Private Life (44 page)

“Where do you want to go?” Pat said.

“Wherever you want,” she answered.

As a precaution, Pat had left the Chrysler in the garage. A taxi would be less noticeable in the event she agreed to go to a
meublé
.

Until Pat closed the door of the room with a key she said nothing. In the taxi she was rather nervous, her heart was beating violently, and her eyes were wet and shiny. Pat took her arm with a trembling, sweaty hand, and from time to time he kissed her hair and her ears. When they were alone in the room, Maria Lluïsa parted her lips to tell him:

“If you want me to get undressed, you’ll have to turn out the light.”

The room was completely dark, and between the panting and excitement that were only natural, the job of unbuttoning went a little slowly. A soft hiss of silks and wool, a grotesque clang of keys and coins, of shoes, which in situations like this are noisy as clogs, and then the peculiar squeak of the mattress springs and the protests of the metal fittings of the bed at that moment when two disconcerted bodies fall onto it. The integral dialogue of their two naked bodies was imbued with the madness of discovery. Words did not achieve expression; contact electrified them from their lips to their toes. Their bodies tangled and intertwined, and their hands would have liked to reach beyond their ribs. When Pat’s eyes reached the right glassiness and phosphorescence, he destroyed what Maria Lluïsa had tired of. With a girl as athletic and flexible as Maria Lluïsa, the job was already half done. Pat found himself in a natural situation; he practically didn’t notice the difference. She moaned, but only softly. The feeling was not as intense as she had imagined. Later, with Pat’s arm around Maria Lluïsa’s waist, when he felt the wetness of her cheeks cooling his breast, he experienced a moment that was more tender, sweet, and full of reverence than any other in his life. In a daze he kissed her forehead over and over. His lips didn’t form the shape of a kiss, but Maria Lluïsa felt them in every drop of her blood.

In truth, what had just happened to them replaced the air in the room with a gas of sadness and incomprehension. Those two naked children wanted to laugh, but they had no strength, and the mouth of
the one sought refuge in the mouth of the other. Then Maria Lluïsa shut herself into the bathroom, and Pat lit a cigarette. At that point Pat realized that he was satisfied; the oil of vanity breathed through the pores of his skin.

From that day on their intimate encounters at the
meublé
multiplied. Maria Lluïsa came to have a perfect naturalness, approaching indifference. She came to realize that she was not the temperamental type. Pat was full of enthusiasm but also so full of fear that he could have jumped out of his skin. He couldn’t help but tell two or three of his friends about the deal that had fallen into his hands. At first, Pat experienced sensational moments, but soon he was invaded by qualms and misgivings. Above all, by the fear that the whole thing could get complicated, that a moment of carelessness on his part or a lack of hygienic experience on hers might end up creating a conflict. Maria Lluïsa had never spoken of even the remotest commitment or obligation; she hardly even mentioned love. Maria Lluïsa was satisfied; it was she who had wanted this. From their first afternoon in the
meublé
, when she went home for dinner she looked at her mother with more self-assured eyes, and her smile was colder and more self-satisfied. Her friend from the bank cauterized any of the insignificant remnants of a scruple she might harbor in her heart. She managed to flee from sentimentalism as if from a contagious disease and, despite all this, Maria Lluïsa felt her dependency upon Pat, she felt that she loved him, but she didn’t want to confess it under any circumstances. She wanted to believe that Pat was an instrument for her own private use, to resolve a need in her intimate life, and nothing more.

As things became routine, Pat began detaching himself from all the poetry of their contacts and came to see Maria Lluïsa’s body as just one of many. They became so familiar with each other that love slipped away into the physiological routine. Pat wasn’t a boy with the imagination to refresh situations, to enhance new onslaughts with a touch of lyricism. No matter what literature says, the practice of love is monotonous. If there isn’t a faith and a tenderness underlying it, sex becomes mechanical and boredom waters down the veins. To compensate for this, Pat tried to rough up the scenes a bit. Maria Lluïsa followed him effortlessly. Pat was too accustomed to treating only one kind of woman to stray from the acquired procedure, and he applied to Maria Lluïsa’s flesh the practices of the others. His language was pure at first; salty or crass words alluding to the erotic function were far from his thoughts. Later, those words and those thoughts appeared one by one, at first timidly, and later with insolence. Finally they were just normal and had lost all their spice. Maria Lluïsa was becoming intoxicated with a gas characteristic of brothels. Pat obliviously allowed her to become intoxicated. As Maria Lluïsa relinquished her last traces of modesty, Pat felt more composed. Each of them was beyond the danger of falling in love. A few months had gone by and everything was smooth as silk. They met a couple of times each week. Maria Lluïsa averted all the family dangers, and Pat no longer bothered to pretend when people alluded to his
collage
, smiling with the affable vanity of a self-indulgent child.

