Private Life Read online

  Copyright © Josep Maria de Sagarra, 1932

  Originally published as Vida Privada by Llibreria Catalònia, 1932, Barcelona

  English translation copyright © Mary Ann Newman, 2015

  First Archipelago Books edition, 2015

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or retransmitted in any form without prior written permission of the publisher.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Sagarra, Josep Maria de, 1894-1961.

  [Vida privada. English]

  Private life : a novel / Josep Maria de Sagarra; translated from Catalan by Mary Ann Newman. – First Archipelago Books edition

  pages cm

  eISBN 978-0-914671-27-5

  I. Title.

  PC3941.S3V513 2015

  849’.9352–dc23

  2015019288

  Archipelago Books

  232 Third Street, Suite A111

  Brooklyn, NY 11215

  www.archipelagobooks.org

  Distributed by Penguin Random House

  www.penguinrandomhouse.com

  cover art by Ramon Casas i Carbó courtesy of the Museu de Montserrat

  This publication was made possible with support from the Institut Ramon Llull, Lannan Foundation, the New York State Council on the Arts, a state agency, and the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs.

  v3.1

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Part I

  Part II

  PART I

  HIS EYELIDS OPENED with an almost imperceptible click, as if they had been sealed shut by earlier contact with tears and smoke, or by the irritated secretions that come from reading too long under a dim light.

  As his pupils struggled to make something out, he rubbed his eyelashes. He flicked at them rapidly, using the pinky finger of his right hand much like a comb. All he could see was a vague panorama of limp, watery shadows, the kind of scene a man blinded by daylight might perceive on entering an aquarium. Against this murky background, a long vaporous blade the color of crushed oranges on the piers came increasingly into focus. It was a beam of light stealing through the slats of the shutters only to sour in the dense atmosphere of the room.

  It must have been about four-thirty in the afternoon. Frederic de Lloberola, the man with the aching eyelids, had awakened on his own. No one had called him, no sounds had startled him. His nerves had had their fill of sleep. They had sapped to the dregs a colorless, absurd dream, the kind that leaves hardly a trace of its plot when you awaken. The kind you have when nothing is going on in your life.

  Frederic spent no more than eight seconds surfacing into reality.

  On the worn tile floor lay items of his clothing, embarrassed at their own disorder, entangled with chiffon stockings and a woman’s deflated and, frankly dirty, cotton knit nightgown.

  All four chairs were piled with her things. The little vanity was weighted down with miniature bottles, powder cases, tweezers and scissors, and the open armoire resembled a funeral procession. The dresses and coats on the hangers, lively with bright colors and appliqués, brought to mind a series of too-thin carnival princesses who had been decapitated and pierced through the trachea with a hook. Atop the armoire rested empty dust-coated hatboxes, keeping company with a stuffed dog. The dog had been entrusted to an inept taxidermist who had stuffed it deplorably, leaving all the stitches visible between the hairs on its moth-eaten belly. His mistress had adorned the dog’s neck with an old-fashioned garter from which three minuscule roses peeped out, like three drops of blood.

  Frederic began to notice the smells in the close chamber. One single odor, of spent tobacco, dominated like a bitter medicine.

  The trapped smoke impregnated the sheets and Frederic’s skin, mingling with traces of a store-bought cologne and all the vapors produced in the abandon of two bodies, which the night maliciously stores up to proffer mercilessly when the storm has passed and sleep has placed a wall of incomprehension between a somnolence of expectant contacts and a livid, skeptical, and unaroused awakening.

  To combat the assault of the odors outside and the bad taste inside his mouth, Frederic stretched out his arm and picked up his cigarette lighter and a Camel from the night table. Only two draws were necessary; the experiment with a fresh cigarette was fruitless.

