You let the months slide by because you’re confident those people will still be there when you get in touch, and by the time you finally get around to it they’ve changed too much or are too unchanged, expecting old gestures that you’ve lost, recalling aspects of you that no longer match the person you’ve convinced yourself you are, a person they no longer recognize.
The time goes too fast or too slow and one day you find yourself with old photographs, unsent e-mails, unfulfilled plans, the whole affair becomes too dense to flow freely, you no longer know what to do with the distance, how to grasp it. Friendship is rooted in shared activity, it’s nourished by everyday challenges. Keeping up to date, notifying each other of changes, sharing projects that prevent the erosion of your shared substrate. But to remain close to the same people for so many years and not grow apart—it’s a bit repugnant. We’re charmed by the idea but we grow tired of the same faces.
What did I matter to Saw? What interest could he have in a childless, divorced, chronically ill man? Why would he care about the layers time had deposited on my body? The lesson I’d learned from the heart scare was that we will never be as young as we are right now, but Pedro-María wasn’t interested in having a forty-something guy remind him how precious his remaining healthy days were. He wanted me to help him immerse himself in the past, the time of promise: his memory of the past, and the past of his dreams.
Nothing good could come of this meeting. I had made a mistake; our roots had rotted from damp.
“I’m going to take a piss.”
It was good timing, but I wasn’t faking: one of the side effects of the pills I was taking to thin my blood was diuretic. The drug liquefied my fat and sent streams of toxins to my bladder. I’d lived for years without knowing that the walls of that gourd grew slack with use. No more pissing before going out at night and holding it till dawn. These days I need to go every half hour, and I never really feel empty. I’ve had to overcome my fears and make my way into the toilets of bars, restaurants, cinemas, and burger joints, where surprises left by other ghastly people, intentionally or not, await me. We old folks are truly adventurous.
The bathroom at La Brasa was clean, courtesy of a gallon of bleach dumped over the floor; my eyes watered. I turned on the tap, and I had gotten so used to the role of senescent that I was surprised to see in the mirror the skin of a still-taut face, healthy lips, my wavy golden hair. I scrubbed my hands with soap and water; men who only wash afterward don’t appreciate their most delicate part. I unzipped my fly and confirmed the mismatch between the urgency I felt and the paltry amount of urine. Going for a piss is hell: all that wasted time while you wait for it to finally dribble out.
I went back to the dining room and the view was still crummy, but the light slid honeyed and cold over the table, and my glass shone with greasy fingerprints. Pedro had knocked back what was left of the wine, and he looked at me with crystalline eyes: he didn’t wear contacts.
“Should we order another bottle?”
I missed my chance to tell him my body had forgotten how to process cholesterol, that the residues of that wine, the slab of red meat with its blackened edges, would build up like gravel and threaten to burst my heart, or blow a blood vessel in my brain and leave me a half-wit.
“Don’t let me stop you.”
Then he told me about how tired he was of working for other people, how sick of trading his time for a subsistence wage. Also, he’d had enough of programming, designing websites for guys who were unable to learn the basics themselves. He told me he wanted time for himself, that when he headed out with his Nikon he felt he was better, healthier, a good person. He told me that ever since signing his first employment contract he’d been waiting for the ideal moment to dedicate himself entirely to photography: he had a real feel for light, he felt his talent deserved recognition. He’d tried to steal hours from work, but by the time he left the office he was too tired, he couldn’t find a second wind. He was swamped by the shopping and the washing and all the other tasks that pile up, oblivious to the artistic spark that burned within him.
“I’m not fooling myself anymore. The perfect time is never going to come. You have to force things along, you have to dare to jump from the train while it’s moving.”
He gave me his Instagram.
“That’s what I do. That’s my calling.”
He told me not to miss the comments, which would show me what his photographs evoked in other aficionados. Their words were injections of energy that kept him from giving in to the zombie life, the office life, the life all the rest of us lead.
“I’m tired of dreaming of a shadow life. I want to attack it head-on, get inside it, live at its center.”
