Divorce Is in the Air

by Gonzalo Torne

  I went to make him an herbal infusion, and while the water was boiling I found that he had moved back to the sofa and was sleeping with his face wedged against the armrest. I had to turn him over like a sack of potatoes to rescue the blanket he’d draped over the upholstery to stop his guest staining the upholstery with crumbs and grease.

  I hadn’t missed his accusation of cradle robbing. You’ll have already realized my arrangement with Pedro was comfortable, but I had more absorbing plans. I was heading down the classic road of sensitive pre-fifty-year-old men: I’d gotten involved with a girl young enough to be your niece. Where does my liaison leave all my jokes about men who break themselves on the treadmill so they can scratch around in a mismatched age group in search of sweet young things? Well, it leaves them wonderfully well placed, because I still don’t think getting old is an abdication: I don’t bleach or dye my hair or spread lotion on my hands. I’m a lived-in specimen, full of practical solutions to specific challenges.

  In fact, my adolescent girl (only she wasn’t so adolescent), who depended economically on parents whose surnames were not promising, believed she deserved to be loved like a real woman, and she tried to move in with me on Rocafort. I flatly refused, not only because it was a vice-ridden area, but also because I needed a refuge from her. In two weeks she spilled her entire life all over me: she took me to meet her friends, her girlfriends, her half-boyfriends (people she had kissed), and her rivals both real and imaginary, with whom she maintained contact because they gave her days a helpful touch of spice. And she presented me to them all as if to say: “Look, this is my new world.”

  I’m not going to say where we met. I only did it because I felt lonely—I’ve always been married or had a girlfriend, and I missed having someone want to put their arms around me. I didn’t give her any hopes for a shared future; to protect us both I gave her a pack of lies. I think she hadn’t entirely ended things with her boyfriend, and I didn’t want to deprive her permanently of the guy who will be there when everything else collapses.

  I liked her because she swung suspended in a limbo of allure, where one day she’d be convinced she was incontestably beautiful, and another she’d be irrationally afraid she was ugly. I liked her because in one short hour she could span every mood; because one day she’d stop smoking, another she’d stop drinking, and the next she’d wear out her shoes, burn her lips, and put her liver to the test. I liked her because she sat atop youth as though she’d conquered it, as though it weren’t a state that would be snatched away so another game could begin. She was going to defend her youth, because it was as much hers as the coffee-colored stain that crossed her face from one cheek to the other, overcoming the bridge of her nose. I liked her because she treated me like I belonged to a different species that had been born into adulthood and couldn’t even guess at the forces and conflicting emotions surging through her. I liked how she pretended to know everything about feelings whose depth and hardness she barely intuited. I liked her because there are girls with wise eyes who know more than they have lived, and she was not one of those girls. I liked her because it’s a luxury to listen to a person who still looks for a rational (even ethical!) justification for her choices, convinced that every impulse springs from a considered decision, and that one day she will finally harmonize that daily tumult into a coherent idea of herself, and I kissed her because all young people are evangelists. I kissed her because I like people and it’s wonderful that their little inner voices never stop. I kissed her even though a kiss meant little to her, because she confused sexual maturity with a list of erotic “experiences” organized according to difficulty: tests that you take and pass and drop like party streamers, never to be picked up again. I liked how she told me she lost her virginity when she was fifteen years and three months old, and that in his urgency the boy had forced her a little and hurt her. She’d developed negative feelings toward penetration and then she gradually overcame them so as not to be left out of life; and although she was almost old (nearly twenty-two), she knew she could achieve something important. I liked how her myopic eyes regarded me when she came out of the shower, and I liked her because out of all that nebulous wealth of women and men she’d decided she preferred males, and out of all the ones she could have chosen to star in the adventure of her life, she’d opted for me.

