As far as I remembered Eloy’s features, they specialized in a sort of expression that was the dictionary definition of “befuddled.” He liked Star Wars figures; he’d had hundreds of them, the brat. He was effective on the court, a shooter, not very generous. It was hard to talk seriously with him, one of those crossword puzzles that we got tired of soon enough and solved by filling in the blanks with the word “faggot.” I didn’t think about it at the time because I tend to relate homosexuality to vice. I don’t know how to deal with boys who are just gay because they like other boys, then fall in love and go live together. And there was no denying that Eloy with tits must be a sight to see.
There were other questions I wanted to explore: Had Pedro seen him? Was the transformation complete? Could you buy a cunt, with all its complicated folds? Did it react the same way, get turned on the same? I knew doctors didn’t have a great track record with cerebral nerves. The awful state of my heart’s plumbing, the terror that an obstruction would snuff me out, had driven me to study the possibilities carefully, and I knew that even if they managed to isolate the mental meat, submerge it in a tank of collagen with its consciousness intact, they still didn’t know how to graft the brain onto a fresh spinal cord.
But I didn’t get to ask him anything, because Pedro-María lost the thread of the conversation and fell into the babble that generally preceded silent inertia. I grabbed him by the armpits and led him (or practically dragged him) to his room. The impulse to take off his boots for him ended there. He assumed an astonishing pose, almost indescribable, more typical of a creature with soft bones; neurologists should really start investigating alcoholic contortionism properly. Luckily that cretinous yogi couldn’t see himself. It shows the intelligence of our design that we sleep with our eyelids shut, that our faces remain beyond our field of vision, that the spirit or the soul or the character can scarcely recognize itself from outside, and we have to fall back on interpreters. And it’s lucky that psychologists and priests are a bunch of charlatans incapable of really opening our eyes. What good would it do Saw for a true reality tutor to sweep away the fine shroud of protective ideas the poor man wove about himself? Better that he not self-assess, better to live lethargically, wreathed in greenish shadows. Because the day he looks at himself with a cold and exacting eye, the day he takes the measure of the wreckage he’s buried in up to his eyebrows and that’s mingled with his very being—that day not even Petra can stop him tearing out his windpipe.
I left the bedroom with a decisive urge to be a better person. I smoothed the sofa cover, and it was only when I started to gather the glasses from our last few nights that it occurred to me how a liver specialist might interpret the last week’s alcoholic fugue state as a sophisticated suicide attempt.
You could develop a comparative theory of drunkards, using Helen and Pedro-María to illustrate it; they’d taken different routes to end up in the same class of bebedores. For Saw, the demands on him had made his headaches chronic, and alcohol helped him keep going in all his weakness. Helen wanted to devour the world, but she lacked the head for it. She soon got tired, and the few ideas she did have came out twisted, as if she were thinking with the wrong organ. Her tonsils, maybe. So Helen started dusting off the notion that she was strong, and could overcome the world’s resistance by the force of her body. And there you have the two of them, in their respective living rooms, wallowing in their alcoholic delirium, destroying reputations, sowing infamies, passing through euphoric periods when they convinced themselves that their isolated words—words that could never hurt anyone—pierced their targets like the marble letter opener I eventually gave to Helen so she’d stop opening envelopes with her teeth. The best medicine for Saw would have been to land himself one of those pretty and determined women who move up the ladder at work and leave you at home taking care of plants and small animals. As for Helen, her supposed salvation from the pit of alcohol and low self-esteem was that strapping boy stepping onto the Corb’s riverbank, matted with reeds, fearful of tripping and falling into the water that flowed with unusual ferocity in that stretch. After all, that was why we’d gone to the spa, whose idiotic lights were floating among the vegetation: to start over again together, rise above the everyday maliciousness that had diminished us. To give ourselves the kind of experience of forgiveness and renewed enthusiasm that love supposedly entails, to fall under the power we assume it possesses.
