From time to time Rosa Trènor would organize custom-made sessions that she said were “for the family.” At those times the only people allowed in were certain gentlemen and ladies who were party to a secret pledge. The ladies who had the good fortune to attend one of those sessions would only refer to them with an exquisite vagueness, never going into detail. Some husbands who happened upon the lair never in their lives learned that the night before, their wives had been indisposed by a glass of lemonade owing to the upset stomach produced by the viewing of one of the most positively filthy scenes a commercial imagination can invent. Such tender and mysterious questions of chance in the life of married couples seem to have bestowed some interest on the elegant set of the times.
With the fall of the dictator, Rosa Trènor suffered serious damages. She was reported by the police and she was fortunate enough to be able to make the baccarat table and the projector of indecencies disappear in time. If she hadn’t, it was quite possible that with all her airs of grandeur she would have ended up at the prison on Carrer d’Amàlia.
In fact, Rosa avoided any substantial mishaps, and one particularly well-informed gentleman in the most sepulchral ring of a circle prone to arthritis, affirmed that Rosa Trènor had been saved by the freemasons.
With the coming of the Republic, Rosa confined herself to maintaining her best clients, who came for sentimental reasons. On Sunday afternoons Rosa would go to the Ritz, always in the company of a couple of “nieces.” Even among young men well-versed in the riddles of courtship there were many unaware of the true meaning of Rosa Trènor’s table. In that somewhat hybrid and pretentious Sunday air, Rosa played a very dignified role. Her dresses were even elegant, and her makeup was very appropriate to her forty-five skeptical years of age. When some young man would ask one of her “nieces” to dance, Rosa would cast him a maternal glance of the kind that asks the boy not to get fresh and to be considerate of the purity and excellent upbringing of the young woman who yields to his embrace to take in five minutes of tango.
Occasionally, a husband who was a client of Rosa’s would attend the Sunday session with his wife and daughters. Generally, husbands who went for tea with their families turned out to be particularly depraved. Rosa knew this very well, and between her and the husband a half hour’s dialogue would take place consisting only of three glances exchanged in such a way that not a single detail was left hanging. Many ladies went to the Ritz with a pure innocence. They were oblivious to the fact that when their husbands offered a chocolate éclair to the blondest girl in that domestic convoy, with a simple blink of the eyes he had just signed off on a conspiracy punishable by law with that dark lady across the table, who picked up a fluted neula wafer with a virginal gesture, as if she were drawing a Madonna lily close to the powdered environs of her nose.
When she took the daughter of her ex-lover into her home as a patient, Rosa Trènor’s friendship with Níobe Casas had just begun. As a result she had begun to see Bobby Xuclà with some frequency, because Bobby, to the stupefaction of his acquaintances, had taken the disconcerting gypsy woman under his wing. Teodora Macaia had been the one to introduce Bobby, as she had done with the Comte de Sallés. Bobby found the dances, and the people who surrounded Níobe, to be revoltingly stupid, but the belly and the armpits of the dancer had made an unsurpassable impression on him. Níobe accepted Bobby without realizing that she had acquired the most decent, liberal, and polite patron in Barcelona. She took advantage of him in a way that did not give the lie to her gypsy origins, but Bobby didn’t like to argue, and his checking account was fat and prodigal. When she wasn’t onstage, Níobe was a voracious eccentric with a positively efficient conservative and bourgeois core. The surrealist gypsy turned out to be a farce, and Bobby caught on to her right away. Her horror at diamonds was only for public display, and after a while it became clear that Níobe cared a great deal more for diamonds than for the spider wings of her cache-sexe. It was precisely for the purpose of purchasing some of those gems that Níobe came to meet Rosa Trènor, because if from time to time a fairly decent deal fell into Rosa’s hands, she wouldn’t say no to it. Even some ladies of unquestionable honor had had dealings with her to acquire a fox coat or a string of pearls at a good price.
Some nights Bobby and Níobe would go to the Pingouin. Rosa Trènor was a fairly assiduous client of that establishment. She didn’t usually take any “nieces” there; instead, generally, she was accompanied by a gentleman of a certain age. Every so often, even a professional dancer or some very young boy whom no one knew would sit at her table.
Bobby really liked that early morning haunt, because everything there was to his taste and his way of being. Níobe forgot all about her dances, and curled all her coppery skin up in a corner. Far from her literary admirers, the dancer’s teeth might even risk a sandwich of filet mignon or a portion of Italian pasta.
Of all the new things produced in Barcelona during the Republic, none was as successful and delightful as the Pingouin. No one knows why, but in those days the habitués of the wee hours felt a great attraction to the blood-red velvet divans and slightly pharmaceutical bar of that outfit on Carrer d’Escudellers. The Pingouin owed its allure to a gramophone with a mute, and to the priceless décor. The walls were hung with wallpaper showing wine-colored flowers against a background dark as squid’s ink that might have been meant for a skilled laborer’s bedroom in 1893. The Pingouin offered a gallery of unreachable boxed seats, where no one ever sat. Decked out in a green lamé fabric, they seemed made to order for a wizard to murder astral bodies or cook up an ectoplasm paella. The ceiling and the columns that held it up still preserved the filthy paint from the former warehouse turned into a dive for night crawlers. From the ceiling hung a naïf decoration. The owner had strung up a few lengths of wire holding wallpaper that showed peach blossom branches in flower. They formed a picture of innocence, a symmetrical green and pink spider web over the gray waves of stale smoke.
The music at the Pingouin was topnotch. Waltzes from before the war and contemporary rumbas, combined with Hawaiian guitars, Russian balalaikas and Tyrolean ocarinas, and dive-y accordions from Argentina and from riffraff the world over. The music, whatever music it was, picked up the rhythm of the establishment: a rhythm of boiled bones sloughing off their flesh, in lyrical and philanthropic convulsions, and above all a rhythm of silent sloth, distracted and barely conscious, the kind of lazy patience for which a quarter of an hour or an hour are all the same. The kind that watches the roses wilt on the tables as the sun climbs high in the sky and the street-cleaning hoses have used up all the water in the street.