Josep Maria de Sagarra - Private Life

Outside the house, Guillem had another personality entirely. In his dealings with certain men and women, he was considered a brilliant and charming young man, who displayed a combination of nerve and elegance. No one knew better than Guillem how to accept a banknote from a lady’s hand with a smile that managed to be both noble and Franciscan at once, the smile of a good jongleur in the circus ring following a particularly difficult act.

Guillem’s circle of friends ran the gamut from the most select and unconventional people to the kind of individual with whom he could close a deal with a wink of the eye from twenty meters away.

Guillem’s world was completely different from Frederic’s. This had allowed him to have a good relationship with his brother, and even to take advantage of a few breaks that wouldn’t have been possible in a community of acquaintances.

Leocàdia looked upon Guillem with the delicate and tender eyes of a mother, inflamed at once with both pride and ignorance. She felt that all the things that enchanted her about her son — his cheeks, his youthful and somewhat feminine profile, his obsessively manicured hands — had nothing to do with her, even though she had brought him into this world. Nor did they have anything to do with what she would have liked this final exuberant fruit of her maturity to be.

When Leocàdia kissed him, it was a breathless kiss of admiration, respect, foreboding, and the kind of animal tenderness we feel for something we ourselves have created, even if it is monstrous, even if it fills us with fear.

IT MUST HAVE BEEN around six in the afternoon when Frederic started up the stairs of the house on Carrer de Mallorca. It had been a good month since he last set foot in there. The less he and his father saw of each other, the better. Maria, Frederic’s wife, took the children there every so often, so their grandparents could have a look at them. No one derived any pleasure from these purely perfunctory visits. Ever since their parents’ falling-out things continued to worsen, and the daughter-in-law, as inept as she was wronged, was subjected to nothing but bitter words. Don Tomàs, in his skull cap and scarf, just rounded off the unpleasant panorama of her husband’s presence, as Maria saw the complement to intimacy with Frederic in that decrepit, fussy, and reactionary man. In contrast to Leocàdia, Maria was never able by any means to adapt to the mentality of the Lloberolas.

Frederic would hear from Maria about the fluctuations of Don Tomàs’s rheumatism and the situation of Leocàdia’s canaries. But what led the heir and firstborn to his parents’ house that afternoon was a topic of greater importance, a mission he could not delegate to his wife. The odd thing is, even as the most critical moments of his adventure with Rosa Trènor transpired, the figure of his ex-lover began fading from his sight, while the interview with his father and the obligation of the promissory note came closer to his heart. Yet now that the interview was imminent, separated by only fifty-seven marble steps, he could not pry the sight of Rosa Trènor’s kitchen, the spectral cat, and the bathtub with its inch or two of dirty water from his imagination. Distracted by these sad images, Frederic didn’t notice that the door was opening, a door adorned with an image of the Sacred Heart that read I will reign . A sweet voice, a rivulet of water trickling through the grass of the most luminous fields of his childhood, reached his ear, and he heard these words from his mother’s mouth:

“Thank God, Frederic! What a sight for sore eyes!”

Frederic kissed Leocàdia on the cheek, and with a theatrical and affected flourish, as if there had been a death in the house, he asked:

“How is Papà?”

Leocàdia’s response fell somewhere between a sigh and a frown:

“He’s in his office. He had a very bad night, he’s a bit fatigued. For God’s sake, my son, please don’t get him started again … your poor father …”

“But, Mamà …”

Frederic ran his hand delicately under Leocàdia’s wrinkled chin, and that tenuous filial massage seemed to reassure Senyora Lloberola, who without another word patted her son on the back and led him down the hallway toward his father’s room.

Don Tomàs spent the whole day secreted away in that place he called his office. The word “office” was most definitely excessive, a product of Don Tomàs’s predilection for exaggeration. In Barcelona’s old mansions, even if the head of the household had never written so much as a single line or counseled a single person, there was always a room designated as the office. The only things that took place there were meetings with an administrator, or signings of rental receipts, or the reading of some journal that spoke of miracles or the parable of the fishes. In his apartment on Carrer de Mallorca, Don Tomàs had wanted to preserve his office, even though by that time anything having to do with his properties, or with receiving or making payments, had been reduced to a minimum. Don Tomàs used his office to dunk the dry day-old biscuits known as secalls , to take naps, to cough his chronic habitual cough, and, once every fortnight, to write a few lines of his memoirs. From time to time, the masover who administered the only property he still owned, or a relative, or some sad priest who had served the Lloberolas as a seminarian, or one of those poor devils without a penny to his name who go from house to house telling tales of illness, would give Don Tomàs’s office the appearance of something that was not quite entirely a coffin.

They lived in a standard neighborhood, whose houses were designed with no imagination and according to geometric principle in such a way that a vertical line traced from the roof to the storefronts would run through five frying pans with their corresponding omelets, or five married couples making love, or five cooks singing the same tango. What Don Tomàs wanted to bring to life in his office was that very personal and slightly wacky decorative mishmash you would find in the old mansions, in which generations of sedimentation had produced clashing styles and stockpiles of absurd pieces. Some of the pieces of furniture in Don Tomàs’s office came from his grandfather, some from his great-grandfather, some he had bought himself, and others had been inherited from a cousin who went off to the Philippines or an aunt whose taste leaned toward aberrations like seashells and stuffed birds. All of this was crammed into a too-small room that twisted like a contortionist to make space for the little paintings, the holy pictures, the documents signed by the king, or the family portraits. And it still had to struggle to make space for the bust of a pope to breathe or for a view of the mountains of Montserrat made of fingernails, rabbit hair, and beetle shells to peep out — this last the work of a slightly crazy Lloberola uncle. Don Tomàs’s furniture was all made of the most accredited mahoganies and jacarandas, with tiles and incrustations, but it was tubercular and worm-eaten, with a patina of tears and disappointments, bloated by the rhetorical wind of two hundred years of Lloberolas. The effect caused by the jumble in that room in the apartment on Carrer de Mallorca was one of overstuffed incongruity.

In the big old house on Carrer de Sant Pere més Baix, all that planed and polished wood engrafted with metals and nacre, gleaming with exotic varnishes and gums, affecting potbellied protuberances or Gothic spires, had a reason to exist and a reason to take up space because the big old house was just like that furniture, and the walls and the decorations supported each other and gave each other meaning. A meaning that was a bit absurd, as we have already noted, but with its elements of grandeur. In that apartment on Carrer de Mallorca, the only thing left was the absurdity, exaggerated even more by the meager space and the agglomeration of the pieces. To the eyes of an outsider who didn’t know what it was all about, every piece of Don Tomàs’s historic furniture, every memory loudly clinging to every stick of wood, would resemble a wretched gang who had taken refuge from a fire in the first convenient place they had found. You couldn’t tell if they were crying, begging, or brazenly showing off their cracks and worm holes because they knew perfectly well that they were done for.