Hortènsia had vitrines full of objects inherited from her great-grandmothers: magnificent fans, tobacco cases, music boxes, slippers, ribbons, and items whose usefulness was a mystery to anyone who was not an expert in all the absurd, old, rancid, constipated, and marvelous bibelots that one keeps in a vitrine.
From the days of modernisme, or Art Nouveau, if you will, Hortènsia preserved a portrait of herself and her husband having hot chocolate in a garden. They are sitting in a couple of rustic chairs painted watering pot green.
Mixed in with the other paintings, there were fake El Grecos, fake Goyas, and fake Riberas. Not that she had a lot of fakes; lately she had been replacing them with fashionable contemporary paintings. She was the only lady in Barcelona with a Matisse and a Derain of the highest quality. From time to time she would purchase something at a local exhibition, on the advice of friends with some knowledge of the field. She was most pleased with her Picasso. The canvas portrayed a long, thin adolescent nude, which scandalized many of the ladies who came to the house. Hortènsia had given it pride of place.
Presiding over the main salon hung the Lloberolas’ historic tapestry, which, as the reader knows, Hortènsia Portell had acquired quite some years before. It showed a scene from the Bible. Jacob, wearing sheepskin gloves, was kneeling at the feet of an Isaac whose hands were full of the fruits of the earth. Isaac had the aquiline nose of a notary public and hair like spaghetti. Rebecca was smiling at them both, holding a bird that looked sort of like a chicken by its feet.
In the background were depicted the sons and daughters of the chosen people. They were waving their arms in the air and making way for a hairy, ruddy, and corpulent man who carried a boar on his hip. It was Esau.
The most important piece in the salon, after the tapestry, was a Louis XVI sofa, admirably pure in its lines and fragile as a nymph. General Arbós, a cannibalistic sexagenarian who weighed one hundred forty-three kilos, developed a habit of sitting on that sofa. This caused the lady of the house great distress.
By this time, the widow Portell had gotten extremely fat. Her exaggeratedly blond hair, her tortoise-shell glasses, and her short round figure made her look like a character from one of those German plays that deal with social or pedagogical topics. Except for her somewhat harsh and loud way of speaking, which smacked of Carrer de la Princesa, Hortènsia didn’t seem to be from here at all. Anyone who ran into her would have thought she was a product of international tourism.
Usually once a year, Hortènsia would throw a party in her home. The main attraction might be a tango singer or, from time to time, an artist of great stature, like Maria Barrientos, the soprano. Barrientos was a friend of Hortènsia’s, though of late their relations seemed to have cooled. Sometimes, giving in to the entreaties of a handful of ladies, she would have a flamenco party in the garden, with bunyols and xurros, fried dough in the form of dumplings or bows, and they would all wear mantons de Manila, voluminous silk embroidered shawls that were a souvenir of the colonial days. This is what they most enjoyed draping over their décolletage, because, the truth be told, the ladies of Barcelona have always had a weakness for flamenco style and all its poses.
The party Hortènsia Portell threw at the high point of the Baró de Falset’s personal persecution complex had no particular artistic theme. In truth, it was mostly an excuse to bring one hundred fifty individuals together to set the leaves on the trees to trembling with their sighs and peals of laughter. The jazz music would exasperate any couples who aspired to continue their conversations as they took a stab at dancing. It was mid-June, and the heat was sticky and tropical.
By eleven the salons were almost full. It was rumored that Primo de Rivera, the dictator, who was in Barcelona those days, might make an appearance. He would be dining at the Cercle de l’Exèrcit, the officer’s club, and had promised to attend Hortènsia Portell’s party afterwards.
A few newcomers, some of them extremely young, situated themselves strategically in the foyer so as not to miss anyone’s entrance.
In the salons, the glow of arms and shoulders was dazzling. A sea of slow, wide waves slightly tinged with blood rose and fell with the rhythmic breathing of creamy rose flesh. From time to time, amid the waves an amphibious medusa would float by in the form of the nape of a neck.
