Sebastià Ripoll was an easygoing and agreeable painter, of a piece with the bourgeois tastes of the moment. He painted Pierrots, indigents and odalisques. He also painted portraits by commission, in which he dissolved flesh into caramel and redingotes into squid’s ink, applying a theatrical grace between the lips and the eyes that even today is not entirely obnoxious on one wall or another.
Aside from his paintbrushes and his juvenile erotic vanity, Sebastià Ripoll was a delicate bon vivant. Pilar selected him from among all her friends to be the artistic dictator of her home. The banker gave him cigars worthy of breaking out on the high holidays, and Ripoll the painter declared that the most velvety coffee of Barcelona could be had on Carrer Ample, where there was a lady who could be tenderly spiritual, with manners redolent of pepper and cinnamon, while not looking down on authentic homegrown garlic.
Pilar and Sebastià Ripoll enacted a novella in which it cannot be asserted that bedrooms, quilts and physiology played an exclusive role. The banker was unperturbed by the novella. A broadminded independence reigned in their marriage and he continued to treat the painter with generous liberality. And when he went abroad, he didn’t lose a moment’s sleep knowing that as his best friends sipped on an orxata or sniffed a carnation, they would be categorically affirming that his wife was cuckolding him.
As Xuclà the banker had inherited from his ancestors a good Hebrew complexion, regarding virile honor he had very clear and intelligent ideas. Pilar agreed with her husband’s ideas, but she made sure not to abuse them. Not out of any respect for the capricious kid-gloved satyr she was married to, but because Pilar, a good daughter of the nineteenth century, still believed that a lady with any self-respect didn’t go around losing her corset in any old corner, like a butcher woman coming down from an Ash Wednesday tryst on Montjuïc.
A portrait by Ripoll the painter of the Pilar of those days has been preserved in the home of D., the collector. Even if you observe the canvas with a hint of skepticism, abstracting the element of personal passion on the part of the black-bearded man, you cannot help but take in all the perfume of an extinct Barcelona that touches the heart of those who appreciate such things. In the painting, Pilar is standing with the smiling immobility of a Juno. Her neckline reveals bare arms and a rather generous triangle of flesh under her neck. Her skirt, made of mulberry satin, has a very long ruffled train and clings gently to her hips and thighs. She is wearing gloves the color of polished white bone that reach to above her elbow, and she holds a silk mask between two fingers of her right hand. A set of silver dominoes and a great bouquet of camellias bursting from a striped paper cone rest upon a strategically-placed sofa.
Ripoll’s ambition had sucked so deeply into her face that blood would have surged to the most academic lips. Her nose, chiseled slightly upward, seems still to be breathing in the sweat and fragrances of a masked ball. Her eyes reveal nothing but the great discretion hidden in her irises, green as the impenetrable gray green of the flounder’s slimy skin. And her hair, part gold, part ash, has something of a storm and something of the moss on a stone, a sort of geological romanticism reminiscent of the verses of Verdaguer’s Atlantis.
But the Pilar Romaní of the portrait precedes by many years the initial events of the story we are writing. When Bobby escorted Frederic to Mado’s house, the widow Xuclà was a matron well into her seventies; she and Bobby, the only child she had with the Semite banker, still lived in her house on Carrer Ample.
In her dotage, the widow Xuclà had been seized by the intransigence of social caste regarding the growing materialism and loss of control of Barcelona society. This genuine lady, who had caused such scandal as a young woman with her democratic and slightly uncouth attitudes, brandished the very same rigidity of which she had been the victim in her day against the loosening of principles that affected the beauties of the present day. When they told her Senyoreta X had taken as a gigolo a store clerk whose only merit was to have built up his biceps a bit at the Club Nàutic, or that Senyora R. had mortified her husband by word and deed before a gathering of young men at the golf club, and that yet another lady had taken a taxi to a meublé on the Diagonal, or that the Baronessa de T., in the midst of her divorce proceedings, had made an appearance at a cabaret only attended by prostitutes and the occasional inexperienced married couple from the provinces, Pilar Romaní was filled with indignation. Not in the tone a lady of Leocàdia’s temperament might have used, but in that of an old fox who has seen it all, but who still demands a bit of etiquette and a bit of dignity even in unavowable affairs. Though Pilar Romaní had been broadminded and paid little heed to the morality of her times, there were some lines she had been very careful not to cross. She had been careful to drape even her vices or caprices in a romantic gauze, revealing only a delicate silhouette of poetry and distinction. Even though she and Ripoll had caused tongues to wag, still the painter had been no vulgar passion, and Pilar Romaní had taken care to embroider the letters of a sentimental, mentholated novel on their relationship. When she spoke of these outrageous young women, the widow Xuclà would use her own very picturesque and somewhat crude way of speaking, which in time had turned rather bitter. Sometimes a phrase uttered by Pilar would subsequently be reported in a half dozen places, commented upon, laughed at by the men and sharpened to a fine point, whereupon inevitably it would reach the ears of the woman in question. Behind Pilar Romaní’s back, her humor was considered the “tantrums of a doddering old witch,” but no one dared say such a thing to her face.
In time, the widow Xuclà suspended her get-togethers and visits and called on fewer and fewer homes. Among the very few exceptions was the home of Hortènsia Portell. If Hortènsia threw a party, Pilar Romaní’s presence was assured. She would enter with the air of a queen, and all the ladies yielded to her. They would needle her to get her talking. Some days she would be gloomy and reserved, and would pretend to be deaf for conversations that went too far. Other days she would be in a friskier mood, and she would nibble away in the sharp and dainty way of a ferret. The widow Xuclà’s clothing was always a bit old-fashioned, in shades perhaps too light and bright for a lady of her age. She was tall and strong; no one could have guessed her age. She was a magnificent specimen, and her wrinkled and shrunken features still resisted old age to reveal the traces of a great beauty.
The widow Xuclà would attend Hortènsia Portell’s salon, above all, out of a particular liking for that plump, fashion-conscious woman, and because in Hortènsia’s circle of vulgar elegance she could still find the occasional intelligent man. He would be a sad, skeptical character without pretensions with whom she might enjoy a long conversation about Catalan affairs and hear a few things that might have a bit of spirit and spark. Pilar Romaní no longer learned of anything on her own account. She read no newspapers, nor any new books. She lived off her memories. All art and literature had come to a stop for her before the War in Cuba, when she would invite the people of sensibility of the day to her house on Carrer Ample. Pilar Romaní was of the opinion that the best things had come and gone, that the literati wrote so that no one would understand them, that modern art — her idea of modern art was more quirky than she herself — was insufferable, and that painters were bent on making life ugly and deforming the grace of things.
She would criticize some young women’s lack of taste, their unattractiveness, their absolute ignorance, their precarious ambition, their lack of personality and resulting willingness to be swept away entirely by what was au courant and fashionable. She would criticize the cowardly morality of some, and the inexcusable lack of modesty of others, and what most disgusted her was the snobbish enslavement to the latest thing and to American fashion. She bemoaned the loss of character and the mongrelization that had swept Barcelona. The big fashion houses and the automobile had leveled everything out. Pilar Romaní couldn’t countenance the fact that, simply because she possessed a magnificent Hispano-Suiza automobile, a woman who had come from who knows where was invited to dinner and supper at the homes of the daughters of the same old aristocratic dowagers who years before had hung her out to dry.