Private Life (53 page)

Maria Lluïsa spoke to Ferran, expressing bewilderment at his tears, asking him what was the matter. She attributed his state to an overabundance of nerves and advised him to go to bed. She said they could continue talking later about all those things that she found so very interesting. Maria Lluïsa even made an effort to give him a kiss – and at that moment, her brother’s skin produced horror in her – and to treat him like a child, the child he had always been, who had begun to entertain the obsessions of a man.

Ferran calmed down and left his sister alone. By lying and pretending, Maria Lluïsa had released him from a moment of anguish, which he could not have found a way out of. The moment was behind them. Never again would Maria Lluïsa and Ferran make reference to that event, which to an outside observer might have appeared to be entirely insignificant, but which had just opened an abyss between brother and sister. Later, they would be able to pretend, and even to forget, and support each other mutually in a polite and distant way, but it would be very difficult for intimacy and understanding to evolve between the two of them, so long as they were under the influence of the memory of that event.

Ferran was terribly disappointed. With regard to every aspect of his house and the human relationships in it, the only welcoming sanctuary Ferran had found was in his sister. He sensed in her the most vivid and noble qualities of his family, and the same desire to escape it and to live her own life that he himself felt. That sister, who had always seen him as a child, would have been able to understand him as a man. Little by little, he could have aspired to be Maria Lluïsa’s confidant. He had hopes of being able to help her, and to provide for her, if necessary, through his work. With Maria Lluïsa by his side, her shadow of protective femininity could have projected itself with ineffable sweetness over all his thoughts. Having coupled with a prostitute and repeated the adventure with other women, it could be said that Ferran had become acquainted with the most dramatic and intense aspect of his flesh in the contest with the flesh of women. The taste of Helen had entered his marrow and his belly, but it had left a sordid
stain in the bluish liquid of his dreams. Ferran didn’t know where to find a woman with that blend of angel and beast, who would make that visceral sensation even more intense with the compensation of the infinite melody of great emotion.

Ferran saw his sister as a guarantee. He wanted her by his side, as his confidante. He needed her gentleness, her confidence. Maria Lluïsa’s presence demonstrated to him that he would be able to find in this world a woman like her, with her eyes and her grace, but with a burning sexuality and veins intoxicated with passion for him. Never, though, could Ferran have been able to imagine any feeling of desire or the most remote intention of animal rebellion mixed up with the almost mystical idea he had of his sister. Ferran realized that it was a misunderstanding on Maria Lluïsa’s part, an excess of suspicion, which had destroyed the possibility of such an equilibrium of affection.

Ferran didn’t understand that when he had opened his heart to his sister, speaking to her of his desires, his doubts, and his melancholy, perhaps he had done so with an unwitting vehemence. Perhaps he had approached her in a way that Maria Lluïsa had not been able to anticipate, and perhaps predictably it had taken her by surprise. Ferran was still a boy, and, heeding the counsel of his own inexperience, he still approached things head-on. He considered this to be the most normal and natural thing in the world. This is why it was impossible for him to assume even a modicum of guilt or responsibility in what had just happened between his sister and him.

Ferran was distressed for hours; he could see no way out. Maria Lluïsa would never be able to erase her impression, no one would ever dissuade her from her certainty. She would see any explanation as an excuse, and nothing more than an excuse. A fictional cordiality, thanks to which brother and sister could live as strangers, side by side. This was the most Ferran could aspire to. The dream he had imagined was now impossible.

Ferran had a lily-white notion of Maria Lluïsa. If he had suspected who his sister was at heart, if he had known only a particle of the true state of moral decomposition Maria Lluïsa was in, perhaps he would have considered all the pain that absurd incident had caused him to be for naught. Ferran’s pain would probably have been different, not so gentle, not so much in love with love, but indeed more concrete, more positive, much more human. He would have had the same taste in his teeth that any skeptical explorer of the acid caverns of life tastes when he bites down on bitter rue.

