Private Life (39 page)

These scenes at the apartment on Carrer de Bailèn were among the most deplorable and idiotic of all the similar scenes that took place in the private life of the bourgeoisie of our country, often for irrational causes. Nothing could console Frederic. He stopped caring about his clothing; his friends at the Club Eqüestre avoided him. Sometimes he would while away a boring afternoon all by himself in a neighborhood
cafè. Don Tomàs’s will left no doubt that the Lloberolas had inherited a pittance, and Frederic couldn’t bear any more humiliations and favors from his in-laws. All he had left was the estate and the company of the masovers who had always been loyal to him. For them he had started out as the young master, el senyoret, and gone on to be “Don Frederic.” He had that pile of rocks in a barren wasteland in which the quixotic Frederic could envisage the castle of his past glory and the justification of his pride and his sadness. He had a red and white spotted cow who listened to his speeches on the grandeur and decadence of human vanity as she munched on the grass. Frederic was not just any old poor devil, as many – including Bobby, with whom he was never reconciled – believed. Frederic had a germ of madness, like all the Lloberolas, and it was that germ that sent him off alone, practically a tenant of the caretakers of his own property, putting up with the whistling and crackling of the radio and the opinions on communism of the handful of farmworkers stuffed with navy beans, reeking of the natural and repulsive odor of agriculture.

In the meantime, back home, things were peaceful. When you came right down to it, Frederic was an unusual case. There are men who go through this world without leaving anything of worth behind, without having had the slightest influence on anything. When they die, no one remembers them, nor does anyone need them. For as long as their contact with others lasts, neither on the surface nor in passing can so much as a blasted anecdote be told. What little effect they have is purely negative, even on themselves. They devote their time to spending, to destroying, to embittering, to making every minute
unpleasant. They are usually serious to no end; they are incapable of humor, of laughter, of anything exuding a pleasant warmth. It might seem as if the most natural thing would be for no one to take note of such men, for them to be avoided so that they could not be a stumbling block for a single project, for in point of fact neither their judgment nor their value, nor even their volume bears any weight. But the strange thing is that this type of man is particularly annoying, and a source of concern to others. They behave like specters that intercept movement. Sometimes it even seems as if they rob all the air from a room, allowing no one to breathe. Their eyes, which are expressionless and reveal no special gaze, are more inquisitive than the eyes of others, and their tongues contradict for the pleasure of contradicting. Faced with such characters, some people give them a wide berth, or leave off what they’re doing in order to avoid that stupid, inoffensive, entirely irrelevant contradiction that, for some inexplicable reason, is intolerably exasperating. Frederic was one of these men, at home, among his friends, among his relations; this is the kind of man he was. His arrogant illiteracy was irritating; inclined to opine on anything, to stick his nose in anywhere, he never knew when to keep his countenance, he kept arguments going, he overcomplicated absurd things, not to be insulting, but because he felt possessed of a divine inspiration, as if he were clairvoyant. Those who just depended on him, out of friendship or acquaintance, did their best to avoid him. If they ran into him on the street, they were always running late, or they would seek out a third person so as not to have to carry on a face-to-face dialogue with him. Frederic was a polite man, a rather decent
and well-bred individual, he even had some sophistication, but despite that, he was annoying, unbearably annoying, in a class by himself. Don Tomàs’s saving point had been his quaintness, his pathos, his theatricality. He had had a Molieresque quality – along the lines of an Orgon or an Imaginary Invalid – that imbued his nose, his moustache and his scarf. Don Tomàs was of another era, with all his clownish ways and all the absurd penitence that could be summed up in the conical cucurulla hat he would wear in the Holy Week processions. As pure spectacle, he could be tolerated, for a while. Not Frederic; Frederic was gray and sad, without contrast on the surface or in the soul. He was the proverbial bitter pill to swallow.

