I’d get up and make myself a coffee. The water for the shower would heat up and I could hear the apartment’s circulation stirring, its metallic veins, pipes, and conduits. I’d shower fearfully, brush my teeth naked and terrified, waiting for Helen’s consciousness to turn on and for the black juices to reconfigure the awareness of her weaknesses: how far she still had to go to get better, the man she lived with, and how little she could expect from him. In the mirror I saw that the discreet veins that irrigated my cheeks had spilled into rosacea. I swear I could hear the sheets squealing when Helen moved. My hands trembled, I couldn’t take three steps without feeling that bitter mass of anxiety climbing up my esophagus.
“John.”
And it could be anything.
I didn’t even seriously think about taking a lover. Outside in the street the salacious parade of pleasing shapes continued, and what happened happened, but I won’t even go so far as to call it an incident. Let’s just say that she had three kids and ten years on me, and an opening so wet I could barely feel anything. Really, the thing was an arrangement between her and her fluids. I chose her because it had been years since I’d kissed a woman that dark. She didn’t take off her bra, and her face barely registered any pleasure. These things happen, but I didn’t feel I had the strength to initiate a real entanglement: the pretending, the duplicity, the phone calls and agreements, the emotional roller coasters, my husband, your wife, the ebb and flow of everyday life, the ebb and flow of feelings about the poor cuckolds, united without knowing each other by an intangible lubricious thread….To promise loyalty to a person with whom you bake yourself in pleasure with a sauce of betrayal, to feel second fiddle and to feel special, indispensable and a nuisance, to go over your e-mail, erase the text messages, jump every time the doorbell rings, provide explanations and hold back information in both directions, evaluate the long-term value of the new interest, rate the worth of what remains of a life together, reach stupid compromises with yourself, with two sets of emotions, survive that instant when you’d get rid of both of them, let the apex of sentimentality pass when you convince yourself that there really is a magical combination of words that would allow both love stories to flourish and be celebrated and welcomed under the blue and indifferent skies, that the two poor women could meet and learn to respect each other. I don’t have the makings of a double agent: my fibs only grow in soils of spontaneity. There must have been a mistake about my date of birth because if anyone is not a Gemini, it’s me. I’m not made for a double life.
And don’t think my heart’s wearing some kind of hair shirt (it’s just a weak lump, a mass in need of coddling). I admire down to my bones the thousands who, though they can’t say “hi” on a stage without their voices strangling into a falsetto, still manage to weave complex webs of deceit around themselves. They dupe the women and men who know them best in the world, and they happily stroll through their half-paid-off houses clutching a time bomb. What men! What women! It’s not a moral question, I follow my desire wherever it leads—frustration isn’t my style. It’s just that we inveterate monogamists don’t find it appealing to screw around with substitutes. The girls we choose are the ones we desire most.
And since Dad let slip once that battles against women are the only ones you can win by fleeing, when things got really bad (when I was standing paralyzed, washed by the cadaverous light from the fridge, convinced that if today she got the urge to make something to eat she would serve me a soup chock-full of hair), I left the apartment. I would kiss her good morning, and before she was up I’d be down in Barceloneta. The beach’s soft colors distracted me, the crests of sand and the white movement of the water. I’d just sit there. It scared me to live like a piece of damp wood, now unable to burn. The sea’s skin stretched to the horizon, a thickly drawn line. Beyond it, my imagination had me visualize that immense mass of water folding like a pliant cloth, to fall in a cascade toward the sidereal void, an optic trick that exists only on the stage of human vision. It’s almost funny to think how these messy years will be the only experience we’ll ever have of the universe. It really is a fine notion, enough to make you die laughing.
To keep myself entertained until night fell, I’d wander the streets, Casp and Ausiàs March. I felt calmed by that stretch between office closing-time and the hour the night owls emerge, an indeterminate period that separates two species with different nutritional needs. Those discreet hours give the sky a little privacy so it can finish its chromatic transformation and open its silvered eye. I’ll never tire of watching as the streetlights start to come on down an avenue, each absorbing its small portion of shadow.
