The Dream of the City (15 page)

In the café, it was as if they'd tacitly agreed to a pact of silence for the good of the boy sitting between them. On guard, much more relaxed but still not completely at ease, they spoke without stopping about whatever topic, almost as if they were afraid the silence would show who they really were without the distraction of a curtain of words between them. From the banal and unimportant they passed to talk about the present day and the recent tragedies that had taken place in the city. Guillermo looked from one to the other and drank his chocolate. When he was finishing the second one, the conversation began to lag. They left and walked down the street. The lamps gave off a yellowish halo in the damp haze. Near the Arco de Triunfo they said their good-byes. Laura ruffled Guillermo's hair. Then she gave Dimas her hand and got into one of the point carriages.

The two brothers watched the coach pull away, hearing the noise of the hoofs beating rhythmically on the cobblestones.

To his regret, Dimas was forced to admit he hadn't had a bad time. Indeed, the evening had been a pleasant one, almost perfect. He remembered every word of the conversation, and his thoughts spun around Laura: the way she brought the napkin to her lips, how she pressed down her skirt when she sat in the metal chair in the narrow café, her narrow eyes when she could hear the conversation of someone talking too loud behind her… Her opinions were reasonable and sharp, and he even had to admit he found them full of intelligence and common sense. And she was fun. She knew how to make Guillermo laugh and she seemed to have established a close and affectionate relationship with him. He wondered if she would say something about what had happened that afternoon the next time he went to her house, and how Ferran would react if he found out that Dimas, his employee, had treated his sister as an equal. Dimas couldn't shake the feeling he'd been doing something wrong, and the thought kept returning to his conscience like a bird of ill omen. Surely she would talk of their encounter. She would present what had happened in some twisted manner and it would seem like something very different from the innocent evening they had shared. He clenched his teeth. He wanted to get away from what smelled of disaster, with all his might; nothing would come between him and his success. Least of all a woman like Laura. No, that wouldn't happen again.

When he crossed the Calle de Sicilia, even though he had said to himself he wouldn't think of her again, Dimas stopped to consider why Laura had acted so warm and affectionate, so different from what she had seemed before. And what if he was wrong, and she was more accessible, more open, kinder and more sincere than she seemed when he saw her at the family business? But no, he said to himself, it couldn't be. She was spoiled and capricious, selfish and frivolous, like everyone of her class, like all the girls from the city's upper bourgeoisie. That's how she had to be—that's how he had to see her—to be safe. Convinced, he freed himself from these thoughts and slapped Guillermo's cap, knocking it to the ground. The boy chased after him, but lost sight of him when he turned a corner. Dimas leaped out suddenly from inside a doorway and swept him off his feet, as he'd done when Guillermo was little. They could barely restrain their laughter as they reached Calle de la Igualdad and saw the lit window in their apartment. Dimas brought his index fingers to his lips and whistled. And Guillermo broke into uncontrollable laughter once more.

III

HUMILITY (PRIDE)

No one may boast, because every gift comes from God.

—Antoni Gaudí

CHAPTER 15

The construction of the Royal Shipyards in the fifteenth century led to an expansion of the city walls. This joined Barcelona to an area that had previously existed outside them. From that time, and down through the centuries, El Raval had been a humble district. The Barrio Chino, as people had begun calling it not long back, was inside it, bordered by Calle del Hospital, the Ronda de San Antonio, the Ronda de San Pablo, and the Avenida Paral
·
lel, then known as the Avenida Marqués de Duero. At the end of the latter street, to the southeast, the shipyards led lazily to the sea, their erstwhile medieval vigor now forgotten.

Amid the taverns and the shops, the prostitutes sought new customers with nonchalant eagerness and the winos mingled with the bohemians and artists drinking absinthe in the French manner and sniffing cocaine they would buy from the pharmacies. The Barrio Chino was narrow and crowded. The bitter breath, the elbows sticking out from threadbare sleeves, the top hats and caps of the
mans d'obra
, the camouflaged police, the whores and anarchists, the bullfighters and ballerinas, gypsies and sailors from abroad—all mingled in a neighborhood where the local and international each overstepped its respective frontiers.

Laura and Jordi had gone near the area one night in October to take part in one of the many roundtable discussions held there. Their friends were meeting in the Casa Almirall, a café-bar with modernist décor located in the Calle de Poniente. The clientele were scattered and seemed a mere extension of the crowds that could be found outside. Nonetheless, the atmosphere was one of calm, and the serenity was only broken by the occasional conflict. The only people who got their comeuppance were those who tried to get smart, the haughty ones, the ones who didn't pay attention or who had gone out purposely looking for a fight.

But Laura and Jordi knew how to act. She walked holding on to his arm with her eyes downcast while he enjoyed his role as gentleman protecting a lady. He even felt it was his duty to transmit his cool head and confidence. He wasn't comfortable in the neighborhood either, but he faked it well enough. In reality, it seemed to him like they were walking through battle trenches.

They entered the café, which at that time, when the night had just begun, was completely full. After passing by the bar of white Catalan marble and Italian marble streaked with color, they headed toward the round tables in the back, where the discussion was in full swing over brimming drinks.

