Josep Maria de Sagarra - Private Life

“All right. But now I owe you fifty thousand pessetes. That much is clear.”

“Maybe … But you needn’t worry your head about repaying me … I won’t issue you any more promissory notes, not me … And it seems to me that, rather than adopt this professorial tone, you might think about thanking me. All things considered, I think I’ve freed you from a more than considerable predicament …”

Frederic de Lloberola was not at all convinced. What kind of mystery could there be here? Was his brother capable of some extremely peculiar form of larceny? He knew Guillem; he knew he was an inoffensive philanderer, a good kid, at heart, incapable of anything dishonorable, or anything that had anything to do with the penal code. But why did neither Antoni Mates in his letter nor Guillem right here and now offer a clear explanation?

Even so, Frederic saw his salvation. The document was authentic. Antoni Mates’s letter was, too. His distress of the last few months was dissolving; the shady dramas were fading from his mind; and his savior was his brother Guillem. He gave in to his native cowardice, to his parasitic and self-centered way of behaving in the face of all life’s challenges. Once Frederic had the promissory note in his hand, once he had Antoni Mates’s letter in his hand, justifying the events, however mysteriously, but justifying them in the end, he decided not to delve any deeper. Pretending to find the whole thing “perfectly natural,” like the Baró de Falset himself, he took Guillem by the arm and said:

“I don’t get it, Guillem. I feel as if I were dreaming. I feel as if I had won the lottery, yes, something like that. Guillem, I swear, I will remember this favor you have done me all my life …”

“I’m telling you, it’s nothing. Do you have the letter?”

“Yes, it’s right here …”

Guillem read the letter meticulously. He verified that the Baró de Falset had behaved like a gentleman, but when he got to the end, he wrinkled his nose. “What does he mean, burn the letter?” Guillem thought. And then a wicked idea occurred to him. Guillem thought he had been an idiot to go to so much trouble just to do his brother a favor. Naturally he needn’t desist from exploiting the baron. But the letter to Frederic would simplify things a great deal. In the event Guillem attempted a new attack it would avert his having to have too shamefully “personal” a role in the extortion. Guillem thought, “This filthy pig must really be lost, he must truly not know what’s happening to him, because no one in his right mind would have made the mistake of signing a letter like this and then go on to suggest that it should be burned.” As these things went through his mind, Guillem looked at his brother and grumbled:

“Fine, Frederic, you’re very grateful, that’s all well and good. But what about our wager?”

“What do you mean?”

“The thousand pessetes you owe me … from yesterday’s wager. Now that I think of it, though, you don’t have to pay me the thousand pessetes. Give me the letter from Antoni Mates, and we’ll call it even.”

“Impossible. You can’t keep the letter.”

“What do you mean?”

“Guillem, you see what he says, here, at the end …”

“I will be forever and deeply grateful if you tear up and burn this letter.” Uh-huh. And so?”

“And so it is my duty to burn the letter …”

“That is quite debatable. He says he will be deeply grateful, nothing more. He will be grateful, but he doesn’t demand it.”

“Guillem, I think it’s very clear. Moreover, what do you want it for?”

“I don’t know, it amuses me.”

“Guillem, this whole affair is very strange …”

“Are you going to start that again? What an ass! Look, I’m keeping the letter and that’s that. The worst that can happen is that he will not be ‘forever and deeply grateful.’ ”

Guillem kept the letter, and Frederic didn’t insist. He had no doubt that he was an accomplice in a very murky affair. His brother appeared before him in a disconcerting light. Frederic didn’t say another word and shrugged. As we have already said, the Lloberolas are a weak and cowardly clan.

THE XUCLÀS WERE descended from Jews. Bobby’s ancestors had goat’s hair beards and thin, dirty, mercantile fingernails, and lived in the Barcelona neighborhood that nowadays is still known as the Call , the ghetto. But even in the 18th century these Barcelonans were already considered honorable and somewhat ennobled people, and they infused blood of the highest quality into their matrimonial alliances. Bobby’s father had been one of the most elegant roués of Barcelona. Still, instead of squandering his inheritance, he had derived great profit from the last ties to the colonies. He was on good terms with the Comillases, the Arnúses, and the Gironas, and with all the other households that in those days held the purse strings of commerce. He was also a shrewd and diligent man, a man of the world with an eye for the fine print. As a result, he held a solid and extremely brilliant position in society, which continued only to expand and to grow in prestige. In old Xuclà’s personality, the banker, the voracious shark, varnished with a generous flexibility, stood side by side with the gallant ladies’ man. The art of the elder Xuclà lay in knowing how to have his cake and eat it, in such a way that his adventures and scandals never put his business at risk, and could be seen by his friends with amusement, and sometimes even with admiration.

His widow was considered by some to have been a victim. “Poor Pilar,” was the plaint, because all her wealth and elegance could not compensate for her husband’s having shown up every month with a new acquisition extracted from the demi-monde, whom he would materially smother in pearls. Nor did they compensate for the famous banker’s long sojourns in Vienna during which, under the cover of business, he sowed the wild oats of his temperament between a gypsy violin and a rose of Bulgaria.

Old Xuclà had imbibed the entire epoch of the waltz and the square sideburn. This is why when he was in Paris his heart yearned for Vienna, because the women there were taller, whiter, blonder, more animal, with easier laughter and a more primal sexuality. Above all, they had a more docile and lyrical flesh, accustomed as they were to being brutalized by the shiny despotism of military officers and the hands of country bumpkins.

In truth, “poor Pilar” couldn’t have cared less about all this. She had never loved her husband, and it was far more pleasant to have at her side a pompous, spiritual philanderer who lavished all manner of attentions upon her, than to be saddled with a reactionary Tomàs de Lloberola, brimming with uncomprehending egoism, who, between processions and intonations of the Tre Sanctus would have given her a horrible life.

Pilar de Romaní i Miralles was the youngest daughter of the Comtes de Sallent. She had rejected her family’s proposal that she marry a young man from Madrid, a nephew of the Duques de Medinaceli, because, besides being Castilian, the man was dull and had green teeth. After rejecting three or four more proposals, she leaned, against her parents’ preferences, toward Xuclà, the banker. He was a bit past his prime, but he had a perfect command of the use of gardenias and of double-entendres. For Pilar — who at the time was the prettiest and most elegant young woman in Barcelona — this preference for a man of Semitic extraction was the sign of a special temperament at odds with the tenor of her family. Like their cousins, the Lloberolas, the Comtes de Sallent made much of the tawdry vanity of their blue blood. What they wanted in a son-in-law was a rheumatic subject with the heart of a rabbit who would offer no risks and be faithful to tradition. If the title they picked up was from Castile or Aragon, all the better — no matter if there was a touch of syphilis along the way. In contrast, Pilar was an unconventional young woman, with a delicate anarchic streak, and by one of those biological miracles that can never be explained, the daughter of the Comtes de Sallent had turned out to have personality. That personality was a throwback to the Barcelona that preceded the Universal Exhibition of 1888, sensitive to the fragrance of colonial breezes, factory greases, the efficiency of cotton spinners and the broad populist humor of Serafí Pitarra. As a girl, she had been roundly castigated by her mother for her insistence on speaking Catalan, which was the language of the cook, the coachman who cared for the household’s horses, and the poets who gathered at the Cafè Suís.