The friction of the beaver coat against his suit jacket felt to Frederic like that of a real live beaver, as feral and repugnant as such an animal could be.
Upstairs in the apartment nothing mattered any more to Frederic. The dialogue went on in bed, and Frederic made mechanical promises; projects took shape amid a strange and painful desire to sleep.
Rosa Trènor set the alarm clock for eleven a.m., when she must get up without fail. She had to see her dressmaker. Frederic fell asleep with Rosa Trènor’s mouth stuck to his teeth with the viscosity of a crushed flower, or of viscera. What kind of flower? Frederic wasn’t sure because it was all vague and monstrous, it was all already taking place in the atmosphere of dreams …
LYING BETWEEN the sheets, Frederic had just mentally identified and reproduced these scenes. He concluded that it had all been a terrible mistake.
As for Rosa Trènor’s bedroom, he was making note of the uncomfortable architecture, the airlessness and disorder of the chairs and the armoire. Frederic felt like a man charity has rescued from a shipwreck, who wakes up in someone else’s home whose inhabitants have coarser habits and a harsher and shabbier way of life than he.
Despite her airs, Rosa Trènor was a woman who had been worn down by privation, and by the need to spend the night with men she had known for a half an hour. Like other kept women of her kind, she had no sense of privacy. Just as she entered into all kinds of physical intimacies with the skin of strangers, she found it natural that the stranger should have the same intimacy with everything that was hers: her bed, her furniture, her stuffed dog … And she thought the stranger would find it perfectly natural to wake up in a chamber in which his hanging clothing would necessarily feel ashamed and out of place.
And, fifteen years later, and unfamiliar with Rosa Trènor’s apartment, Frederic was that stranger, that shipwrecked soul lying between her sheets, taking stock of a setting that both cowed and repelled him.
Under the impression that her novel, Frederic: Part II, was in the bag, Rosa had decided to treat Frederic with a conjugal candor, with the lightheartedness and nonchalance of a woman whose husband has just come back from a long journey during which she has been unfaithful and affects a tender and unaffected informality in order to avert suspicion. This was why Rosa had got dressed and unceremoniously left Frederic snoring, like the lord of the manor, convinced that this was the best way for Frederic to become reacquainted with her “essence.” But Frederic was simply overwhelmed by the lordship of that apartment. He couldn’t wait to get out of there, yet at the same time an absolute corporeal sluggishness kept him pinned to the sheets, at that unspeakable hour of four-thirty in the afternoon. Still incapable of making a decision, his hands ran over the damp warmth of his undershirt adorned with the trophy of a few of Rosa Trènor’s tears, tinged with the mascara she had not quite finished removing from her lashes in the last-minute rush.
If the foreground of Frederic’s moral landscape — his night with Rosa Trènor — had had a more exciting hue and a more pleasing volume, perhaps the background would not have gone so dark so quickly. Just as a migraine develops at the temples — following the characteristic signs of such an attack — and one begins to note the actual pain in a weak, insinuating, and treacherous way, in Frederic’s moral landscape Rosa’s image was fading, giving way — with almost the same physical pain as a migraine — to one clear image of a promissory note and to another of Frederic’s father. The foreground had changed completely. It was no longer a bygone chapter of a half-failed novel, but a future anguish of a pressing urgency and a reality that left no room for doubt.
Frederic had to make a supreme effort; the twenty-four hours had elapsed. At the foot of the bed a pair of reproachful socks lay in wait. Frederic began to get dressed with the disgust of having to put on those socks, which had not exactly come fresh from the armoire. Frederic walked straight to the bathroom, but it was of no avail and, besides, there was no more time. He didn’t even know how to turn on the water heater. In the bathtub two fingers of dirty water flirted with a sponge that floated there like a soaking intestine. That small, cramped bathroom, with the red rubber douche hanging on the wall and the expressionless curves of the sanitary devices, had an air that was both criminal and pornographic all at once. Frederic washed up superficially and was furious to discover that all the towels were used and stained with either lipstick or mascara. Frederic decided that Rosa Trènor was a dreadful, neglectful person. Doing up his tie, he felt a sense of humiliation when he caught sight of the wretched smudges on his sweaty collar. It was humiliating not to be able to change his collar. Nevertheless, he tied his tie with a kind of casual coquetry. His ill-shaven cheeks were another source of humiliation. To hide the darkness of his skin he tried some of Rosa’s dusting powder but soon he was scrubbing his face in rage with a terry cloth towel until he left his skin raw, because the powder was of no use. He stared long and hard at his reflection in the mirror. Frederic’s face looked deplorable, but his puerile vanity was compensated by the sight of his tall, full form, with no offensive obesity, and the slight receding of his jaw, which he considered a sign of spent or even slightly degenerate aristocracy. He rubbed at the two small, shiny, symmetrical black triangles that served as his moustache.
Frederic realized there wasn’t a soul in Rosa Trènor’s apartment. Everything had been left to its own devices. One of those women who see to the cleaning of a string of rental apartments had probably come in to tidy up and timidly left for fear of waking him. Or maybe Rosa had left word that no one should disturb him. Frederic looked into the kitchen and saw a cup with the dregs of a coffee with milk and sugar. The ingredients had separated, and a scrawny cat — which must have jumped in through the open window, because it was hard to imagine that Rosa would keep such an unprepossessing specimen — was licking the inside of the cup. When it saw Frederic it started to meow with a sour and resigned rhythm.
The sadness of the apartment was poisonous, and Frederic felt a deep pity for Rosa Trènor, who had to put up a front, who had to cloak herself in the veils of pretension, suffering the brutality of one man or another, all for the upkeep of a miserable olio of perfume and pink sheets. Frederic had some understanding of those humiliations and pretenses; but nothing in his bitter reality was so strained and funereal as that cup in the kitchen, wobbling and weakly protesting, like a frightened animal bleating, as it endured the lashing of the cat’s tongue.
THE STORY OF THE Lloberolas was one of many family histories that come to a distasteful and impoverished end, without even a reaction to lend it some tragic nobility or, at very least, a scandalous or picturesque vivacity. Don Tomàs de Lloberola i Serradell, the head of the family, had seen all the family’s former grandeur melt in his hands until he had become a poor, gray, defenseless man in a massive, unimportant, practically anonymous residence, amid the uniform geometry of Barcelona apartment buildings.