Josep Maria de Sagarra - Private Life

Emili Borràs was just as eccentric as the count. He was a mathematician who took a great interest in the visual arts and in women’s fashion. He enjoyed this elegant and somewhat trashy world purely as spectacle. Cold, evasive, inconsistent, and fragile in a feminine sort of way, he never let down his guard. Some said he had no blood in his veins. He was the purest example of an intellectual to be found in Barcelona society in those years. Emili Borràs was very successful with women because of his special way of being chic, a bit negligent and apparently offhanded. He was well liked because his conversation was never vulgar. It fluctuated between disconcerting naiveté and putrid cynicism. Emili Borràs was Catholic, and he worked for a living.

Pep Arnau was another member of this group, as was Bobby. The reader will remember that we first ran into him playing baccarat at Mado’s. When we recounted the events of that evening, we didn’t pay much attention to Pep Arnau, nor will we do so now, because, as we said at the time, Pep Arnau’s only distinguishing characteristic was to be fat and innocent as a pig.

Those ladies and those gentlemen parked their two cars in front of the Lion d’Or and went on foot down Carrer de l’Arc del Teatre. It was one o’clock in the morning and the street was simmering with milling shadows. It was full of ammoniac gases and from time to time you might step over a dead cat sleeping its eternal nausea atop a bed of orange peels on the ground.

The ladies were a bit alarmed as they stepped into garbage and repulsive liquids, but they were also full of anticipation, and thrilled to discover who knows what. Lost in inky vagueness, the corners and the narrow streets they were scrutinizing seemed less exciting arteries, feverish with vice than sites of dreadful poverty and filth, resigned and humble desolation. On Carrer de Peracamps, that leads to Carrer del Cid, they caught sight of the cheerless pharmacy-red letters of the great neon sign of La Criolla.

They continued down the street and found themselves on that stretch of Carrer del Cid that had been fixed up rather nicely by the Office of Tourism and Visitor Attraction. These neighborhoods were being spruced up for the 1929 Exhibition, and the procurers were busy hunting for Chinese, blacks, rough trade, and women snatched from the hospital morgue halfway through dissection. They would dress these women up in green skirts and gypsy shawls, pinning a couple of plumped-up chunks of salt cod to their sternums to imitate breasts, then they would hang them with a horseshoe nail to the doors of the most strategic houses.

Mixed in among those women extracted from the morgue, there were others, alive and in one piece, who nonetheless seemed to have visited a salon for dislocation and deformation. Occasionally there would be a sassy wench, or even a pretty one, but her lungs would be soaking in a pool of rotgut. This girl would let out a cry as hoarse as a seal in an aquarium when they toss a rotten sardine in its face. It would tie a knot in your stomach. There were all kinds of men, from perfectly normal sailors, mechanics and workingmen, to pederasts with painted lips, cheeks crusted with plaster and eyes laden with mascara. Among these people whose luck had been shattered sashayed a variety of paupers, cripples and pickpockets who can only be found in that kind of neighborhood. Or maybe it is the neighborhoods themselves that apply a special sort of maquillage. Maybe the very same men set down on the Rambla would be an entirely different thing. In that neighborhood you could see people of humble extraction, such as can be found anywhere, who were not at all picturesque. But there were others, in particular some women attired in smoke, scouring pads, and cats’ skins who you could say might die like fish out of water if you took them away from there. In order to breathe, their veins required a continuous injection of uric acid and rotten cabbage. The taverns were all soaked in tincture of cazalla . This anisette moonshine extracted from the festering of stones may be the substance that best conveys the idea of a perpetual chain on the heart, an irredeemable brutalization. Next to the taverns there were prophylactics stores set off by blue and red lightbulbs, containing rubber, glass, and fabric objects, along with packages of cotton wool. All these things alluded to the catastrophes of sex in a way so vile, so lacking in lyricism, that, combined, they formed a sort of cynical sneer, a repulsive parody of Ecclesiastes, in the heart of the neighborhood. They sang of the vanity of it all, even of the vanity of that sincere, ragged, shameless and poverty-stricken vice.

As if to justify the name Barri Xino , at a bend in the street there was an authentic Chinese man. Old and faded, as if his body were made up entirely of layers of onionskin, he carried a tin can in his hand containing an inch of a black substance that looked like coffee. He seemed close to death. Vendors of substances meant to be chewed alternated mid-street with monstrous beggars exhibiting mutilations that burned the eyes, or some half-naked body with a withered arm twisted behind its back. It was the police, paid by the taverns, who brought these paupers here, to give the neighborhood its final touch of color.

Despite this accumulation of the stuff of pathology, the humanity that resided there seemed to make the most of life, in such a natural and oblivious way that it could easily be mistaken for optimism. Walking through those places, one didn’t even feel the need to button up one’s jacket out of caution. Those ladies and gentlemen at the door of La Criolla didn’t stand out in any way. The neighborhood was accustomed to this kind of visitor. There was already quite a body of literature about the festering quality of the Districte 5è, the official name of the Barri Xino, and both foreigners and curious locals were welcomed at La Criolla with courtesy and normality. Once inside, particularly on the day before a holiday, which was the case that evening, you had to make your way down a compact gauntlet of cotton jerseys, caps, an occasional bowler hat, sailor’s shirts, and even the random elegant trench coat escorting a pair of painted lips with a silver pistol. The visitor’s nose found itself continually cutting through a fluid curtain woven of cigarette smoke, sweat and droplets of rum.

The ladies who had never been to that place before were a little bit disappointed. They had heard such barbaric things about it, and all they saw was a sort of café-club with pretensions to being a dance hall. The establishment was a converted warehouse. The old iron columns that held up the roof were painted to look like palm trees. The ceilings were painted to simulate leaves. The musicians sat in a sort of box. The orchestra was odd and disjointed. The trumpet player was the house eccentric, jumping around the box from one side to the other, and shaking everything up with his metallic convulsions. The eight visitors were given two tables right by to the stage. The dance hall was packed. In the audience there were workingmen from the neighborhood calmly drinking coffee and innocently dancing. They didn’t pay any mind if their partners bumped into a couple of degenerates mid-dance, or into someone who had just stolen a bale of cotton in the port and was celebrating with a plate of blood sausage disguised as a woman. Scattered among the other tables, alongside the anonymous proletariat, were another kind of customer who cashed in on the prestige of the establishment. There weren’t very many of them that night. Some of them wore intentionally effeminate clothing; others dressed like thugs. Some had sclerotic skin, others were disfigured by rickets or tuberculosis, so unrecognizable that you couldn’t tell if they were women or adolescents, or beings from another planet, sadder and more brutal than our own.