Josep Maria de Sagarra - Private Life

“All right, Mamà, all right. But, frankly, this is too much …”

“Right away, my son. Don’t be too long.”

For many years now, there had been two indispensable figures for the Lloberolas: one was Dr. Josep Claramunt, the spiritual confessor of the cathedral. The other was Don Ignasi Serramalera i Puntí, who was a medical doctor, a full professor at the University, an academic, a director and member of the board of several hospitals, and the Lloberola family doctor. These two persons, when spoken of by a Lloberola, received dual consideration. In the first place, the consideration due to a magical and sublime eminence. In the second place, the kind of consideration, selfish and condescending in equal measure, that traditional families develop for an object, an animal, or a person who belongs to them, whom they have the exclusive enjoyment of, whose excellences are known only to them, and whom they can squeeze to the bone. When Don Tomàs spoke of the family doctor or the family priest, he did so with the conviction with which he would speak of a medicine to which he owed his life. For Don Tomàs there was no better doctor than Dr. Serramalera, nor any wiser, more prudent and more virtuous priest than Mossèn Claramunt. If anyone dared to touch a hair on the head of one of these two men, Don Tomàs would fly into a rage. Needless to say, the immunity, the prestige, and the superstition they enjoyed was comparable only to the effect produced by a witch doctor with animal blood in the heart of the most pagan tribe of Africa. Anything one of these two individuals so much as hinted at was considered an article of faith. They were the definitive arbiters of both the temporal and the eternal health of the family.

When some distant relative died, Don Tomàs would say: “They got what they deserved, for being stubborn. They didn’t want Dr. Serramalera to visit them and naturally they have a doctor who’s not up to the task …”

But those two eminences were two poor old men of crushing ineptitude and ordinariness. All their value proceeded from the Lloberolas, who had either made them or imposed them on others. The pride of the Lloberolas lay in the fact that both their doctor and their priest were like those linen underpants that Don Tomàs’s mother used to cut out and sew: solid, invulnerable underpants, insured against splitting and laundering. It was because they wore this kind of underpants that the Lloberolas held themselves to be superior to the rest of the Barcelona gentry. Mossèn Claramunt had been in residence with the Lloberolas since his years as a seminarian, and the old Marquès de Sitjar had paid for Dr. Serramalera’s studies. What’s more, since both one and the other had breathed the air of the old mansion on Carrer Sant Pere més Baix, they held the key to the Lloberola foibles. They could read their minds. They would contradict them when a contradiction was what the patient’s subconscious demanded. Often they would not show up for a requested visit because what the Lloberolas desired for their peace of mind was precisely for the doctor to pay no heed to the supposed illness and neglect to pass by.

Even a person as entirely simple and lacking in imagination as Don Tomàs can offer a psychologist willing to lose a few hours the most novel of wrinkles and the most mysterious of hollows. And a man who knows all those wrinkles and hollows by heart can achieve the most complete domination of the person under study. What Dr. Serramalera or Mossèn Claramunt had not come by through keen perception or psychological skill, they had acquired through practice, routine, and years of contact with the furniture, the dust, and the vanity of the Lloberolas.

For Don Tomàs and for Leocàdia these men had yet another virtue, perhaps the most important one; but this virtue was appreciated unconsciously, because Don Tomàs and Leocàdia never realized it was there: of all the people who had had dealings with the Lloberolas, the doctor and the priest were the only ones who continued treating them in their decline exactly as they had in their days of splendor. The same respectful and familiar smile Mossèn Claramunt had worn in the salons of the old house as Don Tomàs held forth on how his stable was the best in Barcelona, he wore on entering the little dining alcove of the apartment on Carrer de Mallorca, as Don Tomàs gnawed on a hazelnut with a tear trapped in each eye. On the reverend’s lips, the marquis was just as much a Senyor now as before, and even though, as we said, he was not conscious of it, for Don Tomàs this was tantamount to maintaining an illusion. It meant he could extract from the priest’s sanctimonious pupils the delicate gleam of a white lie that lengthened his life.

After a series of detours that poured drops of hot wax on his heart, in a state of compressed rage and desperate impotence, Frederic managed to get Mossèn Claramunt into a taxi. Not two hours had passed since his obsession with the stuffed dog with the garter around its neck in Rosa Trènor’s bedroom. Though the comparison was not entirely fair, that monstrous and ill-stitched object appeared to him again, on finding himself in the taxi next to the priest. Doctor Claramunt seemed not wholly human to him, like an ill-stitched creature. To the Lloberola scion those cheeks — over which the father confessor scraped a straight razor every morning, as if on tiptoe, as if it were a metallic virgin stepping timidly over the stumps of a holy field — looked like the stuffed viscera from a museum of anatomy that a perverse biologist had powdered over and wound up. The cheeks of the father confessor quivered nervously, as what little remnant of facial muscle supporting his flabby and pendulous skin jerked up and down. The priest’s lips stretched tightly and his pointy chin thrust forward or shrank back against his Adam’s apple, as if he had such a painful inflammation of the gums that he could not avoid this grotesque maneuver.

Frederic discovered that one can have the same clinical sensation, the same desire to escape when facing a respectable confessor or a bathtub with two inches of dirty water and a floating sponge.

In the taxi, Doctor Claramunt was talking to himself. Frederic had given him a vague idea of what was going on. His eyes glued to the nape of the driver’s neck, the priest was emitting a string of very empty, slightly honey-coated words:

“ Bueno, bueno, bueno ,” he said in Spanish. “So, el Senyor Marquès. Bueno, bueno, bueno ,” — now he switched from Spanish to Catalan, “Of course, of course, of course! Yes, yes, yes, naturally. I understand, I understand. Bueno, bueno, bueno … ” “An argument, at his age, eh? An aggravation? Bueno, bueno … His heart, of course, his heart! Bueno, bueno, bueno … Yes, of course, he is feeling anxiety. All the Lloberolas suffer from anxiety. Bueno, bueno, bueno … ”

The father confessor rubbed his hands together, as if detecting the smell of the cards and the partners for a game of tuti, a courtly precursor to bridge. The gesture betrayed a touch of the pure, dispassionate concupiscence that is the province of theologians.

Frederic’s untimely visit to the father confessor had actually put him out. He was a methodical man with a strict routine and, indeed, if it had not been at the behest of Don Tomàs, the priest would never have left the house at the very moment he devoted to his prayers and to the classification of his herbariums. Because, in fact, Claramunt was a reputed botanist. He had begun his studies of plants because they were not unlike his idea of chastity, and what he had started in some sense out of morality and lyricism ended up turning into a proper scientific vocation.

When they reached the apartment on Carrer de Mallorca, after a brief word with Leocàdia, Dr. Clarament went into the patient’s room, and Frederic went into the dining room, to smoke a Camel and swear under his breath.