Divorce Is in the Air

by Gonzalo Torne

  It’s funny (mind you, “funny” isn’t exactly the word, but the moment didn’t lend itself to finding a better one) how we can call up the past in a fixed image and leave it frozen on the mind’s projector screen, preventing time from speeding it up. To remember is like passing those images one after another, scrutinizing them, altering their color, classifying them. In one, I drag Helen out of the bathroom, in another I throw her onto the bed, confident in my superior strength, then I throw myself onto her and I hear her face (an expression of vague repulsion marbled with veins of outrage and impotence) repeat in a thread of a voice:

  “Touch me and I’ll kill you.”

  While I thrust into her viciously, it seemed to me that a little gray figure that could only be the shadow of my father was projected onto the wall; he was trying to communicate to me from the other side (I liked that euphemism because it left open the hope of a return) his manly advice on how to dominate a marriage, which he’d never dared to impart in life. Because while he was alive, the most valuable guidance he managed to transmit (and that I assimilated, though it went against the current of my actions) was what could be taken from that little man’s daily habits (the father of my flesh, who breakfasted each morning on buttered toast and went down to Balmes to buy himself a beige handkerchief): the conventional search for moderation. But in the end you flew the coop, Dad, living in secret, taking care of Mother on the sly. If you’re going to tell me something in an attempt to cover the open wound at the heart of your marriage, I’m not sure I want to hear it, and nor did you arrive in time to straighten out what I had with Helen. Even if she grabbed my back (her finger on my scar) as we surrendered ourselves lasciviously, neither of us expected any sweet words. I felt her tremble and emerge from the trance and we broke apart, she moved away and turned over, and I heard her breathing beneath the mass of messy hair. When I recognized the pink mark of my hand on her opulent buttocks, my body felt filled with a kind of paste, disgust for both of us, a final feeling. It occurred to me to reach out and caress her, but the impulse went no further.

  The last thing I saw before falling asleep (it was dark, but my pupils managed to take in loose fibers of light) was enough clothing to fill a clothesline, two toppled chairs, and part of the sheet that had fallen off the bed, which from where I lay looked like a mass of flesh determined to flee its body and spill over the floor. Beside me a hot body slept, a little weepy, a bit of torn skin.

  Somehow while I was sleeping the swell of light advanced surreptitiously from the globe’s antipodes until its luminous froth poured over the horizon. I missed seeing it open the first narcissus and set the lower plains on fire, and how it slipped like an innuendo among the resort’s fronds. I was sleeping the sleep of satisfied mammals. I opened my eyelids slowly and closed them again. Some words spoken during that endless night of struggle shamed me, but let’s not exaggerate: the innermost caverns of my body, which so often felt more spacious than they looked from the outside, were oozing serenity. I opened my eyes in a room invaded by southern light, bathed by a delicate atmosphere of feminine aromas; I even felt the soft tug of arousal and a gnawing hunger. Nothing a kiss and some yogurt couldn’t fix.

  But Helen wasn’t there.

  This time she’d taken her suitcase, collected all her clothes; maybe she was serious.

  I didn’t leap out of bed, didn’t get dressed in a hurry or run barefoot into the corridor to look for her. I didn’t care. I brushed my teeth, urinated, took a really good shower and let the water slide over the skin of my arms, my fingers lathering my hair into foamy crests; I even burst into song. I came out of the bathroom with a pygmy-sized towel tied around my waist, showing half a buttock that in the room’s mirror assumed demotic proportions; how grand I felt. Through the window, two creamy clouds were sliding imperceptibly past. It was like I’d taken off a pair of glasses that had muted all the colors, like rediscovering a brilliant landscape, shimmering, full of just-wet shades; it was like my heart and my brain had broken away from a network of parasitic nerves and veins. That scent of living moss and vegetation came from the miracle of falling out of love.

  I was optimistic and full of verve like a pony released from its bridle, half crazed at the sight of an open field washed by hopeful breezes, my tendons twitching with vitality. I put on the suit fit for a diplomat that I’d brought just in case, and in honor of Dad I folded a silk scarf around the open neck of my periwinkle shirt. The outfit made me look like a country squire nervous about attending the theater, but it wasn’t out of place among the mummies. Plus, there were my chin, my dimples, my mat of springy hair, my eyes with their noble clarity, all bestowing a little beauty on the humans who laid eyes on me.

