Private Life (54 page)

For a time, Maria Lluïsa felt rather sad and benumbed. Her affairs, which she carried on with great caution, didn’t amuse her. She found the fellows more and more selfish, and only interested in one thing, which she was indifferent to. Without a modicum of passion, she found the episodes of the
garconnière
and the
meublé
stupid and monotonous. At twenty years of age, Maria Lluïsa was beginning to be tired of it all.

On the day that Maria Lluïsa, resting her chin on the lapel of Pat’s jacket, said that she was tired of being a virgin as if it were the most natural thing in the world, it is very possible that she viewed with true horror the panorama of ladyfingers and anisette that awaited an unassuming bourgeois marriage, coping with marital flaws and economic constraints. Two years later, a bourgeois marriage along those lines didn’t burst onto her imagination with the sudden flash of a meteor, but perhaps it seemed to be the only practical way out of the dismal impasse she’d reached. Maria Lluïsa had not had the courage to break things off completely with the age-old unctuosity of her family. She had only gone halfway in her freedom and her perversion. If she had resigned herself to living brutally and poetically, for as long as necessary, accepting all the consequences, Maria Lluïsa’s behavior might have seemed suicidal to many eyes, but respectable, in the end.

When her inner sadness began to be visible on her face, and a slight muscular relaxation in her body revealed the anatomical melancholy of the disenchanted, Frederic received a visit from a young man from Bilbao who had come to ask for his daughter’s hand.

He was a youngish man, getting on a bit, but tall and well-built, and he seemed like an excellent fellow. Some business with the metallurgical industry had brought him to Barcelona, and he had been staying at the Nouvel Hôtel on Carrer de Santa Anna for three months now.

The young man from Bilbao had met Maria Lluïsa at the bank where she worked. He followed her, he spoke to her, and he fell in love with her like a lap dog. He was a simple and expeditious man.
Maria Lluïsa found him suitable, and what most enticed her was a change of climate, a change of décor, and a definitive escape from Carrer de Bailèn. The position of the young man from Bilbao seemed brilliant, and the world in which he moved was much more lively and interesting than the office, the family, the parties at the Club Marítim, the officers in the Air Force and the sordid gossip about Maria Lluïsa’s skin and bloodlines. A short time later, Maria Lluïsa emigrated from Barcelona and married as the good Lord intended, her eyes somewhat tinged with the green of hope, and her cheek a bit wet from three tears from Maria Carreres’s eyes.

Ferran was truly happy about his sister’s marriage. Since the night of their confidences and their misunderstanding, Maria Lluïsa’s presence had weighed on his heart.

At the bar of the Hotel Colón, a few guys placed bets on the shape and number of horns the young man from Bilbao would end up wearing, with the same good humor with which they wagered three shots of London dry gin as they shook the dice cup.

AS BOBBY SMOKED HIS last pipe after lunch, he was hard put to understand how he could have been so foolish as to fall in love with Maria Lluïsa. Bobby smiled and wanted to put on a good front, but the truth be told his disappointment in that love affair had left him pretty crushed. The people who had supper with him at the Cercle del Liceu noticed a touch of intemperance and a bitterness they were
not accustomed to. Bobby spoke of the youth of this country, and the young fledglings just starting out, with a scorn that was perhaps a bit self-serving. For him, the tone of Barcelona had become about as flimsy and flighty as it could be.

Bobby spent a lot of time at home, reading. The only things that interested him, though, were history books. Conservative and skeptical as he was, he savored the tales of the most derelict and critical periods, and the most contemptible characters, all mixed in with the smoke from his pipe.

When Bobby left the Cercle del Liceu, he liked to wander lazily through the neighborhoods of Barcelona he most loved. He would turn onto Carrer Ample and breathe in the air that drifted over from the docks. The Passatge de la Pau and the streets that led to the Plaça Reial, which in those days was called Plaça de Francesc Macià, after the current President of the Catalan government, revived in him the flavor of a Barcelona devoted to commerce and decked out in posh velvet. A Barcelona made up of dignified and thrifty people, who had an audacity and drive he didn’t find in the people of his day. What’s more, Bobby appreciated the capacious and seigneurial taste in everything his grandparents had done, with no pretensions to originality and without a shadow of impertinence. Those cobblestones impregnated with drugs and colonial merchandise held the breath of the sails that set out for America to seek sugar and coffee, and of those other ships that came back from the port of Liverpool freighted with cotton bales. The the gray air that clung to their wood had transmitted a polite sort of British morality to the commerce at home.

