Josep Maria de Sagarra - Private Life

Don Tomàs’s two sisters, Clàudia, the spinster, and Anneta, who was married to Don Ramon de Francolí, each plotted while clinging to her aunt’s skirts. Collectively, thanks to all her nieces and nephews, her feet never touched the ground. Despite her terrible avarice, when economic disaster befell Don Tomàs, Tia Paulina helped her nephew out a bit. As Don Tomàs didn’t want to abuse her generosity, what he did was to multiply his acts of solicitousness and tenderness. He would say “Tia …” and “Ay, Tia …” and “But Tia …” as if angels were dictating to him. Don Tomàs would pet her and prance before her like a dog with honey on its tail.

Even before that period of economic anxiety, every summer the Lloberola nieces and nephews geared themselves up for Tia Paulina visit to their respective estates for some little part of the season.

When she was at the Lloberola house, Leocàdia was so eager to be the perfect hostess that it would make her sick. Nothing was ever to Tia Paulina’s liking, and she had very special requirements. Every morning a battle raged between Leocàdia and the cook. Tia Paulina always complained of the cold. Even when the heat was asphyxiating, poor Leocàdia had to keep the balconies closed so her husband’s aunt would not catch a chill. They went to the extreme of killing two pairs of peacocks because the birds’ morning squawks were too raucous and disturbed her sleep. When they went for a walk down a country lane and saw a couple of farm laborers coming towards them, they would step to the side or fall back, to avert any unpleasantness for Tia Paulina in case one of the farmers slipped and used a coarse expression.

The last few years, Leocàdia had had to put up with tremendous rudeness and infinite oddities from Tia Paulina. Despite her extremely advanced age, she still had a clear head and provoked as much torment as ever. Don Tomàs de Lloberola’s last hope lay in Tia Paulina’s inheritance. Shut up in his apartment on Carrer de Mallorca and reduced to utter precariousness, Don Tomàs thought the inheritance might still set things right. His aunt didn’t spend a cent, she simply amassed revenue. According to the Lloberolas’ calculations she had a considerable fortune.

But neither Don Tomàs, nor his sisters, nor the Baró de Gresol could have foreseen the dark beast that would undo all their machinations. Naively, they did not take into account another person who, without paying visits, or sending ring cakes, or slitting defenseless peacocks’ throats, still held the acidic lemon of Tia Paulina’s heart in his hand. The hand was cold, unctuous, servile, and disposed to do whatever was necessary to squeeze that lemon dry. The person was Tia Paulina’s confessor, Mossèn Claramunt, the penintential priest of the cathedral.

Mossèn Claramunt had been reared, one might say, on the teats of the Lloberolas, a product of the munificence of Don Tomàs’s father, and of Don Tomàs himself. In Tia Paulina’s final years of existence he exercised an absolute ascendancy over that good lady’s heart. The sagacious priest delicately insinuated to her that all her relatives only loved her for the assets of her inheritance. While he was at it, he revived her fear of the possible damnation of el Senyor de Llinàs, leading her to believe that the life of chastity, devotion and sacrifice she had lived would not be sufficient to expiate the great sins of the deceased. When she made her confessions, the priest instilled terror in her, portraying her as a somewhat ungenerous person, too in love with her money, and lacking in devotion to charity and pious works. Fear spread throughout Tia Paulina’s body. The sagacious priest hinted delicately at a subtle draft of a will and testament. Tia Paulina was so pleased with it, she committed it to memory, but the priest didn’t entirely trust her, and he used her fear to press her further. Tia Paulina was on the far side of eighty and her mind was not what it used to be. She let herself be absolutely dominated by that fear and even came to have visions. E Senyor de Llinàs would appear to her, naked, with a chain around his neck, surrounded by flames. Instead of comforting her, the priest embellished the pathos of the apparition. When Tia Paulina went to the home of Martí i Beya, the notary, to write her will, the canon accompanied her. As if the will were not enough, Mossèn Claramunt started siphoning off money on the pretense of masses and charities, and Tia Paulina surrendered it to him, kissing his hands all the while. All her stocks and securities, and all her cash, found their way to the canon’s bureau. Mossèn Claramunt had taken control, and as custodian he was free to distribute, as he saw fit and to his liking, an amount that came to more than a million pessetes.

Tia Paulina spent the last five years of her life completely disabled, in a mortifying state of semi-imbecility. The poor maids had to bathe her and do everything for her. They fed her sips of soup as if she were a child. Leocàdia and her sisters-in-law helped them out. Tia Paulina still recognized everyone. Though she could only speak with difficulty, she showed a great disaffection for all the women who were caring for her. Yet if Mossèn Claramunt ever came to see her, the eyes of that poor dim-witted old woman would show a bit of light and her sunken mouth, monstrously deformed by paralysis, would do its best to mimic a sort of smile.

Tia Paulina died two days after the inauguration of the Exposition on Montjuïc. She was eighty-eight years old and for four months she was nothing but a skeleton under a scrap of skin. All that was left of her was a fragment of lung that went through the motions of breathing, and bowels that couldn’t digest a thing.

The priest anointed her with the holy oils and Leocàdia closed her eyelids. Her nieces, Clàudia and Anneta, took charge of dressing her in the habit of the Third Order of Saint Francis and placing the rosary from her first communion between her fingers.

When Martí i Beya, the notary, read Tia Paulina’s will, Don Tomàs had a fit of ferocious rage. Then he simply crumpled. He could never have predicted this. He couldn’t have imagined that Mossèn Claramunt would do such a thing to him. He could imagine it from his sisters, or from that finicky cold fish, the Baró de Gresol, but never from his priest. Tia Paulina had left everything, absolutely everything, for pious works and beneficence. Doctor Claramunt was the sole heir of confidence with absolute liberal faculties. Not one miserable legacy, not one mingy thought for anyone in the family, nothing. The poor maids who had sacrificed their lives for her, the unfortunate Carmeta who had served her for forty years — a dumb martyr to the brazen disrespect of the departed — there was nothing for them either. Fortunately Tia Paulina was already in her grave because the maids were so enraged that they would have spit upon her cadaver and cut out her heart to feed it to the cats.

Never has a dead woman gone to the other life to such a litany of shattered voices or such raw and direct indignation.

Claramunt the canon merely said: “ Bueno, bueno, bueno , such a holy lady, such a pious lady, bueno, bueno, bueno …”

There was no way Don Tomàs could take it in. It was too much. His only hope, his only lifeline, wickedly burned, destroyed by a scheming clergyman dominated by the desire for money, by utterly sordid avarice!

The meeting of Don Tomàs and the priest was sublime. Never had such liturgical smiles and grimaces concealed such moldering hatred. Never had anyone seen the likes of the priest’s gall and the marquis’s indignation. It was the battle of the sea lion and the crocodile, an encounter between the ice of the Antarctic and the hot mud of African rivers.

It seemed impossible that two hidebound Catholics, two remnants of militant adherence to the Carlist cause, two pallid shades of reaction, one clad in the robes of the father confessor, the other in the stain-spattered jacket of a marquis, could be reduced to the incontinence of a dust-choked highway, to the fury of two bilious coachmen, tongues saturated with aïoli.