Gonzalo Torne - Divorce Is in the Air

What did I matter to Saw? What interest could he have in a childless, divorced, chronically ill man? Why would he care about the layers time had deposited on my body? The lesson I’d learned from the heart scare was that we will never be as young as we are right now, but Pedro-María wasn’t interested in having a forty-something guy remind him how precious his remaining healthy days were. He wanted me to help him immerse himself in the past, the time of promise: his memory of the past, and the past of his dreams.

Nothing good could come of this meeting. I had made a mistake; our roots had rotted from damp.

“I’m going to take a piss.”

It was good timing, but I wasn’t faking: one of the side effects of the pills I was taking to thin my blood was diuretic. The drug liquefied my fat and sent streams of toxins to my bladder. I’d lived for years without knowing that the walls of that gourd grew slack with use. No more pissing before going out at night and holding it till dawn. These days I need to go every half hour, and I never really feel empty. I’ve had to overcome my fears and make my way into the toilets of bars, restaurants, cinemas, and burger joints, where surprises left by other ghastly people, intentionally or not, await me. We old folks are truly adventurous.

The bathroom at La Brasa was clean, courtesy of a gallon of bleach dumped over the floor; my eyes watered. I turned on the tap, and I had gotten so used to the role of senescent that I was surprised to see in the mirror the skin of a still-taut face, healthy lips, my wavy golden hair. I scrubbed my hands with soap and water; men who only wash afterward don’t appreciate their most delicate part. I unzipped my fly and confirmed the mismatch between the urgency I felt and the paltry amount of urine. Going for a piss is hell: all that wasted time while you wait for it to finally dribble out.

I went back to the dining room and the view was still crummy, but the light slid honeyed and cold over the table, and my glass shone with greasy fingerprints. Pedro had knocked back what was left of the wine, and he looked at me with crystalline eyes: he didn’t wear contacts.

“Should we order another bottle?”

I missed my chance to tell him my body had forgotten how to process cholesterol, that the residues of that wine, the slab of red meat with its blackened edges, would build up like gravel and threaten to burst my heart, or blow a blood vessel in my brain and leave me a half-wit.

“Don’t let me stop you.”

Then he told me about how tired he was of working for other people, how sick of trading his time for a subsistence wage. Also, he’d had enough of programming, designing websites for guys who were unable to learn the basics themselves. He told me he wanted time for himself, that when he headed out with his Nikon he felt he was better, healthier, a good person. He told me that ever since signing his first employment contract he’d been waiting for the ideal moment to dedicate himself entirely to photography: he had a real feel for light, he felt his talent deserved recognition. He’d tried to steal hours from work, but by the time he left the office he was too tired, he couldn’t find a second wind. He was swamped by the shopping and the washing and all the other tasks that pile up, oblivious to the artistic spark that burned within him.

“I’m not fooling myself anymore. The perfect time is never going to come. You have to force things along, you have to dare to jump from the train while it’s moving.”

He gave me his Instagram.

“That’s what I do. That’s my calling.”

He told me not to miss the comments, which would show me what his photographs evoked in other aficionados. Their words were injections of energy that kept him from giving in to the zombie life, the office life, the life all the rest of us lead.

“I’m tired of dreaming of a shadow life. I want to attack it head-on, get inside it, live at its center.”

He told me he planned to ask for fewer hours and less pay, or at least to be absolved of all the meetings: staff, department, sales, purchasing, empathy and synergy trainings. He told me that at big corporations they keep track of every minute you spend having breakfast, going upstairs to smoke a cigarette, or to the bathroom.

“It’s despicable.”

He told me that there is life throbbing within each of us, and we have the chance to feed it. He told me that our forties are a creative decade, that he felt he had the strength and imagination to reinvent himself, and he wasn’t going to let anyone get in his way. He wasn’t about to stay stuck in the hole they’d dug for people like him: people who had gone to school, fulfilled their responsibilities, people who let themselves be hoodwinked. He told me it was a good moment for entrepreneurs, that the atmosphere was charged with energy and banks were giving credit away.

“I don’t know about you, but I can’t waste any more time.”

He told me he was sick of being tested. They demanded an output he couldn’t keep up with, his nerves were as exposed as stripped wires (and he reached out his arm as he said it, as if I could see right through his skin). The envy he felt, which diminished him and left him dwelling on his own insignificance, wasn’t a sign of small-mindedness — it would disappear once he’d embraced a life equal to his ambitions. He was willing to live on as little as it took; he felt compensated because a good photograph brought beauty into the world. He was going back to basics: money in his pocket, straightforward adventure — that’s why he’d sought out old friends online who were single or divorced, undomesticated boys who weren’t going to surrender, who wouldn’t give up until the final whistle blew. And that’s why he didn’t ask anything about me: he had me all figured out.

“No one can understand me like you.”

Why would I understand him? Because we’d shared eight years of classes, a hundred training sessions, a thousand physical exertions? We’d had similar experiences, but they had gone through different heads that they’d imbued with different characters, before being integrated into constellations of events, fears, and expectations we could never share.

“Of course I understand you, Pedro, I understand you perfectly.”

He invited me to have another coffee, he invited me to take a shot, he invited me on a walk, he invited me to have a drink, he knew a stupendous gin bar at the foot of the mountain, he could take me on the back of the motorbike. If I’d proposed going to the dog track he would have accepted — any plan struck him as better than going home. Even though I thought Pedro was a cretin, a certain congeniality was starting to pervade our conversation, a dangerous camaraderie that smoothed over any friction. One more step and there’d be no turning away from that friendship. I was saved from dragging out the night any longer because I find it vaguely gay to ride on the back of a motorbike, and also because of the lingering fear left by my heart scare; I was going to behave. We said good-bye, exchanging assurances that we’d never let our friendship lapse again. Then I told him I’d lost my mobile, and I switched a digit in the address I gave him.

I watched as he got on the bike, looking for all the world like a string of sausages on a hook. I turned around and headed uphill to avoid his little wave. Once I was alone I walked — gastric fluids slogging away at the bolus in my stomach — through empty lots as spacious as hangars, down unexpected slopes, across bridges and down blind stairways, along streets so open and deserted it was like there’d been an outbreak of a deadly virus. The alcohol began to dissipate, leaving a naked remorse for having injected myself with that hunk of meaty blubber; the lipid polyps must be playing deadly Tetris in my veins. Joan-Marc and Pedro-María, Pedro-María and Joan-Marc: those compound names are hilarious. I wouldn’t be giving him a second chance — that farce ended right there. Friendship is overrated, it makes you overvalue the past, and nostalgia is a leech that sucks the blood from your brain. As soon as I’d gotten rid of the weight in my stomach, that very day, I’d get started on a girlfriend.