Private Life (49 page)

“Maybe I am. But there’s something else. As long as we’re being frank, I’m not ashamed to tell you. I have noticed that some people, no matter how they try to hide it, can’t help but look askance and give
us the cold shoulder when they see me talking with him somewhere. I’ve heard talk about the reputation he’s earned and the reputation I’m earning …”

“But, Conxa, didn’t you say all that didn’t matter? For God’s sake, don’t go on …”

“Well, now it’s a question of pride. I want him to be accepted as my husband in everyone’s eyes, with my head held high. I want the satisfaction of seeing everyone who goes around calling him an unscrupulous gigolo and me a degenerate having to invite him into their homes and fawn over him. Don’t you see? They’ll have to respect him, even if it’s only for my money, because, as you know, Guillem is penniless.”

“You are getting married … Or to put it another way, you are using your money to buy a husband, to buy your reputation and that of a man whom you can’t do without. In this regard, then, well, my way of thinking was, indeed, more romantic … You are a modern woman, Conxa, oh yes, much more modern than I! You think that in a year, or two, or perhaps less, this fellow will be respected as your husband and no one will think of him as your gigolo …”

“They can think what they want, but I will be serene and satisfied. And he’ll be tied to me, he’ll be mine …”

“He’ll be tied to you by your money …?”

“Can’t you believe that he really loves me, that we really love each other?”

“I have doubts about everything, Conxa. I can see you’re in a huff. Since I have never in my life experienced such a passion …”

“Naturally, Hortènsia, I already said you wouldn’t be able to understand what’s happened to me. Maybe I am making a big mistake. I’ve made quite a few mistakes in life. Believe me, one more won’t make a difference …”

“All right, Conxa. My tapestry is at your disposal. You realize that after all you’ve told me I feel more obligated than ever to indulge you.”

“Hortènsia, I’d be grateful if you …”

“You mean I can’t say anything about all this? Conxa, it will be very hard for me. I’m a gossip, I can’t help myself. I spend my days airing dirty laundry over lunch, over tea, at the golf course, at the theater. Imagine how hard it will be for me not to be able to tell people, and you know who they are, at least a little smidgen of the conversation we’ve had. What do you expect us to talk about? What could possibly interest us more than dishing the dirt … As I see it, the topic of your wedding would be a bombshell, a trophy I would carry off this very evening at the Hostal del Sol, where I’m going to have dinner with Teodora Macaia, Bobby, and the Moragueses and I think even that flirt Titina and her in-laws will be there. Just think how hard it will be on me to be silent as a tomb, Conxa! But I promise I won’t say a word … I promise …”

TWO MONTHS AFTER this conversation, the news of the wedding of Conxa Pujol, the widow Baronessa de Falset, to Guillem de Lloberola did indeed fall like a bombshell in the world of the posh.

In the men’s circles, you could hear the following comments: “What brass!” “How cynical!” “What a loose woman!” “What a crook!” “What a tart!” and other comments that decency doesn’t allow us to write down.

To be sure, Guillem de Lloberola accepted the baronessa’s proposition in order to secure his situation. Guillem would not have been capable of taking the initiative himself, nor did it ever cross his mind, when he initiated his assault, that that adventure could end in marriage. Gullem had many defects, but a Lloberola could never have plotted so far in advance. If Guillem had foreseen the value of his play from the outset, he could have been qualified as a good diplomat. But Guillem was more of a wastrel, a bohemian, who lived day-to-day. The first time Conxa brought up the idea of marriage, Guillem wrinkled his nose. He had stooped really low and he had lost all shame: in point of fact, he was a
maquereau
. He took money from Conxa, but that all happened in the murky, irregular world where Guillem drowsed. He found the thought of exchanging that place for a bright world in the full light of day, the thought of becoming a legal
maquereau
, by means of a grotesque ceremony, presided over by the Catholic Church and the current Civil Code, to be a little disgusting. Once in a blue moon, Guillem felt like a Lloberola, and Conxa’s marriage proposal seemed despicable to him. In addition to veiling the madness of a depraved woman and a man with no illusions in a shroud of propriety, for Guillem such a marriage meant becoming the master of the fortune of a man he had practically murdered. Guillem would be acquiring a certificate of grandeur and esteem by means
of a series of base, criminal actions. But Conxa, despite her pirate, Creole blood, was intoxicated by the cowardly air of her social circle, and she wanted to have the pleasure of turning the bite marks of the bordello into the satisfaction of a twelve o’clock Mass to the sound of the municipal band. Conxa persisted, and Conxa demanded. Guillem blinked his eyes and began to get used to the idea of being Conxa’s husband, having a great fortune and the best automobiles at his disposal, and to procuring for himself the most wonderful escapades, out of sight of the sadistic and unnerving sexuality of Conxa Pujol.

In Guillem’s time, protests were ephemeral and people had adopted a general devil-may-care attitude of conformity and acquiescence. The only person Guillem sought some counsel from was his friend, Agustí Casals.

With the coming of the Republic, Agustí Casals had achieved great status. His friendship with Josep Safont and other public figures, his gift for oratory and, above all, his elegance in positioning himself, gave him a splendid standing. Agustí Casals was a good person, and for a while now he had been concerned about Guillem. He wanted to find something, some position, that Guillem could defend. He said Guillem was being ruined, and it was a shame for him to be facing a future with no prospects. When Guillem told him about the wedding project, Agustí reacted more as a lawyer than as a moralist. Agustí knew Guillem, even if he was ignorant of the darkest details of his life, but he knew perfectly well what kind of man he was. If it had been any other kind of person, a more redeemable kind, Agustí would have said to him that the first thing a man must
preserve was his dignity. But Agustí could see that Guillem possessed a cancerous morality that had no chance of redemption. As a good lawyer, Agustí saw this as an excellent business plan that, with a minimal concern for appearances, assured his friend of a great position. Agustí advised him to waste no time on scruples he would get no credit for. And if anyone criticized him it would just be a case of the green-eyed monster …

Guillem married, and within four months he was on the board of the Club Eqüestre. He fabricated the thick skin of an ideal husband for himself, and he never took it off, not even at bedtime.

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.