Private Life (43 page)

“Pat, you’ll never guess what I’m thinking.”

“What?”

“I’m tired of being a virgin.”

“Shocking …” Pat said this in English.

Since that dark night on which Maria Lluïsa would have liked to see Dionísia turn into a monster, Pat had eased up on his audacity. In the water, their contact had been so epidermal and so entwined with laughter that Maria Lluïsa started down a via crucis of disappointment. Pat, on the other hand, fell into a contemplative tenderness in the presence of her natural blessings. The young man’s behavior knew no middle ground between animalistic assault and delicately
inane lyricism. But Maria Lluïsa liked him a lot, and she liked him even more when he tore himself away from them and struggled all by himself with his outboard motorboat, filling the blue waters with thunderous noise. Then the young man was someone, he represented a bountiful living element in a landscape of muscles and machines, without an ounce of brains or ill will. It broke Maria Lluïsa’s heart.

In Barcelona, she and Pat began to meet up and drive around in the Chrysler. Maria Lluïsa noticed Pat’s timidity: he preferred to circumvent her in a dangerous calculus of twists and turns, always sidestepping the real issue. Pat’s kisses seemed perfunctory, performed completely out of touch with his nervous system. But she could tell that he wanted her, even as he felt a great respect for her. The young man was afraid of Maria Lluïsa, and he was afraid of an intense affair with her. At first he thought he was simply in love with her. Then he found her to be too much of a woman for him. Maria Lluïsa disconcerted him. The young woman ran rings around him. Pat had a primitive idea of love, a romantic notion he had drawn from books. Pat thought there was an incredible emotional abyss between the kind of women with whom he had been intimate and the girls of his class. With a girl from his class whom he didn’t particularly care for, he felt he could take liberties and try a few moves that didn’t go anywhere, like those aquatic fantasies in Llafranc. They were ways of passing time that didn’t compromise anyone and could be snatched like a delightful prank. But when he started to take an interest in a girl of his class, Pat imagined that love was swaddled in such complicated veils and required such solemn genuflections that he felt totally lost.
And this is why Maria Lluïsa’s way of being, so direct, simple, and unceremonious, was so disconcerting. She would take his arm, muss his hair, and kiss him on the lips so very naturally, as if it were the least important thing in the world, as if Pat were a doll on her sofa or a little pedigreed dog. When Maria Lluïsa was being effusive in this way, Pat felt inhibited, and his response to her coquetries was stilted and fearful. If Maria Lluïsa’s behavior with him had been reserved and a little hypocritical, doubtless Pat would have become incandescent, and his impulse, always under the restraints of his archangelic idea of love, would have manifested itself with more nerve. It was Maria Lluïsa’s temperament that disconcerted Pat and kept him from doing cartwheels. He, who was fed up with escorting all kinds of women affecting the disenchanted punctiliousness of the
amant de coeur
, didn’t know what to do with a woman like Maria Lluïsa. The fact is, it was the first time in his life that he found himself in such a situation.

When Maria Lluïsa told him she was tired of being a virgin, Pat took it to be one of her
boutades
, a simple wish to play the
enfant terrible
, and he smiled, certain that those words meant no more to her than if she had said she found the smell of his hair lotion unpleasant. Pat could not conceive by any means that Maria Lluïsa had said those words seriously, because the idea he had about girls like her required him to apply an inflexible formula that allowed for no exceptions. At heart, Pat was an innocent. Like many boys of his class, he had become fully sexually active before he knew it, and his bourgeois education had imposed strict criteria on him for the classification of the women of this world.

Pat didn’t realize that the essential character of a person can’t be found in her position in life or in the opinions others may have of her, but rather that the essential character is hidden in her core, independent of time and space, or of morality and prejudices. Pat’s error was to believe that by the mere token of living off her body a prostitute could not be, deep down, more sensitive and a better person than his sisters. And he was also mistaken in believing that a girl of Maria Lluïsa’s class and education, solely by virtue of being of that class, could not be serious in saying, purposefully and sincerely, that she was tired of being a virgin.

These fatal errors led Pat to believe he had the right to treat all prostitutes with contempt and the obligation to consider it a simple extravagance that a girl like Maria Lluïsa should express such an a shameless concept.

In fact, Maria Lluïsa, swept along by a suggestion as banal as the java song that had knocked her in the teeth, was saying something bound to an authentic desire, to an experience she considered to be a prime necessity.

