Josep Maria de Sagarra - Private Life

Pat was a bit weak with emotion and gratitude. They were only a few strokes from the beach, and Pat floated on his back by her side for a while. Maria Lluïsa felt the joy of the philanthropist. Nothing is as satisfying to the ego as an act of pure charity. In the gaze of the man or woman who has just done an act of charity there is a tiny flash, as insignificant as you wish, of that brilliance that theologians claim appears in the eyes of the blessed in the presence of the Supreme Being.

Pat and Maria Lluïsa reached the beach a bit exhausted from their exercise. They fell onto the sand breathing heavily. Dionísia slipped lit Camels between his lips and between her lips.

Pat was stupidly mesmerized by Maria Lluïsa’s toenails. Usually, when a girl has been subject to the pain and deformation of shoes, the spectacle of her wet, naked, sand-encrusted feet after swimming is a disappointment. But under the implacable shower of the sun, his eyes half-closed, Pat felt a muted desire to kiss Maria Lluïsa’s little feet, to nibble softly at the whitish flesh of her heel, right there where the flesh gets hard and the skin has an insensitive thickness. In the desire of that kiss Pat would have liked to deposit a liquid tenderness, like a teardrop of gratitude, of adoration, of effusion …

In the evening, before dinner, Pat and Maria Lluïsa were having a Picon aperitif in a bar decorated with pine branches, as the sea was turning black. Maria Lluïsa considered Pat to be a conventional, self-centered and visceral creature, who thought only of the efficiency of his outboard motorboat and his father’s spinning mill. Pat told her that his father made him get up at nine a.m. when he had only gone to bed two hours before, stealing into the house with red eyes and a stomach full of whiskey. Pat had made love with the prettiest vamps who frequented the hour of the aperitif at the bar of the Hotel Colón. In his Chrysler, he had looked suicide in the face on the curves of the coastal highway of the Garraf, wearing on his tie all the rouge that could rub off a cheek. Pat wanted to bare his heart to Maria Lluïsa, and he told her these things with a touch of puerile vanity and a touch of Tolstoyan transcendence. Pat’s speech drew on the grammar of the sporty gigolo, using catch phrases, some of which were mindless translations from Spanish, some of which proceeded without translation directly from the music-hall. You could see the influence of the movies, of avant-garde decoration, and of some vague familiarity with the intelligent, pleasant and superficial writing of the day in both his mentality and his manner of speaking. Pat was comfortable with these things because they were fashionable among some of his more sensitive friends.

At one point, between smiles and drags on their cigarettes, Maria Lluïsa’s hand mussed Pat’s thick black hair. She shook his cranium and Pat’s cheek brushed against Maria Lluïsa’s neck. But it was nothing more than a moment she desired and engineered. Pat went on talking about movies and other affairs. He was only interested in talking about himself and his thoughts, with the unconscious selfishness of a child. Maria Lluïsa was there in front of him and he didn’t need to know anything about her. Pat didn’t believe in women’s sincerity. He had absorbed the somewhat brutal theory of athletic young men, who are used to feeling love in a purely physiological sense, through their constant dealings with vamps who, seeking a break from the abdomens and bronchitis of their official boyfriends, take up with the members of the Swimming Club. Pat was sweetly vulgar with the girls, and sometimes even inconsiderate. This was considered to be chic and tony among his friends, and this was the way many brilliant young men of the time interpreted romance.

But despite this muscular and mechanical way of behaving, Pat and other young men like him displayed the most baptismal innocence. Sometimes their callow ingenuousness turned them into characters right out of The Lady of the Camellias . Motor cars, whiskey, and the fatigued pubises of fashionable lovelies had not entirely broken the shell of their good-boy upbringings. Inside this shell made up of maternal cares, family comforts and even fatherly talkings-to, the ladyfingers boys like Pat dipped into their hot chocolate were crafted of the most conservative essences of the country. Maria Lluïsa saw Pat for the selfish, common and visceral child he was, but he was a child she found appealing, if only physically. Maria Lluïsa had not yet analyzed any aspect of what she felt for that young man. But the conversation, the aperitif and the tanned arms coming out of the white shirt matched the color of the boy’s soul. It was the first time in her life that she was freeing herself of something she couldn’t quite define. She found Pat to be good company. When the boy followed all four of them back to her cousins’ cream-colored chalet, a few steps from the bar, Maria Lluïsa restrained her heart as if it were a fluttering swallow. She laughed heartily at the table and ate with an optimistic appetite. She might even have eaten more than her cousins, who never said no, and weighed twice as much as she did.

After dinner, Maria Lluïsa and Dionísia chatted. Maria Lluïsa didn’t want to let on. As innocent as Pat, Dionísia was only interested in his ideas.

“He’s very cute, but I think he’s awfully rough around the edges. For a three-day fling, bueno ,” she punctuated in Spanish. “But three days and no more. On the fourth day, I think he’d start to be a pain. If we only got together on the beach, okay, because he’s cute undressed. He has loads of sex appeal. But, as soon as he starts walking, he goes downhill, don’t you think? And I wonder if you noticed another thing: when he crosses his legs, he could drive you crazy, he’s always touching and jiggling his foot. As far as I’m concerned he’s not the slightest bit interesting. He’s not my type, and this morning I sort of let him know …”

“Well, I couldn’t agree less! I think he’s kind of cute precisely because he’s so rough and such a child …”

“But they’re all the same! Still, he does have a sort of flair for talking nonsense …, and he’s likable enough …”

“What more do you want? You say he’s funny, he’s cute, he’s likeable …”

“Yes, he’s plenty mono,” she said, now using the Spanish word for “cute.” “His eyes are very expressive and he has a nice body; but I swear he’s a dope …”

“All right, you win. But it seems to me you don’t need a philosopher to go to the beach. You deal with intelligent men all day long … How are things going with the sex appeal of the wise men at the Athenaeum of Madrid?”

“There are all kinds. And I don’t really care about their physique, you know. I like to talk with men who have interesting things to say, and this guy would get tiresome really quickly. The only thing he can talk about is cars. That’s fine for your cousins, who are wild about wheels, but I don’t know what you see in him …”

“I think you’re being very hard on my catch! And here I was so delighted …”

“Liar. You like Pat because, of all the swells here, he’s the only one worth the time of day. And you know what? He’s a cheeky devil. Do you know what he asked Suzanne and me? If he could come with us in the boat to do calisthenics! He says that at the inlet we go to he’ll have more freedom to show us how to perfect our crawl … I told him that we go to the inlet to practice nudism.”

“You’re kidding! Don’t you think that’s a bit extreme?”

“Of course. And he got even more persistent about coming with us. I told him we’d think about it, that all four of us had to agree to it …”

“Dionísia!”