I was such an idiot that when Helen reached for the ketchup bottle, I took it as a friendly gesture—I thought she was offering it to me. I stopped myself telling her how I detest it when flavors are all reduced to the level of spiced tomato. Then, in horror, I watched Helen’s elbow bending toward her own plate.
“Are you joking? You can’t put ketchup on razor clams.”
“Yes, I can. Just watch me. I like it.”
In a way, it was a masterpiece of condescension, the gesture of contempt with which she dumped enough red gunk to drown a whole family of chicken patties over those delicacies she’d insisted on ordering: a whole period of disenchantment, furious tantrums, and stretches of decayed conversation all coalesced into the image of a healthy woman ruining her food in a chemical delirium. Now I don’t know if I’m referring to the sauce or her brain. She achieved the same effect of obscene defiance as if she’d tried to suck her own big toe. The only difference was that if she’d done that, the waiters would have intervened. As it was, we were going to have to stick it out until the end of a dinner that was destined to become an indelible landmark in the history of our marriage.
“It’s hot.”
And she started taking off clothes until she was in a tank top that recently I’d caught her using as pajamas, perfect for sucking those razor clams like they were shrimp heads and licking the dribbles of processed tomatoes (I can almost convince myself she did it with no evil intent, that she was just confused about what she was eating).
I should have responded by dipping my tie in the coffee (if I’d dunked it in the vintage Viladrau, they would have mistaken my subversive gesture for a fairly pedestrian attempt at removing a stain). Luckily, we left before dessert.
“Pay. I’m cold.”
The filete ruso was roiling in the pit of my stomach, my tongue was turning dry as cardboard under the dome of my palate. I needed a drink; I put Helen into a taxi and kept a set of keys. It was the first time I ever looked at her ass completely devoid of sexual interest, as a mass of glands and sebaceous particles, astutely designed as cushions to protect a fairly disgusting conduit. Nor was the front a lot better, much as you scrubbed it with soap or lily water—oh strange, crazy mammalian love, built into the house of excrement. As a boy, when they first explained to me the technique of human reproduction, I saw clearly that God was a filthy pig. Later on you get used to the genital-excretory mess, but no one is going to convince me that evolution did a great job there—it had thousands of years to find a more elegant design. There’s a lot of laziness around, even the trees repeat the same pattern over and over. And with that idea floating in the delicate shadows of my mind, I ordered my second drink.
I went home calculating the cost of the three taxis, dinner, and drinks, with my tie soaked in Cardhu (I couldn’t resist dunking it). I was overcome by a strange, useless, slightly idiotic feeling: I was offended by the simple passage of time, the gall it had in brushing against us for a mere second, only to move away like a listless residue idly piling up in a past that grew thicker and thicker. I asked the driver to take a spin. Paral-lel was lit by dozens of signs; if I squinted, the lights stretched into shining filaments in the night. I’ve liked that effect since Dad used to drive me around when I was a child (from where to where?). Those days have since emptied out into nothing more than an idea of time: the world was so new, I couldn’t conceive of the earth being so old. I liked the smooth braking at the red lights, the expectant waiting, the feeling of rolling backward before letting out the clutch and accelerating. Through the cold window I saw the needle of the Columbus statue, the sober curve the road traces around Palau de Mar, and the first offices on the port, buildings that hug the ground like insect carcasses. That night, it began to make me furious that among so many vanished memories there were a few that coalesced to become harder and more stable, like monuments tracing the outline of my progress. I told the taxi driver to take us around Montjuïc: along the slope of the botanical garden, past the amusement park Ferris wheel with its cars covered by awnings, through the almost petrified lawns, the esplanade below the cemetery where you can park: a drive-in movie from where they project the city’s shining shell. But a sentimental memory overtook me then: I’m walking and holding Dad’s hand, I don’t know in what country, though we’d spent all afternoon in the desert. The dunes were all right, but in the end they bored me. We went into a tent and I said I didn’t want to sleep; I was afraid of the white scorpions, but the plan was to eat dinner and go back outside. The night had transformed the sky into a deep, deep darkness lit by the galaxy’s kiln. When our eyes got used to it we could see stars behind the stars, and more stars behind them, forming dense, luminous groups; a man with a torch helped us identify the constellations and give them names. It was a fascinating map, drawn in strokes of cold fire, but even more so when you realized that the abysses between the motes of shining dust were the condensation of a terrifying expanse. It made me furious that my richest memories, the most secure ones, were mere points of light between which yawned trenches of lost life, and that as hard as I tried to recapture my memories, the void would always prevail.
Helen had left the key in the lock and I couldn’t open the door. The girl who came to open it was wearing her usual ratty T-shirt and some underpants that stimulated only chastity—the kind of creature one only lives under the same roof with in nightmares. Inside, the floor was littered with photographs and papers, spread out deliberately, a spell.
“It’s my fault. I’m not good enough. I’m not. I didn’t even dare to tell you the truth about my entire family.”
I barely gave her a choice. I bought her a ticket straight back to Montana and I threw her out of the house. I said something about a vacation, about how it would do her good to have her family look after her for a while. Neither of us believed it.
