Josep Maria de Sagarra - Private Life

Eventually, the general’s wife got wind of the story. The idyll came to an end, and the general died of sorrow. One day at dawn, as Rosa was leaving the Grill Room, she came across the little lost dog wandering up and down the Rambles. It jumped up and put its two little front paws on her beaver coat. Rosa was appalled at its boldness. She let out a shriek, but when she recognized the general’s dog, she started to cry. She gently picked it up, lifted it into the taxi, and sat it on her lap with motherly affection. The dog lived with Rosa for two years until a car ran over it, leaving it stretched out on Carrer de Muntaner, its open eyes near bursting, with a rivulet of blood on its snout. Rosa was desolate. She kept a few garters she no longer used in a cardboard box, and she remembered clearly that one of those garters was the first thing the pitiful nails of the general had touched when she surrendered to their idyll. Rosa took the dog to a taxidermist near the school of the Brothers of the Christian Doctrine, by the Palau de la Música Catalana. He was an old man who desiccated small animals, and he did it on the cheap.

Once the dog had been stuffed, Rosa draped the historic garter around its neck and gave it a home in the place where she worked and slept.

Frederic didn’t see the humor in that military memento perched on the armoire and he asked Rosa if she would sacrifice her souvenir of the general for love of him. Rosa put up a great resistance. One day when Frederic was a bit more recklessly lavish than usual, Rosa gave in to his entreaties, and the following day the ragman took the dog away.

Thanks to these innocent little larks, Frederic was able to forget his family situation and his wife’s bitter laments. He would spend many nights away from home without offering any explanation. Maria didn’t care any more. She felt entirely divorced from her husband and by nature made no sexual demands. Maria had everything she needed with the pipes of her mother’s apocalyptic lungs. The children spent the day at school. The girl had just turned fifteen; the boys were dressing in golf clothes and chewing gum.

They didn’t yet have ideas of their own, but Maria did everything in her power to enlist them in a sort of holy war against Frederic. Her mother went even further.

The idyll between Rosa Trènor and Frederic de Lloberola lasted four months and three days. More or less the same length of time as the demise of Antoni Mates, el Baró de Falset.

HORTÈNSIA PORTELL HAD a grand house with a garden on the Passeig de la Reina Elisenda. She had arranged the main floor of the house to receive visitors and accommodate large groups. There was a very spacious entrance hall with three salons and a dining room on the right, and yet another, smaller, salon on the left. On the upper floor were the rooms that corresponded to the more personal life of the house. The architecture was simple, done in rather good taste, but a little bit shoddy. It was one of those mass-produced houses that at first had looked like stage sets for an operetta and are now feeling the effects of film.

Hortènsia had vitrines full of objects inherited from her great-grandmothers: magnificent fans, tobacco cases, music boxes, slippers, ribbons, and items whose usefulness was a mystery to anyone who was not an expert in all the absurd, old, rancid, constipated, and marvelous bibelots that one keeps in a vitrine.

From the days of modernisme , or Art Nouveau, if you will, Hortènsia preserved a portrait of herself and her husband having hot chocolate in a garden. They are sitting in a couple of rustic chairs painted watering pot green.

Mixed in with the other paintings, there were fake El Grecos, fake Goyas, and fake Riberas. Not that she had a lot of fakes; lately she had been replacing them with fashionable contemporary paintings. She was the only lady in Barcelona with a Matisse and a Derain of the highest quality. From time to time she would purchase something at a local exhibition, on the advice of friends with some knowledge of the field. She was most pleased with her Picasso. The canvas portrayed a long, thin adolescent nude, which scandalized many of the ladies who came to the house. Hortènsia had given it pride of place.

Presiding over the main salon hung the Lloberolas’ historic tapestry, which, as the reader knows, Hortènsia Portell had acquired quite some years before. It showed a scene from the Bible. Jacob, wearing sheepskin gloves, was kneeling at the feet of an Isaac whose hands were full of the fruits of the earth. Isaac had the aquiline nose of a notary public and hair like spaghetti. Rebecca was smiling at them both, holding a bird that looked sort of like a chicken by its feet.

In the background were depicted the sons and daughters of the chosen people. They were waving their arms in the air and making way for a hairy, ruddy, and corpulent man who carried a boar on his hip. It was Esau.

The most important piece in the salon, after the tapestry, was a Louis XVI sofa, admirably pure in its lines and fragile as a nymph. General Arbós, a cannibalistic sexagenarian who weighed one hundred forty-three kilos, developed a habit of sitting on that sofa. This caused the lady of the house great distress.

By this time, the widow Portell had gotten extremely fat. Her exaggeratedly blond hair, her tortoise-shell glasses, and her short round figure made her look like a character from one of those German plays that deal with social or pedagogical topics. Except for her somewhat harsh and loud way of speaking, which smacked of Carrer de la Princesa, Hortènsia didn’t seem to be from here at all. Anyone who ran into her would have thought she was a product of international tourism.

Usually once a year, Hortènsia would throw a party in her home. The main attraction might be a tango singer or, from time to time, an artist of great stature, like Maria Barrientos, the soprano. Barrientos was a friend of Hortènsia’s, though of late their relations seemed to have cooled. Sometimes, giving in to the entreaties of a handful of ladies, she would have a flamenco party in the garden, with bunyols and xurros , fried dough in the form of dumplings or bows, and they would all wear mantons de Manila , voluminous silk embroidered shawls that were a souvenir of the colonial days. This is what they most enjoyed draping over their décolletage, because, the truth be told, the ladies of Barcelona have always had a weakness for flamenco style and all its poses.

The party Hortènsia Portell threw at the high point of the Baró de Falset’s personal persecution complex had no particular artistic theme. In truth, it was mostly an excuse to bring one hundred fifty individuals together to set the leaves on the trees to trembling with their sighs and peals of laughter. The jazz music would exasperate any couples who aspired to continue their conversations as they took a stab at dancing. It was mid-June, and the heat was sticky and tropical.

By eleven the salons were almost full. It was rumored that Primo de Rivera, the dictator, who was in Barcelona those days, might make an appearance. He would be dining at the Cercle de l’Exèrcit, the officer’s club, and had promised to attend Hortènsia Portell’s party afterwards.

A few newcomers, some of them extremely young, situated themselves strategically in the foyer so as not to miss anyone’s entrance.

In the salons, the glow of arms and shoulders was dazzling. A sea of slow, wide waves slightly tinged with blood rose and fell with the rhythmic breathing of creamy rose flesh. From time to time, amid the waves an amphibious medusa would float by in the form of the nape of a neck.

The parade of necklines alternated between the sublime and the abominable. The fashion of the long skirt had not yet taken hold. The flowering of legs and ankles and the occasional distracted knee, and the gamut of chiffon stockings, brought to mind the image of a bar with light, fizzy, multicolored sodas.