Private Life

by Josep Maria de Sagarra

  Maria Lluïsa was twenty years old, and her sentimental life had already begun to enter a state of decomposition. As Voltaire’s famous verses to the Marquesa du Châtelet put it, “Qui n’a pas l’esprit de son âge / de son âge a tout le malheur.” But even an aphorism that seems so astute can fail to hold true for some people. Maria Lluïsa, for example. She possessed the spirit of her times and of her age in a brutal way, and perhaps it was this excess of the spirit of the times that was her downfall.

  In every family there is an individual who maintains the qualities and defects intrinsic to the family, exaggerated and concentrated to the point of being grotesque and distasteful. This individual is usually a bachelor uncle who has had a bastard child with the cook. In addition to this farcical character, every family also seems to produce an individual in whom the most dashing, piquant and fragrant part of the family is distilled, and in whose skin the very defects become elements of grace, sparkle and elegance. This individual is usually a girl, and within the crusty, festering, and reactionary gratinée of the Lloberolas, the person chosen to play the role of fruit sherbet and marvelous perfume was Maria Lluïsa.

  If an abandoned, fussy, and unfriendly womb could not produce models of vitality as trembling and out of the blue as the impromptu clash of melodies produced by birds washing their faces, if ladies like Maria Carreres could not have daughters like Maria Lluïsa, the logic of this world would be so unbearable as to oblige us all to close up shop.

  Maria Lluïsa had been confined in a convent school in Sarrià, like most of the girls of her stock. At a time when children feel their puberty bursting like an unpleasant carnation, awakening scruples and desire, Maria Lluïsa had not been prey to any of those disorders that afflict sex in the life of boarders. She didn’t fall in love with a nun, or with an effigy in the chapel, nor did a kiss on the not very hygienic fuzz of another girl’s cheek infect her with nebulous and repressed intentions of the kind that are marked by a dopey tenderness in the voice and a bluish shadow under the eyes. Rest assured that when Maria Lluïsa put on her nightgown, that fragile fabric didn’t hide anything but a sterilized, independent adolescence.

  At the age of sixteen, Maria Lluïsa had mahogany red hair and eyes like two frozen grapes. She gave the piano a solemn kick in the keys because she had no talent for music, and she decided that a girl who had the misfortune of being born to a father like Frederic de Lloberola and a mother like Maria Carreres had no other recourse than to figure things out for herself and find a way to earn a living. This decision was the cause of great outrage, but Maria Lluïsa was the only Lloberola lacking in the two defects that were peculiar to all the rest: weakness and cowardice. Maria Lluïsa prevailed, and by eighteen she was working as a secretary in a bank on Carrer de Fontanella.

  That was when her sentimental life began to get complicated. Till that moment, Maria Lluïsa had lived far from the fire. This is not to say, however, that she was innocent or didn’t know the score. She understood perfectly well that her natural grace was sufficient justification for boxes of bonbons, bouquets of flowers, invitations and requests to ride up the Diagonal or around Montjuïc Park in a very sleek and shiny little car, and that these were simply veiled ways of seeking her body. But up till then no one had ever touched Maria Lluïsa, nor had she fallen in love with anyone. Her temperament was rather chilly; sex demanded nothing more of her than a shower, a racket, and a bit of makeup on her face. When it was time to dance, she listened to the music and nothing more. She responded reflexively and smiled instinctively without her heart’s secreting any of the idyllic substances that throw one’s rhythm off and keep one awake at night.

  At eighteen, Maria Lluïsa stopped practicing her religion. When it was time for Mass, she would slip away from her mother with the excuse of exercise and sport, and she would tell as many lies as were needed to put up a proper front and avoid scandalizing the family. It can be said with certainty that by her last year in high school Maria Lluïsa no longer believed anything the nuns and priests told her. What most infuriated her was to have to do spiritual exercises and play a role she didn’t believe in.

  A few months after Maria Lluïsa took the secretarial job at the bank, she spent her first summer vacation with a couple of cousins at the seashore.

  Under no circumstance did Frederic want to let his daughter go unescorted to the beach at Llafranc. He was opposed to it, as he had been opposed to her working in an office, not for any good reason, but simply out of prejudice and Lloberola vanity, and because of his uncomprehending and draining inclination to disagree. But by then Frederic no longer had any shame, and it had become more than clear that he found his family intolerable. To be contrary, Maria had taken Maria Lluïsa’s side, and it all ended up with a big scene between father, mother, and daughter, and with the girl on the afternoon express to Flaçà, the closest station, and from there to Llafranc in her cousins’ car.

