Private Life (24 page)

With their décolletages and their nighttime coifs, the women lost personality. Their dresses had too many slits and openings and too much skin was left to the elements. Their souls, and even their malice, fell flat. Something like what happens at the beach. In general, women are much more skilled at sustaining their erotic magnetism on an afternoon stroll, at a hippodrome, or at twelve o’clock Mass than by the side of a swimming pool.

In the presence of so much cleavage on so many middle-aged women, such an unnatural pneumatic display, normal men feel as though they’ve been transported to one of those commercial brothels in the south of France in which all the flesh is high quality and no holds are barred. These things throw one’s palate off, and end up producing contradictory sensations.

Even so, some admirable specimens still stood out between the overall provocation and the indistinguishable black tie. An unabashed collector of trophies of the fair sex might have admired anything from the arms of Clementina Botey, pure white with only a tenuous blush of pink, to the shoulder of the Comtessa de Mur, so criminally silken as to be almost metallic, and dense with an intense and fragrant pigment that brought to mind heated Caribbean hallucinations.

Hortènsia sat beneath the tapestry, on the Louis XVI sofa. The most respectable ladies were arrayed around her. The Widow Xuclà was wearing an old-fashioned egg yolk-colored dress of silk moiré, her bosom covered with constellations of diamonds. Rafaela Coll and her sister, the Marquesa de Cardó, two old poker players, flanked Pilar, guarding her like two prudent opponents in an exhibition game to be sure the widow didn’t try any dangerous sprints. This group was dominated by the hippopotamian anatomy of la Senyora Valls-Darnius, who had vowed, ever since her husband pulled off a considerable swindle in a cement deal, never to utter another word in Catalan. She had also let the word get out that she was in the market for a young man who would give her a tickle from time to time, no matter what the price. This lady had something to say about everything and she could get a little tiresome. The most amusing member of the Restoration
équipe –
this team had been in the flower of its youth when Spain lost its colonies in 1998 – was Aurèlia Ribas, of the Ribas silk merchants, as they were known. She had three brothers, all of whom were marquises, but she had been left without a title. She was nothing but the widow of an insignificant lawyer. Aurèlia had
the face of a fish; she called to mind the rigid, inexpressive, silvery profile of the porgy. She was seventy-eight years old and they had just removed a tumor from her uterus. Poor Aurèlia was so simpleminded that she cried over this misfortune, as a young woman would have cried if the operation had made it impossible for her to have more children. Needless to say, Aurèlia’s whimpering about her uterus provoked the gentle laughter of the poker ladies.

The Comtessa de Sallent, the Widow Xuclà’s sister-in-law, presided over a different group, composed of exemplars of the fusty nobility. These noble ladies, in general, dressed in a more lackluster fashion, and made less use of beauty salons than those whose titles were fresher. Some of these ladies were truly awful and positively turtle-like. The Comtessa de Sallent herself, despite proceeding directly from a lateral branch of the Cardonas, looked and dressed like a chestnut vendor and spoke a Castilian studded with as many hard, greasy expressions as lardons on a Lenten flatbread. Next to the Comtessa de Sallent, Teodora Macaia had the magnificent and unapproachable majesty of a bird of paradise. Others, like the old Marquesa de Figueres, were embarrassed by their ridiculous necklines exposing their deteriorated skin. They didn’t dare look up, and they spoke in a whisper, as if they were saying the rosary.

Occasionally a blend of gardenias and bad faith would appear, laughing uproariously, brandishing the flaming helmet of her hair and mortifying the pearls on her breast. Such was the case of the young Baronessa de Moragues, a manufacturer of rubber objects, deeply vulgar, but also deeply exciting.

A jaunty team of young married ladies and single ladies at liberty made up the most numerous group, with the most male components. This group exuded an aroma of hard liquor and grass from the golf course. In general, this team was composed of the prettiest and the most risqué “music hall” toilettes. Among them, flashing sparkling teeth and cherry-pink gums, were a few young women from the high aristocracy of Madrid, newly married to Catalan nobles or local industrialists. These Madrilenyes had the delicate bitterness of a peach pit, and were better at sustaining a more off-color and perhaps more intelligent conversation.