On a Sunday I could cover several blocks without meeting anyone face-to-face, until I’d see the first group inside the cube of light in a bar, sipping their drinks and smoking. I had only enough energy to go into a dairy shop and order a glass of thick horchata; I knew one that closed late, and from inside you could watch the cable car over the docks, the cabins swaying in space like boxy metaphors for so many fragile and wandering souls.
But rarely did I dare return home later than seven. I’d go up to the apartment weighed down with paper towels, tins of food, margarine, fabric softener, and pasteurized milk. I’d pray a freestyle prayer that she would be asleep and I could save myself another sleepless night full of sobbing, rage, and reproaches. If I didn’t find her in the living room, if she didn’t respond to my first words, my heart would leap in my chest and start beating in my gullet. I was tormented by the fear of finding Helen’s corpse. By now I know that in the suburbs, in the rich neighborhoods, in countless matchbox apartments, there are hundreds of husbands ravaged by complicated emotions, but that year I was terrified of discovering I was the kind of man whose loved ones kill themselves; I’d filled my quota with Dad. I didn’t want to lose any more innocence (not that I really believe in God, but if one of his saints surprises me and is there to receive me in the hereafter, what other defense could I offer against my file of sins—laziness, mistakes, complacency, ignored calls for help—beyond a fistful of fresh innocence?). Most of the time Helen was waiting for me with part of her body outside the sheets, a trunk rooted to a dirt floor. But the thoughts that she fed on that sap could only bloom into infected flowers. She reproached me, insulted me. Sometimes in the middle of an argument a trace of reciprocal affection would tremble in her eyes, and she’d briefly remember that these scenes were the result of a mistaken calculation. I’m afraid that what Helen could read in my eyes was the suspicion that we’d already consumed the generosity we would need if we were ever to recover, that the last particles of mutual tolerance were gone. If she was asleep when I got home, I let myself be calmed by the sound of the refrigerator’s little motor as it worked to conserve the nutrients in our collection of animal cadavers. I barely ate—I was afraid she would poison me with mushrooms, mix crushed glass into the ice, stir bleach into the soup. I really believed she was capable of murdering me.
These are the thoughts of a young man unexpectedly trapped by the pressure of life’s complications. Sometimes (for the past five minutes now) I wonder (in a shamefully rhetorical manner) how I would have reacted if, of my two wives, you’d been the one to fall into that depression. The difference (and this should come as a surprise) is that when I tried to put myself in Helen’s head, I was surrounded by darkness. And this isn’t about gender difference. It leaves me in stitches every time they congratulate your brother on his female characters—he doesn’t deserve it. I, too, am a student of the female soul! Move in with a woman, observe her with your eyes wide open, with your senses bared, and soon you’ll feel that you share nerves, grow common organs, and your spoken identities melt into a common dialect. My brain sprouted feminine bits, and Helen’s was more full of testosterone than she was willing to admit when she wrapped herself in the feminist flag. No, what stopped me making sense of Helen’s worries wasn’t that the estrogen grew tits on her and hung some scraps on me; we were separated by an ocean, the culture of a foreig
n continent. It would be ten years before I matured into the man you met and fell in love with (because you did fall in love). You can’t even begin to compare the depth of those two relationships.
