Free Private Life by Josep Maria de Sagarra

who runs around with a group of fellows who write poems and risqué verses …”
    “What do you care about poetry? You’re just a dizzy dame. You know I don’t like you running around with riff-raff.”
    “Oh, come on. No need to be so touchy.”

    GUILLEM, THE LATE FRUIT OF Don Tomàs and Leocàdia, had developed a tactic completely different from that of his brother Frederic. Some would say that the young man took after his mother’s side of the family. Tales were told about old Cisterer, and about Leocàdia’s brothers – unctuous characters, with incredible escapades. They had a character that was both charming and shrewd, and an egotism disguised as refined solicitude. It seems they had found their echo in Guillem’s ability to stay on both sides of the fence in any family situation.
    Guillem had started life at a point when it was no longer possible to conceal the Lloberolas’ economic cataclysm. Guillem’s education, so different from Frederic’s, had met with a feeble and depleted Don Tomàs de Lloberola, a father who in appearance deployed an honor guard of fire and brimstone, but in fact was easily distracted and handily deceived. In contrast with Frederic, Guillem had never suffered his father’s regimen of surveillance, never been spied on every Friday, as if by a detective, to ensure that he had actually taken communion if he said he had. Inspections of his private drawers and the books in his bedroom had been neglected, or perhaps the energy required to carry them out had flagged. When he got home mid-supper on a winter’s night, the paternal interrogation was cursory and in a tone left sort of hanging in the air. Guillem was able to achieve perfection in the art of lying and hiding the truth, the art most easily displayed by children with their parents. As a consequence of his self-important, foolish, and chivalric character – his authentically Lloberola character – Frederic often rebelled openly and provoked stupid conflicts. In the meantime, Guillem, opportunely lowering his gaze, stifling a comment, or murmuring a well-timed “Yes, Papà,” or “Forgive me, Papà,” with a velvety, feminine inflection, averted many conflicts and concealed certain kinds of things of which Don Tomàs lived in utter ignorance. Had he so much as suspected them, it would have been at least enough for his younger son to have suffered some damage to a rib.
    Guillem had studied law, just to study something. He took two or three civil service examinations, to no avail, first of all, because hewas so apathetic and distracted he had never studied for them, and second of all, because he had had no interest in passing them. Guillem had a horror, now more than ever, of any kind of discipline, anything that obligated him to get up at a particular time or take orders from anyone. He preferred the penury of being the son of a useless family, with pretensions to being a misunderstood man of letters, and feeding himself in whatever parasitic way he could, to having a bit of order and economic independence. Guillem was past thirty-one, yet he practiced the absolute lack of responsibility of the youngest of the household, who can always squeeze a
duro
from someone’s pocket, with the excuse that they’re still just boys and will always be just boys and never have to concern themselves with the things adults concern themselves with.
    The Lloberola way of being, and the conditions in which their ruin had come about – conditions of vanity and disarray – were just the ticket to fostering the kind of juvenile mentality Guillem displayed, and just the ticket for a young man like him to find himself more and more lacking in moral sense as time went on. Guillem had absolutely no respect for his father; Don Tomàs’s presence was observed by his son through a magnifying glass of denatured ferocity. Despite the apparent hatred and incompatibility of character that separated him from Don Tomàs, Frederic still had a core of