Private Life (37 page)

As we were saying, Guillem imagined that Conxa would never truly surrender herself, to him or to any man. Guillem began to fear that in the mystery of his lover there was another woman, and that all her fissures and evasions and the unassailable integral possession of her body, her soul, her will, and even her unhappiness could only be understood as a natural or acquired corruption of her temperament. He feared Conxa was a lesbian, and that the fullness of her passion would never belong to him, because Conxa was saving it for a woman.

The fear of lesbianism in the life of “ladykillers” is one of the most ludicrous and unfounded. When a man who considers himself irresistible sees that a woman does not utterly give in to him, and retains a mystery that he cannot divine, he soon accuses the woman of an abnormal vice. The pride or vanity of men often leads them to see things, and in the case of the baronessa, Guillem was definitely seeing things. Conxa was bizarre and perverse, with a perplexing temperament, but she considered intimacy with another woman to be unequivocally disgusting.

This was not where danger lay. Conxa assented to Guillem’s fever, in part just because, and in part because Guillem seemed different from her other admirers. The rudeness of Guillem’s first dialogue allowed her to glimpse a “case study.” A “case study” like those she had pursued through her own deformation and her adventures between abject sheets. Conxa dreamed that perhaps Guillem could provide for her what she had achieved by “slipping into someone else’s skin” – that is, by doing precisely what Guillem had proposed she do in his
monologue – without any need for her to undergo a metamorphosis, and accepting her as the widow of a millionaire cotton merchant and baron. Conxa realized, though, that despite his bookish cynicism, when push came to shove he was just as inexpert as the other pretty boys who infected her environment. What’s more, the baronessa was able to perceive in her intimate dealings with Guillem that he had only been involved with women who were utterly lacking in substance. In her logbook of adventures, Conxa had recorded a night in Hamburg, in the company of a fascinating savage, on which she had experienced the complete detachment of body and soul and the most fiery of spasms. Each of the savage’s gestures was unforeseeable and a work of art. Conxa had not had many experiences like that. She was not so foolish as to believe that this was something that could be found around any corner, or, even more, that a person from Guillem’s environment and education could provide such a thing. She didn’t demand this of him, but, if nothing more, she did want him to discover her, to feel his way with her. Since Guillem didn’t make her feel the way she hoped, the baronessa always maintained the upper hand with him. She disconcerted and humiliated him, and laughed at him in moments when a man is incapable of laughing, in those intimate moments when laughter is worse than an insult and exposes all the grotesquerie of an incandescent physiology. Desperate, Guillem could not by any means shake off his fascination with Conxa Pujol. He was unrecognizable. His apprehensions began to draw blood. And Conxa sustained this unbearable state with feigned
tenderness and facile concessions, only to retreat to aloofness and withdrawal, baring the most inhuman teeth of the femme fatale, all in the hope that Guillem would find his way to where she hoped he would go, instinctively and under his own impetus.

Something even worse made it impossible for Guillem to get to where Conxa would have liked him to go. It was his adoration of Conxa’s beauty. She was so marvelously assembled, the quality of her skin and her countenance were so otherworldly, that Guillem was left feeling openmouthed and unworthy in her presence. When he embraced her, the emotion Conxa produced in him suffused his nerves with all the vacillations and clumsiness of a novice. And so, what for a normal and tenderly feminine woman would have been cause for absolute surrender and an exchange of panting and secret melody between the man and the woman, was, in the case of Conxa Pujol, a disgusted desperation and a cause for laughter that shamed the disappointed lover.

To the eye of a cold observer, Conxa could have appeared on those occasions to be a pure and simple vixen. In truth, Conxa’s suffering and desire were just as strong as Guillem’s. If she had confessed her erotic ideal, and Guillem had attempted to satisfy it, perhaps then Conxa could have experienced moments more to her liking, but they would have come about artificially. To satisfy her, Guillem would have donned a disguise that she had suggested. Conxa, to her own recollection, was too good a collector of authentic brutalities to be content with the dramas and farces of a luxury bordello. To confess would be
unworthy. Conxa possessed the romantic kind of dignity that required that a woman never reveal anything, allowing herself to be ravished with closed eyes and clenched teeth. Any other way was not amusing.

