The most exultant of the Republican ladies, the one with the most opinions, the one who attained the greatest heights of verbal incoherence and wasn’t afraid to shoot off her mouth on any topic at all, was Senyora Casulleres. Salazar the banker devoured her with his eyes. Senyora Rull and her daughters Adela and Conxita were particular friends of Níobe’s. Adela and Conxita were fresh, doughy young women, with all the flavor of a legume salad, who were open to the generosity of any fingers in their vicinity.
Aside from Teodora Macaia there were a couple more whom the reader is familiar with: Conxa Pujol, the widow Baronessa de Falset, and Guillem de Lloberola. The baronessa was the last to arrive. Níobe allowed her to stroke her silvery fingernails gently, and soon after the concert began.
Amèlia Nebot, standing, and Cascante, sitting at the Steinway, interpreted the following program: “Berceuse juive,” de Darius Milhaud; “Villancico del corazón asesinado por las penillas del alma,” a cantata by Cuérnigas, an Andalusian composer; “Egloga piscatoria,” by Respighi; “Rondeau,” by Machault; and a sort of blues for saxophone, piano and voice by Sagristà. This fledgling musician had put music to a lyric from Ausiàs March, the Valencian renaissance poet who warned that only sad lovers need read his writings: Qui no és trist de mos dictats no cur. Young Sagristà was on the saxophone.
The audience listened to the concert with vehement passion and Pliocenic sadness. The favorite piece of the evening was the villancico.
When the concert began, Níobe fled so as not to have to listen to Amèlia Nebot, and to prepare for her own dances. She appeared cloaked in a trench coat of pumpkin-colored leather, which she quickly removed. She didn’t end up entirely naked. Out of concern for the neophytes she had put on the Spanish fly cache-sexe. The paintings she had applied to her skin were pipes, Pernod bottles, decks of cards and bowler hats, all in black and white, interpreted in the cubist mode of Juan Gris.
Cascante never strayed from a single run of chords: an obsessive South African monotone he had come up with himself. According to experts, Cascante had lifted it from an American film titled Trader Horn. Níobe did three dances: “La fumeuse d’étoiles,” “Paprika,” and “L’artério-sclérose.” In the midst of this cosmic absurdity, Níobe had a few moments of graceful lubricity. All the considerable bulk of Miquel, the essayist, was sweating medulla and bay leaves. Some of the ladies were overcome, and they covered Níobe in kisses; their lips were left coated in cubist paint. Senyora Sabater declared that thanks to the Republic, Barcelona would come to be the most refined city in the world. Not even the Comtessa de Noailles had ever dreamt of such a jewel, such a feast for the eyes. The Comte de Sallés undertook to object, as he was a good friend of the Comtessa de Noailles and had attended a private screening of L’âge d’or at her home.
When the commentaries died down, Miquel the essayist, his face illuminated by a watermelon-red light, set to reading his mind-numbing piece. Níobe, Amèlia, Teodora, Senyora Sabater and the Comte made a great effort to read the papers. Ten minutes into the reading, all the air had left the room. But in the dark hallways of the Passeig de la Bonanova, amid clinical porcelains and atop examination tables, the entire crew of poets and idlers, including Conxita, Adela, and two married ladies, applied themselves to reproducing Níobe’s dances. Off in a corner, one of Senyora Casulleres’s nieces and Sabartés the poet channeled her rhythms in a much more human fashion. The niece let out a shriek like that of a wounded swallow.
Miquel the essayist was on page forty-three and the Comte de Sallès had still not lost his polite composure. When the essayist finished, the whole apartment trembled in a Sardanapalian shudder. Salazar the banker had not wasted any of his time with Senyora Casulleres. Níobe was pleased with her success.
The widow Baronessa de Falset was the first to take her leave, escorted by Guillem de Lloberola. They got into the baronessa’s car and went to a studio on Carrer de Casanova.
On the way, Guillem said to the baronessa:
“I don’t know how you put up with this rubbish. Never again, I swear, never. You’re a big girl. If you find these things entertaining, you can go by yourself. I’m not going to be part of it. I can understand why Teodora would enjoy it. She’s played all her cards, it would be hard for her to find someone who treated her as she might like, so naturally she’s not very particular about where she finds her entertainment. But you … You’re much too intelligent, too thoughtful, to mix with all this scum.
