The calm must have lasted three or four weeks until the rumor began to circulate around the boarding house that Srta Angelina wasn’t at all well, that something shocking had happened, that it was an emergency situation. Srta Angelina was the only daughter of landlady Donya Emília. The maid spread the news to the four winds, after swearing she’d keep it secret, gesticulating wildly to prove her lips were forever sealed. Who had seduced her? Initial comments focused on that. Angelina was twenty-four or — five, a tall, thin, undernourished young woman with nothing to say for herself, who seemed romantic but might have been slightly cross-eyed. She studied the pianoforte and had apparently made excellent progress. She interacted little with the boarders, ate separately, and went in and out with never so much as a “Good day.” Nevertheless, her presence was almost intolerable: her enervating musical exercises were endless. I was only aware of the relationship she had with Ramon Potelles, a pharmacy student from Lleida, who played the violin like an angel, or so they said. Potelles was pointed up as almost the only candidate for authorship of the disaster. He was the only boarder invited to hobnob with the family, as one might put it. People recalled how once during the university year Donya Emília organized a fiesta that was pompously dubbed “a surprise party” because it took place around carnival time. In fact, it was an afternoon snack and those present — barely a dozen all told — were dressed in normal, everyday wear. In the course of that humble gathering, Angelina played various fragments of choice classical pieces for piano and violin, accompanied by Potelles. The concierge’s daughter recited a monologue that was felt to be rather near the bone. Two or three of Angelina’s colleagues added their grain of sand and played lugubrious pieces by Granados and Albéniz. The Supreme Court judge, who came to the party as a friend of the family, wanted everyone to have a memento of the occasion and, after muttering a few words, he gave each person a little work of art. The maid quipped that he’d hardly bankrupted himself. The lad from Lleida received a faded blue print in a gilt mahogany frame.
Apart from Potelles, no lodger went to that small gathering. For non-family, the occasion was hardly welcome: it forced us to have supper just after ten, and almost surreptitiously. But the encounter strengthened Potelles’ friendship with the household. Angelina was seen out on the Rambla walking with the student a few days later, a slow promenade with a languid, playful air.
Nevertheless, right from the start Sr Pastells disagreed. According to him — and the act seemed to chime with his specific kind of insight — the material author of the damage was Ramonet Reynals, from an aristocratic Manresan family that had lost its reputation as a family of standing because it hadn’t gone lightly into decline. Pastells had known his father, Don Josep Maria Reynals, whom he described as a man as tall as Saint Paul, who wore blue spectacles and had a cautious, stately, respectable demeanor. Don Josep Maria had sired fourteen viable children with his wife and an elastic band of natural offspring with other different, gray, hazy individuals. Nobody who had dealings with him, said Pastells solemnly, had ever had the guts to praise him. When he was on form — he added — he could perform miracles. And summing up his thoughts on the subject, he quietly added that some gentlemen need only to wrinkle their noses to create havoc and undermine an orderly society. Pastells had a name for this kind of person: “a loose cannon.”
Pastells spoke in an opaque, elliptic manner, as befitted his profession, but one deduced from what he didn’t say that he thought Reynals possessed a thrust and strength that exceeded the most generous bounds of the imagination.
Certainly Ramonet was a dissolute character who left artistes and chorus girls gasping; he had been marked for life by his ability to work on the emotions. One year he failed in a number of subjects in his final engineering exams and his father sentenced him to spend the summer in Barcelona, something that delighted him. He lived in a boarding house two floors down from the one owned by Donya Emília. This meant that Angelina and Reynals met and talked on the staircase. One day they even ate an ice cream together in a café on the nearby Ronda. But there was nothing else that could allow one to speculate about a deepening relationship between Angelina and Reynals.
Pastells’ point of view was ridiculous, however much he’d been influenced by the magical aura surrounding certain privileged beings. To affirm that Reynal’s sole presence in a specific building was enough to affect the different young ladies living on the same staircase seemed to be taking it too far. That young ladies could be defiled without being touched is a typically medieval occurrence, recorded in the history books, and only comprehensible in the light of the dark shadows hanging over that era. The world of today has evolved; contemporary enlightenment is undeniable and science will not allow one to get away with random supposition. But I wasn’t surprised that Sr Pastells’ ideas about this individual were so full of heroic imponderables: he had hobnobbed far too much with blue-blooded people. Despite leading a life in the wide world, surrounded by celebrities and luminaries, and despite warming so many chairs in aristocratic circles and being a man without prejudices, Pastells was a throwback, a man from a bygone age, a relic.
One learned, meanwhile, that Angelina had shut up like a clam and was in vehement denial of the reality. That gave us an idea of her basically moral ways and we thought she must have been duped in a most caddish manner. Though material proof of reality was obvious from her face, we would have needed little persuasion to side with her, and that says a lot about the frailty of man’s philosophical capacities. Time went by and we just couldn’t get to the bottom of it. Students asked would reply in a huff, hoping — I concluded — to force people to think they were men like any others, or even men whose ambitions flew much higher. “Who do you take me for, senyora, who do you take me for …?” hapless Donya Emília kept hearing, as if it was the most natural thing in the world.
Nevertheless, reality took its course, and finally, Angelina, at her wits’ end, revealed all. The man responsible was one Joan Casas, completely unknown to lodgers and family alike; from a good family, he was a poet who had won prizes in various competitions, an aloof, passionate young fellow who had migrated to France a few months ago, as a consequence of those hard times. There was no news from the seducer. Perhaps he was simply a frivolous chap. Perhaps his silence was due to the economic difficulties overwhelming him. Be that as it may, the boarders were hugely affected and the whole house sank into a state of bitter sorrow.
It is difficult to describe the silent, inconsolable sadness that swept through the place. Angelina’s carelessness had no excuses. Everyone agreed that she had abused trust and had gone much too far. The disaster wrought havoc on the honest consciences of Niubó the registrar, Sr Pastells and my friend Veciana. They found it hard to bury what had happened under words of reproach because they were stunned, as if they’d been hit by a hammer. Donya Emília stopped coming into the dining room and I’d often hear her muffled sobs from her bedroom that was next to mine. The judge’s visits became few and far between. On the few occasions he did come he went in for a second and then emerged with a glazed, deadly serious expression on his face. Angelina’s finger exercises ended. Her door seemed to have turned into a gravestone. An oppressive atmosphere enveloped the table at mealtimes. Everyone ate in silence, with no appetite, the only sound coming from the cutlery clattering against plates and glasses. At night, in particular, suppers were interminable and we struggled to chew our meat or empty our glasses of water. My friend Veciana attempted several times to initiate general conversation in order to distract everyone. He tried everything to no avail. One day he decided to remind us that a friend of his at the bank was of the opinion that people like Angelina are capable of amazing sincerity. He struggled to finish his sentence. A round of furious glances strangled his words.