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 they 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.