Josep Maria de Sagarra - Private Life

Maria had pretty hair and nice skin; despite her children, who were now getting big — her daughter had just turned fourteen — she conserved her slim waist and didn’t need girdles or orthopedic wiles to prop up her somewhat abundant but still fresh body. With a different temperament Maria could have been a first-rate woman, but it seemed as if she were bent on killing any positive effects, on limiting herself to being a person without the least bit of sex appeal.

Having thrown in her lot with a family that had not known how to hold on to its wealth, and had exhausted her dowry as well, Maria started rolling out her instinct for unabashed complaint and unmotivated sniveling. While Frederic didn’t want it said that he was ruined, and childishly clinging to the Lloberola airs, he continued to talk in the thousands of thousands like a grand gentleman, Maria did quite the opposite. When a friend praised the fine points of an overcoat, a refrigerator, a dog, or a device for piercing an egg for drinking, Maria would start with the ohs and ahs and roll her eyes back in her head. After this she would put on a sad face and shrug her shoulders, always with the same comment: “Lucky you! None of these things for poor me. With all our household expenses, just imagine! We have to save! Even now we’re getting along with just one maid. When you’ve had the problems we’ve had …” If Maria’s name came up, the ladies would always say, “Poor Maria.” This ostentation of poverty reached irritatingly grotesque proportions. If she went to visit friends who were close enough to receive her in the dining room as they ate, she would comment on every course: “What beautiful asparagus! Of course, you can enjoy such a delicacy. It’s been a long time since we’ve seen asparagus like these in my house. The way prices have risen!” These comments made the friends who were eating the asparagus want to say: “Here, Maria, be quiet and have some asparagus.” Naturally, this didn’t usually happen, but it made her friends feel bad, and they would end up getting no enjoyment out of the asparagus. When she was invited to a party she was dying to attend, she would snivel, just to play hard to get: “Impossible! X and Y will be there, and I don’t have a dress. I would have to wear my black georgette again, and they’ve seen me in it three times.”

This behavior reached funereal heights in the family circle. Her lack of skill at avoiding avoidable things, her sadistic delight in continually pointing out the mended patches and placing the blame on her husband — never with violence, but with the slack demeanor of a beaten-down cat — and a mewling singsong full of bitterness and apparent resignation made her an odious woman. If the compensation of tender and passionate interludes, of something visceral and alive, had existed, perhaps a man could have found her relatively tolerable. But she was cold in intimacy, with a rigid and imperceptible sensuality, full of vengeful sighs of aversion.

The only person she got along with was her mother. Senyora Carreres, flush with money and diamonds, seemed to dissolve with voluptuosity when she contemplated the precarious situation of her daughter and son-in-law. She felt a sort of joyous middle class bad blood on seeing how the Lloberolas had squandered their fortune, right down to her daughter’s dowry. When Maria married, Senyora Carreres had learned that the Lloberolas found the Carreres family undistinguished and had wrinkled their noses at the match. Years later, Maria’s mother felt as if she were bathing in rose water on seeing herself so full of life, so well-fed and well-positioned, just as Frederic de Lloberola had had to lower himself, and beg clemency, often for ludicrous sums. Senyora Carreres cultivated her daughter’s tearful incontinence, inflaming her against her husband’s family, and creating an unbearably tense situation. It had been years since the in-laws had seen each other, and Frederic tolerated his wife’s parents out of pure necessity. Instead of keeping a bit of distance so as not to call attention to their contrasting fortunes, Senyora Carreres spent the entire day at her daughter’s side, saying “My poor dear! What misfortunes we must bear, dear God!” And she wasn’t good for a cent. Sometimes when Frederic got home he would find the two of them sitting in a corner of the dining room. When he came in they barely said a word to him. Maria would bow her head, and Senyora Carreres would glare at him with eyes that appeared to want to cry. She would move her head with the cadence of a disappointed cow, like the ones that secretly lived in the heart of the densest and most impoverished neighborhoods of Barcelona. Frederic would take in the viscous gleam of those ruminant eyes and then, pretending not to have noticed a thing, begin to tell them tales of grandeur or bits of piquant gossip that he knew his mother-in-law would find offensive. Senyora Carreres would adopt an increasingly acidic, passive, and abused attitude, scratching her cheeks with her little doll’s nails. And Frederic would finally take off, wishing he were one of those despotic medieval Lloberolas who could have had the pleasure of sealing the two of them behind a wall, alive.

WHEN FREDERIC HAD dropped the priest off and decided to go home, he realized it had been twenty-four hours since he had last set foot there. Even though relations with his wife had attained a glacial chill, he had had to come up with a story and invent a trip with Bobby in order to spend the night away. He thought about seeing his children again, along with the same tablecloth and the same oil and vinegar cruets and perhaps even the same anemones from two days before. They would now be in a state of withered decomposition, because his wife was so neglectful that it wouldn’t be at all strange if she had not seen to changing the flowers.

Returning once again to the promissory note, and to Antoni Mates, Frederic went so far as to think that if things looked really bad he would have no choice but to flee. Then the melodramatic side of Frederic’s nature began to see that night as the possible prelude to a tale of emigration. Twenty-four hours earlier, his wife, his entire family, had seemed intolerable to him; Rosa Trènor had been his liberation. After dropping off the priest, he had breathed in the bouquet of his family from afar with a nose of bathos. Just a moment before, like some barroom thug, Frederic had given his father a tongue lashing that left him limp as a doll. Then, erratic and weak, he had come to entertain the idea that it was all his own fault. The fifty thousand pessetes had not all gone to covering up urgent debts. Frederic knew full well that twenty thousand of those pessetes had been spent on an affair that had momentarily obsessed him, but had turned out to be a disappointment, like all the others. And that was just around that time that his wife had been whining because she couldn’t buy a coat that cost only four thousand pessetes, and Frederic ignored her and had the gall to say that she must be out of her mind, and the coat was out of the question. Maria never knew a thing, and still didn’t know a thing, about the damned promissory note because Frederic had done everything possible to keep it from her, trusting as he did that things would work out favorably in the end, and Antoni Mates would agree to renew the loan on the same conditions.

Selfish as a spoiled child, Frederic always found a way to justify himself and to play the victim. Still, he also had his moments of wretched mea culpas , as exaggerated and contemptible as his moments of conceit. In just twenty-four hours the change had been radical, and the closer he got to his house, the more desperate and purple the idea became of emigrating, abandoning his family, and sullying forever more his illustrious family name.