Maria complained to God, but, in the end, she got used to menstruating. She could not, however, get used to the boy’s absence, and kept blaming herself for her own stupidity in running away from the very thing she most wanted. The day before the new term began, she went to the only church in town and vowed to the image of St Anthony that she would take the initiative and speak to the boy.
The following day, she put on her smartest dress, one that her mother had made specially for the occasion, and set off to school, thanking God that the holidays had finally ended. But the boy did not appear. And so another agonising week passed, until she found out, through some schoolfriends, that he had left town.
‘He’s gone somewhere far away,’ someone said.
At that moment, Maria learned that certain things are lost forever. She learned too that there was a place called ‘somewhere far away’, that the world was vast and her own town very small, and that, in the end, the most interesting people always leave. She too would like to leave, but she was still very young. Nevertheless, looking at the dusty streets of the town where she lived, she decided that one day she would follow in the boy’s footsteps. On the nine Fridays that followed, she took communion, as was the custom in her religion, and asked the Virgin Mary to take her away from there.
She grieved for a while too and tried vainly to find out where the boy had gone, but no one knew where his parents had moved to. It began to seem to Maria that the world was too large, that love was something very dangerous and that the Virgin was a saint who inhabited a distant heaven and didn’t listen to the prayers of children.
Three years passed; she learned geography and mathematics, she began following the soaps on TV; at school, she read her first erotic magazine; and she began writing a diary describing her humdrum life and her desire to experience first-hand the things they told her about in class – the ocean, snow, men in turbans, elegant women covered in jewels. But since no one can live on impossible dreams – especially when their mother is a seamstress and their father is hardly ever at home – she soon realised that she needed to take more notice of what was going on around her. She studied in order to get on in life, at the same time looking for someone with whom she could share her dreams of adventure. When she had just turned fifteen, she fell in love with a boy she had met in a Holy Week procession.
She did not repeat her childhood mistake: they talked, became friends and started going to the cinema and to parties together. She also noticed that, as had happened with the first boy, she associated love more with the person’s absence than with their presence: she would miss her boyfriend intensely, would spend hours imagining what they would talk about when next they met, and remembering every second they had spent together, trying to work out what she had done right and what she had done wrong. She liked to think of herself as an experienced young woman, who had already allowed one grand passion to slip from her grasp and who knew the pain that this caused, and now she was determined to fight with all her might for this man and for marriage, determined that he was the man for marriage, children and the house by the sea. She went to talk to her mother, who said imploringly:
‘But you’re still very young, my dear.’
‘You got married to my father when you were sixteen.’
Her mother preferred not to explain that this had been because of an unexpected pregnancy, and so she used the ‘things were different then’ argument and brought the matter to a close.
The following day, Maria and her boyfriend went for a walk in the countryside. They talked a little, and Maria asked if he wanted to travel, but, instead of answering the question, he took her in his arms and kissed her.
Her first kiss! How she had dreamed of that moment! And the landscape was special too – the herons flying, the sunset, the wild beauty of that semi-arid region, the sound of distant music. Maria pretended to draw back, but then she embraced him and repeated what she had seen so often on the cinema, in magazines and on TV: she rubbed her lips against his with some violence, moving her head from side to side, half-rhythmic, half-frenzied. Now and then, she felt the boy’s tongue touch her teeth and thought it felt delicious.
Then suddenly he stopped kissing her and asked:
‘Don’t you want to?’
What was she supposed to say? Did she want to? Of course she did! But a woman shouldn’t expose herself in that way, especially not to her future husband, otherwise he would spend the rest of his life suspecting that she might say ‘yes’ that easily to anything. She decided not to answer.
He kissed her again, this time with rather less enthusiasm. Again he stopped, red-faced, and Maria knew that something was very wrong, but she was afraid to ask what it was. She took his hand, and they walked back to the town together, talking about other things, as if nothing had happened.
That night – using the occasional difficult word because she was sure that, one day, everything she had written would be read by someone else, and because she was convinced that something very important had happened – she wrote in her diary:
When we meet someone and fall in love, we have a sense that the whole universe is on our side. I saw this happen today as the sun went down. And yet if something goes wrong, there is nothing left! No herons, no distant music, not even the taste of his lips. How is it possible for the beauty that was there only minutes before to vanish so quickly?
Life moves very fast. It rushes us from heaven to hell in a matter of seconds.
The following day, she talked to her girlfriends. They had all seen her going out for a walk with her future ‘betrothed’. After all, it is not enough just to have a great love in your life, you must make sure that everyone knows what a desirable person you are. They were dying to know what had happened, and Maria, very full of herself, said that the best bit was when his tongue touched her teeth. One of the other girls laughed.
‘Didn’t you open your mouth?’
Suddenly everything became clear – his question, his disappointment.
‘What for?’
‘To let him put his tongue inside.’
‘What difference does it make?’
‘It’s not something you can explain. That’s just how people kiss.’
There was much giggling, pretend pity and gleeful feelings of revenge amongst these girls who had never had a boy in love with them. Maria pretended not to care and she laughed too, although her soul was weeping. She secretly cursed the films she had seen in the cinema, from which she had learned to close her eyes, place her hand on the man’s head and move her head slightly to right and left, but which had failed to show the essential, most important thing. She made up the perfect excuse (I didn’t want to give myself at once, because I wasn’t sure, but now I realise that you are the love of my life) and waited for the next opportunity.
She didn’t see him until three days later, at a party in a local club, and he was holding the hand of a friend of hers, the one who had asked her about the kiss. She again pretended that she didn’t care, and survived until the end of the evening talking with her girlfriends about film stars and about other local boys, and pretending not to notice her friends’ occasional pitying looks. When she arrived home, though, she allowed her universe to crumble; she cried all night, suffered for the next eight months and concluded that love clearly wasn’t made for her and that she wasn’t made for love. She considered becoming a nun and devoting the rest of her life to a kind of love that didn’t hurt and didn’t leave painful scars on the heart – love for Jesus. At school, they learned about missionaries who