Dinners at Ambassadeurs, la Rosaleda, Miramar, and their more economical versions at the Hostal del Sol and La Pèrgola, together with the wine and roasted almonds of the Patio del Farolillo, served to expand the gastric unconsciousness of the country. Anyone with five duros, or even without them, went to Montjuïc to see the Exposition. At closing time, the Rambles and the cabarets were packed to the gills. At the end of the day the American fleet would spew out a stream of giant toy sailors dressed like children, who would gorge themselves on sweet sherry and the high-octane alcohol known as aiguardent, later toppling onto benches or carrying women around on piggy back. Then a squad of some kind of officers, spiffy and loose-limbed as a Charleston, would beat them down with billy clubs and pile them into a big old wagon. When they reached the Porta de la Pau they would toss them into the launches and the sailors would tumble in with a plop, like bales of wet cotton.
The inauguration of the stadium was a sublime fusion of aristocracy and democracy. Never had such a thing been seen. All the top hats of the king, his sons, his brother-in-law, all his gentlemen, all the dross from the municipalities and provinces, and all the parasitic bureaucrats of the moment, served as chimneys for the smoke of enthusiasm. Europe would be hard put to have witnessed on any other occasion a display of more resplendent top hats, their very skin composed of pure mineral coal. That afternoon the great belly of Primo de Rivera, wearing a paisley vest the color of cognac, rubbed up against the jackets of the people. Sixty thousand hats saluted the dictator and the kings of Spain. The royal daughters, les infantes, sat quietly in the central loge, wearing vaporous dresses made of strawberry ice: they were tall, subdued, somewhat sad young women.
The day of the inauguration, the brand-new Plaça d’Espanya saw humanity multiply as if people were ants, or as if all the ants in the country had been blown up with bicycle pumps and then rushed off to steal jackets and skirts from their respective haberdashers or dressmakers.
On that day were written the first lines of a hymn that seemed as if it would never have to end. It was the hymn of the sex and the belly of Barcelona. The laborers from Murcia who had come north to work in construction toiled to a java rhythm. These Murcian men, dark as coal, were too busy sweating blood to think about striking. The union heads who had escaped Martínez Anido’s bullets were out of the country; the ones left behind to live high on the hog basically ogled the legs of showgirls on the Paral·lel and drank the anise water the chief of police would treat them to. Barcelona had forgotten all about the days of politics, pistols and bombs. It had forgotten about virility. Its only creed was those multicolored lights that shone every night from the Palau Nacional. People barely knew the names of their councilmen or provincial representatives. All they knew was that Foronda was in charge. Mariano de Foronda y González Bravo, the Marquès de Foronda, was a Grandee of Spain and the Director of the Exposició Internacional. Foronda was everything, greater than the dictator, greater than the king. The board of the Exposició Universal, under the direction of Milà i Camps and the Baró de Viver, would do anything that struck Foronda’s fancy. Anyone who was more or less thick-skinned or willing to bow his head would be tossed a bone. Colonels, police, canons, and employees from the department of revenue all revealed their troglodytic rapacity with a despicable lack of shame. Milà i Camps, President of the Barcelona provincial government, went a little off his rocker and started to believe he was Lorenzo di Medici. He called in every possible painter, sculptor and goldsmith, and rendered his madness on the walls of the Palau de la Generalitat in the most awful and grotesque murals ever painted. A team of unscrupulous artists interpreted the most reactionary history of Spain to his personal taste. The worldview of this fanciful aristocrat became a sort of madhouse of Gothic peaks. Rubió i Bellver, the architect, pumped his head full of hot air to make his Gothic folly even more monstrous. Milà i Camps wanted the Toison d’Or, he wanted to be viceroy of Catalonia, and he wanted to enter the cathedral in a carriage drawn by all the lions in the zoo at the Parc de la Ciutadella. Back in Madrid they let him be distracted by all these twinkling childish amusements and gave their orders directly to Mariano de Foronda, who was not only the director of the Exposició Internacional but also, and more importantly, of the electric tramway company of Barcelona. At one point, the Baró de Viver was on the verge of being hanged from the prickly dyed moustaches of the Marquès de Foronda, lord and master of the trams and the money of Barcelona.