At the bank where Maria Lluïsa worked it seems that someone hinted at things about her and someone high up in the establishment
took a greater interest in her. Maria Lluïsa’s friend told her not to be a fool, but she hadn’t yet come to this conclusion. Much to the contrary. Ever since Maria Lluïsa and Pat were lovers, she had become much more reserved with other men. She wasn’t doing it to be faithful to him. It was more out of self-preservation, to defend the willful demise of her moral sense behind a mask of correctness.

Ten months had gone by since the scenes at the beach in Llafranc, and the change in Maria Lluïsa’s soul was inconceivable. The truth be told, this was only a rapid and astonishing growth of the seeds Maria Lluïsa unwittingly carried inside. The strangest thing was that, through the whole affair, Maria Lluïsa was destroying any trace of sentimentalism day by day. She even realized that she didn’t feel the slightest bit jealous if she saw that Pat was feeding her a couple of lies to cover up his involvement with other women. Maria Lluïsa had turned her relationship with him into a bit of sport. It was true that she had tired of her virginity, and her sustained commerce with a fresh, muscular, and well-groomed young man gave Maria Lluïsa more aplomb and allowed her to walk in the world with more satisfaction, appetite, and joy. Pat found in her all the advantages of a delicious vamp, without any of the drawbacks or annoyances because, in addition, Maria Lluïsa was docile and undemanding. If on occasion it wasn’t good for Pat to go out with her, Maria Lluïsa didn’t protest in the least and always understood.

The Lloberola tarnish had produced in Maria Lluïsa a variation on her uncle Guillem. Not for nothing did Leocàdia feel the same
tenderness and the same fear when she looked at her younger son and her older granddaughter.

When things had been going on like that for a year, when Pat had lost any trace of scruples or fears, the conflict arose. More than two months had gone by since Maria Lluïsa had had what ladies call their period. The young woman was a bit unnerved. The symptoms were quite clear: pain in the kidneys, upset stomach, some swelling in the ankles, and an aversion to cigarettes and to strong smells. Maria Lluïsa kept silent, hoping for a solution, but ended up telling her friend at the bank. The girl gave her a remedy that was nothing but a strong purgative. Maria Lluïsa had a very unpleasant reaction but it didn’t solve anything. Then Maria Lluïsa told Pat. It fell on him like a bombshell. The first few months it had been all he thought about, but after a year it didn’t seem possible any more. He had become accustomed to the thought that this danger didn’t exist. When she saw Pat’s anxiety and desperation, Maria Lluïsa started laughing in his face like a madwoman.

“I always thought you were a chicken.”

“Oh, sure, a chicken. What do you expect me to do?”

“Nothing, Pat. I don’t want you to do anything.”

Pat had in fact started to be fed up with their relations; they no longer held any interest for him. All that was left was servile routine and Pat was distracted by other things. Marrying Maria Lluïsa was the farthest thing from his mind. For the time being Pat didn’t want to marry anyone, much less Maria Lluïsa. His idea of matrimony was ultraconservative. One thing was a lover, but a potential
legitimate wife was something entirely different. Maria Lluïsa was, to him, an absurd, insecure, morally-depraved girl. He had contributed to her supposed depravation, but that was of no importance. Pat didn’t even realize it. If his back were up against the wall, he wouldn’t have hesitated to affirm that he was blameless in the case of Maria Lluïsa, and that it was she who had ravished him. Pat didn’t have the guts to tell his father about the problem; he would have been furious. Maria Lluïsa came from a noble family, but they were absolutely ruined. In his house they had no social standing. She was earning her living in a bank as an ordinary typist. Pat thought of his sister Isabel, of the aristocratic pretensions of the Sabadells, of his father’s millions, his factory, his outboard motorboat, his friends in the Club Nàutic and the Club Eqüestre. It was monstrous, it was impossible. On the other hand, the girl had known no other man than he and Pat unquestionably had to confess he was the father of the child she was carrying in her womb. Not that the Sabadell mentality gave no credence to considerations of conscience. Pat was perfectly aware of the question of conscience and of his duty as a gentleman and a man, but, terrified and in a panic, he said nothing. Wide-eyed before Maria Lluïsa’s bitter smile, he was incapable of making a decision. He was afraid to propose an abortion to her. Such a thing would have to be her idea, and an operation could be dangerous. Pat didn’t know anything about such things. His ideas about obstetrics were very vague, but he had heard that such procedures, in addition to being a crime, were dangerous and sometimes fatal. The idea of an infanticide was repugnant to his sentimental, bourgeois mentality, but even more
repugnant was the idea of confessing to the whole affair and marrying Maria Lluïsa. Pat was a weak, spoiled child, a creature who could drown in a glass of water.

