Divorce Is in the Air

by Gonzalo Torne

It was only a matter of time before we’d run into each other. From a distance, every city is an archipelago of provincialism, a narrow colony, and that half-assed party in another sumptuous apartment was as good a place as any. I know it was planned because the guests couldn’t help exchanging little glances. Terrible actors, so anxious to get me into the cage with the beast—how it entertains us when people separate, reconcile, intermingle, yell, kiss. Whatever nature-lovers may say, trees are a bore; they will always be far below even the most anodyne human in terms of entertainment potential, there’s no comparison.

  I don’t think they put Lisandra in the mix as part of the plan, but who knows? I’d spent weeks with no stimulation except the occasional sex scene on late-night TV, but I’ve never been one for solo love. My veins were twisting like wires to restrain the built-up libido, which itself was developing a complicated system of inexplicably precise fetishes: fine ankles, rhomboid faces, names rich in fricatives. It was just that Lisandra liked tall boys, and I was wearing the blue jacket that night; it was just that I liked the delicate awkwardness of her body language when she started flirting, I liked the eagerness for fun that lit her face for half a minute, and the way that fire shrank, smothered in timidity, without going out entirely, smoldering like a hot ember. I liked that she was dark and thin, that she was so much the kind of girl I had always imagined for myself before Hurricane Helen ruined my juvenile expectations. I let the image of us together float calmly in an imagined future, and I liked what I saw.

  So we started to exchange words that slid one over the other as if they were caressing or encouraging one another, smoothed by the foregone conclusion that a good impression would be made: words that were more mood-music than meaning. I won’t say it could have gone on until her lips separated for a kiss, but certainly long enough to populate the nighttime mind with pleasant ideas. I was enveloped in that soft mood when I saw him slaloming through the guests, one arm raised and waving frantically. The parting in his hair drawn with a ruler, his collar starched, that little beard, the type on whom age will settle like a corrective to the anomaly of youth: Bicente.

  My first impulse was to head him off and smash his face in, but it tends to be complicated explaining to a girl like Lisandra the curative powers of working out rage with your hands.

  “Just let her talk to you, Juan-Marcos.”

  And I did. I allowed Helen to come up to me in a corner of the room, while man-trays passed carrying cold cuts and canapés of margarine and imitation caviar and emu tartar. Helen’s mouth and lips conspired to produce sounds directed toward my ear, but I paid no attention. I let myself be carried along by the fatigue of a boy who, burning with vital fire, dips his Boy Scout feet into a marriage and who ends up lost in the maze of female complications: a mere puppy still wet behind the ears. For almost three years I had been the one in love, the weak party in the agreement; I got used to following Helen’s changing whims. But a furious convulsion had inverted the situation, driving me from the depths to the summit of our coupledom, where I enjoyed the luminous role of being the desired one. I felt like giving her a hug to celebrate our newfound freedom from that stagnant imbroglio, but Helen was still Helen, and she went on talking about commitment, about our shared project (though the apartment was rented in my name, her fallopian tubes weren’t carrying anything fertilized by me, and a civil marriage is, well, a civil marriage), but I didn’t bother answering or refuting her words. I looked at her from a distance of thousands of miles, protected by a splendid smile of new superiority.

  “I’m bored, Helen. Let’s talk another time. I’m sure we’ll get the chance if you’re going to stay with Bicente.”

  And I turned my back on her, walked away from her pre-cooked words, left her chewing on her rage, soaked in the delicious acidic taste of her saliva. I don’t even remember what she was wearing—her image no longer made my optic nerve vibrate. On the fly I caught a toasted rectangle spread with a creamy paste of something salmon-like, and I took my time chewing it and brushing away the crumbs with the back of my hand. And then I realized that the tables and plates and lamps were all the correct color: seeing Helen hadn’t added an ounce of intensity to the material world, I was still surrounded by the matte of disenchantment. My feet moved to the rhythm of the background music, I could have burst into song, I felt like taking off my jacket and stretching my arms, I felt taller, a true champion. I ran into Lisandra, standing with another brunette who has an even smaller role in this story, though her eyes curdled with a flattering complicity. What friends we could have been in a different life, that creature and me, her humble servant. But it was Lisandra’s face I first saw contort into a grimace of alarm stretching out for long seconds like spilled mercury, preceding the slice through the skin of my trapezius: an injection of cold pain that spread through my nerves to the top of my chest.

