Private Life (38 page)

“The men who hauled the stone on their backs must not have been from here. Some had spent ten years in the galleys, others, even more. Their skin was tough. They were petty criminals, the kind who stole a wineskin full of sweet
vi ranci
or grabbed a girl by the leg and had at it on a haystack. All in all, they were men who were only good for lugging rocks. If they hadn’t been able to haul the ashlars from the Gusi quarry as someone prodded their thighs, they surely would have died of sorrow. These things were natural in those days.”

“How many hands high must the wall in front have been? Who knows! Above the main entrance were the arrow slits. There was a bit of a moat and a drawbridge. Though no sign of any of this remains, it was impossible for there not to have been a drawbridge.”

“To raise such a castle no few years were necessary, and perhaps more than a hundred infected legs. It had to be this way; this was the way of the times.”

“It must have been terribly cold inside the castle. Who knows if the chimney had been invented. Probably. What they hadn’t invented yet were the brazier and the bed warmer. Portable foot warmers came much later. Inside, the walls were also bare stone. They probably didn’t spend much money on wall hangings, because our tapestry, which was from France, was from many years later, the sixteenth century, I think, and tapestries weren’t even produced in Spain until later.”

“What must the first Senyor de Lloberola to wander the corridors of this castle have been like? He didn’t yet use our shield. The three wolves and three pines. According to Papà, this shield is from the seventeenth century. Papà was exaggerating; I think it must be much older. If not, what’s the point?”

“After the first Senyor de Lloberola must have come the second, the third, the fourth, perhaps up to twenty or thirty … No, thirty is too many. Thirty generations would mean seven hundred years. The Lloberolas must have lived here two or three hundred years at most. When a son was born, they would no doubt bring in a wet nurse from Moià, or from some neighboring masia that owed them vassalage. It
would be interesting to know whether they also inserted a clove of garlic into the umbilical cords of the Senyors of Lloberola and tied them up with the lacings from an espadrille as they still do in some farm houses even now. That must be a very ancient custom, and the pagesos probably learned it from the senyors.”

“I think the first Senyor de Lloberola, or the second, it doesn’t matter, must have been terribly bored. As a matter of fact, they must not have been much good for anything. They probably had never in all their lives so much as picked up a blade of straw from the ground, just like papà. When it came to not doing a stitch of work, papà was every inch a senyor. When he died, his nose didn’t turn yellow. It was just as red and swollen as when he was alive; maybe even more. It must have been just the same with these folks up here. Maybe it will also be like that with me, though my nose is finer and more noble than my father’s was …”

“In any case, to be a Lloberola back then was more interesting than to be who I am, for example. To be a Senyor de Lloberola in a position to dispose of the life and property of others rather than smelling the stench of the hallways in that apartment on Carrer de Bailèn! They’re not going to see much more of me in that apartment. Here you have the smell of the stables, but it is all more ventilated … To be a Senyor de Lloberola! A Senyor de Lloberola!… All these thoughts I’m thinking are a little ridiculous, but sort of thrilling, too. For one’s blood to be tied to these stones, to this history … No matter what the newspapers say … No matter that President Companys and the
rabassaires
have decided that the master should no longer receive his
shares of the crops … Tenant farmers!… 
Rabassaires
!… Oh, if only one could … If only one had the Civil Guard at his disposal … The only good thing papà did in all his life was to die in time not to see all this nastiness … The Republic! A bunch of crooks! What the devil! For all I’m going to see of this … Bring on the
rabassaires
, bring on Companys himself! They can have it all. But not the house, the house no, that’s ours to keep, I mean mine to keep … Of course the house isn’t, shall we say, very old … Papà said it was from the eighteenth century. I can’t really tell … In any case, I don’t care if it’s from the eighteenth century, you can lead a much better life, much better, than in that apartment in Barcelona … Let them have it!… They’re the kind who breathe better in an apartment. My children don’t understand all this … They’re more like their mother … I’m still a Senyor de Lloberola, after all, yes indeed! Lloberola is a diminutive of
llobera
, which means wolf’s den … at least I think it does. So Lloberola is a little den … everything is little: little wolves, little den. That’s what we are, wolves with no food, with dull claws, with no courage … I’ve always felt that the Lloberolas were cowards. But why? We’re like everyone else. The difference between us and all the rest of the cowards is that we are still senyors. Not people who think they’re senyors, but actual senyors! We have a sort of seigneurial delicacy … A disregard … Nowadays what used to be called disdain is called disregard … Catalan is a horrible language; or rather, the Catalanists have made it horrible … They will never be senyors, not them!… What do you have to say about all this? What do you think, standing there drooling, with that expression on your face? Answer me? Am I not a true Lloberola?…”