At the start of their intimate relationship, Conxa and Guillem saw each other at most once a week, in a secret place no one would ever discover. Neither he nor she offered any reason to suspect their liaison. This state of affairs went on for at least two years after the baron’s suicide. Always unsatisfied and more and more enamored of Conxa Pujol, Guillem underwent every imaginable torment. He always affected great dignity in her presence; he spoke very little of his family and his life before her, and this made it easier to keep her from learning about the sad economic situation they faced.

After those two years of battle, Conxa began to be aware of Guillem’s failure. At the outset, Guillem had been in his element because the anxiety Conxa produced in him was the only justification he could find for the monotony of sex, yet he also realized his anxiety was to no avail, and Conxa was, indeed, unassailable.

At this disappointing juncture, an exceedingly ordinary event changed things absolutely. In even the most abnormal or absurd erotic dramas, a decisive role is often played by an element as pedestrian and unliterary as money.

A diffuse ill humor suffused Guillem’s digestive system, assaulting his head and giving him no quarter. For days now he had abandoned the fantasy of possessing Conxa. She had become inured to his constant adoration and he knew all the hospitable facets of his lover’s skin by heart. Guillem required a large amount of money. Not because
he was in debt or otherwise compromised, but for the pleasure of having it and spending it. He got it into his head that it was precisely that woman, with whom he had always been unfailingly polite, who ought to give it to him. It amused him to stand before Conxa in the guise of an unscrupulous profiteer. Maybe this would be the pretext for a definitive breakup that would put an end to their misery.

With utter sangfroid, and in the presence of her nudity, he asked Conxa for money. Conxa eyes lit up, and she said she would be delighted to give him whatever he asked, and he shouldn’t deny himself a thing. Guillem found strange not only Conxa’s excessive generosity but also the fact that she considered his request to be so natural. Soon, though, Conxa’s attitude shifted, and using language Guillem had never heard from her before, she launched into a sarcastic monologue. She informed him that his style of lovemaking was too puerile for him to be asking for money for his services, but despite this she didn’t mind giving him whatever he needed, and even keeping him, and paying for shirts and socks for him that were more elegant than the ones he usually wore. She said she looked upon him as a boy, for whom she was beginning to feel a kind of maternal affection, but as a gigolo he was a dud.

Guillem had suffered this kind of humiliation before, but never with such ferocity and malice. And that day, Guillem was incensed. So, when Conxa finally ran out of steam with her immoral tatters, Guillem rose to his feet before her. All his muscles were tense and flushed with blood. Conxa summoned him with an icy smile and, without so much as by your leave, he gave her two slaps in the face
with all his might. Conxa blanched, but she resisted the blows without the slightest peep of protest, just a deep sigh that dilated her ribcage and made the erect tips of her breasts stand upright. Guillem saw a mysterious breath that resembled her soul begin to emerge from between her lips. The glass of his lover’s eyes was no longer hard; her pupils had a more liquid, more human consistency; her cheeks had turned a cadaverous white, and her rouge marked a rough discontinuous patch on her bloodless skin. Guillem was furious, and he followed the first two slaps with a direct blow to her mouth; her lips contracted in pain, but then immediately reacted with a weak and exceedingly tender smile of complete beatitude. Conxa sank back onto the bed, and Guillem, his spine rigid as a cat’s, felt a burning liquor running through his medulla, perhaps the contained rage of his two years of failure, perhaps the atavic memory of a Lloberola who in days of yore had eaten human flesh.

Guillem sank his teeth into her shoulder. Conxa howled with a bestial enthusiasm, and both he and she experienced the most important erotic moment of their lives.

