Believe me, I know very well what I’m saying here, I’m not just speculating, I’m no fortune-teller. One night two weeks ago I woke up at three in the morning, my mind addled, startled awake by the raw feelings that surprise us when our psychic defenses are down. I never even opened my eyes, but I flailed my arm over the sheet. I must have moved out of my usual area while I was sleeping, because I touched the cold left side of the bed where you never lie, where Helen used to be. It was that discomfiting feeling that made me think back more than ten years—the fifteen or twenty that have passed since I’ve seen Helen. So this is not a present-day report, this is only a story: my story with Helen, my story without you.
Only a couple of weeks ago, when I finally convinced myself that you’d left for good and weren’t coming back, that you might not even be reading my e-mails and were probably letting my messages languish in voice mail limbo, I made an annoying discovery: over the past five years, the friendships we’d begun at my initiative would fit on half a page. I had fewer than two hundred contacts on Facebook, and I didn’t even know how many of them were in the country. I accept every friend request I get: there are always people who give themselves odd pseudonyms, I have a bad memory, I don’t like to offend anyone, and you never know what contacts will be useful. So many people get brushed off unremarked from our lives like old hairs. If I had more time I’d find a better metaphor: old hairs are washed away but these guys stick around, starring in their own lives, with good or bad memories of us, a couple of out-of-date phone numbers, the blurred memory of our faces and some residual goodwill. In sum, files no one ever expects to reopen.
I turned to the social network in the hope it would revolutionize my single life—I couldn’t be seen with anyone contaminated by “us.” But the only thing I got (other than ads for cars, drinks, and insurance) was one dose of the past after another: people from La Salle, from ESADE, my sister’s friends. I was uncomfortable about returning to my school days. Sure, it had been a great time: the basketball games when everything goes your way, an unforgettable girlfriend, dinners to be framed and hung on the wall, parties it hurt to leave. But life must be lived in the present, it’s too wide and intense a terrain to let yourself go astray. So what are a bunch of big, forty-something boys—mature, healthy, and virile—doing digging into the past (so recent!) to find buddies who’d most likely been left behind for good reason?
I hardly went beyond the first greeting in my renewed friendships. I didn’t comment on people’s photos, didn’t update my status, and my only public photo was that close-up of you on a Neapolitan street, with your dark hair and an otherworldly smile, a photo you never let me show anyone—you were always so ashamed of your charm. And if I exchanged three or four messages with Pedro-María, it wasn’t out of any particular affection. It certainly wasn’t because, after I accepted his friend request, he wrote on his wall that he had finally gotten his best friend back—a phrase that made me gag. Rather, it was a conscious first step in my quest for experiences washed clean of you. I chose Pedro-María because, in spite of his enthusiasm, he was a fairly negligible burden: the emotional impact of seeing him again was pretty close to zero.
Our friendship had grown from a fertile soil of coincidences. It was my first year in Barcelona and, while we were waiting with our parents in the line of kids waiting to be distributed in classes, my mother told Pedro’s she thought we would become good friends. Mother was trying to help, to do whatever it took to give me my first friend, but the only reason I sat next to him was because we ended up with a teacher who arranged us by height rather than alphabetically. What a guy, Father Margarine. He always knew when you were silently mocking him, as if his eyes could cut right through your skull and read the words swirling inside. He used to tell me I would never amount to anything, and there was a time in my younger days when I’d have loved to track him down and give him a detailed rundown of my love life. But he’d be long dead by now. It’s crazy how those guys who were fifty when we were kids have all keeled over. Anyway, what would I have to boast about these days?
It was also because of our height that both Pedro and I were recruited for basketball, and three days a week, after practice and showers, we went home together while our mothers chattered about unfathomable feminine matters. If we were lucky they’d buy us a Swiss roll covered in cream and crowned with a cherry. And since I helped him with his math homework, and he got my technical drawings into a passable state, our classmates and teachers assumed we were closer than we really were. Actually, I distanced myself from him every chance I got. I was a vigorous kid, lively, the golden boy who always landed on his feet. And Pedro…well, Pedro was too skinny and angular, and I was never sure he had a motor of his own. He seemed content to feed off the surplus energy of another heart that had entered the world overflowing with vital juices. It was absurd that the powers above had bestowed a whole life on such a weak spirit. If you think about it, the house of our friendship was built from the materials supplied by my mother’s pushiness, Father Margarine’s idiosyncrasy, and a sport that favored the tall: all told, a shack of straw and reeds. How can you miss someone who’s been carried away on the wind of the years?
And now we come to my second motive: when I gave Pedro my mobile number, I was so miserable I would’ve thrown myself into a grave if its diggers could guarantee me in writing a bit of human company. But don’t start gloating just yet. Aside from your ignominious departure, something else was weighing on me: my stupendous health was starting to fail.
