Ferran was truly happy about his sister’s marriage. Since the night of their confidences and their misunderstanding, Maria Lluïsa’s presence had weighed on his heart.
At the bar of the Hotel Colón, a few guys placed bets on the shape and number of horns the young man from Bilbao would end up wearing, with the same good humor with which they wagered three shots of London dry gin as they shook the dice cup.
AS BOBBY SMOKED HIS last pipe after lunch, he was hard put to understand how he could have been so foolish as to fall in love with Maria Lluïsa. Bobby smiled and wanted to put on a good front, but the truth be told his disappointment in that love affair had left him pretty crushed. The people who had supper with him at the Cercle del Liceu noticed a touch of intemperance and a bitterness they were not accustomed to. Bobby spoke of the youth of this country, and the young fledglings just starting out, with a scorn that was perhaps a bit self-serving. For him, the tone of Barcelona had become about as flimsy and flighty as it could be.
Bobby spent a lot of time at home, reading. The only things that interested him, though, were history books. Conservative and skeptical as he was, he savored the tales of the most derelict and critical periods, and the most contemptible characters, all mixed in with the smoke from his pipe.
When Bobby left the Cercle del Liceu, he liked to wander lazily through the neighborhoods of Barcelona he most loved. He would turn onto Carrer Ample and breathe in the air that drifted over from the docks. The Passatge de la Pau and the streets that led to the Plaça Reial, which in those days was called Plaça de Francesc Macià, after the current President of the Catalan government, revived in him the flavor of a Barcelona devoted to commerce and decked out in posh velvet. A Barcelona made up of dignified and thrifty people, who had an audacity and drive he didn’t find in the people of his day. What’s more, Bobby appreciated the capacious and seigneurial taste in everything his grandparents had done, with no pretensions to originality and without a shadow of impertinence. Those cobblestones impregnated with drugs and colonial merchandise held the breath of the sails that set out for America to seek sugar and coffee, and of those other ships that came back from the port of Liverpool freighted with cotton bales. The the gray air that clung to their wood had transmitted a polite sort of British morality to the commerce at home.
Bobby would confer with the palm trees of the Plaça Reial and the Passeig d’Isabel Segona. He didn’t understand how the men of his generation had developed an antipathy toward palm trees. He thought that one of Barcelona’s lovely qualities was the possibility of sustaining in its natural climate a tree of such legendary symmetry and such a gently rocking swoon as to have been the pride of the gardens of all the gentlemen of the country. To Bobby, palm trees felt like a living reminder of the lost colonies. Bobby, the skeptic, was an enthusiast for things with an elegiac air. He found a thousand flavors on the Rambles. Bobby’s Barcelonism was entirely soft on the Rambles. He couldn’t even be a skeptic there. He believed with all his faith that in no other city in the world was there a street as original, as alive, and as human as the Rambles of Barcelona.
The state of the Palau de la Virreina caused him some distress. He would have liked to see even a religious respect and consideration for that palace. The story of the Virreina was related to his mother’s family history. Don Manuel d’Amat i Junyent, the man who built that palace, was the brother-in-law of his great-grandparents, the Comtes de Sallent, and he was related to the Castellbell and Maldà families. Bobby knew the life and miracles of el Virrei Amat, and all the tricks and energies he put into being the Viceroy of Peru. He knew about the relations the Viceroy maintained with a dancer called Micaela Villegas, whose nickname was “la Perricholi.” Immortalized by Offenbach as “La Périchole,” she seems to have been a dominant and extraordinarily beautiful woman. With the money he salvaged from her kisses, Viceroy Amat built the noblest house in Barcelona.
Bobby imagined La Perricholi with the eyes and skin of Maria Lluïsa. His relative, Amat, less skeptical than he, probably dragged her home to the docks of Barcelona and locked her up in that palace on the Rambla, not realizing that, in the ship that had brought her from Peru, the dancer had been unfaithful to him with a young man from Cadiz or Cartagena, experienced in the ways of women and the sea.
Though Bobby was almost always silent, when the topic of Barcelona came up he liked to show off his erudition regarding the old stones and history of our city. Bobby’s ennui, his passivity and his smile were not unlike a pleasant cemetery, where at a given moment the shades of the dead would promenade bedecked in their wigs, their egoism, and their deliquescent escapades. This is why Bobby was so averse to sports, affirming that they were the most corrosive, demoralizing, and plebeian thing in this world. In the wee hours, when he carried his little moustache, glued above his lip like a bit of chlorotic brush, off to bed, he would run into troupes of hikers dressed in white — sometimes dirty white — desecrating the Rambla. Bobby was absolutely certain that the country had no chance of salvation. Sports had killed off slow-cooked and tenderly-seasoned love. Girls on the beach looked to him like androgynous animals.
The only thing that ever superficially modified Bobby’s point of view was his brief relationship with Níobe Casas. When Níobe Casas moved to Paris, Bobby reverted even more to a mentality that could be captured in a meerschaum pipe with an amber stem.
At that point, it could be said that Bobby lived only for his mother. She was his only positive affection, the only person he admired a bit, and Bobby awakened every morning with fear in his heart, anticipating the catastrophe, sensing that at any moment her lungs could stop like a tired clock.
The widow Xuclà was just about to turn eighty, but her head was perfectly clear and she could still marshal some degree of energy. In those days of change and upheaval, Pilar was a grande dame who belonged more to an immovable ether than to the bubbling cauldron of the day-to-day. She managed not to take an interest in anything or to comment on any events. Her salons in the house on Carrer Ample, full of anachronisms, never breached by either the dust or the air of the street, were shining pendulums unvaryingly marking the seconds in a coffin of crystal and aromatic woods. Every morning, Pilar would have great sheaves of roses of every color delivered from the flower stands on the Rambles. The roses were the only thing that had not changed. They gave off the same perfume and the same grace that they had fifty years before. Pilar shared her life with the specters of her world, resting her arthritis on the pearl and garnet-colored sateen covering her intact sofas. Almost all the women of her time had disappeared. The Marquesa de Descatllar had been dead for three years. Lola Dussay, her sister-in-law, the Comtessa de Sallent — they were all inhabiting the land of ashes now. She almost never saw Leocàdia Lloberola, because both of them were pained by the present reality. As her forces waned, Pilar became more refined, more original, and more interesting. In Pilar’s conversations, a good hunter of nuances could have found shades of green, blue, and rose that are no longer manufactured, and the formula for which has disappeared.
The person who visited Pilar most often was Hortènsia Portell. Hortènsia, much more refined than all the ladies who criticized her, recognized the worth of a true lady who had outlived an extinct fauna. Some evenings, Hortènsia would dine at the Widow Xuclà’s house, and in that exceedingly severe dining room, painted the color of a Capuchin hood, with the precise accents of a silver service, Pilar and Hortènsia evoked a scenario without gas engines and polychrome bidets, smelling only of the natural fragrance of gardenias and the pomade of men’s moustaches.