  Frederic ran his fingers over the pink fabric of the pillow that lay beside his own, a slightly damp fabric impregnated with smelly oils. His fingers lingered over the fabric, reposing dumbly, his fingernails scratching out a faint sound on the relief of the embroidered initials: R … T … R … T … Ah, yes, Rosa Trènor. His lips said the name softly, repeating it mechanically … A little grease, a little dampness remained behind on her pillow, along with the hollow of her head. But anything she might have left behind of her dreams had already died a cold death. Frozen, perhaps poisoned, by the smoke and breath of this man, Frederic, alone in bed since she had closed the door, sleeping his brutal, inconsiderate, insatiable sleep, turbulent with hydrochloric acid.

  Frederic looked at the clock in fear. In this type of situation, verifying the exact time always provokes a certain panic; one needs a start to face reality. And, yes, it was four-thirty in the afternoon.

  Frederic wondered why he had let himself go, why he had allowed this surrender. What had happened was understandable. Frederic had been biding his time for fifteen years. Ever since his breakup with Rosa, he had watched the woman’s evolution from afar with disdain and apparent coldness. Their breakup had been obligatory at the time of his marriage; the truth be told, he had maintained his relationship with the woman out of vanity. It was not that Rosa was so terribly common, as Frederic’s friends thought. But he saw nothing more in her than intimacy with a woman with whom he had a certain history and who could not be classified in the same category as other kept women.

  What Frederic appreciated in Rosa was her “class”; he had never appreciated all the woman’s personal characteristics while their bond lasted, before his marriage. Even worse, with absolute insensitivity he had carried on affairs as ephemeral as suited his needs with other women, ladies of the trade. Never in his experience of love, whether the woman in question was Rosa or one of the others, had he perceived the slightest difference among them, or anything that might lend a touch of lyricism to the basic physiology of the act.

  Perhaps the very vanity that led Frederic to maintain his scandalous friendship with Rosa Trènor contained a certain taste for anarchy, a feeling of rebellion against the conventions of his own class, even if such a feeling was baseless, because Frederic, like all the Lloberolas, was weak and cowardly, and his youth had been absolutely lacking in imagination.

  If Frederic had taken an anonymous woman of unsuitable extraction for his lover, he would have been no different from any other Lloberola. Perhaps the only opportunity life had offered him to be a bit original was to become the lover of Rosa Trènor, a woman who had been on a first-name basis with his own cousins, who might even have prepared for first communion with them or slept in the bed next to them at boarding school.

  We have already said that in the period preceding his marriage Frederic’s experiences of love had not gone beyond the most elementary physiology. In the intimacy of love, Frederic was the kind of man who didn’t show the least concern for the female element involved. A woman, for him, was just an inevitable accessory to the complete satisfaction of his instincts. Exceedingly selfish and lacking in the habit of reflection, incapable of the slightest critical thought, and never having observed the need to compare his own sensations with those of others, the truth is that, though he had had dealings with and had come to know quite a number of women, Frederic, in
fact, did not have the slightest understanding of what a woman was.

  With marriage, though, things changed completely. The very thing he didn’t have the intuition to divine, and would never have taken the trouble to discover, began to come into being as his married life progressed and little by little took shape in Frederic’s consciousness. As a single woman, Maria Carreres had been exciting. Frederic became accustomed to her love, in those moments of tender and tearful rapture that are the domain of garden-variety egotists. With all his banality and moral inconsistency, Frederic had a vague idea of what it was to be a gentleman, and even a few genuine, perhaps atavistic, gentlemanly instincts. So, his gentlemanly façade accepted by everyone, Frederic reached the state of matrimony.

  From the very first, though, Maria Carreres showed a detachment, perhaps even a revulsion, toward those moments of shadow and contact in which the nervous and angelic battle of the instincts, of shame and the beast, is fought. Frederic had struck a bad sexual bargain. Maria Carreres had one of those indifferent and inhospitable physiologies that react with the chill of a cemetery and provoke virile dissatisfaction. Frederic bore his disappointment with dignity. He let days and months go by, hoping for a possible solution to his conjugal drama. But after their first son was born, the situation took a turn for the worse. It was then that Frederic realized that women’s sexuality was a more heterogeneous item than he had imagined. Finding himself tied to a person insufficient to his needs, to whom he had intended to offer absolute fidelity, little by little he began to find the idea of such fidelity odious. Frederic took to chancing afternoon adventures that could not compromise him or complicate his life in any way.

