Josep Maria de Sagarra - Private Life

“No, Agustí, no, don’t get carried away. These stories have nothing to do with the aristocracy. You’re right, it’s all just middle class, bourgeoisie with new money, if you wish, with a lingering whiff of lint and machine oil that could make your eyes tear. What I was saying has nothing to do with any kind of refinement or decadence. It just exists. It exists here as it does everywhere. Sometimes it’s the most insignificant and gray of men, or the most apparently ordinary and decent married couple.”

“What can I say … what can I say.… You run around in a world of tarts and idlers, and, well, you see things that aren’t there. This is what’s in vogue now. After a war, people will do anything to wallow in the low life and try to seem interesting. The sort of respect people used to show one another is gone. You know that better than anyone. We’ve all become a little bit more shameless. Right now we’re talking in front of my wife about things I am certain my mother never heard of in all her life. This is not distinction, or anything of the kind. This is just pure nonsense.”

“Who said anything about distinction? This is a fact, a flaw, a sickness of our times …”

“No, no, I’ll have none of that. Foolish fantasy, literature for the blasé, like you.”

“Dear, you’re getting all riled up! Lower your voices, both of you! That man with the bandage on his cheek thinks you’re arguing and he hasn’t taken his eyes off you.” (Naturally, it was Agustí Casals’s wife who said this.)

“Mind your own business, do you hear? We’ll speak as loud as we like. What we say is no one else’s affair, and after working all day long, I can certainly be allowed to shout a little. All right? So, Lloberola, to get back to what we were talking about, this is more a literary obsession than anything else. Proust and Gide are in fashion these days, along with that foolishness about Freud that Dr. Marañón is publishing in Madrid. You’ve all read Proust, and you want to discover mysterious bonds and unnatural societies everywhere. I agree that these things exist in Barcelona just as they do everywhere else, and that there are as many degenerates here as you like. These people live in broad daylight, it’s written on their faces, they are part of a perfectly demarcated world. But these married couples, these strange combinations, these respectable and respected people …”

“Well, yes, in fact, all of this exists.”

“Why do only some people know about it? Why, above all, does only a certain type of person talk about it? No, my friend, no. Anyone can be tarred by a story like this. Anyone who has been the butt of gossip can … But where is the proof? Have you ever seen such a thing? Do you have positive evidence?”

“Casals, there’s just no reasoning with you. Listen. Don’t you have a nose?”

“A nose, why?”

“To sniff things out, to connect the dots, to reach conclusions …”

“As you can imagine, I have better things to do. I have other kinds of dots to connect. In my world, if you do no evil, you think no evil.”

“You see, you see, what a dope you are? Do you see why there’s just no reasoning with you?”

“You know, Lloberola is right. He knows more about these things than you. He knows these people …” (This, too, was Senyora Casals.)

“Did you hear that, from my wife? Always against the husband! What do you know about what Lloberola knows? You would be better off keeping quiet and pretending not to listen …”

“I can’t imagine why …”

“That’s neither here nor there, we’re talking about something else. I’m telling you this, Casals, because I know you’re interested, because you have a bit of the soul of a novelist, and what I’ve heard about this couple is a truly horrifying thing.”

“So who is this couple?”

“Look, as you can imagine, the person who tipped me off is someone with an interest in the affair and he didn’t mention any names. Some people think I’m a blabbermouth. But he swore they were very well-known …”

“All right, but get to the point, what’s the story? Because you still haven’t been very clear …”

“For God’s sake, Casals! You want me to tell you all the details? You know that your wife is here …”

“I assure you I understood perfectly what was going on.” (Once again Senyora Casals was speaking, laughing, but blushing a bit.)

“Well, I haven’t understood perfectly. That is, I can’t get it through my head … it seems too preposterous … You said … what did you say?”

“You want me to repeat it? It’s the wife, the husband, and … let’s say, a hired man … Not a friend, you understand. Someone who earns a fee.”