If I ever feel I was closer to Helen than to you, it’s not because of the sex. (How tempted I am to say that it was, just to piss you off. But I’m not so small-minded, yet, to deny that in spite of your affectations, our sex life was so good it terrifies me to think about a life without the body animated by your character.) It had more to do with the specifics of my relationship with her, so different from the one that joined (that joins) me to you. There you have it, it’s absurd to have gotten married twice and twice squandered what mattered to me most: my own home. The poisonous effects of this calamity on my well-being cannot be calculated. But I have no regrets (though some days I do nothing but regret). The priests taught us rules for survival, but we aren’t here to survive, we’re here to live, and these are the troubles that overcome a person when he forges ahead with his whole body engaged, his entire head and that skein of nerves that, if a forensic doctor were ever to entertain himself by unwinding it, would be long enough to lay a tightrope from Barcelona to Morocco. More life! I ask it of the deaf gods, the vacant heavens, indifferent Mother Nature: eternal life. But the only answer comes from a tree blackened like a mummified finger pointing to a hole in the earth, a niche in the wall, an incinerating oven. Don’t go believing that life’s journey lasts that long, either. It’s not worth applying for a mortgage, drooling over a job, it’s only wasted energy. I don’t think I ever told you (you’ll see why) that when Dad died I convinced myself that when I circled his carcass, what I was really doing was soaking up the leftover time he was no longer going to use, so I would live to be a hundred and twenty. Even if it had worked, it would still be too little. Let some other man regret his divorces, his weddings, his fights, kisses, greed, naiveté, and ambition. Don’t expect me to join the whiners, I don’t plan to disown my emotional mistakes. At least when I end up alone in the house (in some house), I can while away the time weighing them up against each other.
What separated me from you was something too shapeless and slippery to understand. I intuited its size the way an insect’s eyes must take in the impression of a spatter of blue and oily paint, unable to situate it within the frame of a canvas that is too big to comprehend. Even so, while recognizing that my mind lacked the openness to understand the paths you trod, I haven’t lost hope I will change and develop the capacity to appreciate you. What separated me from Helen was small (two seconds and I could run my eyes across it) and well defined: a cold, smooth stone made of her basest emotions, hardened by incomprehension and distance. I never learned to soften it, I was unable to pry it open; it was as alien to me as the rest of the mineral kingdom.
If what I had with Helen blew up, it was because I couldn’t find the way to defuse the time bomb Daddy had planted in her brain. In schmaltzy terms: my love wasn’t strong enough to pull her from those cold waters that are only funny if you keep your distance, because once you see them reflected in the eyes of the person you’re trying to give a decent life to, they turn out to be too dark for a happy heart. I’m not saying that love should be able to raise the dead (although it should), but if it’s not even enough to support someone when the glass of her own existence is cracking, if your love is too weak to keep her from draining out to the point of collapse, then something’s gone wrong.
So I was forced to throw her out.
I mean, if you think about it I had no choice, and it didn’t exactly happen overnight. I don’t remember the precise moment when I stopped acting like a cornered marsupial and got my balls back, but along the way there were moments of tenderness, like the afternoon I went with her to the bookshop, holding the umbrella over her so she wouldn’t get wet. I walked outside but that was only because that combination of incense and sandalwood makes me jittery. Through the window I saw her in that baggy sweater, on tiptoe, reaching up to a high shelf. It’s not that she’d gotten fat, but the cheetah whose movements could flood me with desire had swollen into a sad cat. I had noticed it in older people: a month of worry was enough to dull the vital light that burnishes the skin and softens the hair. They feel depressed, they’re invaded by gray hairs, a rim of fat adheres to their waists, years consumed in days. But you can’t really grasp what it’s like until age takes a swing at the person you live with.
This was during the time all of Helen’s hopes were focused on the Jovanotti method. I did some research on the guy: he’d published two little “metaphysical” novels, and after miraculously escaping with his life after a period of experimenting with acid, he earned some sort of reputation writing books in which he assured girls who were aging like sad houses that they are crucial elements within a grander plan. And if you believe that, I’ve got a bridge to sell you. As if the double t in his name weren’t enough to whisper “charlatan, charlatan,” the only thing that ever emerged from Jovanotti’s mouth in his conferences, workshops, or master classes, was garbage soaked in slime. But I didn’t utter a single malicious word. Matrimonial common sense suggested I overlook that nonsense. My tongue bled from biting it so much.
When you’re deliberating between “to do” and “not to do,” choose to do; if you make a mistake at least you’ll have the experience.
Menstrual blood is sacred: use it to paint your self-portrait.
You’re not loved because you’re beautiful, you are beautiful because you are loved.
Transgress prohibitions and dare to confront the impossible head-on. Then scream for five minutes like a savage animal and you’ll achieve a psychological orgasm.
