It isn’t that Maria Lluïsa had a vocation for perversity, or an ideal of unrestrained libertinage. Maria Lluïsa still believed in a trace of heroism, in delicate and ardent possibilities, if she decided to break the intact urn of her maidenhood. Maria Lluïsa saw that if she took her mother’s tack, she exposed herself above all to wasting time waiting for the one who would decide to marry her, and she exposed herself, even more, to that decision’s never taking place, and she exposed herself to the possibility that the man who did take possession would be wrong in every way. In a word, in her mother’s tack, Maria Lluïsa saw only an ominous dependency upon marriage. Maria Lluïsa reasoned this out in a childish and unsophisticated way, as many girls might do. But at very least, she was consistent in her ideas and did her best to be straightforward. In rejecting her mother’s technique, obeying that feeling of disintegration and destruction, Maria Lluïsa accepted as a certainty that the importance of virginity was quite relative. Once she had accepted that, her decorum saw no obstacle in offering it to someone she herself had chosen, a young man who was physically pleasing and agreeable, and with whom she hoped to experience Dionysian moments, with no strings attached. And she wanted to give herself to that young man sitting by her side at the wheel because, as very limited and full of flaws as he was, he had not pursued her voraciously and incontinently. Pat had not taken any initiative in this regard. After that morning in Llafranc, Maria Lluïsa was a bit disappointed, but at the same time, the boy’s passivity gave her a reason to keep observing him, to analyze quietly if he was the right boy on whom to gamble her deepest intimacy. Maria Lluïsa felt the pleasure of choosing her own man, without any lasting ties, when the time was ripe, and when her desire was sweetest. Maria Lluïsa, at eighteen, dreamed of all these things. Naturally they had their risks and dangers, but as we have already said, the Lloberola cowardice was one of the family flaws Maria Lluïsa had avoided.
When Pat said the word “shocking,” Maria Lluïsa blanched, her eyes clouded over, and her mouth clenched in a grimace of sadness. Pat stopped the Chrysler and looked closely at Maria Lluïsa’s face. The boy was beginning to discover a new hemisphere, the hemisphere in which all the paradoxical constellations of a girl’s nerves spin. With the disconcerted tenderness of a porter accustomed to carrying sacks on his back who finds a newborn baby in his hands, he took Maria Lluïsa’s head in his trembling hands and said “Forgive me,” in an almost inaudible voice. Maria Lluïsa relaxed her teeth, and through the opening between those two rows of enameled snow, Pat slipped his tongue, burning with thirst.
Maria Lluïsa was the first to react. Pat’s eyes were wet with tears and she dried his face with her scarf.
“No tragedies, Pat, do you understand?”
The young man felt ashamed and humiliated. They drove all the way to the Diagonal without saying a word. Maria Lluïsa kept singing her java song. Pat was frightened by the decision he had just made. When he dropped Maria Lluïsa off near her house, his inexperience led him to say these words:
“Listen, Maria Lluïsa. Are you sure you’re not making fun of me?”
Maria Lluïsa responded with a fresh, natural smile. They agreed to meet at six p.m.
Pat had told his friends that Maria Lluïsa was a girl who liked to pretend to be modern, and whose head was full of hot air. Whenever someone insinuated that anything definitive might have gone on between them, Pat would get indignant and say:
“Get out of here! What are you thinking?”
Pat’s twenty-five years had given him great arrogance and aplomb in his judgment of women. He knew perfectly well how far he could get with this one and that one. But he wasn’t quite sure whether Maria Lluïsa wanted to entrap him, or if she just wanted to have a good time and amuse herself. He also wasn’t quite sure whether he would let himself be entrapped or if he would merely collaborate in having a good time with Maria Lluïsa. Pat was convinced of one thing, and that was that if by chance he were so foolhardy as to take Maria Lluïsa into a room with a bed at the ready, Maria Lluïsa would defend herself heroically and never again look him in the face. The events of the afternoon demonstrated quite the opposite. They showed that Pat’s certainty had been entirely unwarranted.
