Josep Maria de Sagarra - Private Life

“In any case, to be a Lloberola back then was more interesting than to be who I am, for example. To be a Senyor de Lloberola in a position to dispose of the life and property of others rather than smelling the stench of the hallways in that apartment on Carrer de Bailèn! They’re not going to see much more of me in that apartment. Here you have the smell of the stables, but it is all more ventilated … To be a Senyor de Lloberola! A Senyor de Lloberola!.. All these thoughts I’m thinking are a little ridiculous, but sort of thrilling, too. For one’s blood to be tied to these stones, to this history … No matter what the newspapers say … No matter that President Companys and the rabassaires have decided that the master should no longer receive his shares of the crops … Tenant farmers!.. Rabassaires !.. Oh, if only one could … If only one had the Civil Guard at his disposal … The only good thing papà did in all his life was to die in time not to see all this nastiness … The Republic! A bunch of crooks! What the devil! For all I’m going to see of this … Bring on the rabassaires , bring on Companys himself! They can have it all. But not the house, the house no, that’s ours to keep, I mean mine to keep … Of course the house isn’t, shall we say, very old … Papà said it was from the eighteenth century. I can’t really tell … In any case, I don’t care if it’s from the eighteenth century, you can lead a much better life, much better, than in that apartment in Barcelona … Let them have it!.. They’re the kind who breathe better in an apartment. My children don’t understand all this … They’re more like their mother … I’m still a Senyor de Lloberola, after all, yes indeed! Lloberola is a diminutive of llobera , which means wolf’s den … at least I think it does. So Lloberola is a little den … everything is little: little wolves, little den. That’s what we are, wolves with no food, with dull claws, with no courage … I’ve always felt that the Lloberolas were cowards. But why? We’re like everyone else. The difference between us and all the rest of the cowards is that we are still senyors. Not people who think they’re senyors, but actual senyors! We have a sort of seigneurial delicacy … A disregard … Nowadays what used to be called disdain is called disregard … Catalan is a horrible language; or rather, the Catalanists have made it horrible … They will never be senyors, not them!.. What do you have to say about all this? What do you think, standing there drooling, with that expression on your face? Answer me? Am I not a true Lloberola?…”

His only response was a long, drawn-out “Moooooo …” because the creature being interpellated by that historical, political, and philological commentary was none other than a cow who was chewing on a few blades of tender Johnson grass. What remained of the supposed castle of the Lloberolas were a few vague reminiscences of a dry stone wall, in an untended field overlooking the masia.

Frederic’s imaginings upon the story of those stones may be perfectly gratuitous. That pile had probably never been a castle, nor had it belonged to a Lloberola. It is possible that none of it was medieval, and it was just a piece of a big ramshackle house, abandoned, like so many in the landscape of this land, to end up as shelters for cattle and farm animals and points of encounter between lizards and brambles. It was Don Tomàs who discovered, no one knows how or with what tools of erudition, that that was in fact the castle of the Lloberolas, the lords of that stretch of land since the mid-twelfth century. The Lloberolas clearly had been rich pagesos, farmers who three centuries earlier had come to occupy the masia now known as Can Lloberola. The farmhouse had previously belonged to some other farmers whose name was Sitjar, and one of the first daughters to inherit — the firstborn daughter, la pubilla Sitjar — had married a Lloberola son, but not the firstborn. The firstborn Lloberola of the time died without progeny and all his property was absorbed by the owner of the farmhouse where Frederic lived with the masovers, the caretakers who looked after the mas.

Early in the 18th century, the Lloberolas went to take up residence in Barcelona, and that was when the King Ferdinand VI conceded them the title of the Marquès de Sitjar. The coat of arms of the rupestrian Lloberolas, who before being marquesses had borne the title of “honored citizens” and, not long after, of “gentlemen,” had not exactly been the one with the wolves and the pines. Their coat of arms consisted of a cross and a ram’s head with great horns, as it appears that the wealth of the ancient Lloberolas had derived from the sheep wool trade. But a king of arms, of the many who existed in the eighteenth century, hoodwinking farmers with mythological ascendencies, offered them the three green pines and three black wolves on a field of gold for their approval, on the basis that those ram horns seemed a bit indiscreet among marquesses in wigs and dress coats, stuffed with money and addled with airs.

Frederic was ignorant of the modest titled history of his line. He preferred to adopt the fantasies of Don Tomàs and the king of arms, and to believe that the handful of stones scattered half an hour from his ancestral home, his casa pairal, the home of his forefathers, had been the brilliant lair of all the romantic legends of Lloberolas wearing chain mail and helmets, disemboweling ferocious Berbers, ravishing perfumed Saracen women, and doing their worst to a downtrodden multitude of serfs.

No one but Frederic ever went up to the barren field of the castle. He spent many afternoons there. On the slope leading down to the masia, there was a good stretch of meadow grass. Occasionally, the smattering of cows that belonged to the masover of Can Lloberola would be led there so they could breathe some air beyond the stable and enjoy the scraps of green the land offered them free of cost.

Can Lloberola had been a very important estate, the best in the county, but in his decline Don Tomàs had overseen its fragmentation. The plots were divvied up and ended up in many hands. On Don Tomàs’s death Frederic was left the house and a few jornals. A jornal is the plot of land a man can work in a day’s time, and the masover worked them to his own advantage, while paying a pittance in rent.

In Don Tomàs’s better days, the house had come to be quite a fine place. A good deal of money went into renovating and furnishing it properly as a summerhouse where they could receive guests. Later everything was allowed to deteriorate. Nothing was left of the garden. The masovers were pagesos, good farmer stock who saw no need for aesthetics or superfluous things, and they turned anything that was merely decorative into utilitarian land. They took over the owners’ furniture and little by little invaded the rooms meant for the senyors. When Frederic picked up the dregs of his father’s estate, he found that if he wanted to live in Can Lloberola he practically had to behave like a tenant. Despite the discomforts and the rural duplicity, Frederic was able to feel like a true gentleman there. The masover, who was shrewd, had known Frederic since he was a boy — he was ten years older than his employer. He would humor him and look the other way when Frederic had Soledat, the farmer’s eldest daughter, untie his leggings when he got back from hunting. Soledat, who was no farmer girl, wore rouge and chiffon stockings, and as she went about untying his laces, Frederic’s eyes pointed like two medieval hounds into the well of the girl’s décolletage, within which sighed, somewhat rebelliously, the fresh lemons of her breasts.

It saddened Frederic to see how modernization had turned those noble rural walls into something ordinary and conventional. The masover had a gramophone and a radio, with an undomesticated speaker that let out squeaks and squawks and tangos and speeches by deputies from the Republican Left, while the stable boys dug the hay from their ears and Francisca hung a great cauldron of navy beans from the pothook over the hearth in the kitchen.