At the bank where Maria Lluïsa worked it seems that someone hinted at things about her and someone high up in the establishment took a greater interest in her. Maria Lluïsa’s friend told her not to be a fool, but she hadn’t yet come to this conclusion. Much to the contrary. Ever since Maria Lluïsa and Pat were lovers, she had become much more reserved with other men. She wasn’t doing it to be faithful to him. It was more out of self-preservation, to defend the willful demise of her moral sense behind a mask of correctness.
Ten months had gone by since the scenes at the beach in Llafranc, and the change in Maria Lluïsa’s soul was inconceivable. The truth be told, this was only a rapid and astonishing growth of the seeds Maria Lluïsa unwittingly carried inside. The strangest thing was that, through the whole affair, Maria Lluïsa was destroying any trace of sentimentalism day by day. She even realized that she didn’t feel the slightest bit jealous if she saw that Pat was feeding her a couple of lies to cover up his involvement with other women. Maria Lluïsa had turned her relationship with him into a bit of sport. It was true that she had tired of her virginity, and her sustained commerce with a fresh, muscular, and well-groomed young man gave Maria Lluïsa more aplomb and allowed her to walk in the world with more satisfaction, appetite, and joy. Pat found in her all the advantages of a delicious vamp, without any of the drawbacks or annoyances because, in addition, Maria Lluïsa was docile and undemanding. If on occasion it wasn’t good for Pat to go out with her, Maria Lluïsa didn’t protest in the least and always understood.
The Lloberola tarnish had produced in Maria Lluïsa a variation on her uncle Guillem. Not for nothing did Leocàdia feel the same tenderness and the same fear when she looked at her younger son and her older granddaughter.
When things had been going on like that for a year, when Pat had lost any trace of scruples or fears, the conflict arose. More than two months had gone by since Maria Lluïsa had had what ladies call their period. The young woman was a bit unnerved. The symptoms were quite clear: pain in the kidneys, upset stomach, some swelling in the ankles, and an aversion to cigarettes and to strong smells. Maria Lluïsa kept silent, hoping for a solution, but ended up telling her friend at the bank. The girl gave her a remedy that was nothing but a strong purgative. Maria Lluïsa had a very unpleasant reaction but it didn’t solve anything. Then Maria Lluïsa told Pat. It fell on him like a bombshell. The first few months it had been all he thought about, but after a year it didn’t seem possible any more. He had become accustomed to the thought that this danger didn’t exist. When she saw Pat’s anxiety and desperation, Maria Lluïsa started laughing in his face like a madwoman.
“I always thought you were a chicken.”
“Oh, sure, a chicken. What do you expect me to do?”
“Nothing, Pat. I don’t want you to do anything.”
Pat had in fact started to be fed up with their relations; they no longer held any interest for him. All that was left was servile routine and Pat was distracted by other things. Marrying Maria Lluïsa was the farthest thing from his mind. For the time being Pat didn’t want to marry anyone, much less Maria Lluïsa. His idea of matrimony was ultraconservative. One thing was a lover, but a potential legitimate wife was something entirely different. Maria Lluïsa was, to him, an absurd, insecure, morally-depraved girl. He had contributed to her supposed depravation, but that was of no importance. Pat didn’t even realize it. If his back were up against the wall, he wouldn’t have hesitated to affirm that he was blameless in the case of Maria Lluïsa, and that it was she who had ravished him. Pat didn’t have the guts to tell his father about the problem; he would have been furious. Maria Lluïsa came from a noble family, but they were absolutely ruined. In his house they had no social standing. She was earning her living in a bank as an ordinary typist. Pat thought of his sister Isabel, of the aristocratic pretensions of the Sabadells, of his father’s millions, his factory, his outboard motorboat, his friends in the Club Nàutic and the Club Eqüestre. It was monstrous, it was impossible. On the other hand, the girl had known no other man than he and Pat unquestionably had to confess he was the father of the child she was carrying in her womb. Not that the Sabadell mentality gave no credence to considerations of conscience. Pat was perfectly aware of the question of conscience and of his duty as a gentleman and a man, but, terrified and in a panic, he said nothing. Wide-eyed before Maria Lluïsa’s bitter smile, he was incapable of making a decision. He was afraid to propose an abortion to her. Such a thing would have to be her idea, and an operation could be dangerous. Pat didn’t know anything about such things. His ideas about obstetrics were very vague, but he had heard that such procedures, in addition to being a crime, were dangerous and sometimes fatal. The idea of an infanticide was repugnant to his sentimental, bourgeois mentality, but even more repugnant was the idea of confessing to the whole affair and marrying Maria Lluïsa. Pat was a weak, spoiled child, a creature who could drown in a glass of water.
