“It doesn’t have enough light.”
“I won’t live on a mezzanine floor.”
“It smells. Barcelona smells damp.”
“The windows face a wall.”
“The ceiling is crumbling.”
“You won’t want me walking up stairs when I’m pregnant, will you?”
“I can’t live in this neighborhood.”
“The kitchen is old.”
“The bathroom needs redesigning.”
“We couldn’t have friends over with this living room.”
It had already been hard for me, as a teenager, when I’d discovered that people don’t get to choose where they cook, sleep, and cheat, that houses aren’t just handed over for free, and questions of space and overcrowding, light-drenched salons or narrow living rooms weren’t just matters of taste. So when the next Passgard report came, I had to lean against the wall and watch a few wagons loaded down with coal for the funeral pyre go by: we were left with the Bonanova apartment, the Turret, some questionable investments, and the ace of cheese (still up our sleeve). I had the miserable thought that people making their way up from the bottom, without family networks or contacts, have even less; that cheered me up for about half a minute. I got so nervous that a rash of small pimples broke out over my hands, and the hair on my chest and pubic area turned salt-and-pepper on the left side (the side of arterial problems). I think it was my disfigured appearance that finally moved Helen; she’d rather live in a small apartment (only not that small!) than let herself be seen with a prematurely aged geezer.
“I never said we had to move now. We can wait. You get so hysterical over money.”
And I was so candid, so disrespectful toward my own intelligence, that I sent a copy of the Passgard report to my sister. Enough of acting like children, I was going to convince her we had to “join forces,” “pull together”…that kind of thing.
My sister asked me for a meeting, and she showed up with a stuffed shirt in tow, sporting the obligatory pink tie and a hairdo that was a living, breathing example of the “law of excluded middle.” He put a briefcase smelling of new leather on the table, next to the Passgard report with underlining in red, and a calculator. That clown, who’d put on a brand-new jacket just to intimidate me, was the hit man my sister had recruited to stick a burning iron rod up my ass.
“We have to sell the garret.”
Her plan was to sacrifice my house to fix a problem that was bad news for both of us. She was demanding I become one of the huddled masses who have to use the first euros they earn every month to pay for a place to live. If we didn’t stem the flow of toxic capital by turning my beautiful home into healthy euros, it wouldn’t be long before the Bonanova apartment was threatened, and Mother’s security with it. I took a sip of coffee, and I guess I must have ad-libbed some arguments.
“You should have learned to keep your mouth shut by now. The least you can do is not interrupt when someone serious is talking,” she said.
She sat there looking at me cruelly, defying me. We had shared our childhood; I just couldn’t understand it. She’d stayed up all night practicing, exposing her fleshy insecurities before the mirror. My little sister was expecting me to throw my coffee in her face, to huff and puff, to fly off the handle. But instead she got the gaze of a compassionate older brother, the gentle indulgence that made her burn with rage. I didn’t do it just to make her feel some of the discomfort I felt; over all these years, my dealings with my sister have provided the only glimmer of saintliness I’ve been able to display. I would even have donated a good portion of an organ if its fibers and cells and molecules could resuscitate the dried-up regions of her belly.
I was willing to play dumb in order to maintain our relationship, though I wouldn’t go so far as to believe that plan of hers was born of any sisterly desire to lighten my load: so I wouldn’t feel guilty, because she was tired of watching me suffer, for my own good. But I was convinced the Passgard report had scared her. It was her facial expressions, the bitter smell she gave off sitting opposite me. It’s true, money doesn’t smell, but the fear of being short of it reeks—the fear that the net beneath your feet will break, the fear of ending up in one of those jobs that slowly suffocates your dignity. Mauro’s protection was provisional; he could always get tired of her, he could kick her out. She was afraid of having to take care of Mother, of being trapped in her marriage to Popo, of having to rely on his charity.
“It would be best for everyone if you were out in a week.”
