Guillem’s words left the baron utterly terrified, his response dying on his lips.
From that day on, Guillem took pleasure in elaborating a sort of cruel torment. He found a way to secure introductions to persons who had frequent dealings with the baron, and to others who were under his authority. He would show up in the company of those persons in strategic places where the baron would be sure to see him speaking with them, wearing a meaningful smile. He had the nerve to show up in the baron’s own offices, and enter into conversation with his most important staff.
Antoni Mates thought he was done for. When he ran into someone who greeted him, when he chatted with someone else, he was utterly subject to suggestion. He thought he could sense that the person was already in on everything, that it had all been explained to him. He thought every word was an allusion; he perceived a double meaning in the most innocent things. In his office, on his most sensitive missions to the most notable members of society, on his many boards of administration, everywhere, he would discover imaginary eyes examining him, laughing at him, looking down on him as the lowest and most repugnant of perverts. And this fear, this terrible fear, began to leave its mark on his face. It altered his voice, his gestures, his way of walking. People who ran into him often, and, even more, those who had not seen him in a while, detected a bizarre uneasiness that they couldn’t explain. As the days went by, the situation became darker and darker. In the end, everyone was aware, everyone realized that something very serious was wrong with him, and no one could figure out the cause. Only Guillem de Lloberola secretly reveled, silent as a dead man, as he contemplated the slow martyrdom of that poor man laden with millions, with stature, and with cowardice.
In their conjugal life the situation was even more unsavory. Conxa asked her husband what was happening to him. Since Guillem’s first attack, Antoni Mates had manifested to Conxa his remorse for everything he had done, for the lengths he had gone to in degrading himself and degrading her. Conxa didn’t understand. She was made up of a combination of cynicism and other things the baron couldn’t suspect. She thought her husband had gone soft in the head, which for her, in truth, had long been true. But when his fear took on the dimensions of madness, Conxa became frightened. Antoni Mates didn’t hint at Guillem’s role in his disgrace and, naturally, Conxa didn’t know a thing, nor would she ever know, about how Guillem was undermining her husband.
Conxa called in two or three doctors. Perhaps it was a case of surmenage, a temporary breakdown; perhaps it could be cured with a bit of repose. The more they treated Antoni Mates, the worse things got. He hadn’t the slightest doubt that everyone was in on the story, and that he inspired disgust and pity. He once again considered the idea of making Guillem disappear, but by then it was too late. What good would it do? The death of that young man couldn’t heal a thing, and would only compound the horror that was stalking him with the horror of a crime.
Antoni Mates was a total wreck. In three months, a man who had been famous for his aplomb and his sagacity in business, for his unassailable social position, had turned into a sort of drooping puppet, powerless to clear his lungs of the pus of imaginary infamy that kept him from breathing.
IT TOOK FREDERIC a long time to realize it, but in the end he understood that he had done a foolish thing. Bobby had been a good and trustworthy friend to him. A man as unsubstantial and overwrought as Frederic needed a passive and patient foil. Not everyone could treat him with Bobby’s calm, cool nonchalance. If Frederic had been a thinking man, if he had been able to see himself in the mirror with critical good faith, without the passion and vanity that dominated him whenever his affairs were in question, perhaps he wouldn’t have needed others so much. Above all he wouldn’t have needed Bobby so much. For a man like Frederic, lacking in imagination and any kind of inner life, it is more troublesome to lose a friend of Bobby’s caliber than it is to lose a lover, no matter how smitten he may be. Because people like Frederic see women as creatures who fulfill them and satisfy them on given days or hours, in their spare time, beyond the ordinary, gray hours of everyday. To the man who is experiencing it, a bond with a woman who makes your head spin can seem like a one-of-a-kind thing, tinged with a pearly suggestiveness, a red-hot eagerness. Oftentimes — indeed, most times — this suggestiveness, and this eagerness, can simply be replaced with another woman. It can even happen — also quite frequently — that for the moment there is no need to replace them. That is, they can be compensated for with a feeling of calm, of liberation, of repose, and of clarity. Gray everyday life can continue precisely on its way, perhaps a bit more transparently. Once eliminated and in the past, those moments of private life, of incandescence and lyricism, do not by a long shot possess the same lyricism and incandescence. On the contrary, they are perceived as an oppressive imposition that we have been fortunate to free ourselves of, and if we just persist a bit, it will not be at all difficult to pick up another imposition that will have the same lyrical and incandescent effect.
In contrast, if we are lazy by nature, once we have had as a friend, without realizing his worth — because we thought it was a natural thing, like having healthy teeth or clear eyes — a person who will put up with all the humbuggery of our particular way of being; who will go for a walk when we feel like it or sit down when we don’t feel like walking; who has sufficient lack of initiative to go to the theater we want to go to, or not to go to the theater at all, if we fancy the Forty Hours’ Devotion; a person who has the distinction of listening to us and of knowing how to listen, who contradicts us when we wish to be contradicted and is silent when we require silence; a person who never says no, but has the grace often to pretend to say it; a person with whom we have lived for years and years and who is as useful as a pair of old slippers to rest the feet after a very long walk; as soon as, by whatever chance, we find that this person disappears from our everyday dull routine, then what happens is that time becomes interminable, and our walk, our club, our confidences, our aperitif, our leisure time, and even our boredom are not what they used to be. They are missing the wedge that propped them up. Our life is like those annoying wobbly coffee tables on which no drink can be enjoyed. Someone who has been a friend since adolescence cannot be replaced by just anyone. The obstacles are much more difficult in nature than when it is simply a question of replacing one lover with another. The time of love, the life of the emotions, is always easy to resolve. In contrast, the dreary hours, life without rewards, the slow digestion of minutes stripped of pain or glory, or cloaked in the shadows of the sadness of desire, these are the hours that cannot be resolved just any old way. These are the hours when we most require, and hence most value, a disinterested collaboration.