Frederic’s apartment had an air of neglect. When the time comes to cut back, people accustomed to spending freely and living with a certain pomp adopt a kind of elegiac disregard that softens their bones and extends to all the details surrounding them. It drapes itself over the furniture and over the cooks’ hairdos. You can detect it in the chipped glassware, in the dining room chandelier missing two bulbs that no one bothers to replace, in the sad figurine that has lost a hand, and in the rug that is losing its pile and revealing its veins and bald spots. In the most intimate spaces, the bedrooms and the bathroom, this negligence exposes the cavities in their teeth and their dirty undershirts. The water heater never quite works, the water never flows properly, the towels are always damp. When someone is ill, and a stranger has to come into the bedroom, the lady of the house agonizes over how to conceal the details, the flaws in the room, the peeling wallpaper, or the chair with the broken seat. In the small salon of the house, a bit of proper decorum is maintained, and care is taken to keep everything in order so that the ladies who come to visit can rest their eyes on a serene view as they take their tea, and not feel an uneasiness that would be just as bleak as the shame of their hosts.
In Frederic’s house, this feeling of neglect was even sadder because the furniture was in bad taste but of good quality, and too large for the apartment. Frederic had crammed the foyer with shields and coats of arms and even the occasional fake suit of armor. The same was true of the dining room and the salon: grotesque, incongruous and overbearing heraldic insignias shared the space with awful picture cards and paintings purchased who knows where at ridiculous prices, hung without a particle of discernment.
Maria, Frederic’s wife, was a person without initiative, whiny, bitter, and peevish, who little by little had also taken on the dusty sluggishness of Frederic’s family. Maria lived outside her time. She had adopted all the modifications introduced into the lady’s toilette after World War I: she patronized good hair stylists, manicurists and masseuses. But she followed their regimens in an unenergetic way, never getting any fresh air, never taking into account that in order for the work of the beauty salons to be effective it requires the constant collaboration of the client. The day after she had her nails polished, her hands already looked unkempt. When she tried applying makeup, it only made things worse, as she had no instinct for it. She had lost the desire to be attractive, to be interesting, to breathe a smidgen of charm into the air around her. Maria’s friends affirmed that this was not a recent thing, that she had always been this way; moreover they said she was dirty. Maria’s bad taste was evident because she was incapable of putting together a serviceable outfit. Sometimes she would ruin an elegant evening dress by wearing misshapen old shoes whose leather or silk was worn from use. Like all slovenly people, Maria spent money absurdly. She was hopeless at saving or at the art of making do. Over the years she had been seized by a strange piousness, characterized not by religious fervor or faithful observance, but rather by the sneering and general disapproval born of self-righteousness and moralism.
Maria had pretty hair and nice skin; despite her children, who were now getting big — her daughter had just turned fourteen — she conserved her slim waist and didn’t need girdles or orthopedic wiles to prop up her somewhat abundant but still fresh body. With a different temperament Maria could have been a first-rate woman, but it seemed as if she were bent on killing any positive effects, on limiting herself to being a person without the least bit of sex appeal.
Having thrown in her lot with a family that had not known how to hold on to its wealth, and had exhausted her dowry as well, Maria started rolling out her instinct for unabashed complaint and unmotivated sniveling. While Frederic didn’t want it said that he was ruined, and childishly clinging to the Lloberola airs, he continued to talk in the thousands of thousands like a grand gentleman, Maria did quite the opposite. When a friend praised the fine points of an overcoat, a refrigerator, a dog, or a device for piercing an egg for drinking, Maria would start with the ohs and ahs and roll her eyes back in her head. After this she would put on a sad face and shrug her shoulders, always with the same comment: “Lucky you! None of these things for poor me. With all our household expenses, just imagine! We have to save! Even now we’re getting along with just one maid. When you’ve had the problems we’ve had …” If Maria’s name came up, the ladies would always say, “Poor Maria.” This ostentation of poverty reached irritatingly grotesque proportions. If she went to visit friends who were close enough to receive her in the dining room as they ate, she would comment on every course: “What beautiful asparagus! Of course, you can enjoy such a delicacy. It’s been a long time since we’ve seen asparagus like these in my house. The way prices have risen!” These comments made the friends who were eating the asparagus want to say: “Here, Maria, be quiet and have some asparagus.” Naturally, this didn’t usually happen, but it made her friends feel bad, and they would end up getting no enjoyment out of the asparagus. When she was invited to a party she was dying to attend, she would snivel, just to play hard to get: “Impossible! X and Y will be there, and I don’t have a dress. I would have to wear my black georgette again, and they’ve seen me in it three times.”
This behavior reached funereal heights in the family circle. Her lack of skill at avoiding avoidable things, her sadistic delight in continually pointing out the mended patches and placing the blame on her husband — never with violence, but with the slack demeanor of a beaten-down cat — and a mewling singsong full of bitterness and apparent resignation made her an odious woman. If the compensation of tender and passionate interludes, of something visceral and alive, had existed, perhaps a man could have found her relatively tolerable. But she was cold in intimacy, with a rigid and imperceptible sensuality, full of vengeful sighs of aversion.
The only person she got along with was her mother. Senyora Carreres, flush with money and diamonds, seemed to dissolve with voluptuosity when she contemplated the precarious situation of her daughter and son-in-law. She felt a sort of joyous middle class bad blood on seeing how the Lloberolas had squandered their fortune, right down to her daughter’s dowry. When Maria married, Senyora Carreres had learned that the Lloberolas found the Carreres family undistinguished and had wrinkled their noses at the match. Years later, Maria’s mother felt as if she were bathing in rose water on seeing herself so full of life, so well-fed and well-positioned, just as Frederic de Lloberola had had to lower himself, and beg clemency, often for ludicrous sums. Senyora Carreres cultivated her daughter’s tearful incontinence, inflaming her against her husband’s family, and creating an unbearably tense situation. It had been years since the in-laws had seen each other, and Frederic tolerated his wife’s parents out of pure necessity. Instead of keeping a bit of distance so as not to call attention to their contrasting fortunes, Senyora Carreres spent the entire day at her daughter’s side, saying “My poor dear! What misfortunes we must bear, dear God!” And she wasn’t good for a cent. Sometimes when Frederic got home he would find the two of them sitting in a corner of the dining room. When he came in they barely said a word to him. Maria would bow her head, and Senyora Carreres would glare at him with eyes that appeared to want to cry. She would move her head with the cadence of a disappointed cow, like the ones that secretly lived in the heart of the densest and most impoverished neighborhoods of Barcelona. Frederic would take in the viscous gleam of those ruminant eyes and then, pretending not to have noticed a thing, begin to tell them tales of grandeur or bits of piquant gossip that he knew his mother-in-law would find offensive. Senyora Carreres would adopt an increasingly acidic, passive, and abused attitude, scratching her cheeks with her little doll’s nails. And Frederic would finally take off, wishing he were one of those despotic medieval Lloberolas who could have had the pleasure of sealing the two of them behind a wall, alive.