Nela and the Virgins by Mercè Ibarz / Fiction / Untitled Books

"One way to lose one's virginity, strongly considered by Nela, was the purely hygienic approach. Afterward could come the sex, the joy, the full moon... But it wasn't good to get carried away with losing your virginity and ending up in a relationship for the rest of your life because of it."

Photograph: ©Vlado/FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Nela and the Virgins by Mercè Ibarz

I neither can nor want to resist the image of the still hours, those hours that resound both in and outside of me - these are the important hours. As was said a long time ago: It's then that the world shakes its ass. Though I don't remember if that was said in Prague or at one of the sanatoriums where he'd go to recover from what he didn't want to recover from - namely, writing all night undisturbed in front of the window of his home, or at the window of the sanatorium, it doesn't matter, everywhere is home, whether it's a house that puts you up for a few days or a house you built yourself or a house that tosses you out or a house you run away from. Repulsively, the world shakes its ass, like a pus-oozing fat man in a cage at the circus, the circus we call life. This pain we call life: a circus. Sure. I suppose that it's for this that that man said if you watch and keep quiet as the world shakes its ass so obscenely, it'll reveal to you what it's really like, its sincerer side, its truth. And it does just so because it sells its ass without shame, openly, like at a circus or a cabaret.

Did Kafka go to cabarets? No idea. But I do know that he didn't spend all of his time staring out of a window. He also went around on a motorbike that belonged to his favourite uncle, who by contrast was a man who really knew how to live it up. What would Kafka have seen from up on top of those wheels? He kept quiet about that. Nevertheless, there are some key differences between speeding around on an old motorbike - be it from Kafka's time or from when we were too young to care, some thirty years ago -and staring fixedly out a window, waiting for nothing the way you wait for nothing when riding a motorbike; all told, there are some key differences. The world reveals itself one way or the other, but the difference is in the things you see in it. When you stare for some time into a face, outer space, open sky, an interior patio, the street under your window, the lamppost at night or the traffic at day, you see in them more than you ever had before, you see them in another way, you see what the face, outer space, open sky, interior patio, street, lamppost, traffic all say. The speed of, say, a motorbike, turns you in toward yourself, everything goes by so quickly that your eyes, in order to stay fixed on the road and nothing else, roll back into your head, toward the inner consciousness of your body.

Now that I've stopped, the still hours having kept still and quiet, I see how Valentina came to set up this strange dinner, which I say is strange because, well, you'll tell me how everyone manages to rush to the island, buzz the intercom, walk up the stairs, come in and meet up with the host, and after that look everyone there in the eye, and after that sit and dine. I see Valentina looking through a large window neither saying nor thinking anything, I see her head open like the bud of a hibiscus when day and daylight both begin, she watches the way in which Mo tells what Nela did the first day she saw the apartment, that she didn't pay any mind to either the hallway or anything else, but just sat absolutely silent on the balcony for no one knows how long, and after a few days headed up north and never returned again, breaking all ties with the island, with the entire city. Now, too, the world shakes its tail - and reveals itself. I can go on.

Three young women met on the island called the past, poured out into the city from the greater countryside. That first year in the city they didn't live together but given the frequency with which they met at some of the many small and clandestine meetings they attended, they decided to live together. They were seventeen years old. It was as though they were refugees expatriated from the towns and small cities in which they had been born, finally far from their mothers yet still in need of their tutoring, their terrifying presences. Friendships turn themselves into family. And their nostalgia for their mothers would open a wound that would last years, perhaps forever: a new perspective none of them were warned about, and with which no one was familiar. The classics teach us how to deal with homesickness. But the classics offered them something else, something they would remember for years: Everyone is dragged along by their favourite pleasure. Their favourite pleasure was to be as far as possible from their places of birth.

Virgil would have embraced those three girls with ferocious pride, though they hadn't read his poetry; they knew about him from a television commercial (from back in the black-and-white days), a commercial they barely remembered now that they'd made it out of the provinces. It was a forgetful, discourteous time: Los veinticinco anos de la paz could do that to you. But time flies, and when they came to be teenagers they didn't feel that fear - they felt other fears, but not the type that their mothers and fathers had felt when they were young. For them, everything was new now: pop music, singles dances, advertising, plastics, the hairdryer, the transistor radio, the cassette tape, vinyl. The three of them figured out that citing classic poetry from an old TV ad wasn't exactly the cool thing to do. It wouldn't get you any credit in a test. Pretending to be educated was beside the point. If you were to quote something from a commercial, you were a reactionary - a word that caused a good deal of fear in their urbane circles. It was forbidden above all else to be a reactionary; yet, at the same time, it was constantly necessary to react. This was a paradox that none of them liked to question too deeply.

