Once you’d made his acquaintance Sr Fabregat was easygoing and proved to be pleasant and charming. I realized he had one or two hobbyhorses and I tested them out, to see if he was a man of character. One of his manias was animals. He couldn’t understand why the world needed cats and dogs, chickens and hens, lions and elephants. He said he thought that the Creation was amazing enough to be able to do without these irrational creatures. One day when he was outlining his convictions in this respect, I replied that, in my opinion, the existence of cats, hens, and elephants was based on reasons of natural philosophy that were as powerful as anyone might use to speak of human beings. As I spoke, I could see him surveying himself as if he was deeply perturbed by the idea that he might have said something truly idiotic. The next day, however, he spelled out his zoological ideas in similar terms: I deduced that he was a man with deeply rooted convictions.
Sra Fabregat told me that same afternoon that the pimple on the nape of her daughter’s neck did seem stable but was apparently taking on a pinker hue, which might be a sign that, in the near or far future, that it would probably become poisoned. I told her I preferred to wait patiently and resignedly and let nature run its mysterious course and had always found this philosophy to be highly soothing: it would be rash to claim that I convinced her. She seemed worried and anxious. That blemish seemed to unnerve her in an extraordinary way. Human understanding has worked miracles in the field of engineering and technology, but we will always find this simplest of facts to be incomprehensible: that one of the reasons why the nape of the neck exists is to enable pimples to flourish. But I didn’t dare spell out this obvious truism. I’m sure she would have hit the roof.
Sra Fabregat was a Matilde — as I mentioned a moment ago — and her husband called her Tita. She was a slight, rather dumpy lady, with neat rolls of fat, a rather pert nose, bluish black hair, and magnificently white skin that showed off the stylish freckles on her cheeks. She used lipstick, was free-and-easy, and liked to cause a stir. When you conversed with her it was as if someone was shaking you up and down and turning over your insides and putting you in her thrall, like a bottle of medicine being shaken by a chemist. I remember how I would arrive back at the hotel after my conversations with her feeling at the end of my tether, physically exhausted and in a mental fog. It was really difficult to cope with. I occasionally had to splash water over my face to calm down.
It was impossible not to imagine her in the gallery of her flat on the Carrer de Girona, at ten o’clock, when skivvies have migrated to the market and noisy tykes are having a lie-in and the Eixample has become almost an oasis of peace. At that time of day flats still vaguely reek of the greens cooked the previous night. A pleasant breeze wafts in through the wide open gallery. The ladies of the house, their infamous housecoats wrapped around their ample, docile curves, with pink cheeks and curlers in their hair, maneuver beneath the canary’s cage between furniture perpetually under wraps and paintings by Russinyol, Mir, and Cases. Sra Fabregat was from Mataró and felt a love for this city that she expressed in strident hoots if anyone dared to level the slightest criticism. It was admirable in every way.
Matilde Fabregat had been brought up properly and though her conversation always took on a rather peremptory, bossy tone, it could have its pleasanter sides. A full member of the Royal Academy of Fine Literature, the author of various poetic efforts, inspired by obscure episodes in our country’s ancient history, had for many years visited the Fabregats on a Saturday to drink coffee and smoke a cigar. His assiduous visits hadn’t left any spectacular traces, but neither had they brought no benefit whatsoever. Sr Fabregat used to sum up his wife’s potential with a graphic phrase, namely that she was a person who could listen to a lecture without dozing off. And how true that was!
The good lady undoubtedly dominated the family. Sr Ramon’s life was locked in the manic vice of his business interests — not that he ever jealously defended the territory as exclusively his. If Matilde didn’t interfere, it wasn’t because her husband had barred her, she simply had no interest in that side of life. Matilde proposed and disposed in every other matter without right of appeal. And it was curious that they’d reached that situation — at least on the surface — without it upsetting Sr Ramon one iota. As a husband he did indeed seem rather pleased by the absolute authority wielded by his wife. I didn’t know them well enough to be able to say whether Ramon Fabregat’s stance was simply a case of taking the easy option or a case of resignation before a fateful fact of life. Perhaps it was a bit of both. The truth is that I never heard him try to voice the faintest objection or engage in the slightest criticism of his wife’s opinions or actions. She often made the silliest slips a child would have noticed. Don Ramon never said a word. Silence wasn’t his way of protesting, however. He almost always accompanied his silences with a facial expression or gesture that revealed his total support of her. As far as Don Ramon was concerned, Matilde was always right, everything she did and said was precisely what the occasion demanded. I imagine Matilde found her husband’s monotonous support rather trying. Particularly in the presence of others she must have thought his supine lack of character looked ridiculous, and that she could be blamed. Nonetheless, despite all her efforts, she never succeeded in getting him to pipe up, not even when she made a show of having a tiff with him. Don Ramon didn’t like controversy, and family ones even less so. He accepted marriage to the letter. He was one of those men — who are more common than you would think — who finds freedom to be futile — something that serves absolutely no purpose. Don Ramon indulged any instinctive longing for freedom he had in his business affairs and that probably exhausted his reserves. He didn’t need freedom for anything else.
Their son — Lluís — was a tubby boy who wore a pea jacket and short pants. He was very delicate. He had his father’s face but his mother’s rivers of pallid flesh, his eyes were narrow and swollen with a touch of the Tartar about them. He cut a rather strange figure: round like a little badger, sallow with patches of suntan, with a short neck, gawping mouth, and thin, curly hair. Nevertheless, he’d always received very good marks, was meek and obedient and had an infallible memory. He recited long chunks of poetry without making the tiniest slip.
Lluís did, however, possess one defect that several doctors had examined, though for the moment no clear diagnosis had emerged. He was a child who couldn’t bear to be angry, or upset, or subject to the slightest mishap. If natural precautions taken by the family to avoid that happening failed, he’d have terrible tantrums. It must be difficult to grasp what I am trying to describe, and that is an indication of how strange his malady was. In effect, whenever he was upset, he turned a greenish purple, as if his acids were seeping through his skin, and threw himself on the ground in a bizarre rage and if he’d been contradicted further, would have committed real violence. That meant his every whim had to be indulged: he had to be fed the juiciest chicken, you could say, and constantly supplied with high-quality comic books, sugared almonds, expensive toys, notebooks for sloping writing, and all manner of lovely little treats.