Josep Maria de Sagarra - Private Life

At nightfall, Frederic would visit the wine merchant’s wife. He was getting a little tired. His abdomen, his gray hair, his wrinkles all gave him away. In the games of love with the wine merchant’s wife he couldn’t be much more prodigal than with his fortune. Frederic was almost finished. Premature impotence was common among the Lloberolas, and Frederic was beginning to feel the effects of that family flaw. He wasn’t old: he had just turned forty-eight. But day by day in his intimate physiology Frederic began to notice alarming symptoms. The wine merchant’s wife enveloped him in a cheap, tacky sentimentalism. Soledat, with her rouge and her chiffon stockings, and all the young bucks in town pressing up against her in the dance hall, was a finer prey. But Frederic needed to be flattered, and consoled. The wine merchant’s wife knew how to console him, and it thrilled her that a bona fide Senyor de Lloberola would deign to lie in her bed, in a bedroom that smelled of sheepskins, of the brotherhood of the Virgin of Pain, and of cheap cologne.

Frederic’s nose and heart were becoming accustomed to all this squalor. He even reached the point at which he found the appeal in a silk print nightgown the wine merchant’s wife wore. It was a black fabric with a pattern of orange-colored babies that looked as if they had been stolen from an orphanage.

AFTER HER HUSBAND’S death, Leocàdia moved out of the apartment on Carrer de Mallorca. Guillem would just as soon live in a hotel as in a pension, since no one knew where he would be sleeping or keeping his clothes. Leocàdia spent the first few months at Josefina’s house, but the poor woman wasn’t comfortable with the Marquesas de Forcadell. There was too much bustle and noise in their house. Josefina always had guests, the children were rowdy, and the marquis showed no signs of affection to his mother-in-law. Leocàdia was an early riser. She was accustomed to eating promptly at midday and dining early in the evening. In contrast, her daughter’s house was subject to constant disorder. The marquis would keep them waiting until ten p.m. and then telephone to say he wouldn’t be home for dinner. Josefina had developed an absolute passion for golf and many days she would stay in Sant Cugat for lunch. Leocàdia was flustered by all this, and she proposed to her daughter and son-in-law that she would be better off retreating to the abbey at Cluny. The Sisters of St. Joseph of Cluny took into their convent women who had been left alone by manic disorder, widowhood, or earthquake. In the convent, they didn’t exactly find Baudelairian “ luxe, calme et volupté ,” but they did find order, repose, and discipline, and enough comfort to satisfy their needs. In general, the ladies who retired with the Sisters of Cluny were from good families and highly educated, but wanting in fortune and affection.

Josefina and her husband didn’t find Leocàdia’s proposal acceptable. They thought their friends would be critical. It wasn’t right for the widow Marquesas de Sitjar, with two sons and a daughter married to a well-placed man, to be retiring to a nunnery like a poor widow or an ordinary spinster. When Josefina expressed this opinion, it was not because she had felt any particular pleasure in having Leocàdia under her roof; she was concerned mostly with what people would say. Don Tomàs’s will assigned Leocàdia a number of shares that produced at most a rent of some four hundred pessetes a month. This was sufficient for Leocàdia to pay her board at Cluny and cover her expenses, which were insignificant. Despite the frankly weak opposition of the Marquesas de Forcadell, Leocàdia installed herself in a pleasant cell at the convent, arranged her things there, and lived with more independence and tranquility than in the pompous and obstreperous apartment of her son-in-law.

Some old people, perhaps the immense majority of old people, who lived in harmony during a particular period of their lives, having felt an identification with a fashion or a set of ideas now considered passé, endure the latter years and changes not without protest and incomprehension. In truth, they are the survivors of their times, their fashions, or their ideas.

Old folk who have experienced a good moment in the past maintain a constant controversy with the new life that emerges day by day. If they say that something in the present is bad, it is not exactly for the reasons they adduce. It is bad for them, because the current thing is different from another bygone thing they considered to be good. If an old man affirms that women with short hair are less exciting than women with long hair, it is because back when he was prone to excitement, women wore their hair long. And if an old woman affirms that a man looks better with a beard and moustache, it is because the first man for whom she had feelings had a beard and moustache.

The more intense and fulfilling the bygone age of an old person was, the stronger the controversy, harsher the incomprehension, and more obdurate the protest before the evolution of things.

This criterion, which can be applied to the majority of respectable elders, could not be applied to Leocàdia, for the simple reason that Leocàdia had not lived any period of her life intensely. Leocàdia had always been a mere receptive vessel, without opinions or passions of any kind.

This is why Leocàdia was a delightful old lady. When her daughter was playing golf, not for a moment did she stop to think that between the days of her daughter and the days of her youth there was a notable difference, and she incorporated the word “golf” into her vocabulary beyond time and space. The only objection she had to the sport was that it was the reason lunch was served late or the reason she had to have lunch without her daughter. And she felt the same way about everything else as she did about golf. When her granddaughter Maria Lluïsa showed up to visit her wrapped in a trench coat, alone, after work in an office where she was employed as a secretary, the widow Marquesa de Sitjar didn’t complain or find anything strange in her granddaughter’s situation, even though in her youth no young woman of her class would go out in the street by herself, or wear a trench coat, or take a job as a secretary to earn her living.

If Leocàdia had not enjoyed this sweet numbness, her later years would have been much grimmer, because the same lady who had taken so many pains with all the family furniture and relics of the splendor of the Lloberolas in the apartment on Carrer de Mallorca later sold off most of that furniture with great indifference. This can only be explained by accepting that her earlier pains and care were only a reflection of the importance her husband attributed to the furniture. Once Don Tomàs disappeared, along with the pathetic and grandiose exaltation he applied to anything that made reference to his past history, Leocàdia felt as passive and indifferent to the furniture as she did to everything else. As we have already said in another part of this story, Leocàdia’s marriage had had a sort of mimetic quality, and she had adapted to it and completely annulled herself. As we have also already said, Leocàdia’s protests regarding her husband’s profligacy and wild-eyed notions were very feeble, responding only to a woman’s natural instinct for preservation.

Thanks to this temperament, Leocàdia wasn’t the slightest bit humiliated by living as a boarder in the Cluny convent. And, since in this world the same causes produce morally contradictory effects on different individuals, perhaps it was also as a result of the hereditary transfer of Leocàdia’s temperament to her son Guillem that he too felt no sense of humiliation on accepting three hundred pessetes from Dorotea Palau, the dressmaker, and on later accepting whatever he required from the widow Baronessa de Falset.