They didn't foresee ever becoming comfortable so far from their families, far and for so long. They had to learn with no net, with no strings. Yet, even coming from where they did, they ended up founding a new recruiting centre, bigger than had ever been seen in the city and with as diverse a social make-up as any. These three friends were the first to break the social barrier. It was a liberating milestone that would in time become a stigma, a mark on the forehead, a pathology. For example, my father in those years would remind me time and again that I was a chosen one of the gods, and he didn't care at all how much it bothered me to hear it... But the girls wouldn't tolerate compliance one way or another, they weren't much for any sort of idiotic conformity, be it from the right or from the left. The subject of college, among other things, made them obdurate and loyal, though to whom and to what would remain to be seen. It was the same for many of the boys, but the deepest mark this access to the temples of knowledge had was left in the young women who attended them. Whoever receives in youth the chance to change their life doesn't forget it: these girls will always recognize the vestiges of that old flame.

The city. Her. Wow, what to say? What a joy it was. Back then it was black, black like a bad thought, and so poorly lit. But what joy it was just to walk down the street, what a joy not to be recognized anywhere.

After all these years the image still remains, although of course they see her now through a much different lens: the ballast of basic anonymity both in life and at work is sold in exchange for power by those who - to each other, at least - are no longer anonymous. Such is the extraordinary make-up of the city person in charge. Now she and the others can immediately tell the difference between someone who was born in the city and someone who was not. If someone from the city is friendly, he's not in control of the situation; if he ends up feeling stifled, it's because he's from the city or hates not having been. It almost always works out that way.

City of subterranean webs emitting corrosive acids, city of never-ending unfinished business, city of hurt pride, city of the hypersensitive, city of know-it-alls, city of superegos, city of gardeners' dogs that do nothing yet let nothing go; off-kilter capital, always a touch uncomfortable and always in the dark as to whether this discomfort is caused by the past, by its spot on the map, or simply because it's exhausted itself with its own propaganda. Um, that list turned out rather long. But those girls, after all these years, still aren't ready to let go of the abundance and the dark beauty of their first introduction to Barcelona, this city by sea. They're still in love with a city that, as they put it, doesn't worry about exaggerated realism. It's a place for forgetting the fear that people's stares can cause. One of the first things that Isi Solís, Nela Zubiri and Valentina Morera knew about Barcelona was that being a virgin was a worse blemish than having been seen not participating in an assembly meeting. Nela announced this as if it were the first order of the day. It wasn't too long ago that Nela arrived at Isi and Valentina's apartment to take the place of another girl who couldn't deal with the idea that on any given day the police could show up at their door.

"We won't be virgins long!" Isi and Valentina exclaimed at the same time.

"I'm going to ask you about it again, and soon. Then we'll see."

"It doesn't have anything to do with you," Isi replied.

Nela ran her hands through her long straight hair.

Valentina agreed with Isi. It didn't have anything to do with her. Nela smiled and applied coconut cream to her lips.

And then there was me, the person telling you this story (that's what I do, it's my job). I wasn't really along for the ride, just someone who listens from time to time, someone who had dealings with the committee... I was from a rural town as well and I was also put on notice about needing to stop doing this and needing instead to do that. I was just another girl. What a time that was. The same year that Gloria Gaynor ruled disco with her glorious "I Will Survive" and a singer-songwriter from New York named Annette Peacock, a mythic figure who turned down all sorts of offers and played instead with great musicians ranging from Mingus and Bley to Bowie, recorded a song that more than made up for my always having been just another girl and that would end up being a landmark for my era... it was called "My Mama Never Taught Me to Cook." And it was true: mothers weren't teaching their daughters to cook. Either they didn't know how, or had no interest in learning, or simply weren't around. Ah, Peacock's Moog synthesizer...

Nela was a striking beauty with slightly Asian features and held to her hardline radical politics. She had a sexual energy that all the other girls envied, that the boys desired and feared. It was unsettling. Petite, always well dressed and made-up, everything matching, a seventeen-year-old expert of facial creams, the cause of real agitation among the politically empowered young women who acted so radically contrary to the habits of their mothers and who no longer cooked but did tend to wear Pond's creams and yet nevertheless found themselves fascinated by the sight of Nela applying her own creams from day to night. She wore her hair straight, long, and always touched-up. She was famed for being an incredible lover. You wouldn't believe the advice she'd give.

Nela's friendship with Valentina and her difficulties with Isi were both a question of basic types from day one: nothing could be done about it. When Valentina suggested that Nela come live with them, Isi shot Valentina a look. Yes, sure, she was from the assembly committee, and better her than some stranger, but... From Isi's point of view, Nela was about and only about superficial impressions, as though she was in advertising or was one of those sexy magician's assistants. Touches of psychedelia, pop-art, leftist politics, spliffs and sexual innuendo, but the songs of Maria Dolores Pradera when the boys weren't around... though Isi was partial to music with wailing guitars and sinister-sounding drumming, the voice of Janis Joplin or Jimi Hendrix winding like a snake in the walls.

