In time, the widow Xuclà suspended her get-togethers and visits and called on fewer and fewer homes. Among the very few exceptions was the home of Hortènsia Portell. If Hortènsia threw a party, Pilar Romaní’s presence was assured. She would enter with the air of a queen, and all the ladies yielded to her. They would needle her to get her talking. Some days she would be gloomy and reserved, and would pretend to be deaf for conversations that went too far. Other days she would be in a friskier mood, and she would nibble away in the sharp and dainty way of a ferret. The widow Xuclà’s clothing was always a bit old-fashioned, in shades perhaps too light and bright for a lady of her age. She was tall and strong; no one could have guessed her age. She was a magnificent specimen, and her wrinkled and shrunken features still resisted old age to reveal the traces of a great beauty.
The widow Xuclà would attend Hortènsia Portell’s salon, above all, out of a particular liking for that plump, fashion-conscious woman, and because in Hortènsia’s circle of vulgar elegance she could still find the occasional intelligent man. He would be a sad, skeptical character without pretensions with whom she might enjoy a long conversation about Catalan affairs and hear a few things that might have a bit of spirit and spark. Pilar Romaní no longer learned of anything on her own account. She read no newspapers, nor any new books. She lived off her memories. All art and literature had come to a stop for her before the War in Cuba, when she would invite the people of sensibility of the day to her house on Carrer Ample. Pilar Romaní was of the opinion that the best things had come and gone, that the literati wrote so that no one would understand them, that modern art – her idea of modern art was more quirky than she herself – was insufferable, and that painters were bent on making life ugly and deforming the grace of things.
She would criticize some young women’s lack of taste, their unattractiveness, their absolute ignorance, their precarious ambition, their lack of personality and resulting willingness to be swept away entirely by what was au courant and fashionable. She would criticize the cowardly morality of some, and the inexcusable lack of modesty of others, and what most disgusted her was the snobbish enslavement to the latest thing and to American fashion. She bemoaned the loss of character and the mongrelization that had swept Barcelona. The big fashion houses and the automobile had leveled everything out. Pilar Romaní couldn’t countenance the fact that, simply because she possessed a magnificent Hispano-Suiza automobile, a woman who had come from who knows where was invited to dinner and supper at the homes of the daughters of the same old aristocratic dowagers who years before had hung her out to dry.
The widow Xuclà had a penchant for going off on her own. Many mornings she would go out with her chauffeur and barrel down the highway until she found a nice place where, with the help of her eyeglasses, she might work on a sweater for the daughter of the concierge or for some member of her household staff. The widow Xuclà took an enormous interest in people of more humble condition. She liked to talk with the workingmen and the servants, and in the summer she would spend long hours with the people who tended her land. She was lavish, and generous to a fault, and a tear or two was enough to take her for all she was worth.
Her true friends were few and far between. She was close to another lady of her time, a distant relative, the Marquesa de Descatllar. She was more acid-tongued and more class-bound than Pilar Romaní, and she was absolutely outrageous. The marquesa had been separated from her husband for many years, and in her case it was absolutely true that she had no relations at all with anyone. Pilar Romaní always defended her in her circle, maintaining that she was a true lady and had been very unfortunate. The marquesa had a dark complexion and hard, virile features. She went around with narrowed eyes as if everything disgusted or infuriated her. No matter what turn fashion took, she always wore a bunch of dyed black bird-of-paradise feathers hanging over her forehead. They looked as if they had been plucked from the headdress of a cannibal leader. Stories were told of shameful contact between the marquesa and brutish subjects of the lowest extraction. In the afternoon she would often go to the Paral·lel with her chauffeur and her manservant to see bawdy shows or revues with a great deal of naked flesh on display. She would generally sit half-hidden in a box seat on the mezzanine. Pilar Romaní would occasionally accompany her on these theatrical excursions. They had a particular liking for Catalan vaudeville, with beds and underwear onstage.
From a distance, the marquesa had a magical effect. In the days when only two-horse carriages traveled up and down the Passeig de Gràcia, the marquesa, dark and solitary in her open sedan, contrasted with the pale cream, pea green or turquoise blue mistresses under their monumental hats, complemented by a dog who might have been stolen from a Van Dyck canvas.
At the height of summer, the Marquesa de Descatllar and Pilar Romaní always went abroad together. Some years they would go to Marienbad, but later, as they got older, they found the trip too long. Then they wouldn’t get any farther than the baths at Luchon, or they would drop in for a few days at Biarritz.
On the beach, the two ladies made fun of the female fashions and customs, of the lack of breasts and the diminishing hips. They thought the craze for turning the skin into an artifact resembling a cocoa bean or a jacaranda wood desk was absurd. From the terrace, the two ladies would spend hours and hours under the shelter of a garish, antiquated umbrella and, with the aid of their opera glasses, they would destroy the fabric of the flashiest beach pajamas and what little flesh they covered up. A blink of the marquesa’s eyes was as implacable as a hair clipper.
