“I’m going to be your sister’s best friend, John. Your sister needs a best friend, there’s no denying that.”
My sister’s favorite activity was keeping a detailed catalogue of my defects and mistakes. At some point she’d decided that I was an utterly hopeless idiot, and in spite of the condescension she’d found it necessary to display ever since, her sentence had been liberating for both of us. It was strange, if you think about it. We were both children of a crazy mother and a suicidal father (the very same ones, in fact!), and we’d both unexpectedly been left penniless: we should have gotten along quite well. The fact that I’d ended up painted as the hopeless one and she as levelheaded was a dirty trick of the gender distribution of roles. It was me (so much for any feminist sentiment) they sent as the family’s representative, me who stood before the board of specialists who bled us with the fees they charged for exercising their incompetence. “Circumstances,” they said. “Our hands are completely tied,” they said. And they called themselves professionals! Seriously, I’d been brought up to manage my life within a range of pretty comfortable circumstances. They hadn’t prepared me to survive in the wild. I was created (and I say this swallowing my pride) to be a comic character. I didn’t even hear the death knell when they recommended I invest in cheese.
But you’ll hear no more from me about that. Let the gossip dogs scrabble at other graves; the behind-the-scenes story of the Miró-Puigs’ descent into the pestilential waters of modest circumstances is the part I’ve decided to skip, while Helen and I dance in close-up. My mental well-being depends on me keeping some limits on the humiliation, and I will not…
Lawyers, administrators, consultants, notaries (words whose common root is “shamelessness”) put food on their tables by not solving your problems! Imagine if a “good” dentist, one who could afford a clinic on Via Augusta, was the one with the audacity to hide from his “patient” (this wit of language!) that he let his molars rot rather than lose him as a “customer.” You turn to specialists thinking that with their vast knowledge they can help you, and you’re taken in by con artists, cheats, illusionists, snake-oil salesmen, armchair generals, suit-and-tie-wearing malingerers (and what ties!); the only thing they give you are doses of hope, and we love hope so much that we send numbers full of zeros to their accounts, so they can assure us that our affairs are looking healthy and beautiful. I said to them: “You people are professionals, advise me how to put my business back on a good footing. And while you’re at it, please resuscitate my father.” Which they heard as: “Masters of illusion, please lessen my agony by helping me to dispense with my money as quickly as possible!” So many years at school, the institute, at university, those shoddy master’s programs….What would really have helped me was for someone to teach me how to manage my turbulent desires, my rebellious body, the maddening ideas I had and the sensory overload that one of these days will drown me—a reality tutor, now that would be priceless.
While they were taking what they imagined as my manly strength of character and squeezing it for all it was worth, it took my sister three months to find the man of her dreams. Mauro—get this!—Mauro Sanz Popovych, born of a mother from Ukraine or somewhere worse, was a professional jeweler and had a look about him that justified resurrecting the word “namby-pamby” in everyday conversation. I swear I made (almost) no comment, I tried not to raise an eyebrow. If I betrayed anything it was down to the spontaneous twitchings of strange muscles in my eyelids and my chin. It’s also true that Popo really needed no comment.
“You choose your girlfriends according to impractical criteria. You look for physical qualities, or intellectual ones—although not with this latest girl. And don’t go telling me how my husband is worse or you’ll be stepping in some shit. I know there’s nothing exceptional about him—that’s part of what makes him an excellent companion. You can’t base a marriage on an interesting person and expect it not to fail. People you’ve truly loved become annoying once your sights are set somewhere else. My motto is: leave the most interesting stuff for outside the house. I’m in no danger with Mauro, I assure you, his talent is to be insipid. And just so you’re clear I’m not at all jealous of Helen’s ‘glow,’ I’d encourage you to go find yourself a real teenager. Helen’s already showing her age in those big hips, she’s like a double bass. And of course I care about you, Juan, but you know how my life is, I don’t have the time to tell you all this tactfully.”
She’d jumped from our family ship as it was going down, to become the wife of a social-climbing jeweler. That’s when she started working in her current field: something between earring design and pastry criticism, it’s never been entirely clear. Like all women tend to do when a situation gets hairy and grows claws, she let herself fall happily back into the old chauvinistic routines: cultivate your femininity, become deserving of love—the world is full of men who don’t turn up their noses at flab, at bad tempers, at spoiled-little-girl whims, so just let yourself be seduced by a handsome gentleman (ha!) who won’t save you with a kiss, but with the wind in the sails of his burgeoning career. If your bedroom isn’t as exciting as that of some mechanic’s favorite girl when he comes home hungry from the garage, we can fix that: it makes more sense to change bodies than houses. Not to mention it’s much cheaper.
Of course, it was one thing for my canny sister to succeed in keeping the penthouses, cars, vacations, and the butchers at the Planas plastic surgery clinic…and quite another to be blind to the yawning gulf between the cushy life she would have lived with the money we’d thought Dad had and, well…life with Mauro. There you have a plausible reason for why her savage hatred for our father has never cooled. And after Dad packed in this worldly life, she started channeling all that contempt my way. She probably figured out pretty quickly that I was not the hero destined to rescue us from Dad’s tangled legacy; she lost all respect for me, and she didn’t mind undermining me in public.
