WHEN FREDERIC HAD dropped the priest off and decided to go home, he realized it had been twenty-four hours since he had last set foot there. Even though relations with his wife had attained a glacial chill, he had had to come up with a story and invent a trip with Bobby in order to spend the night away. He thought about seeing his children again, along with the same tablecloth and the same oil and vinegar cruets and perhaps even the same anemones from two days before. They would now be in a state of withered decomposition, because his wife was so neglectful that it wouldn’t be at all strange if she had not seen to changing the flowers.
Returning once again to the promissory note, and to Antoni Mates, Frederic went so far as to think that if things looked really bad he would have no choice but to flee. Then the melodramatic side of Frederic’s nature began to see that night as the possible prelude to a tale of emigration. Twenty-four hours earlier, his wife, his entire family, had seemed intolerable to him; Rosa Trènor had been his liberation. After dropping off the priest, he had breathed in the bouquet of his family from afar with a nose of bathos. Just a moment before, like some barroom thug, Frederic had given his father a tongue lashing that left him limp as a doll. Then, erratic and weak, he had come to entertain the idea that it was all his own fault. The fifty thousand pessetes had not all gone to covering up urgent debts. Frederic knew full well that twenty thousand of those pessetes had been spent on an affair that had momentarily obsessed him, but had turned out to be a disappointment, like all the others. And that was just around that time that his wife had been whining because she couldn’t buy a coat that cost only four thousand pessetes, and Frederic ignored her and had the gall to say that she must be out of her mind, and the coat was out of the question. Maria never knew a thing, and still didn’t know a thing, about the damned promissory note because Frederic had done everything possible to keep it from her, trusting as he did that things would work out favorably in the end, and Antoni Mates would agree to renew the loan on the same conditions.
Selfish as a spoiled child, Frederic always found a way to justify himself and to play the victim. Still, he also had his moments of wretched mea culpas, as exaggerated and contemptible as his moments of conceit. In just twenty-four hours the change had been radical, and the closer he got to his house, the more desperate and purple the idea became of emigrating, abandoning his family, and sullying forever more his illustrious family name.
A moment ago he was saying, “Hah! Even though Antoni Mates is a son of a b …, he wouldn’t dare bring a case against me.” He would take a position of resigned cynicism, adopting an attitude of having seen it all. Later, without rhyme or reason, something he had seen on display in a shop window, or a simple incident on the street, would bring about a change of heart. The reactions of a man like Frederic can have the most absurd causes. He didn’t know if he should confess everything to his wife or if he should let fall, in some vague way, the idea of a troubling situation and a possible trip. Or if he should do it coldly, as if in passing, or strike a more declamatory air, his gestures combining desperation and repentance. How he behaved would depend on the mood his wife was in, the dinner she served, the vinegar cruets, or the wilted anemones.
When Frederic walked in the food was on the table. Maria barely commented on the false trip, showing an absolute indifference to anything that concerned him. In the presence of his children Frederic couldn’t say a word. As he crossly swallowed his soup, he dropped his melodramatic projects and his intention to confess. “With a wife like this, what’s a man to do,” Frederic thought, as Maria scolded Lluís, their youngest son, for no reason. “Let him be, Maria, let him be, don’t be on his back all the time,” said Frederic. Then Maria, losing control and paying no attention to the children, launched into one of those aggrieved monologues that Frederic listened to without a word. Maria completely lost her appetite with her crying, and dinner came to a disastrous end.
Frederic thought, “What a wretched life.” He opened the newspaper and pretended to read. The truth was he didn’t see a thing. He felt a desire to flee the house, not only because of the promissory note, or the danger he was in, but for everything. He wanted to flee without explanation. Once again he had become the victim. Once again Rosa Trènor turned into a glamorous odalisque. Once again his father’s image appeared before him with all the flaws that cruelty, repugnance, and incomprehension can expose. Bobby would probably be at the Eqüestre; his other friends would be there, as they were every night. The only thing he feared was having to see Antoni Mates’s face. But, what the devil, the note wasn’t due for two more days, and a lot can happen in two days. Just a moment ago he had been thinking of going to America; after dinner, this solution seemed ridiculous. Maybe Bobby, maybe it would be more practical to do what his Lloberola pride had never allowed him to do, to test Bobby’s friendship … who knows …
After dinner, Frederic didn’t say so much as a word to his wife. He changed from head to toe and fled from his family, feeling the same disgust and pity he had felt in Rosa Trènor’s kitchen, with the scrawny cat’s tongue licking the dirty coffee cup …
CONXA PUJOL’S GRANDFATHER, l’avi Pujol, had earned a lot of money in Cuba in the days of the slave trade. His family were sailmakers from Sant Pol de Mar, respectable, dignified people. Conxa Pujol’s grandfather had given up the sails and the ovens and joined a trading company, with a few duros he managed to steal from someone, a pipe, three jerseys, a knife, and a pistol.
In no time, l’avi Pujol was a well-known figure in the factories on the Guinean coast and the ports of the Antilles. He was a man of good fortune. Later he would convert the business of coffee-colored skin into the business of actual coffee, and he held government office in the colonies. When he was a bag of worn-out bones with a biblical beard, he turned up in Barcelona, carrying a sweet young mulatta piggyback, and built himself a house of stone on the Rambla de Santa Mònica. The mulatta blossomed in the rocking chairs of the house on the Rambla like a languorous, undulating dahlia, under a buttery silk peignoir that exhaled all the overseas perfume of her skin.
L’avi Pujol died of gall bladder cancer, leaving behind a sickly, squirrelly boy who in time would get into all sorts of mischief. He ended up an extremely rich and respectable gentleman, the manager of a famous shipping agency.
Conxa Pujol was the daughter of that gentleman and a certain Sofia Guanyabens, who proceeded from the dreariest middle class. She died in childbirth. Conxa Pujol had been a dark, magnificent creature, with imponderably dewy skin, and the phosphorescent eyes of a tropical beast. Everyone in the family said that Conxa took after her grandmother, the sweet young mulatta old Pujol had carried home piggyback. Conxa had the aura of a lazy pearl, but not without her moments of malaise. In Sant Pol de Mar, where her father had expanded the old family home and provided every comfort, Conxa spent the summers of her adolescence amid vaporous nights full of shooting stars and vanilla perfume. In that house, el Senyor Pujol kept souvenirs of the old family trade and of the grandfather’s navigation, business, and customs. Conxa Pujol’s hours of leisure within the white walls of the summer house were made up of dreams of sailing ships, Puerto Rican prints, black men in red-striped white cotton pants whose sweat was whisked away with bullwhips, and birds that flew in loop-the-loops, as if their bellies were full of rum. An entire rhythm of water and rumba, a whole sensual world of madrepore and coral reefs.