Maria Lluïsa didn’t stop to weigh the consequences. Her habit of improvisation and living day to day allowed her to accept Bobby’s friendship at face value, without having to think about what would happen tomorrow. All she had to do was pretend, and justify Bobby’s attentions. Maria Lluïsa had achieved considerable independence from her mother, but it was important to her, above all, to avoid any kind of scandal. The rumor had reached Maria Carreres’ ears that her daughter’s ways might be a little too modern, but Maria Carreres felt impotent in the face of her daughter’s power. Frederic, at that point, was completely divorced from his family. He had no authority over his children, nor did he care to. Frederic was a lost cause. When Maria Lluïsa met Bobby, it hadn’t been long since Don Tomàs had died, and Frederic was adrift in the arms of the wine merchant’s wife and the delirium of her black nightgown with the pumpkin-colored babies’ print. Breathing in the dust from the stones of his castle, Frederic had no desire to see his wife or their apartment on Carrer de Bailèn ever again. Nor was he aware of the little temperature he had every evening. The people in the town said he was going mad. What was really going on in Frederic’s body was tuberculosis, which would send him to his grave only a few years later. In Barcelona no one knew anything about this, and Maria Lluïsa didn’t miss her father’s lectures or his baloney a single bit. Without her father around, the air was cleared for her to spin out the golden thread of her dreams.
One day, Maria Carreres spoke to her daughter about a few things, some rumors she had heard, but Maria Lluïsa played her part to perfection, and her mother had no choice but to exclaim: “God be with you! It’s in your hands now, Maria Lluïsa! You’ll be sorry.” In a word, all the things a mother says when she sees that nothing can be done.
Not only that, Maria Lluïsa’s mother didn’t allow Grandmother Carreres to stick her nose in these affairs. Economically, the apartment on Carrer de Bailèn depended on Grandmother Carreres. Yet Frederic’s insipid wife, aware of her impotence with regard to her daughter, thought it was more sensible to play along and mask the situation. This was her way of averting scenes by the grandmother that, instead of convincing Maria Lluïsa, would only have strained the atmosphere. Over the years Maria Carreres had become a woman of frayed morals. Like an old garter, her morals applied no pressure and held nothing up. Whimpering all the way, she accepted her mother’s favors and swallowed all the old woman’s foul and contemptuous remarks. She preferred not to see things, letting herself be deceived and convinced for the sake of peace. The woman’s psychology, like the fabric of her dress, had the look of a hand-me-down. The strategy Maria Carreres had learned from the Lloberolas was to keep up appearances and bury her head in the sand like an ostrich. With a happy, shameless smile, she would make her round of visits, giving news of her own as if she were speaking of the Holy Family, when everyone knew about Frederic’s absurd life, and knew that her daughter worked in a bank, and wore a string of pearls — of the kind that bode no good and are fodder for gossip among more pious souls — around her neck.
Bobby received Maria Lluïsa in the little apartment he kept for affairs of the heart. The girl planted a few fuchsias, some red geraniums and a number of violets in Bobby the skeptic’s small spiritual garden, heretofore lacking in light or water or the slightest drop of hope. Maria Lluïsa’s freshness, her exceptional grace, the way she had of alternating modesty and impudence, were things that Bobby had thought no longer existed in this world. When he rediscovered them in Maria Lluïsa’s skin, he began to fear that he had been mistaken, that his idea of life and of women had served to create a reputation for him among the most elegant and boring sets as a polite man who never gets ruffled or surrenders himself entirely, but had probably ruined him for feeling all the flavor of madness in a pure and simple mouth that besides communicating the warm breath of another’s lungs, also delivers the uncontrollable mystery of a soul.
In his heart of hearts what was happening was that Bobby was getting old and starting to dodder.