“Yes, yes … I get it …”

“Well, the husband … the husband plays a role … let’s say he’s passive with regard to the wife … and active (if you can call that active, because it’s a little complicated), with regard to the other … And the other and the wife … you get it …”

“Yes, yes, of course, I get it.”

“But the strange thing is that, to do this, the man needs for the wife to be there … and the wife …”

“The wife needs for the husband to be there …”

“That’s right! What do you think?”

“I think it’s perfectly disgusting. And you say the wife is a beautiful woman …”

“Beautiful …! Well …, that’s what they told me. And the strangest part is that this gentleman has no other outlet than this. I mean, he doesn’t go off on his own, not at all. He’s not one of these ordinary perverts, you understand? Unless his ‘legitimate’ wife is present, nothing happens …”

“And what about when he and his wife are alone?”

“Nothing, nothing at all.”

“But this is monstrous!”

“Monstrous, indeed. Who could deny it.”

“What I don’t understand is that there could be a person who can provide such details, who knows things firsthand, who could know, for example, that there is nothing going on between him and his wife …”

“Look, Casals, I’m telling you exactly what they told me; I didn’t see it myself, as you can imagine.”

“And the guy who agrees to play this third-rate little game?”

“It seems there are more than a few guys like that in Barcelona …”

“But you have to have a lot of nerve …”

“That’s it exactly. I would say you needed unimaginable nerve.”

FREDERIC WAS CERTAIN his brother was a nobody. “What kind of relations could Guillem have with Antoni Mates? Hah! I don’t think they’ve even met …! If I could find a way to get it over on that Jew.… Because, ultimately, what could actually happen to me? So what if I don’t pay? Will they put me in prison? Would my father go so far as to allow his name to be dragged through the courts? And, even if he is a son of a b …, if I don’t pay, Antoni Mates won’t have the guts to sue me.” This is what was going through Frederic’s mind, this is what he was muttering to himself, after he dropped Mossèn Claramunt off. The scene with his father didn’t matter to him at all. It wasn’t the first, and it wouldn’t be the last: “Father always overacts. He’s just a poor old fool.” Perhaps as a distraction, Frederic started thinking about the role the priest had played in the whole affair. Frederic had derived a negative, arbitrary opinion of priests from observing their behavior in the family enclave. Frederic’s anticlericalism was cowardly and shameful, like everything else about him. He would never dare confess to his mother that he had not been a practicing Catholic for many years. Curiously, he would never even have confessed it to his wife. With his children Frederic always affected a great respect for things religious, and, in the days when they lived in the big house on Carrer de Sant Pere més Baix, he had not been averse to bearing the canopy in Corpus processions wearing the uniform of a Knight of the Mestrança. Later on, he would joke about it with his friends, and say whatever entered his mind, but a strange sort of fear had kept him from ever touching a rib of beef on a Friday during Lent. After the failure of his latest business, he had become a bit more brazen with his conscience, even to the extent of formulating ideas that would have terrified him years before. He was so furious and so cornered that his impotence drove him to take out his rage on the nose and cheeks of Mossèn Claramunt. That decrepit charlatan, whom he had been putting up with ever since he had the use of reason, seemed to him to be the vilest of farceurs. He imagined the scene of the goodly priest hearing his father’s confession. “How hilarious! My father calling for this crank to soothe his conscience, for fear of going to hell. And what should he be confessing for? For having dragged us all to ruin, for having been the most egotistical of men. For having threatened to condemn me to hell. To hell! What was the poor man thinking? Does he think I’m going to lose a moment’s sleep over his malediction? He doesn’t want to co-sign a promissory note, so he calls for his priest! He doesn’t want to help his son, so he requires the church canon! And he’s afraid to die! He’s a fool, a hypocrite! What does he need the money for? Whom should the few bills he has left be for, if not for me? And that idiot priest must be sitting down to dinner now, thinking he’s done something grand. He went to hear el Senyor Marquès’s confession. No, but this one is cleverer than my father; he knows exactly what he’s doing … And they will both sleep peacefully because they have complied with the law of God. As if God didn’t have better things to do than watch over these miserable failures. Meanwhile, his son can drop dead. That’s what religion means to them …”