Josep Maria de Sagarra - Private Life

Bobby dug his fingernails into Frederic’s face. The only reason Frederic didn’t thrash him was that he was in his house, and among gentlemen it is not customary to thrash the master of the house when paying a visit.

On the most idiotic account, for practically no reason at all, these two apparently inseparable friends quarreled, and never spoke to each other again for the rest of their lives.

That night Bobby didn’t dine at the Liceu. He stayed home and kept his mother company. Bobby accepted the widow Xuclà’s way of thinking. He found her youthful indiscretions to be very human and considered the whole thing fine and dandy, because Bobby was a skeptic and his morality was rotten to the core. But that night, in reaction to the insults Frederic had dared to hurl at the widow Xuclà, he saw his mother as a saint. Above all, he valued more than ever her mercy and her elegance. She was a true lady. In the folds of her lips, her slightly pronounced chin, her wrinkles, her tired eyes, and the white hair of her decrepit majesty, still tall and smiling, he found the full essence of that aristocratic and mercantile Barcelona, popular, proud, and a bit childish, all traces of which were fading.

And Bobby was right. The widow Xuclà represented all those things, and more. Even more than a man, an old woman who has lived a full life retains the imprint of the past and the sensible permanence of memory. Women have more passive nerve receptors, and more receptive souls, so they do not consume themselves nor do they expend all their energy in action as men do. Women are both more covetous and more foresightful. Between the folds of their wrinkled skin, they have the good faith to collect dreams, to gather up adventures, and to preserve there what cannot be seen and can only be sensed: the perfume of history.

EL BARÓ DE FALSET didn’t say so much as a word to his wife about how Guillem was blackmailing him. He spent two months in agony. The day after he sent the letter to Frederic, he realized how stupid he had been to write it. Guillem hadn’t approached him, but he feared a new attack at any moment. Two months later, an event occurred that caused a commotion among many Barcelona ladies. It bore all the features of a crime of passion, and eased the baron’s terrible anxieties a bit. The event in question was the murder of Dorotea Palau, the dressmaker.

Dorotea was found with a dagger through her heart in a well-known meublé . She was in the company of a French individual whom all the circumstances seemed to incriminate, despite his protesting that he had had nothing to do with the crime. The court found him guilty.

Yet the alleged murderer was entirely innocent. For the reader to have some idea of how things came about, we will have to delve a little deeper into the private life of the Baró and Baronessa de Falset and their chauffeur, and follow certain paths that until now had been secret and unknown.

The first few years of marriage between Antoni Mates and his wife had apparently been quite normal. Conxa’s husband did not satisfy her in the least, and her own “personal” adventures in that first period of marriage, which we will have occasion to go into at other points in this story, were suspected by no one.

Antoni Mates made a tremendous effort to overcome something he didn’t dare confess even to himself, something he had hoped was long behind him. But he was powerless before his, shall we say, malady. As its effects inflamed his blood, Conxa became colder and more wooden, so much so that at times Antoni Mates felt he was sleeping with a dead body.

As we have said, Conxa had a very special and piquant beauty. Antoni Mates was madly in love with her, but it was a strange sort of love mixed with admiration that didn’t procure him satisfaction, nor was it capable of slaking the other thirst that consumed him.

Neither of them dared confess to the other how cold and empty their encounters were. A pathological sadness, deaf and dumb, crept into the marriage. They kept it out of the public eye by enacting the most delightful of honeymoons.

One afternoon the couple set out on an little trip, intending to spend a couple of days in a town on the coast. Antoni Mates had a new chauffeur; he had been in their service for just two weeks. He was a sporty young man who looked like a ladykiller. He had a youthful grace, and was pleasant and attentive. By nightfall the couple and their chauffeur reached the town where they would be staying. The inn was clean and quite comfortable, and practically empty because the summer season had not yet begun. At dinnertime, it was as if the time they had spent together, each keeping his and her respective secrets, had had an effect upon their nerves, as if instinct, or the beast, had revealed what the power of reason had denied. Conxa and her husband both looked simultaneously at the chauffeur, who was sitting three tables away, focusing on his plate of chops and not daring to look at his masters. The gaze of husband and wife must have been very particular and not very subtle because, later, when they realized what they were doing, and when their own eyes met, they both blushed, trembling and disconcerted. But that lasted only a couple of seconds because Conxa, with a great sigh, looked at her husband again with a smile. And her husband smiled back, as a flash of liberation flared in his eyes. Antoni Mates saw clearly that Conxa understood him, and accepted what he would never have dared to confess, just as he accepted her thoughts, in turn. Without so much as a word or the briefest remark, with just that redness of cheek, that discomposure, those sighs and that shimmer in their eyes, they came to a perfect understanding and mutual endorsement. The depravity of each was completely different from that of the other, but it tended toward one same objective, one same desire, that would be enjoyed in different ways.

Conxa mentally put the final touches on the idea. It didn’t alarm her in the slightest. She found it eccentric and quite chic. And since she found her husband disgusting, this could not be any worse.

She had read novels that told of similar permutations; in Paris, in the great world of the disabused, such practices were an everyday thing. The fact is, if “that” was what her husband was, and she had already suspected it — in fact, she had been certain of it, for quite a while now — Conxa was much less concerned about it than her husband had been.

When the time came to go to bed, everything happened as if by design. The couple was given the best room at the inn and the chauffeur was to sleep two doors down. Antoni and Conxa left the door ajar. She began to undress, as did her husband. The chauffeur was whistling softly. In a state of exceptional excitement, his voice trembling, Antoni Mates called for the young man. He responded pleasantly, as always. Antoni Mates ordered him to come and the poor boy responded that he was about to get into bed. “It doesn’t matter, come right away,” Antoni Mates responded, his voice more and more subhuman. The chauffeur pulled on his pants and stopped in the doorway. “Come in,” said Antoni Mates. Distraught, the boy went in. He was barefoot, wearing pants and a sleeveless undershirt. Conxa was lying almost naked on the bed. Antoni Mates took the chauffeur by the arm; the boy didn’t understand; his head was spinning. But he didn’t protest. Stupidly, he let himself be swallowed up by the same wave, and the three of them fell onto the bed.

From that time on, Antoni Mates was a happy man. Conxa tolerated, and even enjoyed, the absurd combination. The chauffeur, a bit horrified, soon understood, however, that this was a gold mine, and that it was in his interest to be discreet.