Private Life (45 page)

Her friend accompanied her early one afternoon to the home of an acquaintance in whom she had utter confidence. She was a woman of around forty-five, with a pretty face, but much the worse for wear. She had an apartment on Carrer de Rosselló, decorated with airs of refinement, in which a slightly offensive scent of smut prevailed. The woman was neither a midwife nor in the trade, but she dealt in resolving the untimely conflicts of love with discretion and a modicum of safety. The woman’s assistant was a man of around thirty, a medical
doctor, lean, with a sallow complexion, and somewhat repulsive. He treated the patients with cloying sweetness and double entendres.

Though Maria Lluïsa answered the questions the lady asked her with naturalness, the woman was clearly affected.

The sallow doctor took up his duties in a chamber expressly equipped to be like a clinic. The operation went off relatively easily and with a satisfactory outcome. It was very painful, but Maria Lluïsa bore it with that endurance peculiar to women.

After the operation, she lay in the proprietor’s bed for four hours. The good woman offered advice and tried to give her guidance. Maria Lluïsa listened vaguely, but her head was weak. When the doctor returned it was nine in the evening. He took Maria Lluïsa’s pulse, said it was safe to go home, but that she should be very careful, and prescribed a prophylactic treatment for a few days.

The run-down woman with the pretty face took Maria Lluïsa and her friend to the door. When they said goodbye, she kissed Maria Lluïsa on the cheeks with great effusiveness. The woman’s name was Rosa Trènor.

MARIA LLUÏSA’S BRAIN was voracious for negative ideas. It had destroyed the possibility of a love that would move the sun and the stars. It didn’t believe in the appearance of some St. George in a suit, much less in the dragon he would slay.

For her the world was a mass of putty, stupidly come into existence. Since she had been born of this mass, she didn’t protest. It was the salty, blue water in which her arms could become skilled in the perfect crawl. Maria Lluïsa accepted the most brilliant, amoral and metallic aspects of her time. Her landscape still allowed for the presence of enraptured souls and of souls who enraptured. She wanted to be one of the ones who enraptured. She vaguely recalled that her grandfather had been a man of principle. Her grandfather’s principles seemed just as anachronistic and offensive to her as a boy who went to sunbathe on the beach dressed up as a little shepherd or a devil from
Els Pastorets
, the Christmas play. Maria Lluïsa felt a passion for resplendent trash. Her imagination was like those great luminous advertisements that flash on and off, lashed to symmetrical cages of stone and cement, fascinating millions of men who drag their dread down asphalt streets and breathe in a night heavy with alcohol, perfume, ambition and misery. Maria Lluïsa’s tactic was that of many of her time: improvisation. This way of grabbing onto the antennae of life was the strongest imprint left by the war on a society that only began to evolve in the 1920’s. Improvisation was exactly the same as living day to day. Barcelona suffered greatly from this, particularly in the most spectacular arenas. The way fortunes were made and unmade, and the ease of acquiring a sort of universal pass for being seated in the front row of the grand world, without concern for the moral antecedents or the condition of the subjects’ shirts were the surest signs of the general reigning confusion and vain intestinal spirit of survival. Some periods take into account the name and family
traditions of a person before conceding him any status; in other, more democratic, and perhaps more understanding periods, they have stressed intelligence, ingenuity, and even physical beauty, always valuing the clean and well-groomed person. Other, more recent, periods, in order to come to a judgment about a person, only make note of his shirt-maker, her stylist, their dog, or their automobile. Maria Lluïsa belonged to one of those periods in which the value of the person took only second or third place. In first place ranked the crease in one’s trousers or the quality of one’s stockings.

To affirm that a lady was sublime neither her witticisms, nor her acts of philanthropy, nor the anatomical perfection of her hips were mentioned. The only thing worthy of comment was the color or make of the dress she wore to this party or that concert. In general, people limited their vocabulary to the words “nice” or “not nice.” The words “just,” “honest,” “brave,” “contemptible,” or “ignorant,” were not in good form over the green of a golf course or a bridge table. It was very easy to be nice, because Maria Lluïsa’s era was also one of the less demanding, and the dimension of the glands secreting niceness were four times the size of the liver.

After her year of sexual apprenticeship, Maria Lluïsa was perfectly equipped to calculate the value of all her physical attributes without falling into the traps set for shy, inexpert or innocent girls. Fortunately, Pat was so inferior to her that he had not left any trace of himself or any kind of depravity in the blue and pink regions of her soul. When the moment of disenchantment arrived, in the face of Pat’s selfishness and cowardice, the bit of affection Maria Lluïsa had felt for
him allowed her to react without violence. So it was that her blood absorbed a few injections of bitter skepticism and she developed – and in this she was quite mistaken – an absolutely pejorative notion of men’s emotions. Maria Lluïsa believed that all the boys of her day with a bit of decorative value, like Pat, would behave the same way, and that a girl like her could not harbor any illusions of finding anything better. Maria Lluïsa did not suffer the nerves of many women her age, who dream of a great love and, unsatisfied and disillusioned, don’t realize they have failed until they find their hearts dried up in their fingers like a useless object. Maria Lluïsa was lucky enough to sense the presence of delightful topics in the world that were not precisely the death of Isolde or the imitation of that death as it is carried out between an infinity of sheets in public houses and private homes. Even at the start of her relations with Pat, Maria Lluïsa had realized she was not at all temperamental. Maria Lluïsa’s sensibility resided as much or more in her eyes, her skin, and her palate, and, above all, in her imagination, as it did in the secret corners nature has destined for the most celestial and nebulous of joys. Maria Lluïsa felt that a very furry, flexible, and Machiavellian fox coat or a flawless diamond were much more intense things than the fifth Canto of the Divine Comedy. And this theory of Maria Lluïsa’s should not be seen with overly scrupulous eyes; it was a perfectly human theory, shared by numerous illustrious personalities of the time.