Pat went to pick Maria Lluïsa up at the arranged time, still not sure of anything, still believing that she was sort of toying with him. Pat couldn’t bring himself to accept that Maria Lluïsa would hatch such an important plan so lightly, but what filled him with misgivings were the color of her face and the perplexing mystery in her eyes after he had spoken the word “shocking.” For Pat, Maria Lluïsa continued to be the same enigmatic girl who frightened him. That afternoon, though, Pat was feeling virile; he wanted to solve the problem with all his being, no matter what. They met up at six.
“Where do you want to go?” Pat said.
“Wherever you want,” she answered.
As a precaution, Pat had left the Chrysler in the garage. A taxi would be less noticeable in the event she agreed to go to a meublé.
Until Pat closed the door of the room with a key she said nothing. In the taxi she was rather nervous, her heart was beating violently, and her eyes were wet and shiny. Pat took her arm with a trembling, sweaty hand, and from time to time he kissed her hair and her ears. When they were alone in the room, Maria Lluïsa parted her lips to tell him:
“If you want me to get undressed, you’ll have to turn out the light.”
The room was completely dark, and between the panting and excitement that were only natural, the job of unbuttoning went a little slowly. A soft hiss of silks and wool, a grotesque clang of keys and coins, of shoes, which in situations like this are noisy as clogs, and then the peculiar squeak of the mattress springs and the protests of the metal fittings of the bed at that moment when two disconcerted bodies fall onto it. The integral dialogue of their two naked bodies was imbued with the madness of discovery. Words did not achieve expression; contact electrified them from their lips to their toes. Their bodies tangled and intertwined, and their hands would have liked to reach beyond their ribs. When Pat’s eyes reached the right glassiness and phosphorescence, he destroyed what Maria Lluïsa had tired of. With a girl as athletic and flexible as Maria Lluïsa, the job was already half done. Pat found himself in a natural situation; he practically didn’t notice the difference. She moaned, but only softly. The feeling was not as intense as she had imagined. Later, with Pat’s arm around Maria Lluïsa’s waist, when he felt the wetness of her cheeks cooling his breast, he experienced a moment that was more tender, sweet, and full of reverence than any other in his life. In a daze he kissed her forehead over and over. His lips didn’t form the shape of a kiss, but Maria Lluïsa felt them in every drop of her blood.
In truth, what had just happened to them replaced the air in the room with a gas of sadness and incomprehension. Those two naked children wanted to laugh, but they had no strength, and the mouth of the one sought refuge in the mouth of the other. Then Maria Lluïsa shut herself into the bathroom, and Pat lit a cigarette. At that point Pat realized that he was satisfied; the oil of vanity breathed through the pores of his skin.
From that day on their intimate encounters at the meublé multiplied. Maria Lluïsa came to have a perfect naturalness, approaching indifference. She came to realize that she was not the temperamental type. Pat was full of enthusiasm but also so full of fear that he could have jumped out of his skin. He couldn’t help but tell two or three of his friends about the deal that had fallen into his hands. At first, Pat experienced sensational moments, but soon he was invaded by qualms and misgivings. Above all, by the fear that the whole thing could get complicated, that a moment of carelessness on his part or a lack of hygienic experience on hers might end up creating a conflict. Maria Lluïsa had never spoken of even the remotest commitment or obligation; she hardly even mentioned love. Maria Lluïsa was satisfied; it was she who had wanted this. From their first afternoon in the meublé, when she went home for dinner she looked at her mother with more self-assured eyes, and her smile was colder and more self-satisfied. Her friend from the bank cauterized any of the insignificant remnants of a scruple she might harbor in her heart. She managed to flee from sentimentalism as if from a contagious disease and, despite all this, Maria Lluïsa felt her dependency upon Pat, she felt that she loved him, but she didn’t want to confess it under any circumstances. She wanted to believe that Pat was an instrument for her own private use, to resolve a need in her intimate life, and nothing more.