Josep Maria de Sagarra - Private Life

Nighttime conversation around the table of the masovers and the stable boys revolved around tenant farming, soccer, the politics of Macià and Companys, and Greta Garbo. They were all members of Esquerra Republicana, the party of the anti-monarchist pro-Catalan left, except for two farmhands from the FAI, the Federació Anarquista Ibèrica, who went out to dig potatoes with a copy of Solidaridad Obrera , the anarchist paper, stuck in their waistbands. These things drove Frederic mad. He saw disaffection in the eyes of the farmworkers; they barely bade him good day and good night. In town everyone knew he was ruined, he didn’t have a cent, and the masover held more title than he, and soon he would not even be owed even his little bit of rent. On Sunday afternoons, when he went to the cafè, el Senyor de Can Lloberola was hardly afforded more consideration than the men wearing working caps and the sashes, known as faixes, that the Catalan farmworkers still wore around their waists. He had to forget about bridge; he played the local card games, burro and tuti subhastat, with the secretary and two farmers. To be in harmony with the table, he had to pretend to have read the newspapers and abstain from saying everything he thought about the Republic.

Frederic was having a sort of affair with a married woman in the district. She was a bright young girl who had gone to school in Manresa; she was fairly scrupulous with regard to hygiene, and sordidly banal with regard to every other topic under the sun. Her name was Montserrat. Her husband had a wine business and spent many days in Barcelona. As a girl, and even as an adult, Montserrat had been nourished on the innocent and popular Catalanist literature of Josep Maria Folch i Torres. Her husband had corrupted her morally and cultivated in her a taste for vaudeville and broad humor. She fell in love with Frederic because he was a tragic figure and a member of the nobility. He visited her fairly often. It was a topic of general gossip in town, but the wine merchant was one of those people who have ears and do not hear.

Frederic had always had a great fondness for the Can Lloberola estate. In its days of splendor, the hunting expeditions of Frederic and his friends were famous. On occasion, women had gone along, and the masover had done whatever was necessary so Don Tomàs would never learn of their carousing.

Three years before his father died, on the pretext of looking after the estate, Frederic began to spend long periods there, all by himself, leaving his wife and children behind in the apartment on Carrer de Bailèn. With his father’s death and the coming of the Republic, Frederic was determined to extend his stay as long as he could. In truth, he and Maria behaved as if they were divorced. Like all the Lloberolas, Frederic had a mad streak, and ever since he had broken up with Rosa Trènor, he had been subject to a sort of grotesque melancholy, to appearing enigmatic, to registering absurd complaints and making grand scenes before his wife and children. Instead of smoothing things over, Maria tensed the cord even further on her end, and those last four years of marriage had been unbearable. As for the Republic, Frederic was just as indignant as his father, if not more so. But instead of wasting his time on clerical intrigues and cheap conspiracies, Frederic was invaded by sadness, and disgusted with the people of Barcelona who followed politics and went around causing democratic upheaval. His children were already grown, and they were the last straw. Ferran had finished school and begun to study architecture and dared, timidly, to express his opinions in front of his father. Frederic’s blend of melancholy and nonsense came together in the form of an acute crisis. One day he threw a bottle at his son’s head and hurt him rather badly. Another day he threatened to throw him out of the house. Maria always took the side of the little weasel against her husband, and la Senyora Carreres, who was even more necessary than ever from an economic standpoint, went so far as to call her son-in-law a monster and a bad man. She said that if he wasn’t capable of educating and maintaining a family, he should go away and leave them in peace.

These scenes at the apartment on Carrer de Bailèn were among the most deplorable and idiotic of all the similar scenes that took place in the private life of the bourgeoisie of our country, often for irrational causes. Nothing could console Frederic. He stopped caring about his clothing; his friends at the Club Eqüestre avoided him. Sometimes he would while away a boring afternoon all by himself in a neighborhood cafè. Don Tomàs’s will left no doubt that the Lloberolas had inherited a pittance, and Frederic couldn’t bear any more humiliations and favors from his in-laws. All he had left was the estate and the company of the masovers who had always been loyal to him. For them he had started out as the young master, el senyoret, and gone on to be “Don Frederic.” He had that pile of rocks in a barren wasteland in which the quixotic Frederic could envisage the castle of his past glory and the justification of his pride and his sadness. He had a red and white spotted cow who listened to his speeches on the grandeur and decadence of human vanity as she munched on the grass. Frederic was not just any old poor devil, as many — including Bobby, with whom he was never reconciled — believed. Frederic had a germ of madness, like all the Lloberolas, and it was that germ that sent him off alone, practically a tenant of the caretakers of his own property, putting up with the whistling and crackling of the radio and the opinions on communism of the handful of farmworkers stuffed with navy beans, reeking of the natural and repulsive odor of agriculture.

In the meantime, back home, things were peaceful. When you came right down to it, Frederic was an unusual case. There are men who go through this world without leaving anything of worth behind, without having had the slightest influence on anything. When they die, no one remembers them, nor does anyone need them. For as long as their contact with others lasts, neither on the surface nor in passing can so much as a blasted anecdote be told. What little effect they have is purely negative, even on themselves. They devote their time to spending, to destroying, to embittering, to making every minute unpleasant. They are usually serious to no end; they are incapable of humor, of laughter, of anything exuding a pleasant warmth. It might seem as if the most natural thing would be for no one to take note of such men, for them to be avoided so that they could not be a stumbling block for a single project, for in point of fact neither their judgment nor their value, nor even their volume bears any weight. But the strange thing is that this type of man is particularly annoying, and a source of concern to others. They behave like specters that intercept movement. Sometimes it even seems as if they rob all the air from a room, allowing no one to breathe. Their eyes, which are expressionless and reveal no special gaze, are more inquisitive than the eyes of others, and their tongues contradict for the pleasure of contradicting. Faced with such characters, some people give them a wide berth, or leave off what they’re doing in order to avoid that stupid, inoffensive, entirely irrelevant contradiction that, for some inexplicable reason, is intolerably exasperating. Frederic was one of these men, at home, among his friends, among his relations; this is the kind of man he was. His arrogant illiteracy was irritating; inclined to opine on anything, to stick his nose in anywhere, he never knew when to keep his countenance, he kept arguments going, he overcomplicated absurd things, not to be insulting, but because he felt possessed of a divine inspiration, as if he were clairvoyant. Those who just depended on him, out of friendship or acquaintance, did their best to avoid him. If they ran into him on the street, they were always running late, or they would seek out a third person so as not to have to carry on a face-to-face dialogue with him. Frederic was a polite man, a rather decent and well-bred individual, he even had some sophistication, but despite that, he was annoying, unbearably annoying, in a class by himself. Don Tomàs’s saving point had been his quaintness, his pathos, his theatricality. He had had a Molieresque quality — along the lines of an Orgon or an Imaginary Invalid — that imbued his nose, his moustache and his scarf. Don Tomàs was of another era, with all his clownish ways and all the absurd penitence that could be summed up in the conical cucurulla hat he would wear in the Holy Week processions. As pure spectacle, he could be tolerated, for a while. Not Frederic; Frederic was gray and sad, without contrast on the surface or in the soul. He was the proverbial bitter pill to swallow.