One of Maria Lluïsa’s characteristics was her lack of dignity. This became more pronounced after the intervention at Rosa Trènor’s house. Maria Lluïsa’s era emphasized pure economics, a consequence
of which was a relaxation of the sentiment of personal dignity. In Maria Lluïsa, though, this relaxation was aggravated by family circumstances. It’s curious to see how a working-class family or a craftsman or mechanic’s family, or even someone from the middle class working to make a place for himself, feels a sort of gratification, and pride, and most definitely a sense of dignity that families from the grand tradition, accustomed to not working, and for whom the easy life has taken the place of initiative, do not feel, just as economic catastrophe is launching a stage of moral decay. In such families the lack of dignity can sometimes reach unimaginable extremes.

We have already indicated some similarities between Maria Lluïsa and her uncle, Guillem de Lloberola. In fairness to Maria Lluïsa, it must be noted that her family couldn’t offer her any shining examples. The spectacle of her father and mother only served to unleash shamelessness and disaffection. When Maria Lluïsa was able to get a bit free of them, the bank where she worked, the staff she worked for, and her friends were all people who used toothbrushes and worked to fill their stomachs. Pat had pretty clear ideas about sports, but his concept of human dignity was mean and anemic, suffocated by mufflers, sports shirts, and insurance policies.

Maria Lluïsa had experienced these climes, excellent breeding grounds for the fatty existence of the microbe they carry in their blood, a microbe that was nothing more than atavistic fatalism and the natural consequence of the decomposition of the Lloberola family.

Maria Lluïsa’s flaws, in the days when she was nearing her twentieth birthday, were hidden under her ever-so-tender skin, her
luminous and artless smile, her natural, soaring way of doing things, and her quality of pure blood and distinction that adhered even to the drabbest and most conventional sweater restraining the rigid joy of her breasts.

It was both the flaws and gifts of that young woman that brought into her life people the reader is already acquainted with. The pages to come will explain how, in human existence, whether by chance, by fate, or by predestination, names that had been separated come to be joined again. An invisible thread of some kind ties their souls together against their wills, and in the end men and women realize that they have staked all their blood on a useless farce of a game. The only thing left of it is a bit of a bad taste in the mouth and a few steps forward on the road to death.

The name of the friend who had had the two abortions was Teresa Martínez. She was older than Maria Lluïsa, and had been frequenting Rosa Trènor’s apartment for a good while. Since we abandoned Rosa Trènor at the entrance to the Grill Room, after she slashed Frederic’s face and wrapped herself in the balding skin of her beaver coat, her life had taken quite a few turns. She had cloaked her life of revelry and sentimentality in tones of respectability. When she realized that the exploitation of her body was a losing business, Rosa Trènor opted to exploit others’ bodies.

Rosa Trènor established her business with the utmost discretion. Secrecy and mystery were her accomplices. The friends of her youth and the pleasant clients of her autumn years visited Rosa Trènor’s house on the pretext of having a glass of champagne or a cup of tea.
Everything else was up to Rosa Trènor, and her friends were utterly satisfied. The staff she chose for the business were girls from needy homes and even some from good families. From typists to members of the tennis club: a bit of everything. A very small and perfectly reliable staff.

At the time of the Exposició Universal, Rosa established a great friendship with an extremely important person, a general. Rosa’s every wish was his desire. At that point she expanded other facets of her little business. She bought a few thousand meters of pornographic film and she installed a baccarat table. Rosa Trènor’s apartment was on the second floor of the building, the traditional noble floor, where one would least expect such a place. A plaque on the door that read “La Aseguradora Agrícola, S. A.,” lent the landing an aura of actuarial and agricultural normalcy. The neighborhood watchman knew the score and his palm was well-greased. The attendees at Rosa Trènor’s place were the crème de la crème of Barcelona.

In that new phase of her life, Rosa Trènor was able to put her entire pretentious grande dame repertoire to use. The way she received her clients was worthy of admiration, and the blasé aristocratic smirk that settled onto her plump velvety cheeks so as to play down the importance of things, particularly when the time came to set a price, was also worthy of admiration. To enter Rosa Trènor’s apartment, one had to meet a goodly number of requirements. But for a gentleman known to some degree for his honorability and for the solidity of his bank account, it was sufficient just to present his card. The pornographic films were one of Rosa’s great ruses for reaching other things
from which she could derive fatter earnings, particularly the gaming table. The Dictatorship had prohibited gambling throughout Spain, and the fact was that wagering aficionados would have done just about anything to be able to place a decent bet. Rosa Trènor’s baccarat cured no few neurasthenias among the gentry of the time. She had clients who went exclusively for the pornographic films; they tended to be all false teeth and hair more white than black. Rosa Trènor tolerated the parasites of the industry because among them were some who were considered to be the most gelatinous and influential. When the obscene film sessions in Rosa Trènor’s apartment were over, occasionally a retired general or an ancient marquis and president of a religious association would have to grab onto the banister so they wouldn’t fall down the stairs. The doctors registered many burst arteries among the most illustrious elders as a consequence of those films.

From time to time Rosa Trènor would organize custom-made sessions that she said were “for the family.” At those times the only people allowed in were certain gentlemen and ladies who were party to a secret pledge. The ladies who had the good fortune to attend one of those sessions would only refer to them with an exquisite vagueness, never going into detail. Some husbands who happened upon the lair never in their lives learned that the night before, their wives had been indisposed by a glass of lemonade owing to the upset stomach produced by the viewing of one of the most positively filthy scenes a commercial imagination can invent. Such tender and mysterious questions of chance in the life of married couples seem to have bestowed some interest on the elegant set of the times.