Josep Maria de Sagarra - Private Life

A moment ago he was saying, “Hah! Even though Antoni Mates is a son of a b …, he wouldn’t dare bring a case against me.” He would take a position of resigned cynicism, adopting an attitude of having seen it all. Later, without rhyme or reason, something he had seen on display in a shop window, or a simple incident on the street, would bring about a change of heart. The reactions of a man like Frederic can have the most absurd causes. He didn’t know if he should confess everything to his wife or if he should let fall, in some vague way, the idea of a troubling situation and a possible trip. Or if he should do it coldly, as if in passing, or strike a more declamatory air, his gestures combining desperation and repentance. How he behaved would depend on the mood his wife was in, the dinner she served, the vinegar cruets, or the wilted anemones.

When Frederic walked in the food was on the table. Maria barely commented on the false trip, showing an absolute indifference to anything that concerned him. In the presence of his children Frederic couldn’t say a word. As he crossly swallowed his soup, he dropped his melodramatic projects and his intention to confess. “With a wife like this, what’s a man to do,” Frederic thought, as Maria scolded Lluís, their youngest son, for no reason. “Let him be, Maria, let him be, don’t be on his back all the time,” said Frederic. Then Maria, losing control and paying no attention to the children, launched into one of those aggrieved monologues that Frederic listened to without a word. Maria completely lost her appetite with her crying, and dinner came to a disastrous end.

Frederic thought, “What a wretched life.” He opened the newspaper and pretended to read. The truth was he didn’t see a thing. He felt a desire to flee the house, not only because of the promissory note, or the danger he was in, but for everything. He wanted to flee without explanation. Once again he had become the victim. Once again Rosa Trènor turned into a glamorous odalisque. Once again his father’s image appeared before him with all the flaws that cruelty, repugnance, and incomprehension can expose. Bobby would probably be at the Eqüestre; his other friends would be there, as they were every night. The only thing he feared was having to see Antoni Mates’s face. But, what the devil, the note wasn’t due for two more days, and a lot can happen in two days. Just a moment ago he had been thinking of going to America; after dinner, this solution seemed ridiculous. Maybe Bobby, maybe it would be more practical to do what his Lloberola pride had never allowed him to do, to test Bobby’s friendship … who knows …

After dinner, Frederic didn’t say so much as a word to his wife. He changed from head to toe and fled from his family, feeling the same disgust and pity he had felt in Rosa Trènor’s kitchen, with the scrawny cat’s tongue licking the dirty coffee cup …

CONXA PUJOL’S GRANDFATHER, l’avi Pujol , had earned a lot of money in Cuba in the days of the slave trade. His family were sailmakers from Sant Pol de Mar, respectable, dignified people. Conxa Pujol’s grandfather had given up the sails and the ovens and joined a trading company, with a few duros he managed to steal from someone, a pipe, three jerseys, a knife, and a pistol.

In no time, l’avi Pujol was a well-known figure in the factories on the Guinean coast and the ports of the Antilles. He was a man of good fortune. Later he would convert the business of coffee-colored skin into the business of actual coffee, and he held government office in the colonies. When he was a bag of worn-out bones with a biblical beard, he turned up in Barcelona, carrying a sweet young mulatta piggyback, and built himself a house of stone on the Rambla de Santa Mònica. The mulatta blossomed in the rocking chairs of the house on the Rambla like a languorous, undulating dahlia, under a buttery silk peignoir that exhaled all the overseas perfume of her skin.

L’avi Pujol died of gall bladder cancer, leaving behind a sickly, squirrelly boy who in time would get into all sorts of mischief. He ended up an extremely rich and respectable gentleman, the manager of a famous shipping agency.

Conxa Pujol was the daughter of that gentleman and a certain Sofia Guanyabens, who proceeded from the dreariest middle class. She died in childbirth. Conxa Pujol had been a dark, magnificent creature, with imponderably dewy skin, and the phosphorescent eyes of a tropical beast. Everyone in the family said that Conxa took after her grandmother, the sweet young mulatta old Pujol had carried home piggyback. Conxa had the aura of a lazy pearl, but not without her moments of malaise. In Sant Pol de Mar, where her father had expanded the old family home and provided every comfort, Conxa spent the summers of her adolescence amid vaporous nights full of shooting stars and vanilla perfume. In that house, el Senyor Pujol kept souvenirs of the old family trade and of the grandfather’s navigation, business, and customs. Conxa Pujol’s hours of leisure within the white walls of the summer house were made up of dreams of sailing ships, Puerto Rican prints, black men in red-striped white cotton pants whose sweat was whisked away with bullwhips, and birds that flew in loop-the-loops, as if their bellies were full of rum. An entire rhythm of water and rumba, a whole sensual world of madrepore and coral reefs.

Conxa Pujol leafed through books with incredible engravings, navigation diaries, letters, and family portraits. On the beach she would toast her skin with the patience of a slave. She would find a place tucked away between sharp dry canes so no one would see her, where she could lie nearly nude on the sand and watch as her perfectly proportioned breasts took on the sweet amber glow of the fruit of the palm tree.

Bogged down in the opulence of his business, Conxa Pujol’s father only half-remembered her. Conxa’s only censor in her adolescence was Madame Pasquier, an ugly, depraved Frenchwoman from Toulon with a penchant for the literary.

Madame Pasquier allowed Conxa to do whatever foolish thing crossed her mind, and she encouraged her in the development of modish affectations. Conxa felt no attraction at all to boys of her own stripe, but when she saw the young fishermen pulling their boats along behind pairs of oxen or setting out in the evening for sardine trawls or night fishing, her phosphorescent eyes cast off doleful cinders. Conxa had the heart of a hysterical medusa. She would have liked for those burly, brutish, and inoffensive young men to dive naked into the sea, knives clenched between their teeth, and bring her back a slimy, fascinating sea monster. Conxa would have aspired to other things, too, and one of those brutish and inoffensive boys captured those aspirations perfectly, flashing his extremely white teeth at her one day when “the young lady from Can Pujol” wandered perilously close to those undershirts enhanced with sweat and salt. Conxa gave in to her own private democratic impulses, and an evil tongue assured that one night among the boats she had been seen arching her back like a grouper out of water, beneath the unrefined attentions of a young man who was known among the sailors as “Plug Ugly.”

But none of these things had been verified. In Sant Pol they circulated with some acidity, but by the time they reached Barcelona they were completely watered down.

Even so, el Senyor Pujol came to realize that marriage was as necessary for his daughter as their daily bread. Enigmatic Conxa, with the tropical insouciance she had inherited from her grandmother, didn’t protest at all when Antoni Mates, a man twenty years her senior, but a peerless match in both economic and social terms, asked for her hand. Nor when the marriage took place, with insulting and baroque pomp, in the Basilica of Our Lady of Mercy, known popularly as La Mercè.