Josep Maria de Sagarra - Private Life

What Don Tomàs de Lloberola did have to keep him going, in compensation, was a consciousness of his own magical superiority, which flowed directly and legitimately from thirty generations who had never so much as lifted a blade of straw from the ground. The only weapon Don Tomàs de Lloberola could brandish in his defense was his pride of family, without a shred of irony, and without a drop of cunning.

The Lloberolas belonged to the kind of lineage, still in ascendancy at the end of the 19th century, whose profound ignorance of time and space carried within it the termite that would turn it into a harmless ghost: families attached to a not-so-old tradition that formed part of that petty rural aristocracy that acquired its noble titles in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries from the kings of Spain, by occupying some more or less flashy bureaucratic commission in the colonies, obtaining a kinship with more creditable and illustrious names through the grace or disgrace of marriage, and contributing a notable contingent of second and third sons and daughters to convents, the secular clergy, and the military service. Their only contact with their rural roots was maintained through attorneys and administrators, even though, in fact, during the expansion of Barcelona they had built their big old mansions — many of which have now vanished — in the most venerable, ripe, and crusty neighborhoods, those most steeped in the enterprising spirit of medieval trade guilds and the petty bourgeoisie.

Contact with the land, for families like the Lloberolas, was strictly an affair of the belly. Their property allowed them to cling to the reminiscence of their lost dominions, of which nothing remained but the title to the terrace farms and a house equipped with a the most basic comforts. There they could spend the summer months, or shoot, from time to time, a few rounds of buckshot into some hare’s back. Like so many families of their kind, the only thing the Lloberolas loved about the rural landowners who had engendered them was the revenue they received, always skimmed and filtered by the craftiness of caretakers and administrators. They hadn’t so much as set foot on many of their properties, nor had they tried to improve them. Without batting an eye, and to the detriment of the land, they would occasionally order a forest to be brutally cut down to satisfy some urgent need, nearly always the result of vanity or lack of foresight.

But anything having to do with a sort of spiritual affection for the land and, at very least, enough industriousness and cleverness to perceive its value and make the most of it, anything that might signify an intelligent and moral contact with a small parcel of the world that was theirs, and that often represented a great treasure, didn’t enter into the reckoning of these families. They looked upon the caretakers and terrace farmers with offensive paternalism, accepting their fawning, and the roast chickens and salads they provided for mid-afternoon picnics, as they would the obligatory affection of a dog. What they did not take into account was that — once the magical prestige of the landowner had been destroyed in our country — those caretakers were their enemies, who more often than not ended up taking over the properties and throwing them out. And if the caretakers didn’t do it, there was never any lack of spiders spinning a web of usury for aristocratic foibles. They would offer a low appraisal to take over a rundown property, and turn it into a first-rate homestead.

Along with this estrangement from the land, dating from the early 19th century, came a Castilianization of the greater part of the Catalan petty aristocracy. They became parasites, who turned their backs completely on the real traditions and all the essential local sentiments that were awakening little by little at the time in our country. The civil wars of the period contributed to the economic and moral suicide of many of these families. And when the wars died down, one could say that the political passion that leads one to risk even his own skin died down as well, and all that remained was a fading anachronistic ferocity, the consequence of discord produced by the wars themselves. Hence, for many of these gentlemen, politics was nothing but the spirit of the lowest form of caciquisme , local machine politics exercised through cronyism and ties to Madrid and the Court. Sometimes, this would serve a utilitarian purpose, perhaps the concession of a highway that would benefit a property; other times it was for nothing more than to satisfy the delusional heart of an insignificant character, who would willingly dismantle his inheritance for a seat in the Senate.

Religious sentiment cleaved to the backs of this aristocracy in the form of the most ineffectual clericalism. Owing to their blood ties with the Church, through a profusion of relatives in the clergy, be they parish priests, canons, or even bishops, the machinery of religion in these families proceeded with perfect rhythm. Each family had its own parish or church where they could put on airs at a specific Mass. They were members of the parish board, the benevolent societies, or the merely religious associations that occupied preferred places in solemn processions, wearing uniforms of extinct grandeur and bearing candles with more blessings than any ordinary candle. Each family had its own specific number of religious orders to patronize, and in the salons of those cold, damp houses whose pomp fell somewhere between sepulchral and carnavalesque, infinite pairs of nuns wearing the most heterogeneous wimples and scapularies warmed the brocade chairs.

Often the only way for one of these aristocrats to highlight his own figure with a color that might stand out against the surrounding gray was a solemn religious event, at which he might be positioned by the side of a bishop, his military coat emblazoned with stripes and his three-cornered hat trimmed with noticeably moth-eaten feathers.

These religious mechanics took the form of a sort of penitent’s parade that discharged its offices in those grand houses from the vestibules to the most intimate recesses of the bedroom. Those dark bedrooms held great canopied beds, in the vicinity of which the bathrooms and sanitary apparatuses had been replaced by all manner of colorful images in pathetic robes standing in glass cages, by the side of holy water fonts or hulking black armoires crowned with escutcheons and filled with never-worn undergarments whose lace trim had yellowed with sadness.

Outward morality was so fastidious in these families that often it was considered scandalous merely to drop the name of a famous actress or dancer, or intelligent author, or the title of a novel. During visits to the lady of the house no lips would ever mention a topic of conversation that might be considered even remotely free, and dialogues centered exclusively on religion, illness, the children’s upbringing, or questions regarding servants or property. And in a very vague way, from a very peculiar angle, politics might be commented upon.

Moral rigidity, strictly external, was no impediment to the secret practice in the heart of the most prim and proper families of the basest imaginable sexual practices, cases of vile degeneration. A respectable white-bearded gentleman, the bearer of candles and canopies in processions, might be inverted with all that such a thing entails, or a sadist might be keeping his tastes under the most cowardly wraps with the complicity of the most sordid people.

AT A TIME WHEN the amorous life of our city was not yet as big and brazen as it is today, some of those aristocrats relieved their sexual inclinations in airless, plebeian surroundings. It wasn’t at all unusual for their excitement to be focused on the stockings of a cook or the fleshy opulence of a hired wet nurse. The aristocrat who gave a diamond necklace to a dancer from the Liceu Opera, or who bedecked a seamstress in a hat trimmed with cloth camellias and the wings of an exotic bird, was considered lacking in moral fiber, a man who brought public offense to his class.