Bobby would confer with the palm trees of the Plaça Reial and the Passeig d’Isabel Segona. He didn’t understand how the men of his generation had developed an antipathy toward palm trees. He thought that one of Barcelona’s lovely qualities was the possibility of sustaining in its natural climate a tree of such legendary symmetry and such a gently rocking swoon as to have been the pride of the gardens of all the gentlemen of the country. To Bobby, palm trees felt like a living reminder of the lost colonies. Bobby, the skeptic, was an enthusiast for things with an elegiac air. He found a thousand flavors on the Rambles. Bobby’s Barcelonism was entirely soft on the Rambles. He couldn’t even be a skeptic there. He believed with all his faith that in no other city in the world was there a street as original, as alive, and as human as the Rambles of Barcelona.

The state of the Palau de la Virreina caused him some distress. He would have liked to see even a religious respect and consideration for that palace. The story of the Virreina was related to his mother’s family history. Don Manuel d’Amat i Junyent, the man who built that palace, was the brother-in-law of his great-grandparents, the Comtes de Sallent, and he was related to the Castellbell and Maldà families. Bobby knew the life and miracles of el Virrei Amat, and all the tricks and energies he put into being the Viceroy of Peru. He knew about the relations the Viceroy maintained with a dancer called Micaela Villegas, whose nickname was “la Perricholi.” Immortalized by Offenbach as “La Périchole,” she seems to have been a dominant and extraordinarily beautiful woman. With the money he salvaged from her kisses, Viceroy Amat built the noblest house in Barcelona.

Bobby imagined La Perricholi with the eyes and skin of Maria Lluïsa. His relative, Amat, less skeptical than he, probably dragged her home to the docks of Barcelona and locked her up in that palace on the Rambla, not realizing that, in the ship that had brought her from Peru, the dancer had been unfaithful to him with a young man from Cadiz or Cartagena, experienced in the ways of women and the sea.

Though Bobby was almost always silent, when the topic of Barcelona came up he liked to show off his erudition regarding the old stones and history of our city. Bobby’s ennui, his passivity and his smile were not unlike a pleasant cemetery, where at a given moment the shades of the dead would promenade bedecked in their wigs, their egoism, and their deliquescent escapades. This is why Bobby was so averse to sports, affirming that they were the most corrosive, demoralizing, and plebeian thing in this world. In the wee hours, when he carried his little moustache, glued above his lip like a bit of chlorotic brush, off to bed, he would run into troupes of hikers dressed in white – sometimes dirty white – desecrating the Rambla. Bobby was absolutely certain that the country had no chance of salvation. Sports had killed off slow-cooked and tenderly-seasoned love. Girls on the beach looked to him like androgynous animals.

The only thing that ever superficially modified Bobby’s point of view was his brief relationship with Níobe Casas. When Níobe Casas moved to Paris, Bobby reverted even more to a mentality that could be captured in a meerschaum pipe with an amber stem.

At that point, it could be said that Bobby lived only for his mother. She was his only positive affection, the only person he admired a bit, and Bobby awakened every morning with fear in his heart, anticipating the catastrophe, sensing that at any moment her lungs could stop like a tired clock.

