Women came to the Pingouin with evening escorts already arranged, or with their current squeeze. They were relaxed and unassuming, their makeup often a ruin, with whiskey starting to trickle down hairdos tortured by bleach and marcel waves. Any arrangements made once inside were either a last resort or the result of the influence of the red of the roses and the sickly amber of the gin. Somewhere between six and seven in the morning a woman perched on a barstool, her tongue nebulous with drink, might cling to the arm of a solitary Scandinavian who had probably taken a vow of chastity. At the Pingouin anything was possible at closing time. Conversations there could just as easily be liquid and vaporous as lucid, uncompromising and realistic, without a shadow of mercy. Many couples would drop in at the Pingouin before going off to bed in order to capture a few whiffs of madness or resignation that would add a little greenery to the sad flesh of copulation.
The audience at the Pingouin was a mix of delicate and austere people, well-meaning poets, and certified drunks, not to mention bilge rats, men who lived off the flesh of women, and boatswains with no strings attached, who had arrived in the morning aboard a cargo ship and were carrying bank notes pressed like dead butterflies between their bellies and their belts. These sailors would hire an interpreter who had most likely been a gunslinger for some union, who would dart quickly in and out, with canine eyes, wearing a cheap suit, to let the sailors know that outside four women, like four phosphorescent mermaids, were awaiting them, when it truth it was only the four most faded souls from the bottom of Carrer de la Unió o Carrer de Sant Pau.
There were always two or three couples dancing at the Pingouin. Occasionally, revelers full of good humor and good manners would come in and concoct some eccentric dance steps. Other times a refined, but entirely drunk, gentlemen from a Nordic clime would start dancing all by himself, bowing to everyone and bothering no one. The Pingouin’s salient feature was its great tolerance. Only with great difficulty could one come to fists or to fingernails. Within those walls alcohol became metaphysical, full of comprehension and soul. Everything moved to the rhythm of the music, everything was muted, everything had the flexibility of a rumba and the water of the port brewing in the belly of the gramophone.
Few people grasped as Bobby did the slippery jellyfish delight that floated in the air of the Pingouin. He would greet the better class of kept women, who arrived arms full of fresh roses and hungry as tigers, with a gray smile. Every so often he would order a bottle of Pommery to be uncorked to give the place a little grandeur. Bobby couldn’t stand the stuff; for him champagne was only good for wetting the tips of his moustache. Even when Níobe didn’t come along, Bobby would go to the Pinguoin with a friend, or a select married couple he had picked up at the Hollywood, a high-octane cabaret that had got its start around the same time, where many tender bourgeois ladies of Barcelona would go with their husbands to contemplate the celestial breasts of the Cuban women and dance bawdy, Tabarinesque dances, surrounded by the sultry aroma of the prostitutes.
One night at the Pingouin, Rosa Trènor took the opportunity to speak with Bobby about a little business deal with a smidgen of drama. That motley, absent, and dead ambiance seemed the most appropriate to her for concocting a scene in which she and he would play the role of specters that emerged from another atmosphere. The topic was Maria Lluïsa de Lloberola. By the intercession of her friend Teresa, Maria Lluïsa had confided in Rosa Trènor. Rosa didn’t let her get away. That marvelous creature bore the same blood as a man with strong ties to Rosa Trènor’s history, and Rosa, who was just as silly, romantic, and transcendental as ever, grabbed hold of what chance had placed within her grasp to extricate that chapter that is usually titled “Twenty Years Later,” in which the heart of the protagonist, bloated with memories and emotions, is about to burst. Rosa did not consider the possibility of exploiting Maria Lluïsa for one of her discreet and excellent latter day concerns. The woman’s dreadfully trashy mentality perceived in Maria Lluïsa’s blithe disposition a vengeance of destiny, the final act of a drama in which Rosa Trènor believed she had deposited her heart, when in truth she had deposited nothing but a little bit of stomach.
The only man who could be of use to Rosa in her perverse plot was Bobby. Another high-class client would have turned the scene into a banal anecdote of no importance. Bobby listened with his eyes half-closed as Rosa told her story. He said neither yes nor no. Bobby was a pretty decent guy. All his life long no one could accuse him of anything malicious or mean spirited, nothing that would sully a man’s elegance. But like most people from his circle, skeptical and disabused, lacking in passion, every so often it amused him to try a taste of something that might seem perverse or even have a touch of evil. Since Bobby had broken off relations with Frederic, he hadn’t thought for a moment of making peace with that smug and tedious man, but neither did he bear him the slightest hatred. Frederic’s affronts to Bobby’s mother were nothing new to him. He was aware of the opinion many ungenerous people had of the Widow Xuclà. Frederic meant nothing to Bobby. His economic disasters, the absurd life he was living on his estate, didn’t affect him in the slightest. But Rosa Trènor’s insinuations piqued his curiosity. Bobby also saw something of a final curtain in the affair at hand, and he realized he could act with impunity, playing the role of a traitor. Unseemly though it may be, sometimes this is the role a spectator would most enjoy playing.
Maria Lluïsa had only a vague notion of who Bobby was, but she was aware of the friendship he had once had with her father, and of the reputation that bitter and scrupulously polite bachelor enjoyed among the elegant set. Maria Lluïsa shared the ideas of some young women of her time regarding mature men and callow boys. It had become fashionable to disparage “cute” and athletic boys, with their vanity in their physiques. They were considered lightweights, lacking in interest and discernment. They were attacked for their empty chit-chat and their inability to show a path to the stars. Young women like Maria Lluïsa preferred a man of substance, more polished and more experienced, to a speed demon or a tango dancer with slicked-back hair. Young woman like Maria Lluïsa liked to be taken seriously, to be treated with respect. If they were out to infatuate, they preferred a victim with stature and history to a gigolo whose only concern was how to dress, and how to get undressed in staler latitudes.
Maria Lluïsa and Bobby met one day at Rosa Trènor’s house, and something happened to Bobby that had never happened to him before: he fell in love like a little kid.
He swapped the role of the traitor for that of the gallant young man, tender and pure, right out of a romantic love story. Bobby hid his feelings and tried to play the cynic, the paternal yet despicable man of the world who reveals that the whole plot revolves around a superficial fantasy. His behavior delighted Maria Lluïsa. She found him extraordinarily charming. His fifty years of age weren’t the slightest obstacle. Maria Lluïsa wanted to be more and more modern, and his gray hair was a perfect fit for her state of mind. Bobby conducted himself splendidly with her, accentuating his generosity with a cool amiability that allowed her to retreat.