Josep Maria de Sagarra - Private Life

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.

“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.