As we have said, Bobby venerated the widow Xuclà, and he found in his mother’s way of speaking the elegant and unspoiled mercy of a grande dame. He decided to underwrite the promissory note or, if necessary, to hand Frederic a check for fifty thousand pessetes, and put a stop to the whole thing, without setting any conditions for its restitution.
But the mercy of the grande dame had not been transformed into the mercy of the gentleman in Bobby. Bobby felt like humiliating his friend a bit, to impress on him the favor he was doing him. If Frederic had been a different kind of man, Bobby would have behaved in a cool, indifferent and even elegant way. But twenty-five years of intolerable condescension and vanity on Frederic’s part had peppered Bobby’s tongue.
When the two friends found themselves face to face, the Lloberola heir, huffing and puffing, smiling, a bit heated, wore the supercilious look of a man who has just discovered America and spies a mouse gnawing at his heels. Slowly he spat these words out onto Bobby’s blond moustache and dead gaze:
“I’ve come to tell you that you needn’t put yourself out. I am grateful for your generosity but you needn’t speak with your mother. Fortunately, I don’t need to ask favors of anyone. I have resolved the issue of the promissory note. I am only sorry to have taken up your time and to have spoken of disagreeable things … with a person who …”
Bobby was deepy outraged. His dead gaze took on a special life, as if a wasp had stung him in the eye. His pupil felt engorged with blood and rage, like a mongoose in the presence of a cobra. Bobby was furious, because the scene in which he would humiliate Frederic, and make him pay for twenty-five years of condescension, had come to naught. Bobby would have given half his fortune to make Frederic eat the fifty thousand pessetes like a dog.
But this burst of cholera took its time in reaching Bobby’s tongue, and he intimated in his usual tone of voice (fully prepared to substitute whatever tone of voice was necessary):
“I couldn’t be more pleased …, but I assure you — if you wish, I will show it to you — that I had a check for fifty thousand pessetes signed and made out to you …”
“Thank you, my friend, thank you. That is very generous of you, I won’t be needing it …”
“Listen, Frederic, I find your tone of disdain offensive. Anyone would think I had done you wrong. You came and regaled me with a string of misfortunes that I couldn’t care less about, do you understand? Not at all. And I was prepared to be generous with you …”
“Generous!”
Frederic let loose with a peal of laughter worthy of Rigoletto, and Bobby couldn’t take it any more. He let it all come out, he rained insults on him, calling him ridiculous, grotesque, an ass, not just him, but his father and his whole family. And a joyful Frederic replied at an even higher pitch, dizzy at the opportunity to offend that person to whom he had always felt so superior, whom he had always considered an also-ran. Now, seeing short, pudgy Bobby with his blond moustache, confronting him, tall and stately, a Lloberola from head to foot, he lost control. Amid the coarse invective, he included a reference to the widow Xuclà. “What did you say about my mother?” shrieked Bobby, his voice rising to a squeal, which made Frederic observe him with even greater disdain. Naturally, Frederic thought he was within his rights to say what he wished about her, and he said it all in the most stupid, unthinking and gratuitous way he knew how.
Bobby dug his fingernails into Frederic’s face. The only reason Frederic didn’t thrash him was that he was in his house, and among gentlemen it is not customary to thrash the master of the house when paying a visit.
On the most idiotic account, for practically no reason at all, these two apparently inseparable friends quarreled, and never spoke to each other again for the rest of their lives.
That night Bobby didn’t dine at the Liceu. He stayed home and kept his mother company. Bobby accepted the widow Xuclà’s way of thinking. He found her youthful indiscretions to be very human and considered the whole thing fine and dandy, because Bobby was a skeptic and his morality was rotten to the core. But that night, in reaction to the insults Frederic had dared to hurl at the widow Xuclà, he saw his mother as a saint. Above all, he valued more than ever her mercy and her elegance. She was a true lady. In the folds of her lips, her slightly pronounced chin, her wrinkles, her tired eyes, and the white hair of her decrepit majesty, still tall and smiling, he found the full essence of that aristocratic and mercantile Barcelona, popular, proud, and a bit childish, all traces of which were fading.
