Josep Maria de Sagarra - Private Life

When the condition of the maids in the service of el Senyor de Llinàs began to show — sometimes even earlier — they were let go and they would return to their villages. The illegitimate children of el Senyor de Llinàs collected dung along the roads of all four provinces of Catalonia. One boy who turned out to be a little more clever than the rest entered the seminary. In time he would write a Month of May devotional and die like a little saint.

El Senyor de Llinàs was twenty-five years older than his wife. The only activities he felt any passion for were playing tresillo , a 19th century card game played with the Spanish deck, and eating the tender green walnuts they would send him from his estates. His house was located on Carrer de Mercaders, an immense old mansion with a square garden out of which two palm trees stretched their necks like two condemned men trapped in a well. El Senyor de Llinàs played cards every afternoon with three gentlemen: Don Josep Rocafiguera, a man from Aragon by the name of Ceballos, and the grandfather of the author of this book. Ceballos had the sexuality of a soldier and the soul of a swashbuckler. As the men played cards, Tia Paulina and the other ladies knit woolen socks for el Senyor de Llinàs, with a brazier at their feet and the song of a canary and the mewling of a discontented cat in their ears. Occasionally, they would embroider a mantle for a statue of the Virgin Mary or cut out underwear patterns for the poor of Saint Vincent de Paul.

Ceballos was in love with Tia Paulina, and someone let on about it to el Senyor de Llinàs. This gentleman was jealous in the extreme, more jealous than a tiger. Tia Paulina knew nothing of Ceballos’s great passion, but she noticed that where her husband’s moustache met his jowls it looked for all the world like a Florentine dagger. One day el Senyor de Llinàs said a few choice words to Ceballos. There was a duel. As luck would have it, Ceballos’s bullet went straight to the heart of el Senyor de Llinàs. He dropped his top hat and pistol on the field of honor and fled like a madman. Not long afterwards, he got himself killed fighting for the Carlists in the Seu d’Urgell, just as Savalls was betraying the holy cause by reaching an accord with Martínez Campos at the Hostal de la Corda.

Tia Paulina was widowed at thirty-eight. She sensed that her husband’s soul was destined for hell, but since she couldn’t be entirely sure, she decided her time would be well spent if she devoted the rest of her life to praying for the eternal repose of el Senyor de Llinàs.

From then on, Tia Paulina’s life could have been considered exemplary if the years had not turned her heart into a dried-up, yellowed and acidic artifact. Many thought she had a lemon where her heart ought to be. Where el Senyor de Llinàs had taken the maids down the path of iniquity, Tia Paulina had them singing the “Holy, Holy, Holy” even as they gutted fish entrails. From break of day till nine in the evening, when everyone went to bed, in Tia Paulina’s immense old mansion you could hear the music of the scrub brush, the broom, the feather dusters, the washing bats in the laundry, and the fans for the kitchen fires, accompanying unschooled, tuneless voices endlessly repeating: “Holy God, almighty God, immortal God.” Tia Paulina filled the apartment with birdcages. She had five parrots that also intoned “Holy, Holy, Holy,” as well as a blackbird that whistled it. But Tia Paulina had to be on her guard, because the birds tended to forget the pious singsong as their hearts went out to a little tango popular in those days that went “ Cariño, ho hay mejor café que el de Puerto Rico … ”

Tia Paulina kept six or seven maids because she was a fanatic for cleanliness and her house was endless. There was always a lot of drama among them, because she would get jealous of one and develop an aversion to another. The maids used her, bamboozled her, and filled her ears with gossip and bad faith. When a new one arrived from the village, still warm from cows’ breath and the tongue of a young buck, Tia Paulina would subdue her rebel breast with the wool of the scapulary. If she suspected that the girl had a boyfriend, Tia Paulina would shut herself up in a room with the girl and try to charm her like a serpent. If the girl was pliable, she would succumb to asceticism. If she rebelled, she had no choice but to close the door behind her. Tia Paulina cultivated a sort of special service of stunted, colorless and sexless young women: they all wore habits and they only went out at night once every twelve months, to attend midnight Mass on Christmas Eve.

Before the reformation of the old city of Barcelona, Tia Paulina had never been so far as the Plaça de Catalunya, and had barely set foot on the Rambla, where it meets Carrer de Portaferrissa. The streets she was familiar with were Mercaders, Pont de la Parra, Riera de Sant Joan, Sant Pere més Baix, Carders, Plaça Nova, l’Infern, Ripoll, Catedral, Santa Maria, el Pi, Sant Just and Sant Jaume, and the squares were the Plaça de les Beates and the Plaça Nova. In truth, she could go months and months without leaving the house except to go to mass at the chapel called Capella de l’Ajuda on Sant Pere més Baix. On Sunday she would go twice, early in the morning and for noonday mass. When she went to church she always dragged along her own little folding chair because she didn’t want to sit on the woven rush seats for fear of getting fleas. When white hair and rheumatism began to afflict her, she would have a maid carry the chair. At the noonday mass at l’Ajuda she would stop a while at the door to speak with the few acquaintances she frequented. One of them was Don Manuel Duran i Bas, who attended the same mass, on his wife’s arm. Don Manuel Duran i Bas was Tia Paulina’s lawyer and she doted on him. He was one of the last men in Barcelona to use the top hat in all its splendor. In old age, he had developed a hunchback, and the curvature made him seem very small. His eyes languished under his incredibly hairy and droopy eyebrows, and his moustache — the whitest and thickest in the land — fell over his mouth like a great curtain of sadness. Don Manuel could barely see. He would lift his head, which sank into the stiffness of his crooked back, and through gold-rimmed glasses poised on his nose he would contemplate that toasted almond known as Tia Paulina, puffed up with corsets, underskirts, and petticoats, and the blackest, bleakest fabric the world had ever seen. The four strands of whitish hair she had left had turned yellow as a smoker’s fingers from the potions her hairdresser applied. Atop it all was a timid little mantilla, as forlorn as a hospice.

Tia Paulina talked with Don Manuel about mortgages and the old days. They would also mention a former friend of Don Manuel’s, a girl who had gone to school with Tia Paulina and had died very young in a cholera epidemic.

When Tia Paulina felt the need to make an important confession, she would go to the cathedral and work her jaw for a couple of hours behind the screen of her father confessor. This man was a penitential priest, who could stand in as a surrogate for the bishop when assigning penance. When it was merely a question of what she called “making peace with herself,” she would go directly to l’Ajuda and resolve it with any old parish priest.

The urban reformation of Barcelona had been hard on Tia Paulina. The havoc it had wreaked on her neighborhood obliged her to change her idea of the world’s topography.

Don Tomàs de Lloberola was always very solicitous of his aunt, treating her with exceptional interest. His counterpart in the business of winning her over was Tia Paulina’s godson, the Baró de Gresol.

They kept track of who had paid her more visits throughout the month, and who had sent her the best botifarra sausages when the pig was slaughtered in the fall. Or the biggest ring cake on the day of Saint Anthony of the Asses in June. Or the almond confection known as panellets that had most delighted her on All Souls’ Day. Leocàdia would take the children to visit her. When they were small, Tia Paulina had terrified them. Without fail, their aunt would give them six unces , about three ounces, of candies from l’Abella. They were every bit as acidic as she was. This point counterpoint between Don Tomàs and the Baró ended in a fierce hatred between the two relatives that expressed itself in gossip and tales they would take to Tia Paulina regarding the discourtesies that one or the other of the aspirants to her inheritance had shown her.