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 too 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.