“You should have learned by now to shut up, Juan. The least you can do is not interrupt when someone serious is talking.”
The truth is that I went along with everything my sister said. I didn’t rebel, I never even considered arguing with her, because there was a gaping and sorrowful mandorla spread open between the two of us, and also because I’ve never felt comfortable in the role of abuser.
In short: my sister suffered from a problem that would keep her from ever being a mother. She’d inherited a variant of Dad’s intestinal pestilence (like the white birthmarks that parents pass on to their children through their genes, depositing them on different areas of their bodies), which, as luck would have it, ended up in her reproductive organs. Salpingitis, gonorrhoea, I never really knew. It was one of those stories that go on and on, half hidden, half disguised by suppositions, misunderstandings, imaginings, partial truths. I know they took her into the hospital to yank out her ovaries or fallopian tubes. I remember it well, because I felt ashamed of the contrast with my own virile health: the splendid immune system that expelled viruses without any feverish scenes, my stupendous stomach busy secreting liters of gastric juices that no feast could withstand. I was proud to be equipped with genitals so receptive to sight and sound, so easy to bring to attention. No hiding inside the lips of any pelvic wound for me, no labyrinth of feminine dampness and complications: the impurity, the vapor, the viscosity. But I did want to kill that quack who I heard say under his breath:
“Female castration.”
The last time my sister hugged me and cried on my shoulder (in a hospital gown so thin it barely shielded me from the chubby touch of her arms), it was because she’d dreamed of a phantom birth. No fetus slid out through her dried-up pipeline—the thing that came from between her legs wasn’t alive, just a lumpy mass of blackened blood.
Ten days after introducing Helen, I went back to Bonanova with a bouquet of dahlias to get Mother’s impression of my American girlfriend. I found her sitting in her little chair; she looked transparent, as if she’d been woven from colorless thre
ad. The expression on her face was soft and serene. For the first time ever, it occurred to me that the mask of her medicine might slip one day. I didn’t get a word out of her about Helen.
“Juan, if you go to the bathroom this time, don’t turn out the light in my grandchildren’s room.”
I was pierced to my marrow by an icy feeling. I’d always taken it for granted that the chemicals slowed her thoughts down; it hadn’t occurred to me that her brain could be damaged.
“Don’t look at me like that, son, don’t be silly. I know I don’t have grandchildren. It’s just that if I leave the light on in the room where I always thought they would sleep, it’s as if they’re keeping me company. Strange.”
“I could still give you grandchildren, Mother.”
“With that girl? With the girl you brought over here? I suppose you still haven’t managed to sort out the numbers your father left.”
“I’m working on it, Mother.”
“You know what I like most about spring, now that I hardly ever leave the house? I like it when they light those paper lanterns at the restaurant on the corner, the ones they hang to give the place some atmosphere. They sell mussels and fries with white and pink sauces. It sounds a little questionable, I know, but the men go in suits and the women wear blouses that are so soft. Beautiful couples. I like to see people having a good time; I don’t hold it against them. How could I, when they’re all heading where I am eventually? Make the most of these years, Joan-Marc, they’ve been well designed.”
She picked up a pill and placed it on her tongue: the pearl on its pillow. She pushed it down her throat with a sip of the linden and mint infusion I’d made her. The liquid in the cup settled back down in yellow and greenish waves.
“What a sad family we are. A suicide, a sick woman, a sterile girl. Who would have thought it when we were starting out, eh? But that’s how things ended up, and that’s fine, that’s fine.”
Who were you talking to, Mother? People who’ve known you for a long time, they do that sometimes: when you’re there in front of them, they see through the man going numb from fidgeting with his napkin, and they start to talk to the boy who made the swing squeal, who kicked along a maroon ball, or the brat they sent away one day to live in another city. And if I’m honest, I didn’t let my mother’s harsh words get to me. What do you think you’d find if you started looking into people who say, filling out their forms, that they’re lawyers, doctors, experts, salespeople, teachers, or nurses? They’re all hiding some rupture, they’re all dragging emotional handicaps along behind them. The time you get is too short to renounce any of the travel, the cars, kisses, and cuisines the world has to offer, so at first glance everyone seems caught up in the present, but just let them talk for twenty minutes or so, and you’ll soon make out the scars beneath the chatter. It’s scary to imagine the extent of the emotional leprosy our self-sufficient high-tech society works so hard to conceal; to think how, beneath that security blanket of photographs attesting to the good time we’re all having, we walk around dissembling, on the lookout, stalking a ration of warmth.
Some of us bear it with more dignity than others. My dear sister was of the sort who bleed when you touch them; she’d rush to scratch your eyes out first so she could protect herself. And this was the woman to whom Helen, her lips damp with saliva and cloudy wine, had decided to reveal her private life, to offer her arm in support and “save her.”
“Your sister is my age, we’d get along well. It would be strange if you didn’t introduce me.”
