Josep Maria de Sagarra - Private Life

Hortènsia didn’t know any of them, and she was a bit put out, asking Isabel why, instead of Safont, she hadn’t brought some of those men she thought were more remarkable. Bobby was satisfied, as always, to be in the midst of the ladies’ conversation because, between the squabbles and the henpecking, he never had to express an opinion. He made a bit of cruel fun of Hortènsia, telling her that now she had no choice but to invite the two or three fellows Isabel had mentioned, and her devotion to the Republican cause was going to cost her a lot of money in dinners.

Bobby only spoke of politics when he was among his lady friends, out of courtesy to them, and nothing more.

Many of Bobby’s aristocratic friends from the club had gone over to Alejandro Lerroux, the populist, anti-Catalanist leader of the Radical Republican Party. Bobby found this attitude ignoble. One aristocrat best known for how he had worshiped the monarch and kowtowed to the bygone dictator proposed to him that he join the radical party, because Senyor Lerroux was the only guarantee of their oysters on ice and their poker games. Bobby didn’t want to argue. With just a stiff smile and a slow blink of the eyes he left him frozen in place.

There were some truly abhorrent elements in the Cambra de la Propietat , the real estate authority, and the Foment del Treball Nacional , a regional chamber of commerce. These individuals considered Mr. Lerroux to be such a good fellow that if they asked nicely enough he would bring back the king, reduce salaries to pre-war level, and send them a priest and a civil guard to rub their tummies on nights when they had indigestion.

During the Dictatorship, families that obstinately adhered to a strong morality had been shaken to the core by a kind of social contact that had already taken hold in Barcelona. In those days the world of the demimondaines had been admired only for its natural beauty and for its shamelessness, or for the stories brilliant playboys and disabused artists would tell. Now it was admired, tolerated and appreciated first-hand. A scandalous dancer, who once had merely been applauded from a theater box, would be received years later, not as a sensational number at a private party in someone’s home, but as a close friend of the lady of the house.

Some of the ladies from Hortènsia Portell’s clan, such as Teodora Macaia or the Baronessa de Moragues, started paying visits backstage and attending late-night dinners in questionable company. Things that a true lady of Barcelona or a respectable bourgeoise would not have dared to do a few years before without exposing herself to great scandal and absolute disrepute could now be done coolly and casually, as if it were the most natural thing in the world.

The finest actresses and dancers would go for tea or play bridge with the granddaughters of ladies who had embroidered flags for the Carlist army, ladies who would say an Our Father before fulfilling the intimate acts of the sacrament of matrimony and who saw love as a quasi-sacrifice in the service of the preservation of the species.

These contacts between different social atmospheres occasionally produced pathetic squalls. Still, in general the disasters they produced were nothing worse than a growing flexibility in certain lovely souls, a more peculiar cultivation of reckless behavior or of the unstoppable pursuit of the latest thing, and a more intense secretion in the glands of gossipmongers.

Straitlaced ladies, moralists, and priests preached against what had begun to be called the relaxing of customs. During the Dictatorship, with the aid of local authorities, bishops had imposed punishments and prohibitions with regard to women’s clothing, how much skin could be revealed, and what things couldn’t be done on beaches in the summer.

But despite the prohibitions and the spiritual exercises, what was emerging day by day was the temperament of a more physical, more sporty, more carefree, and, above all, less morally and economically conservative society. And it was not that this represented a rebellious stance, nor was it a rejection of principles. It was just something in the air. It was a system in evolution, and you could even say it happened in good faith. Attitudes and words that entailed a spark of audacity crept imperceptibly into the heart of even the most rigid houses.

With the advent of the Republic, that freedom of association took on an even more eccentric aroma. It was a potpourri of propaganda in favor of divorce and women’s rights, a respect for personal merits that was not exactly under the control of the confessional, the relative muffling of the vociferations of the clergy, nudist and Bolshevik propaganda that circulated with impunity, the dissolution of the Jesuits, and the sense that adultery was not such a tragedy … Indeed, in certain nuclei, all this activated some very hardened tumors of protest and reaction. However, it gave ordinary, everyday people of lukewarm convictions, whose doctrine was limited to getting by, stronger lungs to breathe in whatever might present itself and a more tolerant retina that inclined them toward the refreshing new notion of keeping an open mind.

With the Republic, women of the merchant, middle, and petty bourgeois classes, who might have their own intellectual or journalistic leanings, or might be the daughters or wives of preeminent politicians, came to be fodder for community intrigues or the delicate foam of whisperings at five-pesseta tea parties. And these women might mix with some of the odalisques of the fallen regime who had painted their lips fire engine red to prowl the places of influence, either to try and captivate a public figure, or simply to strut their stuff.

In the society pages of the papers other ladies’ names were added to the list of the two dozen top-drawer names approved by the arbiters of elegance. Having emerged from more modest temperatures, to position themselves for the social success they coveted, many abused the services of beauty institutes, stylists, magazine articles, gigolos, and eccentric cartwheels.

Ladies who had forsworn tea and taken up gin, would still perform a pantomime of disdain for Republican social climbers. Many ladies of the ancien régime stopped going to the Liceu opera house so as not to run into the families of the Republican authorities. It was a tame and thrifty sort of conspiracy.

But as we have said, ladies of a more conciliatory spirit, some of them the former clientele of the dictator’s appetites, went over to the Republic. Under the pretext of concerts, art exhibits, charitable balls and cozier, more private parties, the snobberies of old were thrust together with the new.

All this exposition should serve to prepare the reader for the heterogeneous society that came together at the home of Níobe Casas, the dancer, a few nights after Josep Safont’s debut at Hortènsia Portell’s.

Níobe was the daughter of gypsies from Tarragona. As a child she had eaten grass and crushed tadpoles’ heads amid the thorny and erotic vegetation that surrounds the Pont del Diable . That ancient aqueduct was known as Devil’s Bridge because only the devil can build a bridge to last a thousand years. As long as she was making camp with the gypsies, she was no more significant than a coppery insect. A cat-eater like the rest of her family, at night she would lift her little pug nose to the stars and doze off in the company of a wicked and romantic cricket that would perch on the toasted parchment of her belly and sing songs to her.

One day, when the air held the peculiar pungent aroma of foxtail amaranth, she was carried off in a sack. She spent days upon days confined in long indistinguishable rooms containing pianos, trapezes, horizontal bars, and other instruments of torture. When she was fifteen, not knowing where she came from or how, not knowing anything at all, she found herself dressed up in a tutu and dancing the “Dance of the Hours” in La Gioconda , at the Teatro di San Carlo in Naples.