Private Life (41 page)

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.

Pat shot straight as a bullet for Maria Lluïsa’s smile. The day after he first saw her, Pat told her his life story, his ambitions, and his ideas.

On the third day, when the beaches were full of people, Pat and Maria Lluïsa went a little farther out; Pat’s slightly rough hand, accustomed to water sports, slipped inside her maillot and visited its secrets, which with the help of the cool water felt like fresh fruit and flesh
without a soul. Maria Lluïsa didn’t protest, nor did she laugh. Altruistically, and for no particular reason, she allowed the boy’s nerves to take in through her wet skin the intact electricity of her body.

It was the first time in Maria Lluïsa’s life that she had felt that sort of generosity. She was not at all sentimental; she didn’t feel any attachment to that boy’s well-distributed and well-iodized physique; it was simply a moment of female generosity. She wasn’t looking for moral compensation; she wasn’t looking for anything. Animals that have never been to college and gods not subject to any doctrine regarding sex must also enjoy this splendid license to be visited by a hand that sweeps diplomacy aside.

Pat was a bit weak with emotion and gratitude. They were only a few strokes from the beach, and Pat floated on his back by her side for a while. Maria Lluïsa felt the joy of the philanthropist. Nothing is as satisfying to the ego as an act of pure charity. In the gaze of the man or woman who has just done an act of charity there is a tiny flash, as insignificant as you wish, of that brilliance that theologians claim appears in the eyes of the blessed in the presence of the Supreme Being.

Pat and Maria Lluïsa reached the beach a bit exhausted from their exercise. They fell onto the sand breathing heavily. Dionísia slipped lit Camels between his lips and between her lips.

Pat was stupidly mesmerized by Maria Lluïsa’s toenails. Usually, when a girl has been subject to the pain and deformation of shoes, the spectacle of her wet, naked, sand-encrusted feet after swimming is a disappointment. But under the implacable shower of the sun, his
eyes half-closed, Pat felt a muted desire to kiss Maria Lluïsa’s little feet, to nibble softly at the whitish flesh of her heel, right there where the flesh gets hard and the skin has an insensitive thickness. In the desire of that kiss Pat would have liked to deposit a liquid tenderness, like a teardrop of gratitude, of adoration, of effusion …

In the evening, before dinner, Pat and Maria Lluïsa were having a Picon aperitif in a bar decorated with pine branches, as the sea was turning black. Maria Lluïsa considered Pat to be a conventional, self-centered and visceral creature, who thought only of the efficiency of his outboard motorboat and his father’s spinning mill. Pat told her that his father made him get up at nine a.m. when he had only gone to bed two hours before, stealing into the house with red eyes and a stomach full of whiskey. Pat had made love with the prettiest vamps who frequented the hour of the aperitif at the bar of the Hotel Colón. In his Chrysler, he had looked suicide in the face on the curves of the coastal highway of the Garraf, wearing on his tie all the rouge that could rub off a cheek. Pat wanted to bare his heart to Maria Lluïsa, and he told her these things with a touch of puerile vanity and a touch of Tolstoyan transcendence. Pat’s speech drew on the grammar of the sporty gigolo, using catch phrases, some of which were mindless translations from Spanish, some of which proceeded without translation directly from the music-hall. You could see the influence of the movies, of avant-garde decoration, and of some vague familiarity with the intelligent, pleasant and superficial writing of the day in both his mentality and his manner of speaking. Pat was comfortable with
these things because they were fashionable among some of his more sensitive friends.

At one point, between smiles and drags on their cigarettes, Maria Lluïsa’s hand mussed Pat’s thick black hair. She shook his cranium and Pat’s cheek brushed against Maria Lluïsa’s neck. But it was nothing more than a moment she desired and engineered. Pat went on talking about movies and other affairs. He was only interested in talking about himself and his thoughts, with the unconscious selfishness of a child. Maria Lluïsa was there in front of him and he didn’t need to know anything about her. Pat didn’t believe in women’s sincerity. He had absorbed the somewhat brutal theory of athletic young men, who are used to feeling love in a purely physiological sense, through their constant dealings with vamps who, seeking a break from the abdomens and bronchitis of their official boyfriends, take up with the members of the Swimming Club. Pat was sweetly vulgar with the girls, and sometimes even inconsiderate. This was considered to be chic and tony among his friends, and this was the way many brilliant young men of the time interpreted romance.

But despite this muscular and mechanical way of behaving, Pat and other young men like him displayed the most baptismal innocence. Sometimes their callow ingenuousness turned them into characters right out of
The Lady of the Camellias
. Motor cars, whiskey, and the fatigued pubises of fashionable lovelies had not entirely broken the shell of their good-boy upbringings. Inside this shell made up of maternal cares, family comforts and even fatherly talkings-to, the
ladyfingers boys like Pat dipped into their hot chocolate were crafted of the most conservative essences of the country. Maria Lluïsa saw Pat for the selfish, common and visceral child he was, but he was a child she found appealing, if only physically. Maria Lluïsa had not yet analyzed any aspect of what she felt for that young man. But the conversation, the aperitif and the tanned arms coming out of the white shirt matched the color of the boy’s soul. It was the first time in her life that she was freeing herself of something she couldn’t quite define. She found Pat to be good company. When the boy followed all four of them back to her cousins’ cream-colored chalet, a few steps from the bar, Maria Lluïsa restrained her heart as if it were a fluttering swallow. She laughed heartily at the table and ate with an optimistic appetite. She might even have eaten more than her cousins, who never said no, and weighed twice as much as she did.

After dinner, Maria Lluïsa and Dionísia chatted. Maria Lluïsa didn’t want to let on. As innocent as Pat, Dionísia was only interested in his ideas.

“He’s very cute, but I think he’s awfully rough around the edges. For a three-day fling,
bueno
,” she punctuated in Spanish. “But three days and no more. On the fourth day, I think he’d start to be a pain. If we only got together on the beach, okay, because he’s cute undressed. He has loads of sex appeal. But, as soon as he starts walking, he goes downhill, don’t you think? And I wonder if you noticed another thing: when he crosses his legs, he could drive you crazy, he’s always touching and jiggling his foot. As far as I’m concerned he’s not the slightest
bit interesting. He’s not my type, and this morning I sort of let him know …”

“Well, I couldn’t agree less! I think he’s kind of cute precisely because he’s so rough and such a child …”

“But they’re all the same! Still, he does have a sort of flair for talking nonsense …, and he’s likable enough …”

“What more do you want? You say he’s funny, he’s cute, he’s likeable …”