Josep Maria de Sagarra - Private Life

The only man who could be of use to Rosa in her perverse plot was Bobby. Another high-class client would have turned the scene into a banal anecdote of no importance. Bobby listened with his eyes half-closed as Rosa told her story. He said neither yes nor no. Bobby was a pretty decent guy. All his life long no one could accuse him of anything malicious or mean spirited, nothing that would sully a man’s elegance. But like most people from his circle, skeptical and disabused, lacking in passion, every so often it amused him to try a taste of something that might seem perverse or even have a touch of evil. Since Bobby had broken off relations with Frederic, he hadn’t thought for a moment of making peace with that smug and tedious man, but neither did he bear him the slightest hatred. Frederic’s affronts to Bobby’s mother were nothing new to him. He was aware of the opinion many ungenerous people had of the Widow Xuclà. Frederic meant nothing to Bobby. His economic disasters, the absurd life he was living on his estate, didn’t affect him in the slightest. But Rosa Trènor’s insinuations piqued his curiosity. Bobby also saw something of a final curtain in the affair at hand, and he realized he could act with impunity, playing the role of a traitor. Unseemly though it may be, sometimes this is the role a spectator would most enjoy playing.

Maria Lluïsa had only a vague notion of who Bobby was, but she was aware of the friendship he had once had with her father, and of the reputation that bitter and scrupulously polite bachelor enjoyed among the elegant set. Maria Lluïsa shared the ideas of some young women of her time regarding mature men and callow boys. It had become fashionable to disparage “cute” and athletic boys, with their vanity in their physiques. They were considered lightweights, lacking in interest and discernment. They were attacked for their empty chit-chat and their inability to show a path to the stars. Young women like Maria Lluïsa preferred a man of substance, more polished and more experienced, to a speed demon or a tango dancer with slicked-back hair. Young woman like Maria Lluïsa liked to be taken seriously, to be treated with respect. If they were out to infatuate, they preferred a victim with stature and history to a gigolo whose only concern was how to dress, and how to get undressed in staler latitudes.

Maria Lluïsa and Bobby met one day at Rosa Trènor’s house, and something happened to Bobby that had never happened to him before: he fell in love like a little kid.

He swapped the role of the traitor for that of the gallant young man, tender and pure, right out of a romantic love story. Bobby hid his feelings and tried to play the cynic, the paternal yet despicable man of the world who reveals that the whole plot revolves around a superficial fantasy. His behavior delighted Maria Lluïsa. She found him extraordinarily charming. His fifty years of age weren’t the slightest obstacle. Maria Lluïsa wanted to be more and more modern, and his gray hair was a perfect fit for her state of mind. Bobby conducted himself splendidly with her, accentuating his generosity with a cool amiability that allowed her to retreat.

Maria Lluïsa didn’t stop to weigh the consequences. Her habit of improvisation and living day to day allowed her to accept Bobby’s friendship at face value, without having to think about what would happen tomorrow. All she had to do was pretend, and justify Bobby’s attentions. Maria Lluïsa had achieved considerable independence from her mother, but it was important to her, above all, to avoid any kind of scandal. The rumor had reached Maria Carreres’ ears that her daughter’s ways might be a little too modern, but Maria Carreres felt impotent in the face of her daughter’s power. Frederic, at that point, was completely divorced from his family. He had no authority over his children, nor did he care to. Frederic was a lost cause. When Maria Lluïsa met Bobby, it hadn’t been long since Don Tomàs had died, and Frederic was adrift in the arms of the wine merchant’s wife and the delirium of her black nightgown with the pumpkin-colored babies’ print. Breathing in the dust from the stones of his castle, Frederic had no desire to see his wife or their apartment on Carrer de Bailèn ever again. Nor was he aware of the little temperature he had every evening. The people in the town said he was going mad. What was really going on in Frederic’s body was tuberculosis, which would send him to his grave only a few years later. In Barcelona no one knew anything about this, and Maria Lluïsa didn’t miss her father’s lectures or his baloney a single bit. Without her father around, the air was cleared for her to spin out the golden thread of her dreams.