  The cousins were from the Carreres side of the family, daughters of one of Maria’s sisters, who was married to a solid merchant from the French Midi who spent seasons in Paris and seasons in L’Empordà, where they were now.

  The girls’ names were Henriette and Suzanne. One of them was twenty-one years old and the other nineteen, but they were identical, and if you weren’t used to them, you couldn’t tell them apart. They had a very delicate complexion, with blood very close to the surface, and subject to fever blisters. They were somewhat gigantic in shape. They inherited this tendency from their father, Gaston, a Frenchman with a vaudeville cuckold’s black moustache and cheeks. From their mother they had inherited a chlorotic tenderness and a devotion to the Virgin of Montserrat. Henriette and Suzanne were fresh-faced, with big eyes and big mouths. They were well-liked, but they were not exciting. Long of arm and leg, on the fleshy side, lacking in femininity, it seemed as if all their inner piquancy must have evaporated through their pores and been lost between laughter and sea water without germinating in any virile gaze. Their father had bought them a mint green Talbot and they passed the wheel from one to the other, making sensational turns and coughing and squawking like moorhens when the intercity bus left their mascara full of dust.

  Henriette and Suzanne received Maria Lluïsa with an explosion of a bottle of “extra dry” from a good year. Maria Lluïsa cried with joy. The three girls spread out enough pajamas, maillots, rubber penguins and panthers, balls, hats, scarves, and terry cloth robes to drive all the beaches in the world wild. They had a canoe and two water sleds, and a friend of all three by the name of Dionísia Balcells, who summered with her mother in Llafranc. Dionísia was one of those delightful snub-nosed girls whose faces continue all their lives to be a little comical and girlish: a wide mouth, bright, partridge eyes, and peroxide blonde hair cut and combed like a boy’s. Her legs were slender and firm, she was narrow in the chest and hips, and her entire musculature was made for rapid movement and wild gesticulation, and for a laugh that reached all the way down to her toenails. She was one of those girls so intentionally à la page, so innocently in command of the flirtatious gesture and the eccentric moue that when they give in to love there is nothing left of them but a warm spoonful of honey that trickles out with a primary physiological tenderness.

  Dionísia may have been the youngest of the four, but she was also the most modern and free. She had a degree in Natural Sciences, she had spent long periods in Madrid and Algiers, and she had spent the past winter in Paris. Despite her youth, Dionísia had been one of the most outspoken and feminist inhabitants of the Residencia de Estudiantes in Madrid. She was a friend of the surrealist poets, the psychiatrists, and the Mexican painters who also lived there. Her insides were glazed with whiskey and her lungs with Lucky Strikes. Even though she chattered like a magpie and the saliva of self-importance glistened on her teeth, this young lass was extraordinarily attractive and charming, and her femininity was of the most authentic and disconcerting kind.

  Dionísia and Maria Lluïsa were made for confidences and commentaries, and t
hey got along very well. Henriette and Suzanne tended to live for sports. The four of them made up eight hips of a modern girl, not homogeneous, but so well-endowed in water and flesh that the world’s best milieus had nothing on them.

  Early in the morning, the four of them would escape in the canoe to deserted beaches in hidden inlets. The colorful knit fabrics clinging to their bodies and the entire traveling circus of rubber creatures left no few knives of tropical lust in the eyes of the fishermen, as the canoe cut through the waves in the bay spreading a trail of diamond excelsior.

  In the deserted inlets the four girls would bathe and sunbathe in the nude, throw stones at the sea gulls, and eat strips of cured ham, pinching them between shiny and dangerous red fingernails, dirty with grains of sand. They liked to feel the transparency of the submarine landscape on their bellies, with all the gelatinous and corrosive greens of the vegetation and the zoophytes that clung to the rocks. They did the crawl with their eyes open underwater and the white skin on the soles of their feet floated nervously and in rhythmic jolts like roses attached to the tail of a mechanical fish.

  On the jetties, the broom flowers were lit up by the last gaslights, where the bumblebees flocked to burn. A deeply fragrant gas, opaque, the color of Hollandaise sauce.

  The four young women, to keep in shape, would do fifty sit-ups every day, keeping their legs rigid and touching the tips of their toes with the palms of their hands. At some point in the arc of the exercise their breasts would hang from their torsos like two little pear-shaped lanterns. Later, when they lifted their heads and their mussed hair was back in place, a struggle between sweat, smiles and fatigue was outlined on their faces.

  At peak time, they would go back to the beach, their eyes glassy with the burning of the sun, their pupils bearing the dreams and the prestige of their adventures in the deserted inlets. All this went straight to the spinal cord of the sun-black boys lolling on the sand, who sensed a mysterious something in the laughter of the four young women that was both brutal and innocent and wicked and exciting.

