist of the kind who are roused by the
gabinetto pornografico
of the National Museum of Naples and don’t go any farther, in a word, if Conxa Pujol had not been exactly who she was, she might simply have called a cop at the start of Guillem’s aggressive and insolent speech. Accustomed to more slimy and much more dimwitted admirers than Guillem, Conxa Pujol felt neither slighted nor persuaded, and the following day she showed up punctually for their appointment.

With a precision that even he was astounded by, Guillem continued tacking back and forth between a literary cynicism full of anisette and arnica and the genuine and childlike passion of a sardana dancer. After ten months at this game, Conxa agreed to undress in his presence and get into bed with him. For the time being, Conxa was fairly persuaded and Guillem began to come into his own. The fact that the body of the widow baronessa was a magic box, with all the springs and trap doors of the most corrosive voluptuosity in the hands of a talented juggler, would not have been sufficient to make Guillem feel so swallowed up, so evaporated amidst the leaves of that sublime agave. It was Conxa’s disconcerting, bewildering, and tormenting mind that
infused Guillem’s cheeks with the burning pallor of an impassioned pilgrim. Conxa was half-persuaded, for the moment, because that was precisely what she wanted: a man in a constant feverish state, a perpetually aroused sexuality, forever initiating more devious snares, aspiring to more effective tricks, like a hunter of impossible monsters, and always with that air of defeat combined with a hope of triumph. Because Conxa always slipped away. There was no way he could dominate that undulating perfumed weakness. If for a moment he sensed he was dominating her, she would elude him through the most impracticable crevices. Sometimes the crevice would consist of all the profound brutality of a monosyllable spoken tenuously with the phonetics of an angel. Sometimes it was simply a puff of air from her lungs that Conxa, closing her mouth, would direct through her nose, accompanied by a vitreous, absent gaze and the mere beginnings of a smile, but it would sink into Guillem’s heart like a ferret’s incisors. Guillem found himself in all of this, because the only justification he could find for the monotonous activity of sex was the anxiety of contingency, the constant playing and losing, the stimulus of defeat, and that stuff of hatred and destruction veiled by a gelatin of tears that makes the skin of male and female creatures interesting. All in all, what each felt at the core of the other was a touch of sadism. Guillem was inured to the life of a successful gigolo. He had aplomb and utter self-confidence. Desperately virile, he was also desperately feminine. He had an unfathomable facility for adapting to the detail and the nuance of all the women he had contact with. An ordinary prostitute could find in him the same base echo of meticulous wickedness and
rouged gossip that she could have found in a fellow prostitute. He was the ideal character to dally with a woman and sweet talk her. He never moved too fast, he always sensed the perfect moment. He displayed lovely absences, delicate reluctance, and a cool and tender passivity in awaiting the right move. He wasn’t easily put off, he wasn’t jealous, and he was willing to play roles that a more resolute man who wants to pay and wants to dominate would never tolerate. Discreet and reserved in his triumphs, he had a fertile imagination when it came to lying. And all of this came hand in hand with an unquestionable charm and a reliable and accommodating physiology.

This aptitude for conquest had given Guillem a very bad opinion of women. All he saw in them was the part that served his selfish ends: their likelihood of succumbing to Guillem’s prestige. All they represented for him was their purely animal aspect of adoration or of jealousy; he appreciated them for their skin and for their intimate reactions, and that was it. Guillem had never been in love, and at times he wondered if he was even capable of falling in love, of feeling that profound luxuriance, lyrical with anguish, enthusiasm, and sidereal scintillation that he imagined love to be. Women had never provided Guillem the opportunity to infuse a little spirituality into his flesh, at least not the women he had dealt with so far. Sensitive as he was, the young man was perfectly aware of all that, aware even of how he had been brutalized by his conquests. He was running the risk of becoming a physiological machine mounted on a dissatisfied spirit. Despite his youth, he already had an excess of experience. The time for great emotional arias had passed him by; his weakness for debauchery and
his lack of scruples had shielded his skin with a layer of skepticism. Guillem saw all this with no little melancholy. Another young man would have considered the profusion and diversity amassed in his erotic register to be of inestimable value. And it is not that Guillem derived no satisfaction from it, but he was beginning to feel fatigued, to find no merit in it, and to discover all the gray brushstrokes of monotony. So, the presence of Conxa Pujol renewed him. His fear of failure, his loss of confidence in himself, his need to refine all his powers in order to dominate an elusive skin, his pain at uncertainty, his renewed self-respect, his secret tears, the sensorial density of their encounters, and above all the superior perfume of the inconsistent and contradictory biology he was engaging with his muscles and his breath offered Guillem the possibility of something that, if nothing more, was a reasonable simulacrum of the flaming vestments of a true, pathetic love.

On occasion, powerless to unravel her mystery, in the face of her unceasing battle, Guillem had suspected that Conxa Pujol would never entirely surrender herself to him or to any man. Physically, this woman’s case was not one of coldness or indifference; quite the contrary. Guillem sensed volcanic possibilities in her that he, however, had not managed to ignite. Nor could he accept the thesis that the baronessa belonged to that species of women whose sensibilities have been drained by constant and varied brutalization. A woman who was married at such a young age to the man she had been married to, and who until now had not been known to have a lover, led one to suppose a more or less undamaged temperament. Guillem would have liked to
connect their present intimacies with those two shameful episodes in which he had taken part, but those episodes did not offer any pattern. One would have had to know the extent of the baronessa’s intention in all of that. One would have to separate her responsibility from her husband’s with great care, and that was impossible. In moments of obfuscation and defeat, when Guillem thought his desire was unattainable, he came very close to confessing to the baronessa. He tried to explain his double personality with perfect cynicism, but he realized that such an explanation would probably have closed all doors to him. As unusual as the baronessa was, Guillem was not certain how she would react on learning that this Guillem de Lloberola was the very same derelict her dressmaker had procured for her. Later on, when Conxa yielded, when an absolute intimacy had been established between the two of them, in moments of depression Guillem once again felt the desire to produce a dramatic effect by recounting to the baronessa the details of Dorotea’s “scene of the crime.” But then, too, he held back, and was assailed by yet another doubt: what if what he had accepted in good faith, his certainty that the baronessa had not recognized him, were just an illusion? Guillem came to fear that Conxa, much more astute than her departed husband and with a sharper memory, had been dissembling, had turned a blind eye, on recognizing Guillem de Lloberola to be the same subject procured by her dressmaker. This aspect of Guillem’s fear was groundless, because Conxa Pujol never recognized him nor did she suspect for a moment that Guillem had been a party to those secret events.