Josep Maria de Sagarra - Private Life

A jaunty team of young married ladies and single ladies at liberty made up the most numerous group, with the most male components. This group exuded an aroma of hard liquor and grass from the golf course. In general, this team was composed of the prettiest and the most risqué “music hall” toilettes. Among them, flashing sparkling teeth and cherry-pink gums, were a few young women from the high aristocracy of Madrid, newly married to Catalan nobles or local industrialists. These Madrilenyes had the delicate bitterness of a peach pit, and were better at sustaining a more off-color and perhaps more intelligent conversation.

For some reason, the Dictatorship had facilitated a feminine trade between Madrid and Barcelona in that world that called itself aristocratic. Thanks, too, to the Dictatorship there was a resurgence of grotesque pomp, exhibitionism, and traffic in noble titles. With parades of gold and uniforms and military fanfare, the regime of the time buttered up the base vanity of shopkeepers and petty nobles. Many of them had never been anyone, and their utter insignificance had had no other initiative than to collect the rent on their properties and redeem the coupons on their bonds, always pinching pennies and fearful of falling into poverty. In the years of the Dictadura, these people felt a sudden desire to spend and to show off, to see their names in the newspapers and their wives four meters from the queen, with a gigolo, and to sponsor a flag-raising in some little town on the coast. Their air of parvenus and bottom feeders rested like a spider web or a strip of leather from a carpet beater on the dress shirt of many of the gentlemen who sauntered through that party and the infinite public and private feasts that were taking place in those daysin Barcelona.

Some gentlemen from fusty families had come to realize they were no longer of any relevance and had been relegated to the dust bin by the democratic and industrial policies of the country. Those gentlemen who had been content during the war to cut down the forests on their estates as they bred canaries and did spiritual exercises, surfaced at the party with all the shiny hardware of their coats of armor and their inanity. Many of the children of these families held positions in the parasitic bureaucracy that sprang up in Barcelona as the 1929 Exposition drew near, with the proliferation of public works underway all over town. The people who worked in the Treasury, the Civil Government, the Bank, the Customs office, were almost all from the province of Extremadura. They lived a separate, resentful, life during that sentimental expansion of Barcelona. Under the dictatorship, they, too, invented titles and uniforms and they, too, introduced glossy, pneumatic wives and sassy, carnivalesque creatures who were accepted by the practical bourgeoisie.

Hortènsia Portell didn’t sympathize by a long shot with the deluge of tawdry pomp of the times, but she found herself, and most of her friends and relations, caught up in the game. She was in her element, like almost all the fine bourgeois ladies of the period, with a taste for public display and exhibition. Hortènsia was a weak woman, and she couldn’t say no to anyone. At heart she was very tolerant and liberal, but lacking in deep-rooted convictions. It was this temperament — perfumed like her skin with superficiality and distraction — that invented those grand eclectic gatherings at her home.

Because that night on the Passeig de la Reina Elisenda, alongside that whole empty, déclassé world, Hortensia had also invited people who had played a role in the old Catalanist political life. These were men who stood apart from the masquerade, including the occasional sensible businessman, skeptical grayhair, or intelligent young mien.

Hortènsia had brought together exactly the sort of mélange that can always be found at pompous Barcelona gatherings. A mélange of this sort is the result of improvisation, rapid growth, and insufficient review of credentials. It is also the result of a somewhat materialistic world, in which the brand and price of an automobile is paid respect even before the person ensconced within has been identified. The occupant is then extended moral credit and elegance credit in proportion to the price and brand of said automobile. All this dressing up as aristocratic scarecrows that had been the consequence of the First World War was spurred on further by the mentality of the Dictatorship.

If the conversations of all the different groups had been placed side-by-side they might have produced the effect of Horace’s monster, with the peculiarity that each of the monster’s members would have been gnawing at the other.

The most peppery tongues belonged to those fifty years and over; the most airy lungs would glide back and forth from tangos to love and from love to tangos.

Most of the young men’s dialogue centered on chassis, car bodies and gonorrhea. These conversations, in a Catalan spoken to the tune of a zarzuela , sounded like a bumblebee buzzing, smelled like mineral oil, and were tinted the color of permanganate.

Among the more serious political topics were timidly broached, and Romanesque art might be discussed, along with the half dozen most highly valued legs at the party. Great Barcelona events were spoken of with satisfaction, from the construction going forward on the Plaça de Catalunya to the two thousand priests from a whole range of Spanish dioceses who would be coming for the 1929 Exposició Universal. These canons would check out the objects on display in the Palau Nacional , the main exhibition space of the fair, and then stroll down the Rambla in mufti, smoking cigars. In certain male circles, anticlericalism was in vogue.

The ladies in the tapestry room were all aflutter. Many didn’t believe the dictator would come. Hortènsia smoothed their feathers. Shrill as a parrot, the young Marquesa de León squawked in Spanish for everyone to hear: “I saw Miguel this afternoon, and he assured me he was coming.” These particulars offered up by the marquesa caused a few old ladies to snicker, as it was going around that she and Primo de Rivera were in a dalliance.

The arrival of Conxa Pujol, the Baronessa de Falset, caused a commotion, as she was coming without her husband. She was escorted by her in-laws, who looked as if their only reason for coming to the party was to accompany her.

It was the first time that Conxa had attended such an event without her husband. She was at the peak of her great beauty. Conxa must have been thirty or thirty-five years old. All the men’s eyes clung like leeches to her cleavage. Her skin was the most fascinatingly foreign and dreamy product ever to grace the streets of Barcelona.

Conxa’s presence stirred up a great deal of commentary. The topic of Antoni Mates was vividly and impertinently present. Everyone had his own personal version of the famous cotton dealer’s state of mind. Many claimed he had gone mad. In one group, they secretly exchanged shady references, but the explanations were completely off the mark. Without a doubt, the main source of these references was the Baró de Falset’s own behavior, and, at most, some particular detail from the market scare, because, in fact, Guillem de Lloberola had not used any of his arsenal against the baron.

Conxa made her way over to the jaunty team after dropping a few crumbs for the old ladies and allowing herself to be subjected to a string of malicious questions.

Hortènsia escaped from the rheumatic team and went over to breathe in a bit of the fragrance of freshly-mown grass that surrounded Conxa Pujol. The baronessa’s only explanation was that her husband was a bit weary, but she said she would not under any circumstances have missed Hortènsia’s big night.

Among the men who decided to wag their tails in the vicinity of Conxa Pujol’s stockings was a young man with curly hair and the face of a child who said a couple of words amid the hurly-burly of men who were melting over the baronessa’s skin. Clearly that young man was not part of the scene, because many asked who he was.