I paid for two nights for Helen in the Claris hotel, and the balance of our bank account sank well below the imaginary safety line I had drawn. All my alarm bells started ringing—I had no idea of the series of humiliations that were still to come, which would make me remember even the decline of those days as a period of opulence. Of course, I expected Helen to take it badly. I had calculated that she’d get so depressed her hair would start falling out, that she’d threaten me with slitting her wrists. What took me completely by surprise was that she still had enough energy to terrorize me.
I had to change the lock not only out of fear she would rob me, not just to protect the Miró (Helen was so furious that, rather than taking it with her, I think she would have added a brushstroke using the toilet brush), but because the previous night (after thirty-something calls that went unanswered), she’d threatened to plant drugs in my apartment. And I would have asked her snidely just where she was going to get enough cocaine to fuck up my life, if only she hadn’t been using the same voice as when she yelled at me while tearing up shirts and smashing dishes and burning the armrests, difficult habits that I’ve managed to leave out of the story until now, who knows why. When she used that voice, she was capable of yanking the lymph nodes out of a live camel. And since I’d bought a ticket for the next day to Istanbul, thinking it would do me good to have a change of scenery, I had to call a night locksmith who only accepted my explanations after I showed him the stamped rental contract. Then he started jabbering on so incontinently about the movies that were on and the boom in Korean cinema, I was forced to stop listening to the criminal messages that crazy bitch was sending me from her evil doghouse, where she had forgotten her problems with Daddy shockingly fast. Rejection is a great personal trainer, and Helen was now an enemy in top form.
Although it would have been exciting to stay home in monastic calm, pirating the flicks Muñoz the locksmith told me about, with the phone disconnected, starting at every sound, expecting Helen to begin pounding at the door (do police get involved to defend the husband in domestic arguments?), I decided to go ahead with my plan and leave. Istanbul is cheap, the sun shines, you can drink iced tea,
and I had never seen a real mosque up close, in its habitat. But I did something besides visit the Bosphorus and photograph cupolas: I brought with me the new set of keys and the invoice for what that last-minute intervention had cost me. And while my body was swimming at the private beach on Büyükada or eating dinner on a terrace overlooking a stream of detritus borne along on a soft current, the most turbulent part of my soul was feeling envy toward this society that still protected women from their own initiative. Bicycles whizzed past, Polish vans, orange carts, crippled street vendors, almost every one of them crazy to get into the EU. I felt sorry for all those Orhans and Omars (did you know they’re not even Arabs?) whose eyes jumped out of their heads when some little European beauty went by, squeezed into linen showing every line of her behind. They were ignorant of the costs that come with that visual freedom: if the West is unstoppable, well then, Cide Hamete, hold on to your minaret, because you don’t know what’s coming for you.
What can I say? I followed the plotline that best fit my character. You can look for heroes in any movie, in songs on the radio, in books that fill your head with ideas about Fate and personal betterment. Here we’re talking about a guy who couldn’t even visit his own mother once a month—do you really think I’d go see Helen off at the airport? Viewed unsentimentally, that sad good-bye wasn’t going to do either of us any favors. My plan was pretty humane—she could wallow as long as she liked in my selfish macho insensitivity (and forget about the fact that I had supported her for almost three years), but by the time I opened the door to our building, carrying a stupendous hookah and several boxes of apple tea, Helen would already have spent three days gazing out over the electrifying Montana prairies. Those people may be barbaric, but they must get some great sunsets over there.
She couldn’t hide drugs in my apartment, but when I came back I was met at the door by a garbage bag the size of a red kangaroo. It held every dress I had ever given her, mixed with mayonnaise, cans of tuna, dried-up apple cores, gobs of ketchup, rotten vegetables, and more sanitary pads than she could have dirtied on her own in a single month: all of it perfectly equal in its level of filth.
The girl who cleaned the stairwell cost me fifty euros a month, so I put on a white jacket to go and seduce her with a formal complaint that she’d forgotten the bag on the landing. She was the first Russian I’d ever spoken to, a specimen of disconcerting size. I didn’t want to sleep with the help, I was only reawakening the social skills without which a single man is nothing. My pants were tight around the thighs, too much Turkish pastry, too many nerves soothed by steaming portions of junk food—excess weight Natasha wasn’t going to hold against me. It had been three years since I’d folded a handkerchief in the pocket of my jacket.
“A woman left it there this morning. She had the key to the front door.”
So we’d missed each other by only an hour or two. I calculated what it was going to cost me to convince the other tenants to change the lock on the front door. If it weren’t for the closed-circuit camera, I would have broken it myself.
“She gave me this for you.”
And with Chechen cunning she slid me an envelope from which peeked, intact, Helen’s plane ticket. I went into the apartment and flopped down on the sofa without unpacking my bags. I listened to the messages Helen had left on the answering machine: one of those cassettes that dragged the tape as if time itself were turning inside it. How could a woman incapable of going out into the street alone manage to find a room (and pay for it!) in the Mediterranean’s most expensive city?
Of course, I also thought about “my folks.” But even with her brain turned to mush, my mother wouldn’t have let Helen take the fabulous elevator up to the living room alone, and Señora Popo had been trying to mend fences with me for months: it’s one thing to torment a brother, but quite another to side with an in-law.