Maria Lluïsa was incapable of formulating an idea like that, by making use of the emotional circumstances of a moment that could be historic in her life. Maria Lluïsa chose an indifferent temperature and landscape, she chose a tone of voice without chiaroscuro, and even a smile that neutralized the transcendence of what she had just said. Maria Lluïsa had learned quite a few things in those few months. She had become good friends with a young woman who worked at the bank with her. This young woman, of black extraction, overcame
the high yellow whiff of her family’s origins with the oceanic play of her hips and a hairdresser equipped with solvents. This girl was the lover of the assistant director, and she carried this role with the aloof and dissembling dignity of a girl who doesn’t beat around the bush. She had already had two abortions and she was ready to do it again, with aplomb. Maria Lluïsa took everything that came from her friend’s lips to be an article of faith, and when she turned out the light in her bedroom in the apartment on Carrer Bailèn, she had those subversive goods in her baggage. Gifted in the realistic analysis that women tend to perform instinctively, Maria Lluïsa could see the moral catastrophe of her ancestors. She saw the hysterical, petty and hypocritical ineptitude of Maria Carreres and the abusive and egotistical blubber of her maternal grandmother. Maria Lluïsa felt just as foreign next to her mother’s bleached hair as she did beside the raffia moustache of a Congolese divinity.

In our country there are families in full productivity, in which parents and children live as if they were bound together by a fever of collaboration, helping one another, the parents filling the children’s feeder with the last crumbs of their meal. They have a family spirit, sometimes aggressive, sometimes defensive. These are people who are still infused with the ferment of the workingman or the cringing of the shopkeeper that can bend their backbone. In contrast, there are families of long tradition that are so evaporated, squeezed so dry, whose social productivity is so nullified that their members feel a fatal desire to separate, to flee from the paternal path, to destroy the family spirit. The Lloberolas, and other ancient houses like theirs, had been
attacked by the latter microbe. Before her parents, Maria Lluïsa felt the same thing Frederic, Josefina and Guillem felt before Don Tomàs de Lloberola. All of them fled for their own reasons, and all of them hated and rejected their parents’ ideas and feelings in their own ways. Maria Lluïsa was just the same. She didn’t want to have anything to do with the tearful, leather-bound moral cowardice of her mother. She felt an inhuman contempt for Frederic. She wanted to be herself, a Maria Lluïsa in touch with her heart, whose name perforce was Lloberola, but who didn’t have anything to do with them.

The same anarchic sentiment that moved Frederic to choose Rosa Trènor as his lover, the same anarchic sentiment that made it tolerable for Guillem to don his vagabond rags and accept Dorotea Palau’s three hundred pessetes, was at the heart of the feeling of disintegration, destruction and disdain that compelled Maria Lluïsa to say that she was tired of being a virgin.

And it was not just words. Maria Lluïsa had thought these things through in her own way. She was aware that, in those times, materialism, as some saw it, or a more rational and understanding vision, as others saw it, had undermined certain principles that the pre-war bourgeoisie defended tooth and nail, including the principles having to do with modesty and sex. In this world, female figures who dispensed with modesty were well thought of, welcomed, and admired, even if it was only at a distance, even if it was only in their existence in film and theater. The remoteness of this consideration was shrinking so steadily that it was reaching as far as personal relations, practically even direct contact. Maria Lluïsa discovered cases she had
only seen in novels in close proximity, on her own street, at her own workplace, a meter away from her own typewriter. Maria Lluïsa knew single women, the daughters of bourgeois families, who had lovers, and enjoyed the shadiest of intimate interludes. Some of them became emancipated in good faith, others out of passion, and others coldly, in pursuit of a utilitarian end or a perversion with no material compensation.

Not that everyone Maria Lluïsa frequented was like this. One step away there was still passive resistance, the world of numb silence, prejudice, routine and sanctimonious devotion, servile imitation, fear, solitary vices. That was the system advocated by her mother, by the Lloberolas, that is, the family phantasm that was smothering Maria Lluïsa and from which she wanted to free herself by leaping into the field of liberty and lack of shame, accepting all the risks and all the potential catastrophes.

