Private Life (40 page)

AFTER HER HUSBAND’S death, Leocàdia moved out of the apartment on Carrer de Mallorca. Guillem would just as soon live in a hotel as in a pension, since no one knew where he would be sleeping or keeping his clothes. Leocàdia spent the first few months at Josefina’s house, but the poor woman wasn’t comfortable with the Marquesas de Forcadell. There was too much bustle and noise in their house. Josefina always had guests, the children were rowdy, and the marquis showed no signs of affection to his mother-in-law. Leocàdia was an early riser. She was accustomed to eating promptly at midday and dining early in the evening. In contrast, her daughter’s house was subject to constant disorder. The marquis would keep them waiting until ten p.m. and then telephone to say he wouldn’t be home for dinner. Josefina had developed an absolute passion for golf and many days she would stay in Sant Cugat for lunch. Leocàdia was flustered by all this, and she proposed to her daughter and son-in-law that she would be better off retreating to the abbey at Cluny. The Sisters of St. Joseph of Cluny took into their convent women who had been left alone by manic disorder, widowhood, or earthquake. In the convent,
they didn’t exactly find Baudelairian “
luxe, calme et volupté
,” but they did find order, repose, and discipline, and enough comfort to satisfy their needs. In general, the ladies who retired with the Sisters of Cluny were from good families and highly educated, but wanting in fortune and affection.

Josefina and her husband didn’t find Leocàdia’s proposal acceptable. They thought their friends would be critical. It wasn’t right for the widow Marquesas de Sitjar, with two sons and a daughter married to a well-placed man, to be retiring to a nunnery like a poor widow or an ordinary spinster. When Josefina expressed this opinion, it was not because she had felt any particular pleasure in having Leocàdia under her roof; she was concerned mostly with what people would say. Don Tomàs’s will assigned Leocàdia a number of shares that produced at most a rent of some four hundred pessetes a month. This was sufficient for Leocàdia to pay her board at Cluny and cover her expenses, which were insignificant. Despite the frankly weak opposition of the Marquesas de Forcadell, Leocàdia installed herself in a pleasant cell at the convent, arranged her things there, and lived with more independence and tranquility than in the pompous and obstreperous apartment of her son-in-law.

Some old people, perhaps the immense majority of old people, who lived in harmony during a particular period of their lives, having felt an identification with a fashion or a set of ideas now considered passé, endure the latter years and changes not without protest and incomprehension. In truth, they are the survivors of their times, their fashions, or their ideas.

Old folk who have experienced a good moment in the past maintain a constant controversy with the new life that emerges day by day. If they say that something in the present is bad, it is not exactly for the reasons they adduce. It is bad for them, because the current thing is different from another bygone thing they considered to be good. If an old man affirms that women with short hair are less exciting than women with long hair, it is because back when he was prone to excitement, women wore their hair long. And if an old woman affirms that a man looks better with a beard and moustache, it is because the first man for whom she had feelings had a beard and moustache.

The more intense and fulfilling the bygone age of an old person was, the stronger the controversy, harsher the incomprehension, and more obdurate the protest before the evolution of things.

This criterion, which can be applied to the majority of respectable elders, could not be applied to Leocàdia, for the simple reason that Leocàdia had not lived any period of her life intensely. Leocàdia had always been a mere receptive vessel, without opinions or passions of any kind.

This is why Leocàdia was a delightful old lady. When her daughter was playing golf, not for a moment did she stop to think that between the days of her daughter and the days of her youth there was a notable difference, and she incorporated the word “golf” into her vocabulary beyond time and space. The only objection she had to the sport was that it was the reason lunch was served late or the reason she had to have lunch without her daughter. And she felt the same way about everything else as she did about golf. When her granddaughter
Maria Lluïsa showed up to visit her wrapped in a trench coat, alone, after work in an office where she was employed as a secretary, the widow Marquesa de Sitjar didn’t complain or find anything strange in her granddaughter’s situation, even though in her youth no young woman of her class would go out in the street by herself, or wear a trench coat, or take a job as a secretary to earn her living.

