Josep Maria de Sagarra - Private Life

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.

For a time, Maria Lluïsa felt rather sad and benumbed. Her affairs, which she carried on with great caution, didn’t amuse her. She found the fellows more and more selfish, and only interested in one thing, which she was indifferent to. Without a modicum of passion, she found the episodes of the garconnière and the meublé stupid and monotonous. At twenty years of age, Maria Lluïsa was beginning to be tired of it all.

On the day that Maria Lluïsa, resting her chin on the lapel of Pat’s jacket, said that she was tired of being a virgin as if it were the most natural thing in the world, it is very possible that she viewed with true horror the panorama of ladyfingers and anisette that awaited an unassuming bourgeois marriage, coping with marital flaws and economic constraints. Two years later, a bourgeois marriage along those lines didn’t burst onto her imagination with the sudden flash of a meteor, but perhaps it seemed to be the only practical way out of the dismal impasse she’d reached. Maria Lluïsa had not had the courage to break things off completely with the age-old unctuosity of her family. She had only gone halfway in her freedom and her perversion. If she had resigned herself to living brutally and poetically, for as long as necessary, accepting all the consequences, Maria Lluïsa’s behavior might have seemed suicidal to many eyes, but respectable, in the end.