Private Life (55 page)

Despite his brilliant position and his fortune, that night Bobby felt a true disgust with the very air that entered his lungs. Never before had Bobby considered worthless the vanities of the people he knew, and all the things he had seen or been informed of.

Bobby did not begrudge a dose of bitter pity to those who had ambitions or illusions of some kind, or who believed in their vocations, their work, or their creative faculties, but who, sooner or later, will have to face up to their impotence or their utter failure. He found
desperately grotesque the attitude of those who think they are on the road to greatness by going into politics. Bobby took comfort in thinking that he had never done anything or even made an effort to take an interest in anything. He had invested a minimum of conflict and a minimum of criticism in things and people. He had suffered a minimum of disappointment. Never having given in to passion, never having got off the fence, he would go to the other world fairly free of resignation and regret.

Bobby didn’t recall that just four or five months earlier he had practically been turned into a child by a girl who, from the outset, had set her sights upon him for purely utilitarian ends.

Bobby didn’t realize that the bitterness of his thoughts simply obeyed his tainted temperament, that of a man who had always had what he wanted, and who couldn’t countenance a natural misfortune such as the death of his mother.

Fatigued with dark ideas, Bobby fell asleep stretched out in his armchair and started to have a dream of the kind that appear when one’s stomach is upset. He awakened with a start, wondering how long he had been sleeping. In truth, only ten minutes had gone by. Bobby made his way to his mother’s room. Pilar was resting and her breathing was a bit slow. He wanted to put his hand on her forehead but he was afraid of waking her. Bobby didn’t know what to do. He thought it would be too much to call for the doctor at that time of night. All in all, it was probably nothing. His mother didn’t look better or worse than other nights, and Bobby began to have the feeling that
both his and his mother’s apprehension had been groundless. Bobby decided to go to bed, and after tossing and turning for a while, he fell asleep without a fuss. At five-thirty in the morning, his manservant rushed in to wake him. Despite his most recent reaction, Bobby was not surprised. He even had the impression that what his servant was saying was exactly what he had been dreaming at the precise moment he’d been awakened. When he entered his mother’s bedroom, that thing he thought would not surprise him shocked him like an unforeseeable horror. His dead mother’s skin was a color he would have been incapable of imagining. Her passing had probably taken place a couple of hours before, and it is very possible that not even she had had time to realize it, because the chambermaid who kept vigil every night outside her door hadn’t heard any particular sound or a cry of any kind. Death had shown Pilar Romaní its kindest and least harrowing face.

The servants mobilized automobiles and telephones. The first to arrive was Hortènsia Portell. Hortènsia was truly moved, and it was she who dressed Pilar’s cadaver with somewhat clumsy fingers. Inseparable from the yellow specter of his mother, Bobby didn’t want to see anyone. Hortènsia took him by the arm to pull him away from that bleak spectacle.

Bobby kissed her hand with infinite gratitude. Only he and Hortènsia could comprehend the grace and beauty of an eighty year-old body that, as it grew colder bit by bit, was carrying with it the sublime air of a Barcelona that no longer existed.

“You are a good friend, Hortènsia, a very good friend …”

Pilar Romaní closed her eyes on a July morning. On the roof of the house on Carrer Ample the swifts and swallows screeched in pure indifference.

The stands on the Rambla were bursting with white and red roses, the very roses Pilar Romaní used to say were exactly the same as the roses of her day.

Over the Rambla hung a mingling of the odors of night dwellers, morning hikers, and democracy. The yellow taxis whisked the dregs of sadness and prostitution off to their beds.

Between the stands of red roses a gray man of indeterminate cheeks and age wobbled a bit as he walked, his stomach full of whiskey and his heart full of red roses …

July 1932