Josep Maria de Sagarra - Private Life

Along with the potins about the members of the fallen regime, there was beginning to be new and entertaining gossip about the personalities of the new regime. The brilliant folk of Barcelona have always been rather provincial in spirit, and the most stimulating gossip was always the chatter about things happening in Madrid. Rafaela would quote the words of Minister Indalecio Prieto to show what a boor he was; Isabel and Hortènsia found them very funny. Safont brought fresh stories that met with great approval. Of the morsels that circulated about Barcelona, the most sought-after were the ones about Senyora Casulleres. She was the wife of an important public figure, a beautiful, sassy, and vain brunette who had always lived in the deepest poverty, and was out of her depth with her husband’s new position. Only a few months before, no one had ever heard of this woman, and yet in just days she had become the rage in Barcelona. Monstrous tales circulated about Senyora Casulleres among the ladies of the aristocratic circles that hated the Republic. Some of the things they said about her were true, and some were lies. There was also a lot of talk about Senyora Sabater, a poor, tacky, and grotesque woman who had pretensions to being Madame de Tallien. Senyora Sabater gave tea parties at which she recited poetry before a series of reptilian followers of communism. The prevailing topic among the aristocratic ladies was the debauchery and dirty business of the Republic. In this area, fantasy and calumny achieved the sublime. It was said that the wife of another public figure had purchased and paid cash for jewelry valued at one hundred thousand duros. There wasn’t a single dressing room, confession box, meublé , or nuptial bedroom that hadn’t heard the story of these jewels a thousand times over.

Many ladies were convinced that in order to be hired, the typists and secretaries in the offices of the public institutions had had to sacrifice their virginity to a councilman or a deputy. The most wicked backstairs gossip was the daily bread of spurned women and of ladies who believed that communism consisted of allowing traffic to circulate on Holy Thursday.

All these protests against the new regime, all this sadness at the suspension of military and religious parades, exuded an air of boiled cabbage and local cowardice. All in all, the climate had not changed all that much, and the sentimental life of the country was much the same as it had been before.

The topics that awakened the greatest passion were feminism, female suffrage, and, above all, divorce. As soon as the divorce law was passed, women in the kind of circles that formed around Hortènsia Portell started predicting likely imminent divorces. This led to tremendous conversations and arguments. Hortènsia was in favor of divorce, of women’s suffrage, and of woman in government and anywhere else they might be useful.

A couple of young women asked Hortènsia to give a lecture, but she didn’t have the nerve. They wanted her to talk about fashion and the Republic. When Rafaela heard about it she spread the word far and wide, maintaining that Hortènsia had accepted the invitation. For a few days Hortènsia was a laughingstock among her closest friends.

Isabel Sabadell, quite the Republican and quite a friend to Joan Safont, had not yet given up her old ways. Whenever she could she would seize the opportunity to speak Spanish and cozy up to a ring of young aristocrats who got together in a little apartment to conspire and play the royal march on a gramophone. The poor boys passed the time shouting “¡Viva el rey!” in Spanish at closing time in the cabarets, and proselytizing among prostitutes and bootblacks. Truth be told, they were utterly irrelevant, but since their families were very wealthy and had been prominent during the Dictatorship, Isabel Sabadell and other ladies like her couldn’t help but have a soft spot in their hearts for them, even if afterwards they would delight in explaining their shortcomings.

Hortènsia, who wanted to be a pure Republican, reproached Isabel for this frailty, while Isabel was annoyed by Hortènsia’s cruelty, because in the presence of Safont she presumed to being the most radical of them all, even a communist sympathizer.

Many ladies and many young women, spurred on by boys still wet behind the ears, spoke of Russia with grotesque enthusiasm. Most of these women had no idea what a five-year plan was, but it was considered to be a topic of the most chic and elegant conversation. They discovered their passion for Russia through the Soviet films that were being shown in those days in Barcelona. The local authorities were very open-minded about programming and they coddled this snobbish desire to be à la page . These special sessions where people came to see the most important films of Bolshevik propaganda were showcased by the Cinaes group. The audience was a mixture of the elegant set and those known as intellectuals and artists, but above all it was married ladies accompanied by athletic young men from good families, who applauded wildly at things that were sometimes childish and sometimes deplorable. They considered the monotony and doggedness of Soviet film to be the last word in good taste and refinement.

Despite all their talk, in the world of Hortènsia Portell and other fine ladies like her, everything that was going on in the country, all the changes, which were considerable, were viewed as spectacle. Deep down, none of it really mattered very much to them. Naturally they had a fear of strikes, and a fear of losing their money and their peace of mind, but even this fear was only relative. The sheer full-bellied optimism of these people was hard to subdue. That night at Hortènsia’s house, Josep Safont was a spectacle. Even Isabel saw him this way, for she knew very well that this man was neither of her world nor of her atmosphere. Josep Safont just didn’t fit in, in that air tainted by a bourgeoisie too steeped in the ancien régime . What truly concerned Hortènsia and those ladies was the world of tittle-tattle that unfolded in fifty Barcelona mansions. Still and all, Hortènsia had to be given some credit. She was an honest and generous woman. Her age precluded affairs, and in truth she didn’t desire one. Hortènsia just needed to fill her life, and she did so by pretending to be extremely concerned about politics and the world of the intellect. She would apply a coat of three or four extremely unremarkable ideas to her skin, and the perfume of those ideas accompanied her wherever she went. At that point in time, she felt Republican, because that seemed to be the more intelligent choice and in Barcelona it was beginning to be fashionable for women to lean a bit toward the side of intelligence.

Hortènsia took no risks. If her aristocratic circle criticized her for having had Josep Safont and other revolutionaries and atheists to dinner, she would absolve herself, attributing the invitations to curiosity, the same curiosity that had steered her to the cabarets or the perverts at La Criolla. Hortènsia was Catholic, but very much in her own way and very little in the way of the priests. She believed that she was not a sinner, and that someone like her was beyond all that and could be exposed to all of life’s spectacles. Hortènsia was a self-centered, conservative bourgeois lady. She had nothing to lose if at some point she appeared to espouse divorce and even free love. These questions didn’t affect her in the slightest. Just as in other days she had had actresses with shady reputations, flamenco singers, and generals like Primo de Rivera to her house, now she could indulge herself by inviting a Communist or a Republican like Josep Safont over. Her virtue was not compromised at all.

Josep Safont retreated from the after-dinner conversation at eleven-thirty, on the pretext that he had a party meeting to attend. As soon as he was out the door, Rafaela began to tear him apart. To be contrary, Hortènsia defended him to the hilt. Isabel found him amusing, because she could see the self-importance and puerile vanity in the man’s eyes. She didn’t find Josep Safont at all attractive, physically, but she felt he was neither as foolish and common as Rafaela thought, nor as sublime as Hortènsia made him out to be. Within the governing Republican Party, Isabel thought there were more intelligent and spectacular young men than Safont, and she mentioned a couple of names.