  I went down the stairs convinced that the sex we’d had, so hard-fought (the final fight with Helen), so aggressive, so sad, so satisfactory as a form of physical relief, was a good symbolic summary of our marriage: we had no more to give. At reception I stocked up on salty peanuts and inquired after Jack Mabus, the only man to whom I could confide the ending of my story. I was afraid that if I kept it in, it would turn sour; I wanted to say it and expel it, dissolve it in the immensity of the shared world.

  “Mr. Mabus left this morning.”

  I figured Helen had gone back to Barcelona, or that she’d locked herself in her parents’ room, or headed out on a hike among the cornfields; I imagined her enthusiastically looking at some fissured figs with red pulp, who knows? The only certainty was that just then, not only was Jack Mabus headed away from the resort at the speed of his chosen means of transportation, but Jackson and his grandparents were also packing their suitcases en route to the far-flung fields of Montana. So I had the sort of scare that can make your hair fall out when the receptionist pointed mutely down the corridor toward Daddy Rupert’s sagging body. He’d tried to call my room, he’d been waiting two hours for me, so soft and livid that if it weren’t too obvious a joke I’d say that the health spa was killing him.

  He invited me to sit with him on the terrace. It was an emotionally charged scene; half an hour earlier I’d been sure I was free of Helen. A man can convince himself of incredible things when he’s singing naked in a hotel room (you should try it), but I guess two out of every three of my heartbeats were still pumping blood bewitched by the daughter of the Thrush clan. It’s no easy business to clean one’s matter, to sterilize it, expel the final atoms of shared expectations. In the end, I had to have a talk with the decrepit incarnation of the man responsible for the bestial daily life I’d enjoyed for the past year, the scoundrel who’d turned Helen’s spirit bitter with his inflexible gender preferences, the same man I wanted to see flayed alive every time my wife crawled back over our emotional garbage. It’s no surprise my leg was trembling.

  He ordered a chamomile tea, and I decided it would be too much to ask if they could make me a gin and tonic. In the creases of his debilitated face shone cold, metallic irises; he smiled at me belligerently, pulled up a sock. The other was down around his ankle: my empty stomach fought back a heave when I saw that naked shin, pale and thick like those noodles the Japanese eat.

  “Helen told us everything. My daughter is ready to charge you with rape, but she won’t do anything without our support. And we won’t support her in a case she’ll never win and that will only keep her chained to you. For all I know, that’s her motivation. What we are asking for is an effort on your part to get a fast divorce. The airline has had the courtesy to change the name on my ticket—the Spanish never kick up a fuss if you show them an American passport. The boy will leave with his mother and grandmother. The climate in this town suits me, and in three or four days we can have all the paperwork for your separation finished. Given the circumstances, it would be quite surprising if a gentleman like you, sir, were to start making strange requests now.”

  He managed to say it all in Spanish with just a few supporting words in English. He had planned the speech, and made no effort to hide the currents of apathy swirling under his general feelin
g of relief at putting an end, once and for all, to his daughter’s disastrous Latin phase (which at least he’d come out of without another grandchild). He seemed more interested when he heard the sound of pigs grunting, turning his head from side to side, looking for the animals. Rupert put both hands on the table and tried to stand up; when he managed it, slightly hunched over, he was roughly the same size as Dad. Though, of course, Dad would never have stooped to wearing those Bermuda shorts.

  “Why didn’t you love her?” I asked.

  Rupert hadn’t given his deposed son-in-law a single line in his script, so my reply cracked the scene he’d anticipated and we were left to improvise: two people born in different decades, thousands of kilometers apart, whose trajectories would never have coincided were it not for the fact that men engender daughters in the bodies of women, and other men fall in love with those daughters, and that fluke muddles the expectations of the present into an unknowable future.

  I think they came squealing out of the forest: three piggy Zeppelins. They skirted the pool like greased lightning and crossed the terrace toppling chairs in their wake. The pursuing gang of waiters struggled with them on the grass until they finally got the animals tied up. They dragged the pigs away through the pines along a hidden path.