  Frederic found himself again through these adventures; he found the lost taste for love, as he understood it. And these small evasions brought him vague reminiscences – occasionally precise memories – of what had been his greatest happiness in erotic affairs, his relations with Rosa Trènor.

  Six years into his marriage, Rosa had become an obsession for him, but if indeed Frederic was a man of extremely malleable conscience, he was also spineless. He was afraid of his wife, afraid of her name, afraid of her father’s white moustaches, and even afraid of the last button on her father’s shirt that dug into the flesh on his neck. The thought of initiating the slightest negotiation with his former girlfriend produced an understandable alarm in him, because Rosa Trènor, even supposing she would have anything to do with Frederic, would not be one of those inconsequential afternoon trysts. Frederic feared, correctly, that taking up with her again would be his perdition. What’s more, the years had also gone by for Rosa Trènor. Most likely the woman he had known would have undergone pronounced evolutions in the tenuous ramifications of her nervous system, and the fragrance of Rosa Trènor’s heart would be for him like the disconcerting perfume of a boat that has sailed over many seas, picking up the contradictory resonances of all the ports where it has berthed.

  Frederic spent fifteen years mulling over these questions. What gullies must Frederic Lloberola’s soul have fathomed to arrive at the spent air of that chamber, facing the glass eyes of a desiccated dog with a garter around its neck?

  FOR MONTHS NOW Frederic and Rosa Trènor had been eyeing each other at the bar of the Hotel Colón. Penetrating the discipline she imposed with mascara, he had perceived a gaze that was neither indifferent nor ill-disposed. Seen from a distance, her make-up applied with severity, his former lover’s skin still had its effect. Frederic knew from his friends that Rosa’s situation was dire. She had lost any trace of regular patronage, and only her arts – praised by many who had had dealings with her – and the imperative of the air a woman who has been very beautiful never entirely loses, allowed Rosa Trènor, pushing forty, to risk still playing the role of a lady in the theater of love, retaining her dignity under the benign deference of the half-light.

  The habitués and professionals of the demimonde knew Rosa Trènor by heart, and her presence or the memory of it elicited merciless commentaries. Still, from time to time, at her table, in the wee hours of the night or, if you will, in the first hours of the dawn, some gentleman of good intentions, fortified with a relative enthusiasm, would approach the florists of the most effervescent cabarets to choose and purchase, without haggling, the best bouquet of camellias for Rosa Trènor. One of those men who drink in moderation and do not entirely lose all respect at the sight of painted lips. Those admirable gentlemen, generally the object of ridicule in the view of rowdy and raucous youth, who have the distinction of considering that a woman is never, not even in her saddest condition, a beast inferior to a man, who can be brutalized as if she had no soul.

  One of Frederic’s most loyal friends, Robert Xuclà, whom everyone knew as Bobby Xuclà – and this pretentious and somewhat gigoloesque name of Bobby was somewhat laughable as applied to a middle-aged bachelor with thinning hair, short of leg and large of girth, in whom all the most inoffensive and homely Barcelona essences came together – was the kind soul who acted as the intermediary between Frederic and Rosa Trènor.

  In part because of her brilliant past, and a kind of cynical and offhanded way of behaving, proper to the aristocracy, but even more because of her taste for reading and penchant for argument, Rosa’s prestige as a superior woman was acknowledged among the vaporous clan of kept women who could flaunt their diamonds and even dump a five-star gent with relative impunity. One of these vamps was Mado, Bobby’s erstwhile girlfriend. Not that Bobby had the exclusive; Mado was a girl whose hospitality was luscious, inconstant, ephemeral, and as absolutely lacking in intelligence as a branch of lilac. Fidelity, for Mado, was just as impossible as wearing garters attached to a girdle. Whenever she had tried to put on such garters she had had to give up in the attempt, because they made her feel faint. This is why Mado was constantly pulling up her stockings, a peculiarity that lent her a rather lewd charm, of the kind seen in ports and sailors’ taverns.