  Though she pulled the weapon out stained with the fibers and threads of my flesh, the Butcher of Montana repeated the operation, and any way you look at it, that’s aggravation. But she must have used up all her strength, because—as they told me later—this second attempt didn’t go as deep into my back. And they had to tell me about it later, because I collapsed before I’d really understood what was happening, what she was doing to me. Helen must have thought she’d killed me, maybe felt a tingling of horror in her hands; she ran out and took the weapon with her. From the width and depth of the wounds, she could easily have used ordinary scissors, but somehow I’m sure the object she drove into my flesh was the marble letter opener that disappeared when I kicked her out. It was Bicente who called the paramedics and climbed into the ambulance, which held up traffic as it carried me over damp streets, warm and blue, to the Hospital del Mar. They dumped me straight into a bed because they were afraid (because of the wound’s location, because of my heroic faint; the doctor congratulated me for having fallen so well, I barely even bit my tongue) that I had a perforated pulmonary vein.

  Under the heavy smell of chloroform, I wanted only to live. Lying between sheets that smelled of bitter fruits, I realized that dying is a pretty immodest affair. If Helen had hit my pulmonary wall, if she’d popped my consciousness like a balloon, I would have left behind several half-watched films, wet clothes in the machine, an unfinished tube of hand lotion, coffee dregs in cups, financial reports still to be deciphered, the bank account with an overdraft I was putting off resolving, a modest collection of more or less personal objects to be catalogued and which no one would ever use again…not to mention all the days that none of my senses would brush against, a mind-boggling luxury for other people to enjoy…not to mention the ideas ambushed by the primitive emotions, warm like stables, that overtake us as we sink into decrepitude. I’m not surprised Dad didn’t think about how he’d end up with his calluses exposed.

  I could barely move under the weight of the painkillers. I tried to protest—by now I wasn’t going to die by Helen’s hand, but if they went on like that they’d annihilate my immune system. And I was far from sure that my roommate, Mr. Ponç, a blind man who twisted with laughter at the jokes on TV, was free of viruses. Hospitals finish people off, you’ve got all kinds of microbes that breed in decomposing organs let loose in the air. Those bugs are just looking for a fleshy opening so they can lace up their boots and get to work, but try telling that to the surgeons with their white coats and sadistic flair for cutting and sewing. The patient is only there to keep quiet until he gets bedsores in his crack, and if you must know, I was too tired to argue. So tired I let Bicente approach the foot of my bed, and from there that toad—I picture him covered in slimy scales—told me in a soft, confessional voice how Helen wouldn’t get out of bed, how she couldn’t get over the idea that she would have to live with a murder (that she was a murderer!). Depressed and drugged, what a novelty. The only surprise was that she’d had the energy to chase me down and stab me. But still, he was so dejected, so weak, that I promised him I wouldn’t press charges.

  And the reason I made that promise w
as not a magnanimous one, oh no! I did it precisely to annoy my sister, who in the meantime had appointed herself the representative of the fragmented Miró-Puig family. Mother certainly wasn’t going to leave her living room for anything less than six stab wounds, and my father remained stubbornly dead, so it was Madame Popo who parked her bulging backside on my bed each and every afternoon to offer advice, pampering, and admonitions. She hadn’t exactly grown a triple chin—she’d be what your Grandma Rosa permissively calls “chubby”—but she’d definitely suffered a big jump in her calorific intake. The increase in body mass had blurred the wavering line of her self-esteem. She was entering a phase of bottom-feeding for affection.

