Josep Maria de Sagarra - Private Life

At first, the Monk supplied his relative with the necessary personnel. Material of excellent quality, in very good condition, and guaranteed to be safe. With the baronessa behind her, Dorotea Palau came to serve the most select clientele of Barcelona. Realizing that she should choose an apartment that met with the needs of the baron and baronessa, Dorotea moved. One day, Dorotea learned of the existence of a certain group of more or less elegant and dissolute young men. By chance, one of these young men came from a very good family. Dorotea had met him in a seigneurial mansion when she was a young girl and he was a ten year-old boy, very cute, and very diligent, with a sailor suit and curly hair that was irresistible to ladies’ fingers. Dorotea also learned that the seigneurial family was practically in the poorhouse, that for a hundred-pesseta bill that boy was capable of doing a great many things, and she found an opportunity to bring a great lady with an excellent heart into her obligation by doing a “favor” for her son. Dorotea made a deal with the young man. She spoke clearly from the start, and the young man accepted the conditions. The readers already know the rest of the story of Dorotea, the young man and the Barons de Falset.

Up to that point, Pere Ranalies had been living off the fat of the land. However, starting with the negotations between Dorotea and Guillem de Lloberola, he began to note an inordinate negligence on the part of his relative. The Monk had become a nuisance to Dorotea, who no longer had any need for him. Not to mention that Dorotea was an absolute miser. The Monk asserted that the “she-beast” had cheated him, and demanded the money owed him. The Monk had fallen on hard times; all his savings had been wiped out in the notorious failure of a bank that had affected half of Barcelona. The Monk was ambitious by nature. He saw that he had lost, and he had a right to recover what he demanded of Dorotea. She refused, and she threatened to turn him over to the police for a whole pile of reasons. The Monk, who was smarter than Dorotea, laughed in her face and said it was “hard to believe she was such a fool.” When he saw that Dorotea wouldn’t cough up the dough, the Monk vowed that he would kill her. She took it as a joke. She thought of Ranalies as a kind of repugnant, but inoffensive, mosquito.

Pere Ranalies bought a knife to kill Dorotea Palau with. He didn’t know when or where it would happen, but he swore that his distant cousin would not get away with this. Ranalies believed in witches. A murder like the one he had in mind was a bit hard to carry off with absolute impunity. But Ranalies believed in witches. Besides, inhabited only by impotent monsters and vomitous aberrations, his brain demanded a special kind of cruelty. Ranalies had a sick mind, cold, calm, and fully conscious. He wanted to kill like a cat, without a sound, with clean hands and a smile on his face. When, and how? He was sure that luck would favor him. Dorotea would fall into his hands. He envisioned the moment, he savored the impunity of his crime, he heard the woman’s muffled scream and smelled her viscous blood … With his soft, icy fingers he would sit and caress the knife. It was a five-spring stiletto, like the ones from the days of the hoodlums, the kind that plunge delicately into a man’s body fat, like a diver with perfect style.

Luck or witchcraft did indeed watch over Ranalies the night porter. Dorotea had made a friend in France, an odd, shady guy with a blond moustache, a bowler hat, dirty fingernails, and a diamond on his pinky finger. He wore secondhand suits that had been painstakingly restored at the dyers’, filmy pochettes in pastel colors, and metallic ties, with a gold pin in the knot that had a tooth — probably from a child who had been killed for his blood — set right in the middle. He was a rascal who liked to sing, drink red wine all day long, and dine al fresco, and he made love in a roguish, gallant, and theatrical way, like a character out of Beaumarchais. Dorotea had been thoroughly diddled by that strapping fellow, who continued to write her after she left Paris. He had some wine business in Perpinyà and on occasion he would cross the border and come to Barcelona to enjoy “un dîner fin avec la belle Dorothée.”

On one of these getaways, Dorotea accompanied him to a quiet cafè near the Pla de Palau for a glass of Pernod; the Frenchman was in high spirits, and they continued on to the restaurant Can Soler on the Barceloneta. He liked the spattering of the frying oil, the slices of watermelon from the Passeig Nacional, and the whole petty trade in fishing, sailing and distilled liquor that reminded him of the port of Marseille. They dined on lobster in tomato sauce with an exhilarating allioli. “Comme ça sent bon, ma belle!” said the Frenchman, whose cheeks had gone dark, practically purple, like two veal kidneys.

The Frenchman had brought Dorotea “quelque chose de très chic” : a necklace of tiny glass seed beads that practically danced upon her fleshy neck with their peals of laughter.

Later they went to see a revue at the Teatre Còmic. The Frenchman found it dull and a little crass. Then they still found time for a drink, and the Frenchman began to think that despite Dorotea’s excess pounds, her flirty gaze was still quite nice. The Frenchman was staying in a hotel by the Boqueria Market. They couldn’t go there, and Dorotea didn’t want any compromising situations at her own house, so they adopted the most practical solution. The taxi driver pulled up to the meublé that was currently most in demand. After drawing the curtains behind them, a diminutive little man, gray and seedy, wearing the white jacket uniform of the house, opened the door for them. Dorotea was very put out, but she didn’t let on. The Monk pretended not to recognize her. He led them to the lift and deposited them in room thirty-two. At that time of night there were three people on duty. As it was a weekday, the erotic temperature was not so high as on other nights, and the work wasn’t killing them. The Monk was covering both the door and the telephone. The other two were doing their rounds on the upper floors. About two hours had gone by when the Frenchman called down and requested a taxi; in five minutes the cab was at the door. The Frenchman went downstairs and said he would be back within the half hour. When the Monk asked after the lady, the Frenchman, smiling and in the tone used by a man in his cups, responded: “ Elle dort, la belle Dorothée … Dommage de la réveiller … Je reviens tout à l’heure …” What had happened to the Frenchman was quite natural. When Dorotea, fatigued and worn out by it all, began to nod off, the man realized that he had left certain papers he didn’t want to lose in a jacket pocket in his lodgings. Since he was a distrustful type, and he, too, believed in witches, he got nervous. He dressed without a sound so as not to awaken Dorotea.

Once the Monk had closed the cab door on the Frenchman, he felt for his knife as he wondered whether the man had been so stupid as to leave the door to the chamber unlocked. He took advantage of a lull to go quickly upstairs, first ensuring that the other two were on duty and unaware of his maneuver. With great caution, he pushed on the door of room thirty-two, and it opened. Inside he found only darkness and the sound of Dorotea snoring. On tiptoe, the Monk turned on the red light. Dorotea continue to snore. He picked up a washcloth lying on the floor in case he had to muffle her voice, and gripped his knife. Dorotea let out a weak guttural groan that wouldn’t have caused the slightest alarm because, in a house like that, the origins of the “ahhhs” were harmless, and no one paid them any mind. The knife pierced her heart and the hemorrhage bubbled up as if from a spring. The Monk left the knife in the wound; earlier, he had scrubbed it down, just in case, and he was wearing the white gloves they wore when taking a meal up to one of the higher-priced rooms. He pulled the sheet up over the dead woman’s body, turned out the light, peeped out to make sure the hall was empty, and opened the door. Three minutes later he was back at the telephone. The maneuver had been perfect; there was not so much as a drop of blood on him anywhere. He looked in the mirror; he had the same gray face of an upstanding man as always.