Josep Maria de Sagarra - Private Life

Maria Lluïsa was astonished that she could think all those thoughts, with no shame, with all that animal desire, with such a lack of concern for her friend that she would have wished her dead. And all for what? For a boy to whom, as Dionísia said, they were paying more attention than he deserved.

Henriette heard Maria Lluïsa’s noticeable sighs. Perhaps she might have heard a sob, and she sprang from her bed to see what was wrong. Maria Lluïsa grabbed her by the hand; Henriette felt a feverish contact, but her cousin didn’t say a word, she just clung to her hand, she drew her closer, she put her arm around her waist and made her lie down with her. Maria Lluïsa needed company, she needed a warm skin next to her own, a generous flesh. Henriette didn’t know what was going on, and she kissed Maria Lluïsa. Under her kisses, Maria Lluïsa broke into abundant silent tears, hiding her head against Henriette’s hard, vibrant breasts. The wet warmth of Maria Lluïsa’s tears pervaded her cousin with a strange voluptuosity. When she had found some release through her tears, Maria Lluïsa felt as if a cord tying her lungs had been broken. Henriette got out of Maria Lluïsa’s bed and slipped back into her own sheets a bit amazed and a bit ashamed of what had happened.

FOUR MONTHS AFTER those scenes on the beach, Maria Lluïsa rested her head enveloped in her mane of tangled hair on Pat’s gray jacket. In her left hand she was holding a black velvet cap; with her right hand she was taking a cigarette stained with red from her lips. Maria Lluïsa half-closed her eyes lashed by a cold wind and ran the wet end of the cigarette over the tip of her nose. Maria Lluïsa’s smile was made of the same clean, cold gold as that December morning. His fingers on the steering wheel, Pat had one eye on the highway and one on Maria Lluïsa’s cheek. Maria Lluïsa’s head bobbled delightfully on Pat’s collarbone, following the rhythm of the suspension. Pat could sense her ideas, resting on the wool of his jacket, but he didn’t understand them. A special light flowed through Maria Lluïsa’s eyelashes, as if her thoughts were pearly fish wriggling among the mysterious flora of an aquarium, and a bit of the glint of their scales escaped through her pupils.

On one side of the highway, a red gas pump stood out against the dying silver of a hedge. Pat stopped to get ten litres. Maria Lluïsa used the time spent in this maneuver to fix her hair, her cheeks and her lips. When the motor started up again, a fragment of a melody of a java song no longer in fashion knocked Maria Lluïsa in the teeth. Most likely the blood red gash on the tip of her cigarette suggested the blood red color of the song. For Maria Lluïsa, java was an atmosphere: exposed nerve endings with a tremulous erotic voracity, cassis -tinted foulards, and a blade retreating like a squid through the smoke, slippery with the green moss of peppermint liqueur. For Maria Lluïsa, java music was a sort of protest against the bare landscape lacking in ambition on either side of the road, against Pat’s gray jacket, against the perfect symmetry of the steering wheel, and against the little mirror in which she could see Pat’s mouth, just as bare and lacking in ambition as the landscape. Maria Lluïsa turned off the song and rubbed her forehead on her friend’s lapel, just as one might wipe a tool or a drill bit off on a sheepskin rag before making an incision.

“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.