And she left me with a brochure for some new apartments, seventy square meters, in L’Hospitalet.
“You’d be seven stops from the middle of town, and electricity and water are much cheaper there. And the mortgage is very low.”
The apartment I found, the apartment I finagled without paying a deposit, was on an uncomfortable hill below Diagonal; it had a bedroom with no balcony into which wafted the emanations from a repair shop, a living room that seemed fairly large until Helen decorated it with two four-seater sofas, wall shelves, and a table on which we could have sacrificed a buffalo. We bought flowers, pots, and a TV. I brought Dad’s little Miró, whose blotches, in my worst moments, seemed to conspire mockingly. The utility room, the kitchen, and our bedroom looked onto a narrow courtyard that pigeons had singled out as a depository for their filth. The bathroom (with a shower stall) and the dining room were flooded with sunlight at noon; I liked the effect of the light slowly turning the windowsills golden, illuminating the air as if igniting the space between atoms. We bought three electric heaters and rotated them, so there was always one cold room; the radiators gave Helen headaches. And that was the apartment that guzzled my salary, that forced me to fall back on my savings, that left us without a vacation; the apartment that rationed our dinners and nights out, that obliged me to calculate the cost of drinks. The apartment that tied our hands, and that still wasn’t good enough for Helen. In fact, she managed pretty well to imply (or remind me) a couple of times a week that the place was a dump.
Back in the Turret, Helen’s reproaches had been so all over the place that we rarely clashed in earnest; it was just a way of relating to me, of letting out the currents of mean-spirited ideas before they festered. I listened to them, but it wasn’t hard to convince myself she was directing them to someone else.
“If the electricity keeps going off you should talk to the landlord or the council. That’s what a real man would do.”
“The way you joke about religion isn’t funny at all. I’m a believer, you know. I don’t go to church because I don’t have time, but I intend to invest in it later. It’s a plan for the second half of my life, if you don’t strangle me first. Ever since I was a little girl, I’ve felt very close to Jesus.”
“A girl’s got to really excite men so she doesn’t end up married to a fag. They can simulate the lewd way of looking, they learn it as teenagers from their single friends. Since they’re all so depraved, they can perform acceptably at first. The real drama comes later. So I’m going to have to keep an eye on you.”
“You’re just a little boy, John. You don’t know what to do with a woman who loves you with all her soul.”
I should have replied that I wasn’t even sure I believed in the soul. I’d read in a popular science magazine that the mind was a function of the brain, a kind of talkative and obsessive phantom, but those scientists never really convinced me. How do you prove that something doesn’t exist? And how do you prove something you’ve never even seen? I wouldn’t say I’m fundamentally a believer in some invisible existence, but scientists will have to come up with a lot of explanations—and good ones—to deny that there is something beyond the flesh, the spinal vertebrae, the network of veins. I discovered all this during the wake, when I was alone with my father’s rigid body, his skin yellow under the makeup. It was Dad, all that was left of him, but it was missing the force that had stirred his muscles, the soft electricity that lit his expressions, the swell of his thoughts, his vo
ice. Scientists have their fabulous tools for seeing ever further and deeper, but they’re badly focused. For all the chemical power these balls of gray matter have, it still seems wrong to yank the soul out of the heart only to put a mind in the brain; I could identify my father or Helen easily by that stubborn pump. While Helen chopped vegetables, watched TV, tried on clothes, or spread lotion over her skin, her eyes and the play of her facial muscles were always palpitating with rage, desire, fear—all reflecting what was going on in the viscus in her chest.
“You’re too intellectual.”