Nela and Valentina went way back. They had known each other from the first year of college. Nela was a radical then, she was a quiet girl from the rural west, where Valentina was from as well. The militant political climate of the time had differing effects on people. For Nela, it brought out her best. She turned into a hardcore cheerleader for the assemblies, someone few people wanted to debate with, let alone contradict. On the other hand, for Valentina, all this activism led her to more or less take a vow of silence. They were two sides of the same coin, two forms of a life-sharing impulse that neither Nela nor Valentina knew how to get the better of. When late at night Isi would put on "All Is Loneliness", "Careless Love" or "Cry Baby", Joplin's sharp screams wouldn't let us sleep in peace.

Valentina was happy to have entered into a world a little more real, she thought, than the one she had known until then... but she had lost her spirit. She spent her freshman year in Barcelona in a good enough mood, going to the movies. She discovered double features and her search for double features took her all over the city where she learned along the way the names of the streets of l'Eixample and the bus and train lines. She lived near the market of Sant Antoni, which was unpredictable and lively. Sundays at the book fair she'd check out antique photographs and old magazines. But when she made it onto the assembly committee she shut her mouth, and her smile turned stale.

She realized that Nela's gravelly voice at the assemblies and meetings and the threatening tone of her suggestions were elaborate productions for the benefit of Salvador, captain of the committee, a fling that kept on going. Nela turned on the charm, which is what men need, to be charmed and to charm in return... I remember well the Salvador side of Nela. Isi, the most intelligent and motivated girl in our class, let them be; she even indulged their fantasies of authority, happy to use the boy's influence as though it was her own. Isi, who Valentina thought so strong, wasn't smug. Valentina watched it all unfold, confused. She just didn't get Isi, didn't understand why she bent, bent until she split in two when men were around; first Salvador, then Bat and whoever after. She saw her friend Nela disappear. Nela, who she knew - despite all of Isi's objections, despite the feelings that Salvador inspired - was really a shy and generous person. He consumed one girl after another and Valentina couldn't do a thing. She shut up to avoid disappearing like Nela or doubling over like Isi. If she just shut up perhaps she'd be able to go back to being that girl who had arrived in Barcelona happy. If she just shut up perhaps she could avoid having the words of the revolution change her like they had Nela and Isi. And so Valentina just shut up.

They used the obligatory pseudonyms when they weren't talking only among themselves, but Bat they would always call Bat. It wasn't just any old nickname but rather a matter of the effect, well calculated by him, hoping to take things in another direction entirely, that the three of them felt the day they met him. Perhaps Isi was the one who first came up with his nom de guerre, but it fitted for all three of them like a tailored dress: he looked like a pop-art cartoon bat! And like that, Bat stuck. Hi Bat, they said to him the next time they saw him, which drew a laugh from him, and how he could laugh. They always shared a laugh with him during those sweet years of terror. Armouring themselves and, above all, finding a form to live in, for Nela's sake - or, better said, because of Nela - as Valentina thinks now, thirty years later. Somehow there was still that bond, that old and intimate wound formed when women become friends and still see in each other the girl that once was. Nameless wounds. Nela's face lost all its tenderness and her eyes focused on the apolitical, on all the old conventional customs. Hers was a catalytic reaction, an interior convulsion that led her to believe she was an indestructible warrior - Andromeda, Joan of Arc, Magdalena, it depended on the day. Her fear would vanish if the committee supported what she was saying and the captain looked at her, pleased. Then she'd be quiet; her face perfect then, classical. She'd head to the restroom, take out her small bag of creams and subsequently re-emerge looking even more precious. No one thought to call her bourgeois. She made it all look as natural as smoking. Valentina still sees her putting on her make-up. Me too. I still see her cold eyes, as though she weren't exactly making herself up, softening her look to heighten her beauty, but rather retouching the mask that allowed her to continue, to push forward. Mechanical, pleasureless gestures. Her eyes stare at Valentina from the mirror and then, yes, they become playful, taunting, friendly. Nela strikes poses like a mannequin and the two share a good laugh. To the other girls in the apartment, especially Isi, Nela is the image of conflict and freedom, hard like asphalt and so beautiful that she makes the rest of them feel small. They slept in the same room, in two bunk beds, and at times Valentina would hear her crying. One night, Nela turned over to ask Valentina if she was still a virgin. Valentina didn't see any reason to be reserved about the topic. Nela shot from her bed as though the police were knocking at the door. This has to be fixed right away! she said.

"Being a virgin is worse then being afraid of the police."

Valentina shrugged her shoulders and got up from her bunk.

"Being a virgin can make you suffer," Nela insisted.

