Josep Maria de Sagarra - Private Life

In among legs of exquisite style swelled lamentable arthritic extremities, like the grotesque balloons given to children, or legs that were simply sedentary, deformed by consecutive pregnancies. Some of these legs had reached the point of elephantiasis. Salomé Roca, a heavyset woman in a very short silver tunic showed off everything she could with the aggressivity of a satyress.

Lace dresses dominated, especially in black. There were many splashes of white and pink. The occasional burgundy or pea green accompanied the most agile musculatures, and the slenderest arms and ankles of the “it” girls.

Costume jewelry had not yet been invented, and the gathering did not give off that air of later parties, at which ladies were draped in so much colored glass they looked like extras in a pharaonic operetta. At Hortènsia Portell’s party only strings of pearls and well-set diamonds were admitted.

Many of the ladies on the guest list knew Hortènsia only vaguely. Others had very little contact with the world in evidence that evening. They were a bit lost, taking up positions in the corners of the entrance hall, not daring to display themselves under the lights beside the guests who had taken over the sofas and pillows.

The men were distributed between silk and skin, like little black chunks of truffle amid the pink and white flesh of a galantine. Many wandered off on their own, or a trio would corner a young woman and proceed to laugh their heads off. Others went off under the trees to have a smoke.

In the smaller salon there was an assembly of abdomens feeling a bit indignant at the strain of the tailcoat and the demands of the wing collar. These abdomens had to make do with the cheeks of sixty year-olds suffering from chronic bronchitis.

Every so often, some old-school gentleman would go and dip his white moustaches into the plump perfume of a more tender cleavage and return with an anecdote fluttering delicately between two fingers, like a butterfly. He would then release it between noses and laughter to spread a bit of honey and cynicism on their arteriosclerotic lack of imagination.

The dance floor was getting crowded, but many young men were not dancing. This was when saxophones were beginning to be intoxicated with the blues and the black bottom. The Charleston had moved on to skid row. This was the high point of the red-hot days of Josephine Baker. Half the men at Hortènsia Portell’s that night had devoured “la Baker” at the Folies-Bergère, as she emerged from her silvery sphere to reveal the most dynamic India rubber haunches ever to be seen.

Many girls felt the same veneration for “la Baker” that their aunts had felt years before for the Virgin of Montserrat, whose image had been blackened by the smoke of centuries of candlelight. It was just a question of directing one’s devotion to one black skin or another, and in Hortènsia Portell’s milieu there were many more advocates in the ranks of colonial paganism. Milans del Bosch, the Civil Governor of Barcelona, did not share with the tender dancers of the black bottom their veneration for Josephine Baker, and he ordered the removal of a portrait of the Negress on exhibit in a record store, on the grounds that it was pornographic.

Hortènsia Portell allowed her guests absolute freedom of movement. Groups formed according to the magnetic attraction of affinity and friendship. Many bridge partners gathered around a hope chest as if ready to play. Without the table and the cards, lacking an ace of clubs or a king of hearts to pinch between them, some guys’ fingers were at a loss; they couldn’t even manage to smoke. The most desperate fingers would dig into some sweet upper arm and drag it off to the garden to tell whatever latest story wasn’t too corrosively blue to tell, making do with a few drops of curaçao in a glass of water.

With their décolletages and their nighttime coifs, the women lost personality. Their dresses had too many slits and openings and too much skin was left to the elements. Their souls, and even their malice, fell flat. Something like what happens at the beach. In general, women are much more skilled at sustaining their erotic magnetism on an afternoon stroll, at a hippodrome, or at twelve o’clock Mass than by the side of a swimming pool.

In the presence of so much cleavage on so many middle-aged women, such an unnatural pneumatic display, normal men feel as though they’ve been transported to one of those commercial brothels in the south of France in which all the flesh is high quality and no holds are barred. These things throw one’s palate off, and end up producing contradictory sensations.

Even so, some admirable specimens still stood out between the overall provocation and the indistinguishable black tie. An unabashed collector of trophies of the fair sex might have admired anything from the arms of Clementina Botey, pure white with only a tenuous blush of pink, to the shoulder of the Comtessa de Mur, so criminally silken as to be almost metallic, and dense with an intense and fragrant pigment that brought to mind heated Caribbean hallucinations.

Hortènsia sat beneath the tapestry, on the Louis XVI sofa. The most respectable ladies were arrayed around her. The Widow Xuclà was wearing an old-fashioned egg yolk-colored dress of silk moiré, her bosom covered with constellations of diamonds. Rafaela Coll and her sister, the Marquesa de Cardó, two old poker players, flanked Pilar, guarding her like two prudent opponents in an exhibition game to be sure the widow didn’t try any dangerous sprints. This group was dominated by the hippopotamian anatomy of la Senyora Valls-Darnius, who had vowed, ever since her husband pulled off a considerable swindle in a cement deal, never to utter another word in Catalan. She had also let the word get out that she was in the market for a young man who would give her a tickle from time to time, no matter what the price. This lady had something to say about everything and she could get a little tiresome. The most amusing member of the Restoration équipe — this team had been in the flower of its youth when Spain lost its colonies in 1998 — was Aurèlia Ribas, of the Ribas silk merchants, as they were known. She had three brothers, all of whom were marquises, but she had been left without a title. She was nothing but the widow of an insignificant lawyer. Aurèlia had the face of a fish; she called to mind the rigid, inexpressive, silvery profile of the porgy. She was seventy-eight years old and they had just removed a tumor from her uterus. Poor Aurèlia was so simpleminded that she cried over this misfortune, as a young woman would have cried if the operation had made it impossible for her to have more children. Needless to say, Aurèlia’s whimpering about her uterus provoked the gentle laughter of the poker ladies.

The Comtessa de Sallent, the Widow Xuclà’s sister-in-law, presided over a different group, composed of exemplars of the fusty nobility. These noble ladies, in general, dressed in a more lackluster fashion, and made less use of beauty salons than those whose titles were fresher. Some of these ladies were truly awful and positively turtle-like. The Comtessa de Sallent herself, despite proceeding directly from a lateral branch of the Cardonas, looked and dressed like a chestnut vendor and spoke a Castilian studded with as many hard, greasy expressions as lardons on a Lenten flatbread. Next to the Comtessa de Sallent, Teodora Macaia had the magnificent and unapproachable majesty of a bird of paradise. Others, like the old Marquesa de Figueres, were embarrassed by their ridiculous necklines exposing their deteriorated skin. They didn’t dare look up, and they spoke in a whisper, as if they were saying the rosary.

Occasionally a blend of gardenias and bad faith would appear, laughing uproariously, brandishing the flaming helmet of her hair and mortifying the pearls on her breast. Such was the case of the young Baronessa de Moragues, a manufacturer of rubber objects, deeply vulgar, but also deeply exciting.