His only response was a long, drawn-out “Moooooo …” because the creature being interpellated by that historical, political, and philological commentary was none other than a cow who was chewing on a few blades of tender Johnson grass. What remained of the supposed castle of the Lloberolas were a few vague reminiscences of a dry stone wall, in an untended field overlooking the masia.

Frederic’s imaginings upon the story of those stones may be perfectly gratuitous. That pile had probably never been a castle, nor had it belonged to a Lloberola. It is possible that none of it was medieval, and it was just a piece of a big ramshackle house, abandoned, like so many in the landscape of this land, to end up as shelters for cattle and farm animals and points of encounter between lizards and brambles. It was Don Tomàs who discovered, no one knows how or with what tools of erudition, that that was in fact the castle of the Lloberolas, the lords of that stretch of land since the mid-twelfth century. The Lloberolas clearly had been rich pagesos, farmers who three centuries earlier had come to occupy the masia now known as Can Lloberola. The farmhouse had previously belonged to some other farmers whose name was Sitjar, and one of the first daughters to inherit – the firstborn daughter, la pubilla Sitjar – had married a Lloberola son, but not the firstborn. The firstborn Lloberola of the time died without progeny and all his property was absorbed by the owner of the farmhouse where Frederic lived with the masovers, the caretakers who looked after the mas.

Early in the 18th century, the Lloberolas went to take up residence in Barcelona, and that was when the King Ferdinand VI
conceded them the title of the Marquès de Sitjar. The coat of arms of the rupestrian Lloberolas, who before being marquesses had borne the title of “honored citizens” and, not long after, of “gentlemen,” had not exactly been the one with the wolves and the pines. Their coat of arms consisted of a cross and a ram’s head with great horns, as it appears that the wealth of the ancient Lloberolas had derived from the sheep wool trade. But a king of arms, of the many who existed in the eighteenth century, hoodwinking farmers with mythological ascendencies, offered them the three green pines and three black wolves on a field of gold for their approval, on the basis that those ram horns seemed a bit indiscreet among marquesses in wigs and dress coats, stuffed with money and addled with airs.

Frederic was ignorant of the modest titled history of his line. He preferred to adopt the fantasies of Don Tomàs and the king of arms, and to believe that the handful of stones scattered half an hour from his ancestral home, his casa pairal, the home of his forefathers, had been the brilliant lair of all the romantic legends of Lloberolas wearing chain mail and helmets, disemboweling ferocious Berbers, ravishing perfumed Saracen women, and doing their worst to a downtrodden multitude of serfs.

No one but Frederic ever went up to the barren field of the castle. He spent many afternoons there. On the slope leading down to the masia, there was a good stretch of meadow grass. Occasionally, the smattering of cows that belonged to the masover of Can Lloberola would be led there so they could breathe some air beyond the stable and enjoy the scraps of green the land offered them free of cost.

Can Lloberola had been a very important estate, the best in the county, but in his decline Don Tomàs had overseen its fragmentation. The plots were divvied up and ended up in many hands. On Don Tomàs’s death Frederic was left the house and a few jornals. A jornal is the plot of land a man can work in a day’s time, and the masover worked them to his own advantage, while paying a pittance in rent.

In Don Tomàs’s better days, the house had come to be quite a fine place. A good deal of money went into renovating and furnishing it properly as a summerhouse where they could receive guests. Later everything was allowed to deteriorate. Nothing was left of the garden. The masovers were pagesos, good farmer stock who saw no need for aesthetics or superfluous things, and they turned anything that was merely decorative into utilitarian land. They took over the owners’ furniture and little by little invaded the rooms meant for the senyors. When Frederic picked up the dregs of his father’s estate, he found that if he wanted to live in Can Lloberola he practically had to behave like a tenant. Despite the discomforts and the rural duplicity, Frederic was able to feel like a true gentleman there. The masover, who was shrewd, had known Frederic since he was a boy – he was ten years older than his employer. He would humor him and look the other way when Frederic had Soledat, the farmer’s eldest daughter, untie his leggings when he got back from hunting. Soledat, who was no farmer girl, wore rouge and chiffon stockings, and as she went about untying his laces, Frederic’s eyes pointed like two medieval hounds into the well of the girl’s décolletage, within which sighed, somewhat rebelliously, the fresh lemons of her breasts.