If Leocàdia had not enjoyed this sweet numbness, her later years would have been much grimmer, because the same lady who had taken so many pains with all the family furniture and relics of the splendor of the Lloberolas in the apartment on Carrer de Mallorca later sold off most of that furniture with great indifference. This can only be explained by accepting that her earlier pains and care were only a reflection of the importance her husband attributed to the furniture. Once Don Tomàs disappeared, along with the pathetic and grandiose exaltation he applied to anything that made reference to his past history, Leocàdia felt as passive and indifferent to the furniture as she did to everything else. As we have already said in another part of this story, Leocàdia’s marriage had had a sort of mimetic quality, and she had adapted to it and completely annulled herself. As we have also already said, Leocàdia’s protests regarding her husband’s profligacy and wild-eyed notions were very feeble, responding only to a woman’s natural instinct for preservation.

Thanks to this temperament, Leocàdia wasn’t the slightest bit humiliated by living as a boarder in the Cluny convent. And, since in this world the same causes produce morally contradictory effects on different individuals, perhaps it was also as a result of the hereditary
transfer of Leocàdia’s temperament to her son Guillem that he too felt no sense of humiliation on accepting three hundred pessetes from Dorotea Palau, the dressmaker, and on later accepting whatever he required from the widow Baronessa de Falset.

The family member to whom Leocàdia was closest was Maria Lluïsa, Frederic’s daughter. Maria Lluïsa loved her grandmother because she never divined in her clear blue eyes the slightest drop of bitterness or surprise. Leocàdia was like a child without enthusiasm. Maria Lluïsa was a passionate child. Leocàdia’s feelings for her granddaughter were exactly the same as her feelings for her son, Guillem: tremendous tenderness, mixed with fear. That twenty year-old girl, as determined as she was reserved, as affectionate as she was elusive, gave her grandmother the shivers. Leocàdia never said a word to Maria Lluïsa, never gave her a sermon or tried to understand her. Leocàdia sensed that nothing would come of it.

Maria Lluïsa was twenty years old, and her sentimental life had already begun to enter a state of decomposition. As Voltaire’s famous verses to the Marquesa du Châtelet put it,
“Qui n’a pas l’esprit de son âge / de son âge a tout le malheur.”
But even an aphorism that seems so astute can fail to hold true for some people. Maria Lluïsa, for example. She possessed the spirit of her times and of her age in a brutal way, and perhaps it was this excess of the spirit of the times that was her downfall.

In every family there is an individual who maintains the qualities and defects intrinsic to the family, exaggerated and concentrated to the point of being grotesque and distasteful. This individual is
usually a bachelor uncle who has had a bastard child with the cook. In addition to this farcical character, every family also seems to produce an individual in whom the most dashing, piquant and fragrant part of the family is distilled, and in whose skin the very defects become elements of grace, sparkle and elegance. This individual is usually a girl, and within the crusty, festering, and reactionary gratinée of the Lloberolas, the person chosen to play the role of fruit sherbet and marvelous perfume was Maria Lluïsa.

If an abandoned, fussy, and unfriendly womb could not produce models of vitality as trembling and out of the blue as the impromptu clash of melodies produced by birds washing their faces, if ladies like Maria Carreres could not have daughters like Maria Lluïsa, the logic of this world would be so unbearable as to oblige us all to close up shop.

Maria Lluïsa had been confined in a convent school in Sarrià, like most of the girls of her stock. At a time when children feel their puberty bursting like an unpleasant carnation, awakening scruples and desire, Maria Lluïsa had not been prey to any of those disorders that afflict sex in the life of boarders. She didn’t fall in love with a nun, or with an effigy in the chapel, nor did a kiss on the not very hygienic fuzz of another girl’s cheek infect her with nebulous and repressed intentions of the kind that are marked by a dopey tenderness in the voice and a bluish shadow under the eyes. Rest assured that when Maria Lluïsa put on her nightgown, that fragile fabric didn’t hide anything but a sterilized, independent adolescence.

At the age of sixteen, Maria Lluïsa had mahogany red hair and eyes like two frozen grapes. She gave the piano a solemn kick in the keys because she had no talent for music, and she decided that a girl who had the misfortune of being born to a father like Frederic de Lloberola and a mother like Maria Carreres had no other recourse than to figure things out for herself and find a way to earn a living. This decision was the cause of great outrage, but Maria Lluïsa was the only Lloberola lacking in the two defects that were peculiar to all the rest: weakness and cowardice. Maria Lluïsa prevailed, and by eighteen she was working as a secretary in a bank on Carrer de Fontanella.