The parade of necklines alternated between the sublime and the abominable. The fashion of the long skirt had not yet taken hold. The flowering of legs and ankles and the occasional distracted knee, and the gamut of chiffon stockings, brought to mind the image of a bar with light, fizzy, multicolored sodas.
In among legs of exquisite style swelled lamentable arthritic extremities, like the grotesque balloons given to children, or legs that were simply sedentary, deformed by consecutive pregnancies. Some of these legs had reached the point of elephantiasis. Salomé Roca, a heavyset woman in a very short silver tunic showed off everything she could with the aggressivity of a satyress.
Lace dresses dominated, especially in black. There were many splashes of white and pink. The occasional burgundy or pea green accompanied the most agile musculatures, and the slenderest arms and ankles of the “it” girls.
Costume jewelry had not yet been invented, and the gathering did not give off that air of later parties, at which ladies were draped in so much colored glass they looked like extras in a pharaonic operetta. At Hortènsia Portell’s party only strings of pearls and well-set diamonds were admitted.
Many of the ladies on the guest list knew Hortènsia only vaguely. Others had very little contact with the world in evidence that evening. They were a bit lost, taking up positions in the corners of the entrance hall, not daring to display themselves under the lights beside the guests who had taken over the sofas and pillows.
The men were distributed between silk and skin, like little black chunks of truffle amid the pink and white flesh of a galantine. Many wandered off on their own, or a trio would corner a young woman and proceed to laugh their heads off. Others went off under the trees to have a smoke.
In the smaller salon there was an assembly of abdomens feeling a bit indignant at the strain of the tailcoat and the demands of the wing collar. These abdomens had to make do with the cheeks of sixty year-olds suffering from chronic bronchitis.
Every so often, some old-school gentleman would go and dip his white moustaches into the plump perfume of a more tender cleavage and return with an anecdote fluttering delicately between two fingers, like a butterfly. He would then release it between noses and laughter to spread a bit of honey and cynicism on their arteriosclerotic lack of imagination.
The dance floor was getting crowded, but many young men were not dancing. This was when saxophones were beginning to be intoxicated with the blues and the black bottom. The Charleston had moved on to skid row. This was the high point of the red-hot days of Josephine Baker. Half the men at Hortènsia Portell’s that night had devoured “la Baker” at the Folies-Bergère, as she emerged from her silvery sphere to reveal the most dynamic India rubber haunches ever to be seen.
Many girls felt the same veneration for “la Baker” that their aunts had felt years before for the Virgin of Montserrat, whose image had been blackened by the smoke of centuries of candlelight. It was just a question of directing one’s devotion to one black skin or another, and in Hortènsia Portell’s milieu there were many more advocates in the ranks of colonial paganism. Milans del Bosch, the Civil Governor of Barcelona, did not share with the tender dancers of the black bottom their veneration for Josephine Baker, and he ordered the removal of a portrait of the Negress on exhibit in a record store, on the grounds that it was pornographic.
Hortènsia Portell allowed her guests absolute freedom of movement. Groups formed according to the magnetic attraction of affinity and friendship. Many bridge partners gathered around a hope chest as if ready to play. Without the table and the cards, lacking an ace of clubs or a king of hearts to pinch between them, some guys’ fingers were at a loss; they couldn’t even manage to smoke. The
most desperate fingers would dig into some sweet upper arm and drag it off to the garden to tell whatever latest story wasn’t too corrosively blue to tell, making do with a few drops of curaçao in a glass of water.
With their décolletages and their nighttime coifs, the women lost personality. Their dresses had too many slits and openings and too much skin was left to the elements. Their souls, and even their malice, fell flat. Something like what happens at the beach. In general, women are much more skilled at sustaining their erotic magnetism on an afternoon stroll, at a hippodrome, or at twelve o’clock Mass than by the side of a swimming pool.
In the presence of so much cleavage on so many middle-aged women, such an unnatural pneumatic display, normal men feel as though they’ve been transported to one of those commercial brothels in the south of France in which all the flesh is high quality and no holds are barred. These things throw one’s palate off, and end up producing contradictory sensations.
