When Maria Lluïsa told him she was tired of being a virgin, Pat took it to be one of her boutades, a simple wish to play the enfant terrible, and he smiled, certain that those words meant no more to her than if she had said she found the smell of his hair lotion unpleasant. Pat could not conceive by any means that Maria Lluïsa had said those words seriously, because the idea he had about girls like her required him to apply an inflexible formula that allowed for no exceptions. At heart, Pat was an innocent. Like many boys of his class, he had become fully sexually active before he knew it, and his bourgeois education had imposed strict criteria on him for the classification of the women of this world.
Pat didn’t realize that the essential character of a person can’t be found in her position in life or in the opinions others may have of her, but rather that the essential character is hidden in her core, independent of time and space, or of morality and prejudices. Pat’s error was to believe that by the mere token of living off her body a prostitute could not be, deep down, more sensitive and a better person than his sisters. And he was also mistaken in believing that a girl of Maria Lluïsa’s class and education, solely by virtue of being of that class, could not be serious in saying, purposefully and sincerely, that she was tired of being a virgin.
These fatal errors led Pat to believe he had the right to treat all prostitutes with contempt and the obligation to consider it a simple extravagance that a girl like Maria Lluïsa should express such an a shameless concept.
In fact, Maria Lluïsa, swept along by a suggestion as banal as the java song that had knocked her in the teeth, was saying something bound to an authentic desire, to an experience she considered to be a prime necessity.
Maria Lluïsa was incapable of formulating an idea like that, by making use of the emotional circumstances of a moment that could be historic in her life. Maria Lluïsa chose an indifferent temperature and landscape, she chose a tone of voice without chiaroscuro, and even a smile that neutralized the transcendence of what she had just said. Maria Lluïsa had learned quite a few things in those few months. She had become good friends with a young woman who worked at the bank with her. This young woman, of black extraction, overcame the high yellow whiff of her family’s origins with the oceanic play of her hips and a hairdresser equipped with solvents. This girl was the lover of the assistant director, and she carried this role with the aloof and dissembling dignity of a girl who doesn’t beat around the bush. She had already had two abortions and she was ready to do it again, with aplomb. Maria Lluïsa took everything that came from her friend’s lips to be an article of faith, and when she turned out the light in her bedroom in the apartment on Carrer Bailèn, she had those subversive goods in her baggage. Gifted in the realistic analysis that women tend to perform instinctively, Maria Lluïsa could see the moral catastrophe of her ancestors. She saw the hysterical, petty and hypocritical ineptitude of Maria Carreres and the abusive and egotistical blubber of her maternal grandmother. Maria Lluïsa felt just as foreign next to her mother’s bleached hair as she did beside the raffia moustache of a Congolese divinity.
In our country there are families in full productivity, in which parents and children live as if they were bound together by a fever of collaboration, helping one another, the parents filling the children’s feeder with the last crumbs of their meal. They have a family spirit, sometimes aggressive, sometimes defensive. These are people who are still infused with the ferment of the workingman or the cringing of the shopkeeper that can bend their backbone. In contrast, there are families of long tradition that are so evaporated, squeezed so dry, whose social productivity is so nullified that their members feel a fatal desire to separate, to flee from the paternal path, to destroy the family spirit. The Lloberolas, and other ancient houses like theirs, had been attacked by the latter microbe. Before her parents, Maria Lluïsa felt the same thing Frederic, Josefina and Guillem felt before Don Tomàs de Lloberola. All of them fled for their own reasons, and all of them hated and rejected their parents’ ideas and feelings in their own ways. Maria Lluïsa was just the same. She didn’t want to have anything to do with the tearful, leather-bound moral cowardice of her mother. She felt an inhuman contempt for Frederic. She wanted to be herself, a Maria Lluïsa in touch with her heart, whose name perforce was Lloberola, but who didn’t have anything to do with them.
The same anarchic sentiment that moved Frederic to choose Rosa Trènor as his lover, the same anarchic sentiment that made it tolerable for Guillem to don his vagabond rags and accept Dorotea Palau’s three hundred pessetes, was at the heart of the feeling of disintegration, destruction and disdain that compelled Maria Lluïsa to say that she was tired of being a virgin.
And it was not just words. Maria Lluïsa had thought these things through in her own way. She was aware that, in those times, materialism, as some saw it, or a more rational and understanding vision, as others saw it, had undermined certain principles that the pre-war bourgeoisie defended tooth and nail, including the principles having to do with modesty and sex. In this world, female figures who dispensed with modesty were well thought of, welcomed, and admired, even if it was only at a distance, even if it was only in their existence in film and theater. The remoteness of this consideration was shrinking so steadily that it was reaching as far as personal relations, practically even direct contact. Maria Lluïsa discovered cases she had only seen in novels in close proximity, on her own street, at her own workplace, a meter away from her own typewriter. Maria Lluïsa knew single women, the daughters of bourgeois families, who had lovers, and enjoyed the shadiest of intimate interludes. Some of them became emancipated in good faith, others out of passion, and others coldly, in pursuit of a utilitarian end or a perversion with no material compensation.
Not that everyone Maria Lluïsa frequented was like this. One step away there was still passive resistance, the world of numb silence, prejudice, routine and sanctimonious devotion, servile imitation, fear, solitary vices. That was the system advocated by her mother, by the Lloberolas, that is, the family phantasm that was smothering Maria Lluïsa and from which she wanted to free herself by leaping into the field of liberty and lack of shame, accepting all the risks and all the potential catastrophes.