So I was happy to see her stop swaying and wobbling at the edge of the water. I took two long strides toward her like a valiant prince in a story, and even if I did grab her arm with more force than was strictly necessary, the main thing was to get her feet away from the edge and onto solid ground.
Helen was the type to argue for hours as if her life depended on it, until finally she crashed, exhausted. If I kept probing her once she was worn out, she’d forget all her crazy accusations, as well as the more reasonable parts of her argument. She didn’t try to reconcile the various ideas she held of me, and I resigned myself to being two (or even three) different people in her mind.
She looked me up and down, gazing half a second longer than necessary at my lips.
“It’s cold.”
The wind had raised goose bumps on her arms. I thought of the little bubbles that float up from the bottom of the pan and burst on the surface. She enveloped herself in my body, defeated by marital solicitude: Helen didn’t know what to make of her escape, she was unable to turn it into anything useful that she could prolong. I smoothed her hair away from her face; that always calmed her down.
“Let’s go back to the bedroom.”
She said it in a resigned tone, as if giving in to a plan of mine. She didn’t miss the chance to qualify it, maybe unconsciously.
“Let’s go back to the hotel.”
We shared an instinctive optimism about our future as a couple, but we had to proceed carefully. We owed a good part of our reconciliation to exhaustion, and to our habit of leaning on each other. The raw zones of pride, distrust, and shame were still exposed and sensitive. One glancing blow and they would flare up all over again.
We crossed the filthy little forest and the canal. We followed the lights of the resort; the bright circle of the old clock tower was our North Star. The incongruous grunting of the pigs didn’t help me calm down—my spirit was still fouled with a bitter substance. The sexed aroma of Helen’s flesh reached me, mixed with clothing fibers and dust. I still couldn’t begin to guess at the movements of her mind. I suppose I was hoping our hearts would move closer to understanding all by themselves, and that a generous and completely spontaneous gesture would breathe life into their depths.
It didn’t help that since we’d been married we hadn’t taken any decent vacations, that we’d lived in small apartments with rooms the sun barely touched, feeding ourselves on the narrow economies allowed by two checking accounts. If we wanted to stay together, the only thing to do was apply the old remedy: bring in more money. I was going to have to find her a job, especially if the kid was going to spend time with us—a thought that filled me in advance with pride. I was turning these problems over when I felt her fingernail pressing into the skin between my index finger and thumb. That vestigial web is already pretty sensitive, and the next thing I felt was the touch of her lips on my neck: a kind of suction that we’d had a very precise name for when we were growing up, which I couldn’t think of just then.
“Jhaaapsn…”
“What?”
“Jhapsm…”
A blustery wind tore the sound from my ears, breaking the words into confused units of noise as it made the treetops rattle like coins in a pocket. But I only had to see her smile—her lips damp, that trace of playful greed growing out of her face like a second nose—and I was convinced that Helen was starting to take our reconciliation seriously. We were going to have a good time, our greatest joint asset. We’d return to the hotel hugging and laughing, ready to just skip dinner. Projected onto the wall, our shadows looked like the ghosts of
a couple of lovers.
When we reached the bar, Helen turned her head and stared fixedly inside. She let go of my arm and approached the window, drawn by the sound of a magical flute that only she could hear. I stood where I was, enjoying the fresh air and the lassitude of the sweet, chlorinated pool water. I could only see the bottles floating on the shelves in the bar: the Cyrillic letters of the newly fashionable imported vodkas, the sandy color of the whisky, the red hues of the girly liquors with flavors of dried fruits, and the irresistible sapphire blue of Bombay. The overhead fluorescent turned on in two long flashes, and I caught sight of the black man pressed to the window, a dark-sheeted ghost; the glass in his hand looked filled with emerald light and he was smiling, intensely interested in us. Laugh all you like, but I found it soothing that a being of his demeanor, with the noble expression of a diplomat who’d traveled back from the future, was there to keep me company at the decisive point of my marriage.