But what began to brew in our new apartment was something more disturbing than Helen’s inclination to channel her baser emotions my way. Our arguments had a personal tinge now. My sister, camouflaged as doting sister-in-law, started to take Helen out. And what a pair they must have been: my little sister’s perfumed rotundity beside Helen dressed in white, Helen in green, Helen in jeans, Helen in sandals, Helen dressed in a tunic and burka, it didn’t matter. How the contrast must have pained my sister. And, honestly, our parents’ DNA had demonstrated the vast range of its possible combinations when from the same ingredients it formed a son with the makings of an athlete and the mythical Fiera Corrupia beast in female form. In a city like Barcelona, with so much feminine beauty on display, every trip into town must have needled my sister terribly. And when Mauro took her shopping down Passeig de Gràcia, it must have been like dousing her hands in acid. I’m not saying that Hermès and company didn’t have their soothing effect, but the problem is that people’s clothes always come off in the end. Genetic destiny had been a bitch to my sister. She should have moved someplace where the human temperature was more lukewarm, to take the edge off her envy. Antwerp, maybe. They make jewelry there, it rains every day, and the people are so ugly I had to go into a shop and buy a magazine just to rest my eyes on a pleasant face.
And don’t think you got away unscathed. When your time came, that tongue of hers had poison for you as well.
“You do everything backward, Juan. You don’t even realize how predictable you are. Only you would think to marry the wild and sensual one first, then divorce her to set up house with a tame, snooty woman who doesn’t fool me—if she spends all her time reading, it’s only to make up for her nonexistent social life. And don’t give me that about how she’s a writer, that’s just bullshit to make herself seem more interesting. Writers write, and if that girl, at her age, was destined for literature, she’d have published something by now. A couple of stories at the very least.”
It was no good reminding her I hadn’t left Helen for you—my sister had no interest in chronological precision. The type who won’t let any scrupulous adherence to facts get in the way of a moral tongue-lashing.
The simplest thing, and don’t think I didn’t consider it for years, was to conclude that her contempt for you, for Helen, for the girls in between en route to our marriage, was not only because of her cabbage face, but was also fed by an incestuous envy: she was secretly in love with me. These days I’m fairly certain that she was singing your praises in a roundabout way; I think you got her all horny, and she was really a Hummer-sized carpet muncher. Because just tell me how a woman who likes men could tie herself down to one like Popovych.
Anyway, my sister took Helen on the Grand Tour of things we couldn’t afford, and she added the bitter aftertaste of “things you can’t afford as long as you’re with him” and the cynical finish of “a woman like you”: they went to Biosca & Botey, to the Jaguar dealership on Roger de Llúria (neither of them could drive). They licked their lips in front of the window displays on Passeig de Gràcia, and then she took Helen to Cartier. If she didn’t reserve a table at the underwater restaurant in the Red Sea, it’s just because it hadn’t opened yet. And don’t think I only see my sister’s mean side—I’m almost proud of her for managing to design such a fantastic panorama, one in which Helen had more reasons to be ashamed of marrying me than my sister had for marrying Mauro. If I didn’t give her a hug there and then, if I didn’t jump up to applaud her, it was because my head wasn’t clear. I’d been diagnosed with a terrible social disease: working. Not decoratively, or as an exotic way of finding myself, but as a necessity if we were to keep our bodily gears turning. I was so tense I almost didn’t notice the new little battery of complaints that Helen started lobbing reproachfully from her sofa, legs crossed: she told me I had to try my best to get her into precisely what I was desperate to get away from.
“If I want to be a liberated woman, I need a job. And I am a liberated woman.”
The problem was not so much that Helen confused a certain style in bed with a true breadth of thought; it was not that the person encouraging her longing to labor had never done a day’s work in her life. The real issue was that in order to find her a job, we were going to have to get past our “lifestyle,” which was incompatible with any form of employment. Incompatible, even, with the most permissive idea of healthy behavior.