AS THE DAYS WENT BY, Maria Lluïsa started thinking that she might have been mistaken. Maybe Ferran’s behavior didn’t mean “that.” Maria Lluïsa treated her little brother with pleasant cordiality, but Ferran maintained a distant and exceedingly polite attitude. Ferran was finding other things down the road. One of those things was the prettiest shoe store clerk to be found those days on the streets
of Barcelona. With this girl, Ferran had a hint of the kind of love that moves the sun and the stars. The clerk, who seemed much more natural and kind to him than Maria Lluïsa, smacked of popular taste, unpleasant and slightly tacky, occasionally ragtag and greedy, but she was sincere, uncomplicated, and alive. This was love, with the eternally corny delights of paper lanterns, neighborhood bands, and slices of watermelon. In the armpit of the shoe clerk Ferran the communist found the integral perfume of anonymous flesh with no pretensions to nobility, idleness, or the gold frames bearing the dust of misery that pained his sight in the apartment on Carrer de Bailèn.

Maria Lluïsa received a letter from her father. With that letter, Frederic was testing the waters. He didn’t dare write to his wife. He was hoping Maria Lluïsa would be the best go-between for a reconciliation. Frederic was beginning to feel very sick. The wine merchant’s wife and the farmer’s daughter had impoverished him body and soul. The doctor in Moià told him his illness was no joke. Proud and inconsistent, Frederic Lloberola had decided to sell at any price what little was left of his estate and prostrate himself at the feet of Maria Carreres.

Frederic’s return to the house on Carrer de Bailèn was silly and theatrical. Husband and wife shed tears, and mother-in-law Carreres had to drink great quantities of linden tea for her nerves. In Ferran’s eyes, his father was unspeakably odious and grotesque.

Old Leocàdia had been flickering like a votive candle in the Cluny convent. They kept Frederic’s illness and any other unpleasant news from her so she wouldn’t worry. Leocàdia lived in that sweet,
transparent egocentrism of the old, when they become like children and their only concern is for their devotions and other petty details.

From the opulence of Conxa Pujol’s bed, Guillem responded to the servile and unlettered missives of his brother Frederic with the occasional banknote.

The Lloberola anachronism had become a frayed tightrope on which to walk heel to toe, amid admissions of defeat, without principles or dignity of any kind.

Frederic rejoined the Club Eqüestre. When he fell behind on his accounts, his brother, who was on the board, paid them without a word.

Frederic did everything he could to ignore his children’s lives and his wife’s bitterness. He was terrified of dying, and the doctors patched up his illness with injections and warnings.

Maria Lluïsa abused Bobby’s affection, she cheated on him shamelessly, and her name was on the verge of losing what little prestige it had left. Many were aware of the concrete facts of her irregular conduct. Maria Lluïsa even came to question her own comportment. She began to fear that all this living for today and broadmindedness would lead to disaster in the long run. Considering the scope of her ambitions, she couldn’t even have gotten a start on what she earned at the bank.

Maria Lluïsa had fantasized about a carefree life of limitless freedom. She had thought that the people she kept company with would accept such a moral position. This was an overly optimistic view of society. The literature and the conversations Maria Lluïsa sought out
could digest anything. They gave the impression that the people of our country had taken a considerable turn, but even the young men who cited her as the very model of a modern girl and danced with her to the point of collapse as they whispered lewd phrases in her ear, criticized her from head to toe when they were on their own. None of them would have wanted a girl who behaved like Maria Lluïsa for a fiancée or a sister.

Bobby spoke seriously with her about getting married, and in principle Maria Lluïsa accepted. Bobby didn’t see a thing. He was convinced of the girl’s affection and sincerity. When Maria Lluïsa understood the softening of principles she had brought about in that distant and genteel man, instead of slowing down a bit she became childishly conceited. She saw Bobby as a sort of Lewis Stone. Maria Lluïsa admired that fine American actor who so admirably played the role of the understanding modern spouse. She imagined that Bobby would also be happy to live by her side in a modish film in which Maria Lluïsa would play the role of Greta Garbo.

Bobby had one of the most solid fortunes of Barcelona, and Maria Lluïsa saw herself sailing on a yacht overflowing with tangos, cocktail shakers, and spiritual gigolos, as she distributed orchids, smiles and fatalities on the arm of a husband who was as imperturbable as the Eternal Father.

