Josep Maria de Sagarra
Private Life
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.