Conxa’s night in Hamburg had had nothing on this. Like a marvelous sea anemone found at water’s bottom, with wary contractile antennae full of corrosive viscosities that open up at a given moment and expand in a multicolored swoon that brings to mind perfectly denatured chrysanthemums and perfectly artificial orchids, so was the soul of that woman, and her sex and her ferocity and her joy and her enthusiasm and her tenderness began to liquefy, released and rendered in a gelatinous mystery of effusion, in a sighing melody
beyond physiology, in a perspiration perfumed with the whole gamut of ultramarine atavisms and dark nights lit by the glow of shooting stars. Her skin, till now dry, insatiable, and cold as the belly of an iguana, was now softened, porous, hot, drenched by the thousands of internal arterioles that follow the rhythm of sincerity, that hold fast to the skin of men, and communicate from one heart to another all the anguish concentrated in the moments of sterile orgasm and unsatisfied desire.

Guillem and Conxa got up from bed certain of their triumph. Without a word or a comment. Everything that had just happened to them had nothing to do with the world of logic. Nor did it have anything to do with the world of physiology. It would be very sad to have to stop believing that in the skin of men and women there is occasionally something like a flash of divinity, in which gods mingle with monsters, and the gods laugh delicately at morality and reason.

The following day Guillem received double the amount he had demanded of his lover. Guillem did not attempt to refuse it, or even to say thank you. He kept the money, just as a wolf would have done.

From that time on, Guillem was Conxa’s absolute master. Little by little her temperament and his underwent a change. Conxa began day by day to feel more tender, more feminine, more inferior; Guillem, in contrast, felt more and more self-possessed, he recovered his aplomb, his coldness and his hard surface. Guillem’s disdain distressed the baronessa, but she could no longer do without him. After the first inebriation, Conxa no longer had the strength to judge or analyze. In her eyes, Guillem became more worthy of adoration by
the day. Conxa tasted the bitter effects of jealousy and came to know the entire gamut of tears.

Their relationship went on in secret and Guillem exploited Conxa in every way. When Don Tomàs de Lloberola died, Conxa and Guillem’s situation was that of a woman ruined by passion and a common gigolo.

At this point, Conxa began to lose her shame, and on occasion she appeared in his company in public; the woman in her circle saw nothing wrong with it. Conxa always denied it, but everyone knew the truth.

Guillem de Lloberola, more and more independent of and distant from his family, came to be a fashionable figure. His economic future was assured.

“THE ENTRYWAY WAS probably right there: natural stone, no paint, no plaster, no mixtures. The ashlars must have come from the Gusi quarry, or maybe even farther away. The blocks of stone were lashed with straps to the backs of the very hairy men who transported them. The backs and the kidneys of those men must have made a cracking sound, like a snapping tendon, with every step they took. They would stop only to breathe and to scratch the hair on their chests. Between the hairs there was sand and clay and crushed fleabane leaves and maybe a grasshopper scraping at their nipples with the saw of its legs. As they flicked the grasshopper off
with a fingernail, and wiped the sweat from their eyes, they would feel a prick on their thighs, and it would be a boxwood goad with an iron spike that had no other purpose than to poke men’s thighs. It was wielded by a long, lean man with bad lungs. From time to time those pricks sliced through the flesh and did real harm. At night some of the thighs slashed by the boxwood goad would swell up terribly, and the wounded man would get dry mouth and see red lights flashing, and begin to wail. The other men who were packed in beside him, sleeping flesh against flesh under a big overhang on top of a couple of blades of straw and nothing more, would land a good punch on him and the wound would swell even more. The following day they would find him dead and no one would take the trouble to bury him. They had too much work hauling ashlars. They would toss his body out in back, probably in Mr. Domingo’s gully. There he would be eaten by ants, praying mantises, beetles and earwigs. Herons would take a little taste and no more. Herons built their nests in that wasteland, which at the time was full of black pines.”