Grant yourself all the possibilities of being. Change your path as many times as necessary.
Before you die you must bury a firefighter, witness an epileptic fit, and dance with a Chinese prince: this is how you will master your ego.
Helen started the exercises from Jovanotti’s book. She drew her father in burlesque postures (luckily she let me convince her it was just as good to use pencils) and her mother copulating with all manner of creatures. She sewed a doll and stuck pins into it, and she also (I think, because of how it smelled) subjected it to symbolic humiliations with urine. She was so convincing about painting a mural on the white hallway wall that I was willing to turn our apartment into a grotto of cave paintings if only to see her beautiful face again, fatigued from the effort, soft wrinkles at the corners of her eyes, lit by a natural light: almost happy. The fact is she did seem to get better, and when I saw her through the crack in the bathroom door smearing blush on her cheeks, I had to admit that she was coming out of her hole. And although I didn’t like the intense shade she’d chosen for her lips (as if I’d married a discreet, modest bride, and not a woman who just by walking was already beyond the limits of decorum), I let myself be soothed by those frivolous signs with the complacency of a mutt that feels the reassuring touch of a human hand running over its fur.
“What do you want me to do, John?”
I asked her to shower (paying special attention to her hair) and get dressed. I wanted us to go out for dinner, to dance, to drink the way healthy people drink: slowly, letting the intoxication unfurl its solemn ability to soften the world’s revolting disfigurement without isolating you, to enable the embrace of the people you love. I wasn’t asking for anything most couples don’t give each other: to spend a few hours together, support each other with a word, to laugh…even that seemed magnificent to me! I poured a drink, still doubtful we’d make it out the door. The luminous six o’clock air filled the bedroom, and Helen tried on three skirts and two tops before deciding on some green pants that looked like jeans, and the red wool sweater that made her pull her hair back in a high ponytail; she must have had her reasons. I asked her not to wear lipstick: I liked to see her pulpy mouth in its natural shade. If she had gained weight it was only a few kilos; I didn’t care. When she had her usual attitude, I’d find Helen attractive with a baby bootee on her head. I f
elt tempted to threaten the calm atmosphere of a married couple dressing for dinner and test out that new behind right there. I was stopped only by how sick I was of that convalescent bed. I was all too familiar with the sheets’ wrinkles and folds, the textile expression of the anguish built up in the body that spent entire days between them: a piece of meat run aground.
So I gave up on the idea of touching her, and we took a shiny taxi to none other than Les Corts, where they’d opened a new restaurant with a romantic terrace. It wasn’t the most free-flowing conversation we’d ever had, nor did it help that Helen pushed my hand away just as it found the creases of her inner thigh through the stitching of her pants. A secret reason for bringing her there (other than that it was far enough from home to prevent that lazybones getting up all of a sudden and leaving me there) was that I’d heard wonderful things about the filete ruso, the dish that every Friday for three years an employee served me (I don’t have the heart to write “servant”). I can’t remember now if she went home (somewhere like Honduras), or if she was the one who cracked her skull open in a motorcycle accident and never came back.
I told Helen how filete ruso was a singular creation of industrial Barcelona’s calorific proletarian cooking. A fillet of chicken breast, chopped up finely and soaked in flour and egg. I may have overacted a bit, I’m sure I added something about its flavor as well as its social value, but I was spooked by the way Helen’s gaze was losing its softness. I guess I was hoping that some of my energy could spread to her through my enthusiasm for a delicious chicken dish.
“I don’t want to try that.”
“And wine?”
“No. A glass of water.”
“What do you want to eat?”
“Razor clams.”
And so they brought us a strange pair of dishes: for me, the austere filete ruso with its carapace of fried and shining bread crumbs, crying out for the potato omelette and chorizo sandwich that were its usual companions inside a lunch box. For her, those sticks of mucous, cooked just enough so they wouldn’t spill out of their shells, reeking of stagnant water, of marine salt: the most expensive dish on the menu. I ordered a bottle of Nestlé’s finest Viladrau water to wash it all down.
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