People with a little taste and common sense just laugh all of this off. Níobe is no one and nothing. Any tart who dances in a music hall is cleverer than she is. If it weren’t for Miquel’s pedantic articles no one would even know she existed. Have you ever seen such a pompous ass? Do you think such claptrap should be tolerated in times like this? After all, who are these people who decided that Níobe was a sensation? Is there a single serious person among them? Teodora, poor Teodora, just wants to be in vogue … what does she know? And Professor Pinós is a fool, and Casulleres an idiot! Do you think I enjoy hearing a bunch of chars and gossips pretending to be refined? No, I swear, never again. Ask what you want of me, but not this. When I see you smile and take an interest in trashy pornography like this Níobe, you seem ridiculous, disgusting …”
The more overwrought Guillem got, the cruder his language got, and the widow baronessa drew first her neck, then her cheek, then her lips close to Guillem’s lips. Swayed by the perfection of her skin, Guillem loosened up until all his cholera dissolved into closed eyes and a slow kiss.
AFTER THE SUICIDE OF the Baró de Falset, Guillem’s life began to make sense to him. That dose of cold water to his pectorals flushed the lymph from his soul. Till then he had been a child playing at perversity. When he came to, he entered a danger zone: he could sink into a grotesque remorse, continuing to behave like a debauched child, as before, but now with the sham of tears and smarmy cowardice. There was also the danger of his accepting in good faith that he had been the murderer of the Baró de Falset. Fortunately, a well-timed cold shower had made a man of him. Not a good man, by any means. Guillem carried all the mildew of the Lloberola family in his heart.
When Guillem had been with Conxa Pujol at the stylist’s house, he had perceived a magnificent body, a dazzling criolla. But other things interfered. The affair was too base and contemptible for Guillem’s thoughts to have been elevated toward a luminous sphere. It wasn’t until Hortènsia Portell’s party that Guillem understood who the baronessa was. He had had to see the reaction the woman produced in an elegant cage. To see how men’s virility responded to the sight of her, the admiring tremble in their eyes, the contained desire in their breath. He had had to observe how the baronessa took a punch in that silent, polite sexual bout, to see how her arms, her lips and her diamonds counterpunched, giving no ground, dashing every hope. It was there, in her evening gown, with all the restraint of formal dress, and all her solitary strength, without the shameful appendix of her husband, that the Baronessa de Falset fully revealed herself to a young man who, camouflaged in the scouring rags of sordid abjection, had still been able to appreciate like no one else there the full effect of the implacable tragedy of a beautiful woman. That night Guillem’s true struggle began. He had no baggage, for this combat was non-existent, because Guillem’s familiarity with the baronessa was limited to two afternoons, and nothing more. Guillem didn’t know what kind of beast he was risking his happiness on. With Conxa Pujol Guillem had only his instincts to rely on, and Conxa was no ordinary woman.
The death of her husband had almost scuttled the whole thing, but Guillem’s ambitions found the right response. His pain was evaporating; the specter of the Baró de Falset had disappeared. In his insomnia, Guillem never again felt the presence of that cadaver by his side, snoring lubriciously, with a thread of blood trickling from the bullet hole. In his moments of insomnia, in the place of that terrifying neighbor Guillem sensed by his side a dense bouquet of gardenias with the smell of a woman.
The baron
essa had been a widow for three months. The scandal of her husband’s suicide had been the subject of much and varied commentary. In some conversations, people had gotten pretty warm, coming fairly close to the motive behind the catastrophe. But it was only in a vague way, with no precise details, because in point of fact none of them knew anything beyond the ravings of the baron a few days before he put the bullet in his head. It was natural that no one lent any credence to these ravings, because everyone thought the baron had gone mad. The cause of his mental disorder was a secret known to only one person, and this person, as we have said, kept silent at the time and forever after. After the first stage, things began to be forgotten. The widow baronessa slowly began to regain her own natural color and the characteristic color of her makeup. Teodora, Hortènsia, and other friends kept her company. She found ways to distract herself and not speak of the tragedy. In her heart of hearts, Conxa had been freed of the most disagreeable weight upon her life and began breathing freely. Her black mourning clothes made her all the more fascinating.