Maria Lluïsa watched him without saying a word. She could deduce the path of Pat’s thoughts as if a malignant spirit were inscribing them on his forehead as they emerged. Maria Lluïsa understood everything. She saw his rejection, and his cowardice. His scandalously conservative twenty-six years of age, and his industrialist’s soul with no capacity for uncertainty. Pat didn’t dare break the silence, and almost by force he tried to draw Maria Lluïsa to his breast and embrace her dramatically. With great delicacy, Maria Lluïsa resisted.
“What solution do you suggest for me, Pat? What do you think I should do? What do you think you should do?”
Pat didn’t answer. He shrugged his shoulders and finally expelled an “I don’t know” so profoundly strained it could have been uttered by a fifty year-old man, and not by a boy with suntanned skin who had enameled his teeth with sea air and paroxysms of sport. Maria Lluïsa put her hand on his shoulder and, decisively and maternally, said:
“Don’t worry your head about it, Pat. Don’t give it another thought.”
Pat sniveled:
“What will you think of me, Maria Lluïsa?”
“What else can I think? That you’re a baby … just a wretched baby …”
When Maria Lluïsa was alone again, the scene with Pat began to sink in. She had certainly expected something along those lines from him, but not that bad. Then she began to realize that despite her desire to stifle sentimentalism, she did love Pat, she had believed in him a little. This had been an acute disappointment. Maria Lluïsa had never supposed that marriage would be the solution to her problem, it wasn’t that. But she did expect a bit more generosity on his part, some compassion, at least some goodwill. Maria Lluïsa was perfectly aware, and she blamed herself, that she was the one who had wanted this, and she had no intention of demanding anything at all from her lover. But women, even the most realistic of them, always retain a bit of romantic illusion, they always believe in the possibility of a gentleman who will know how to make a gentleman’s gesture. And that boy from the outboard motorboat perhaps was just not enough of a gentleman. However, since Maria Lluïsa was a decisive young woman, she let Pat be. She would never demean herself by asking for anything. For a moment – Maria Lluïsa was a girl of nineteen – she entertained the idea of a sincere maternity with all the consequences. But that just couldn’t be. Maria Lluïsa envisioned her family panorama. Such a scandal could by no means take place in a climate so bitter, shattered, and lacking in comfort as their apartment on Carrer Bailèn. The humiliation would be too great. The disdain Maria Lluïsa felt for her mother and for all her kin, the independence she had imposed on herself as her primary obligation, made it impossible for her to lose face before them. In her house, the word “dishonor” was the only applicable word in this case. And she found this word to be so stupid, so inhuman, that she would rather die than accept it. The romantic thought of running away, breaking with all their prejudices, keeping her job and looking for someone to help her out also passed through Maria Lluïsa’s head, but she was too pretty and she believed to
o truly in a sporting and decorative idea of life to be prepared to make such sacrifices. Besides, as yet she had no sense of motherhood; it was pure literature to her. What she felt was apprehension, horror at her situation, and the desire to free herself at any cost. This wasn’t motherhood. No inner light had shone, there had been no metamorphosis of affection. What she was going through was simply shame and misfortune. Of all the possible solutions, Maria Lluïsa chose the one that was most shabby, expeditious, and in keeping with her moral temperature. Her friend from the bank made the arrangements. She needed around a thousand pessetes. Maria Lluïsa didn’t have so much money and even though she hated to ask Pat for it, she didn’t have any choice. Pat dispensed the money with a philanthropic pomposity, and he felt that those thousand pessetes absolved him of all obligation. Maria Lluïsa accepted the money with the proviso that she would return it and made him swear he would accept it when the time came.
