Josep Maria de Sagarra - Private Life

“Who knows, who knows,” answered Emili Borràs.

They were a bit thirsty, so to round off the night they stopped off at Villa Rosa.

In those days, Villa Rosa was having a moment of splendor. In addition to the last dregs of the nighthawks and the quota from the cabarets, every night there was a group of air force officers who had recently discovered the establishment and went there to soak their wings in manzanilla sherry and raise the boorish ruckus characteristic of the military. They were good kids, tanned and mildly acrobatic, who had great success with the ladies. The German and Scandinavian element, and above all the Americans, looked after the Gypsies who performed there. They would turn red as bull’s blood, and you had the impression their skin might burst. The boiled front of their uniform shirts would get positively soggy. Some of them turned almost gelatinous, like cooked cod tripe. That night there was a magnificent giant in attendance who could balance a glass of manzanilla on his nose, as two streams of liquid flowed down his face. Maybe it was rash to enter Villa Rosa stone sober on a night like that. To adapt to the boiling pitch of those souls, the prerequisite was a prior alcoholic fever and an undiscerning nose.

It had been a long time since Bobby had been to Villa Rosa. His last memory was awful. The Marquesa de Moragues had asked him to engage two chorines who worked there to dance at her house. The deal was done in the early afternoon, when the establishment was empty and the only thing floating there was the dense air left behind by the expansions of the stomachs and the bottles of wine that had been working at full tilt the night before. In the light of the early afternoon, Villa Rosa felt to Bobby like the state of cerebral sorrow and self-loathing that follows a tumultuous bender. By the side of the counter an extremely fat old Gypsy woman was crying. She had one foot propped up on a foot stool, in exactly the same position as Philip II in the Escorial. The woman’s leg was deformed and wrapped top to toe in a dirty bandage. She was weeping because the pain was getting progressively worse. She said the cause of her ills was a bite from a rabid cat. A thin man, whose skin and clothing were both the color of tobacco juice, was inspecting the bandages and saying they might have to amputate her leg.

The sight of the Gypsy with the bandaged leg haunted Bobby for days. When he and his traveling companions entered Villa Rosa he could still see that old crone bitten by a rabid cat by the side of the counter.

Seated at a table with a bottle of solera sherry before them, Emili Borràs was still talking about Jesus Christ.

Hortènsia, who had traded in her good bourgeois egotism for a Russian soul, found the spectacle of the previous establishment artificial and perfectly commendable. She said everything they had just seen was the “pus from society’s wounds.” The Count, a fan of popular science, said that pus was necessary for the organism to defend itself. He mentioned leucocytes and dead bacteria. Isabel begged them to drop the topic of pus and stop talking about such disgusting things.

Teodora began casting insistent glances at an aeronautics officer who was a friend of hers. The officer was sucking on the nape of a twenty year-old hostess’s neck. She was a bit drunk and very beautiful. When the officer realized that Teodora was watching him, he saluted her smartly, blushed and stopped.

When the Gypsies of the house caught sight of their posh guests, they went over to pay their compliments. Two of them, known as La Tanguera and La Mogigonga for their expertise in dancing and burlesque, finished off the wine the guests hadn’t seen fit to drink. La Tanguera dedicated one of her sublime dances to them, duplicating the delicate and fragile tapping of a wounded partridge.

Emili Borràs made a few Germanic and Freudian comments about flamenco dancing. Hortènsia listened with delight. The Comte rattled on for a while like famed racconteur Garcia Sanchiz but the ladies didn’t take him seriously. Bobby rubbed at his moustache, thinking that he and the ladies and the others and the entire crowd were all a bunch of fools.

They left Villa Rosa at four-thirty in the morning. When they got to the Rambla and jumped into their automobiles it was as if they were waking from a bad dream to find themselves between peaceful sheets, with a drawn bath. They sank into the upholstery, corroborating that indeed it was truly theirs and that nothing horrible had happened to them. Rafaela ran her fingers over her ears, her neck and her wrists to be sure no one had robbed her.

Hortènsia thought vaguely of Raskolnikov, of inverts, of Primo de Rivera, of the Russian soul, of the act at La Sevillana , of Antoni Mates’s wife … But she was very tired and she rested her head on Isabel’s coat. Isabel still had the energy to refresh her lipstick and powder her rouged cheeks.

Just about the same time that Hortènsia Portell reached her house on Passeig de la Reina Elisenda, got undressed, wrapped herself in a Japanese robe, and dissolved two aspirins in a glass of water, in the Grill Room on Carrer d’Escudellers two pairs of police patrolmen were breaking up a group of onlookers who were standing at the door. Inside the establishment things were in disarray. The people sitting at the bar got down from their barstools and stuck their heads into the dining room of the restaurant. There you could see an upended table, and on the floor a sizable circle of wine, a broken bottle, half a filet mignon, a dozen potatoes, and a whole bowl of cheese soup which, sans plate and spread out on the carpet, looked pretty repulsive

In a corner, the restaurant staff and two women who had just arrived were holding up a young woman in the midst of an attack of hysteria, while an utterly ineffectual gentleman, his face blanched with dismay, was dabbing a towel soaked in cold water on his forehead to wipe the blood from a wound caused by a wine bottle. Another group of women was trying to calm a lady wearing a bedraggled beaver coat, her face full of scratches, and the polite gray man who accompanied her. Such a scene in the Grill Room of the time was not unusual, and no one paid it much mind. In the match that had just taken place, no bones had been broken, and the police saw no need to arrest anyone or to trouble any of the actors in the drama. All the owners wanted was to put the whole thing behind them, because there were not yet many people in the restaurant, but soon the regular clientele would begin to arrive.

The lady with the beaver coat and the scratches on her face was Rosa Trènor. Quick to recover, she disappeared in the company of the gray man and a young woman. She had gone there to make a scene, and her work at the Grill Room was done for the evening. The man with the cut on his forehead, Frederic de Lloberola, had them apply a taffeta strip to the wound, which was insignificant. The girl with him was over her attack of hysteria. The waiters cleaned the carpet, set the table with fresh tablecloths, and brought over another bottle of wine, another filet mignon, and another cheese soup.

Rosa Trènor wanted to break up with Frederic, but in her own particular way, which in fact would be like not breaking up. Frederic had had no intention of splitting with her because, oblivious as he was, and seeing other women behind her back as he did, he still found some kind of company and solace in being able to express all the vacuous thoughts that passed through his head to Rosa Trènor in conversations and over dinner. From time to time, a night with her was not all that bad. Frederic thought Rosa was perfectly satisfied with this arrangement, and that the money she had recently asked him for and that he had not been able to give her was of no consequence. Frederic thought her asking for cash was just a casual thing. He thought perhaps she didn’t even need it, and even if she did, she could get along without it. He was convinced that Rosa was an altruist who put no price on her gratitude to Frederic for having renewed their friendship and chosen her as a confidante for such an important life as his.