Helen moved back toward me, and I don’t mean she put one foot in front of the other with the intention of coming closer. Rather, she took advantage of the basic step of human locomotion to display her hips and shake her upper cargo. She completed this demonstration of dynamic flirtation with the exact neck rotation needed to lift the mass of her hair and let it fall in a layered cascade, capricious and hypnotic, almost without affectation; I felt my blood start to pound. The waiter, the nocturnal drinkers, my somber guardian angel (sweet companion) were all there just to look at her. I saw it as a good sign that she was getting back her taste for flaunting herself.
“Did you see the black man?”
“What black man, Freckles?”
“The one who’s been looking at us since we got here, John. Well, looking at me, watching me. You never notice anything, it’s no wonder you don’t get jealous. He must be nearly sixty. It didn’t even discourage him that I was with Jackson, a child, for the love of God, those people have such dirty minds. I guess they can fool you Spaniards, they’re a novelty here, but they can’t pull one over on a girl from Montana—they only think about drinking and fucking, they’re full of sick half-thoughts. You really haven’t noticed? How can you be so careless? I don’t feel safe with you.”
“I was too focused on you.”
“Tall. Bald. Vicious eyes. But he won’t bother us again.”
“Oh, no? And what did you do, show him the butt of a gun?”
“This.”
And she bent her knees to give more force to that ghetto gesture that consists of gathering your fingers in a fist and letting one escape, stiff and erect, in the middle. And although I’ve never really known what it means (something to do with the anus) I know that had my father been there to see it, the shame would have corroded his flesh.
“He can go fuck himself.”
That’s what my wife said, my love, the mother of the child who was going to be “ours,” and in decent Spanish, before she took my arm once again, savoring the satisfaction of a job well done.
I was a guy who liked silk scarves and riding horses, who couldn’t drink cognac from a glass that didn’t have a narrow mouth to concentrate the aroma, who had to make an effort to repress the paternalistic habit of calling the waiter over with a clap, and who’d had, as a child, a woman employed for various purposes that all fit under the obsolete name of “service,” who came every morning to put on my socks and fold my pajamas (it’s not that I hid this from you, but you have to admit it’s not the kind of memory that fits easily into ordinary conversations). And Helen was the creature I had married: ignorant, rough, impertinent, but bold and full of energy and life; the girl who’d pulled off my husk of pretentiousness, the tegument of refinement that covered me. With no protection bar my own sensitive skin, she was the girl I had hurled myself with into the murky, hot, and tumultuous zones of the human breeding ground. Beneath the first layer of stars in that clear sky, under all that luminous dust sprinkling us with energy from celestial bodies packed with inert material, my racing pulse confirmed how much I loved her healthy and lively vulgarity. Those were the spiritual reasons I had married her, and they were still good ones.
I was overcome again by the color of the lighted pool, the smell of the dianthus, by the incomprehensible abundance of things that have shape and symmetry when you move among them holding the hand of the woman you desire. Helen was talking to me, but the words got lost in my ear without reaching my brain. My erotic imagination was running riot, composing complicated and tangled scenes the way it’s wont to do. The breadth of everyday desire had concentrated into a gluttonous craving to burrow into her innermost folds. My impatience distorted every step we took. It doesn’t matter how often I get this horny—I don’t think in this life I’ll ever get used to the lusty chaos that rides roughshod over my normal thought process.