Ensconced in her living room, my sister had Helen figured out before she ever opened her mouth. She realized Helen had plans to give her a supporting role in a pantomime of incipient sisterly friendship, and she decided to play along. She left Mauro and me in the living room for us to act out at our leisure the scene best suited to us: a deep-sea meeting between an anemone and a sea horse, Mauro waving fibrously while I nodded impassively. My sister led Helen by the arm to admire the spectacle of boiling water in the kitchen, the ideal room for free-flowing confessions. It did not escape her—as if it could escape her—that dissatisfaction was gnawing at Helen’s core.
“I don’t want to keep living in the garret.”
I had prepared Helen for the possibility that my sister would give me a hard time: tell her what a fraud I was, how I was letting our inheritance drain away by the minute, that I was pitifully afraid and ultimately useless. Not to mention how I ignored my mother…
“A family needs a home. Anything else is a bad way to start. Too temporary. Way too temporary.”
But what my sister had actually set about doing in the kitchen (while Mauro trotted out the full range of his interests: bank balances, types of knots, royal lineages…a monody that led me to think about women fighting, and not in sexy little poses—I’m talking all-out rage) was to gently undermine Helen’s confidence, to chip away at our complicity as a couple, to tease out problems.
“The family just wants what’s best for you. It’s up to you to know what that is.”
Helen let herself fall under the sway of a creature so dominated by her brain’s reptilian layers that she secreted malice naturally, the same way her pores opened to let the sweat flow. In certain lights you could confuse her with a different kind of person, I’ll give you that. But it was just an optical effect, a trompe l’oeil. She’d also seem like a genuine world traveler if you let her wear out your eyes on the photographs of her and Mauro Polo in rice paddies, Asian temples, tropical rain forests, Australian savannahs, and places where it snows. Until finally you’d realize that the only thing she got out of all that globe-trotting was a comparative analysis of the locations and services of the Hilton hotel chain. I told Helen, of course I told her. The problem was that I had an urge to be frugal that day, and instead of hailing a taxi to make the trip from Vallvidrera back to the Turret, we took the train. I could feel my words twisting in the air, burning up and crashing to the ground, heavy as potatoes, making no impact on her. Men lose their authority over women when we lecture them on public transportation, that’s just how it is.
It had taken my sister two half-conversations to bewitch Helen and load her up with demands and responsibilities it was then my duty to satisfy. In contrast to the mockery and contempt Helen had received from our “friends,” my sister’s frank manner with her must have seemed like the start of a downright cozy relationship, in which floated the germs of affection. The dough of Helen’s brain had been kneaded with flour supplied by TV dramas and women’s magazines, to the point where my sister barely had to make an effort to convince her that she and Mother had forgiven my bachelor excesses only thanks to Helen’s charm. What could seem more natural? That was precisely the kind of wholesome effect she’d spent her adolescence convinced she would engender the moment she erupted onto the social stage.
“Your sister is right.”
From the tension around her eyes, the self-importance in the way she turned her head, from the repugnant wake those words sown by my sister trailed as they emerged from Helen’s lovely mouth, I realized she was prepared to wage a long-term battle. Every week we spent in the Turret, where we were reasonably happy, began to needle her like an insult. Every day was confirmation that my sister wasn’t talking nonsense, that she hadn’t been wrong when she predicted I’d be unable to satisfy the basic needs of a girl joined to her man out of love.
“Why don’t we go live with your mother? It’s a big apartment, and families are supposed to support each other, right?”
I didn’t have the strength to set straight an error of that magnitude; I didn’t even have the energy to point out the absurd contradiction of demanding that we leave the Turret (which my sister had downgraded to the “garret”) to move into an apartment we’d have to pay for. And then came the sudden, disturbing prospect of my mother living under the same roof as that testosterone accelerator I was married to, with her makeup kit (which weighed as much as Galaxia’s entire collection that you so pretentiously disp
layed in our living room), and the dregs of Evan Williams that nestled in unexpected crannies (that drink was my latest discovery, and it got our systems purring like motorcycles). The trick of suggesting we live with Mother transformed the repugnant prospect of leaving the Turret, with its view over roofs and terraces stretching toward the shining sliver of sea, into a reasonable option. I stopped giving her the runaround, and even while I was slogging through a storm of financial disasters (that pair of hucksters tasked with getting the family business “afloat” again must have been about to advise me to invest in cheeses, an idea that came from the Passgard people), I got down to apartment hunting. I visited over twenty real estate agents, where I learned that the children of the old working class were swallowing seventy-year mortgages, with interest rates subject to the ups and downs of various gloomy indices; they were even signing off on eviction clauses. Ah, you marvelous middle class, your shining greed, luxury cars and second homes, Far Eastern vacations paid for in installments: wonderful sons of sidereal Spain, that winter I loved you as never before. The apartments on offer looked like they’d survived a bombing in Kosovo. Broken stoves, cisterns that threatened to crack your skull open, paneled hallways. None of the places I could afford were up to Helen’s standards (and when I say “none,” I’m talking about two months of traversing the Eixample and Sarrià and the disinfected parts of Gràcia like a herd of elephants after water). Those standards, of course, were informed by interior design magazines published for citizens who pay their taxes in countries swimming in oil—magazines my sister began sending her so they could go over them together in detail, sitting at the Mauri café.
Divorce Is in the Air Page 12