His eyes half-closed, affecting his usual air of ennui, Bobby let the ash of his cigar grow long, pretending not to be following the two ladies’ conversation. In truth, though, he didn’t miss so much as a syllable his mother uttered. He sensed that the music of Pilar’s fatigued and rheumatic conversation was like a first-rate alcohol, of which extremely few drops remained, which had to be savored scrupulously and conscientiously.
One evening after dinner, Pilar felt a particular discomfort, as if someone were pressing delicately on her heart. The Widow Xuclà serenely caressed her son and gazed at him with eyes that betrayed the vicinity of death. Pilar was not mistaken; that was the annunciation of the angina pectoris that would carry her off definitively a few hours later.
Bobby acted as if it were nothing to be concerned about. The day had had to come, but he couldn’t stand the thought. That night, Bobby was overcome with a weakness, an impotence, and an unhappiness that made him ashamed even to get up from his chair and look at himself in the mirror.
He escorted his mother to her bedchamber. She wanted especially to brace herself on Bobby’s arm. Her memory, which was becoming cloudy, made an effort to sort out her sweetest images of herself and of that child who was now on the verge becoming an old man. Pilar held back her tears so as not to destroy a silence in which neither she nor Bobby had the stamina to say a single word. Bobby patted her twice on the cheek, and with a forced laugh advised her not to let herself be overcome by foolish apprehension.
Bobby went to his room full of dread. He wanted to believe it was for naught, that his mother was in no particular danger, and that perhaps she would still last a bit longer. Despite these reflections, Bobby sat glued to his armchair unable to open a book, waiting for he knew not what, as if he were on guard against the danger of some invisible thieves.
Bobby’s skepticism and bitterness had reached a pathological moment. He would have liked for what he was sensing to make itself known all at once, because the doubts and threats seemed even worse to him. Through one of those peculiar associations that come in the night in situations of illness and enervation, as Bobby listened to the pendulums of the clocks in the hall giving off signs of life in the darkness, it seemed to him that that little ticking sound was the rhythm of his mother’s pulse.
His mother’s pulse! Facing the presentiment that her vital rhythms might be coming to an end forever, this man of glacial indifference and self-certainty discovered all his own insignificance. Perhaps it was then that Bobby realized he had always been tied to his mother by an invisible umbilical cord. He breathed with her lungs, and the perceptions of his retina were a reflection of the anachronic gaze and taste of that sensitive and original octogenarian. Bobby’s Barcelonism, his way of living Barcelona, was nothing more than his shrouded veneration for everything that derived from Pilar. The premonition that he might lose his mother did not bring out in Bobby the natural fear and pain that in a similar situation might overwhelm a man who stands on his own two feet and has a free heart. Bobby’s fear was of losing the light that gave color to his personality. With his mother’s disappearance, Bobby would be nothing but a dying star, a silent lament amid a vulgar and uncomprehending hemisphere of flashing teeth and rosy cheeks.
Despite his brilliant position and his fortune, that night Bobby felt a true disgust with the very air that entered his lungs. Never before had Bobby considered worthless the vanities of the people he knew, and all the things he had seen or been informed of.
Bobby did not begrudge a dose of bitter pity to those who had ambitions or illusions of some kind, or who believed in their vocations, their work, or their creative faculties, but who, sooner or later, will have to face up to their impotence or their utter failure. He found desperately grotesque the attitude of those who think they are on the road to greatness by going into politics. Bobby took comfort in thinking that he had never done anything or even made an effort to take an interest in anything. He had invested a minimum of conflict and a minimum of criticism in things and people. He had suffered a minimum of disappointment. Never having given in to passion, never having got off the fence, he would go to the other world fairly free of resignation and regret.
Bobby didn’t recall that just four or five months earlier he had practically been turned into a child by a girl who, from the outset, had set her sights upon him for purely utilitarian ends.
Bobby didn’t realize that the bitterness of his thoughts simply obeyed his tainted temperament, that of a man who had always had what he wanted, and who couldn’t countenance a natural misfortune such as the death of his mother.
Fatigued with dark ideas, Bobby fell asleep stretched out in his armchair and started to have a dream of the kind that appear when one’s stomach is upset. He awakened with a start, wondering how long he had been sleeping. In truth, only ten minutes had gone by. Bobby made his way to his mother’s room. Pilar was resting and her breathing was a bit slow. He wanted to put his hand on her forehead but he was afraid of waking her. Bobby didn’t know what to do. He thought it would be too much to call for the doctor at that time of night. All in all, it was probably nothing. His mother didn’t look better or worse than other nights, and Bobby began to have the feeling that both his and his mother’s apprehension had been groundless. Bobby decided to go to bed, and after tossing and turning for a while, he fell asleep without a fuss. At five-thirty in the morning, his manservant rushed in to wake him. Despite his most recent reaction, Bobby was not surprised. He even had the impression that what his servant was saying was exactly what he had been dreaming at the precise moment he’d been awakened. When he entered his mother’s bedroom, that thing he thought would not surprise him shocked him like an unforeseeable horror. His dead mother’s skin was a color he would have been incapable of imagining. Her passing had probably taken place a couple of hours before, and it is very possible that not even she had had time to realize it, because the chambermaid who kept vigil every night outside her door hadn’t heard any particular sound or a cry of any kind. Death had shown Pilar Romaní its kindest and least harrowing face.
The servants mobilized automobiles and telephones. The first to arrive was Hortènsia Portell. Hortènsia was truly moved, and it was she who dressed Pilar’s cadaver with somewhat clumsy fingers. Inseparable from the yellow specter of his mother, Bobby didn’t want to see anyone. Hortènsia took him by the arm to pull him away from that bleak spectacle.
Bobby kissed her hand with infinite gratitude. Only he and Hortènsia could comprehend the grace and beauty of an eighty year-old body that, as it grew colder bit by bit, was carrying with it the sublime air of a Barcelona that no longer existed.
“You are a good friend, Hortènsia, a very good friend …”
Pilar Romaní closed her eyes on a July morning. On the roof of the house on Carrer Ample the swifts and swallows screeched in pure indifference.
The stands on the Rambla were bursting with white and red roses, the very roses Pilar Romaní used to say were exactly the same as the roses of her day.
Over the Rambla hung a mingling of the odors of night dwellers, morning hikers, and democracy. The yellow taxis whisked the dregs of sadness and prostitution off to their beds.