Josep Maria de Sagarra - Private Life

Back then Hortènsia Portell was still a fresh and radiant widow. Blond, plump, with a lorgnette and too much make-up — elegant ladies were not yet using make-up in those days — she attracted a blend of authentic aristocracy, social climbers, artists, and men of letters. Hortènsia was known for being a free thinker, though she was both very proper and very chaste. Some of the ladies — Leocàdia among them — found her affected, common, and brazen. If indeed they didn’t dare give her the cold shoulder in public, in no event would they ever have invited her to their homes or deigned to set foot in hers. Hortènsia considered those ladies to be “démodé” and called them “old biddies,” and she made fun of their fussiness and their lack of style. Still, the truth be told, their snubs hurt her feelings, and it could be said that in the purchase of the Lloberola tapestry there was as much amour-propre and spirit of revenge as artistic enthusiasm.

The “shock” of the tapestry dissolved into fifty-thousand spoonfuls of nightly soup in the apartments of Barcelona until the shock of other sizeable sales came along, and the final thunderclap when the Lloberolas abandoned their house.

Don Tomàs’s tactic was to hide his head under his wing like an ostrich, and Leocàdia naturally followed suit, as we said before. Out of consideration, people accepted the grandiose and defensive behavior of el Senyor de Lloberola, who continued to speak of his glories in the same tone of voice as before. If at some point he made a fool of himself at the betting table he frequented in the Cercle del Liceu, the regulars pretended not to notice, and el Senyor de Lloberola would clear his throat with his usual leonine roar, convinced that no one had noticed a thing.

His two sons, Frederic and Guillem, and his daughter, Josefina, were Don Tomàs’s torment. Married off to the young Marquès de Forcadell, Josefina had escaped the conflagration and, even though she truly loved her mother, and shared her phlegmatic, dull, and acquiescent nature, her married state and the atmosphere of comfort that filled her lungs made her selfishly set foot as rarely as possible in the apartment on Carrer de Mallorca. Don Tomàs, who never bit his tongue and was an unrepentant and tempestuous pater familias with his children, loosed his harshest fulminations upon Josefina’s ample blubber, considerably sweetened by massage. He spoke of her ingratitude, lack of consideration, frivolous habits, and lack of respect, in the thorny crimson tones a good prophet might use. Josefina would weep and protest, and Leocàdia would play the role of Sarah by the side of her penniless Abraham. All she got out of it, though, was a scolding from Senyor Lloberola that sent mother and daughter fleeing in a damp veil of tears. When she got home, Josefina would tell her husband the tale, playing the part of the victim. The young Marquès de Forcadell would then declare that his father-in-law was a beast and didn’t deserve all the deference they showed him.

Frederic, whom we met in Rosa Trènor’s bed, was the hereu , the heir and firstborn. He was the spitting image of his father, and he had all the family flaws. Yet he didn’t have Don Tomàs’s theatricality or tremolo, and hence, he didn’t have his charm. Because, in spite of it all, Don Tomàs had a certain charm. Since the one had been molded with the defects of the other, Frederic and his father couldn’t stand each other. When Don Tomàs had to name a person in whom every moral calamity converged, the first name he came up with was Frederic; when his son had to conjure up the beast of the Apocalypse, he thought inevitably of his father. In early youth, Frederic had tried to study many things, but he was successful at none. His head full of the airs of the hereu to a fine household, he ended up tossing his books to the wind and deciding to live off the fat of the land. Despite the outrage and reprimands of Don Tomàs, Frederic — who at the time was convinced of the solidity of the family fortune — got his way. Partially in secret and partially in open rebellion, he prevailed over his father’s feeble objections. In his heart of hearts, his father relished having such a brilliant, modern son, with such fine taste in clothes and coveted by no few mothers. The match with Maria Carreres was not entirely satisfactory to Don Tomàs, who aspired to a daughter-in-law from the household of a duke of Madrid. Maria Carreres came from a distinguished bourgeois family, which naturally could not measure up to the shields and traditions of the Lloberolas, but she had a good dowry and seemed like an excellent young woman.

When the time came for his son to marry, Don Tomàs was feeling the pangs of insolvency. The sale of the famous tapestry coincided with the birth of his granddaughter Maria Lluïsa. From that time on, relations between Frederic and Don Tomàs became more and more grim. All Frederic wanted was to save himself. He started a business, got rapped on the knuckles with two or three bad deals, and buried his wife’s dowry on a particularly bad transaction. The Carreres and Lloberola families had a falling-out. Maria Carreres, inexpert and melodramatic, was the Iphigenia of the situation. Frederic hid his discomfort by coughing, though with less of a roar than his father at the card table of the Cercle del Liceu. With no money to throw around, Frederic felt like a cat with a can tied to its tail. Accustomed to spending heedlessly, it was a terrible blow to him to accept a post at the Banc Vitalici, a position that was unrewarding and ill-paying because the firstborn son of the Lloberolas could barely read or write. When Don Tomàs sold the house, the older and younger couples went their separate ways. Having happened upon a decent lawyer, the elder Lloberolas were able to save a sum of some importance on which to live. Don Tomàs was able to pass his son a monthly pension, since his daughter-in-law’s dowry was now nonexistent and the salary from the Banc Vitalici was a pittance. Among the properties Don Tomàs had managed to salvage was the Lloberola estate on the outskirts of Moià. He wouldn’t have given up this estate for anything in the world. To do so would have made him feel as if the imponderable liquid of his nebulous feudal ancestry were being sucked from his veins.

Even though Frederic rejected the stuffy ceremony and traditional airs of his father, and wanted to be a carefree, modern man, he still took pride in his name, his coat of arms, and his estate, which was known as the Lloberola castle. He would take his friends, including the ever-present Bobby, to hunt there as often as he could, even though they never killed so much as a pitiful heron.

Don Tomàs’s other son, Guillem, lived with his parents. There was an age difference of twelve or thirteen years between the two brothers, because Leocàdia was one of those unfortunate mothers who, bending with brutish submission to the insatiable task of procreation, had been cruelly compensated by a fate that conceded her only three children. All the rest were either sacrificed to miscarriages or sickly creatures who ended up in the cemetery before they had use of reason.

Don Tomàs de Lloberola was starting to feel over the hill, and had turned into a toothless lion unawares. His ailments had brought him close to Leocàdia. You might say that when his children were not around, his limp despotism was transformed into a more human and comprehending attitude. He and Leocàdia had done all they could. They had slept side by side for so many nights, they knew each others’ snores and guttural sounds so thoroughly, that from time to time, in those moments of liquid sadness old people are given to, moments empty of passion and ambition, Don Tomàs would take refuge in the winter fruit of Leocàdia’s skin, as if attempting to breathe a bit of joy into his sapped nerves.