Ah, but then…the other side reveals itself. After Wright is settle in the pension, the two young men who’d led him through the Cathedral on their way to the inn took him out for the evening to….well. And here all the various threads are woven together in the confusing, conflicted tapestry of Spanish society that Wright encounters:
I ordered her a beer. Through André I learned that her name was Isabel, that she had traveled in France and Germany. She did not smile and her eyes were like green agates.
“Pesetas para los niños,” she begged me. “Money for my children.”
I gave her five pesetas. She wore a silver medallion of the Virgin.
“Catholic?” I asked her.
“I no Catholic,” she growled.
“Por qué ça?” I asked, mixing languages and pointing to the medallion. “Why that?”
She shrugged. André and Miguel were furious; their faces darkened with displeasure.
“Vilaine fille!” André spat. “Sale fille! Va-t-en!“
Isabel understood and tried desperately to hang on to me.
“You mí telephone, sí?” she suggested.
I extended my notebook and indicated that she should write down her name and telephone number.
“Me no write,” she said, looking at me as though I had accused her of a crime.
Pilly, who had been hovering in the background and overhearing what had been said, now came forward and exhibited her golden medallion of the Virgin.
“Mi Católica,” she said proudly.
“Bon,” André approved.
Pilly and Isabel glared at each other; then André, over my protests, waved Isabel away from the table. Both boys shook their heads, indicating that they would not tolerate Isabel’s anti-Catholic attitude. To be a prostitute was bad, but to be a prostitute who was not Catholic was worse….
The atmosphere was getting more and more strained. André and Miguel were feeling that the tables had been turned; in one half hour I had plunged my hands into Spanish life and had brought up poverty, fear, prostitution, illiteracy–and all of this was but half a mile from the bishop’s rotting body in the glass coffin, the white marble basin in which Columbus’s Indians had been baptized. This morning I had been the lost heathen standing in the need of being civilized and saved; now it was I who was feeling the tissue and texture of their lives and they were ashamed and angry.
I drove slowly toward my pension. Poor, “bad,” illiterate girls…. I glanced at the tall, dark middle-class apartment buildings and hotels that loomed to left and right of me; they were filled with respectable Catholic families in which all the women were “good.” The sailors, soldiers, the men who were married to “good” women and the young sons in “good” families became the clientele of “bad” girls….
And to complete the circle – later, Wright visits with Andre in his family home and meets his fiancee:
Being a virgin, evidently, was a kind of profession in itself. It seemed that she stayed home with her mother and was never allowed out except in the company of the immediate members of the family, a situation that constituted proof of her virginity. I understood now why she had been so wonder-struck by me; she had not had an opportunity to meet many men, and I was, moreover, a different sort of man: brown…. Her being a virgin was all in the world she knew, felt, and thought about. Hence, each man that she saw she regarded as a possible agent of defloration, an agent which, no doubt, she longed to meet and embrace. Her living the role of a virgin had steeped her personality with an aura of sex and she unconsciously attracted men to her body with more definiteness than even a professional prostitute. Her entire outlook was one of waiting to be despoiled, longing for the day when she could shed her burdensome and useless role, when she could live a free and normal life like the older women about her.
Suddenly something became terribly clear to me: André was aware that he was sacredly pledged to marry this girl whose sole value was centered in her virginity. When in her presence he could not help but be conscious of her longing to be deflowered, and he responded emotionally and psychologically to this ardent wish of hers, but he could do nothing about it. He had to worship her from afar and wait until he had money enough to marry her with the ceremonial blessings of the Church. And that was why he had to go so often to seek the “bad” women in the dark and fetid alleyways, and it was why, in his confused and embattled heart, he hated those women and yet had to be with them. Those prostitutes were the iron-clad guarantee that his fiancée was and would remain a virgin until marriage. But it was a torturous emotional and psychological price that André had to pay for so dubious a value.
***
Wright’s take on prostitution in this intensely externally Catholic country is that because the Church’s framework of sin overwhelms everything else, it makes thinking about prostitution as a social problem impossible – in other words, Wright’s take is that since the Church teaches that all of this is inevitable in the fallenness of human life…there’s nothing to be done about it.
All part of what he sees as a Catholic fatalism that impedes change and progress.
It’s thought provoking – that line between acceptance of human frailty and the complexity of human life – and resignation and helplessness.
Again. Worth thinking about, si?
Charlotte was Both 