Private Life (6 page)

Don Tomàs’s tactic was to hide his head under his wing like an ostrich, and Leocàdia naturally followed suit, as we said before. Out of consideration, people accepted the grandiose and defensive behavior of el Senyor de Lloberola, who continued to speak of his glories in the same tone of voice as before. If at some point he made a fool of himself at the betting table he frequented in the Cercle del Liceu, the regulars pretended not to notice, and el Senyor de Lloberola would clear his throat with his usual leonine roar, convinced that no one had noticed a thing.

His two sons, Frederic and Guillem, and his daughter, Josefina, were Don Tomàs’s torment. Married off to the young Marquès de Forcadell, Josefina had escaped the conflagration and, even though she truly loved her mother, and shared her phlegmatic, dull, and acquiescent nature, her married state and the atmosphere of comfort that filled her lungs made her selfishly set foot as rarely as possible in the apartment on Carrer de Mallorca. Don Tomàs, who never bit his tongue and was an unrepentant and tempestuous
pater familias
with his children, loosed his harshest fulminations upon Josefina’s ample blubber, considerably sweetened by massage. He spoke of her ingratitude, lack of consideration, frivolous habits, and lack of respect, in the thorny crimson tones a good prophet might use. Josefina would weep and protest, and Leocàdia would play the role of Sarah by the side of her penniless Abraham. All she got out of it, though, was a scolding from Senyor Lloberola that sent mother and daughter fleeing in a damp veil of tears. When she got home, Josefina would tell her husband the tale, playing the part of the victim. The young Marquès
de Forcadell would then declare that his father-in-law was a beast and didn’t deserve all the deference they showed him.

Frederic, whom we met in Rosa Trènor’s bed, was the
hereu
, the heir and firstborn. He was the spitting image of his father, and he had all the family flaws. Yet he didn’t have Don Tomàs’s theatricality or tremolo, and hence, he didn’t have his charm. Because, in spite of it all, Don Tomàs had a certain charm. Since the one had been molded with the defects of the other, Frederic and his father couldn’t stand each other. When Don Tomàs had to name a person in whom every moral calamity converged, the first name he came up with was Frederic; when his son had to conjure up the beast of the Apocalypse, he thought inevitably of his father. In early youth, Frederic had tried to study many things, but he was successful at none. His head full of the airs of the
hereu
to a fine household, he ended up tossing his books to the wind and deciding to live off the fat of the land. Despite the outrage and reprimands of Don Tomàs, Frederic – who at the time was convinced of the solidity of the family fortune – got his way. Partially in secret and partially in open rebellion, he prevailed over his father’s feeble objections. In his heart of hearts, his father relished having such a brilliant, modern son, with such fine taste in clothes and coveted by no few mothers. The match with Maria Carreres was not entirely satisfactory to Don Tomàs, who aspired to a daughter-in-law from the household of a duke of Madrid. Maria Carreres came from a distinguished bourgeois family, which naturally could not measure up to the shields and traditions of the Lloberolas, but she had a good dowry and seemed like an excellent young woman.

When the time came for his son to marry, Don Tomàs was feeling the pangs of insolvency. The sale of the famous tapestry coincided with the birth of his granddaughter Maria Lluïsa. From that time on, relations between Frederic and Don Tomàs became more and more grim. All Frederic wanted was to save himself. He started a business, got rapped on the knuckles with two or three bad deals, and buried his wife’s dowry on a particularly bad transaction. The Carreres and Lloberola families had a falling-out. Maria Carreres, inexpert and melodramatic, was the Iphigenia of the situation. Frederic hid his discomfort by coughing, though with less of a roar than his father at the card table of the Cercle del Liceu. With no money to throw around, Frederic felt like a cat with a can tied to its tail. Accustomed to spending heedlessly, it was a terrible blow to him to accept a post at the Banc Vitalici, a position that was unrewarding and ill-paying because the firstborn son of the Lloberolas could barely read or write. When Don Tomàs sold the house, the older and younger couples went their separate ways. Having happened upon a decent lawyer, the elder Lloberolas were able to save a sum of some importance on which to live. Don Tomàs was able to pass his son a monthly pension, since his daughter-in-law’s dowry was now nonexistent and the salary from the Banc Vitalici was a pittance. Among the properties Don Tomàs had managed to salvage was the Lloberola estate on the outskirts of Moià. He wouldn’t have given up this estate for anything in the world. To do so would have made him feel as if the imponderable liquid of his nebulous feudal ancestry were being sucked from his veins.

