This aptitude for conquest had given Guillem a very bad opinion of women. All he saw in them was the part that served his selfish ends: their likelihood of succumbing to Guillem’s prestige. All they represented for him was their purely animal aspect of adoration or of jealousy; he appreciated them for their skin and for their intimate reactions, and that was it. Guillem had never been in love, and at times he wondered if he was even capable of falling in love, of feeling that profound luxuriance, lyrical with anguish, enthusiasm, and sidereal scintillation that he imagined love to be. Women had never provided Guillem the opportunity to infuse a little spirituality into his flesh, at least not the women he had dealt with so far. Sensitive as he was, the young man was perfectly aware of all that, aware even of how he had been brutalized by his conquests. He was running the risk of becoming a physiological machine mounted on a dissatisfied spirit. Despite his youth, he already had an excess of experience. The time for great emotional arias had passed him by; his weakness for debauchery and his lack of scruples had shielded his skin with a layer of skepticism. Guillem saw all this with no little melancholy. Another young man would have considered the profusion and diversity amassed in his erotic register to be of inestimable value. And it is not that Guillem derived no satisfaction from it, but he was beginning to feel fatigued, to find no merit in it, and to discover all the gray brushstrokes of monotony. So, the presence of Conxa Pujol renewed him. His fear of failure, his loss of confidence in himself, his need to refine all his powers in order to dominate an elusive skin, his pain at uncertainty, his renewed self-respect, his secret tears, the sensorial density of their encounters, and above all the superior perfume of the inconsistent and contradictory biology he was engaging with his muscles and his breath offered Guillem the possibility of something that, if nothing more, was a reasonable simulacrum of the flaming vestments of a true, pathetic love.
On occasion, powerless to unravel her mystery, in the face of her unceasing battle, Guillem had suspected that Conxa Pujol would never entirely surrender herself to him or to any man. Physically, this woman’s case was not one of coldness or indifference; quite the contrary. Guillem sensed volcanic possibilities in her that he, however, had not managed to ignite. Nor could he accept the thesis that the baronessa belonged to that species of women whose sensibilities have been drained by constant and varied brutalization. A woman who was married at such a young age to the man she had been married to, and who until now had not been known to have a lover, led one to suppose a more or less undamaged temperament. Guillem would have liked to connect their present intimacies with those two shameful episodes in which he had taken part, but those episodes did not offer any pattern. One would have had to know the extent of the baronessa’s intention in all of that. One would have to separate her responsibility from her husband’s with great care, and that was impossible. In moments of obfuscation and defeat, when Guillem thought his desire was unattainable, he came very close to confessing to the baronessa. He tried to explain his double personality with perfect cynicism, but he realized that such an explanation would probably have closed all doors to him. As unusual as the baronessa was, Guillem was not certain how she would react on learning that this Guillem de Lloberola was the very same derelict her dressmaker had procured for her. Later on, when Conxa yielded, when an absolute intimacy had been established between the two of them, in moments of depression Guillem once again felt the desire to produce a dramatic effect by recounting to the baronessa the details of Dorotea’s “scene of the crime.” But then, too, he held back, and was assailed by yet another doubt: what if what he had accepted in good faith, his certainty that the baronessa had not recognized him, were just an illusion? Guillem came to fear that Conxa, much more astute than her departed husband and with a sharper memory, had been dissembling, had turned a blind eye, on recognizing Guillem de Lloberola to be the same subject procured by her dressmaker. This aspect of Guillem’s fear was groundless, because Conxa Pujol never recognized him nor did she suspect for a moment that Guillem had been a party to those secret events.
As we were saying, Guillem imagined that Conxa would never truly surrender herself, to him or to any man. Guillem began to fear that in the mystery of his lover there was another woman, and that all her fissures and evasions and the unassailable integral possession of her body, her soul, her will, and even her unhappiness could only be understood as a natural or acquired corruption of her temperament. He feared Conxa was a lesbian, and that the fullness of her passion would never belong to him, because Conxa was saving it for a woman.
The fear of lesbianism in the life of “ladykillers” is one of the most ludicrous and unfounded. When a man who considers himself irresistible sees that a woman does not utterly give in to him, and retains a mystery that he cannot divine, he soon accuses the woman of an abnormal vice. The pride or vanity of men often leads them to see things, and in the case of the baronessa, Guillem was definitely seeing things. Conxa was bizarre and perverse, with a perplexing temperament, but she considered intimacy with another woman to be unequivocally disgusting.