It saddened Frederic to see how modernization had turned those noble rural walls into something ordinary and conventional. The masover had a gramophone and a radio, with an undomesticated speaker that let out squeaks and squawks and tangos and speeches by deputies from the Republican Left, while the stable boys dug the hay from their ears and Francisca hung a great cauldron of navy beans from the pothook over the hearth in the kitchen.

Nighttime conversation around the table of the masovers and the stable boys revolved around tenant farming, soccer, the politics of Macià and Companys, and Greta Garbo. They were all members of Esquerra Republicana, the party of the anti-monarchist pro-Catalan left, except for two farmhands from the FAI, the Federació Anarquista Ibèrica, who went out to dig potatoes with a copy of
Solidaridad Obrera
, the anarchist paper, stuck in their waistbands. These things drove Frederic mad. He saw disaffection in the eyes of the farmworkers; they barely bade him good day and good night. In town everyone knew he was ruined, he didn’t have a cent, and the masover held more title than he, and soon he would not even be owed even his little bit of rent. On Sunday afternoons, when he went to the cafè, el Senyor de Can Lloberola was hardly afforded more consideration than the men wearing working caps and the sashes, known as faixes, that the Catalan farmworkers still wore around their waists. He had to forget about bridge; he played the local card games, burro and tuti subhastat, with the secretary and two farmers. To be in harmony with the table, he had to pretend to have read the newspapers and abstain from saying everything he thought about the Republic.

Frederic was having a sort of affair with a married woman in the district. She was a bright young girl who had gone to school in Manresa; she was fairly scrupulous with regard to hygiene, and sordidly banal with regard to every other topic under the sun. Her name was Montserrat. Her husband had a wine business and spent many days in Barcelona. As a girl, and even as an adult, Montserrat had been nourished on the innocent and popular Catalanist literature of Josep Maria Folch i Torres. Her husband had corrupted her morally and cultivated in her a taste for vaudeville and broad humor. She fell in love with Frederic because he was a tragic figure and a member of the nobility. He visited her fairly often. It was a topic of general gossip in town, but the wine merchant was one of those people who have ears and do not hear.

Frederic had always had a great fondness for the Can Lloberola estate. In its days of splendor, the hunting expeditions of Frederic and his friends were famous. On occasion, women had gone along, and the masover had done whatever was necessary so Don Tomàs would never learn of their carousing.

Three years before his father died, on the pretext of looking after the estate, Frederic began to spend long periods there, all by himself, leaving his wife and children behind in the apartment on Carrer de Bailèn. With his father’s death and the coming of the Republic, Frederic was determined to extend his stay as long as he could. In truth, he and Maria behaved as if they were divorced. Like all the Lloberolas, Frederic had a mad streak, and ever since he had broken up with Rosa Trènor, he had been subject to a sort of grotesque melancholy, to
appearing enigmatic, to registering absurd complaints and making grand scenes before his wife and children. Instead of smoothing things over, Maria tensed the cord even further on her end, and those last four years of marriage had been unbearable. As for the Republic, Frederic was just as indignant as his father, if not more so. But instead of wasting his time on clerical intrigues and cheap conspiracies, Frederic was invaded by sadness, and disgusted with the people of Barcelona who followed politics and went around causing democratic upheaval. His children were already grown, and they were the last straw. Ferran had finished school and begun to study architecture and dared, timidly, to express his opinions in front of his father. Frederic’s blend of melancholy and nonsense came together in the form of an acute crisis. One day he threw a bottle at his son’s head and hurt him rather badly. Another day he threatened to throw him out of the house. Maria always took the side of the little weasel against her husband, and la Senyora Carreres, who was even more necessary than ever from an economic standpoint, went so far as to call her son-in-law a monster and a bad man. She said that if he wasn’t capable of educating and maintaining a family, he should go away and leave them in peace.