He told me he planned to ask for fewer hours and less pay, or at least to be absolved of all the meetings: staff, department, sales, purchasing, empathy and synergy trainings. He told me that at big corporations they keep track of every minute you spend having breakfast, going upstairs to smoke a cigarette, or to the bathroom.
“It’s despicable.”
He told me that there is life throbbing within each of us, and we have the chance to feed it. He told me that our forties are a creative decade, that he felt he had the strength and imagination to reinvent himself, and he wasn’t going to let anyone get in his way. He wasn’t about to stay stuck in the hole they’d dug for people like him: people who had gone to school, fulfilled their responsibilities, people who let themselves be hoodwinked. He told me it was a good moment for entrepreneurs, that the atmosphere was charged with energy and banks were giving credit away.
“I don’t know about you, but I can’t waste any more time.”
He told me he was sick of being tested. They demanded an output he couldn’t keep up with, his nerves were as exposed as stripped wires (and he reached out his arm as he said it, as if I could see right through his skin). The envy he felt, which diminished him and left him dwelling on his own insignificance, wasn’t a sign of small-mindedness—it would disappear once he’d embraced a life equal to his ambitions. He was willing to live on as little as it took; he felt compensated because a good photograph brought beauty into the world. He was going back to basics: money in his pocket, straightforward adventure—that’s why he’d sought out old friends online who were single or divorced, undomesticated boys who weren’t going to surrender, who wouldn’t give up until the final whistle blew. And that’s why he didn’t ask anything about me: he had me all figured out.
“No one can understand me like you.”
Why would I understand him? Because we’d shared eight years of classes, a hundred training sessions, a thousand physical exertions? We’d had similar experiences, but they had gone through different heads that they’d imbued with different characters, before being integrated into constellations of events, fears, and expectations we could never share.
“Of course I understand you, Pedro, I understand you perfectly.”
He invited me to have another coffee, he invited me to take a shot, he invited me on a walk, he invited me to have a drink, he knew a stupendous gin bar at the foot of the mountain, he could take me on the back of the motorbike. If I’d proposed going to the dog track he would have accepted—any plan struck him as better than going home. Even though I thought Pedro was a cretin, a certain congeniality was starting to pervade our conversation, a dangerous camaraderie that smoothed over any friction. One more step and there’d be no turning away from that friendship. I was saved from dragging out the night any longer because I find it vaguely gay to ride on the back of a motorbike, and also because of the lingering fear left by my heart scare; I was going to behave. We said good-bye, exchanging assurances that we’d never let our friendship lapse again. Then I told him I’d lost my mobile, and I switched a digit in the address I gave him.
I watched as he got on the bike, looking for all the world like a string of sausages on a hook. I turned around and headed uphill to avoid his little wave. Once I was alone I walked—gastric fluids sloggin
g away at the bolus in my stomach—through empty lots as spacious as hangars, down unexpected slopes, across bridges and down blind stairways, along streets so open and deserted it was like there’d been an outbreak of a deadly virus. The alcohol began to dissipate, leaving a naked remorse for having injected myself with that hunk of meaty blubber; the lipid polyps must be playing deadly Tetris in my veins. Joan-Marc and Pedro-María, Pedro-María and Joan-Marc: those compound names are hilarious. I wouldn’t be giving him a second chance—that farce ended right there. Friendship is overrated, it makes you overvalue the past, and nostalgia is a leech that sucks the blood from your brain. As soon as I’d gotten rid of the weight in my stomach, that very day, I’d get started on a girlfriend.