Three months after the suicide, Guillem de Lloberola pounced. The baronessa hardly knew him. At the Ritz and at Hortènsia’s party, Guillem had only crossed a few words with her. He was just one among the very many, and he supposed that Conxa would not remember him.
The way he approached Conxa was not at all dramatic. He stopped her in the middle of the street, positioning himself by her side, like those ne’er-do-wells who go after the first girl who comes along, trying to start a dialogue that rarely goes beyond a sad, brief monologue, because the woman doesn’t even bother to turn her head. Guillem did just that, in front of a shop window, when Conxa stopped to examine some refrigerators. For a practitioner of storefront eroticism, the objects that had caught Conxa’s interest in the shop window would have offered an opportunity to speak of the cold shoulder and the frozen heart of an insensitive woman. Guillem almost succumbed to the temptation of the visual suggestions and images, but he didn’t say any of those things. He simply showed her a fifty-pesseta bill, assuring her that he had seen it fall from her purse. Conxa glanced at her purse, the clasp in place. She opened it, checked the money in it, and thanked Guillem, insisting he was mistaken.
Guillem didn’t budge from his stubborn insistence on giving her the bill. Not understanding his determination, Conxa laughed in his face, just to have something to do. Guillem looked down and turned cherry red. Conxa found the situation amusing and asked him, with no little aplomb:
“Sir, do you pull this trick with the fifty-pesseta bill with all the ladies?”
Guillem raised his eyes and, facing her with the full brunt of his insolence, responded:
“Not all of them, no. If I think they are worth less than fifty pessetes, I show them a twenty-five pesseta bill; and if I think they’re worth less than five duros, I take care not even to notice them.”
Right up until the last word, Conxa hadn’t recognized him, but the fact was, they had been introduced. What was his name …? Not losing her composure, and even being rather pleasant, she added:
“Listen here, I know you … your name is …”
“Yes, senyora. My name is Guillem de Lloberola. I had the pleasure of meeting you the day …”
“Do you mind telling me what angel inspired you to attempt something so crass with a lady you …”
“It was no angel! I have done this thing you call crass in the hope that you would not recognize me, wouldn’t remember me at all. It was within the realm of possibility not to be recognized. The dark, the suddenness of my approach, worked in my favor. And I thought … well, that you, a lady whom everyone knows, and everyone is familiar with, might perhaps, how shall I put it, enjoy running into a man who not only didn’t recognize her, but even took her for a …”
“How bizarre …”
“No, senyora, it is entirely natural. It’s so normal, in fact, as to be embarrassing, because your opinion of me … I mean, I have no interest in your taking me for a big shot or for an idiot. Your opinion doesn’t matter to me at all …”
“Well, then, what it is you’re after? I don’t understand this whole business. Why have you taken the trouble to …”
“It was an act of kindness, senyora, pure kindness …”
“Kindness?”
“Yes, senyora, to give you a little thrill, a moment of distraction …”
“I don’t understand.”