The image of the Sacred Heart of Jesus was enthroned in every military headquarters and officers’ club. These were places where poker was played and the murder of prostitutes was primed. Like the time a poor girl was thrown off a balcony on the Passatge dels Escudellers, her kidneys run through with a sword that had made its name in the disastrous wars in Africa.
The bishops and archbishops fanned the flames of this reactionary orgy. The priests and canons they sent to Barcelona to survey the treasures of the Palau Nacional – over five thousand pieces of art from all over Spain – consumed two thousand liters of manzanilla sherry daily, and all the meat from all the bulls killed in the Monumental and Arenes bullrings was reserved for them in its entirety. A line of canons formed to eat a sandwich made from the first bull. The dictator resuscitated the mentality of the “dandy generals” who were the consorts of queens, and of the petty loyalist defenders of King Charles who turned up the heat on bordellos and sacristies to distract the people with incense or desire, according to their predilections. At heart, the dictator had the ridiculous charm of a Tartarin. In this regard, and in others, he put one in mind of General Francesc Savalls i Massot, the colorful and hapless leader of the Carlist wars who somehow always found a way to land on his feet.
Barcelona shimmered like an international shooting star. In the publicity published abroad about the Exposition, the financial “fiddling” of the magnates of the situation swelled to cosmic proportions. Anyone who didn’t brazenly steal simply didn’t have fingers, poor thing.
When it was over, people cringed, wondering how such things could have been tolerated. But the fact that they put up with it, and accepted it, was very natural. Politicians know that there is nothing so mutable, so easy to fool, so corruptible, as a mob. And in those days Barcelona, Catalonia and Spain were just that: a great mob of small intestines and rubberneckers. The Dictatorship filled shriveled stomachs with crusts of bread and offered up a bit of fireworks to cast a reflex of red happiness on their curious faces. Cowardice and stupidity on all sides contributed to the game, and yet it cannot be denied that Barcelona did have a brilliant, stupendously decorative moment.
The stale old aristocracy and the fresh new aristocracy that have popped up in this book felt as if they really were somebody. The pneumatic tires that the Hispanos-Suizas and Rolls-Royces set into motion had the grandeur of a Roman catapult. The upholstery might be a little the worse for wear, but it exuded a deeply human breath, like the breasts of slave times. The buttocks of the aristocrats that flattened it out on their return from kissing the hand of the queen would soak up the genuflections of all the workers of Murcia, ripping out rails and bursting pipes without the slightest fear of a rebel bullet.
But this happiness was not to last. Stocks began to wobble; currency began to wobble; the dictator was tired and everyone was tired of the dictator. The king gave him a kick in the belly, with the cold, geological cruelty that is the province of kings. As Primo de Rivera had the good fortune to die a dull and decent death in Paris, no one asked for his head. In a word, it was a blunt, primary, and not at all perverse sort of biology. A biology of the kind cultivated in a Spanish barracks, over a bottle of wine, a deck of cards, and a nameless chanteuse, a homegrown version of la Bella Chelito, doing a belly dance in a dressing gown festooned with ribbons and bows. The dictator sought to extend the nineteenth century military chaos that had been stemmed by the alternating two-party system imposed by Cánovas del Castillo. When Primo de Rivera left, not a single bone of either the military anarchy or the Cán
ovas system was left unbroken. The monarchy dragged its tail for a good long time, and no line it was thrown could help. In Jaca two captains with communist pipe dreams faced the firing squad, but things got even worse. A few months later, not a single city or town was left in Spain without a street or town square bearing the names of those two martyred captains. One fine day people woke up to find the Republic in the streets. People seized onto the Republic in childlike amazement, without bloodshed or vengeance. The Conde de Romanones went to the Escorial to send the queen off. The count sat on a wooden bench at the train station, with his moustache, his twisted hat, and his desolately historic eyes. Not far from his shoe stood an empty bottle of Sinalco, the oldest soft drink in Europe. In those days, in El Escorial, they still drank Sinalco.