One way to lose one's virginity, strongly considered by Nela, was the purely hygienic approach. Afterward could come the sex, the joy, the full moon... But it wasn't good to get carried away with losing your virginity and ending up in a relationship for the rest of your life because of it. Valentina knew that, right? How many women has this happened to in the world? It was way more interesting to plan out a deflowering sans attractions, sans sexual hunger - like an operation, just to make you feel a bit better. That way you avoid a whole host of complications. There's nothing more to expect. When all is said and done, you don't marry the surgeon who performs your appendectomy or the dentist who removes your wisdom teeth. On the other hand, heaven only knows what love is. They were all dead-set against the old, inherited forms of love that had given them life - debased by pigs and castrators all frustrated to the point of nausea. Nela said this all so easily, as though she'd just been reading the Surrealists. She had no idea who they were, and I really don't know what these three girlfriends would have said if they'd ever gotten around to reading them, back then - man, what a group they were... Thanks to a few newspapers and magazines, which were the mirrors of that moment, they took in as best they could what news would arrive from the frontiers. Those were tense years, tense like a traffic accident. Beds were always occupied, often with people who when they rose wouldn't say anything and wouldn't be seen again for months on end or indeed ever again. Theirs was a narrow path that had to be followed. Given all of that, the most hygienic way to lose one's virginity was to look for someone who would do it to you with no strings attached and that's it. Some asked their neighbour to do it or the first guy who passed on the street, which was an elegant and distanced sort of attitude that the oh-so-ironic postmodernists of today would have loved. The student apartments flourished: there were a ton of them; they were the breakthrough of the youth liberation movement, vestals and avant-gardists alike arrived at those most-famed loci of 1970s Barcelona. And they weren't filled with city kids, but rather with people from rural and other regional areas, and especially by young women, and our three were among them. I, your narrator, can promise you this.

The girls' and boys' apartments communicated with each other according to habit and custom, above all according to political allegiances. They also communicated due to some of the girls wanting the boys to do them the favour of deflowering them. Afterward the girls would explain it to themselves, draw conclusions, and compile lists with recommendations. One classmate - who wasn't on the committee and who, due to Valentina never saying a word, wasn't afraid of her, unlike the other girls who tended to fear the girls on the committee - told Valentina about her first time. She was a little older than the other girls in her year and so the whole virginity thing bothered her more, sort of like being the last one to get your period. One day she said enough was enough, that tonight was the night, that she would ask the first guy that went to the bar for a cup of coffee (and she said specifically a cup of coffee) if he would go to bed with her. And so it was. She didn't give any other details, she only smiled. It was the first time Valentina saw a girl actually satisfied with her first time. The first time seemed so dangerous, like being carted into the operating room. That's why Nela recommended the hygienic method. Without being aware of it, this notion fitted right in with the prior generation's way of doing things. As though bodies have to fight each other before learning to dance together.

When Valentina first met Pau she christened him Sweetskin and launched right into things; whatever would happen would happen. And he, more and more certain that he should keep cool with her, spent silent hour after silent hour in American Soda by her side, quiet while love was being born; Valentina was so quiet that Sweetskin finally took her by the hand and didn't let her go again even after he heard her speak. Words wishing they could be something more spilled out of him and returned her voice to her. Day after day through Carrer del Carme until reaching La Rambla, then walking along all of Les Rambles; afternoon after afternoon at American Soda. Love's reins were tangled and unwittingly made marvelous by the art of silence and by knowing that silence too is a bond, knowing this intuitively - love becoming a sea that has no explanation save for its hushed music, only music. Nothing was said about sex nor about how they spent their nights together. Nela and Isi protested and accused, like jilted lovers. What a semester. It makes me laugh. But I'm obliged to look at things this way, since I'm the storyteller of another life, another life that was also mine. We storytellers can choose what we tell only to a certain point - after all, we were given this rare gift, we had the impertinent luck to be tellers of the ineffable. To write is to transcribe, to tell is to recount, to retell. Valentina and Pau built an intimate home for themselves, a complicated home, without knowing the foundations, confiding only in silence, who made excuses for them when they entered rooms without knocking; they wove together, one into the other, whatever the image, whatever the mask, whatever the masquerade, whatever the intention, whatever tomorrow would be. Making her way through the streets with Pau, she decided to become a photographer. In bed with Pau, all she heard was music. Heaven had made for them the choice they should have made themselves, her I woke him from his oblivion, the music that they heard together, it was more than music.
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Translated from Catalan by Rowan Ricardo Phillips.

This story appears in Best European Fiction 2011, published by Dalkey Archive Press.

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Thursday, 21 April, 2011

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Issue 44 / May 2012

"One way to lose one's virginity, strongly considered by Nela, was the purely hygienic approach. Afterward could come the sex, the joy, the full moon... But it wasn't good to get carried away with losing your virginity and ending up in a relationship for the rest of your life because of it."