A fairly Siberian day had encroached on Barcelona’s climate. I was heading down Calle Muntaner, too furious to take shelter in a taxi. I’d just visited my mother, and if asking to borrow money once you’re over forty is already more debasing than at twenty (it’s harder to convince yourself the situation is temporary and things will soon get better), I can assure you it’s even worse when you’re given the runaround in reply. I’d found my mother livelier than usual, and the cause for her sudden euphoria—a newfound group of septuagenarian friends—should have made me happy. I was surprised, of course, but I didn’t waste my time inquiring about her new companions. I was too busy fuming over her refusal to advance me what I needed to avoid descending yet another rung down the proverbial ladder.
“Let’s talk about it in two weeks. I’m sure I’ll have an answer for you by then.”
I called my sister and got her voice mail, but it wouldn’t let me leave a single message; I called six times and was charged for each of them. I wasn’t wearing gloves or a scarf, and I went into one of those Pakistani or Brahmin shops that don’t pay taxes and will be the only kind of business to survive after the imminent crisis has devoured all the rest: the shops selling collectible stamps, the bookstores, tailors, and all the fine liquor stores. Who knows, maybe you ran off with a Syrian, but I’ll have to watch as the Eixample’s diverse commercial landscape simplifies into a bunch of yucca dispensaries, hotels, outlets, Chinese wholesale shops, and Internet cafés that smell like feet. I bought a big bag of chips—kettle-cooked, 2.35 euros—telling myself I needed the energy. I searched all my pockets, hoping to avoid breaking my fifty-euro note.
The fabulous power of saturated fats propelled me home, which obviously is no longer the charming apartment in Diagonal Mar I can’t afford without you. Now I have a low-ceilinged matchbox stuck on top of a building with no elevator and no central heating, where I moved because the landlord (a friend Vicente met in rehab) agreed to let me pay the deposit of 1,200 euros over three months, which are up next week. Also because, like an idiot, I bought into the romance of the word “attic,” even though the place faces inward and the living room windows look onto an alley featuring trash cans and the fluorescent lights of the Adam sauna, whose main service you can well imagine.
Calle Rocafort is half an hour from the beating heart of the Gayxample, and the common species around here is the old lady walking a repulsive dog that will start to lick your shoes and trouser leg if you don’t cross the street;
even so, the Adam is packed to the gills every Friday. It can’t hope to attract the queer VIPs that flock to Barcelona from northern Europe looking for easy sex or streets where they can walk openly hand in hand. But the Adam has no competition for the closeted flamers from Sants and La Bordeta, from dramatic Creu Coberta or that strange neighborhood that opens up as the Gran Via breaks away from Paral-lel (a street that in any other city would be called Perpendicular), so the managers have a guaranteed full house every weekend.
And while I juggle things so I can pay the VAT, the land tax, the water bill, the taxes for parking, garbage collection, and weed trimming in those neighborhood parks that only depress me the second I think of walking through them…not to mention the indirect taxes on tobacco, alcohol, and gas…all that municipal reverse dialysis that sucks the clean blood from my bank account and replaces it with an infusion of debt and requests for payment…while I try to stop them cutting off my electricity, or the water (full of lead particles and other carcinogens), I’m sure the folks at the Adam don’t have to cough up even half. Those fairies function like a mafia of mutual support—forget about the heart’s network of capillaries, that crowd is all irrigating each other. And don’t get me wrong, I’ve got nothing against dykes and even less against gays. But if on top of letting two-husband couples adopt kids, they get tax breaks to boot, just what do the rest of us get for being normal?
I gathered my courage to climb the stairs. If I hadn’t been ashamed at the thought of eating in front of the peepholes, I would have saved some chips to replenish my energy on the landings. Luckily, I was only two floors up when the pain hit me. It felt like fingers were plucking my nerve endings, pulling them toward the side where I felt my heart beating. I stood stock-still like a rodent surprised by artificial light, repeating “it’s OK, it’s OK.” Some afternoons I go swimming at the local pool, and if I push my body too hard nausea overcomes me when I grab the float to rest. I never thought it was important—my mental life is so tangled there’s bound to be the odd physical repercussion. I realized right away this was more aggressive. It wasn’t just the pain that coiled through my arm, ribs, and throat, leaving a burning wake behind it: what really scared me was the crystal-clear impression, as if my own myocardium were whispering it in my ear, that my heart was suffocating.
Somehow I hailed a taxi, and three blocks before we reached the Quirón hospital the pain started to fade. I ruled out going back home. I know I promised you I’d try to rein in my hypochondria, and no one could deny I’ve stopped confusing headaches with tumors or thinking every red spot is a fermenting melanoma. This time, though, I was sure something truly malignant was afoot in those veins of mine. This was serious; my sweat reeked of adult trauma.
