Private Life (5 page)

Along with this estrangement from the land, dating from the early 19th century, came a Castilianization of the greater part of the Catalan petty aristocracy. They became parasites, who turned their backs completely on the real traditions and all the essential local sentiments that were awakening little by little at the time in our country. The civil wars of the period contributed to the economic and moral suicide of many of these families. And when the wars died down, one could say that the political passion that leads one to risk even his own skin died down as well, and all that remained was a fading anachronistic ferocity, the consequence of discord produced by the wars themselves. Hence, for many of these gentlemen, politics was nothing but the spirit of the lowest form of
caciquisme
, local machine politics exercised through cronyism and ties to Madrid and the Court. Sometimes, this would serve a utilitarian purpose, perhaps the concession of a highway that would benefit a property; other times it was for nothing more than to satisfy the delusional heart of an insignificant character, who would willingly dismantle his inheritance for a seat in the Senate.

Religious sentiment cleaved to the backs of this aristocracy in the form of the most ineffectual clericalism. Owing to their blood ties with the Church, through a profusion of relatives in the clergy, be
they parish priests, canons, or even bishops, the machinery of religion in these families proceeded with perfect rhythm. Each family had its own parish or church where they could put on airs at a specific Mass. They were members of the parish board, the benevolent societies, or the merely religious associations that occupied preferred places in solemn processions, wearing uniforms of extinct grandeur and bearing candles with more blessings than any ordinary candle. Each family had its own specific number of religious orders to patronize, and in the salons of those cold, damp houses whose pomp fell somewhere between sepulchral and carnavalesque, infinite pairs of nuns wearing the most heterogeneous wimples and scapularies warmed the brocade chairs.

Often the only way for one of these aristocrats to highlight his own figure with a color that might stand out against the surrounding gray was a solemn religious event, at which he might be positioned by the side of a bishop, his military coat emblazoned with stripes and his three-cornered hat trimmed with noticeably moth-eaten feathers.

These religious mechanics took the form of a sort of penitent’s parade that discharged its offices in those grand houses from the vestibules to the most intimate recesses of the bedroom. Those dark bedrooms held great canopied beds, in the vicinity of which the bathrooms and sanitary apparatuses had been replaced by all manner of colorful images in pathetic robes standing in glass cages, by the side of holy water fonts or hulking black armoires crowned with escutcheons and filled with never-worn undergarments whose lace trim had yellowed with sadness.

Outward morality was so fastidious in these families that often it was considered scandalous merely to drop the name of a famous actress or dancer, or intelligent author, or the title of a novel. During visits to the lady of the house no lips would ever mention a topic of conversation that might be considered even remotely free, and dialogues centered exclusively on religion, illness, the children’s upbringing, or questions regarding servants or property. And in a very vague way, from a very peculiar angle, politics might be commented upon.

Moral rigidity, strictly external, was no impediment to the secret practice in the heart of the most prim and proper families of the basest imaginable sexual practices, cases of vile degeneration. A respectable white-bearded gentleman, the bearer of candles and canopies in processions, might be inverted with all that such a thing entails, or a sadist might be keeping his tastes under the most cowardly wraps with the complicity of the most sordid people.

AT A TIME WHEN the amorous life of our city was not yet as big and brazen as it is today, some of those aristocrats relieved their sexual inclinations in airless, plebeian surroundings. It wasn’t at all unusual for their excitement to be focused on the stockings of a cook or the fleshy opulence of a hired wet nurse. The aristocrat who gave a diamond necklace to a dancer from the Liceu Opera, or who bedecked a seamstress in a hat trimmed with cloth camellias and the wings of an exotic bird, was considered lacking in moral fiber, a man who brought public offense to his class.

The most outstanding characteristic of houses like that of the Lloberolas was a life of isolation, spent in relations with only a very limited number of families, who attributed to one another all the moral and social value the Catalans could muster. Anyone who did not pay social visits in an open carriage with a coat of arms on the door – even if it was dilapidated – was considered inferior. Likewise any lady who did not dispose of damp and lugubrious salons with sofas upholstered in pearly silk (but with arthritic swollen legs) for her conversations with canons, generals, or seamstresses – often the only counsel available to the lady of the house.

A whole new life was emerging in Barcelona, where pirates, espadrille-makers and fugitives from the factory were becoming great industrialists, where thrifty shopkeepers who counted their pennies found themselves with enough capital to devote to new construction and the expansion of the city. Meanwhile, this unimaginative aristocracy, without a shred of initiative, was becoming deflated, impoverished, and utterly annihilated. A few members of this class of families modernized, made arrangements with those among the industrialists they might once have called common, and the occasional, shall we say, morganatic, marriage turned out to be good business for certain families. Others had the good fortune of a felicitous investment or were favored by very particular circumstances. Others, like the Lloberolas, had no choice but complete annulment, because the decadence they harbored in their blood no longer had the strength to react.

DON TOMÀS DE LLOBEROLA lived in an apartment that occupied a whole floor on Carrer de Mallorca. It was furnished in an incongruous and unappealing way with the last remnants of his time of glory. The occasional dresser or mirror that held pride of place in the history of their former house played the empty, chipped role of a relic in that space. Leocàdia, la Senyora de Lloberola, couldn’t abide seeing mercenary hands touch that furniture, so every morning, when she got home from Mass, she would set to dusting them and caressing them tenderly, as if stroking the cheeks of a paralytic old grandmother who in better days had been a holy terror.

