Josep Maria de Sagarra - Private Life

“They didn’t get a good look at my face, because between the darkness of the room and that trick you suggested with the pillow … And not a single word … There must not have been a bit of noise today.”

“If you could only have seen them at the door when they left: a couple of angels, perfect angels.”

“Never again, Dorotea! Just find a beggar! It’s too disgusting! I have a pretty strong stomach … and for three hundred pessetes one can put one’s stomach to the test, but this is too much.”

“Oh, I almost forgot to return your medallion.”

In the foyer, the young man from a good family, restored to his natural personality, had run into a bright, coarse, and very elegantly dressed young woman on the arm of a gray and proper man, the kind who can never conceal their jealousy. When the young woman saw the false ditch digger she blushed and said, just to have something to say:

“Hello! What are you doing here?”

The false ditch digger smiled and let them pass.

As they went down the stairs, the gray and proper man who couldn’t conceal his jealousy asked his companion:

“Who is that guy?”

“Don’t you know him? That’s Guillem de Lloberola, a boy from a very high society family without a penny to their name, they say. Ah, and if you must know, he’s a perfectly pleasant young man who runs around with a group of fellows who write poems and risqué verses …”

“What do you care about poetry? You’re just a dizzy dame. You know I don’t like you running around with riff-raff.”

“Oh, come on. No need to be so touchy.”

GUILLEM, THE LATE FRUIT OF Don Tomàs and Leocàdia, had developed a tactic completely different from that of his brother Frederic. Some would say that the young man took after his mother’s side of the family. Tales were told about old Cisterer, and about Leocàdia’s brothers — unctuous characters, with incredible escapades. They had a character that was both charming and shrewd, and an egotism disguised as refined solicitude. It seems they had found their echo in Guillem’s ability to stay on both sides of the fence in any family situation.

Guillem had started life at a point when it was no longer possible to conceal the Lloberolas’ economic cataclysm. Guillem’s education, so different from Frederic’s, had met with a feeble and depleted Don Tomàs de Lloberola, a father who in appearance deployed an honor guard of fire and brimstone, but in fact was easily distracted and handily deceived. In contrast with Frederic, Guillem had never suffered his father’s regimen of surveillance, never been spied on every Friday, as if by a detective, to ensure that he had actually taken communion if he said he had. Inspections of his private drawers and the books in his bedroom had been neglected, or perhaps the energy required to carry them out had flagged. When he got home mid-supper on a winter’s night, the paternal interrogation was cursory and in a tone left sort of hanging in the air. Guillem was able to achieve perfection in the art of lying and hiding the truth, the art most easily displayed by children with their parents. As a consequence of his self-important, foolish, and chivalric character — his authentically Lloberola character — Frederic often rebelled openly and provoked stupid conflicts. In the meantime, Guillem, opportunely lowering his gaze, stifling a comment, or murmuring a well-timed “Yes, Papà,” or “Forgive me, Papà,” with a velvety, feminine inflection, averted many conflicts and concealed certain kinds of things of which Don Tomàs lived in utter ignorance. Had he so much as suspected them, it would have been at least enough for his younger son to have suffered some damage to a rib.

Guillem had studied law, just to study something. He took two or three civil service examinations, to no avail, first of all, because he was so apathetic and distracted he had never studied for them, and second of all, because he had had no interest in passing them. Guillem had a horror, now more than ever, of any kind of discipline, anything that obligated him to get up at a particular time or take orders from anyone. He preferred the penury of being the son of a useless family, with pretensions to being a misunderstood man of letters, and feeding himself in whatever parasitic way he could, to having a bit of order and economic independence. Guillem was past thirty-one, yet he practiced the absolute lack of responsibility of the youngest of the household, who can always squeeze a duro from someone’s pocket, with the excuse that they’re still just boys and will always be just boys and never have to concern themselves with the things adults concern themselves with.

The Lloberola way of being, and the conditions in which their ruin had come about — conditions of vanity and disarray — were just the ticket to fostering the kind of juvenile mentality Guillem displayed, and just the ticket for a young man like him to find himself more and more lacking in moral sense as time went on. Guillem had absolutely no respect for his father; Don Tomàs’s presence was observed by his son through a magnifying glass of denatured ferocity. Despite the apparent hatred and incompatibility of character that separated him from Don Tomàs, Frederic still had a core of respect and consideration for the old man, while Guillem could have feigned the tenderest of tears as he watched his father’s death throes, and still been cold as marble inside. Between Don Tomàs and Guillem yawned an abyss of years. All the excellent qualities his father proclaimed for his epoch merely disgusted Guillem. He saw his father as a poor deluded man who had brought him into the world by accident, in his dotage, when his capacity to engender was half-exhausted. He felt that Don Tomàs had done nothing for him. He had not taken an interest in him and had not loved him. In simple obedience to a grotesque and clerical criterion of education, he had deprived Guillem of things he wanted just because. He had imposed religious and moral duties on him that Guillem had never carried out in good faith, which had only served to cultivate his hypocrisy.

Guillem never stopped to think that, despite all the defects Don Tomàs might have, the good man truly loved him, had spent sleepless nights on his account, had suffered anxiety for him, had even done truly outrageous things for him. Guillem didn’t even want to suspect what that old man would be capable of to save him. And it wasn’t that Guillem was a criminal, but simply that he hadn’t yet had occasion to meditate a bit on the dramatic situation of parents and children. Guillem lived his life apart, concerned with things that had no point of contact with those of his father. Guillem inhabited an atmosphere that was amoral, weak and selfish and, even though he would never dare admit it, lacking in dignity. Guillem might be a much more intelligent and refined person than Frederic, but his understanding always missed the mark when it came to his father. Inclined to the easy life, he was offended by Don Tomàs’s miserliness, his refusal to give money when requested, and his sermons in response to every bill from the shirt maker or any expense that Lloberola found useless or wicked.

Nothing worthwhile came of that young man. Don Tomàs had undeniably stopped worrying on his account, and his every whim was tolerated. Don Tomàs said to him: “You’ll wise up one of these days, because if you’re counting on the family …” But Guillem never wised up.

Or if he did, it was more often than not in a despicable way because, when he needed some cash, he didn’t waste time on scruples. Of the traditional family ineptitude he had inherited the decadence: an absolute collapse of the will in the face of catastrophe that reached levels of baseness he considered part of the merit and grace of his aristocratic cynicism.