Even so, some admirable specimens still stood out between the overall provocation and the indistinguishable black tie. An unabashed collector of trophies of the fair sex might have admired anything from the arms of Clementina Botey, pure white with only a tenuous blush of pink, to the shoulder of the Comtessa de Mur, so criminally silken as to be almost metallic, and dense with an intense and fragrant pigment that brought to mind heated Caribbean hallucinations.
Hortènsia sat beneath the tapestry, on the Louis XVI sofa. The most respectable ladies were arrayed around her. The Widow Xuclà was wearing an old-fashioned egg yolk-colored dress of silk moiré, her bosom covered with constellations of diamonds. Rafaela Coll and her sister, the Marquesa de Cardó, two old poker players, flanked Pilar, guarding her like two prudent opponents in an exhibition game to be sure the widow didn’t try any dangerous sprints. This group was dominated by the hippopotamian anatomy of la Senyora Valls-Darnius, who had vowed, ever since her husband pulled off a considerable swindle in a cement deal, never to utter another word in Catalan. She had also let the word get out that she was in the market for a young man who would give her a tickle from time to time, no matter what the price. This lady had something to say about everything and she could get a little tiresome. The most amusing member of the Restoration équipe – this team had been in the flower of its youth when Spain lost its colonies in 1998 – was Aurèlia Ribas, of the Ribas silk merchants, as they were known. She had three brothers, all of whom were marquises, but she had been left without a title. She was nothing but the widow of an insignificant lawyer. Aurèlia had the face of a fish; she called to mind the rigid, inexpressive, silvery profile of the porgy. She was seventy-eight years old and they had just removed a tumor from her uterus. Poor Aurèlia was so simpleminded that she cried over this misfortune, as a young woman would have cried if the operation had made it impossible for her to have more children. Needless to say, Aurèlia’s whimpering about her uterus provoked the gentle laughter of the poker ladies.
The Comtessa de Sallent, the Widow Xuclà’s sister-in-law, presided over a different group, composed of exemplars of the fusty nobility. These noble ladies, in general, dressed in a more lackluster fashion, and made less use of beauty salons than those whose titles were fresher. Some of these ladies were truly awful and positively turtle-like. The Comtessa de Sallent herself, despite proceeding directly from a lateral branch of the Cardonas, looked and dressed like a chestnut vendor and spoke a Castilian studded with as many hard, greasy expressions as lardons on a Lenten flatbread. Next to the Comtessa de Sallent, Teodora Macaia had the magnificent and unapproachable majesty of a bird of paradise. Others, like the old Marquesa de Figueres, were embarrassed by their ridiculous necklines exposing their deteriorated skin. They didn’t dare look up, and they spoke in a whisper, as if they were saying the rosary.
Occasionally a blend of gardenias and bad faith would appear, laughing uproariously, brandishing the flaming helmet of her hair and mortifying the pearls on her breast. Such was the case of the young Baronessa de Moragues, a manufacturer of rubber objects, deeply vulgar, but also deeply exciting.
A jaunty team of young married ladies and single ladies at liberty made up the most numerous group, with the most male components. This group exuded an aroma of hard liquor and grass from the golf course. In general, this team was composed of the prettiest and the most risqué “music hall” toilettes. Among them, flashing sparkling teeth and cherry-pink gums, were a few young women from the high aristocracy of Madrid, newly married to Catalan nobles or local industrialists. These Madrilenyes had the delicate bitterness of a peach pit, and were better at sustaining a more off-color and perhaps more intelligent conversation.
For some reason, the Dictatorship had facilitated a feminine trade between Madrid and Barcelona in that world that called itself aristocratic. Thanks, too, to the Dictatorship there was a resurgence of grotesque pomp, exhibitionism, and traffic in noble titles. With parades of gold and uniforms and military fanfare, the regime of the time buttered up the base vanity of shopkeepers and petty nobles. Many of them had never been anyone, and their utter insignificance had had no other initiative than to collect the rent on their properties and redeem the coupons on their bonds, always pinching pennies and fearful of falling into poverty. In the years of the Dictadura, these people felt a sudden desire to spend and to show off, to see their names in the newspapers and their wives four meters from the queen, with a gigolo, and to sponsor a flag-raising in some little town on the coast. Their air of parvenus and bottom feeders rested like a spider web or a strip of leather from a carpet beater on the dress shirt of many of the gentlemen who sauntered through that party and the infinite public and private feasts that were taking place in those daysin Barcelona.