The situation of the Lloberolas was almost invisible; if it weren’t for Frederic, who retained some contact with the upper crust – where naturally a nebulous, irregular, or precarious position is no impediment to retaining such contacts – one could say that, with the exception of their closest relatives, the Lloberolas saw almost no one, were not invited anywhere, and were never seen at any notable gatherings. Many of those who knew Frederic had never heard a word about his family, and they accepted him like any other parvenu. Leocàdia, limited by her husband’s bronchitis, and more and more scandalized by people who just laughed and squandered, acclimated her old age to a sad, pious, and housebound life.

Even though Leocàdia had never been beautiful, and an early obesity had robbed her, even when she was single, of that special excitement men used to find in bustles and leg-of-mutton sleeves, she was still a lady of refinement, delicate and docile. Leocàdia married Tomàs de Lloberola without a whit of passion, but entirely convinced
that there could be no other man for her than her husband. Between her innocence and the unremitting moral norms she had bred in the bone, she accepted the bit of recreation afforded her by intimacy with a heavy, graceless, and monotonous man with the tender resignation of Sarah in the bed of Abraham. Still, always full of compunction, she would drone on in the ears of her spiritual directors with the rustling of a pious owl, resistant to pacification. The only thing that mollified her was the persuasive counsel of a prestigious priest, who told her that in holy matrimony the woman must be amenable and have a bit of patience. In time, Leocàdia found it all very natural, and even came to feel genuine love for Don Tomàs. By dint of the sort of mimicry that can be seen in some animal species and some married couples, Leocàdia began to lose her own initial refinement and her family colors, to reabsorb in her soul and display in all their variations the most banal qualities of the personality of the Lloberola patriarch.

Leocàdia adopted Don Tomàs’s family vanity. In this regard she was an old-fashioned lady, the kind who shrink and fade away in the presence of their lords and masters, never showing them up or expressing a contrary opinion. It was only with regard to her husband’s great economic disasters and absurd spending sprees that Leocàdia might timidly protest, advise, or insinuate, with that conservative and practical spirit women generally possess. Still, she was never energetic about it, but always phlegmatic, in keeping with her phlegmatic constitution, and she never managed to avert a single catastrophe.

Believing, in error, that he was at the top of his game, Don Tomàs de Lloberola continued, with an evident lack of intelligence, to make
terrible business decisions. Later, in consequence, he would have to take out a loan at a usurious rate, or a second mortgage that squeezed them to the bone. Leocàdia never opened her mouth, crying in secret and chalking up to bad fortune what was nothing more than the consistent ineptitude of her husband.

Despite having served two or three times as President of the Association of Catholics, and on the board of the Committee for Social Defense, which was one of the most bovine and cloying ways of being reactionary, Don Tomàs had passed up no opportunity to be unfaithful to his wife, and the loveseats of the Liceu Opera House served more than once as a cover for certain adventures that the Senyor de Lloberola preferred to keep to himself. The always innocent Leocàdia, believing in the good faith of her husband, had fallen prey on one or two occasions to the torment of suspicion, at which point instead of crying out to the four winds, she preferred to keep her counsel and offer up her devotions to Don Tomàs’s guardian angel.

The hardest blow for Leocàdia was the sale of the family manor, which came about not because it would bring in a great amount of money, but because maintenance of the property occasioned a series of unsustainable expenses. Up to that point, she and her husband had been able to keep up appearances before their acquaintances. The word was that the Lloberolas were in a bit of a jam, but no one suspected that a family with so much history and such an important inheritance could fall apart so suddenly. Their renunciation of past splendors came to light gradually. If Don Tomàs, on realizing his situation, had simply stopped short, unsentimentally cut back,
and put his cards on the table for the world to see, perhaps he could have saved a great deal more than he did, and perhaps the Lloberolas could have continued to play a relatively brilliant role. But his stubborn vanity, the centuries-long heritage of the family, and a willful insistence on pretending to have more that they had meant that his transactions and patchwork solutions were always negotiated more or less under the table, in the worst of conditions, and sometimes the Senyor de Lloberola – who saw himself as a real shark – ended up simply being fleeced.

The first cry of alarm announcing to Barcelona society the toppling fortunes of the Lloberolas – a special kind of protestation, containing inflections of laughter muted with phony compassion, like that of a flock of crows the scruffiest and most gossipy of which has happened upon a dead cow – went up on the feast day of Saint Hortènsia. On that day many of the ladies who went to visit the widow Hortènsia Portell saw the Gobelins tapestry that had famously presided over the green room of the Lloberolas hanging in her salon. That tapestry, one of the most magnificent of those possessed by the old families of Barcelona, was so well-known in society, and so familiar, not only to the eyes of the ladies, but even to the neighborhood shopkeepers and mechanics, who had never laid eyes on it, that when they wanted to identify the Lloberolas they would say, “that family with the tapestry.” Hence the general surprise produced in Hortènsia Portell’s salon could not have been more acidic and smeared with gossip. The question was on everyone’s lips, mixed in with theatrical variations on “Well, I never.” Hortènsia, both ashamed and amused,
said, “Yes … the poor Lloberolas … you could see it coming for some time now. I got a good price for it because, as you can imagine, I am not in a position to own such a thing. But I didn’t want to let it slip away. Better for it to stay here. If not, who knows where it might have ended up!” Later, in a more intimate setting, and in a lower voice, Hortènsia would drop the tearful tones and pick up the kitchen shears that could rip out the innards of a hake without a hint of compassion.

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.