Josep Maria de Sagarra - Private Life

Her friend accompanied her early one afternoon to the home of an acquaintance in whom she had utter confidence. She was a woman of around forty-five, with a pretty face, but much the worse for wear. She had an apartment on Carrer de Rosselló, decorated with airs of refinement, in which a slightly offensive scent of smut prevailed. The woman was neither a midwife nor in the trade, but she dealt in resolving the untimely conflicts of love with discretion and a modicum of safety. The woman’s assistant was a man of around thirty, a medical doctor, lean, with a sallow complexion, and somewhat repulsive. He treated the patients with cloying sweetness and double entendres.

Though Maria Lluïsa answered the questions the lady asked her with naturalness, the woman was clearly affected.

The sallow doctor took up his duties in a chamber expressly equipped to be like a clinic. The operation went off relatively easily and with a satisfactory outcome. It was very painful, but Maria Lluïsa bore it with that endurance peculiar to women.

After the operation, she lay in the proprietor’s bed for four hours. The good woman offered advice and tried to give her guidance. Maria Lluïsa listened vaguely, but her head was weak. When the doctor returned it was nine in the evening. He took Maria Lluïsa’s pulse, said it was safe to go home, but that she should be very careful, and prescribed a prophylactic treatment for a few days.

The run-down woman with the pretty face took Maria Lluïsa and her friend to the door. When they said goodbye, she kissed Maria Lluïsa on the cheeks with great effusiveness. The woman’s name was Rosa Trènor.

MARIA LLUÏSA’S BRAIN was voracious for negative ideas. It had destroyed the possibility of a love that would move the sun and the stars. It didn’t believe in the appearance of some St. George in a suit, much less in the dragon he would slay.

For her the world was a mass of putty, stupidly come into existence. Since she had been born of this mass, she didn’t protest. It was the salty, blue water in which her arms could become skilled in the perfect crawl. Maria Lluïsa accepted the most brilliant, amoral and metallic aspects of her time. Her landscape still allowed for the presence of enraptured souls and of souls who enraptured. She wanted to be one of the ones who enraptured. She vaguely recalled that her grandfather had been a man of principle. Her grandfather’s principles seemed just as anachronistic and offensive to her as a boy who went to sunbathe on the beach dressed up as a little shepherd or a devil from Els Pastorets , the Christmas play. Maria Lluïsa felt a passion for resplendent trash. Her imagination was like those great luminous advertisements that flash on and off, lashed to symmetrical cages of stone and cement, fascinating millions of men who drag their dread down asphalt streets and breathe in a night heavy with alcohol, perfume, ambition and misery. Maria Lluïsa’s tactic was that of many of her time: improvisation. This way of grabbing onto the antennae of life was the strongest imprint left by the war on a society that only began to evolve in the 1920’s. Improvisation was exactly the same as living day to day. Barcelona suffered greatly from this, particularly in the most spectacular arenas. The way fortunes were made and unmade, and the ease of acquiring a sort of universal pass for being seated in the front row of the grand world, without concern for the moral antecedents or the condition of the subjects’ shirts were the surest signs of the general reigning confusion and vain intestinal spirit of survival. Some periods take into account the name and family traditions of a person before conceding him any status; in other, more democratic, and perhaps more understanding periods, they have stressed intelligence, ingenuity, and even physical beauty, always valuing the clean and well-groomed person. Other, more recent, periods, in order to come to a judgment about a person, only make note of his shirt-maker, her stylist, their dog, or their automobile. Maria Lluïsa belonged to one of those periods in which the value of the person took only second or third place. In first place ranked the crease in one’s trousers or the quality of one’s stockings.

To affirm that a lady was sublime neither her witticisms, nor her acts of philanthropy, nor the anatomical perfection of her hips were mentioned. The only thing worthy of comment was the color or make of the dress she wore to this party or that concert. In general, people limited their vocabulary to the words “nice” or “not nice.” The words “just,” “honest,” “brave,” “contemptible,” or “ignorant,” were not in good form over the green of a golf course or a bridge table. It was very easy to be nice, because Maria Lluïsa’s era was also one of the less demanding, and the dimension of the glands secreting niceness were four times the size of the liver.

After her year of sexual apprenticeship, Maria Lluïsa was perfectly equipped to calculate the value of all her physical attributes without falling into the traps set for shy, inexpert or innocent girls. Fortunately, Pat was so inferior to her that he had not left any trace of himself or any kind of depravity in the blue and pink regions of her soul. When the moment of disenchantment arrived, in the face of Pat’s selfishness and cowardice, the bit of affection Maria Lluïsa had felt for him allowed her to react without violence. So it was that her blood absorbed a few injections of bitter skepticism and she developed — and in this she was quite mistaken — an absolutely pejorative notion of men’s emotions. Maria Lluïsa believed that all the boys of her day with a bit of decorative value, like Pat, would behave the same way, and that a girl like her could not harbor any illusions of finding anything better. Maria Lluïsa did not suffer the nerves of many women her age, who dream of a great love and, unsatisfied and disillusioned, don’t realize they have failed until they find their hearts dried up in their fingers like a useless object. Maria Lluïsa was lucky enough to sense the presence of delightful topics in the world that were not precisely the death of Isolde or the imitation of that death as it is carried out between an infinity of sheets in public houses and private homes. Even at the start of her relations with Pat, Maria Lluïsa had realized she was not at all temperamental. Maria Lluïsa’s sensibility resided as much or more in her eyes, her skin, and her palate, and, above all, in her imagination, as it did in the secret corners nature has destined for the most celestial and nebulous of joys. Maria Lluïsa felt that a very furry, flexible, and Machiavellian fox coat or a flawless diamond were much more intense things than the fifth Canto of the Divine Comedy. And this theory of Maria Lluïsa’s should not be seen with overly scrupulous eyes; it was a perfectly human theory, shared by numerous illustrious personalities of the time.

One of Maria Lluïsa’s characteristics was her lack of dignity. This became more pronounced after the intervention at Rosa Trènor’s house. Maria Lluïsa’s era emphasized pure economics, a consequence of which was a relaxation of the sentiment of personal dignity. In Maria Lluïsa, though, this relaxation was aggravated by family circumstances. It’s curious to see how a working-class family or a craftsman or mechanic’s family, or even someone from the middle class working to make a place for himself, feels a sort of gratification, and pride, and most definitely a sense of dignity that families from the grand tradition, accustomed to not working, and for whom the easy life has taken the place of initiative, do not feel, just as economic catastrophe is launching a stage of moral decay. In such families the lack of dignity can sometimes reach unimaginable extremes.