Some gentlemen from fusty families had come to realize they were no longer of any relevance and had been relegated to the dust bin by the democratic and industrial policies of the country. Those gentlemen who had been content during the war to cut down the forests on their estates as they bred canaries and did spiritual exercises, surfaced at the party with all the shiny hardware of their coats of armor and their inanity. Many of the children of these families held positions in the parasitic bureaucracy that sprang up in Barcelona as the 1929 Exposition drew near, with the proliferation of public works underway all over town. The people who worked in the Treasury, the Civil Government, the Bank, the Customs office, were almost all from the province of Extremadura. They lived a separate, resentful, life during that sentimental expansion of Barcelona. Under the dictatorship, they, too, invented titles and uniforms and they, too, introduced glossy, pneumatic wives and sassy, carnivalesque creatures who were accepted by the practical bourgeoisie.
Hortènsia Portell didn’t sympathize by a long shot with the deluge of tawdry pomp of the times, but she found herself, and most of her friends and relations, caught up in the game. She was in her element, like almost all the fine bourgeois ladies of the period, with a taste for public display and exhibition. Hortènsia was a weak woman, and she couldn’t say no to anyone. At heart she was very tolerant and liberal, but lacking in deep-rooted convictions. It was this temperament – perfumed like her skin with superficiality and distraction – that invented those grand eclectic gatherings at her home.
Because that night on the Passeig de la Reina Elisenda, alongside that whole empty, déclassé world, Hortensia had also invited people who had played a role in the old Catalanist political life. These were men who stood apart from the masquerade, including the occasional sensible businessman, skeptical grayhair, or intelligent young mien.
Hortènsia had brought together exactly the sort of mélange that can always be found at pompous Barcelona gatherings. A mélange of this sort is the result of improvisation, rapid growth, and insufficient review of credentials. It is also the result of a somewhat materialistic world, in which the brand and price of an automobile is paid respect even before the person ensconced within has been identified. The occupant is then extended moral credit and elegance credit in proportion to the p
rice and brand of said automobile. All this dressing up as aristocratic scarecrows that had been the consequence of the First World War was spurred on further by the mentality of the Dictatorship.
If the conversations of all the different groups had been placed side-by-side they might have produced the effect of Horace’s monster, with the peculiarity that each of the monster’s members would have been gnawing at the other.
The most peppery tongues belonged to those fifty years and over; the most airy lungs would glide back and forth from tangos to love and from love to tangos.
Most of the young men’s dialogue centered on chassis, car bodies and gonorrhea. These conversations, in a Catalan spoken to the tune of a zarzuela, sounded like a bumblebee buzzing, smelled like mineral oil, and were tinted the color of permanganate.
Among the more serious political topics were timidly broached, and Romanesque art might be discussed, along with the half dozen most highly valued legs at the party. Great Barcelona events were spoken of with satisfaction, from the construction going forward on the Plaça de Catalunya to the two thousand priests from a whole range of Spanish dioceses who would be coming for the 1929 Exposició Universal. These canons would check out the objects on display in the Palau Nacional, the main exhibition space of the fair, and then stroll down the Rambla in mufti, smoking cigars. In certain male circles, anticlericalism was in vogue.
The ladies in the tapestry room were all aflutter. Many didn’t believe the dictator would come. Hortènsia smoothed their feathers. Shrill as a parrot, the young Marquesa de León squawked in Spanish for everyone to hear: “I saw Miguel this afternoon, and he assured me he was coming.” These particulars offered up by the marquesa caused a few old ladies to snicker, as it was going around that she and Primo de Rivera were in a dalliance.
Private Life Page 18