If the universe were a fair place, I would have gotten something out of our separation. My spirit was swirling with enough foul gunk as it was—a scare would have been enough, there was no need for anything so drastic. If the world were at all rational, there would be a cap on suffering. Of course, if there were, Vicente wouldn’t have lost the hearing in his right ear, just like that. He was taking a walk, and suddenly it felt like his inner ear was sucking up all the sound and replacing it with a whistling that didn’t go away at night. The ENT specialist was encouraging: he might recover some of his hearing at any moment, though in the meantime he had to get used to living with tinnitus that kept him awake one in every three nights. They told him it could be caused by an allergy, a virus, the stress they use to explain everything, or a common antibiotic. So Vicente lived like a deaf man until the day he had a migraine that almost knocked him over in the middle of the street. In the hospital they drugged him and handed him off to a specialist who rummaged around in his head with lasers and X-rays until he reached a diagnosis: a benign tumor was growing between Vicente’s inner ear and his brain. They cut it out, because even in all its benignity the lump threatened to damage his temporal lobe. During the operation, with half Vicente’s skull open and his brain propped up in cotton and bloodied gauze, the surgeon slipped and nicked the nerve that regulates facial muscles on Vicente’s left side. He recovered 70 percent of his hearing, and maybe it’s even better now—we don’t see each other too much anymore. For one thing, there’s what he did to me with Helen. For another, it’s pretty off-putting talking to a guy who can’t move half his face. Doctors can go on all they like about odds, but just try telling the people who actually suffer that kind of weird illness. When it happens to you, it’s like you bet the farm on a single hand.
The doctor called me in. He used a remote that looked like a toy to lower the lights and run through slides with graphics and drawings of the heart. While I appreciated the staging—a gold star for public health—I was still too scared to take in the details. The jargon whizzed by and I couldn’t arrange the words into any sort of order, until finally I grasped the secret motive of his spiel: the guy was reprimanding me. He explained that the heart is an organ that cannot store oxygen, which entails—aside from embarrassment for whoever designed the thing—a constant demand for blood to move through the tangled channels of vessels toward our hungry organs. The complexity of the capillary network made me feel a little better about our genetic legacy—hats off to DNA’s handiwork.
My blood flow had been interrupted for half a minute, long enough to give a shock to my senses; a few more minutes and the tensed wall of my heart would have dried into dead tissue. Luckily (oh, so luckily) the flow had stabilized. It was hard to accept that I was actually seeing the inside of my artery, or to understand what it meant that it was only 30 percent clear. The rest was obstructed by a plaque of lipids and fat, cellular or molecular muck—I wasn’t sure which scale we were talking about, or what was really going on inside me, under the skin covering my hands and thighs and ribs.
“It’s like the mixture of hair, soap, and dead skin that clogs up the shower drain.”
This was the example that disgusting man gave me, and I smiled as if I had some familiarity with that filth. If my artery wall hadn’t held up, some member of his class would have sliced through the hairy layers and fat of my chest, then split my sternum with a surgical saw and conducted a life-or-death operation on my aging heart.
“One might say you were lucky.”
You know me, my appetites are basic but clear: I asked for something to eat.
“That’s part of the problem.”
I reacted like a child playing Parcheesi who sees the dice land on the combination that spells his defeat, but waits a few seconds to give reality the chance to backtrack. In the end I took it in, and the explanation was striking: from my myocardium to my pulmonary veins and optic nerves, my entire system was filthy and unstable with the toxic residue of forty years of extravagance.
“We are what we eat. You have to be careful, and the best thing you can do is go on a diet.”
To tell the truth, this doctor inspired confidence: he was around my age, but was the kind of guy who’s already given up on his appearance. With a hairless skull and slack skin over the flesh of his cheeks, his attractiveness was limited to the flashes of intelligence in his expression. But still, I wasn’t about to let him call me “diabetic” and be so pleased about it. That he was a doctor and I had no goddamn idea what I was talking about was neither here nor there—society is democratic now, and you can’t just go around imposing your point of view on people. I decided I’d investigate on my own: Wikipedia and the Discovery Channel. Because I couldn’t make head or tails of the diagnosis. In school we’d always had one or two diabetics: white as marble, shooting up insulin like junkies in training, useless at sports, and condemned to eat peas and cauliflower forever. I was never one of them—you only had to look at me to know that—and no one was going to rewrite my own history.
“It’s adult onset. Your pancreas is deteriorating.”
“You might find yourself getting more tired than normal. You might have nausea or vomiting, and polyphagia, polydipsia and polyuria, and prickling of the skin.”
&nb
sp; “Your body will have trouble forming scars if you cut yourself, that’s another problem.”
“You are going to have to take care of yourself, Mr. Miró-Puig.”
Taking care of myself meant giving up, first of all (the doctor had enough empathy to ration the bad news), fried potatoes, nuts (innocent nuts!), sweets, alcohol (the doctor knows that the list of exceptions here will be long), tobacco (I don’t smoke), meat and seafood binges, and bingeing in general (even lettuce has too much carbohydrate): all the things that provide an ounce of bodily pleasure. Sure, he didn’t put a limit on sex, but your departure had left me without an accomplice—though toward the end our bedroom hadn’t exactly been a carnival—and I wasn’t feeling up to finding a girlfriend.
Divorce Is in the Air Page 3