Of course we were young (young—oh, truly young), with splendid livers and the kidneys of racehorses, and every night I dragged her out to drink. We whiled away hours in lounges and pubs, in the whisky bars that had come into fashion. We breathed it all in, fascinated by the array of nocturnal possibilities, the soft air of winter nights, walking a grid of streets where even the blind can’t get lost, among the thousands of Barcelonans either passing through or living there with whom unexpected friendships crystallize on every night out, ready to dissolve like sugar in the liquid morning. We let ourselves be carried along on the same tide of parties and gossip and expensive drinks and attractive and stupid people that had swallowed up and sucked the bones of so many careers before us: students from the provinces, naive madrileños, Erasmus students who arrive with a moderately condescending idea about the superiority of northern ways and end up won over by the charms of the Barcelona night.
As you know, alcohol has never affected me. I know how to pace myself, when to take a break; I don’t mix, and I never drink tequila or rotgut. Too bad Helen belonged to that group who refuse to learn the basic rules of drinking. Once she reached the point where alcohol starts “lubricating socially,” Helen would get drowsy. Then I could take her home and put her to bed, with no responsibility beyond breathing until late the next morning.
My days were simple: at eleven thirty I entered the office trailing cologne, because I hadn’t yet learned that the vile stuff is made by mixing animal excrement and offal. If there were still traces of alcohol splashing around in my temples like those crazy seals that never tire of jumping for their sardine, I rode it out drinking coffee and water. My colleagues supplied me with reports, and when I got tired of leafing through folders I counted people through the window, with its view of the traffic on Via Augusta. I liked the pastry shop, where I watched spoiled grandchildren come and go, nibbling at puff pastries. And so my mornings passed; going off the rails is stressful, but it doesn’t require much concentration.
I laid out a few safe zones: on Tuesdays and Thursdays we barely drank, we’d stay in and watch something Helen had rented at the video store, we’d eat dinner at home, high-calorie dishes of Tex-Mex inspiration—any kind of chili mixed with beef, with pork, covered in fronds of cheddar cheese. We fought for the good spot on the sofa (the armrest was loose on the left side), over who spooned whom, over the remote control (she got nervous in scenes where the sound track heralded a scare), she tickled me and I couldn’t get her off me the way I can you: you may be five foot seven but you’ve always been manageable. I don’t know if Helen topped five foot three, but with those thighs so abundant in flesh, and those scholarship athlete’s powerful arms, it was a struggle for me. It wasn’t unusual for both of us to end up on the floor in configurations that seemed pretty erotic to me but only made her laugh—a shuddering of the damp opening encircled by her lips—and from which she would emerge looking at me disconcertedly, drenched in a liquid gratitude, as if that kind of spontaneous happiness wasn’t right there in the script she’d
brought with her all the way from Montana.
I admit it was a pretty bad sign when Helen spent the morning checking the clock out of the corner of her eye, urging it to strike the universally agreed hour when it’s acceptable to start drinking. But I can assure you that was better than when she started warming up her gullet early in the morning and spent the whole day submerged in a bucket of alcohol; I’d come home at noon and find her with half-closed eyes, her upper lip sweating. I started to feel embarrassed for her. For months she lied to me, her tongue red from tannins and swollen like a plum. Catching others telling lies tends to give you a certain fleeting power over the relationship, so I suppose we entered a new phase when she stopped bothering to hide it when she was drunk. She would wait for me with goose bumps, in bed or on the sofa, and if I managed to make a noise horrible enough to penetrate the sensitive roots of her brain, Helen would turn with a mechanical movement that spoke very eloquently of her inability to stand up, and pierce me with her wooden gaze. It’s terrible when women start to drink in earnest, much worse than when men get sloshed. I don’t know why, but that’s how it is.
I guess a grown-up husband would have taken the bull by the horns. Confronting problems head-on didn’t come easily to me, though; you can’t be good at everything. I couldn’t even manage to ease up on our nighttime rhythm. I was very tense, and those excursions were my main distraction, my only source of daily gratification. I couldn’t resist the sight of her buttocks swaying drunkenly, and I wasn’t willing to go from being a beneficiary to a casualty just because no one had ever taught Helen to drink like a civilized person.
Divorce Is in the Air Page 13