Free Private Life by Josep Maria de Sagarra Page A

respect and consideration for the old man, while Guillem could have feigned the tenderest of tears as he watched his father’s death throes, and still been cold as marble inside. Between Don Tomàs and Guillem yawned an abyss of years. All the excellent qualities his father proclaimedfor his epoch merely disgusted Guillem. He saw his father as a poor deluded man who had brought him into the world by accident, in his dotage, when his capacity to engender was half-exhausted. He felt that Don Tomàs had done nothing for him. He had not taken an interest in him and had not loved him. In simple obedience to a grotesque and clerical criterion of education, he had deprived Guillem of things he wanted just because. He had imposed religious and moral duties on him that Guillem had never carried out in good faith, which had only served to cultivate his hypocrisy.
    Guillem never stopped to think that, despite all the defects Don Tomàs might have, the good man truly loved him, had spent sleepless nights on his account, had suffered anxiety for him, had even done truly outrageous things for him. Guillem didn’t even want to suspect what that old man would be capable of to save him. And it wasn’t that Guillem was a criminal, but simply that he hadn’t yet had occasion to meditate a bit on the dramatic situation of parents and children. Guillem lived his life apart, concerned with things that had no point of contact with those of his father. Guillem inhabited an atmosphere that was amoral, weak and selfish and, even though he would never dare admit it, lacking in dignity. Guillem might be a much more intelligent and refined person than Frederic, but his understanding always missed the mark when it came to his father. Inclined to the easy life, he was offended by Don Tomàs’s miserliness, his refusal to give money when requested, and his sermons in response to every bill from the shirt maker or any expense that Lloberola found useless or wicked.
    Nothing worthwhile came of that young man. Don Tomàs had undeniably stopped worrying on his account, and his every whim was tolerated. Don Tomàs said to him: “You’ll wise up one of these days, because if you’re counting on the family …” But Guillem never wised up.
    Or if he did, it was more often than not in a despicable way because, when he needed some cash, he didn’t waste time on scruples. Of the traditional family ineptitude he had inherited the decadence: an absolute collapse of the will in the face of catastrophe that reached levels of baseness he considered part of the merit and grace of his aristocratic cynicism.
    Outside the house, Guillem had another personality entirely. In his dealings with certain men and women, he was considered a brilliant and charming young man, who displayed a combination of nerve and elegance. No one knew better than Guillem how to accept a banknote from a lady’s hand with a smile that managed to be both noble and Franciscan at once, the smile of a good
jongleur
in the circus ring following a particularly difficult act.
    Guillem’s circle of friends ran the gamut from the most select and unconventional people to the kind of individual with whom he could close a deal with a wink of the eye from twenty meters away.
    Guillem’s world was completely different from Frederic’s. This had allowed him to have a good relationship with his brother, and even to take advantage of a few breaks that wouldn’t have been possible in a community of acquaintances.
    Leocàdia looked upon Guillem with the delicate and tender eyes of a mother, inflamed at once with both pride and ignorance. She felt that all the things that enchanted her about her son – his cheeks, his youthful and somewhat feminine profile, his obsessively manicured hands – had nothing to do with her, even though she had brought him into this world. Nor did they have anything to do with what she would have liked this final exuberant fruit of her maturity to be.
    When Leocàdia kissed