I opened the hotel door for her, and we snuck stealthily in (what resonances words drag behind them, what echoes). We avoided the dining room, where a handful of mummies, animated by stubborn hearts ignoring all their bodies’ vital signs, were ingesting pastes and purees and other crap you can swallow without really needing to fire up the gastric ovens. Helen used to double over with laughter when I opened doors for her. If I pulled her chair out she trembled with a shameful pleasure, bubbles in her nose: the poor girl felt like a heroine in a historical drama. Sisi, or a Romanov princess, Anne Boleyn, any of the Tudors, it didn’t matter, to her they were all muddled with the same vague idea of a luxury she tasted only because she kissed a man who had been educated in the ancestral laws of courtliness. I had a hard time convincing her that it was out of deference that I let her enter the elevator last, that it was the done thing to let the most important person spend the least time in those moving coffins. That night, when she begged me to take the long way up because she’d had a dream that the elevator’s walls were closing in on her like a trap, I didn’t even try to make her understand why a gentleman must never let a lady go first on the stairs, especially if they’re not wearing skirts but jeans or white pants (Helen’s vulgar specialty) tight over the buttocks. It was late, we’d already fought, and bad as the food was, that vapor of seasoned aromas, of grease and oil singed on the grill, had woken my taste buds. If Helen turned her back on me I could start emptying my pockets of nuts without hearing her nutritional advice or renewed reproaches about my gut (which was barely even visible).
What’s more, Helen’s backside was intimately connected to her brain. She was the sort of person whose movement reminded you that, biologically speaking, we start out as tadpoles with a cerebral mass that lengthens into a strong medullary tail, protected by a bony spine, which melts into myriad nerves and vessels irrigating the adipose hills of the derriere. And I promise you that not only did those buttocks manage to express her moods more clearly than the features of her face (the social slog had taught her too many strategies of disguise), but you could also upset or calm her down depending whether you chose to caress or pinch it.
Anyway, I was on fire when I went through the door of that damn room, and it didn’t dampen my enthusiasm a bit that the floor and bed were littered with the wreckage of our battle. I’m not saying I expected her to kneel down and kiss my feet, but I certainly didn’t anticipate her scurrying away when I moved in resolutely to kiss her, two and three and four times in a row: she pressed her lips together, clenched her teeth and, worst of all, started ridiculously thrashing her tongue to interrupt my passionate crescendo.
“No.”
And she fell back onto the bed, cutting off the most natural channel of communication and starting a conversation instead, in a rather delirious, completely incongruous way.
“Please open the window.”
By this point I’m no longer surprised when a woman misinterprets my exquisitely suggestive moves as mere flirting; you all do it just because you feel like it, because you think it’s funny to see our reaction. And don’t give me that bullshit about the complexity of feminine sexuality—that is such a tired old excuse. Give me, a thousand t
imes over, the vigorous straight line of my desire, which increases in potency and fervor as it gets closer to climax; such an efficient device, I don’t know how it could be improved upon. But what can you do? I know the rules of the game…I can live with the candles, the little massages, and the mortuary-style background music. It’s just that with Helen I’d gotten used to a generous response to my manly appetite. While I was opening the window and she was lighting a foul-smelling Lucky, I calculated that our night of reconciliation had already met two roadblocks. Enough was enough, I deserved some gratification, so I know I didn’t sound entirely calm.
“And now what?”
“We talk. We have to talk. Seriously.”
“About what?”
“I told you! On the way back here, I told you and you smiled! You don’t listen to me, you never listen, you’re such a hypocrite.”
I should have replied that I hadn’t understood because of the wretched wind, and because she’d been giving me a hickey (the term popped up in the sentence of its own accord, from God knows what warehouse of memories). But she was too upset by the mess of clothes, the scent of our recent battle. Helen was trying to hold back her rage, even as her thoughts kept slipping forward, driven by adrenaline. If I gave a wrong answer she might try to scratch out my eyes. I was going to let her talk—encourage her, even. The night could only end one way; my body deserved it. Being the more intelligent one had to be worth something.
“You said a lot of things.”
“It’s the only thing that matters to me—why do you think we’re here? About Jackson, we have to talk about Jackson!”
It was her tone of contained desperation, the still-damp tips of her hair, the ring of smoke that drifted from her lips…Helen clearly saw herself framed in a scene from the type of TV movie where a blonde and indomitable woman decides to fight, for her son’s good, against the man she loves.
Divorce Is in the Air Page 18