Josep Maria de Sagarra - Private Life

After lunch, he would sit and smoke a magnificent Havana cigar in full view of the historic Lloberola tapestry. He gazed at Conxa with gratitude for her delicacy in rescuing it. He saw himself in the figure of the warlike Jacob, bamboozling Isaac and everyone else with his youthful profile. While hairy and ruddy Esau brought to mind the image of his dimwit brother, Frederic, ensnared in wretchedness and confusion, playing cards amid the faded, acidic weeds, and nursing a case of tuberculosis in the bed of a wine merchant’s wife.

ON CARRER DE BARBERÀ a man has just been killed. He saw how two policemen carried the man off to the clinic. Amid the cobblestones, the man’s warm trampled blood was transferred from the valves of a heart to the soles of anonymous shoes and espadrilles. The desecration of human blood is a thing the civil codes of modern countries do not punish. That day, on Carrer de Barberà, there was no little blood to be desecrated, as criminals often use bullets with no sense of decorum. The faces of the people at the door to the clinic wore that common, yellowing, and congested expression the Barcelona public adopts when a man has been murdered in the middle of the street.

He had heard the shots as he went down the stairs, the well-worn and despicable steps that had the elasticity of rubber to the soles of his feet. To hear shots at that moment seemed impossible to him. He didn’t even suspect that was what they were, and he continued down the stairs. When he reached the doorway, he found himself before the vision of a dead man suspended between two policemen, and the running, gesticulating and rubbernecking people.

Any other time, a spontaneous show of that sort would have punctured his flesh like an unconscious bite with no wish to hurt him or do him harm. But in the situation he found himself in, he felt as if the crime were premeditated, timed precisely so that he would find himself face to face with the dead man’s eyes and the ochre cheekbones of the policemen on going out that door.

He was eighteen years old and had just left a brothel. It was the first time he had been with a woman.

He had had enough of the spectacle in the street; what he had seen was that a stain from such acids is not easy to wash away. But fifty meters from the clinic, the mobile indifference of the faces, the shoes, the hats and the shirts was reconstituted. As he walked toward the Rambla, the walls and the storefronts took on a gray and reserved air, like a man who adjusts his sleeves and cuffs after a fight. At the corner of Carrer de la Unió the tables of the venerable Orxateria Valenciana, where four generations of Barcelonans had sipped on tigernut milk, exuded the sugar, xufles and modesty of its comforting legacy. It was seven p.m. and, under a tent of fog, a sudden June heat was in the air.

On the Rambla, the carnations bursting out on the stands of the flower vendors and the round bellies of the sparrows plumped in the forks of the tree branches seemed more human and all-embracing to him.

At least these creatures didn’t spit the aggressive egotism of the passing eyes in his face. Thousands of eyes. The Rambla was full of them. Eyes full of selfishness and lack of compassion and the tendency to hear only their own voices that walking on the Rambla at any time of day tends to produce. No one was to blame if they saw him as just another guy, with no interest in who he was or what had just happened to him.

He sat down at a sidewalk cafè and ordered a beer. He had twenty cèntims left in his pocket: just enough for the beer and a tip.

In every man’s life there is a moment that is usually hidden in a fog of fear and shame or, if word gets out among his cronies, tinged with insincere, infantile and rude blustering. Years go by, and the negligent man, either unconscious or full of himself, manages to store the moment we are alluding to in the zone of infelicity, in a place where actions lose their flavor and color and are accepted as the bland eventualities of our existence. There is no record of any illustrious academic, solemn professor, or fashionable speaker who has chosen this moment as the topic of a dissertation before a select audience. And despite this, that guilty moment contains so much festering poetry, condensed melancholy, or naked joy that it would be difficult, if one were sincere — if men can, indeed, be sincere — to find any equal to it in intensity. It is the moment when a young virgin boy overcomes his fear and delivers himself up to all the consequences of a brothel.

It is useless for the straightest of straitjackets, the most metaphysical of conversations, the darkest of Soviet enthusiasms, or the most terrifying of hymns from the hereafter to try and separate us from the millenary vibration of sex. It is pointless for intellectual or ecclesiastic good breeding to evoke the images of a panther, a pig, a serpent, or a frog with regard to the question of sex. The naked flesh of Siegfried will always leap over the flames when the time comes to pursue the flesh of the sleeping Brunhilde. And this will always be the axis on which men of all climes — the weak, thinking reed, as the sublime ascetic of the ruined bowels with a passion for abstract ideas put it — will spin.

Sexual life, depending on the person, can either be colored the gray of lymph or have an intense and hallucinatory polychromatic muscularity. But when even the most imaginative and skillful man reaches his plenitude and maturity, it will have an air of habit and routine. The poetic grandeur of sexual life, the place where it retains all its unpredictability and its dramatic interest, resides in the moment of initiation and discovery.

Poets, preachers, and aging pettifoggers speak of adolescence as the golden core of our path through this world, an enviable time, and they look at the human soul at that point when it is a green grape with all its juice still to be defined and channeled, as if it were a suit more full of flowers and hope than any we wear upon our bones. Where there is neither experience, nor a sense of responsibility, nor economic loss, nor calculated and mature incisions with a knife, there can be no pain. This is accepted by academic literature and by the heads of families. The definition of the imberbis juvenis as defined by Horace is still current when it comes to observing the sad university student, the sad rugby fan, the sad detector of brothels, the sad utter hypocrite up against paternal interrogations. When this sad creature is only seventeen he carries around a red and black confusion in the form of a monster that never leaves the zone of the pubis, the zone of the heart, or the zone of the brain.

Adolescents laugh and leap and dance, but no one wants to admit the adolescent’s sexual sadness. He himself is embarrassed by it, and he will never confess it to anyone else. And when the years have gone by, he will assert that that sexual sadness is a lie.

In the solitary hours of adolescence, discoveries comes little by little. In our innocence and limitations — more pedantic at that age than at any other — we prefer to twirl the moustaches of wickedness, prefer to pretend we fear nothing, while our hearts tremble like poplar leaves. Reading allows for the morbid efficacy of masturbation; dreams are more full of alcohol than at any other time of life, and the only brutally poetic dreams are those of adolescence. Dreams that take direct revenge on the cowardice of unexplored flesh, icy spines and disgust at nocturnal pollutions. Pollutions without enthusiasm, without joy, that often even feel like a punishment. Nec polluantur corpora , says a bitter liturgical hymn that Catholic priests intone at the approach of spring.

Neither swimming pools, nor sports, nor maternal kisses, nor the four black peaks of the biretta worn by those who administer spiritual exercises are sufficient to combat the savage erection. When shameless friends come along — because among adolescents, too, there are the purely gastric types, who digest such preoccupations as if they were a basket of cherries — the shameless friends laugh their shameless laugh at the fear, the cowardice, or the voluntary chasteness of the shameful. Often, remorse accompanies the delirium of imagination, and time slips by without a decision. The champagne goblet modeled on Helen’s tremulous breast is a cup that serves all drinks. The teeth of adolescent boys collide at every turn with that non-existent perfect goblet. The phallic totem of the most remote tribes is the very same totem of today’s high schools and universities. The adolescent has been made to believe in the existence of sin. The case is presented to him factually, with its horrible material consequences. Some pedagogues employ convincing images. They have no compunction about projecting the catastrophes of secret maladies, with all their repugnant secretions and deformations and all their unbearable pain. But it is all for nothing: at some point shame and cowardice are gone. Temptation is too cruel, and the naked flesh of Siegfried will leap over the flames.