Josep Maria de Sagarra - Private Life

Guillem let go of Leocàdia, and made a beeline into the bathroom. He soaped himself up from head to toe, and let the cold shower fall with all its force onto his chest. Guillem stretched out his arms, clenched his jaw, and smiled. But this time it was a ruthless smile, with all the glee of a wild animal.

IT HAD BEEN FIVE years since the Baró de Falset drilled a bullet into his head. In those five years, the public life of the country had undergone quite an evolution. Events of glorious transcendence had taken place in Barcelona. The most brilliant moments were marked by the 1929 Exposició Universal in Montjuïc. The entire parade of souls the reader had occasion to contemplate one night at a party thrown by Hortènsia Portell completed the final lap of its peacock promenade. Firecrackers burst from their eyes and streamers flowed from their mouths. The summer of 1929 was a season of phosphorescence: the most lacquered chassis, the most pearlescent yachts festooned with the most profuse bunting combined to dazzle all the bootblacks from Almeria who bent to their trade at the foot of the Rambla around the monument to Columbus and on the sidewalk cafès of the Plaça de Catalunya. Cabarets once again exuded chilled champagne, as in the good old days of World War I. Barcelona’s hotels were overwhelmed; anyone with an extra cot or a room ordinarily devoted to fleas had a canon from Extremadura or a fishmonger from Portbou as a boarder. Some even went so far as to lay mattresses on the rooftops and use the lightning rods for hangers. Barcelona was bubbling in a stew of grandeur and it was every man for himself. Eyes, cheeks, noses, and sexes found infinite room to play. Nocturnal parties during the exhibition were truly a dream, a prodigious sight that horrified the people of Barcelona. “Where will the millions come from to pay for such extravagance?” said the man on the street, carrying a child in each arm and a little dog sticking out of his vest pocket. And it’s the man on the street who will have to pony up so that all the blue, green, and pink mystery of the colored fountains of the Palau Nacional can rain down ballets russes , St. Lorenzo’s tears and otherworldly foam onto his necktie.

Dinners at Ambassadeurs, la Rosaleda, Miramar, and their more economical versions at the Hostal del Sol and La Pèrgola, together with the wine and roasted almonds of the Patio del Farolillo, served to expand the gastric unconsciousness of the country. Anyone with five duros, or even without them, went to Montjuïc to see the Exposition. At closing time, the Rambles and the cabarets were packed to the gills. At the end of the day the American fleet would spew out a stream of giant toy sailors dressed like children, who would gorge themselves on sweet sherry and the high-octane alcohol known as aiguardent, later toppling onto benches or carrying women around on piggy back. Then a squad of some kind of officers, spiffy and loose-limbed as a Charleston, would beat them down with billy clubs and pile them into a big old wagon. When they reached the Porta de la Pau they would toss them into the launches and the sailors would tumble in with a plop, like bales of wet cotton.

The inauguration of the stadium was a sublime fusion of aristocracy and democracy. Never had such a thing been seen. All the top hats of the king, his sons, his brother-in-law, all his gentlemen, all the dross from the municipalities and provinces, and all the parasitic bureaucrats of the moment, served as chimneys for the smoke of enthusiasm. Europe would be hard put to have witnessed on any other occasion a display of more resplendent top hats, their very skin composed of pure mineral coal. That afternoon the great belly of Primo de Rivera, wearing a paisley vest the color of cognac, rubbed up against the jackets of the people. Sixty thousand hats saluted the dictator and the kings of Spain. The royal daughters, les infantes , sat quietly in the central loge, wearing vaporous dresses made of strawberry ice: they were tall, subdued, somewhat sad young women.

The day of the inauguration, the brand-new Plaça d’Espanya saw humanity multiply as if people were ants, or as if all the ants in the country had been blown up with bicycle pumps and then rushed off to steal jackets and skirts from their respective haberdashers or dressmakers.

On that day were written the first lines of a hymn that seemed as if it would never have to end. It was the hymn of the sex and the belly of Barcelona. The laborers from Murcia who had come north to work in construction toiled to a java rhythm. These Murcian men, dark as coal, were too busy sweating blood to think about striking. The union heads who had escaped Martínez Anido’s bullets were out of the country; the ones left behind to live high on the hog basically ogled the legs of showgirls on the Paral·lel and drank the anise water the chief of police would treat them to. Barcelona had forgotten all about the days of politics, pistols and bombs. It had forgotten about virility. Its only creed was those multicolored lights that shone every night from the Palau Nacional. People barely knew the names of their councilmen or provincial representatives. All they knew was that Foronda was in charge. Mariano de Foronda y González Bravo, the Marquès de Foronda, was a Grandee of Spain and the Director of the Exposició Internacional. Foronda was everything, greater than the dictator, greater than the king. The board of the Exposició Universal, under the direction of Milà i Camps and the Baró de Viver, would do anything that struck Foronda’s fancy. Anyone who was more or less thick-skinned or willing to bow his head would be tossed a bone. Colonels, police, canons, and employees from the department of revenue all revealed their troglodytic rapacity with a despicable lack of shame. Milà i Camps, President of the Barcelona provincial government, went a little off his rocker and started to believe he was Lorenzo di Medici. He called in every possible painter, sculptor and goldsmith, and rendered his madness on the walls of the Palau de la Generalitat in the most awful and grotesque murals ever painted. A team of unscrupulous artists interpreted the most reactionary history of Spain to his personal taste. The worldview of this fanciful aristocrat became a sort of madhouse of Gothic peaks. Rubió i Bellver, the architect, pumped his head full of hot air to make his Gothic folly even more monstrous. Milà i Camps wanted the Toison d’Or, he wanted to be viceroy of Catalonia, and he wanted to enter the cathedral in a carriage drawn by all the lions in the zoo at the Parc de la Ciutadella. Back in Madrid they let him be distracted by all these twinkling childish amusements and gave their orders directly to Mariano de Foronda, who was not only the director of the Exposició Internacional but also, and more importantly, of the electric tramway company of Barcelona. At one point, the Baró de Viver was on the verge of being hanged from the prickly dyed moustaches of the Marquès de Foronda, lord and master of the trams and the money of Barcelona.

The image of the Sacred Heart of Jesus was enthroned in every military headquarters and officers’ club. These were places where poker was played and the murder of prostitutes was primed. Like the time a poor girl was thrown off a balcony on the Passatge dels Escudellers, her kidneys run through with a sword that had made its name in the disastrous wars in Africa.

The bishops and archbishops fanned the flames of this reactionary orgy. The priests and canons they sent to Barcelona to survey the treasures of the Palau Nacional — over five thousand pieces of art from all over Spain — consumed two thousand liters of manzanilla sherry daily, and all the meat from all the bulls killed in the Monumental and Arenes bullrings was reserved for them in its entirety. A line of canons formed to eat a sandwich made from the first bull. The dictator resuscitated the mentality of the “dandy generals” who were the consorts of queens, and of the petty loyalist defenders of King Charles who turned up the heat on bordellos and sacristies to distract the people with incense or desire, according to their predilections. At heart, the dictator had the ridiculous charm of a Tartarin. In this regard, and in others, he put one in mind of General Francesc Savalls i Massot, the colorful and hapless leader of the Carlist wars who somehow always found a way to land on his feet.