For some reason, the Dictatorship had facilitated a feminine trade between Madrid and Barcelona in that world that called itself aristocratic. Thanks, too, to the Dictatorship there was a resurgence of grotesque pomp, exhibitionism, and traffic in noble titles. With parades of gold and uniforms and military fanfare, the regime of the time buttered up the base vanity of shopkeepers and petty nobles. Many of them had never been anyone, and their utter insignificance had had no other initiative than to collect the rent on their properties and redeem the coupons on their bonds, always pinching pennies and fearful of falling into poverty. In the years of the Dictadura, these people felt a sudden desire to spend and to show off, to see their names in the newspapers and their wives four meters from the queen, with a gigolo, and to sponsor a flag-raising in some little town on the coast. Their air of parvenus and bottom feeders rested like a spider web or a strip of leather from a carpet beater on the dress shirt of many of the
gentlemen who sauntered through that party and the infinite public and private feasts that were taking place in those daysin Barcelona.

Some gentlemen from fusty families had come to realize they were no longer of any relevance and had been relegated to the dust bin by the democratic and industrial policies of the country. Those gentlemen who had been content during the war to cut down the forests on their estates as they bred canaries and did spiritual exercises, surfaced at the party with all the shiny hardware of their coats of armor and their inanity. Many of the children of these families held positions in the parasitic bureaucracy that sprang up in Barcelona as the 1929 Exposition drew near, with the proliferation of public works underway all over town. The people who worked in the Treasury, the Civil Government, the Bank, the Customs office, were almost all from the province of Extremadura. They lived a separate, resentful, life during that sentimental expansion of Barcelona. Under the dictatorship, they, too, invented titles and uniforms and they, too, introduced glossy, pneumatic wives and sassy, carnivalesque creatures who were accepted by the practical bourgeoisie.

Hortènsia Portell didn’t sympathize by a long shot with the deluge of tawdry pomp of the times, but she found herself, and most of her friends and relations, caught up in the game. She was in her element, like almost all the fine bourgeois ladies of the period, with a taste for public display and exhibition. Hortènsia was a weak woman, and she couldn’t say no to anyone. At heart she was very tolerant and liberal, but lacking in deep-rooted convictions. It was this temperament –
perfumed like her skin with superficiality and distraction – that invented those grand eclectic gatherings at her home.

Because that night on the Passeig de la Reina Elisenda, alongside that whole empty, déclassé world, Hortensia had also invited people who had played a role in the old Catalanist political life. These were men who stood apart from the masquerade, including the occasional sensible businessman, skeptical grayhair, or intelligent young mien.

Hortènsia had brought together exactly the sort of mélange that can always be found at pompous Barcelona gatherings. A mélange of this sort is the result of improvisation, rapid growth, and insufficient review of credentials. It is also the result of a somewhat materialistic world, in which the brand and price of an automobile is paid respect even before the person ensconced within has been identified. The occupant is then extended moral credit and elegance credit in proportion to the price and brand of said automobile. All this dressing up as aristocratic scarecrows that had been the consequence of the First World War was spurred on further by the mentality of the Dictatorship.

If the conversations of all the different groups had been placed side-by-side they might have produced the effect of Horace’s monster, with the peculiarity that each of the monster’s members would have been gnawing at the other.

The most peppery tongues belonged to those fifty years and over; the most airy lungs would glide back and forth from tangos to love and from love to tangos.

Most of the young men’s dialogue centered on chassis, car bodies and gonorrhea. These conversations, in a Catalan spoken to the tune of a
zarzuela
, sounded like a bumblebee buzzing, smelled like mineral oil, and were tinted the color of permanganate.

Among the more serious political topics were timidly broached, and Romanesque art might be discussed, along with the half dozen most highly valued legs at the party. Great Barcelona events were spoken of with satisfaction, from the construction going forward on the Plaça de Catalunya to the two thousand priests from a whole range of Spanish dioceses who would be coming for the 1929 Exposició Universal. These canons would check out the objects on display in the
Palau Nacional
, the main exhibition space of the fair, and then stroll down the Rambla in mufti, smoking cigars. In certain male circles, anticlericalism was in vogue.