Maria Lluïsa watched him without saying a word. She could deduce the path of Pat’s thoughts as if a malignant spirit were inscribing them on his forehead as they emerged. Maria Lluïsa understood everything. She saw his rejection, and his cowardice. His scandalously conservative twenty-six years of age, and his industrialist’s soul with no capacity for uncertainty. Pat didn’t dare break the silence, and almost by force he tried to draw Maria Lluïsa to his breast and embrace her dramatically. With great delicacy, Maria Lluïsa resisted.

“What solution do you suggest for me, Pat? What do you think I should do? What do you think you should do?”

Pat didn’t answer. He shrugged his shoulders and finally expelled an “I don’t know” so profoundly strained it could have been uttered by a fifty year-old man, and not by a boy with suntanned skin who had enameled his teeth with sea air and paroxysms of sport. Maria Lluïsa put her hand on his shoulder and, decisively and maternally, said:

“Don’t worry your head about it, Pat. Don’t give it another thought.”

Pat sniveled:

“What will you think of me, Maria Lluïsa?”

“What else can I think? That you’re a baby … just a wretched baby …”

When Maria Lluïsa was alone again, the scene with Pat began to sink in. She had certainly expected something along those lines from
him, but not that bad. Then she began to realize that despite her desire to stifle sentimentalism, she did love Pat, she had believed in him a little. This had been an acute disappointment. Maria Lluïsa had never supposed that marriage would be the solution to her problem, it wasn’t that. But she did expect a bit more generosity on his part, some compassion, at least some goodwill. Maria Lluïsa was perfectly aware, and she blamed herself, that she was the one who had wanted this, and she had no intention of demanding anything at all from her lover. But women, even the most realistic of them, always retain a bit of romantic illusion, they always believe in the possibility of a gentleman who will know how to make a gentleman’s gesture. And that boy from the outboard motorboat perhaps was just not enough of a gentleman. However, since Maria Lluïsa was a decisive young woman, she let Pat be. She would never demean herself by asking for anything. For a moment – Maria Lluïsa was a girl of nineteen – she entertained the idea of a sincere maternity with all the consequences. But that just couldn’t be. Maria Lluïsa envisioned her family panorama. Such a scandal could by no means take place in a climate so bitter, shattered, and lacking in comfort as their apartment on Carrer Bailèn. The humiliation would be too great. The disdain Maria Lluïsa felt for her mother and for all her kin, the independence she had imposed on herself as her primary obligation, made it impossible for her to lose face before them. In her house, the word “dishonor” was the only applicable word in this case. And she found this word to be so stupid, so inhuman, that she would rather die than accept it. The romantic thought of running away, breaking with all their prejudices,
keeping her job and looking for someone to help her out also passed through Maria Lluïsa’s head, but she was too pretty and she believed too truly in a sporting and decorative idea of life to be prepared to make such sacrifices. Besides, as yet she had no sense of motherhood; it was pure literature to her. What she felt was apprehension, horror at her situation, and the desire to free herself at any cost. This wasn’t motherhood. No inner light had shone, there had been no metamorphosis of affection. What she was going through was simply shame and misfortune. Of all the possible solutions, Maria Lluïsa chose the one that was most shabby, expeditious, and in keeping with her moral temperature. Her friend from the bank made the arrangements. She needed around a thousand pessetes. Maria Lluïsa didn’t have so much money and even though she hated to ask Pat for it, she didn’t have any choice. Pat dispensed the money with a philanthropic pomposity, and he felt that those thousand pessetes absolved him of all obligation. Maria Lluïsa accepted the money with the proviso that she would return it and made him swear he would accept it when the time came.