  “They’re females. Males are too big to be held down by two people. Smart animals. I owe them a lot.”

  I tuned out. I wasn’t there to listen to the melancholic doddering of an old man whose only known skills were driving vans, taking care of Beryl (he of the model planes), and shredding his daughter’s nerves. But Daddy kept going.

  “One of their species donated tissue for my transplant.”

  I’d heard something about that before, how the human heart’s fragile fibers can be propped up by the pig’s tough cells. Of course, in those days, maladies that required surgery sounded like distant music to me. It’s only now that I’ve started to worry about whether the influx of porcine molecules is mutating us into a hybrid race. Or does it seem normal to you that Rupert was walking around with a hog’s ventricle?

  “It’s funny that even after being married to her, you don’t see that my daughter is a little…excessive. A girl in love with her problems, which to be honest have never been all that serious. Helen doesn’t let her wounds heal, she doesn’t forget any reason she has to feel offended and lets them build up day after day; you’re always beholden to her. Behind her low self-esteem is a hidden, unspeakable pride, and not much more. I gave her affection, an education, and we never abandoned her, not even when she left behind an unwanted child and took off to gad about on another continent with a man who doesn’t even understand her.”

  He said all this in English, not even looking at me. To him I was like an isolated element in a solved equation that no longer offered any intellectual stimulation. It was only as I watched him hobble away that responses, accusations, and reproaches came bubbling up from I don’t know what depths of my mind, accumulating behind my forehead. I could chase him, I could force him to come back and listen to me (I still had strength on my side), but I did none of that; I stayed sitting there quietly, with my English handkerchief and my silk scarf. I raised my hand but no waiter appeared, the light fell in raw columns between cracks in the atmosphere; I cooled off and realized I was sick of arguing. How fast adult life moves: I never saw Helen again, they no longer give me a basket and ball to measure my good fortune, it’s never about winning or losing anymore.

  I had three more days ahead of me. I could leave, what was keeping me? But the wasted money hurt. I didn’t want to flee like a rat, I wanted to spend the hours ahead forgetting myself in the wave pool. Rupert’s reprimand had been like a refreshing shower. I missed having someone put me in my place. If not for the dismal prospect of moving to Montana, I would have let Daddy adopt me.

  I went to bed early. I fell asleep plowing through foggy torrents of alcohol, wondering if sons are still sons once they’re orphaned, so I was startled when the phone in my room started ringing at four in the morning. It didn’t help that I confused the ringing with the fire alarm; Cataluña is prone to summer wildfires, and we were boxed in a shallow valley, so it’s understandable (and forgivable) that I was relieved when I understood that the cavernous voice was referring to Rupert. “Your father-in-law” was the repeated subject of a riot of predicate nouns: “serious collapse,” “coronary attack,” “muscular paralysis.” I got dressed freestyle without considering colors or fabrics (I went out in mismatched socks, in scuffed shoes), everything reflecting my state of mind, still sticky with sleep, and when I entered room 601 I remembered that, according to the civil laws of the City of Madrid, I was the only relative Rupert had on the peninsula.

  The doctor (a gorgeous, ruddy-cheeked rural specimen, with lines on his forehead from rolling up his barretina cap) brought me up to speed on the series of heart attacks during the night that had left Rupert disoriented and with just enough strength to call for help. He needed oxygen and saline, and it wasn’t out of the question that the macrophages, overflowing with lipids, fat, and cholesterol, would block another vein. It was best to transport him to the local hospital and start sawing him up (he didn’t use that verb) to unclog the veins, because Dr. Capri didn’t have the resources at the spa—the center’s first aid and medical facility were a bit of a joke. I’m not one of those weirdos who see words in colors, but the doctor’s next sentence flashed golden as it was projected in my imagination:

  “I need you to authorize his hospitalization.”

  “I need to be alone with him.”

  “Didn’t you hear what I said?”

  “It’ll just be a moment, I only need a moment.”