Once I’d reached my building on Rocafort and made it up the stairs, I could just picture my heart slumped exhausted in my chest, so I spent the rest of the evening on the couch, flipping through channels, all fifty-two, and back again to the beginning. I got sick of cooking shows, tennis matches, skinny teenagers shaking their asses, talk shows, movies that were half over, those dramas that always end with a cliff-hanger, and the news feed on repeat, programmed by the CIA. My neighbor had gone on vacation and this time he’d remembered to turn his router off, and I knew all my DVDs by heart. Nor could I sleep with the thunder of taxis and buses from the Gran Via, so I got up and poured myself a proxy: a tumbler full of cold water with lemon. I’ve read somewhere that taste is a mental construct, that those yogis who spend their lives upside down have such control over their enzymes and taste buds that they can call up at will the flavor of crunchy chicken wings, or a curry, or whatever they eat in Tibet. And I’m not saying that a good placebo can’t cure a cold, or appendicitis or AIDS—I won’t be the one to deny the power of positive thinking. I’m just saying that my own brain let me down when I asked it to imbue that tap water, between the insipid foretaste and the chlorine aftertaste, with just a hint of Tanqueray.
Thinking about Helen helped me get over my state of prostrate self-indulgence. Only a fool like her would ever decide to attempt a reconciliation in that storehouse for old fossils weighted down by arthritis, paresis, hearing aids, and the metal scars of pacemakers stuck into the flesh of their hearts. First wives are not the best topic of conjugal conversation, and you were a bit naive when I first met you, so we didn’t talk about Helen much. Though I must admit it was delightful to have my two ribs together in the same scene on the stage of my imagination—one of the tricks that makes having the thing worthwhile.
And at first glance, you wouldn’t have thought Helen held many secrets: a stupendous blonde, predictable as an innocent joke. You got more of a sense of her ambition with every breath she took…people are so blank at first, and they conform so well to our stereotypes…Of course, you can take even the dullest person around, stir her up with your words, and before long you’ll see rising to the surface all kinds of feelings and ideas that flow from her unique blend of interests, and you’d never have known they were there. There’s a private universe in every single vessel of flesh taking up its space on sidewalks, in chairs, on buses. Billions of brains pumping all kinds of mental matter. Nature overdid it with us—we’re a real waste of resources.
One of those brains was atop my shoulders twenty years ago as I went walking in Madrid. It was spring, and I went into a fruit shop with a craving to sink my teeth into the sweet pulp of a peach—and there you have the kind of boy I used to be. I’d received my master’s diploma in the mail, and I’d hung it beside my degree in management and business administration; I’d just bought myself a TAG Heuer with a round black face. Although I wasn’t the ambitious type, it wouldn’t be totally inaccurate to say I was in Madrid for work, only it wasn’t the kind of job that involves alarm clocks, metros, and salaries, or coming home at the end of the day with a brain turned to mush. I’d heard tales of that fantastic world, and my family had all concurred it wasn’t for me. My job involved meeting with Dad’s veteran clients: during lunches I wore a listening face, and if they asked me any questions, I replied that I’d rather understand the ins and outs of the business before making any decisions—they really liked that phrase. They introduced me to their kids and I met new people every night. We could spend two hundred euros on a single dinner—hell, on one bottle of wine. I let myself be carried along; I had no intention of letting Dad’s “business” embitter me; I was in Madrid at the end of May, my favorite city at the prettiest time of year.
They welcomed me into a circuit of house parties and we went out every night. I pretended to understand the in-jokes, the obscure allusions. In every little group we tossed around a set of names that it felt good to criticize, accuse, and belittle. People would collapse from boredom if we couldn’t bitch about those who aren’t here.
We’d stay seated until dessert, then drink coffee and digestifs standing up, in shirtsleeves, mingling freely in the space that yawned between the balcony and the terrace. The nights were starting to grow warm, and the parties were held with the windows open to the noise from the street: fragments of conversation, wafting laughter, improvised songs that filled the room with a sense of rushed delight. The little groups traded members, and it was always strange to see the moment when the various cliques melted together in a jolly wave that washed over the whole room before subsiding.
Vicente’s apartment wasn’t up to the standard of Rétiz’s or Álvarez del Valle’s, but since his father’s widow traveled all the time, we convinced ourselves that the relative restrictions on space forced us to be more selective. Plus, Vicente was the kind who would work for it; that evening he’d covered his floor with a felt cloth, and in every corner stood a candelabra giving off a spicy aroma—incense or sandalwood—that almost concealed the impregnated nicotine. I assumed it was another vintage party, which were all the rage then. We were like a generation gone astray, puzzled by our own era; unable to give it a recognizable iconography, we flirted instead with decades past. Still, I was thrown by the gigantic pillows and the little Buddha statues. Vicente cleared it up with one of his unctuous phrases:
“It’s an ethnic party.”