Her friend accompanied her early one afternoon to the home of an acquaintance in whom she had utter confidence. She was a woman of around forty-five, with a pretty face, but much the worse for wear. She had an apartment on Carrer de Rosselló, decorated with airs of refinement, in which a slightly offensive scent of smut prevailed. The woman was neither a midwife nor in the trade, but she dealt in resolving the untimely conflicts of love with discretion and a modicum of safety. The woman’s assistant was a man of around thirty, a medical doctor, lean, with a sallow complexion, and somewhat repulsive. He treated the patients with cloying sweetness and double entendres.
Though Maria Lluïsa answered the questions the lady asked her with naturalness, the woman was clearly affected.
The sallow doctor took up his duties in a chamber expressly equipped to be like a clinic. The operation went off relatively easily and with a satisfactory outcome. It was very painful, but Maria Lluïsa bore it with that endurance peculiar to women.
After the operation, she lay in the proprietor’s bed for four hours. The good woman offered advice and tried to give her guidance. Maria Lluïsa listened vaguely, but her head was weak. When the doctor returned it was nine in the evening. He took Maria Lluïsa’s pulse, said it was safe to go home, but that she should be very careful, and prescribed a prophylactic treatment for a few days.
The run-down woman with the pretty face took Maria Lluïsa and her friend to the door. When they said goodbye, she kissed Maria Lluïsa on the cheeks with great effusiveness. The woman’s name was Rosa Trènor.
MARIA LLUÏSA’S BRAIN was voracious for negative ideas. It had destroyed the possibility of a love that would move the sun and the stars. It didn’t believe in the appearance of some St. George in a suit, much less in the dragon he would slay.
For her the world was a mass of putty, stupidly come into existence. Since she had been born of this mass, she didn’t protest. It was the salty, blue water in which her arms could become skilled in the perfect crawl. Maria Lluïsa accepted the most brilliant, amoral and metallic aspects of her time. Her landscape still allowed for the presence of enraptured souls and of souls who enraptured. She wanted to be one of the ones who enraptured. She vaguely recalled that her grandfather had been a man of principle. Her grandfather’s principles seemed just as anachronistic and offensive to her as a boy who went to sunbathe on the beach dressed up as a little shepherd or a devil from Els Pastorets, the Christmas play. Maria Lluïsa felt a passion for resplendent trash. Her imagination was like those great luminous advertisements that flash on and off, lashed to symmetrical cages of stone and cement, fascinating millions of men who drag their dread down asphalt streets and breathe in a night heavy with alcohol, perfume, ambition and misery. Maria Lluïsa’s tactic was that of many of her time: improvisation. This way of grabbing onto the antennae of life was the strongest imprint left by the war on a society that only began to evolve in the 1920’s. Improvisation was exactly the same as living day to day. Barcelona suffered greatly from this, particularly in the most spectacular arenas. The way fortunes were made and unmade, and the ease of acquiring a sort of universal pass for being seated in the front row of the grand world, without concern for the moral antecedents or the condition of the subjects’ shirts were the surest signs of the general reigning confusion and vain intestinal spirit of survival. Some periods take into account the name and family traditions of a person before conceding him any status; in other, more democratic, and perhaps more understanding periods, they have stressed intelligence, ingenuity, and even physical beauty, always valuing the clean and well-groomed person. Other, more recent, periods, in order to come to a judgment about a person, only make note of his shirt-maker, her stylist, their dog, or their automobile. Maria Lluïsa belonged to one of those periods in which the value of the person took only second or third place. In first place ranked the crease in one’s trousers or the quality of one’s stockings.