  Salt water sports are among the most corrupting and most given to blood-gorged adolescent rebellion. The deceptive coolness of the water and the reptilian innocence of sunlight inject into the skin and cauterize in the bones all the infected wounds of ideas, awakening a budding melancholy, and intercepting the broad animal breathing with tears of decay. They fill evenings and nights with dreams of disaster and shipwreck, and visions of dark and quiet waters where ripped-out teeth, coral sex organs, and rootless roses drift.

  Four girls together on a boat, secretly bound by the webs of rubber toy animals, terry cloth robes, salt-laden maillots, and calisthenics, laughing with utter impunity, bend over to pull up an anchor, revealing, even for a couple of seconds, the possibility of a perfect nipple trying to penetrate the wool fabric. Yielding to nothing, defending one another, complicit in their virgin animal joy, they are four flashes of lightning that strike the soft backbone of banality and docile lust without mercy.

  A woman who has been spent and explored, whether she is the most celestial and world-weary adulteress who delivers herself up to a violet-strewn affair or the saddest, drabbest tramp who, amid the coals on a dock, reconnoiters through the misery of cotton and alcohol thieves, will always be a spent and explored woman. Always the monotonous repetition of everything, from which nothing, neither love nor madness, can free us.

  In spent and explored women, even the most skeptical man can find a glimmer of starlight, without so much as a single star from the immense night escaping her eyes. But this will always be done on the basis of comprehension, humiliation, renunciation, and compulsion. A spent and explored woman, for the strict connoisseur of authentic sensuality, can never touch the compact mystery of four young women on a boat, with their bathing suits, their rubber toys, the laughter that burns in their mouths, physically assaulting all the piety scattered throughout the world with the absolute immodesty of their hidden, virgin vulvas. Four young women on a boat, joined together by the sweat of their sit-ups, their nettles, their jellyfish, their unconscious coral reefs. Joined together by their own deeply irresponsible springtime. Maria Lluïsa, Dionísia, Suzanne, Henriette arrived on the beach at peak time, which was the time of the hairy sun-black legs of the boys in counterpoint to their own less sun-black and perfectly hairless legs, hanging from the white wood of the paddle boat, imitating the back-and-forth motion of the legs of aquatic birds.

  The paddle boat would suddenly start to shudder, as if undergoing some kind of internal catastrophe, and a pea green, butter yellow and tar-colored swimsuit would plummet into the water with a shriek. Then the hands of a boy accustomed to the oars, trembling a bit, arms contracting, would pull out a fruit of naked skin peeled in places by the sun’s grill. The young man’s fingers slipped on the underarms, periodically visited by the razor, and that spiky contact that lasted as long as he liked was replaced by the shock of two elastic lemons wrapped in colorful wool, crushed for a moment against the boy’s naked thorax. The breath and the laughter of the girl rubbed up against the pained and concealed sigh of the oarsman, and, one leg here, one leg there, the rhythm was reestablished. To kill the silence, the antipathy or the excited flesh, girls and boys together would sing one of the Cuban rumbas that were in vogue those days in the cabarets.

  The youngest brother of Isabel Sabadell, known as Pat, had come to spend a few days in Llafranc with some friends. His name was Patrici, but no one called him by such an archaeological and pretentious moniker, so unsuited to the aesthetic of heavy oil engines.

  Pat was twenty-five at the time. He was boyish and fresh-faced, with shiny, deep black hair and very white teeth. Pat spent his days winning first prizes in nautical challenges and punishing his lungs on his outboard motorboat that was the color of fish entrails. His ears were full of gas explosions and he cultivated his musculature as if he were a show dog.

  Pat shot straight as a bullet for Maria Lluïsa’s smile. The day after he first saw her, Pat told her his life story, his ambitions, and his ideas.

  On the third day, when the beaches were full of people, Pat and Maria Lluïsa went a little farther out; Pat’s slightly rough hand, accustomed to water sports, slipped inside her maillot and visited its secrets, which with the help of the cool water felt like fresh fruit and flesh without a soul. Maria Lluïsa didn’t protest, nor did she laugh. Altruistically, and for no particular reason, she allowed the boy’s nerves to take in through her wet skin the intact electricity of her body.

  It was the first time in Maria Lluïsa’s life that she had felt that sort of generosity. She was not at all sentimental; she didn’t feel any attachment to that boy’s well-distributed and well-iodized physique; it was simply a moment of female generosity. She wasn’t looking for moral compensation; she wasn’t looking for anything. Animals that have never been to college and gods not subject to any doctrine regarding sex must also enjoy this splendid license to be visited by a hand that sweeps diplomacy aside.

  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.