Josep Maria de Sagarra - Private Life

Miquel adored Níobe, and had written fifty-two articles establishing parallels between the gypsy woman and Santa Teresa de Ávila. More than one young nincompoop who ventured to read this Molieresque charlatan would cut out his articles and read them to the poor wenches who went out to bare it all onstage at the Bataclán or the Moulin Rouge. Miquel the essayist also frequented the afternoon sessions at these places in the company of his wife, the daughter of a usurer, who had become more artful than her husband. With his wife’s money, Miquel the essayist found a way to become a man of refinement without ever having to bend a single vertebra.

That night Miquel was going to read a longish essay on the thighs of Níobe Casas and the philosophy of imminent states. With all Miquel’s philosophy, the most he came up with were garbled and unamusing obscenities that Amèlia Nebot found sublime.

Salazar the banker, whose parents were Castilian, was born in Roda. Rich, carefree, fat, and prone to laughter, he attended the session not so much to see the dancer as to see if he could get something going with Senyora Casulleres. One of Níobe’s admirers was Renom, a deputy in Parliament, who was a lean, gray, and silent man. He had once secured funding for a dance recital that Níobe had done in the Palau de Projeccions theatre. He never lifted a finger after that, but he felt that gave him the right to spend hour after hour lying at Níobe’s feet, with the face of a dessicated lion or tiger converted by the capitalist system into an expensive rug.

There were half a dozen poets at the session, too. Some of them were fine young men, unpretentious and full of good faith, who had no other defect than that of taking seriously the most poetic poet of them all, by the name of Sabartés. What Sabartés shared with Níobe was her blackness, but his was confined to his shirt, his cuffs, and his fingernails. Sabartés was a member of the penya of the desperate. He had pulled off forty-cèntim scams. Women would buy him half a cafè au lait . You could say he was the Barcelona equivalent of the kind of poetic bohemians who still frequent the Café Universal or the Café Colonial in Madrid. Sabartés performed in establishments off the Rambla; midway down Carrer Sant Pau, Carrer de la Unió, Carrer Nou, or Carrer d’Escudellers. However, he didn’t dare pontificate as yet at the sidewalk café of the Lion or the Cafè del Liceu, or La Granja, or Gambrinus. The world of intellectuals who couldn’t quite make it to the Rambla was quite sizeable at the time. Many had been to jail, and not precisely in the section reserved for political prisoners. Sabartés had not yet suffered this fate. In a word, he was a poor devil whose tongue and heart were made of pus. Two of the poets in Sabartés’s orbit were members of the Swimming Club and owned a car, but they never let him ride in it.

Cascante, the musician, and Corminola and Saladrigues, the sketch artists, completed the one hundred per cent transcendental sector of the meeting. Saladrigues did lead pencil reproductions of well-known pornographic postcards at a very good price. Corminola only drew gas burners. The two of them were famous for something else, but they were both excellent young men. Cascante played exclusively for Níobe, and in the summer he played the saxophone under the tents at neighborhood and village fairs.

Alongside all those characters there were people like the Comte de Sallès. No one could ever have imagined how that delicate man would react to the Republic. When he saw the royal disaster, the count, who had been a close friend of the deposed king, and of the few kings still standing in Europe, had adopted an intelligent and tolerant attitude. Instead of making a fuss and rushing to dry the tears of the Marquesa de Perpinyà at the Portbou border crossing, the count betook himself to the Hotel Formentor in Mallorca in the company of a young Chilean woman. There he meditated copiously on love and politics, and after mulling it over a good while he decided that things weren’t going all that badly and that the best thing an aristocrat could do was to aid in the consolidation of the Republic and advocate for full-blown Catalanism. Naturally he did neither of these things. On his return from Mallorca, he settled into an armchair at the Club Eqüestre and tickled his beard, just as he had always done. On the occasions when he took a break from his armchair, he would water the orchids in his garden and tend to his scientific correspondence. Teodora Macaia convinced him that Níobe was just the thing for him. The count, deferential and extremely polite to all the scoundrels and paupers who congregated around Níobe, opted for enthusiasm, wiping his British nose with a handkerchief and assuming a cosmetic smile that lasted all night long.

Another of those society admirers was Senyora Sabater, the wife of the prestigious politician of the same name who, as we said in previous pages, gave communist teas and recited her own poems between cookie and cookie. This woman had a very large head and was such a font of idiotic conversation that the two lovers she’d had didn’t have the heart to extend the relationship beyond a month.

The most exultant of the Republican ladies, the one with the most opinions, the one who attained the greatest heights of verbal incoherence and wasn’t afraid to shoot off her mouth on any topic at all, was Senyora Casulleres. Salazar the banker devoured her with his eyes. Senyora Rull and her daughters Adela and Conxita were particular friends of Níobe’s. Adela and Conxita were fresh, doughy young women, with all the flavor of a legume salad, who were open to the generosity of any fingers in their vicinity.

Aside from Teodora Macaia there were a couple more whom the reader is familiar with: Conxa Pujol, the widow Baronessa de Falset, and Guillem de Lloberola. The baronessa was the last to arrive. Níobe allowed her to stroke her silvery fingernails gently, and soon after the concert began.

Amèlia Nebot, standing, and Cascante, sitting at the Steinway, interpreted the following program: “Berceuse juive,” de Darius Milhaud; “Villancico del corazón asesinado por las penillas del alma,” a cantata by Cuérnigas, an Andalusian composer; “Egloga piscatoria,” by Respighi; “Rondeau,” by Machault; and a sort of blues for saxophone, piano and voice by Sagristà. This fledgling musician had put music to a lyric from Ausiàs March, the Valencian renaissance poet who warned that only sad lovers need read his writings: Qui no és trist de mos dictats no cur . Young Sagristà was on the saxophone.

The audience listened to the concert with vehement passion and Pliocenic sadness. The favorite piece of the evening was the villancico.

When the concert began, Níobe fled so as not to have to listen to Amèlia Nebot, and to prepare for her own dances. She appeared cloaked in a trench coat of pumpkin-colored leather, which she quickly removed. She didn’t end up entirely naked. Out of concern for the neophytes she had put on the Spanish fly cache-sexe. The paintings she had applied to her skin were pipes, Pernod bottles, decks of cards and bowler hats, all in black and white, interpreted in the cubist mode of Juan Gris.

Cascante never strayed from a single run of chords: an obsessive South African monotone he had come up with himself. According to experts, Cascante had lifted it from an American film titled Trader Horn . Níobe did three dances: “ La fumeuse d’étoiles ,” “ Paprika ,” and “ L’artério-sclérose .” In the midst of this cosmic absurdity, Níobe had a few moments of graceful lubricity. All the considerable bulk of Miquel, the essayist, was sweating medulla and bay leaves. Some of the ladies were overcome, and they covered Níobe in kisses; their lips were left coated in cubist paint. Senyora Sabater declared that thanks to the Republic, Barcelona would come to be the most refined city in the world. Not even the Comtessa de Noailles had ever dreamt of such a jewel, such a feast for the eyes. The Comte de Sallés undertook to object, as he was a good friend of the Comtessa de Noailles and had attended a private screening of L’âge d’or at her home.