The widow Xuclà was just about to turn eighty, but her head was perfectly clear and she could still marshal some degree of energy. In those days of change and upheaval, Pilar was a grande dame who belonged more to an immovable ether than to the bubbling cauldron of the day-to-day. She managed not to take an interest in anything or to comment on any events. Her salons in the house on Carrer Ample, full of anachronisms, never breached by either the dust or the air of the street, were shining pendulums unvaryingly marking the seconds in a coffin of crystal and aromatic woods. Every morning, Pilar would have great sheaves of roses of every color delivered from the flower stands on the Rambles. The roses were the only thing that had not changed. They gave off the same perfume and the same grace that they had fifty years before. Pilar shared her life with the specters of her world, resting her arthritis on the pearl and garnet-colored sateen covering her intact sofas. Almost all the women of her time had disappeared. The Marquesa de Descatllar had been dead for three years. Lola Dussay, her sister-in-law, the Comtessa de Sallent – they were all inhabiting the land of ashes now. She almost never saw Leocàdia Lloberola, because both of them were pained by the present reality. As her forces waned, Pilar became more refined, more original, and
more interesting. In Pilar’s conversations, a good hunter of nuances could have found shades of green, blue, and rose that are no longer manufactured, and the formula for which has disappeared.

The person who visited Pilar most often was Hortènsia Portell. Hortènsia, much more refined than all the ladies who criticized her, recognized the worth of a true lady who had outlived an extinct fauna. Some evenings, Hortènsia would dine at the Widow Xuclà’s house, and in that exceedingly severe dining room, painted the color of a Capuchin hood, with the precise accents of a silver service, Pilar and Hortènsia evoked a scenario without gas engines and polychrome bidets, smelling only of the natural fragrance of gardenias and the pomade of men’s moustaches.

His eyes half-closed, affecting his usual air of ennui, Bobby let the ash of his cigar grow long, pretending not to be following the two ladies’ conversation. In truth, though, he didn’t miss so much as a syllable his mother uttered. He sensed that the music of Pilar’s fatigued and rheumatic conversation was like a first-rate alcohol, of which extremely few drops remained, which had to be savored scrupulously and conscientiously.

One evening after dinner, Pilar felt a particular discomfort, as if someone were pressing delicately on her heart. The Widow Xuclà serenely caressed her son and gazed at him with eyes that betrayed the vicinity of death. Pilar was not mistaken; that was the annunciation of the angina pectoris that would carry her off definitively a few hours later.

Bobby acted as if it were nothing to be concerned about. The day had had to come, but he couldn’t stand the thought. That night, Bobby was overcome with a weakness, an impotence, and an unhappiness that made him ashamed even to get up from his chair and look at himself in the mirror.

He escorted his mother to her bedchamber. She wanted especially to brace herself on Bobby’s arm. Her memory, which was becoming cloudy, made an effort to sort out her sweetest images of herself and of that child who was now on the verge becoming an old man. Pilar held back her tears so as not to destroy a silence in which neither she nor Bobby had the stamina to say a single word. Bobby patted her twice on the cheek, and with a forced laugh advised her not to let herself be overcome by foolish apprehension.

Bobby went to his room full of dread. He wanted to believe it was for naught, that his mother was in no particular danger, and that perhaps she would still last a bit longer. Despite these reflections, Bobby sat glued to his armchair unable to open a book, waiting for he knew not what, as if he were on guard against the danger of some invisible thieves.

Bobby’s skepticism and bitterness had reached a pathological moment. He would have liked for what he was sensing to make itself known all at once, because the doubts and threats seemed even worse to him. Through one of those peculiar associations that come in the night in situations of illness and enervation, as Bobby listened to the pendulums of the clocks in the hall giving off signs of life in the
darkness, it seemed to him that that little ticking sound was the rhythm of his mother’s pulse.

His mother’s pulse! Facing the presentiment that her vital rhythms might be coming to an end forever, this man of glacial indifference and self-certainty discovered all his own insignificance. Perhaps it was then that Bobby realized he had always been tied to his mother by an invisible umbilical cord. He breathed with her lungs, and the perceptions of his retina were a reflection of the anachronic gaze and taste of that sensitive and original octogenarian. Bobby’s Barcelonism, his way of living Barcelona, was nothing more than his shrouded veneration for everything that derived from Pilar. The premonition that he might lose his mother did not bring out in Bobby the natural fear and pain that in a similar situation might overwhelm a man who stands on his own two feet and has a free heart. Bobby’s fear was of losing the light that gave color to his personality. With his mother’s disappearance, Bobby would be nothing but a dying star, a silent lament amid a vulgar and uncomprehending hemisphere of flashing teeth and rosy cheeks.