“Perspective is dead!” bellowed one of the participants, a man with long black hair. His effusiveness was a cover for concealed timidity. When he fell quiet, he began to wipe away imaginary dust particles from the black derby on the table in front of him.

“A toast to that,” Jordi shouted out by way of greeting.

All turned to hear the voice at their backs. Laura smiled, looking for a chair to settle into, and left Jordi standing there, though he too finally found his place, a ways away from her. They were received gladly; many there hadn't seen Laura since before her trip. After a few brief explanations—practically all of them had been in Rome—the discussion continued.

“I'm being serious, and anyway, it's fine,” Frederic Bru, the painter, continued. “That's what photography is for, and cinema …”

“Comrade Bru here is enlightening us as to the future,” Eusebi Arnau explained to the recent arrivals, unable to suppress his vocation as professor at La Llotja. He tried to sum up the belligerent painter's words: “He was saying, enough with conformism, with breaking partway with the academy, with pushing, but not too far. … That's why you see him so aroused.”

“Ah, so Frederic, now you're devoting yourself to biting the hand that feeds you,” Laura remarked.

The interruption didn't sit well with the painter. His face gave a glimpse of his exasperation, even anger.

“You're coming out of the gate strong, my friend,” he responded. “That was then. Everyone needs to eat.”

“Just to be clear,” Jordi interrupted, with one hand raised. “I hope you're not referring to the advertisements you did for me. Everyone here should know that I didn't impose anything. He was the one who decided to paint that old woman with the spinning wheel.”

“Don't hold it against me; it was a sin of my youth,” said Bru, excusing himself. “I was taken with modernism. But never again.”

“Are you denying your roots?” Laura asked, imagining the rough waters the conversation could head into.

“I no longer care for half measures,” the painter replied. “I prefer the future to the modern, the abstract to the symbolic. … I don't want my idea to be understood: I simply want my idea.”

“But ideas are nothing without their realization. As Gaudí says …”

“Gaudí? Isn't he retired?” Bru looked around for accomplices but he was the only one who cared for the joke. Though many thought the same as he, none wanted to utter such radical opinions aloud.

“Someday you'll regret what you're saying,” Laura hissed, now going full steam. “When you're old and Gaudí is dead, you will walk through Barcelona and there will be almost nothing left of your conceptualism, your ideas.” She mimicked his pronunciation. “Barcelona will be known the world over for Gaudí's works and a day may come when even you will find yourself happy to pay for a ticket to see them.”

Frederic Bru's face lit up with fury. He glared at her in silence. She returned the look with a tinge of irony. Eusebi Arnau and Amadeu Robí, Bru's constant companion, clapped him on the back in unison until they had almost knocked him into the table. When he looked up, everyone had raised their glasses to him and he did the same to those around him. When at last they had toasted, Eusebi Arnau, the professor, recited in an incantatory voice.

“For debate, for the diversity of voices. May everything be open to opinion; may everyone be civilized. May the absinthe flow through our veins as it did for the great Toulouse-Lautrec. May we be radically unhappy. May the future be modern.”

All applauded and downed their glasses. The conversation was impassioned and the little disagreements subsided gradually. One of those present had just come from Paris, where he had been astonished by a new form of art called cubism, which had already been under way for years: Picasso, Braque, and Juan Gris were the principal architects of the movement.

But a dark shadow was extending over Europe and the optimism of the avant-garde, which embodied the idea that Bru had mentioned before; all that was vanishing in the mud of the trenches of the Great War. Georges Braque had been mobilized along with many other young men. Art would have to pass through the cruelty of life.

That morality was reflected in Spain as well and gave birth to two opposing tendencies: Some thought that humility and hard work were the proper response to man's dilemmas; others thought that art was a necessity of its own and had no need for any relationship with daily life. Social art—committed art, in other words—versus art for art's sake.

That was why Gaudí so often popped up in their conversations: attacked for his exaggerated religiosity and his fairy-tale classicism; defended for his love for work and for the utility of his structures. Laura became the axis of these debates, encouraged by her friend and mentor Eusebi Arnau. Under his attentive gaze, Veronica, Amadeu Robí's lover, asked Laura about her impressions of the workshop of the Sagrada Familia.

“I'm happy, Veronica. I barely have contact with Gaudí, but in the short time I've been with him, he has been extraordinarily kind to me. I'm part of a team of collaborators and the feeling is incredible,” she expounded, looking sideways at Bru. “And after living in Rome, I find more and more truth in that phrase of Gaudí's, you know the one: ‘Originality is returning to the origin.'”

While the rest of the tablemates dove into the new discussion Laura had provoked, she looked away, wishing to be alone with her thoughts, and her eyes wandered to the storeroom in the back. She had seen something before from the corner of her eye that had caught her attention, even though the room was softly lit. She looked at one of the servers, who was waiting on a customer with his back turned. The hair, the shoulders … Suddenly she felt a shiver.

