Josep Maria de Sagarra - Private Life

With a precision that even he was astounded by, Guillem continued tacking back and forth between a literary cynicism full of anisette and arnica and the genuine and childlike passion of a sardana dancer. After ten months at this game, Conxa agreed to undress in his presence and get into bed with him. For the time being, Conxa was fairly persuaded and Guillem began to come into his own. The fact that the body of the widow baronessa was a magic box, with all the springs and trap doors of the most corrosive voluptuosity in the hands of a talented juggler, would not have been sufficient to make Guillem feel so swallowed up, so evaporated amidst the leaves of that sublime agave. It was Conxa’s disconcerting, bewildering, and tormenting mind that infused Guillem’s cheeks with the burning pallor of an impassioned pilgrim. Conxa was half-persuaded, for the moment, because that was precisely what she wanted: a man in a constant feverish state, a perpetually aroused sexuality, forever initiating more devious snares, aspiring to more effective tricks, like a hunter of impossible monsters, and always with that air of defeat combined with a hope of triumph. Because Conxa always slipped away. There was no way he could dominate that undulating perfumed weakness. If for a moment he sensed he was dominating her, she would elude him through the most impracticable crevices. Sometimes the crevice would consist of all the profound brutality of a monosyllable spoken tenuously with the phonetics of an angel. Sometimes it was simply a puff of air from her lungs that Conxa, closing her mouth, would direct through her nose, accompanied by a vitreous, absent gaze and the mere beginnings of a smile, but it would sink into Guillem’s heart like a ferret’s incisors. Guillem found himself in all of this, because the only justification he could find for the monotonous activity of sex was the anxiety of contingency, the constant playing and losing, the stimulus of defeat, and that stuff of hatred and destruction veiled by a gelatin of tears that makes the skin of male and female creatures interesting. All in all, what each felt at the core of the other was a touch of sadism. Guillem was inured to the life of a successful gigolo. He had aplomb and utter self-confidence. Desperately virile, he was also desperately feminine. He had an unfathomable facility for adapting to the detail and the nuance of all the women he had contact with. An ordinary prostitute could find in him the same base echo of meticulous wickedness and rouged gossip that she could have found in a fellow prostitute. He was the ideal character to dally with a woman and sweet talk her. He never moved too fast, he always sensed the perfect moment. He displayed lovely absences, delicate reluctance, and a cool and tender passivity in awaiting the right move. He wasn’t easily put off, he wasn’t jealous, and he was willing to play roles that a more resolute man who wants to pay and wants to dominate would never tolerate. Discreet and reserved in his triumphs, he had a fertile imagination when it came to lying. And all of this came hand in hand with an unquestionable charm and a reliable and accommodating physiology.

This aptitude for conquest had given Guillem a very bad opinion of women. All he saw in them was the part that served his selfish ends: their likelihood of succumbing to Guillem’s prestige. All they represented for him was their purely animal aspect of adoration or of jealousy; he appreciated them for their skin and for their intimate reactions, and that was it. Guillem had never been in love, and at times he wondered if he was even capable of falling in love, of feeling that profound luxuriance, lyrical with anguish, enthusiasm, and sidereal scintillation that he imagined love to be. Women had never provided Guillem the opportunity to infuse a little spirituality into his flesh, at least not the women he had dealt with so far. Sensitive as he was, the young man was perfectly aware of all that, aware even of how he had been brutalized by his conquests. He was running the risk of becoming a physiological machine mounted on a dissatisfied spirit. Despite his youth, he already had an excess of experience. The time for great emotional arias had passed him by; his weakness for debauchery and his lack of scruples had shielded his skin with a layer of skepticism. Guillem saw all this with no little melancholy. Another young man would have considered the profusion and diversity amassed in his erotic register to be of inestimable value. And it is not that Guillem derived no satisfaction from it, but he was beginning to feel fatigued, to find no merit in it, and to discover all the gray brushstrokes of monotony. So, the presence of Conxa Pujol renewed him. His fear of failure, his loss of confidence in himself, his need to refine all his powers in order to dominate an elusive skin, his pain at uncertainty, his renewed self-respect, his secret tears, the sensorial density of their encounters, and above all the superior perfume of the inconsistent and contradictory biology he was engaging with his muscles and his breath offered Guillem the possibility of something that, if nothing more, was a reasonable simulacrum of the flaming vestments of a true, pathetic love.

On occasion, powerless to unravel her mystery, in the face of her unceasing battle, Guillem had suspected that Conxa Pujol would never entirely surrender herself to him or to any man. Physically, this woman’s case was not one of coldness or indifference; quite the contrary. Guillem sensed volcanic possibilities in her that he, however, had not managed to ignite. Nor could he accept the thesis that the baronessa belonged to that species of women whose sensibilities have been drained by constant and varied brutalization. A woman who was married at such a young age to the man she had been married to, and who until now had not been known to have a lover, led one to suppose a more or less undamaged temperament. Guillem would have liked to connect their present intimacies with those two shameful episodes in which he had taken part, but those episodes did not offer any pattern. One would have had to know the extent of the baronessa’s intention in all of that. One would have to separate her responsibility from her husband’s with great care, and that was impossible. In moments of obfuscation and defeat, when Guillem thought his desire was unattainable, he came very close to confessing to the baronessa. He tried to explain his double personality with perfect cynicism, but he realized that such an explanation would probably have closed all doors to him. As unusual as the baronessa was, Guillem was not certain how she would react on learning that this Guillem de Lloberola was the very same derelict her dressmaker had procured for her. Later on, when Conxa yielded, when an absolute intimacy had been established between the two of them, in moments of depression Guillem once again felt the desire to produce a dramatic effect by recounting to the baronessa the details of Dorotea’s “scene of the crime.” But then, too, he held back, and was assailed by yet another doubt: what if what he had accepted in good faith, his certainty that the baronessa had not recognized him, were just an illusion? Guillem came to fear that Conxa, much more astute than her departed husband and with a sharper memory, had been dissembling, had turned a blind eye, on recognizing Guillem de Lloberola to be the same subject procured by her dressmaker. This aspect of Guillem’s fear was groundless, because Conxa Pujol never recognized him nor did she suspect for a moment that Guillem had been a party to those secret events.

As we were saying, Guillem imagined that Conxa would never truly surrender herself, to him or to any man. Guillem began to fear that in the mystery of his lover there was another woman, and that all her fissures and evasions and the unassailable integral possession of her body, her soul, her will, and even her unhappiness could only be understood as a natural or acquired corruption of her temperament. He feared Conxa was a lesbian, and that the fullness of her passion would never belong to him, because Conxa was saving it for a woman.