A man like this in the midst of a family, even an impassive family without an ounce of critical sense, ends up filling every room with corrosive vapors. His wife had many of her own defects but in a less strident way, more muted, one might say. She was dull, whiny, sniveling, hypocritical, vague, acidic, but even her acid was diluted with a great deal of water. Frederic’s wife didn’t realize who he was; she rebuffed him for reasons that were not exactly what made him so impossible – his infidelities, reproofs, bugbears, and lack of money – all of which could have been tolerated if Frederic simply hadn’t been such a bore. And the most painful part is that he was no ordinary bore, oh no. If Frederic had been an ordinary man, as normal, sad and insignificant as you like, perhaps he would still have been tolerable. Frederic, in his own way of being, was an exceptional man, an original. An exceptional bore, despicable and gentlemanly, innocent and suspicious, generous and miserly, irresponsible, insubstantial, loud,
false, and cowardly. Full of the most quixotic and most sublime illusions, defeated and self-important, he had been disarmed by life like no other.

His influence on his children was disastrous. If ever there was a man who didn’t have the slightest idea of what it meant to educate a child, it was Frederic. When Don Tomàs had educated Frederic, he had believed in a few norms. His criteria might be good or bad, he might cling to asceticism, or morality, or nobility, or to the Sunday parish letter, or whatever, but between hassocks and cuffs to the back of the head, he followed those criteria. The results of his method were terrible, but it was a method. Not Frederic. He had reached the point of having no shame with regard to his children, and he would swing back and forth between punishment, shouting, and violence, and letting them do whatever they pleased. His children had no respect for him; bitterness and conjugal battle were their daily spectacle. Doubtless some of the things that were passed on to the progeny of Frederic de Lloberola and Maria Carreres, which the reader who continues to read this story will hear about, were caused by the terrible education and poor example of a household whose head was a failure as a father and in every other way.

Not that we can have a great deal of faith, in this world, in pedagogy or the healthy influence of parents on their children, because every home is a world unto itself and every technique fails. But what is certain is that, for temperaments like those of the Lloberola family, the pressure of a man like Frederic comes to produce the most absolute demoralization: the demoralization of exhaustion, smothering,
and loss of respect. It cannot be said of Frederic that he is a criminal or a thief or excessively debauched, or an alcoholic, or black of heart, or anything like that. Indeed, such vices, when present in the father, have been known to behave as reactants, making the children resistant to vice. Frederic is simply a bore, simply a pain, simply insignificant, simply wretched, and the end result is the desire for the disappearance or death of a person whom by nature one ought to love and respect.

And this is what Frederic’s children felt, spurred on even more by Maria’s sourpuss expression and all the sighs and lamentations of Grandmother Carreres. The one who bore the most guilt for all that disaffection and exhaustion was Frederic. He had brought three children into the world without a drop of enthusiasm because, when he lost his illusions about his wife, he lost his illusions about paternity. It’s not that he didn’t love them, nor that he hadn’t suffered when as little ones they bumped their knees against the corner of a table. But he loved them in a very peculiar way; his distress came more from the annoyance of hearing them cry than from tenderness and compassion for a child who has hurt himself. In truth, they got on his nerves, and he fled the house whenever he could. His children never required any effort, or gave him any headaches. They had their mother, their grandparents, their nannies, and he had plenty to do, gambling at the Eqüestre, or trying out an automobile, or chasing after a woman, or being a monumental pain, or arguing, or sitting around. When things started really going badly for him, when he ought to have behaved with humility, when he had to accept a sad salary at the Banc Vitalici,
he would take his cowardly egotism out on his blameless children, depending on the mood he was in.

Since he needed to be seen as the wisest of them all, a gesture made by one of his children in all innocence – a shrug of the shoulders, for example – would be seen by Frederic as proof of a terrible instinct for depravity that had to be corrected. He would impose a disturbing, humiliating and unsuitable punishment on the child. The child would carry it out, not innocently, but rather with a resignation full of hatred for his father, taking note of his father’s wretchedness, showing obedience so that the wretchedness would not go any farther. Children often have more common sense and flexibility than adults.