Occasionally, they would become entranced with the maillot and the curly nape of some sporty, boorish and optimistic young man, and they would savor him from afar, with deliberation. They would digest him slowly and carefully, like serpents, with all the bitterness and impotence of depraved old women.
Another friend of the widow Xuclà’s was Lola Dussay, who was the polar opposite of the marquesa.
Lola Dussay was older than Pilar, but not by much. She lived on Carrer de Montcada, in a three-hundred-year-old house that was starting to collapse. The ground floor, the stables, and the courtyard, had been rented to an individual who kept a drug warehouse there. Lola lived on the principal, the main floor of her large noble home, which was enormous for her and the two maids and one manservant who attended her. Lola was single, religious, and prim and proper, but she shared with the widow Xuclà a taste for tradition and popular culture. Lola didn’t have so much as a particle of intelligence; she was loud, fussy, and rude, all things she compensated for with an enormous heart and an absolute selflessness. Every spring Lola would throw a party at her house. She only abandoned this custom four years before she died. Her guests were old stock, faded and reactionary. They were married couples who lived in their own world and young men with medallions around their necks, heraldic coats of arms on the rings between the hairs on their fingers and genuine imbecility diluted throughout their bodies who came to fish for fiancées. Lola was as simpleminded as an octopus, and at these parties some, it seems, had taken advantage of her innocence in the dark, damp, and interminable corridors of her house on Carrer de Montcada, as the chandeliers trembled in the salons, excited by the upheaval of a polka.
Lola spent her days and nights caring for the ill, visiting midwives and expressing condolences. Her main passion was cooking, and her greatest joy was the killing of the pig. Lola had hair white as snow, an enormous belly, and cheeks that were red and taut from the heavy food she prepared. She would spend long hours in the kitchen, sweating and overheated, preparing sauces and tending to roasts. Among her best friends was Don Felicià Pujó, just as much an old bachelor as she was a spinster. Don Felicià Pujó was President of the Brothers of Peace and Charity. He was cold, gentle, and delicate in the extreme. There were those who took for granted that Lola Dussay and Don Felicià Pujó were secretly married. What is beyond all doubt is that Lola expected Don Felicià Pujó to partake of her culinary marvels. Sometimes at midday, when Don Felici�
� got home from sitting in the sun, he would find Lola Dussay’s manservant in his foyer with the following mission:
“Donya Lola sent me, senyoret, because today the pig’s feet have turned out first-rate and she would like the master to come and try them.”
Don Felicià Pujó, who was dyspeptic, would sadly shrug his shoulders, put on his mid-crown top hat, pick up the cane he always carried with an ivory dog’s head for a handle, and set out for Carrer de Montcada to dine on pig’s feet. Later, at home, no cannula or thyme infusion would suffice to calm his irritable bowels.
Despite Lola Dussay’s religious devotion, she liked to use blue language. This was not out of malice, but stupidity, as often she didn’t understand the double-entendres, and she repeated everything she heard, whether it made sense or not.
Pilar Romaní appreciated her cooking talents and her frivolous, picturesque, and singular way of living her life.
The house on Carrer Ample was decorated according to the banker Xuclà’s taste, with the counsel of persons like Ripoll the painter, whom Pilar considered to be peerless. The house had all the heavy, gold-leaf pomp of the turn of the century. Bobby had made a few more modern contributions, but only in moderation so as not to hurt the widow’s feelings.
Bobby loved his mother a great deal, though days and days could go by without their exchanging a word. Much more intelligent than most of the people in his milieu, Bobby was subdued, and rather shy. He was in the habit of never contradicting anyone and never arguing with anyone, more out of apathy than anything else. He was skeptical and tolerant; he almost never laughed, but neither did he get angry. He had inherited from his mother a natural and unaffected elegance, and a pure essence of Barcelona that transcended time and space, or literature and politics. Bobby wasn’t au courant, nor did he want to be. He tended to express very vague and noncommital opinions. Perhaps the clearest vestige in Bobby of his family’s Jewish heritage was a somewhat reptilian flexibility that allowed him to put on a smile that was neither hot nor cold, a smile that was sort of who-gives-a-damn, yet not at all offensive, in the face of the things that usually spark men’s passions. It was more a product of indolence or of a delicate egoism born of not wanting to be get worked up about anything.
Bobby understood his mother’s way of life, and he respected it in every way. He had a very high opinion of his father; he understood his dynamism and his infidelities, and he saw fit to apply prudent and conservative principles to his enjoyment of the fortune his father had left them.
Bobby was the ideal lover. His continual contact with women was neither out of vanity nor because he was a man of passion. Bobby was often bored, and he found women amusing. With women, moreover, he could avoid having to talk: he could let them do the talking. He enjoyed their world of little squabbles and henpecking, and above all he liked to breathe in the superfluous warmth that flows from blood to pearls and from pearls to gossip.
This is why Bobby felt equally at ease in the world of trollops, young married ladies, or at Hortènsia Portell’s table in a comfortable tea parlor. He was the kind of man who needed nothing more than a comfortable chair and a pair of lips prepared to sip and talk of their own volition.