And Bobby was right. The widow Xuclà represented all those things, and more. Even more than a man, an old woman who has lived a full life retains the imprint of the past and the sensible permanence of memory. Women have more passive nerve receptors, and more receptive souls, so they do not consume themselves nor do they expend all their energy in action as men do. Women are both more covetous and more foresightful. Between the folds of their wrinkled skin, they have the good faith to collect dreams, to gather up adventures, and to preserve there what cannot be seen and can only be sensed: the perfume of history.
EL BARÓ DE FALSET didn’t say so much as a word to his wife about how Guillem was blackmailing him. He spent two months in agony. The day after he sent the letter to Frederic, he realized how stupid he had been to write it. Guillem hadn’t approached him, but he feared a new attack at any moment. Two months later, an event occurred that caused a commotion among many Barcelona ladies. It bore all the features of a crime of passion, and eased the baron’s terrible anxieties a bit. The event in question was the murder of Dorotea Palau, the dressmaker.
Dorotea was found with a dagger through her heart in a well-known meublé. She was in the company of a French individual whom all the circumstances seemed to incriminate, despite his protesting that he had had nothing to do with the crime. The court found him guilty.
Yet the alleged murderer was entirely innocent. For the reader to have some idea of how things came about, we will have to delve a little deeper into the private life of the Baró and Baronessa de Falset and their chauffeur, and follow certain paths that until now had been secret and unknown.
The first few years of marriage between Antoni Mates and his wife had apparently been quite normal. Conxa’s husband did not satisfy her in the least, and her own “personal” adventures in that first period of marriage, which we will have occasion to go into at other points in this story, were suspected by no one.
Antoni Mates made a tremendous effort to overcome something he didn’t dare confess even to himself, something he had hoped was long behind him. But he was powerless before his, shall we say, malady. As its effects inflamed his blood, Conxa became colder and more wooden, so much so that at times Antoni Mates felt he was sleeping with a dead body.
As we have said, Conxa had a very special and piquant beauty. Antoni Mates was madly in love with her, but it was a strange sort of love mixed with admiration that didn’t procure him satisfaction, nor was it capable of slaking the other thirst that consumed him.
Neither of them dared confess to the other how cold and empty their encounters were. A pathological sadness, deaf and dumb, crept into the marriage. They kept it out of the public eye by enacting the most delightful of honeymoons.
One afternoon the couple set out on an little trip, intending to spend a couple of days in a town on the coast. Antoni Mates had a new chauffeur; he had been in their service for just two weeks. He was a sporty young man who looked like a ladykiller. He had a youthful grace, and was pleasant and attentive. By nightfall the couple and their chauffeur reached the town where they would be staying. The inn was clean and quite comfortable, and practically empty because the summer season had not yet begun. At dinnertime, it was as if the time they had spent together, each keeping his and her respective secrets, had had an effect upon their nerves, as if instinct, or the beast, had revealed what the power of reason had denied. Conxa and her husband both looked simultaneously at the chauffeur, who was sitting three tables away, focusing on his plate of chops and not daring to look at his masters. The gaze of husband and wife must have been very particular and not very subtle because, later, when they realized what they were doing, and when their own eyes met, they both blushed, trembling and disconcerted. But that lasted only a couple of seconds because Conxa, with a great sigh, looked at her husband again with a smile. And her husband smiled back, as a flash of liberation flared in his eyes. Antoni Mates saw clearly that Conxa understood him, and accepted what he would never have dared to confess, just as he accepted her thoughts, in turn. Without so much as a word or the briefest remark, with just that redness of cheek, that discomposure, those sighs and that shimmer in their eyes, they came to a perfect understanding and mutual endorsement. The depravity of each was completely different from that of the other, but it tended toward one same objective, one same desire, that would be enjoyed in different ways.