It isn’t that Maria Lluïsa had a vocation for perversity, or an ideal of unrestrained libertinage. Maria Lluïsa still believed in a trace of heroism, in delicate and ardent possibilities, if she decided to break the intact urn of her maidenhood. Maria Lluïsa saw that if she took her mother’s tack, she exposed herself above all to wasting time waiting for the one who would decide to marry her, and she exposed herself, even more, to that decision’s never taking place, and she exposed herself to the possibility that the man who did take possession would be wrong in every way. In a word, in her mother’s tack, Maria Lluïsa saw only an ominous dependency upon marriage. Maria Lluïsa reasoned this out in a childish and unsophisticated way, as many girls
might do. But at very least, she was consistent in her ideas and did her best to be straightforward. In rejecting her mother’s technique, obeying that feeling of disintegration and destruction, Maria Lluïsa accepted as a certainty that the importance of virginity was quite relative. Once she had accepted that, her decorum saw no obstacle in offering it to someone she herself had chosen, a young man who was physically pleasing and agreeable, and with whom she hoped to experience Dionysian moments, with no strings attached. And she wanted to give herself to that young man sitting by her side at the wheel because, as very limited and full of flaws as he was, he had not pursued her voraciously and incontinently. Pat had not taken any initiative in this regard. After that morning in Llafranc, Maria Lluïsa was a bit disappointed, but at the same time, the boy’s passivity gave her a reason to keep observing him, to analyze quietly if he was the right boy on whom to gamble her deepest intimacy. Maria Lluïsa felt the pleasure of choosing her own man, without any lasting ties, when the time was ripe, and when her desire was sweetest. Maria Lluïsa, at eighteen, dreamed of all these things. Naturally they had their risks and dangers, but as we have already said, the Lloberola cowardice was one of the family flaws Maria Lluïsa had avoided.

When Pat said the word “shocking,” Maria Lluïsa blanched, her eyes clouded over, and her mouth clenched in a grimace of sadness. Pat stopped the Chrysler and looked closely at Maria Lluïsa’s face. The boy was beginning to discover a new hemisphere, the hemisphere in which all the paradoxical constellations of a girl’s nerves spin. With the disconcerted tenderness of a porter accustomed to carrying sacks
on his back who finds a newborn baby in his hands, he took Maria Lluïsa’s head in his trembling hands and said “Forgive me,” in an almost inaudible voice. Maria Lluïsa relaxed her teeth, and through the opening between those two rows of enameled snow, Pat slipped his tongue, burning with thirst.

Maria Lluïsa was the first to react. Pat’s eyes were wet with tears and she dried his face with her scarf.

“No tragedies, Pat, do you understand?”

The young man felt ashamed and humiliated. They drove all the way to the Diagonal without saying a word. Maria Lluïsa kept singing her java song. Pat was frightened by the decision he had just made. When he dropped Maria Lluïsa off near her house, his inexperience led him to say these words:

“Listen, Maria Lluïsa. Are you sure you’re not making fun of me?”

Maria Lluïsa responded with a fresh, natural smile. They agreed to meet at six p.m.

Pat had told his friends that Maria Lluïsa was a girl who liked to pretend to be modern, and whose head was full of hot air. Whenever someone insinuated that anything definitive might have gone on between them, Pat would get indignant and say:

“Get out of here! What are you thinking?”

Pat’s twenty-five years had given him great arrogance and aplomb in his judgment of women. He knew perfectly well how far he could get with this one and that one. But he wasn’t quite sure whether Maria Lluïsa wanted to entrap him, or if she just wanted to have a good time and amuse herself. He also wasn’t quite sure whether he
would let himself be entrapped or if he would merely collaborate in having a good time with Maria Lluïsa. Pat was convinced of one thing, and that was that if by chance he were so foolhardy as to take Maria Lluïsa into a room with a bed at the ready, Maria Lluïsa would defend herself heroically and never again look him in the face. The events of the afternoon demonstrated quite the opposite. They showed that Pat’s certainty had been entirely unwarranted.

Pat went to pick Maria Lluïsa up at the arranged time, still not sure of anything, still believing that she was sort of toying with him. Pat couldn’t bring himself to accept that Maria Lluïsa would hatch such an important plan so lightly, but what filled him with misgivings were the color of her face and the perplexing mystery in her eyes after he had spoken the word “shocking.” For Pat, Maria Lluïsa continued to be the same enigmatic girl who frightened him. That afternoon, though, Pat was feeling virile; he wanted to solve the problem with all his being, no matter what. They met up at six.