  Of course, if instead of this chatter projected into sterile nothingness I had you here with me, I’d tell you that I’d also slept with women my own age, girlfriends from before. And I’d be careful not to give you her name or Facebook page, where you could easily follow my very first illustrated romance. I took so many photos of her (what am I here for?) and she took so many of me (no comparison) that I stopped thinking of photography as a salvaged instant that years later will help animate lost landscapes of memory. When I saw them arranged on Instagram like cobblestones that don’t leave an inch of earth in sight, the minimal time between the photographs (several hours, a few days, never a week) worked as a spell to create the illusion of seamless continuity.

  The gap between what she saw in the photographs and what I saw was one of the many problems that complicated her project of building something stable with me. Ours was a love without roots, without a shared home. If Helen made my heart beat faster, it wasn’t just because of her beauty and youth; it was also because she secreted the same innocence and wonder as the boy I used to be. What I want in my life is her emotion, her fear, her tremor—my safety and confidence embracing her inexperience and doubts, opening doors together. What I want, these young girls can’t give me; age will always come between us.

  And though it may be a cheapened idea, I think it would have been good for me to have navigated the decades with a companion who’d known me from the beginning. The sense of responsibility that overwhelmed me when I said good-bye to Mabus was tied to the awareness that when I opened the door to the room in the hotel where Helen and I had tried to rip out each other’s tonsils, I was going to have the most important conversation of my life.

  I didn’t go straight upstairs, I needed some fresh air first. The sleepless night, the three times I’d crossed the hotel’s threshold in very different states of mind, the confusion between the boy who lived and didn’t know and the man who tells and knows all there is to know about the things he has experienced—it all cohered into a tense, slippery, hallucinatory scene. I heard the pigs squealing again. They must have been waking up, the beasts are early risers. It felt like one of those undulations of the universe was bringing me close to a different sequence of my own life, and I could touch an episode from the past.

  I wasn’t even three feet tall. We’d just come back from some excursion of which I remember only the road, the ruts from the wheels, and the ditches infested with thistles and sunflowers. Mother was watching over my sister, but her eyes only swelled with love when they turned to her son, playing as usual with the maroon ball until the darkness hid the basket from me. It wasn’t fair, but Mother had placed the better part of her love in her male offspring, so I felt no distrust when she told me, while she stirred a red infusion:

  “Tomorrow is hog day, you’ll enjoy it. It’s in the barn.”

  I wasn’t even put off by the wild, earth-colored cats, or the vivid suspicion that if my father had been there and not in one of the other places adults went without telling you, it wouldn’t have occurred to anyone to take me to a barn to see a hog. There was a time when it was enough that I just give my all, and things were fine; that time is gone, but it did exist.

  I didn’t know the person they chose to take me. The two of us went in a truck, it was dusk, and since the man scared me, I concentrated on watching out the window as the little villages along the roadside gradually condensed into smatterings of electric light: they shone like the stars at night. The man only broke the silence when the farmyard’s outline appeared. The flagstones in the barn smelled of dry grass, of vegetable things, bitter and rancid. On the floor (lit by the sun’s last rays—there was a tear in the c
urtain), I saw viscous impregnations with the texture of bitumen, almost no shine. While we were waiting for whatever we were waiting for, some adults came in with buckets. I’d never seen two men wielding rags; they scrubbed with a solution of water and bleach, but they weren’t really serious about washing whatever it was off the floor. They just sloshed it around and diluted it.

  Then we heard the piercing squeals of the pig.

  They dragged it in between four or five men. The hog moved fast on those sickly little legs that could barely carry it, so worked up that its belly brushed against the ground. It realized very quickly that things weren’t going well. Those creatures aren’t idiots like cows or ducks, they have mature brains, and when they smell the blood of other hogs spread over the floor they go mad, you really have to fight to hold them down. These days they use a pistol that shoots compressed air and destroys the neural tissue instantly. I saw it one night, years later, over seven years ago: the pig shrieks like a chain saw and shits itself from struggling so much, but it’s cleaner than slitting its throat and waiting for the avalanche of viscera and mucous to finish falling through the gaping wound. We stayed there for some minutes. Another adult, among the many there, assured me the pig was no longer suffering. But its eyes were flickering, suspended, as if they were forcing it to lie there looking into the abyss. It seemed mute, but only because the flesh of its throat was bleeding out into the sand.

