Josep Maria de Sagarra - Private Life

When she took the daughter of her ex-lover into her home as a patient, Rosa Trènor’s friendship with Níobe Casas had just begun. As a result she had begun to see Bobby Xuclà with some frequency, because Bobby, to the stupefaction of his acquaintances, had taken the disconcerting gypsy woman under his wing. Teodora Macaia had been the one to introduce Bobby, as she had done with the Comte de Sallés. Bobby found the dances, and the people who surrounded Níobe, to be revoltingly stupid, but the belly and the armpits of the dancer had made an unsurpassable impression on him. Níobe accepted Bobby without realizing that she had acquired the most decent, liberal, and polite patron in Barcelona. She took advantage of him in a way that did not give the lie to her gypsy origins, but Bobby didn’t like to argue, and his checking account was fat and prodigal. When she wasn’t onstage, Níobe was a voracious eccentric with a positively efficient conservative and bourgeois core. The surrealist gypsy turned out to be a farce, and Bobby caught on to her right away. Her horror at diamonds was only for public display, and after a while it became clear that Níobe cared a great deal more for diamonds than for the spider wings of her cache-sexe. It was precisely for the purpose of purchasing some of those gems that Níobe came to meet Rosa Trènor, because if from time to time a fairly decent deal fell into Rosa’s hands, she wouldn’t say no to it. Even some ladies of unquestionable honor had had dealings with her to acquire a fox coat or a string of pearls at a good price.

Some nights Bobby and Níobe would go to the Pingouin. Rosa Trènor was a fairly assiduous client of that establishment. She didn’t usually take any “nieces” there; instead, generally, she was accompanied by a gentleman of a certain age. Every so often, even a professional dancer or some very young boy whom no one knew would sit at her table.

Bobby really liked that early morning haunt, because everything there was to his taste and his way of being. Níobe forgot all about her dances, and curled all her coppery skin up in a corner. Far from her literary admirers, the dancer’s teeth might even risk a sandwich of filet mignon or a portion of Italian pasta.

Of all the new things produced in Barcelona during the Republic, none was as successful and delightful as the Pingouin. No one knows why, but in those days the habitués of the wee hours felt a great attraction to the blood-red velvet divans and slightly pharmaceutical bar of that outfit on Carrer d’Escudellers. The Pingouin owed its allure to a gramophone with a mute, and to the priceless décor. The walls were hung with wallpaper showing wine-colored flowers against a background dark as squid’s ink that might have been meant for a skilled laborer’s bedroom in 1893. The Pingouin offered a gallery of unreachable boxed seats, where no one ever sat. Decked out in a green lamé fabric, they seemed made to order for a wizard to murder astral bodies or cook up an ectoplasm paella. The ceiling and the columns that held it up still preserved the filthy paint from the former warehouse turned into a dive for night crawlers. From the ceiling hung a naïf decoration. The owner had strung up a few lengths of wire holding wallpaper that showed peach blossom branches in flower. They formed a picture of innocence, a symmetrical green and pink spider web over the gray waves of stale smoke.

The music at the Pingouin was topnotch. Waltzes from before the war and contemporary rumbas, combined with Hawaiian guitars, Russian balalaikas and Tyrolean ocarinas, and dive-y accordions from Argentina and from riffraff the world over. The music, whatever music it was, picked up the rhythm of the establishment: a rhythm of boiled bones sloughing off their flesh, in lyrical and philanthropic convulsions, and above all a rhythm of silent sloth, distracted and barely conscious, the kind of lazy patience for which a quarter of an hour or an hour are all the same. The kind that watches the roses wilt on the tables as the sun climbs high in the sky and the street-cleaning hoses have used up all the water in the street.

Women came to the Pingouin with evening escorts already arranged, or with their current squeeze. They were relaxed and unassuming, their makeup often a ruin, with whiskey starting to trickle down hairdos tortured by bleach and marcel waves. Any arrangements made once inside were either a last resort or the result of the influence of the red of the roses and the sickly amber of the gin. Somewhere between six and seven in the morning a woman perched on a barstool, her tongue nebulous with drink, might cling to the arm of a solitary Scandinavian who had probably taken a vow of chastity. At the Pingouin anything was possible at closing time. Conversations there could just as easily be liquid and vaporous as lucid, uncompromising and realistic, without a shadow of mercy. Many couples would drop in at the Pingouin before going off to bed in order to capture a few whiffs of madness or resignation that would add a little greenery to the sad flesh of copulation.

The audience at the Pingouin was a mix of delicate and austere people, well-meaning poets, and certified drunks, not to mention bilge rats, men who lived off the flesh of women, and boatswains with no strings attached, who had arrived in the morning aboard a cargo ship and were carrying bank notes pressed like dead butterflies between their bellies and their belts. These sailors would hire an interpreter who had most likely been a gunslinger for some union, who would dart quickly in and out, with canine eyes, wearing a cheap suit, to let the sailors know that outside four women, like four phosphorescent mermaids, were awaiting them, when it truth it was only the four most faded souls from the bottom of Carrer de la Unió o Carrer de Sant Pau.

There were always two or three couples dancing at the Pingouin. Occasionally, revelers full of good humor and good manners would come in and concoct some eccentric dance steps. Other times a refined, but entirely drunk, gentlemen from a Nordic clime would start dancing all by himself, bowing to everyone and bothering no one. The Pingouin’s salient feature was its great tolerance. Only with great difficulty could one come to fists or to fingernails. Within those walls alcohol became metaphysical, full of comprehension and soul. Everything moved to the rhythm of the music, everything was muted, everything had the flexibility of a rumba and the water of the port brewing in the belly of the gramophone.

Few people grasped as Bobby did the slippery jellyfish delight that floated in the air of the Pingouin. He would greet the better class of kept women, who arrived arms full of fresh roses and hungry as tigers, with a gray smile. Every so often he would order a bottle of Pommery to be uncorked to give the place a little grandeur. Bobby couldn’t stand the stuff; for him champagne was only good for wetting the tips of his moustache. Even when Níobe didn’t come along, Bobby would go to the Pinguoin with a friend, or a select married couple he had picked up at the Hollywood, a high-octane cabaret that had got its start around the same time, where many tender bourgeois ladies of Barcelona would go with their husbands to contemplate the celestial breasts of the Cuban women and dance bawdy, Tabarinesque dances, surrounded by the sultry aroma of the prostitutes.

One night at the Pingouin, Rosa Trènor took the opportunity to speak with Bobby about a little business deal with a smidgen of drama. That motley, absent, and dead ambiance seemed the most appropriate to her for concocting a scene in which she and he would play the role of specters that emerged from another atmosphere. The topic was Maria Lluïsa de Lloberola. By the intercession of her friend Teresa, Maria Lluïsa had confided in Rosa Trènor. Rosa didn’t let her get away. That marvelous creature bore the same blood as a man with strong ties to Rosa Trènor’s history, and Rosa, who was just as silly, romantic, and transcendental as ever, grabbed hold of what chance had placed within her grasp to extricate that chapter that is usually titled “Twenty Years Later,” in which the heart of the protagonist, bloated with memories and emotions, is about to burst. Rosa did not consider the possibility of exploiting Maria Lluïsa for one of her discreet and excellent latter day concerns. The woman’s dreadfully trashy mentality perceived in Maria Lluïsa’s blithe disposition a vengeance of destiny, the final act of a drama in which Rosa Trènor believed she had deposited her heart, when in truth she had deposited nothing but a little bit of stomach.