Josep Maria de Sagarra - Private Life

ONE MIGHT HAVE thought Guillem was fleeing the family soup, Swiss chard, and omelet repast for a revelry of skirts, sauce anglaise and depravity, but the supper Guillem was bound for was as conventional and honest as they come. The truth is the young man was having dinner at the Suís with a married couple. The fact that he seemed destined to consort with married couples did not mean that the collaboration always had to be unpalatable. In this case, the husband was a young lawyer, a lifelong friend of Guillem’s, by the name of Agustí Casals. Agustí Casals was of humble extraction. His father, an exemplary working man, had reared a good brood of children, sent them all to school, and given each one a start in life. Agustí’s wife was an intelligent young woman who, though she was no beauty, had personality and charm. Agustí Casals earned a comfortable living and had a large apartment furnished with taste and grace. His books were well chosen, he had a horror of appearing extravagant, and his intelligence, and even natural modesty, precluded so much as a whisker of snobbery. Agustí Casals, with his varnish of ordinariness, was in fact a rather spiritual and broadminded young man, especially when you took into account that life had dealt him a difficult hand, that his field of vision had always been limited by work, courtship and family, and that his knowledge of the world had not been influenced by colorful affairs or voyages or complicated sentimental relations. When it came to women, in fact, he knew only one, because his bachelor indiscretions hadn’t allowed him so much as time for reflection. Agustí Casals made an effort to be well-read and up on things as he made his way. But all in all he had a fresh-faced innocence that he didn’t attempt to hide and wasn’t ashamed to admit. In some aspects of life his criteria were primary and narrow-minded, and with the brutal optimism of a healthy man with no dependencies, Agustí Canals would impose his opinion by laughing, shouting, or getting red in the face and cursing like a longshoreman.

Agustí Casals knew perfectly well who Guillem de Lloberola was. He had known him since they were children, and the friendship of this boy had seemed to him like the friendship of an ambassador from a completely unknown land, who had come to bare his soul in a new environment.

The world of the Lloberolas and the world of Agustí Casals’s family were at opposite poles. Agustí Casals was the child of the democratic shopkeeper’s class ruled by savings: the saving of space, the saving of time, the saving of money, and the saving of clothing. The apartment he had been born in had no personality. His education, the kitchen in his house, his shoes — purchased ready-made, like the ready-made shirts he had worn — absolutely everything had been as lacking in personality as a ten cèntim coin. Agustí Casals had frequented the variety shows on the Paral·lel, the amusement park at the top of the Tibidabo, the picnics at Les Planes, the beaches at Banys Sant Sebastià, the cafès on the Rambla, and the commonest brothels, in the most anonymous way, just like thousands of students and apprentices and hired hands by the name of Casals, like him, who had no pride of family nor even much of an idea of who their grandfather had been. This was why, beyond being a flesh-and-blood boy like himself, in the person of Guillem de Lloberola, Agustí Casals saw the representative of another race. And since Guillem was a talkative, brilliant and friendly guy, Agustí Casals (and once they were married, his wife, even more), derived great enjoyment from hearing Guillem’s stories about the grandeurs and disasters of his family, his childhood memories from the house on Carrer de Sant Pere més Baix, his picturesque perspective on his relatives, and the interminable tales Guillem had picked up from his father about the 19th century aristocracy of Barcelona and the Carlist Wars fought over the return of the Bourbon monarchy. Agustí Casals listened to his friend’s stories with genuine tenderness, because even though his blood had no connection to that antique bric-à-brac, when as a student he had ventured into the old neighborhoods, more than once he would stop before the courtyard of a house bearing an illustrious name. He felt a delicate admiration for this select and useless world that nowadays has failed so miserably, and of which Don Tomàs de Lloberola was a particular example.

Agustí Casal’s wife was a healthy young woman, satisfied with and utterly enamored of her husband. Though she herself had a somewhat dizzy and spontaneous way of talking, she enjoyed Guillem’s conversation. He would tell stories about some of the most well-known ladies of the brilliant leisure class, whom Agustí Casal’s wife never dreamed of mixing with, though within her own discreet position she was a refined young woman with an unaffected natural quality, who could have fit in anywhere. Guillem was aware of this soft spot of hers, and he would make things up and exaggerate, sometimes in good fun, sometimes spurred on by his own literary pretensions. Without ever betraying himself, or transmitting too much passion, he managed even to relay certain things of which he had professional experience.

From time to time, Agustí Casals enjoyed inviting his friend to dinner at the Suís because this restaurant imbued with the palm trees and noble architecture of the Plaça Reial (known nowadays as the Plaça de Francesc Macià) retained some of the essence of the final throes of the Barcelona he wanted to discover in the weak and amoral person of Guillem de Lloberola. The Cafè Suís, nowadays a bit run-down, despite the pre-war renovations, used to retain, and still retains, a touch of the air of the tony old cafès and restaurants. It retained the prestige of a good chef and servers who appeared not to have heard of communism. Agustí Casals liked to eat well; the taste for fine cuisine was something he had discovered recently, and when he found himself before an excellent dish he felt a bit of the shivering emotion of a parvenu.

Fine cuisine was part of his sentimental and somewhat literary attachment and devotion to the Barcelona of yore. Thanks to Guillem de Lloberola he knew that the Cafè Suís had seen parades of good gourmets enamored of opulent French women wearing agonizing corsets and picture hats with birds of paradise, trailing endless boas made of ostrich feathers dyed indigo blue. And in the winter the same women had hidden their tiny diamond-encrusted hands inside cylindrical beaver muffs.

Agustí Casals was sorry that the restaurant, either because of the crisis, or perhaps the changing fashion, had seen the migration of its old clientele of flamboyant playboys and Olympian nymphets. At suppertime, with his wife and Guillem, the Suís had the peaceful air of a convent. At the other tables sat the occasional foreigner, who had heard of the restaurant’s reputation before coming to Barcelona, or the regulars, gentlemen who were faithful right down to their tables. But, all in all, it had the air of a Monday night.

After dinner, time stretched on and the conversation got lively, with the natural excitement produced by drinks, coffee, and smoke. It was the sort of oasis of happiness that comes of the digestion of a good filet mignon accompanied by a genuine cognac. The two friends had brought up a topic that made Senyora Casals simper and pretend to fuss, though that didn’t keep her from offering her two cents every so often, in a sort of affected, yet inoffensive way.

They must have been halfway through the topic and halfway through the cigar; Agustí Casals was speaking with his characteristic vitality, the aplomb of a man with no complications.

“What can I say, Lloberola? I find this all a bit comical. The thing is, in Barcelona people like to grandstand, but it’s all just hot air. You can’t convince me that such things actually go on among these people you call ‘the aristocracy.’ Frankly, there is no aristocracy here. It all has the shriveled air of a highfalutin middle class. Just imagine that I decided to behave like a marquis. It would be quite silly, no?”