Josep Maria de Sagarra - Private Life

In contrast, if we are lazy by nature, once we have had as a friend, without realizing his worth — because we thought it was a natural thing, like having healthy teeth or clear eyes — a person who will put up with all the humbuggery of our particular way of being; who will go for a walk when we feel like it or sit down when we don’t feel like walking; who has sufficient lack of initiative to go to the theater we want to go to, or not to go to the theater at all, if we fancy the Forty Hours’ Devotion; a person who has the distinction of listening to us and of knowing how to listen, who contradicts us when we wish to be contradicted and is silent when we require silence; a person who never says no, but has the grace often to pretend to say it; a person with whom we have lived for years and years and who is as useful as a pair of old slippers to rest the feet after a very long walk; as soon as, by whatever chance, we find that this person disappears from our everyday dull routine, then what happens is that time becomes interminable, and our walk, our club, our confidences, our aperitif, our leisure time, and even our boredom are not what they used to be. They are missing the wedge that propped them up. Our life is like those annoying wobbly coffee tables on which no drink can be enjoyed. Someone who has been a friend since adolescence cannot be replaced by just anyone. The obstacles are much more difficult in nature than when it is simply a question of replacing one lover with another. The time of love, the life of the emotions, is always easy to resolve. In contrast, the dreary hours, life without rewards, the slow digestion of minutes stripped of pain or glory, or cloaked in the shadows of the sadness of desire, these are the hours that cannot be resolved just any old way. These are the hours when we most require, and hence most value, a disinterested collaboration.

Bobby was not precisely this ideal friend to Frederic, but of all his acquaintances he was the one who came closest, the one who gave him that feeling of repose, calm, and companionship. Frederic would never have given any thought to the value of friendship. Bobby offered him nothing more than patience and good manners, and Frederic absorbed these things — which came very easily to Bobby — as if they were the elements of a true friendship. Both as a single and a married man, Frederic had fallen out with everyone. Companions didn’t last long with him because, in general, in order to take Frederic seriously you had to be just as trivial and oblivious as he was. Squabbles were common and intemperance was shared equally. Only Bobby, by virtue of being so different from Frederic, and so incapable of passion, abandon, or a vivid interest in anyone’s fate, allowed Frederic, who was no psychologist, the gratification of believing that he was a faithful friend. At the same time, Frederic could indulge in the pleasure of considering himself far superior to Bobby.

After their foolish falling-out, Frederic thought he had lost the company of a first-rate fellow, the only one he considered a good friend. And for a ridiculous reason, in which the greater part of the fault lay with him. He discovered that he missed a number of things. He discovered that when he left the Banc Vitalici to take up his position at the sidewalk café of the Hotel Colon, he had no one to listen to him when he said the world was a mess, and this country was a piece of sh …, and Catalans were impossibly vulgar and ill-mannered people, and his neck was itchy, and marriage was absurd, and love didn’t exist, and gentlemen here don’t know how to behave like gentlemen, etc., etc. He discovered that, when he ran into a woman and winked at her, he couldn’t run and gush into patient ears that he had just seen the most “stunning” woman, and he was the only man who knew how to deal with women like her, and she was a sure thing, and there was no one like him at flirting and leading them on. Frederic found that when his arms were itching for a string of caroms in a good game of billiards, he couldn’t come up with a couple of intelligent and comprehending arms willing to let him win, if such was his mood. Or when someone had passed on some piece of juicy gossip, there was no sponge to absorb it all without protest, even managing to evince interest and curiosity. He discovered that when he just wanted to fool around, shooting bread balls at his friend’s nose, sticking a toothpick into his ribs, or just calling him a “nincompoop,” this guinea pig for his experiments in banality, silliness or conceit had fled his cage. The cage was just empty. His bridge partners were only good for bridge and nothing else; his officemates simply disgusted him; his family poisoned the very air he breathed; and the mere thought of his father made him hate life. There was only one door left through which he might escape, but the effects of his escape were unpredictable. The only door he had left was Rosa Trènor. Why Rosa Trènor, in particular? The nocturnal adventure on Carrer de Muntaner had been a failure. It had been entangled with the anxiety of a promissory note, with an imminent battle with his father, with the fictional illusion of recovering his life of fifteen years before. Naturally, not even glue could hold all this together. Like everything concerning Frederic, it was skin-deep, and came and went without rhyme or reason. But after his falling-out with Bobby, Rosa Trènor’s presence had neither sentimental nor erotic interest, nor the thrill of rebellion and scandal within the routine of a false and nauseating family peace. Rosa Trènor now represented the possibility of companionship and perhaps even friendship. When they had been lovers, years before, Frederic had turned Rosa into the repository of his egotism. He trusted her. He would consult her on anything from the color of a tie to guidance of a moral order on some issue he was looking into. Rosa knew him, she tolerated him, she understood him perfectly. Rosa was what Maria, Frederic’s wife, had never known how to be. With the passing of time, she was spent, exhausted, and less demanding, and he was worn down, defeated, less fussy, and perhaps more indulgent with humiliation. So, perhaps, once she was stripped of her femme fatale patina and he was resigned to putting up with a few pains in the neck, they might achieve a sort of idyll without phony violins and with a merciful abundance of poultices.

And so it was. Rosa took a bit of distance from Mado, on account of the incompatibility between Frederic and Bobby, and she accepted her late night bouquets of camellias more and more infrequently, because Frederic advanced her all the money he could, and more.

Frederic became very familiar with Rosa’s apartment on Carrer de Muntaner. He even came to find some charm in the spectral cat that licked the coffee cup, whose appetite knew no bounds. As Frederic came to discover, she paid her frequent visits by jumping in through the kitchen window. He found it amusing to see her perched on the quilt as he explained to Rosa Trènor, looking grotesque in pajamas the color of a white wine from Alella, some theory he had just come up with on the cultivation of peas or on how to carry out a risk-free abortion.

Frederic interceded on the cat’s behalf. Rosa had the concierge bring her a bit of fish. And the cat got fatter and lost her spectral personality.

One day Rosa told Frederic the story of the stuffed dog. The dog’s master had been a general born in Valladolid, a short, slight man with the voice of an angel, whose wife beat him. The general fell in love with Rosa, and every day they would talk a walk down to the Parc de la Ciutadella, past the monument to General Prim, and visit the zoo. At one o’clock on the dot the general would board the tram. The little dog was a sort of cross between a terrier and a seminarian. It would get ill-tempered and snappy as it walked along beside them. Rosa would bring a couple of sugar cubes for him, which he would catch mid-air, his mouth wide open and his eyes rolling back in his head like an opera singer’s.