  Of course she reproached me for having married a murderer, and for being profligate, but I didn’t hold it against her—her brain was too slow to realign her language with her new objectives. I could hear the goodwill in her tone, in the warmth of her speech:

  “You’re an absolute idiot, Juan.”

  Best of all is that she showed up with one of those green cardboard folders that have charted the progress of my growing poverty. She’d summoned the Passgard people (though now they were Passgard & Helsengør) in order to confess that Dad had left her an apartment, a secret London flat: another love nest for that crow, or an expensive way of protecting my sister from our indifferent mother, who with or without the pills was capable of leaving everything to me. She told me that Dad had summoned her before she’d left for Boston. They hadn’t gone to the replicant flat, but rather to a bar that was like a fried-food sauna.

  “It was like having a conversation on a grill. I felt like crying. I didn’t know what to make of his plan. I put off signing the papers, he kept insisting—he’d never paid so much attention to me before. He was waiting for the deal to close before he did it. I could have kept him alive longer.”

  She told me the flat had made her feel guilty, that her property secret shamed her, and her aggression toward me had been an effort to shake off that burden. And she added that things were going to be different now, that she would arrange the papers so we shared the flat, she’d take care of me with her own two hands (and the combination of these words and her pinched little smile revolted me, as if they were extracting a live creature from my neck). She said I could use the place, go and live in London.

  “It’s beautiful there in spring. You’d be so happy starting a business there. The Catalans just don’t appreciate you.”

  I squirmed in my bed, making a frightening noise with the cables, the catheter, and the collapsible breakfast table, and I told her I was sick of having Mother ever-present in my head, of feeling Dad looming no matter where I went. I told her I’d just gotten rid of Helen and I couldn’t possibly feel better, and I didn’t want anyone dictating the rhythm of my days. I was done with following other people’s demands, and I was going to take the reins of my own life.

  “You’re really not that good when it comes to taking the reins.”

  OK, so that was pretty impolite, but she said it with a sweetness that ruled out clawing at each other’s eyes: beneath the words stirred currents of sisterly concern, and I felt fine.

  “You should have dragged that psychopath to court.”

  I swallowed it all until the end; it was a stupendous performance. She made her only mistake when she got up to leave: the gold necklace, the marble pants tight around her flabby haunches, the brand of her sunglasses easily legible on the arm, and the princess diamond sparkling on her left index finger. People can’t just shed their skins; they may think they’ve cut something loose, but their old selves survive. My sister hadn’t given up on competing in attractiveness (women of her size have a very faithful fan base); it was only a passing disenchantment: the most repulsive aspects of her character would come crawling right back into place sooner or later. Her animosity was too deep-seated to be soothed with a salve of fat. My sister belongs to that class who only lift a finger the better to slap you; she can’t help it, she doesn’t even realize she’s doing it.

  The fact is that when Helen called and begged to visit, I encouraged her and let her come. Not because she swore she wouldn’t see Bicente again (what a strategy), but because she had managed to emerge from the garbage can where she’d spent almost a year with only her Daddy for company. I was testing her, because it’s one thing to hear how a woman’s passion is more imperative, no wells of cynicism or safe distances, and it’s quite another to see a girl scrape her initiative off a floor slippery with low self-esteem, then cross the city to fight to keep you.

  “Stay. No váyaste. I love you with all my heart. There is nothing more important than a woman in love.”

  Her swollen eyes, disheveled hair, her enormous tits, the chewed-up nail of her left index finger (the only one she allowed herself, the one she’d always hidden from Rupert), the peanut shells on the table, that terrible accent when she pronounced the word “soirée,” her little box of pills shuttling from one pocket to another as if they burned her, the unnatural shapes that her lips could adopt, and the expressiveness of her eyes when something didn’t go the way she expected…the echo of so much that had become futile between us, and that now appeared in memories like dead extremities I was too disgusted and frightened to amputate. But on the other hand, there were the hours we had drunk of so deeply without noticing them pass, and there was the inconceivable number of people who were not Helen and I: people who don’t reheat our leftover stew on our stove, who never think to call our house or ask how things are going for us. She’d sorted out everything with her parents over the phone, without resorting to spells and incantations, and now she was feeling better; and, honestly, how many girls do you know who can say they love you with all their heart and not die of embarrassment at the cheesiness of it all? She convinced me that nothing should be more important in this shitty world where people break down and get lost and grow old and die than a silly blonde from Montana who was in love with me. That’s why I let her stay.