  Though Mado devoted every evening to humiliating Bobby, he was an understanding fellow, and even as he entered his girlfriend’s apartment, he would often wear the polite and somewhat beleaguered air of a man who is afraid he’s not welcome.

  Mado’s little apartment was the place Rosa Trènor favored whenever she felt the irresistible desire to exercise her spiritual ascendancy. Even though Mado loved to deflate, denigrate, and tell horrible stories about Rosa Trènor, she held her in great esteem. More than once the kindness and good heart of Mado or some other girl had got Rosa out of a jam, and whenever she had received a favor from one of those young women, Rosa Trènor would put on such dignified airs and affect such grande dame simpers that no one could ever have doubted that it was precisely Rosa Trènor who had done the favor and was enjoying her own generosity.

  Through Mado and Bobby, Frederic was gathering ideas about Rosa Trènor’s soft spots. Once Bobby had half-dragged him over to Rosa’s table, but Frederic had resisted. Under no circumstances did he want this event to take place in public. One of the characteristics of Frederic’s insignificance was that he thought of himself as a sort of central character on whom all eyes converged.

  Other times Bobby had tried to bring them face to face, because Frederic was dying of anticipation, but the circumstances had not quite been ripe.

  News had been reaching Bobby about Frederic’s irregular situation and his family disasters, but even though their friendship was longstanding, he behaved with the utmost discretion in this regard. Despite the confidence Bobby had always inspired in him, and unwilling, in the way of the Lloberolas, to surrender his lordly airs, Frederic had never said so much as half a word to his friend about what he called “unpleasant” things.

  Frederic could tell Bobby about some despicable thing he had done, or reveal an intimate detail about his wife, with the crudity, vulgarity, or ferocity of a feudal lord; he could go on at length with the most boorish remarks about certain things of a physiological nature pertaining to his own person. But never, among all the sad confidences he had entrusted to Bobb
y, had Frederic told him that his father had mortgaged such-and-such a property or that he himself had been obliged to pawn his wife’s jewels.

  And, once Frederic had made up his mind, when the circumstances were ripe for the encounter with Rosa Trènor, he had also hidden the “unpleasant” cause, the immediate and determining factor of his decision, from Bobby. Even though it was, in fact, an extremely unexceptional event. In the preceding years the economic disarray of Frederic and his wife had reached scandalous proportions. Everyone was aware of the situation both Frederic and his father faced. Everyone knew that the Lloberolas had had to sell off a great deal, and curtail their expenses. But Frederic was not about to relinquish his histrionic streak; he had covered things up any way he could, and at the point where this story begins, he was facing the threat of a loan about to come due. It was a personal credit extended to him without an underwriter. Frederic could not make the payment. There had been talk of an extension, but this would not be possible without his father’s guarantee. Naturally, Frederic was incapable of disavowing his signature or risking the consequences of non-payment. But horrible as these things seemed to him, the interview with his father filled him with even greater dread. The amount in question was considerable enough to produce scenes Frederic had no stomach for.

  Worries about money had been the dyspepsia of his entire life, but at that point they had become acute. Frederic had been holding on for a long time; for the first time the possibility arose of not holding on, nor wanting to hold on, nor making the slightest effort to hold on.

  It didn’t faze Frederic to spin out of control, to plunge into the mud with one foot now that he was mired in the mud with the other, to combine economic disgrace with a daring, glaring fling, or to resolve with weepy, theatrical cynicism what a genuine person would resolve with humility.

  The circumstances were ripe. Frederic wanted twenty-four hours of oblivion, or twenty-four hours to hide his head in the sand like an ostrich. One day far from his family and from the overdue promissory note.