Josep Maria de Sagarra - Private Life

A man like this in the midst of a family, even an impassive family without an ounce of critical sense, ends up filling every room with corrosive vapors. His wife had many of her own defects but in a less strident way, more muted, one might say. She was dull, whiny, sniveling, hypocritical, vague, acidic, but even her acid was diluted with a great deal of water. Frederic’s wife didn’t realize who he was; she rebuffed him for reasons that were not exactly what made him so impossible — his infidelities, reproofs, bugbears, and lack of money — all of which could have been tolerated if Frederic simply hadn’t been such a bore. And the most painful part is that he was no ordinary bore, oh no. If Frederic had been an ordinary man, as normal, sad and insignificant as you like, perhaps he would still have been tolerable. Frederic, in his own way of being, was an exceptional man, an original. An exceptional bore, despicable and gentlemanly, innocent and suspicious, generous and miserly, irresponsible, insubstantial, loud, false, and cowardly. Full of the most quixotic and most sublime illusions, defeated and self-important, he had been disarmed by life like no other.

His influence on his children was disastrous. If ever there was a man who didn’t have the slightest idea of what it meant to educate a child, it was Frederic. When Don Tomàs had educated Frederic, he had believed in a few norms. His criteria might be good or bad, he might cling to asceticism, or morality, or nobility, or to the Sunday parish letter, or whatever, but between hassocks and cuffs to the back of the head, he followed those criteria. The results of his method were terrible, but it was a method. Not Frederic. He had reached the point of having no shame with regard to his children, and he would swing back and forth between punishment, shouting, and violence, and letting them do whatever they pleased. His children had no respect for him; bitterness and conjugal battle were their daily spectacle. Doubtless some of the things that were passed on to the progeny of Frederic de Lloberola and Maria Carreres, which the reader who continues to read this story will hear about, were caused by the terrible education and poor example of a household whose head was a failure as a father and in every other way.

Not that we can have a great deal of faith, in this world, in pedagogy or the healthy influence of parents on their children, because every home is a world unto itself and every technique fails. But what is certain is that, for temperaments like those of the Lloberola family, the pressure of a man like Frederic comes to produce the most absolute demoralization: the demoralization of exhaustion, smothering, and loss of respect. It cannot be said of Frederic that he is a criminal or a thief or excessively debauched, or an alcoholic, or black of heart, or anything like that. Indeed, such vices, when present in the father, have been known to behave as reactants, making the children resistant to vice. Frederic is simply a bore, simply a pain, simply insignificant, simply wretched, and the end result is the desire for the disappearance or death of a person whom by nature one ought to love and respect.

And this is what Frederic’s children felt, spurred on even more by Maria’s sourpuss expression and all the sighs and lamentations of Grandmother Carreres. The one who bore the most guilt for all that disaffection and exhaustion was Frederic. He had brought three children into the world without a drop of enthusiasm because, when he lost his illusions about his wife, he lost his illusions about paternity. It’s not that he didn’t love them, nor that he hadn’t suffered when as little ones they bumped their knees against the corner of a table. But he loved them in a very peculiar way; his distress came more from the annoyance of hearing them cry than from tenderness and compassion for a child who has hurt himself. In truth, they got on his nerves, and he fled the house whenever he could. His children never required any effort, or gave him any headaches. They had their mother, their grandparents, their nannies, and he had plenty to do, gambling at the Eqüestre, or trying out an automobile, or chasing after a woman, or being a monumental pain, or arguing, or sitting around. When things started really going badly for him, when he ought to have behaved with humility, when he had to accept a sad salary at the Banc Vitalici, he would take his cowardly egotism out on his blameless children, depending on the mood he was in.

Since he needed to be seen as the wisest of them all, a gesture made by one of his children in all innocence — a shrug of the shoulders, for example — would be seen by Frederic as proof of a terrible instinct for depravity that had to be corrected. He would impose a disturbing, humiliating and unsuitable punishment on the child. The child would carry it out, not innocently, but rather with a resignation full of hatred for his father, taking note of his father’s wretchedness, showing obedience so that the wretchedness would not go any farther. Children often have more common sense and flexibility than adults.

Clearly when Frederic had his attack of rural melancholy and liberated himself by forgetting about his family, everyone breathed more easily in the apartment on Carrer de Bailèn.

Frederic thought of them occasionally, above all of Maria Lluïsa, his eldest daughter, who was almost twenty. Not that his thinking of her had anything to do with regret for his own behavior, or with baring his soul before his own conscience … Much to the contrary, he believed that his children didn’t love him because his wife had inculcated hatred for their father in them. He was a victim of his children, just as he had been a victim of his father. In his quarrels and fallings-out with Don Tomàs, it never occurred to Frederic that guilt is always two-sided, and that often no one is actually guilty but pure fate, the blind and contradictory biology that creates risible conflicts that, to some eyes, appear to be unassailable mountains. Frederic saw himself as pure, well-meaning, and angelic, and it was others who were his enemies and who were to blame for everything. This was not persecution mania. It was just emptyheadedness.

One of the clearest endorsements of Rosa Trènor’s patience or stupidity was her having put up with him as a lover. As we know, it was Bobby’s peculiar temperament and ennui that made him impervious to Frederic’s monologues and effrontery.

Back at Can Lloberola, Frederic was getting a little coarser by the day. He began to enjoy the radio, and the farmhands’ arguments about communism didn’t get on his nerves the way they used to. He would go three days without shaving. He would feel an agrarian tenderness when Soledat untied his leggings, and he would go red in the face if Francisca caught on. The farmers who played cards with him no longer called him Don Frederic; they called him Senyor Frederico, and one of them even called him Senyor Frederiquet, diminishing him with the diminutive. He just kept his eyes on the cards and didn’t move a muscle.

After dinner, when there was moonlight, he would wander around among the old castle stones. His heart bucolic and his belly full, he would listen to the crickets sing with tawdry sentimentalism. The castle stones took him back to the clouds of idealism. Alone, in the evening dew that was beginning to reveal the effects of arthritis, he would stiffen up and adopt the proper bearing of a Lloberola who speaks with the medieval shades of his ancestors. There he was, against all democracy, against all socialism, defending the traditions of a country to which he had never paid the slightest mind. For him, to have been born in Catalonia and to be called Lloberola meant to play bridge, to bring children into the world because that’s what one did, to lose a fortune, and to put on a new tie for the first time. Everything else was a waste of time. In the presence of the ruins, these criteria underwent some modification. He was disgusted by the bridge games, the children, the fortune, and the ties. He was suffused with the solemnity of paellas and salads prepared in the fields, the delightful sight of Soledat’s breasts, the stench of the stables, the chirping of the crickets, and the immutable pale yellow moon that cast a theatrical chiaroscuro over his ancestral ruins.