Free Private Life by Josep Maria de Sagarra Page B

him, it was a breathless kiss of admiration, respect, foreboding, and the kind of animal tenderness we feel for something we ourselves have created, even if it is monstrous, even if it fills us with fear.

    IT MUST HAVE BEEN around six in the afternoon when Frederic started up the stairs of the house on Carrer de Mallorca. It had been a good month since he last set foot in there. The less he and his father saw of each other, the better. Maria, Frederic’s wife, took the children there every so often, so their grandparents could have a look at them. No one derived any pleasure from these purely perfunctory visits. Ever since their parents’ falling-out things continued to worsen, and the daughter-in-law, as inept as she was wronged, was subjected to nothing but bitter words. Don Tomàs, in his skull cap and scarf, just rounded off the unpleasant panorama of her husband’s presence, as Maria saw the complement to intimacy with Frederic in that decrepit, fussy, and reactionary man. In contrast to Leocàdia, Maria was neverable by any means to adapt to the mentality of the Lloberolas.
    Frederic would hear from Maria about the fluctuations of Don Tomàs’s rheumatism and the situation of Leocàdia’s canaries. But what led the heir and firstborn to his parents’ house that afternoon was a topic of greater importance, a mission he could not delegate to his wife. The odd thing is, even as the most critical moments of his adventure with Rosa Trènor transpired, the figure of his ex-lover began fading from his sight, while the interview with his father and the obligation of the promissory note came closer to his heart. Yet now that the interview was imminent, separated by only fifty-seven marble steps, he could not pry the sight of Rosa Trènor’s kitchen, the spectral cat, and the bathtub with its inch or two of dirty water from his imagination. Distracted by these sad images, Frederic didn’t notice that the door was opening, a door adorned with an image of the Sacred Heart that read
I will reign
. A sweet voice, a rivulet of water trickling through the grass of the most luminous fields of his childhood, reached his ear, and he heard these words from his mother’s mouth:
    “Thank God, Frederic! What a sight for sore eyes!”
    Frederic kissed Leocàdia on the cheek, and with a theatrical and affected flourish, as if there had been a death in the house, he asked:
    “How is Papà?”
    Leocàdia’s response fell somewhere between a sigh and a frown:
    “He’s in his office. He had a very bad night, he’s a bit fatigued. For God’s sake, my son, please don’t get him started again … your poor father …”
    “But, Mamà …”
    Frederic ran his hand delicately under Leocàdia’s wrinkled chin, and that tenuous filial massage seemed to reassure Senyora Lloberola, who without another word patted her son on the back and led him down the hallway toward his father’s room.
    Don Tomàs spent the whole day secreted away in that place he called his office. The word “office” was most definitely excessive, a product of Don Tomàs’s predilection for exaggeration. In Barcelona’s old mansions, even if the head of the household had never written so much as a single line or counseled a single person, there was always a room designated as the office. The only things that took place there were meetings with an administrator, or signings of rental receipts, or the reading of some journal that spoke of miracles or the parable of the fishes. In his apartment on Carrer de Mallorca, Don Tomàs had wanted to preserve his office, even though by that time anything having to do with his properties, or with receiving or making payments, had been reduced to a minimum. Don Tomàs used his office to dunk the dry day-old biscuits known as
secalls
, to take naps, to cough his chronic habitual cough, and, once every fortnight, to write a few lines of his memoirs. From time to time, the
masover
who administered the only property he still