“Naturally, senyora. I said it was a ‘kindness,’ and I am not backing down. I didn’t do it in my own interest, but in yours, yours entirely. It’s quite simple. I can imagine how unbearable it must be for a person like you to play this incessantly passive role in the game of admiration and enthusiasm. To be known to everyone, and now, after your husband’s suicide, even more well known, and more highly esteemed. I imagine it must be a torment for you (well, perhaps torment is an exaggeration, but it must be tedious, at very least) to realize that you can never stop playing this one role, and that when you meet someone you have no choice but to put on this mask that others have assigned you. Because, if you are beautiful and interesting, and I am not denying that, of course, your interest and your beauty and your elegance become a sort of cliché, something everyone takes for granted, and this voice of everyone and general admiration and popularity – even if no aspect of the term ‘popular’ is exact or apt, in your case – are the elements that make up your way of being, or the role you play. And you are a slave to it all, to what you are and to what others have added to your innate prestige. There is absolutely no escape for you. At first, when one becomes cognizant of this power, of the power of this kind of stature, I have no doubt it must be rather amusing. But later, a person with all your gifts has to tire of it, and lose all pleasure in it, in this constant enthusiasm, in the acclaim and desire you see in everyone’s eyes. Look here, Baronessa, I am sure that a king, for example, or an eminent man, who enjoys extraordinary popularity, must feel the desire to evade his majesty or his fame and one day have the pleasure of not being recognized by anyone, or respected or admired by anyone, of being just an anonymous person walking down the street. Do you see? And a woman like you is a player in this prestige of royalty. Most of the men who approach you, do so from below, like dogs, one could say, the same way they would approach a king or a genius, the same way they treat men who have such a public, notorious figure that they cannot escape their own skins, no matter how much they would like to. Baronessa, since I consider you to be a sensitive person, I imagine this is to some extent the way you must feel as well. And hence, believe me, my motive was not to be crass, but to be monstrous, to be atrocious, in pretending that I didn’t know who you were. It was out of kindness, senyora, that I wanted you to have the delight (perhaps I am mistaken, my dear senyora, but I think there must be some delight on your part) of seeing that a man like me, a man from Barcelona who doesn’t seem to be some kind of hayseed, not only doesn’t recognize you, not only offers you the thrill of ceasing to be la Senyora Baronessa, Viuda de Falset (please note, senyora, that I have called you ‘widow’), but rather takes her for a woman who can be bought, whom I think I can buy for fifty pessetes. In doing this, senyora, I am doing you the kindness, the immense service, of allowing you a change of personality, of granting you a way to leave behind that skin beautified for the admiration of all who know you to be the Baronessa de Falset, so that you can put on the skin of a common prostitute, in a world as far away as possible from yours, breathing an air that you will never, ever, be able to breathe. Never! Do you see? By saying that crass thing I said, I was opening a new door for you. Your curiosity would have shown me whether the door was tempting or not. I know that you, and not your curiosity, will say that never in this life could a door like that be tempting, and as a favor to me you will say I’ve gone mad, that is if you are forgiving or merciful enough not to say right off the bat that I am a scoundrel, or simply indecent. But that’s what the lady playing her role would say, not what sincerity would say, don’t you see? Not the intimate truth
of a woman obliged to act in a play, and who finds this act to be a burden …”
“Excuse me …”
“Yes …”
“Well, this is all very … bizarre … and, indeed, it is all very interesting …”
“I haven’t quite finished, senyora.”
“But it’s getting late, you know. I would be pleased to go on listening, but …”
“Well, when you are not in a hurry, I am at your disposal to finish my explanation …”
“Tomorrow at five?”
“Perfect. Where?”
“On Gran Via, at the corner of Carrer del Bruc … Is that all right?”
Guillem de Lloberola kissed the baronessa’s hand, and she noticed a slight dampness on her skin. Even though it was now quite dark, when Guillem raised his head, the baronessa could see that his eyes were full of tears.
Guillem was quite pleased with himself. His relatively Pirandellian monologue – Pirandello was in vogue in Barcelona in those days – very possibly may have made an impression on the baronessa. If Guillem’s vague knowledge of Conxa Pujol’s flesh of had included a few of the tidbits of information that came up as we told the tale of Hortènsia Portell’s party in the first part of this story, if he had known of the forbidden escapades and whoring pursuits of his idol, perhaps he wouldn’t have played up that bit about the world “as far away as possible from yours” or that other bit about the “new door.”
If Conxa Pujol had not been something more than a mere dilettante, or a simple chlorotic tourist of the kind who are roused by the gabinetto pornografico of the National Museum of Naples and don’t go any farther, in a word, if Conxa Pujol had not been exactly who she was, she might simply have called a cop at the start of Guillem’s aggressive and insolent speech. Accustomed to more slimy and much more dimwitted admirers than Guillem, Conxa Pujol felt neither slighted nor persuaded, and the following day she showed up punctually for their appointment.
Private Life Page 27