The widow Xuclà wanted her son to marry. Bobby never contradicted his mother when her sermons took this tack. He would let her go on, while he scratched his moustache as if to say he had all the time in the world.
The widow Xuclà had no love lost for the men of the Lloberola clan. She thought Frederic was a useless ne’er-do-well. Old Don Tomàs reminded her of a mummy festooned with rosaries and hypocrisy. Nevertheless, she felt a real affection for Leocàdia. And, despite Leocàdia’s being so different from Pilar, leading a life of patience, devotion and spiritual retreat, not a month would go by without her visiting the widow on Carrer Ample. Conversation between these two old ladies was a little painful. Pilar didn’t have the slightest interest in the things that interested Leocàdia. Though there were long interludes of silence, neither of them would give up these visits, and whenever Pilar spoke of Leocàdia, she praised her to the heavens. Narrow-minded Leocàdia, in the days when Pilar’s reputation was in danger, was among those who always spoke of “poor Pilar.” If Frederic ever mentioned the widow Xuclà’s fancies and frivolities to his mother, Leocàdia would respond, even a bit forcefully, “You know I don’t like it when you speak like this about one of the people I hold in highest esteem. What’s more, I’m certain it is all untrue.”
When the bottom fell out for the Lloberolas, and they stopped seeing practically anyone, the widow Xuclà took special care to be kind to Leocàdia and to visit her more often.
Don Tomàs was grateful for the widow Xuclà’s attitude, because she was the daughter of the Comtes de Sallent, because their grandparents were cousins, and because on the Romaní coat of arms there was a branch of rosemary, a dog and a half-moon. These things were very important to Don Tomàs.
FREDERIC HAD GONE looking for Bobby at the Club Eqüestre the very night of his father’s calamity and the scene with the mossèn, but Bobby was still at supper at the Liceu Opera House, as he was every night. Frederic telephoned him and he came right away.
Frederic felt trapped and had no inkling that things would be resolved so favorably for him the following day.
Bobby was expecting him to relay some particular about Rosa Trènor, or give some account of how the reconciliation had gone. Frederic had to make a tremendous effort to impress upon Bobby that the issue was money. Bobby’s expression became distant. Frederic realized this, but he persisted. When Bobby realized how much was involved, he retreated further, and said he couldn’t take any immediate action without consulting his mother. Frederic knew this response was just an excuse. He knew Bobby could dispose of that much money and a great deal more without any prior consultation. Frederic was consumed with a distinct hatred for his friend. He saw how the blood of the conservative Jew flowed beneath those cheeks, generally considered the least judgmental and most generous cheeks in Barcelona. Frederic used an expression that Bobby found a bit rude, which led to five tense minutes between the two friends. Seeing that nothing good would come of that approach, Frederic surrendered his Lloberola pride and supercilious attitude, and tried to speak with his heart in his hand. Perhaps he revealed a bit too much weakness, and even groveled a bit, but Bobby didn’t budge.
At heart, Bobby had no real liking for Frederic. He had tolerated him all his life, out of an aversion to discord. He had listened in disgust, always with a pleasant smile, to all Frederic’s stories of grandeur. Bobby pretended to have a great friendship with Frederic precisely because of the antipathy his mother professed for all the Lloberola men. For Bobby, who truly loved Pilar Romaní, this defiance regarding Frederic was one of those silly punctilios that sometimes crop up between two people who love each other.
But now, what Frederic was asking of Bobby was very unpleasant. It was a nuisance for a man as passive, self-centered and indolent as Bobby Xuclà. As he watched Frederic grovel and go into excessive detail about his family’s privations, on the inside he was feeling avenged for all the tedious heraldic lectures, grand adventures, and useless irritating rhetoric that Frederic had foisted on him, oblivious to how annoying he was. Bobby concentrated his entire being behind his little blond moustache and his dead blue gaze. He listened to Frederic with relish, and Frederic barreled ahead, trying to make an impression on him, to touch his heart. If Frederic had been more astute, perhaps he would have realized he was on false ground. Perhaps he would have understood what Bobby’s blond moustache and dead gaze were saying.
When Frederic had finally hung out all his dirty, mended laundry, Bobby, colder than ever, but with some sense of satisfaction, pronounced a few words, the same few words he had put him off with before. He had taken a stand, and even if Frederic’s children had appeared chopped to pieces at his feet, he wouldn’t have gone back on it. Offering Frederic no assurance, Bobby said he would speak with his mother and give him a definitive answe
r the following day.
When he was alone, Frederic was full of shame and desperation at his weakness, at having made such a confession to a Jew. But necessity was stronger. He would have been capable of approaching Pilar Romaní himself, or, as he referred to her in his running monologues of entrapment, “Tia Pilar, that rotten b.…”
The next day things had changed, as if by miracle. We already know how Guillem got the letter, and how Frederic was freed of his commitment to the Baró de Falset. Once Frederic was sure of his salvation, he went over to Bobby’s house to spit all his scorn in his face.
Private Life Page 14