Even though Frederic rejected the stuffy ceremony and traditional airs of his father, and wanted to be a carefree, modern man, he still took pride in his name, his coat of arms, and his estate, which was known as the Lloberola castle. He would take his friends, including the ever-present Bobby, to hunt there as often as he could, even though they never killed so much as a pitiful heron.

Don Tomàs’s other son, Guillem, lived with his parents. There was an age difference of twelve or thirteen years between the two brothers, because Leocàdia was one of those unfortunate mothers who, bending with brutish submission to the insatiable task of procreation, had been cruelly compensated by a fate that conceded her only three children. All the rest were either sacrificed to miscarriages or sickly creatures who ended up in the cemetery before they had use of reason.

Don Tomàs de Lloberola was starting to feel over the hill, and had turned into a toothless lion unawares. His ailments had brought him close to Leocàdia. You might say that when his children were not around, his limp despotism was transformed into a more human and comprehending attitude. He and Leocàdia had done all they could. They had slept side by side for so many nights, they knew each others’ snores and guttural sounds so thoroughly, that from time to time, in those moments of liquid sadness old people are given to, moments empty of passion and ambition, Don Tomàs would take refuge in the winter fruit of Leocàdia’s skin, as if attempting to breathe a bit of joy into his sapped nerves.

Sometimes when the two of them found themselves at table, and Don Tomàs found the oil on the cauliflower a bit rancid or maybe he had choked on a lump in his semolina soup, he would start to spit out words of bile against his elder son or his daughter. Leocàdia would observe the volcanic explosion of her husband’s teeth and the artificial cloud of smoke formed by the scarce and untamed bristles of his moustache, speckled with semolina. As the wick of his anger burned down, Leocàdia’s pupils, veiled by an otherworldly web, would scrub the pepper from Don Tomàs’s tongue and he would finish up with a little cough and bend his head over his plate. After a moment of silence, husband and wife would look at each other in embarrassment, and the bead of a tear would shimmer in the corner of their eyes.

It was then that Don Tomàs realized that of all the fruits he had harvested in this world of vanities, all he had left was that little handful of flesh and bones, that white head, those eyes and those wandering teeth. Don Tomàs realized that, for him, love, friendship, sexual joy, and his most vibrant expectations had all come down to the smile of a whitish lady who could barely draw an easy breath, by the name of Leocàdia …

Leocàdia! That overblown, romantic, inexpressive flower, as full of virtues as an aged
ratafia
liqueur, whom he had met at a storied ball held in Barcelona to celebrate the first marriage of Alphonse XII. In those days Leocàdia wore a suffocating corset and a pink satin dress with a bustle and a ruffled train, and amidst the combination of
stitches and backstitches and the chastity of her chemise breathed the flesh of Leocàdia’s bosom, made of bland white camellias, lacking in fragrance or promise, restrained by her extremely discreet neckline and a great ribbon of sky blue velvet, as tight as a dog’s collar. Leocàdia was escorted by her father, the old Senyor de Cisterer, blind in one eye from a bullet fired by the liberals, taut and plump as a bass viol and having the same deep, hoarse, and solemn resonances as a bass viol. Old Cisterer introduced his youngest daughter, who dared not lift her eyes from the ground, and when the time came to meet the Lloberola heir, who was in those days resplendent, wealthy, and unattainable, a discreet tremor ran over her camellia bosoms in a lyrical and devoted way, as if they were obeying the gentle gust produced by the wing of a dove.