“MY HUSBAND EXHAUSTED all his available kindness on me. If he didn’t do more, it was because he simply didn’t have the wherewithal. He was not to blame for his medullary disease; he was a specter who fell in love with me, never suspecting his condition. Everyone lied to my husband; I was the only one who didn’t lie to him. My mother was not the kind of woman who could understand what I was doing, what she practically obliged me to do. Our marriage was just one of the many marriages of the time. It was also not my husband’s fault that on our return from Venice, one month after we were married, I, who was living in a dream, had to resign myself to being a nurse to a dying man. My husband had a nobility that I have not sensed in any other man. With his gaze he asked me only one thing, always the same thing: he asked me to forgive him for having married me, to forgive him for having turned me into a nurse. Perhaps the only worthwhile thing I have done is to understand that request for forgiveness and to feel grateful for it, more grateful than for any of the embraces of an irresistible seducer. At that point to be anything less than true to him would have been the greatest ignominy, in my eyes. If I had found myself by the side of a healthy, dominant husband, the kind who kill a woman with kindness but basically keep her in her place, I might very well have been unfaithful. At this stage, I don’t think so, but I couldn’t swear to it. What I can indeed swear to is that it never even remotely occurred to me to offend my husband. I find that for most women, nothing can be more compelling than a pair of impotent, supplicating eyes that see in us the prestige of a mother, that feel the confidence our hand bestows when we place it on a forehead for the sole purpose of transmitting our disinterested womanly spirit. My husband’s gaze was that of a sick child, a child fifteen years older than I, and I was only twenty at the time. I felt an obligation to those eyes.”
“I am writing these lines to console myself a bit. To remember that at twenty I wasn’t an entirely stupid girl, and I knew how to capture all the mortified adoration in the gaze of a sick man.”
“When my husband died, I put on an act. I didn’t know you could produce tears without feeling anything. But I realized it was possible. The funereal faces of everyone around me, in addition to my own nervous exhaustion, made it easy for me to behave accordingly. I cried, I cried a lot, but it was entirely artificial. I would be lying if I said that I didn’t feel great tenderness toward my husband. But I would also be lying if I tried to pretend that I wasn’t hoping for him to die. What I don’t understand is why I wanted it so badly, if in the end it didn’t solve anything for me. As long as my husband was alive, his gaze kept me company, it even satisfied my ego to discover I was useful and to offer that poor sick man consolation. Once he was dead, even that was gone. I confess that when they carried him off, it seemed as if they were removing a bad dream from my heart. But years later, I must also confess that I missed that bad dream.”
“I was never beautiful. I was never one of those women men find exciting. I don’t want to kid myself. I’m certain of this. In my youth, I had enough intuition and enough presence of mind to realize it. Since my husband died, I have had thousands of opportunities to realize that my material fortune was of no little consequence, much more than my natural endowments. By twenty-five I was a widow and completely free. My mother was dead and I held one of the most brilliant positions in Barcelona. In those days, I had an obsession. I thought no one liked me, and I made every effort, I even humiliated myself, to be nice to people. But I could see it was all for nothing. They would show kindness in many different ways, they would flatter me to excess, but it all seemed fake to me. Now that I’m sixty years old, I think maybe I was imagining things. It’s possible someone might have fallen in love with me in all good faith, if I hadn’t been so standoffish with men when the time came for a tête-à-tête, and even more so if I hadn’t been the victim of that peculiar melancholy that obliged me to distance myself from people. Now that I’m looking back with a cool head, the air I adopted seems frankly stupid. Not that what was happening to me at that point was my fault. Since my first marriage had been a disaster, I didn’t want to expose myself to a second. In those days I couldn’t help but think that my great fortune was sufficient for any man to have faked the most vivid love without a second thought. I don’t think I was so mistaken about this. Despite the opinion of most of my friends, I am rather gullible; even now anyone can take me in. Nowadays, naturally, I couldn’t care less, because I have nothing to lose, but at age twenty-five I had more than enough reasons to be mistrustful and to be protective of my own innocence. Since I had started to know myself a bit, I was afraid that if I allowed myself to risk being deceived, they would almost certainly deceive me. And this was why, on the one hand, I made such an effort to be nice and to conquer the dislike I believed I inspired in others, and on the other, if I started a conversation with a man, I did my best to avoid any insinuations.”