Bobby was not precisely this ideal friend to Frederic, but of all his acquaintances he was the one who came closest, the one who gave him that feeling of repose, calm, and companionship. Frederic would never have given any thought to the value of friendship. Bobby offered him nothing more than patience and good manners, and Frederic absorbed these things — which came very easily to Bobby — as if they were the elements of a true friendship. Both as a single and a married man, Frederic had fallen out with everyone. Companions didn’t last long with him because, in general, in order to take Frederic seriously you had to be just as trivial and oblivious as he was. Squabbles were common and intemperance was shared equally. Only Bobby, by virtue of being so different from Frederic, and so incapable of passion, abandon, or a vivid interest in anyone’s fate, allowed Frederic, who was no psychologist, the gratification of believing that he was a faithful friend. At the same time, Frederic could indulge in the pleasure of considering himself far superior to Bobby.
After their foolish falling-out, Frederic thought he had lost the company of a first-rate fellow, the only one he considered a good friend. And for a ridiculous reason, in which the greater part of the fault lay with him. He discovered that he missed a number of things. He discovered that when he left the Banc Vitalici to take up his position at the sidewalk café of the Hotel Colon, he had no one to listen to him when he said the world was a mess, and this country was a piece of sh …, and Catalans were impossibly vulgar and ill-mannered people, and his neck was itchy, and marriage was absurd, and love didn’t exist, and gentlemen here don’t know how to behave like gentlemen, etc., etc. He discovered that, when he ran into a woman and winked at her, he couldn’t run and gush into patient ears that he had just seen the most “stunning” woman, and he was the only man who knew how to deal with women like her, and she was a sure thing, and there was no one like him at flirting and leading them on. Frederic found that when his arms were itching for a string of caroms in a good game of billiards, he couldn’t come up with a couple of intelligent and comprehending arms willing to let him win, if such was his mood. Or when someone had passed on some piece of juicy gossip, there was no sponge to absorb it all without protest, even managing to evince interest and curiosity. He discovered that when he just wanted to fool around, shooting bread balls at his friend’s nose, sticking a toothpick into his ribs, or just calling him a “nincompoop,” this guinea pig for his experiments in banality, silliness or conceit had fled his cage. The cage was just empty. His bridge partners were only good for bridge and nothing else; his officemates simply disgusted him; his family poisoned the very air he breathed; and the mere thought of his father made him hate life. There was only one door left through which he might escape, but the effects of his escape were unpredictable. The only door he had left was Rosa Trènor. Why Rosa Trènor, in particular? The nocturnal adventure on Carrer de Muntaner had been a failure. It had been entangled with the anxiety of a promissory note, with an imminent battle with his father, with the fictional illusion of recovering his life of fifteen years before. Naturally, not even glue could hold all this together. Like everything concerning Frederic, it was skin-deep, and came and went without rhyme or reason. But after his falling-out with Bobby, Rosa Trènor’s presence had neither sentimental nor erotic interest, nor the thrill of rebellion and scandal within the routine of a false and nauseating family peace. Rosa Trènor now represented the possibility of companionship and perhaps even friendship. When they had been lovers, years before, Frederic had turned Rosa into the repository of his egotism. He trusted her. He would consult her on anything from the color of a tie to guidance of a moral order on some issue he was looking into. Rosa knew him, she tolerated him, she understood him perfectly. Rosa was what Maria, Frederic’s wife, had never known how to be. With the passing of time, she was spent, exhausted, and less demanding, and he was worn down, defeated, less fussy, and perhaps more indulgent with humiliation. So, perhaps, once she was stripped of her femme fatale patina and he was resigned to putting up with a few pains in the neck, they might achieve a sort of idyll without phony violins and with a merciful abundance of poultices.
And so it was. Rosa took a bit of distance from Mado, on account of the incompatibility between Frederic and Bobby, and she accepted her late night bouquets of camellias more and more infrequently, because Frederic advanced her all the money he could, and more.
Frederic became very familiar with Rosa’s apartment on Carrer de Muntaner. He even came to find some charm in the spectral cat that licked the coffee cup, whose appetite knew no bounds. As Frederic came to discover, she paid her frequent visits by jumping in through the kitchen window. He found it amusing to see her perched on the quilt as he explained to Rosa Trènor, looking grotesque in pajamas the color of a white wine from Alella, some theory he had just come up with on the cultivation of peas or on how to carry out a risk-free abortion.
Frederic interceded on the cat’s behalf. Rosa had the concierge bring her a bit of fish. And the cat got fatter and lost her spectral personality.
One day Rosa told Frederic the story of the stuffed dog. The dog’s master had been a general born in Valladolid, a short, slight man with the voice of an angel, whose wife beat him. The general fell in love with Rosa, and every day they would talk a walk down to the Parc de la Ciutadella, past the monument to General Prim, and visit the zoo. At one o’clock on the dot the general would board the tram. The little dog was a sort of cross between a terrier and a seminarian. It would get ill-tempered and snappy as it walked along beside them. Rosa would bring a couple of sugar cubes for him, which he would catch mid-air, his mouth wide open and his eyes rolling back in his head like an opera singer’s.
Eventually, the general’s wife got wind of the story. The idyll came to an end, and the general died of sorrow. One day at dawn, as Rosa was leaving the Grill Room, she came across the little lost dog wandering up and down the Rambles. It jumped up and put its two little front paws on her beaver coat. Rosa was appalled at its boldness. She let out a shriek, but when she recognized the general’s dog, she started to cry. She gently picked it up, lifted it into the taxi, and sat it on her lap with motherly affection. The dog lived with Rosa for two years until a car ran over it, leaving it stretched out on Carrer de Muntaner, its open eyes near bursting, with a rivulet of blood on its snout. Rosa was desolate. She kept a few garters she no longer used in a cardboard box, and she remembered clearly that one of those garters was the first thing the pitiful nails of the general had touched when she surrendered to their idyll. Rosa took the dog to a taxidermist near the school of the Brothers of the Christian Doctrine, by the Palau de la Música Catalana. He was an old man who desiccated small animals, and he did it on the cheap.
Once the dog had been stuffed, Rosa draped the historic garter around its neck and gave it a home in the place where she worked and slept.
Frederic didn’t see the humor in that military memento perched on the armoire and he asked Rosa if she would sacrifice her souvenir of the general for love of him. Rosa put up a great resistance. One day when Frederic was a bit more recklessly lavish than usual, Rosa gave in to his entreaties, and the following day the ragman took the dog away.
Thanks to these innocent little larks, Frederic was able to forget his family situation and his wife’s bitter laments. He would spend many nights away from home without offering any explanation. Maria didn’t care any more. She felt entirely divorced from her husband and by nature made no sexual demands. Maria had everything she needed with the pipes of her mother’s apocalyptic lungs. The children spent the day at school. The girl had just turned fifteen; the boys were dressing in golf clothes and chewing gum.