His widow was considered by some to have been a victim. “Poor Pilar,” was the plaint, because all her wealth and elegance could not compensate for her husband’s having shown up every month with a new acquisition extracted from the demi-monde, whom he would materially smother in pearls. Nor did they compensate for the famous banker’s long sojourns in Vienna during which, under the cover of business, he sowed the wild oats of his temperament between a gypsy violin and a rose of Bulgaria.
Old Xuclà had imbibed the entire epoch of the waltz and the square sideburn. This is why when he was in Paris his heart yearned for Vienna, because the women there were taller, whiter, blonder, more animal, with easier laughter and a more primal sexuality. Above all, they had a more docile and lyrical flesh, accustomed as they were to being brutalized by the shiny despotism of military officers and the hands of country bumpkins.
In truth, “poor Pilar” couldn’t have cared less about all this. She had never loved her husband, and it was far more pleasant to have at her side a pompous, spiritual philanderer who lavished all manner of attentions upon her, than to be saddled with a reactionary Tomàs de Lloberola, brimming with uncomprehending egoism, who, between processions and intonations of the Tre Sanctus would have given her a horrible life.
Pilar de Romaní i Miralles was the youngest daughter of the Comtes de Sallent. She had rejected her family’s proposal that she marry a young man from Madrid, a nephew of the Duques de Medinaceli, because, besides being Castilian, the man was dull and had green teeth. After rejecting three or four more proposals, she leaned, against her parents’ preferences, toward Xuclà, the banker. He was a bit past his prime, but he had a perfect command of the use of gardenias and of double-entendres. For Pilar — who at the time was the prettiest and most elegant young woman in Barcelona — this preference for a man of Semitic extraction was the sign of a special temperament at odds with the tenor of her family. Like their cousins, the Lloberolas, the Comtes de Sallent made much of the tawdry vanity of their blue blood. What they wanted in a son-in-law was a rheumatic subject with the heart of a rabbit who would offer no risks and be faithful to tradition. If the title they picked up was from Castile or Aragon, all the better — no matter if there was a touch of syphilis along the way. In contrast, Pilar was an unconventional young woman, with a delicate anarchic streak, and by one of those biological miracles that can never be explained, the daughter of the Comtes de Sallent had turned out to have personality. That personality was a throwback to the Barcelona that preceded the Universal Exhibition of 1888, sensitive to the fragrance of colonial breezes, factory greases, the efficiency of cotton spinners and the broad populist humor of Serafí Pitarra. As a girl, she had been roundly castigated by her mother for her insistence on speaking Catalan, which was the language of the cook, the coachman who cared for the household’s horses, and the poets who gathered at the Cafè Suís.
Pilar had a democratic mentality and, without her realizing it, her heart took part in the air of rebirth that was becoming more and more accentuated in Barcelona.
When she married Xuclà the banker, her personality became more refined; bit by bit, it was honed. In her, a traditional and popular Barcelonism was united with natural elegance and perfect beauty. Pilar was the least affected, most natural lady one could ever hope to meet. The somber timidity of the black armoires, the doleful chiffarobes, the lady’s bustles, the lack of hygiene, and the cone-shaped cucurulles worn by penitents in Holy Week processions could be summed up, in a word, as the provincialism that would convert the Catalan aristocracy of the turn of the century into a sort of shabby and reactionary extension of restoration Madrid. Against all this Pilar offered up, unabashed, a seamstress’s little snub nose and the kind of laughter you might hear among the carts of the greengrocers and the red breeches in the soldiers’ garrisons.
Once they were married, a state of polite coolness did not take long in manifesting itself in the marriage. Xuclà the banker was quite satisfied with his wife, because she was intelligent, she was decorative, and she was the most dazzling person in Barcelona. But Xuclà the banker had other kinds of tastes, and his polygamous temperament led him on the chase for fresh quarry. Pilar surrounded herself with a motley circle and showed utter scorn for her parent’s circle of relations. Out of obligation, she would take up her position in the front seats at the grand parades, and her place there was never in question. Yet her sense of humor and her offhanded way of speaking scandalized certain segments of the circle of the Comtes de Sallent, and word began to get around that Pilar had a wandering eye. Another segment of the aristocratic sphere maintained, through thick and thin, that Pilar’s behavior was beyond reproach. This was the plaintive segment that wept for “poor Pilar” and accused her husband of being perfectly vile.
As always, there was truth and untruth on both sides of the question. Among her detractors, some crusty and unbearable marquesa would claim that Pilar Xuclà was worse than a cocotte, that a dozen lovers were too few for her and that her husband was within his sacred right to seek distraction elsewhere. This was a great exaggeration. Pilar didn’t share the compunctions of the other grandes dames. She had had actresses over to her house on Carrer Ample, and in particular she had been quite friendly with a ballerina who had danced for two seasons at the Liceu and was famous for being brazen and for having blackmailed a prince from the house of Orleans. The day this dancer performed before a select audience at one of Pilar’s salons, a panic not dissimilar to a run on the stock market rippled through many Barcelona families. The scandal was sublime. There are those who remember it even today. So as not to have to break off relations with their daughter once and for all, the Comtes de Sallent pretended not to have heard a word about it. To avoid comment they spent four months away from Barcelona.
Pilar stood her ground. Three of the most prominent ladies of the day assembled to discuss whether they should continue receiving her in their homes. It is said that this conference — according to people who remember this, as well — broke all records in terms of feminine ferocity. The attempt by the three ladies was a fiasco. Pilar was too pretty and too brilliant. And her husband had too much money and was too enmeshed in the interests of many of her detractors. All la Senyora Xuclà had to do was don a floor-length ermine coat to distract the ladies’ tongues away from the pecadilloes of the lady who wore it.
Of all the improprieties attributed to Pilar, the only one that might have had some substance involved Sebastià Ripoll, the artist. This painter, a friend and disciple of Martí Alsina, died a miserable death in Paris in the days when artists of means like Ramon Casas and Santiago Rusiñol were striking out to discover Montmarte. In Pilar’s youth, though, he had possessed the most exciting black beard in Barcelona. Sebastià Ripoll was no bohemian, but the son of a manufacturer, and a friend to opulent chorus girls and idle fellows with artistic leanings. He had a place at certain privileged tables and a chair in the penyes of the men’s clubs, bull sessions at which the topics of the day were discussed.