  The Joan-Marc with his health compromised by trail mix and potato chips saturated in corrosive fats would have felt solidarity with that Rupert who was unable to support the weight of his own body: it strikes me, too, that it was a real mistake to make an organ as important as the heart unable to store oxygen for when the need arises, so its demand is continuous. But what I experienced that day, once I was alone with that man into whose nostrils they’d stuck thick tubes like organic tentacles, was an invigorating power, an extra dose of manliness. The strength he’d had during our conversation, not to mention the touch of aggression, had vanished. The bird that watched me from that damp bed was just a scared old man with a rubber tube between his lips, which his tongue and uvula palpated shamelessly.

  And don’t get the idea I planned to strangle him. I wouldn’t have had the nerve. All I did was pull the sheet off him; he smelled of dust, wax, and something else. The skin of his feet was hard like a rind, his blood had congealed in several dark spots of livid ink. He had the same hard and spongy calluses as Dad. My next step was to dig around in his suitcase—he tried to stop me from burgling him with some utterly impotent mutterings. Anyway, I had the medical establishment on my side, as well as a long history of abusive legal precedents against the wishes of defenseless patients. I took his wallet, a mobile phone, his pillbox, and an envelope holding three letters. It was a lot like having your rival’s guts in your hands. Then I signed all the papers they put in front of me—as far as I was concerned, they could steal his organs.

  In the ambulance I entertained myself by going through Rupert’s phone, which of course wasn’t the kind of pocket computer we haul around with us these days, but it did have a little camera. I looked through the photos and I found his grandson and Helen, shots of the house and of license plates (every man has his photographic perversions). His wife must not have known how to work the thing, because Rupert had also saved photos of a plump and uninhibited blonde a bit older than me, who wore jeans that the word “tight” was a little baggy on. Rupert smiled in front of urban backgrounds (Boston, Seattle, the San Francisco Bay) or landscapes that could be anywhere (cacti, sand, bald patches of earth), and the sequence of little poses culminated in an orthopedic kiss in front of a replica Statue of Liberty. The blurry quality of the pictures lowered those occasions to the
category of half-developed memories, ones that have neither dissolved entirely nor been integrated into the series of shining moments that constitute the public profiles of our lives.

  They untied him, propped him up in a wheelchair, stuck him in a room. They took off his clothes, shaved him, tied him down again so he wouldn’t be tempted to fall off, and told him that in half an hour they would sedate him. Rupert, though, was only babbling away in fragments of German left over from God knows what remote period of his life.

  If you think about what he was going through, Rupert’s gaze was pretty calm. His composure reminded me of my father’s levelheadedness when he was alive (because when he hanged himself his eyes had gone crooked): they both belonged to a generation that didn’t deal with problems by shouting, men constrained by modesty, no chicken feathers on them. I should have hated him, but hate is hard to muster when your enemy is swelling up like a drowned corpse. I’d actually been feeling friendly toward the old coot—call it fellow feeling, or masculine solidarity if you prefer. Maybe Helen’s parents had also intended to fix their relationship with a trip to that resort, give it another shot before heading off to the grave. It must be sad to grow bitter when there’s so little time before they’re spreading your ashes over a field of violets. Daddy had opted for his wife, and he saved the photos only out of pride, or nostalgia, the kind of complacent contradiction you’ll find circulating in the brains of the living.

  I was already getting overly solemn when Rupert started emitting that teakettle sound. An invisible force was racking him like he was a cardboard doll, you could almost hear him crunch; Daddy was truly battling death. An aroma of reheated resin and flannel suits wafted in. I dialed Helen’s number but she still didn’t answer, convinced that a Spanish prefix could only portend her Latin rapist. Dad had also been alone when he climbed up onto the stool with the cable (I hadn’t told you that part—he looped half a meter of antenna cable around his neck: copper sheathed in rubber). I called the doctors in and they took him to emergency, on the floor for coronary patients, and somehow we ended up on a ward for the terminally ill. In the room with us were other crustaceans, in whose eyes you could still see a sliver of spirit, the last flash of conscious activity. For years I had silently given thanks (fighting to evade regrets, to dry them out in the sun of new events before they permeated me) that my father had saved me the horror of watching him ebb away slowly in a synthetic bed, perforated like a voodoo doll. In spite of all the hours I’d lived alongside him, not to mention my familiarity with his intestinal rhythms, the ordeal of accompanying him into that unknown would have been too much for me to bear.