The ladies in the tapestry room were all aflutter. Many didn’t believe the dictator would come. Hortènsia smoothed their feathers. Shrill as a parrot, the young Marquesa de León squawked in Spanish for everyone to hear:
“I saw Miguel this afternoon, and he assured me he was coming.”
These particulars offered up by the marquesa caused a few old ladies to snicker, as it was going around that she and Primo de Rivera were in a dalliance.

The arrival of Conxa Pujol, the Baronessa de Falset, caused a commotion, as she was coming without her husband. She was escorted by her in-laws, who looked as if their only reason for coming to the party was to accompany her.

It was the first time that Conxa had attended such an event without her husband. She was at the peak of her great beauty. Conxa must have been thirty or thirty-five years old. All the men’s eyes clung like leeches to her cleavage. Her skin was the most fascinatingly foreign and dreamy product ever to grace the streets of Barcelona.

Conxa’s presence stirred up a great deal of commentary. The topic of Antoni Mates was vividly and impertinently present. Everyone had his own personal version of the famous cotton dealer’s state of mind. Many claimed he had gone mad. In one group, they secretly exchanged shady references, but the explanations were completely off the mark. Without a doubt, the main source of these references was the Baró de Falset’s own behavior, and, at most, some particular detail from the market scare, because, in fact, Guillem de Lloberola had not used any of his arsenal against the baron.

Conxa made her way over to the jaunty team after dropping a few crumbs for the old ladies and allowing herself to be subjected to a string of malicious questions.

Hortènsia escaped from the rheumatic team and went over to breathe in a bit of the fragrance of freshly-mown grass that surrounded Conxa Pujol. The baronessa’s only explanation was that her husband was a bit weary, but she said she would not under any circumstances have missed Hortènsia’s big night.

Among the men who decided to wag their tails in the vicinity of Conxa Pujol’s stockings was a young man with curly hair and the face of a child who said a couple of words amid the hurly-burly of men
who were melting over the baronessa’s skin. Clearly that young man was not part of the scene, because many asked who he was.

Bobby was in one of those groups, He cleared it up for them:

“That’s Guillem de Lloberola.”

“De Lloberola?” said his interlocutor. “Ah, sure! The brother of that cad, right? Your former friend?”

“Precisely,” added Bobby. Neither he nor his companion said another word.

But Guillem still triggered the following exchange between two other people in the group:

“Who are these Lloberolas?”

“How can I put it?.… I don’t know …, just some old spongers …”

The Marquesa de Perpinyà de Bricall i de Sant Climent made another sensational entrance. She swept in like a dethroned queen, escorted by her son-in-law, a couple of colonels, and her sister-in-law, who was from Valencia and flaunted the title of Duquesa de Benicarló. The Marquesa de Perpinyà wore a very severe black dress with a golden shawl draped over her shoulders. She was ugly and misshapen and her skin was pitted and deathly white, as if coated with cheap stucco. The marquesa belonged to the most authentic nobility in the country. It was said that she had a decisive influence on all echelons of the regime. She could have Captain Generals removed from office, and in Madrid people paid her much mind. The Dictator stopped by her house for coffee every day. Ever since the coup d’état in 1923, the marquesa had puffed up like a bullfrog.
Legend had it that the coup was planned in her palace on Carrer de Carders.

The presence of this grande dame pacified a number of the ladies, because in effect it guaranteed that the dictator would be showing up at one point or another. Otherwise, the Marquesa de Perpinyà would not have bothered to attend Hortènsia Portell’s party. The marquesa paraded stiffly among the files of the dumbfounded, and went over to sit under the tapestry, immersed in the poisonous pomp that was beginning to enter a comatose state. Generals bowed to kiss her hand with a cocky and liturgical flourish, and she alternated laughs and hiccups, producing a dry, infrahuman voice, reminiscent of the sound of walnuts rolling around in a sack. In one corner of the great hall there were two middle-aged men. One had a gray moustache and a disabused and absent air, and the other had a lively demeanor and the mouth of a jackal. When the one with the gray moustache caught sight of the Marquesa de Perpinyà, he said to his companion: