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.
It was for all these reasons that Frederic asked Bobby to go with him to Mado’s house, where he was sure to run into Rosa Trènor.
And the day after that decision, stretched out between the sheets, mechanically interrogating the stuffed dog with his gaze and once again lightly running his fingernails over the initials on the pillow, he started reconstructing the scenes of the previous night.
AT HALF PAST ELEVEN, he and Bobby were on their way up the stairs. Mado herself opened the door; she was wearing colonial blue and silver striped pajamas. The satin pajama fabric strained over her breasts, which resembled two boxes of bonbons of the kind you would have seen at the turn of the century on top of the piano of a family of modest means. Frederic took much more notice of Mado’s pectoral ploy than of the explosive kiss the young woman planted on Bobby’s lips, forcing up his nostrils the dregs of smoke that clung to her gums. Frederic ran the nail of Mado’s pinky finger over his lips, and with an almost musical peal of laughter she pushed the two men into the dining room.
Mado’s living room contained the expectation produced by sudden twists of fate; gambling dilated the eyes, producing stinging and natural tears, and causing mascara to be forgotten. Tics, cold stomachs, or cold feet, and a displacement of the jaw and nasal creases disturbed the equilibrium of the features. In such a place, when things were going badly for someone, an atavistic simian air left its bold imprint on the faces there.
Among the players was Reina, a very young girl with platinum hair, her back exposed to below her kidneys, revealing a stretch of bloodless whitish muscles molded into the casing of a more vegetal and decorative skin.
Reina was Mado’s best friend, and there were those who attributed certain predilections to them, because Reina treated the young men who surrounded her as if she always had a fissure ready through which the eel of her soul could make its escape.
When it came time to play cards, Reina’s concentration breached the limits of the most elementary manners: she allowed no jokes, her extremely forced smile revealed teeth with an excessive secretion of saliva, produced by her state of nerves, not unlike that of a group of hyenas that have convened upon the cemetery. More superstitious than the others, when Reina was dealt a card, before looking at it she would press down on it with her index finger until it hurt, leaving behind the slight imprint of her nail. Suspicious minds attributed this to a wish to mark the cards, but this was an entirely false accusation, because Reina had no intention of cheating when she did this. It was a superstitious quirk that she combined compulsively with lifting her chin and staring off into the distance. At moments like this Reina’s eyes took on the alluring artificial brilliance of fake gemstones. As Frederic walked into the dining room, propelled by Mado’s laughter, the first thing his eyes fell upon was that stare. Frederic, who was acquainted with Mado and the other girls in the game, felt repelled by those eyes, which appeared to him as a new and hostile thing. His first reaction was to fall back, not to continue forward toward the encounter with Rosa Trènor. Reina’s involuntary gaze, which bore no ill will toward Frederic, had cooled the temperature of his audacity, and Frederic had felt like a coward again; but before he could formulate any kind of decision, Rosa Trènor’s small, plump hand was covering Frederic’s lips, and he felt bound by the warm, dry silk of that hand.
In Mado’s living room, Rosa abstained from any complicated toilette; she was wearing a simple dress topped by a cherry-colored sweater; the same clothes she would have worn at home, on a winter’s night, with a migraine or the vague beginnings of a cold. Her lack of concern for clothing was considered a characteristic of good taste; when the time came to say good-bye, Rosa enveloped her flesh and the worn clothing that covered it in a great beaver coat, a bit moth-eaten and the worse for wear, with the tender good humor of a person who was going off to rest with no intention of giving anyone cause for alarm.
When Rosa paid this kind of visit to the girls, she carried with her an enormous snakeskin bag, which she opened with the unctuous sigh of a philanthropist of popular lore ready to hand out bread and cheese to a band of raggedy children. In point of fact, Rosa didn’t hand out anything she carried in the bag; she would rummage around inside and extract skeins of multicolored wool and a sweater she had just started. Mixed in with that bit of feminine handiwork, Rosa had books, papers, notebooks, a little bottle of peppermint, the keys to her house, and an entire battery of rouges, mirrors, compacts, and combs. Rosa Trènor’s bag was one of her most personal belongings. She talked about “her” bag in the same way that a hairdresser with fantasies talks about “his” hair-growing elixir.
When Rosa started weaving her web, she would tantalize her admirers with hints and meaningful glances. She would attribute a lie she had just read in a trashy novel to some fashionable fellow — someone from “her world” as she put it — far-removed from the present company of kept women and famous for his wife’s fur coats and infidelities. Rosa had a special gift for twisting gossip and for making tacky, trashy comments without altering her tone of voice or the monotonous movement of her lips. Sometimes her conversation meandered onto paths of tenderness and morality, and she affected dismay at something some honorable gentlemen had told her about a lady of the finest reputation.
Rosa’s natural grace consisted of a sort of careless, authentic Barcelona flair that she, the daughter of a notary, born in the old city center, had not entirely managed to lose despite the bastardization of her contacts and the coming apart of her life.
When the time came to shuffle the cards, Rosa left off pontificating and set to trying her luck, in the flaccid, voracious way of a leech sucking blood from bruised flesh. On those occasions, Rosa would produce a discreet amount of money and lay her bet with the yellowish grimace characteristic of people with kidney problems. In general, Rosa didn’t lose much, but when she did, her sweater turned a deeper red, by contrast, because all the rouge on Rosa’s cheeks was not enough to veil her pallor.
When gambling, the disinterested feelings those bosom friends affected towards one another turned into a miserly and ferocious conduct known only in the world of insects.
The presence of men neutralized the corrosive tension of the game. Which didn’t mean that some of them, like the insignificant and tubercular Baró de Foixà, did not apply an intricate technique to their wagering, or were not intransigent and unwilling to entertain any kind of irony when their money was at stake. The Baró de Foixà was very wealthy and more than once he had settled a baccarat debt by appropriating a diamond or taking a mink coat to the pawnshop himself, taking no notice of the ladies’ tears or the coarse comments of the gentlemen regarding his sanctimonious regard for the letter of the law. There were those who recalled that the baron had once lost the favors of a girl he was head over heels in love with, because of his insistence on collecting an insignificant gambling debt from her.