That was when her sentimental life began to get complicated. Till that moment, Maria Lluïsa had lived far from the fire. This is not to say, however, that she was innocent or didn’t know the score. She understood perfectly well that her natural grace was sufficient justification for boxes of bonbons, bouquets of flowers, invitations and requests to ride up the Diagonal or around Montjuïc Park in a very sleek and shiny little car, and that these were simply veiled ways of seeking her body. But up till then no one had ever touched Maria Lluïsa, nor had she fallen in love with anyone. Her temperament was rather chilly; sex demanded nothing more of her than a shower, a racket, and a bit of makeup on her face. When it was time to dance, she listened to the music and nothing more. She responded reflexively and smiled instinctively without her heart’s secreting any of the idyllic substances that throw one’s rhythm off and keep one awake at night.

At eighteen, Maria Lluïsa stopped practicing her religion. When it was time for Mass, she would slip away from her mother with the excuse of exercise and sport, and she would tell as many lies as were needed to put up a proper front and avoid scandalizing the family. It can be said with certainty that by her last year in high school Maria Lluïsa no longer believed anything the nuns and priests told her. What most infuriated her was to have to do spiritual exercises and play a role she didn’t believe in.

A few months after Maria Lluïsa took the secretarial job at the bank, she spent her first summer vacation with a couple of cousins at the seashore.

Under no circumstance did Frederic want to let his daughter go unescorted to the beach at Llafranc. He was opposed to it, as he had been opposed to her working in an office, not for any good reason, but simply out of prejudice and Lloberola vanity, and because of his uncomprehending and draining inclination to disagree. But by then Frederic no longer had any shame, and it had become more than clear that he found his family intolerable. To be contrary, Maria had taken Maria Lluïsa’s side, and it all ended up with a big scene between father, mother, and daughter, and with the girl on the afternoon express to Flaçà, the closest station, and from there to Llafranc in her cousins’ car.

The cousins were from the Carreres side of the family, daughters of one of Maria’s sisters, who was married to a solid merchant from the French Midi who spent seasons in Paris and seasons in L’Empordà, where they were now.

The girls’ names were Henriette and Suzanne. One of them was twenty-one years old and the other nineteen, but they were identical, and if you weren’t used to them, you couldn’t tell them apart. They had a very delicate complexion, with blood very close to the surface, and subject to fever blisters. They were somewhat gigantic in shape. They inherited this tendency from their father, Gaston, a Frenchman with a vaudeville cuckold’s black moustache and cheeks. From their mother they had inherited a chlorotic tenderness and a devotion to the Virgin of Montserrat. Henriette and Suzanne were fresh-faced, with big eyes and big mouths. They were well-liked, but they were not exciting. Long of arm and leg, on the fleshy side, lacking in femininity, it seemed as if all their inner piquancy must have evaporated through their pores and been lost between laughter and sea water without germinating in any virile gaze. Their father had bought them a mint green Talbot and they passed the wheel from one to the other, making sensational turns and coughing and squawking like moorhens when the intercity bus left their mascara full of dust.

Henriette and Suzanne received Maria Lluïsa with an explosion of a bottle of “extra dry” from a good year. Maria Lluïsa cried with joy. The three girls spread out enough pajamas, maillots, rubber penguins and panthers, balls, hats, scarves, and terry cloth robes to drive all the beaches in the world wild. They had a canoe and two water sleds, and a friend of all three by the name of Dionísia Balcells, who summered with her mother in Llafranc. Dionísia was one of those delightful snub-nosed girls whose faces continue all their lives to be a little comical and girlish: a wide mouth, bright, partridge eyes, and
peroxide blonde hair cut and combed like a boy’s. Her legs were slender and firm, she was narrow in the chest and hips, and her entire musculature was made for rapid movement and wild gesticulation, and for a laugh that reached all the way down to her toenails. She was one of those girls so intentionally
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, so innocently in command of the flirtatious gesture and the eccentric moue that when they give in to love there is nothing left of them but a warm spoonful of honey that trickles out with a primary physiological tenderness.