Josep Maria de Sagarra - Private Life

Guillem sank his teeth into her shoulder. Conxa howled with a bestial enthusiasm, and both he and she experienced the most important erotic moment of their lives.

Conxa’s night in Hamburg had had nothing on this. Like a marvelous sea anemone found at water’s bottom, with wary contractile antennae full of corrosive viscosities that open up at a given moment and expand in a multicolored swoon that brings to mind perfectly denatured chrysanthemums and perfectly artificial orchids, so was the soul of that woman, and her sex and her ferocity and her joy and her enthusiasm and her tenderness began to liquefy, released and rendered in a gelatinous mystery of effusion, in a sighing melody beyond physiology, in a perspiration perfumed with the whole gamut of ultramarine atavisms and dark nights lit by the glow of shooting stars. Her skin, till now dry, insatiable, and cold as the belly of an iguana, was now softened, porous, hot, drenched by the thousands of internal arterioles that follow the rhythm of sincerity, that hold fast to the skin of men, and communicate from one heart to another all the anguish concentrated in the moments of sterile orgasm and unsatisfied desire.

Guillem and Conxa got up from bed certain of their triumph. Without a word or a comment. Everything that had just happened to them had nothing to do with the world of logic. Nor did it have anything to do with the world of physiology. It would be very sad to have to stop believing that in the skin of men and women there is occasionally something like a flash of divinity, in which gods mingle with monsters, and the gods laugh delicately at morality and reason.

The following day Guillem received double the amount he had demanded of his lover. Guillem did not attempt to refuse it, or even to say thank you. He kept the money, just as a wolf would have done.

From that time on, Guillem was Conxa’s absolute master. Little by little her temperament and his underwent a change. Conxa began day by day to feel more tender, more feminine, more inferior; Guillem, in contrast, felt more and more self-possessed, he recovered his aplomb, his coldness and his hard surface. Guillem’s disdain distressed the baronessa, but she could no longer do without him. After the first inebriation, Conxa no longer had the strength to judge or analyze. In her eyes, Guillem became more worthy of adoration by the day. Conxa tasted the bitter effects of jealousy and came to know the entire gamut of tears.

Their relationship went on in secret and Guillem exploited Conxa in every way. When Don Tomàs de Lloberola died, Conxa and Guillem’s situation was that of a woman ruined by passion and a common gigolo.

At this point, Conxa began to lose her shame, and on occasion she appeared in his company in public; the woman in her circle saw nothing wrong with it. Conxa always denied it, but everyone knew the truth.

Guillem de Lloberola, more and more independent of and distant from his family, came to be a fashionable figure. His economic future was assured.

“THE ENTRYWAY WAS probably right there: natural stone, no paint, no plaster, no mixtures. The ashlars must have come from the Gusi quarry, or maybe even farther away. The blocks of stone were lashed with straps to the backs of the very hairy men who transported them. The backs and the kidneys of those men must have made a cracking sound, like a snapping tendon, with every step they took. They would stop only to breathe and to scratch the hair on their chests. Between the hairs there was sand and clay and crushed fleabane leaves and maybe a grasshopper scraping at their nipples with the saw of its legs. As they flicked the grasshopper off with a fingernail, and wiped the sweat from their eyes, they would feel a prick on their thighs, and it would be a boxwood goad with an iron spike that had no other purpose than to poke men’s thighs. It was wielded by a long, lean man with bad lungs. From time to time those pricks sliced through the flesh and did real harm. At night some of the thighs slashed by the boxwood goad would swell up terribly, and the wounded man would get dry mouth and see red lights flashing, and begin to wail. The other men who were packed in beside him, sleeping flesh against flesh under a big overhang on top of a couple of blades of straw and nothing more, would land a good punch on him and the wound would swell even more. The following day they would find him dead and no one would take the trouble to bury him. They had too much work hauling ashlars. They would toss his body out in back, probably in Mr. Domingo’s gully. There he would be eaten by ants, praying mantises, beetles and earwigs. Herons would take a little taste and no more. Herons built their nests in that wasteland, which at the time was full of black pines.”

“The men who hauled the stone on their backs must not have been from here. Some had spent ten years in the galleys, others, even more. Their skin was tough. They were petty criminals, the kind who stole a wineskin full of sweet vi ranci or grabbed a girl by the leg and had at it on a haystack. All in all, they were men who were only good for lugging rocks. If they hadn’t been able to haul the ashlars from the Gusi quarry as someone prodded their thighs, they surely would have died of sorrow. These things were natural in those days.”

“How many hands high must the wall in front have been? Who knows! Above the main entrance were the arrow slits. There was a bit of a moat and a drawbridge. Though no sign of any of this remains, it was impossible for there not to have been a drawbridge.”

“To raise such a castle no few years were necessary, and perhaps more than a hundred infected legs. It had to be this way; this was the way of the times.”

“It must have been terribly cold inside the castle. Who knows if the chimney had been invented. Probably. What they hadn’t invented yet were the brazier and the bed warmer. Portable foot warmers came much later. Inside, the walls were also bare stone. They probably didn’t spend much money on wall hangings, because our tapestry, which was from France, was from many years later, the sixteenth century, I think, and tapestries weren’t even produced in Spain until later.”

“What must the first Senyor de Lloberola to wander the corridors of this castle have been like? He didn’t yet use our shield. The three wolves and three pines. According to Papà, this shield is from the seventeenth century. Papà was exaggerating; I think it must be much older. If not, what’s the point?”

“After the first Senyor de Lloberola must have come the second, the third, the fourth, perhaps up to twenty or thirty … No, thirty is too many. Thirty generations would mean seven hundred years. The Lloberolas must have lived here two or three hundred years at most. When a son was born, they would no doubt bring in a wet nurse from Moià, or from some neighboring masia that owed them vassalage. It would be interesting to know whether they also inserted a clove of garlic into the umbilical cords of the Senyors of Lloberola and tied them up with the lacings from an espadrille as they still do in some farm houses even now. That must be a very ancient custom, and the pagesos probably learned it from the senyors.”

“I think the first Senyor de Lloberola, or the second, it doesn’t matter, must have been terribly bored. As a matter of fact, they must not have been much good for anything. They probably had never in all their lives so much as picked up a blade of straw from the ground, just like papà. When it came to not doing a stitch of work, papà was every inch a senyor. When he died, his nose didn’t turn yellow. It was just as red and swollen as when he was alive; maybe even more. It must have been just the same with these folks up here. Maybe it will also be like that with me, though my nose is finer and more noble than my father’s was …”