Enthralled, Bobby said yes to her every wish, until one day he started to see certain things. In his dialogues with his conscience, Bobby tried to justify Maria Lluïsa and stifle his doubts. But one evening, a little scandal took place at the sidewalk cafè of the Hotel
Colon, and among the many people who heard about it, more than one went off to tell Bobby what had happened in full detail. Maria Lluïsa and two other girls were sitting at a table at the height of the hour of the aperitif. When they were at their most merry, a very well-known lady of the evening who plied her trade at the bar of the hotel appeared at their table and addressed a string of withering insults to Maria Lluïsa. In addition to the insults she tried to get her nails on Maria Lluïsa’s face, and she swore she would kill her if Maria Lluïsa did not leave a certain person alone. According to the experts, it was said that the person in question was an officer in the Air Force, one of the most well-groomed and most alcoholic. Maria Lluïsa was quite vexed, but she more than held her own in the noisy exchange.

That incident was the straw that broke Bobby’s enamored heart, overflowing with good intentions. He didn’t stage any scenes of jealousy, he didn’t even complain, but everything Maria Lluïsa needed to note to understand that Bobby had tired of her was perfectly clear.

Rosa Trènor, whom Maria Lluïsa saw on occasion, didn’t despair of finding her a substitute along the same lines as Bobby. But Maria Lluïsa shuddered at the thought of continuing down that road. A second act, following Bobby, would place her on a lower rung, and soon Maria Lluïsa would no longer be able to sustain her equivocal situation. Things would just be too evident, and retreat would be impossible.

Maria Lluïsa preferred to step back a bit, and manage her adventures with more discretion. She performed a sort of examination of
conscience, which left her feeling bitter, practically convinced she was a failure.

Maria Lluïsa saw that her job at the bank was an unbearable burden that became more and more tedious with each passing day. She had imagined she was capable of feeling the joy of labor and emancipation from the family. She had dreamed of living life
à l’américaine
within the climate of Barcelona. Maria Lluïsa only knew the movie version of America. She saw it all through “weekends” with strawberry ice cream, exciting bathing suits, and millionaires’ sons, whose naiveté and tenderness were foolproof, who fell in love and signed checks and marriage licenses and divorce papers without batting an eye. Her adventure with Pat had not opened her eyes, much to the contrary. Not only had Maria Lluïsa accepted Bobby’s attentions – and Bobby, in the long run, was a man of parts – but in a most unthinking way, she had gotten involved with other, absolutely deplorable men, who spared no details in explaining intimate particulars about Maria Lluïsa. Since there are always people in this world ready and willing to stick their feet in their mouths, on one occasion Frederic was essentially a hair’s breadth away from hearing right to his face an appalling anecdote about his daughter that couldn’t have left him unscathed.

Maria Lluïsa finally came to realize that, in the end, nothing good had come of all her emancipation and her modern ways. She didn’t have a superior mentality or better taste, or more knowledge than most girls of her class. She was just as common and selfish as Pat. The only science in which she could show a bit of aptitude was one that did her no favors. It was extremely painful to admit that in Maria
Lluïsa’s case, her two years of freedom and eccentricity had served only for her to lose her reputation, and a good portion of her personal delicacy and sparkle.

Even so, Maria Lluïsa couldn’t have been less inclined to make peace with her mother’s standards, or to resign herself to a path completely opposed to the one she had followed to that point. Maria Lluïsa’s case was not unique among her acquaintances. Even if her behavior had been scandalous, most of her female friends continued to spend time with her as if nothing had happened, and perhaps Maria Lluïsa even had in her favor, in contrast to other young women like her, that she had allowed herself certain liberties without hypocrisy, and without going out of her way to keep it all secret. In a word, Maria Lluïsa was frank, and maybe it was asking too much of her frankness to want her to behave with absolute sincerity with Bobby. If Bobby hadn’t had the misfortune of falling in love with Maria Lluïsa the way he had, he would have been able to anticipate that meeting a girl like her in the circumstances in which he had met her did not guarantee him a virgin out of Roman martyrology. But in this world, the most experienced and skeptical of men can also be the most gullible.