The explanation was ridiculous and efficient, like life itself. In vaudeville there is always the useful dunce, the guy who opens the door at the wrong time to stop the action tiring, hired so the audience stays glued to their seats. If you’ve been paying attention, you’ll have already guessed that the willing dupe of this interlude could only be Bicente (did you really think I’d shine the spotlight on him only to let him sink back into the shadows?). Bicente needed to regroup after the end of his marriage to a posh little chick who’d come into the world to smooth her hair and make demands, and who’d ended up with their apartment in Madrid. So Bicente allowed himself a period of calm to “find himself again” in the Catalan paradise of warm weather and multicolored girls. He’d spent half a week in the “Ciudad Condal,” as he called it in the unmistakable provincial-capital way of the madrileños (tender little partridges that they are, lost in this lair of hyenas). And after seeing all the famous buildings and getting tired of beauty at the exhibitions and looking out over the bobbing sea, he decided to strike up our friendship again, which he remembered with alarming warmth.
They must have bumped into each other in the doorway of my apartment. Or maybe someone had given him Helen’s number and, spurned as she was, she threw herself into his arms like a castaway who, with a storm threatening overhead, latches onto a slimy life buoy. I hope you’re happy with that analogy, because I can come up with less flattering ones. Bicente took her to a place he rented by the week and that they optimistically called an apartment. Part of my brain rebelled against the aberration of those two idiots seeing themselves as a “couple,” even if it didn’t go beyond a tacit, instrumental association—temporary, very temporary. Part of me still believed in a cosmic justice that makes people disappear when they become too stupid, that, when they pass certain limits of shamelessness and self-humiliation, just freezes them out of pity. Still, I’ve always been naive. I don’t even think she had to touch his cock, bathed as he was in the pleasure of being taken for a white knight. Though of course, between a man and a woman these things can never be assumed.
What Bicente wanted was to teach me a lesson, which any way you look at it was a much more powerful motive than libido. I remember him only too well, hunched on that sofa (surrounded by Buddhas!), trying to convince us that smoking marijuana was very bad. I guess at a certain point you get sick of your guests forgetting your name; you want to shake yourself out of the sad, stupefied role that your stand-ins act out on the stages of other people’s minds. Maybe he was hurting from being cheated on, who knows? When you look a certain way not even money can protect you, and he wasn’t that loaded by the standards of get-rich-quick Spain, where bandolero-investors and moneymen swoop about like bloody Baron von Munchausens. Anyway, Bicente saw the chance to give a performance in the role of his life, to score a goal on the other team’s field; he’d be a champion of pure love, the defender of marriage.
“If you stick your nose into this again, Vicente, I’ll rip it right off.”
It was a reasonable answer to the five daily messages that Helen left on the machine, with the restrained tone Bicente advised, and the fifteen she spat at me like poisoned arrows when she was alone in the apartment.
One of those days, I started to get a sharp pain in my back. The disks were coming out of their cushions of bone; I had to stand up or lie down, I couldn’t even think about sitting. The tension irritated the tissues of my back, and waves of pain radiated outward. When it comes to other people I’m very much against painkillers, but I was quite indulgent with my own suffering. I started to take something stronger than Nolotil. I never got rid of the pain; it stayed there, scraping away at my fibers. But at least the drug separated it from my brain—I could see it floating there in an isolated capsule, and it didn’t touch me. The downside was that I went around practically sleepwalking, and given the situation, a clear mind would have come in handy.
Bicente’s plan was to tail me. He gathered information from the “friends” I turned to back then for some crumbs of social sustenance. He was trying to “catch me by surprise”—or so said the people who came to visit me after the debacle was over,
happy to find me alive, consoling me in my convalescence.
I imagine the two of them there in the apartment, by the light of those candles that stink of sandalwood (these invented memories are as vivid as ever), eating pizza (Bicente with a knife and fork), using all four hands to draft their convoluted plan to intercept me. All they needed to do was come see me at the door to my office. If I’d known they weren’t even capable of that, I could have saved myself the hassle of synchronizing my exit to the street with the arrival of the 45 bus, and the pathetic little race across Via Augusta, one hand bracing my burning back. Just let them spend three or four nights feeling like intelligent creatures whose “ideas” could actually influence the course of events; I certainly won’t be giving them any credit for a simple plan in an open world. We humans with our games, what a spectacle we’d be for the extraterrestrial heavens, if only they weren’t deserted. I suppose Helen didn’t want to meet me in the open; she was looking for a chance to confront me in an apartment with walls and doors, among other people. And so the two of them go on puzzling it out: Helen is lying on the floor, covering (and emphasizing!) her loins with a napkin soaked in pepperoni juice, while she incites the “strategist” to devise the best way to catch me unawares. Bicente paces about in shirtsleeves, feeling like a titan in the waves of humid air. Then he sits down and takes off his glasses, folds them up, and leaves them on the bedside table, because once upon a time a girl (his cousin) told him he had sad and dreamy eyes. She left that flower pinned to his breast and he’s not ever going to let it dry out.
Divorce Is in the Air Page 23