The queen left Spain like a lady-in-waiting wearing a necklace of tears. No one dared steal even a petal of the disintegrating roses she held in a large, pallid, and misty bouquet, watered with the sobs of the aristocracy.
The king had fled hours before. In Barcelona the Catalan Republic was proclaimed, and the Plaça de Sant Jaume celebrated one of the most enthusiastic, sweaty and sublime days of its history.
In the five years that transpired between the 1929 Exposition and advent of the Republic, the daily uncertainties in the private life of the people we have met in the pages of this book continued to be resolved behind the blindfold destiny reserves for us all. Those were thorny days for the Lloberolas. The most brilliant moment of the Exposition coincided with the most bitter moment for don Tomàs: a failed inheritance.
Don Tomàs had a paternal aunt, his father’s younger sister, known to at least four hundred Barcelonans as la Tia Paulina. Tia Paulina had been widowed at a very young age. With no surviving family on the side of the deceased, she inherited her husband’s entire fortune free of taxes or obligations. Tia Paulina had sole possession of the cut she took away from the house of the Lloberolas because, even though Don Tomàs’s father was the absolute heir, the part bequeathed to her as inalienable successor represented a considerable inheritance, which in time quintupled in value.
The only possible heirs to Tia Paulina were Don Tomàs, his sisters, and the Baró de Gresol, a second cousin to Don Tomàs. Despite being a more distant relation, the Baró de Gresol was Tia Paulina’s godson. That good lady had always shown him great affection.
Tia Paulina had been born in 1840, at the ancestral home of the Lloberolas. Her birth was met with the scent of the last blasts of powder from the first civil war. She made her communion in a tiny hoop skirt that reached below her knees, beneath which you could see white silk pantaloons that covered her little partridge feet in hoops of lace trim. Tia Paulina had been a silent, anemic child, terrified of devils, freemasons, and the wayward ways of Queen Isabella II. She spent winters shut up in a school run by the Sisters of the Holy Family who had her sing songs under the trees of a damp garden and taught her to embroider on a canemàs – or canyamàs, as the ladies who did embroidery Catalanized the Spanish cañamazo. On this embroidery canvas Tia Paulina would stitch images of the baby Jesus, of General Zumalacárregui, and of the Lloberola family coat of arms in wool of many colors.
Tia Paulina spent the summers in a little town close to Perpignan where the Lloberolas had an estate. Most of the trip was made in enormous ramshackle stagecoaches. Tia Paulina would suffocate in the heat and turn fuchsia red. Once, the stagecoach was shot at and robbed by bandits as it made its way through the province of Girona. One of the thugs stuck his big hairy hand into the warmth of Tia Paulina’s corset to see if she was hiding any jewels there. Her two small breasts were tiny and green as an almond hull. She fainted. For four years after that she would tell the priests when she went to confession how a big thuggish man had touched her that way. At the Perpignan estate, Tia Paulina listened to the song of the crickets and the warblers. Her hair was combed every day, she was bathed twice a year, and her little body was enshrouded in a long gown made of something like sackcloth that reached down to her feet. Tia Paulina was very white and very sad. She read Chateaubriand’s Les martyrs and a romantic little French novel called La siège de la Rochelle. That novel was the basis for her criteria on love.
At eighteen years of age she was married off to el Senyor de Llinàs. Out of family expediency, he sympathized with the Carlist cause, but in fact el Senyor de Llinàs was a somewhat brutal Voltairean; he moved with great ease from gunpowder to laughter. The wedding night was a monstrous affair for Tia Paulina; her mother’s instructions proved utterly worthless.
After two years of marriage she began to feel a deep adoration for her husband. Even though the realization that el Senyor de Llinàs was not the slightest bit religious caused her great suffering, that apoplectic man’s moustache – an exact copy of Napoleon III’s – had pervaded her heart.
El Senyor de Llinàs impregnated every chambermaid and cook in their home, but he never managed to impregnate the womb of Tia Paulina.