  I let her stay because, as the effect of the painkillers ebbed away from the empty crevice in my flesh, the sliced veins, arteries, and capillaries sent out waves of pain that were too distracting; really, I asked her to stay because the hospital food was rubbish and Helen managed to bring in some delicious Japanese; I asked her to stay because I couldn’t resist her idiotic idea, stolen from Colombian soap operas or women’s magazines, of fixing our relationship by going to a spa hidden in the pines; I begged her to stay because I saw something alive in her eyes that might let us regain some of our intimacy, and although I wasn’t in great shape and hand jobs are the bottom rung of teenage fantasies, it was delicious to watch as she managed the doctors, the nurses, the family of the blind guy they’d unzipped from pubis to throat to remove an invasive vine of ganglia, all so we could have a little privacy. And you tell me what other body part is connected more closely to the brain and its innumerable ideas about life and love and death than the hand: hundreds of nerve bunches encouraging contact between the delicate sensibility of what you would probably call the penis, and the body of the wife in love, so gentle in its touch, so soft in its handling. I think it was while we were in transit between dry and wet (me simulating the sort of abominable pain that drags you feetfirst toward death, Helen smiling the way a person can only smile if they’re born in the United States, call their father Daddy, and have hair that grows in vexing waves, blonde and healthy) that she took the opportunity to say what she’d come there to say:

  “Now you can’t leave me, it would be a mistake to leave me, don’t you see? It’s impossible to leave.”

  So Helen proposed we spend a few days at the spa. She asked to visit her parents first (Daddy would pay for the ticket) and bring Jackson (she mentioned the kid’s name before clarifying where he fit into the family framework), and although the roots of my spirit were still buried in damp, dark earth, rich in the minerals of fear and alarm, I took shelter in the cliché of foolish minds, I ignored my sense of foreboding: I said yes.

 
Aren’t intuitions odd? No more than two months ago, while I was gathering Pedro-María’s dirty clothes (but not his underwear) to try out the laundry sink, I thought of the word “chicle,” which had been our cue to execute the suicide play that could bring us back from a ten-point deficit in two minutes. The afternoon we played on IPSI’s court, a premonition had flashed before me that things weren’t going to turn out well; and it really was a mess, they’d practiced escaping our trap with a simple throw from the baseline. We found ourselves losing by a lot and on the opponents’ court, with the stands full of middle-class parents just dying to teach a lesson to those posh snobs from Bonanova, whose representatives were a bunch of teenagers in shorts. Doesn’t that happen to you all the time—don’t you get warnings? I have a theory, though I haven’t worked out the equations to prove it, and so far the astrophysicists have ignored it. If our universe is surrounded by an almost infinite number of other universes, there’s no reason that at any given instant each of them couldn’t occupy a different point in time, and if a godlike eye were to observe all of them simultaneously, it would understand that there is a universe for every past, present, and future second, that time is concurrent. It’s hard to explain how I reached this conclusion; what I need now is for you to empty your mind of prejudices, because if the different universes move in gentle undulations, forming folds like the frills of a summer dress, you’ll see that there must be fleeting moments when one plane of experience moves so close to another wave of the cloth that you get glimpses of the future, like smooth, bloodless visions, broadcasts about what we will become. So if I’m right, being alive is like having a conversation with other “me’s” dispersed throughout the cosmic ocean.

  Just as I’d unclogged the laundry sink, Pedro-María came home with an envelope and a smile: he’d bought two tickets to Sónar.

  “I had to get back to the hunt sometime, Johan. Plus, Jeff Mills is DJing.”