Jordi turned to her and saw she was focusing more on one of the customers than on anything else. He squinted his eyes and tried to discover who it was. Did Laura know him? The person in question, a bottle in his hand, turned around, but the abundant clientele in the establishment blocked Jordi's view and made it impossible to see the other man's face clearly. The customer was about to pass by behind them and he could feel Laura tense up in her seat, and her attention, as much as she might try to conceal it, was completely absorbed in that figure. At last he could see the unknown man's face and his expression contracted into a grimace that appeared to be a combination of distaste, disappointment, and relief. Jordi stood up to cross the sea of chairs and acquaintances that separated him and Laura, and when he reached her, he inquired, “Do you know him?”

“Who?” she asked, seeming bothered. She looked to where Jordi pointed and blurted, “Not in the least. Why? Do you?”

Jordi shook his head and returned to his place intrigued. For a few seconds, he had been plagued by jealousy, even feeling disarmed, defenseless. He decided to concentrate on their talk again, and Laura did the same. For a moment he had even imagined the man who had come in to buy a bottle of bulk wine had been Dimas Navarro.

When they left, it was already quite late. Jordi had taken for granted that the two of them would take a taxi to Laura's house, and when he proposed it, he felt disappointed at her reply that it wasn't necessary. She must have noticed something, because in the end she changed her mind and agreed to let him accompany her.

“That way my parents can offer you a drink and you can talk a little about the direction the country's taking,” she added.

Jordi smiled, contented, and remained cheerful for the better part of the journey. It seemed spending the entire evening and the better part of the night talking had not been enough for him. He tried to mask all their silences with words. The occurrence with the unknown man at Casa Almirall had left a bad taste in his mouth. Laura had looked at that man with anxious eyes and then had seemed disappointed, as if she was hoping to see someone else. Carlo, maybe? It had been some time since they'd spoken of him, and suddenly the topic had come back up. Whatever the case, she had seemed distant that night and hardly spoke a word until they arrived at her home, which dispirited him once more, for inside, he felt the burning need to take their relationship one step further. As the carriage coursed through the city streets, Jordi had reflected, with Laura silent and self-absorbed at his side, that it was true they'd been friends for many years. But he wanted more. … He remembered how his heart had shrunk when she spoke to him of Carlo, how he thought he would go mad with jealousy and he had only barely been able to conceal it. But no, he reminded himself, she had roundly affirmed that all that was over, and he should, he
needed
to, believe it, because that was the only way he could maintain the confidence that he could win her heart: a pure, pristine heart, just for him, where no one else could fit.

At last they reached their destination. Laura stepped out wearily and Jordi, occupied with his own thoughts, had grown taciturn as well. But still, he knew how to change his demeanor once they'd entered the house. The elder Jufresas appeared at once, happy to greet him. Cheered, Jordi handed his hat to Matilde and held out his forearm so that Pilar Jufresa could place her hand atop it.

“How lovely to see you, dear! And how gallant of you to accompany Laura all the way up here. How are your parents? Will you do us the honor of sharing your company with us a short while?”

Pilar's voice shifted, moving up and down in tone, now tender, now nervous, like a curtain flapping in the breeze. Jordi was pleased to accept Laura's mother's invitation. Francesc was affable as always.

“I wouldn't like to be a bother, Señora Jufresa …” the young man said, not wanting to overstep the bounds of politeness or the rules of courtesy that he always followed to the letter, the good manners he was as proud of as everyone else in his family.

Wanting to please Laura, he turned to her with a helpless expression, full of irony and complicity. He was surprised to note that she seemed impatient to go to her room even though she was smiling amiably. It was Francesc Jufresa who answered in her place.

“I have a special reserve brandy that I didn't dare open until I found a good excuse, if that tells you how little a bother your presence is. Come, let's go to the library. Will you join us, Laura?”

She excused herself, alluding to her sleepiness. In fact she had no desire at all to take part in one of those conventional, inescapable male conversations about money and politics. She said good night to Jordi and her parents and, trying not to delay too long, pretending not to see the irritated face of her friend, she walked toward the stairs that led to the upper floor.

Francesc grabbed his guest by the elbow and directed him to the library while he uttered the inevitable questions about such recent bits of news as the formation of the
Mancomunidad
of Catalonia, a commonwealth institution with certain governing powers that had been formed only a few months back. The war also made its way into their conversation. Both hoped that Spain would continue to declare itself neutral, as they repudiated violence in all its forms.

Pilar Jufresa had stayed behind in the vestibule. She called the butler to send him to the library to wait on the gentlemen. From there, she could see Laura slowly ascending the stairs. The severe gaze of Pilar's dark brown eyes followed her daughter's path. She didn't understand her; Jordi Antich would make an exceptional husband. He was a good man, intelligent and sensitive, and moreover, he belonged to one of the most well-placed families of industrialists in Barcelona. Apart from that, Pilar adored him. She thought she should redouble her efforts so that her “artist” daughter would think twice and not let an opportunity like that escape. She knew Francesc was too easy on her, but even he seemed to recognize the depth of Jordi's feelings, and he encouraged them as well. From the vestibule, she could hear the two men's voices, embroiled in their little debate. Everything wasn't lost, not even close, she thought. With her hands, she wrung a delicate handkerchief of beautifully embroidered silk.