One day, Maria Carreres spoke to her daughter about a few things, some rumors she had heard, but Maria Lluïsa played her part to perfection, and her mother had no choice but to exclaim: “God be with you! It’s in your hands now, Maria Lluïsa! You’ll be sorry.” In a word, all the things a mother says when she sees that nothing can be done.

Not only that, Maria Lluïsa’s mother didn’t allow Grandmother Carreres to stick her nose in these affairs. Economically, the apartment on Carrer de Bailèn depended on Grandmother Carreres. Yet Frederic’s insipid wife, aware of her impotence with regard to her daughter, thought it was more sensible to play along and mask the situation. This was her way of averting scenes by the grandmother that, instead of convincing Maria Lluïsa, would only have strained the atmosphere. Over the years Maria Carreres had become a woman of frayed morals. Like an old garter, her morals applied no pressure and held nothing up. Whimpering all the way, she accepted her mother’s favors and swallowed all the old woman’s foul and contemptuous remarks. She preferred not to see things, letting herself be deceived and convinced for the sake of peace. The woman’s psychology, like the fabric of her dress, had the look of a hand-me-down. The strategy Maria Carreres had learned from the Lloberolas was to keep up appearances and bury her head in the sand like an ostrich. With a happy, shameless smile, she would make her round of visits, giving news of her own as if she were speaking of the Holy Family, when everyone knew about Frederic’s absurd life, and knew that her daughter worked in a bank, and wore a string of pearls — of the kind that bode no good and are fodder for gossip among more pious souls — around her neck.

Bobby received Maria Lluïsa in the little apartment he kept for affairs of the heart. The girl planted a few fuchsias, some red geraniums and a number of violets in Bobby the skeptic’s small spiritual garden, heretofore lacking in light or water or the slightest drop of hope. Maria Lluïsa’s freshness, her exceptional grace, the way she had of alternating modesty and impudence, were things that Bobby had thought no longer existed in this world. When he rediscovered them in Maria Lluïsa’s skin, he began to fear that he had been mistaken, that his idea of life and of women had served to create a reputation for him among the most elegant and boring sets as a polite man who never gets ruffled or surrenders himself entirely, but had probably ruined him for feeling all the flavor of madness in a pure and simple mouth that besides communicating the warm breath of another’s lungs, also delivers the uncontrollable mystery of a soul.

In his heart of hearts what was happening was that Bobby was getting old and starting to dodder.

“MY HUSBAND EXHAUSTED all his available kindness on me. If he didn’t do more, it was because he simply didn’t have the wherewithal. He was not to blame for his medullary disease; he was a specter who fell in love with me, never suspecting his condition. Everyone lied to my husband; I was the only one who didn’t lie to him. My mother was not the kind of woman who could understand what I was doing, what she practically obliged me to do. Our marriage was just one of the many marriages of the time. It was also not my husband’s fault that on our return from Venice, one month after we were married, I, who was living in a dream, had to resign myself to being a nurse to a dying man. My husband had a nobility that I have not sensed in any other man. With his gaze he asked me only one thing, always the same thing: he asked me to forgive him for having married me, to forgive him for having turned me into a nurse. Perhaps the only worthwhile thing I have done is to understand that request for forgiveness and to feel grateful for it, more grateful than for any of the embraces of an irresistible seducer. At that point to be anything less than true to him would have been the greatest ignominy, in my eyes. If I had found myself by the side of a healthy, dominant husband, the kind who kill a woman with kindness but basically keep her in her place, I might very well have been unfaithful. At this stage, I don’t think so, but I couldn’t swear to it. What I can indeed swear to is that it never even remotely occurred to me to offend my husband. I find that for most women, nothing can be more compelling than a pair of impotent, supplicating eyes that see in us the prestige of a mother, that feel the confidence our hand bestows when we place it on a forehead for the sole purpose of transmitting our disinterested womanly spirit. My husband’s gaze was that of a sick child, a child fifteen years older than I, and I was only twenty at the time. I felt an obligation to those eyes.”