  I went outside, and what I did there was play. Back then it was always playing, even if I only sat still.

  When I got bored with playing, I peered in through the barn’s window.

  They still had work to do with what remained of the pig. That beast might have weighed as much as four adult humans, maybe half a ton. The proteins in its brain hadn’t gotten used to being dead, and were sending chemical flashes to its muscles. The whole pink mass contracted in spasms, but the men didn’t appear to be at all afraid of that pig’s nervous ghost. They were strong, they were healthy, they were loud when they drank, they were nothing like my father. What could possibly frighten them? There was nothing left of the hog as such, it was just meat and lard. Death was something that left scraps behind. You could cut them, pound them remorselessly; death gave you an absolute power, and it left its victim entirely defenseless.

  I know that they put an iron hook through the opening in its neck and that its tongue fell spongily out, flat like a sole fish. Its thick hide sagged to the ground (I had eaten it, but I still hadn’t seen it twist and wither in hot oil, I hadn’t associated it with anything living), and on its fatty inside were fluorescent bubbles, different from the oily veins of industrial bacon. I don’t know if what they did with the water spurting from the hose could be called cleaning; the ground was still covered with muck that was darker and shinier than the usual filth. They were juices and tissues of the type required to keep life on its feet, and now there they were, exposed on the floor of the barn.

  I know they scorched the animal to get rid of its stiff hair. I know that once it was hot they pulled off its hooves. I know they cleaned it using cork. I know they pulled out its guts and organs. I know they cut it from top to bottom along the spinal column, that they left it hanging for the white and bloody meat to cure, that they extracted its ribs, its backbone, and its loins, which they cut up into strips of meat. And I know that among the entrails floating in a bucket of ice water, I saw the pig’s heart. It was the same color of concentrated blood as the raw kidneys that I’ve never again put in my mouth, but triple the size of the little rabbit hearts you could break out of their membrane with your fingers and toss in the bin.

  Two months later, I got onto a bus, my knees grass-stained and the ball hidden away in a backpack. I got off a little before the last stop and I left the ball in an empty field the neighbors used for parking, where garbage rotted and cottony rounds woven of vegetation and dust rolled by, looking like desiccated animal carcasses. I felt lighter on the way back. Every time I’d stumbled over that garnet-colored ball, I’d imagined the enormous, beating organ stuck in the middle of the hog’s hulking body: a muscular pump designed to distribute blood to its extremities, to its pig organs, to its glands.

  I stood there admiring that knot of fibers in the bucket. If no one did anything, it would start to dry out in a few hours. And who was going to take the time to keep it moist? I went closer to the window; floating particles were turning the water murky. Living bodies are strange inside, they have galleries, caves, arches, and domes. They’re wet. Even if they let me take the pieces out of the bucket, I couldn’t put them back together; no matter how hard you concentrate in class, living things can’t be reassembled once they’re broken. I know my attention was caught by the fine and firm veins of fat, which struck me then as a frame to support the maroon pulp. Years have passed, and I’ve come to think of them as the marks that a lifetime of lashes had opened in the flesh.

  So, as I was saying, I climbed the hotel stairs briskly, convinced I was about to untangle an annoying knot so that life could unfurl once and for all toward my authentic future: the easy life. I opened the door with a kick (I thought the surprise would work in my favor), and I found Helen kneeling on the floor with her face painted vermilion. She’d used the same thick, organic red to draw on the wall the outline she used to represent her Daddy (her fingerprints were stamped where the line curved to change direction). Sure, I saw the stains on the floor; it was just that I wondered at first where that maniac had gotten hold of paint—maybe they’d given her a bottle of ketchup in the kitchen? It was just that the window was open and a fresh, pleasant breeze was blowing in; it was just that it took me a few seconds to orient my brain in the correct, delirious, abject direction: her own body had supplied the paint, she’d extracted it from inside herself.