When the condition of the maids in the service of el Senyor de Llinàs began to show – sometimes even earlier – they were let go and they would return to their villages. The illegitimate children of el Senyor de Llinàs collected dung along the roads of all four provinces of Catalonia. One boy who turned out to be a little more clever than the rest entered the seminary. In time he would write a Month of May devotional and die like a little saint.
El Senyor de Llinàs was twenty-five years older than his wife. The only activities he felt any passion for were playing tresillo, a 19th century card game played with the Spanish deck, and eating the tender green walnuts they would send him from his estates. His house was located on Carrer de Mercaders, an immense old mansion with a square garden out of which two palm trees stretched their necks like two condemned men trapped in a well. El Senyor de Llinàs played cards every afternoon with three gentlemen: Don Josep Rocafiguera, a man from Aragon by the name of Ceballos, and the grandfather of the author of this book. Ceballos had the sexuality of a soldier and the soul of a swashbuckler. As the men played cards, Tia Paulina and the other ladies knit woolen socks for el Senyor de Llinàs, with a brazier at their feet and the song of a canary and the mewling of a discontented cat in their ears. Occasionally, they would embroider a mantle for a statue of the Virgin Mary or cut out underwear patterns for the poor of Saint Vincent de Paul.
Ceballos was in love with Tia Paulina, and someone let on about it to el Senyor de Llinàs. This gentleman was jealous in the extreme, more jealous than a tiger. Tia Paulina knew nothing of Ceballos’s great passion, but she noticed that where her husband’s moustache met his jowls it looked for all the world like a Florentine dagger. One day el Senyor de Llinàs said a few choice words to Ceballos. There was a duel. As luck would have it, Ceballos’s bullet went straight to the heart of el Senyor de Llinàs. He dropped his top hat and pistol on the field of honor and fled like a madman. Not long afterwards, he got himself killed fighting for the Carlists in the Seu d’Urgell, just as Savalls was betraying the holy cause by reaching an accord with Martínez Campos at the Hostal de la Corda.
Tia Paulina was widowed at thirty-eight. She sensed that her husband’s soul was destined for hell, but since she couldn’t be entirely sure, she decided her time would be well spent if she devoted the rest of her life to praying for the eternal repose of el Senyor de Llinàs.
From then on, Tia Paulina’s life could have been considered exemplary if the years had not turned her heart into a dried-up, yellowed and acidic artifact. Many thought she had a lemon where her heart ought to be. Where el Senyor de Llinàs had taken the maids down the path of iniquity, Tia Paulina had them singing the “Holy, Holy, Holy” even as they gutted fish entrails. From break of day till nine in the evening, when everyone went to bed, in Tia Paulina’s immense old mansion you could hear the music of the scrub brush, the broom, the feather dusters, the washing bats in the laundry, and the fans for the kitchen fires, accompanying unschooled, tuneless voices endlessly repeating: “Holy God, almighty God, immortal God.”
Tia Paulina filled the apartment with birdcages. She had five parrots that also intoned “Holy, Holy, Holy,” as well as a blackbird that whistled it. But Tia Paulina had to be on her guard, because the birds tended to forget the pious singsong as their hearts went out to a little tango popular in those days that went “Cariño, ho hay mejor café que el de Puerto Rico …”
Tia Paulina kept six or seven maids because she was a fanatic for cleanliness and her house was endless. There was always a lot of drama among them, because she would get jealous of one and develop an aversion to another. The maids used her, bamboozled her, and filled her ears with gossip and bad faith. When a new one arrived from the village, still warm from cows’ breath and the tongue of a young buck, Tia Paulina would subdue her rebel breast with the wool of the scapulary. If she suspected that the girl had a boyfriend, Tia Paulina would shut herself up in a room with the girl and try to charm her like a serpent. If the girl was pliable, she would succumb to asceticism. If she rebelled, she had no choice but to close the door behind her. Tia Paulina cultivated a sort of special service of stunted, colorless and sexless young women: they all wore habits and they only went out at night once every twelve months, to attend midnight Mass on Christmas Eve.
Private Life Page 23
