The widow Xuclà had a penchant for going off on her own. Many mornings she would go out with her chauffeur and barrel down the highway until she found a nice place where, with the help of her eyeglasses, she might work on a sweater for the daughter of the concierge or for some member of her household staff. The widow Xuclà took an enormous interest in people of more humble condition. She liked to talk with the workingmen and the servants, and in the summer she would spend long hours with the people who tended her land. She was lavish, and generous to a fault, and a tear or two was enough to take her for all she was worth.
Her true friends were few and far between. She was close to another lady of her time, a distant relative, the Marquesa de Descatllar. She was more acid-tongued and more class-bound than Pilar Romaní, and she was absolutely outrageous. The marquesa had been separated from her husband for many years, and in her case it was absolutely true that she had no relations at all with anyone. Pilar Romaní always defended her in her circle, maintaining that she was a true lady and had been very unfortunate. The marquesa had a dark complexion and hard, virile features. She went around with narrowed eyes as if everything disgusted or infuriated her. No matter what turn fashion took, she always wore a bunch of dyed black bird-of-paradise feathers hanging over her forehead. They looked as if they had been plucked from the headdress of a cannibal leader. Stories were told of shameful contact between the marquesa and brutish subjects of the lowest extraction. In the afternoon she would often go to the Paral·lel with her chauffeur and her manservant to see bawdy shows or revues with a great deal of naked flesh on display. She would generally sit half-hidden in a box seat on the mezzanine. Pilar Romaní would occasionally accompany her on these theatrical excursions. They had a particular liking for Catalan vaudeville, with beds and underwear onstage.
From a distance, the marquesa had a magical effect. In the days when only two-horse carriages traveled up and down the Passeig de Gràcia, the marquesa, dark and solitary in her open sedan, contrasted with the pale cream, pea green or turquoise blue mistresses under their monumental hats, complemented by a dog who might have been stolen from a Van Dyck canvas.
At the height of summer, the Marquesa de Descatllar and Pilar Romaní always went abroad together. Some years they would go to Marienbad, but later, as they got older, they found the trip too long. Then they wouldn’t get any farther than the baths at Luchon, or they would drop in for a few days at Biarritz.
On the beach, the two ladies made fun of the female fashions and customs, of the lack of breasts and the diminishing hips. They thought the craze for turning the skin into an artifact resembling a cocoa bean or a jacaranda wood desk was absurd. From the terrace, the two ladies would spend hours and hours under the shelter of a garish, antiquated umbrella and, with the aid of their opera glasses, they would destroy the fabric of the flashiest beach pajamas and what little flesh they covered up. A blink of the marquesa’s eyes was as implacable as a hair clipper.
Occasionally, they would become entranced with the maillot and the curly nape of some sporty, boorish and optimistic young man, and they would savor him from afar, with deliberation. They would digest him slowly and carefully, like serpents, with all the bitterness and impotence of depraved old women.
Another friend of the widow Xuclà’s was Lola Dussay, who was the polar opposite of the marquesa.
Lola Dussay was older than Pilar, but not by much. She lived on Carrer de Montcada, in a three-hundred-year-old house that was starting to collapse. The ground floor, the stables, and the courtyard, had been rented to an individual who kept a drug warehouse there. Lola lived on the principal, the main floor of her large noble home, which was enormous for her and the two maids and one manservant who attended her. Lola was single, religious, and prim and proper, but she shared with the widow Xuclà a taste for tradition and popular culture. Lola didn’t have so much as a particle of intelligence; she was loud, fussy, and rude, all things she compensated for with an enormous heart and an absolute selflessness. Every spring Lola would throw a party at her house. She only abandoned this custom four years before she died. Her guests were old stock, faded and reactionary. They were married couples who lived in their own world and young men with medallions around their necks, heraldic coats of arms on the rings between the hairs on their fingers and genuine imbecility diluted throughout their bodies who came to fish for fiancées. Lola was as simpleminded as an octopus, and at these parties some, it seems, had taken advantage of her innocence in the dark, damp, and interminable corridors of her house on Carrer de Montcada, as the chandeliers trembled in the salons, excited by the upheaval of a polka.
Lola spent her days and nights caring for the ill, visiting midwives and expressing condolences. Her main passion was cooking, and her greatest joy was the killing of the pig. Lola had hair white as snow, an enormous belly, and cheeks that were red and taut from the heavy food she prepared. She would spend long hours in the kitchen, sweating and overheated, preparing sauces and tending to roasts. Among her best friends was Don Felicià Pujó, just as much an old bachelor as she was a spinster. Don Felicià Pujó was President of the Brothers of Peace and Charity. He was cold, gentle, and delicate in the extreme. There were those who took for granted that Lola Dussay and Don Felicià Pujó were secretly married. What is beyond all doubt is that Lola expected Don Felicià Pujó to partake of her culinary marvels. Sometimes at midday, when Don Felicià got home from sitting in the sun, he would find Lola Dussay’s manservant in his foyer with the following mission:
“Donya Lola sent me, senyoret, because today the pig’s feet have turned out first-rate and she would like the master to come and try them.”
Don Felicià Pujó, who was dyspeptic, would sadly shrug his shoulders, put on his mid-crown top hat, pick up the cane he always carried with an ivory dog’s head for a handle, and set out for Carrer de Montcada to dine on pig’s feet. Later, at home, no cannula or thyme infusion would suffice to calm his irritable bowels.
Despite Lola Dussay’s religious devotion, she liked to use blue language. This was not out of malice, but stupidity, as often she didn’t understand the double-entendres, and she repeated everything she heard, whether it made sense or not.
Pilar Romaní appreciated her cooking talents and her frivolous, picturesque, and singular way of living her life.
The house on Carrer Ample was decorated according to the banker Xuclà’s taste, with the counsel of persons like Ripoll the painter, whom Pilar considered to be peerless. The house had all the heavy, gold-leaf pomp of the turn of the century. Bobby had made a few more modern contributions, but only in moderation so as not to hurt the widow’s feelings.
Bobby loved his mother a great deal, though days and days could go by without their exchanging a word. Much more intelligent than most of the people in his milieu, Bobby was subdued, and rather shy. He was in the habit of never contradicting anyone and never arguing with anyone, more out of apathy than anything else. He was skeptical and tolerant; he almost never laughed, but neither did he get angry. He had inherited from his mother a natural and unaffected elegance, and a pure essence of Barcelona that transcended time and space, or literature and politics. Bobby wasn’t au courant, nor did he want to be. He tended to express very vague and noncommital opinions. Perhaps the clearest vestige in Bobby of his family’s Jewish heritage was a somewhat reptilian flexibility that allowed him to put on a smile that was neither hot nor cold, a smile that was sort of who-gives-a-damn, yet not at all offensive, in the face of the things that usually spark men’s passions. It was more a product of indolence or of a delicate egoism born of not wanting to be get worked up about anything.