  I had to concentrate on curbing the oily, nauseating taste that made me shudder as it traced a rising arc up my esophagus. I leaned against the wall to let the shudders of disgust pass. Helen was still kneeling on the floor, invoking in her little voice forces that weren’t going to save us, her face smeared with menstrual blood: a magic philter to retain the lover whose back she’d broken.

  “What are you doing? What do you think you’re doing?”

  “Shut up, get out of here, you couldn’t begin to understand. This is too personal and spiritual for an animal like you, you’re just a collection of missing pieces.”

  And if you stop to think about it, blood is already pretty mysterious in itself. There you have it, spinning through your veins, irrigating organs and tissues, drenching them in vitamins and iron; you find it in birds, you won’t believe how fish bleed, even those shitty little insects less than a centimeter long have their drop to defend; a baby is born covered in blood, and it is blood that congeals in the arteries of corpses. It’s a vital juice we pass on, generation after generation, a scarlet thread that traces the figure of life inside the body. You could write a good book with an idea like that. We’d watched the video together, eating popcorn, entwined on the sofa (how you would disapprove of the new domestic habits, Dad) while on the screen Jovanotti spouted off about how women were creatures who bled, and men trained them to be ashamed of their cycles, their processes, their phases, their…well, you can add any idiotic word you like, take your pick. And, unperturbed by so much crudeness, he added that with the nutrients of fecundation that went unused every month any woman could put right broken relationships, or get rid of traumas so deeply rooted they can’t be torn out without irreparable harm. Naturally, my reaction was to laugh in that fraud’s face, and because I heard her laughing I thought Helen was following my lead. But it seems her feet were dragging her in the direction of magical, fantastical thinking, toward the marvelous catalogue of easy answers: spells and charms.

  “I don’t think we came here for these demented tricks. I, for one, came because I believed in us. I still believed. I came for love.”

  She replied with some whistling noises; I suppose the ritual continued apace. And at this point it’s so
rely tempting to put Helen in a clinical category and expel her from the ranks of the sane. It wouldn’t be the first time—her silky buttocks had experienced being kicked. But it isn’t that easy, of course. If you counted all the men who knock on wood, and girls who leave the house carrying magic stones, convinced that the future leaves signs etched into the constellations, you’d come up with a seven-digit number, and I refuse to believe that those millions are all cuckoo. This huge, intricate machine we’re hurled into and expected to find our way in is too confusing, stubborn, and volatile to interpret with scientifically approved theories or ideas handed down to us by our parents; it does us all good to wield a daring hypothesis or two. Personally, I believe in sympathetic telepathy and in vitamin C’s influence on love. Helen’s concoction was lower quality; it included more irrational bullshit than mine did, that was all. I’m just saying that Helen hadn’t come up with her bloody ritual in an injured area of her brain; Jovanotti had whispered it to her via the prestigious channels of public radio and private television. Helen was only a silly creature trying to do things right. How could I hold that against her?

  “Touch me and I’ll kill you.”

  I hadn’t moved with any intention of touching her, but that warning acted as a map of where to channel the indignation burning my hands. I grabbed her arms and dragged her to the bathroom, leaving her sprawled while I adjusted the water in the shower. When I pulled off her shirt she started to struggle, but without conviction, as if she wanted neither to surrender nor conquer, as if my violence were the force she’d been trying to invoke all along. I stuck her face under the water and cleaned her lips and teeth and her armpits and belly, I lathered her all over. The drain wasn’t working well, and I saw a pinkish substance swirling, the color of guts, crowned with rapids and crests of foam. I didn’t let go of her neck, just in case.