In the moments of arid vision that followed his distaste at the adulterated cooking oil or the lump in the semolina, Don Tomàs de Lloberola, his eyes half-closed, was fond of discovering, in the failed pretensions of his inner landscape, the Leocàdia of the rose-colored dress clinging to the rigid sleeve of old Cisterer, beneath the innumerable glass chandeliers with their thousand yellow tongues of gas instinctively following the rhythm of the rigaudon. The music of that dance was in some way reminiscent of a military parade, and it gave el Senyor de Lloberola satisfaction to follow the complicated steps of the rigaudon, because it seemed to him that they evoked a tactical
je-ne-sais-quoi
. That silly music lacking in spirit or passion, infused with the most colorless mechanical frenzy, filled his heart with the trembling of his adolescent hours, the Carlists in the mountains, the
barricades and fanfares of the brass bands (that might just as soon accompany a bishop as a thief being led to the garrotte) or the poor cripples dressed up in grotesque costumes for Carnaval who were paraded past the Lloberola mansion, where he would go out on the balcony and throw them a few xavos, the coins that had been used to pay the indemnization for the African war. Over the tablecloth of the dining alcove Don Tomàs relived that earlier Leocàdia and that earlier Barcelona, in which he still meant something. For Don Tomàs everything had changed. To console himself over his current misery he would repeat continually: “In my day it was not so …”, “I am from another world …” His Leocàdia was also from another world; the young woman with the bustle clinging to the arm of old Cisterer was a poor, insignificant old lady, whom no one respected or held in consideration, who would be given no special treatment in a clothing store. Only at the door of a church in the old neighborhood, when Leocàdia would go back for some particular devotional rite, would she come across a woman as anachronical as she herself, who had been begging for alms there for years. When Leocàdia bent down over her alms plate and dropped a five cèntim coin into it, the poor woman would look at her with glacial and obsequious eyes and effortlessly utter:

“May God be with you, Senyora Marquesa.”

AS FREDERIC LISTENED to the weak, rhythmic tinkling of a coffee cup subjected to the pressure of a phosphorescent cat’s tongue in Rosa Trènor’s kitchen, some curious scenes were unfolding in Dorotea Palau’s dress shop.

Dorotea had once been Senyora de Lloberola’s family seamstress. Leocàdia would have her to her house two afternoons a week. Following the tradition of the ladies of old who preferred, whenever possible, for their clothing to be fabricated at home, Leocàdia invested a great deal of her time in the sewing of underwear for her husband and children, among other things of a more decorative nature. In those days Dorotea was a quiet and retiring girl, with a romantic oval-shaped face, and eyes between green and gray, without sparkle, like the wings of those quiet insects that blend into the leaves of plants. Dorotea turned out to be an excellent worker; she was always in the company of a young man she claimed was her brother, who must have been a couple of years older than she. Everyone was convinced of Dorotea’s modesty and good faith until, one day, without anyone’s ever knowing the reason why, Dorotea stopped serving in the Lloberola house, as a result of which Don Tomàs and Leocàdia wore long faces for a week. Later on, as it appears, it came to be known that Dorotea was the protegée of an important gentleman who spent seasons in Paris, and she had married a French hairdresser. Others said she hadn’t married, but had had a child; still others that Dorotea was dead. But all of this is old news, and most likely a pack of lies.

Twenty years after leaving the service of the Lloberolas, Dorotea Palau was a single woman over forty, rich, generous with others, and
the head of her own fashion house, which was patronized by very well-known ladies from the finest set. That afternoon, a man who couldn’t quite seem to decide whether or not to press the doorbell stood before Dorotea’s door. On the door was a plaque that proclaimed “Palau-Couture” to anyone who could read. It was a young man whom no one would have guessed to be more than twenty-three or twenty-four years old, though he must have been past thirty. Dressed in the style of the young men of the day concerned with being in vogue, his garments were clearly refashioned hand-me-downs. Biting down on a dying cigar that was unraveling like an old broom, the young man squeezed his eyes shut and pulled the brim of his hat down over his nose. After contemplating the plaque, he shrugged his shoulders and rang the bell with the puerile force and ill will of a boy crushing an ant’s belly.