Clearly when Frederic had his attack of rural melancholy and liberated himself by forgetting about his family, everyone breathed more easily in the apartment on Carrer de Bailèn.

Frederic thought of them occasionally, above all of Maria Lluïsa, his eldest daughter, who was almost twenty. Not that his thinking of her had anything to do with regret for his own behavior, or with baring his soul before his own conscience … Much to the contrary, he believed that his children didn’t love him because his wife had inculcated hatred for their father in them. He was a victim of his children, just as he had been a victim of his father. In his quarrels and fallings-out with Don Tomàs, it never occurred to Frederic that guilt is always two-sided, and that often no one is actually guilty but pure fate, the blind and contradictory biology that creates risible conflicts that, to some eyes, appear to be unassailable mountains. Frederic saw
himself as pure, well-meaning, and angelic, and it was others who were his enemies and who were to blame for everything. This was not persecution mania. It was just emptyheadedness.

One of the clearest endorsements of Rosa Trènor’s patience or stupidity was her having put up with him as a lover. As we know, it was Bobby’s peculiar temperament and ennui that made him impervious to Frederic’s monologues and effrontery.

Back at Can Lloberola, Frederic was getting a little coarser by the day. He began to enjoy the radio, and the farmhands’ arguments about communism didn’t get on his nerves the way they used to. He would go three days without shaving. He would feel an agrarian tenderness when Soledat untied his leggings, and he would go red in the face if Francisca caught on. The farmers who played cards with him no longer called him Don Frederic; they called him Senyor Frederico, and one of them even called him Senyor Frederiquet, diminishing him with the diminutive. He just kept his eyes on the cards and didn’t move a muscle.

After dinner, when there was moonlight, he would wander around among the old castle stones. His heart bucolic and his belly full, he would listen to the crickets sing with tawdry sentimentalism. The castle stones took him back to the clouds of idealism. Alone, in the evening dew that was beginning to reveal the effects of arthritis, he would stiffen up and adopt the proper bearing of a Lloberola who speaks with the medieval shades of his ancestors. There he was, against all democracy, against all socialism, defending the traditions of a country to which he had never paid the slightest mind. For him,
to have been born in Catalonia and to be called Lloberola meant to play bridge, to bring children into the world because that’s what one did, to lose a fortune, and to put on a new tie for the first time. Everything else was a waste of time. In the presence of the ruins, these criteria underwent some modification. He was disgusted by the bridge games, the children, the fortune, and the ties. He was suffused with the solemnity of paellas and salads prepared in the fields, the delightful sight of Soledat’s breasts, the stench of the stables, the chirping of the crickets, and the immutable pale yellow moon that cast a theatrical chiaroscuro over his ancestral ruins.

At nightfall, Frederic would visit the wine merchant’s wife. He was getting a little tired. His abdomen, his gray hair, his wrinkles all gave him away. In the games of love with the wine merchant’s wife he couldn’t be much more prodigal than with his fortune. Frederic was almost finished. Premature impotence was common among the Lloberolas, and Frederic was beginning to feel the effects of that family flaw. He wasn’t old: he had just turned forty-eight. But day by day in his intimate physiology Frederic began to notice alarming symptoms. The wine merchant’s wife enveloped him in a cheap, tacky sentimentalism. Soledat, with her rouge and her chiffon stockings, and all the young bucks in town pressing up against her in the dance hall, was a finer prey. But Frederic needed to be flattered, and consoled. The wine merchant’s wife knew how to console him, and it thrilled her that a bona fide Senyor de Lloberola would deign to lie in her bed, in a bedroom that smelled of sheepskins, of the brotherhood of the Virgin of Pain, and of cheap cologne.

Frederic’s nose and heart were becoming accustomed to all this squalor. He even reached the point at which he found the appeal in a silk print nightgown the wine merchant’s wife wore. It was a black fabric with a pattern of orange-colored babies that looked as if they had been stolen from an orphanage.