To affirm that a lady was sublime neither her witticisms, nor her acts of philanthropy, nor the anatomical perfection of her hips were mentioned. The only thing worthy of comment was the color or make of the dress she wore to this party or that concert. In general, people limited their vocabulary to the words “nice” or “not nice.” The words “just,” “honest,” “brave,” “contemptible,” or “ignorant,” were not in good form over the green of a golf course or a bridge table. It was very easy to be nice, because Maria Lluïsa’s era was also one of the less demanding, and the dimension of the glands secreting niceness were four times the size of the liver.
After her year of sexual apprenticeship, Maria Lluïsa was perfectly equipped to calculate the value of all her physical attributes without falling into the traps set for shy, inexpert or innocent girls. Fortunately, Pat was so inferior to her that he had not left any trace of himself or any kind of depravity in the blue and pink regions of her soul. When the moment of disenchantment arrived, in the face of Pat’s selfishness and cowardice, the bit of affection Maria Lluïsa had felt for him allowed her to react without violence. So it was that her blood absorbed a few injections of bitter skepticism and she developed – and in this she was quite mistaken – an absolutely pejorative notion of men’s emotions. Maria Lluïsa believed that all the boys of her day with a bit of decorative value, like Pat, would behave the same way, and that a girl like her could not harbor any illusions of finding anything better. Maria Lluïsa did not suffer the nerves of many women her age, who dream of a great love and, unsatisfied and disillusioned, don’t realize they have failed until they find their hearts dried up in their fingers like a useless object. Maria Lluïsa was lucky enough to sense the presence of delightful topics in the world that were not precisely the death of Isolde or the imitation of that death as it is carried out between an infinity of sheets in public houses and private homes. Even at the start of her relations with Pat, Maria Lluïsa had realized she was not at all temperamental. Maria Lluïsa’s sensibility resided as much or more in her eyes, her skin, and her palate, and, above all, in her imagination, as it did in the secret corners nature has destined for the most celestial and nebulous of joys. Maria Lluïsa felt that a very furry, flexible, and Machiavellian fox coat or a flawless diamond were much more intense things than the fifth Canto of the Divine Comedy. And this theory of Maria Lluïsa’s should not be seen with overly scrupulous eyes; it was a perfectly human theory, shared by numerous illustrious personalities of the time.
One of Maria Lluïsa’s characteristics was her lack of dignity. This became more pronounced after the intervention at Rosa Trènor’s house. Maria Lluïsa’s era emphasized pure economics, a consequence of which was a relaxation of the sentiment of personal dignity. In Maria Lluïsa, though, this relaxation was aggravated by family circumstances. It’s curious to see how a working-class family or a craftsman or mechanic’s family, or even someone from the middle class working to make a place for himself, feels a sort of gratification, and pride, and most definitely a sense of dignity that families from the grand tradition, accustomed to not working, and for whom the easy life has taken the place of initia
tive, do not feel, just as economic catastrophe is launching a stage of moral decay. In such families the lack of dignity can sometimes reach unimaginable extremes.
We have already indicated some similarities between Maria Lluïsa and her uncle, Guillem de Lloberola. In fairness to Maria Lluïsa, it must be noted that her family couldn’t offer her any shining examples. The spectacle of her father and mother only served to unleash shamelessness and disaffection. When Maria Lluïsa was able to get a bit free of them, the bank where she worked, the staff she worked for, and her friends were all people who used toothbrushes and worked to fill their stomachs. Pat had pretty clear ideas about sports, but his concept of human dignity was mean and anemic, suffocated by mufflers, sports shirts, and insurance policies.
Maria Lluïsa had experienced these climes, excellent breeding grounds for the fatty existence of the microbe they carry in their blood, a microbe that was nothing more than atavistic fatalism and the natural consequence of the decomposition of the Lloberola family.
Private Life Page 34