Every night, after the girls and the more sporadic guests went home to sleep, we’d have a coda to the party: we cleaned up plates and glasses, straightened the lamps, we conjured spells against hangovers with cold water and amphetamines that we ventured down to the street to buy. It was all very “hail fellow well met”; when you have a comfortable couch and the caress of well-tailored clothes, it’s hard to convince yourself of life’s seriousness. It was too distant, off in a place I never planned to go, one not made for Vicente or for me: after all, someone had to benefit from our fathers’ efforts.
In a way those were still university parties (Vicente hadn’t quite finished), and names of students figured on the lists of possible invitees. So I suppose I heard about Helen before I ever saw her—something about the way she shook her mass of blonde hair when she laughed, her peculiar pronunciation, and her scandalous way of looking a person up and down. Her gaze didn’t creep along over skin and cloth like the eyes of those little English spiders. No, Helen’s pupils slurped down the world in gulps. She’d come to Spain on an athletic scholarship—hurdles, long jump, something like that. Imagine the kind of details that get tacked on when you add alcohol to intoxication: you let rip, box people up in a comic, improvised profile; no one is so respectable you can’t cut them down with words.
So I guess we invited her because we liked her way of savoring Spanish words and the way her pallid freckles danced when her expression changed; because she had caught my friends’ attention and now they wanted to talk to her far from the cafeteria and classrooms, in a territory foreign to Helen and familiar to them. Thanks to an annoying back sprain I got as I was leaving a dull meeting with Passgard, I missed the first evening that Helen spent among us. Vicente had told me about how she’d been unable to respect people’s personal space, but no one prepared me for the uninhibited relationship she had with her prizewinning
anatomy, an ease on display every time she went for a canapé or another glass. In a country full of boys and girls defined by habits of expressive restraint (we were eager to get naked but didn’t know where to start), Helen could only astonish us.
When I imagine those parties where the furniture fades into the background, I see myself standing among people whose names and features blur together. Entire hours have vanished, and what a bore it would be if we ever had to relive the past in real time. But Helen was sure she had seen me one night while I was holding court, seated like a Chinese emperor (an odd association) and attended by two beautiful girls (she herself was feeling ugly that day), sipping my gin haughtily, my sunglasses still on (it was cool then not to take them off inside). She didn’t even notice the ironed handkerchief I’d tucked into my breast pocket (in imitation of and homage to Dad), nor the toasty shade of my jacket, nor the waves drawn in the cloth of my white shirt with a very fine blue thread—sartorial details I’d calculated with the meticulousness of a nightingale choosing branches, leaves, and plants for its nest: mating rituals.
So I guess she was already thinking about me when she leaned against the upright piano as if it were the arm of a couch, and I guess her defiant smile was meant for me. I caught her turning her head several times—she seemed fascinated by her image in the mirror. She was having one of those evenings (later I learned to recognize them by the vibration of the air around her) when she felt comfortable in her skin, when the contours of her body coincided with her spirit’s intentions. She seemed to harbor a patient fury—a girl with a mind boiling furiously. If she looked so relaxed it was because she’d granted herself some time to calculate what her ambitions were worth, and where she should channel the energy she generated with those healthy young thighs. She was after someone who would help her propel her life forward, and judging from the way she looked at the light striking the folds of my jacket, she was reaching a conclusion. That’s why she exhaled the smoke so slowly (enough that she thought she did it slowly); that’s why those dark corpuscles in the blue of her irises were set in motion. It was something subtler and less intuitive than rating my attractiveness—she was trying to see herself through my body, catch a glimpse of what her future would be like if she were to mingle it with mine.
Divorce Is in the Air Page 5