Gonzalo Torne - Divorce Is in the Air

Once I’d reached my building on Rocafort and made it up the stairs, I could just picture my heart slumped exhausted in my chest, so I spent the rest of the evening on the couch, flipping through channels, all fifty-two, and back again to the beginning. I got sick of cooking shows, tennis matches, skinny teenagers shaking their asses, talk shows, movies that were half over, those dramas that always end with a cliff-hanger, and the news feed on repeat, programmed by the CIA. My neighbor had gone on vacation and this time he’d remembered to turn his router off, and I knew all my DVDs by heart. Nor could I sleep with the thunder of taxis and buses from the Gran Via, so I got up and poured myself a proxy: a tumbler full of cold water with lemon. I’ve read somewhere that taste is a mental construct, that those yogis who spend their lives upside down have such control over their enzymes and taste buds that they can call up at will the flavor of crunchy chicken wings, or a curry, or whatever they eat in Tibet. And I’m not saying that a good placebo can’t cure a cold, or appendicitis or AIDS — I won’t be the one to deny the power of positive thinking. I’m just saying that my own brain let me down when I asked it to imbue that tap water, between the insipid foretaste and the chlorine aftertaste, with just a hint of Tanqueray.

Thinking about Helen helped me get over my state of prostrate self-indulgence. Only a fool like her would ever decide to attempt a reconciliation in that storehouse for old fossils weighted down by arthritis, paresis, hearing aids, and the metal scars of pacemakers stuck into the flesh of their hearts. First wives are not the best topic of conjugal conversation, and you were a bit naive when I first met you, so we didn’t talk about Helen much. Though I must admit it was delightful to have my two ribs together in the same scene on the stage of my imagination — one of the tricks that makes having the thing worthwhile.

And at first glance, you wouldn’t have thought Helen held many secrets: a stupendous blonde, predictable as an innocent joke. You got more of a sense of her ambition with every breath she took…people are so blank at first, and they conform so well to our stereotypes…Of course, you can take even the dullest person around, stir her up with your words, and before long you’ll see rising to the surface all kinds of feelings and ideas that flow from her unique blend of interests, and you’d never have known they were there. There’s a private universe in every single vessel of flesh taking up its space on sidewalks, in chairs, on buses. Billions of brains pumping all kinds of mental matter. Nature overdid it with us — we’re a real waste of resources.

One of those brains was atop my shoulders twenty years ago as I went walking in Madrid. It was spring, and I went into a fruit shop with a craving to sink my teeth into the sweet pulp of a peach — and there you have the kind of boy I used to be. I’d received my master’s diploma in the mail, and I’d hung it beside my degree in management and business administration; I’d just bought myself a TAG Heuer with a round black face. Although I wasn’t the ambitious type, it wouldn’t be totally inaccurate to say I was in Madrid for work, only it wasn’t the kind of job that involves alarm clocks, metros, and salaries, or coming home at the end of the day with a brain turned to mush. I’d heard tales of that fantastic world, and my family had all concurred it wasn’t for me. My job involved meeting with Dad’s veteran clients: during lunches I wore a listening face, and if they asked me any questions, I replied that I’d rather understand the ins and outs of the business before making any decisions — they really liked that phrase. They introduced me to their kids and I met new people every night. We could spend two hundred euros on a single dinner — hell, on one bottle of wine. I let myself be carried along; I had no intention of letting Dad’s “business” embitter me; I was in Madrid at the end of May, my favorite city at the prettiest time of year.

They welcomed me into a circuit of house parties and we went out every night. I pretended to understand the in-jokes, the obscure allusions. In every little group we tossed around a set of names that it felt good to criticize, accuse, and belittle. People would collapse from boredom if we couldn’t bitch about those who aren’t here.

We’d stay seated until dessert, then drink coffee and digestifs standing up, in shirtsleeves, mingling freely in the space that yawned between the balcony and the terrace. The nights were starting to grow warm, and the parties were held with the windows open to the noise from the street: fragments of conversation, wafting laughter, improvised songs that filled the room with a sense of rushed delight. The little groups traded members, and it was always strange to see the moment when the various cliques melted together in a jolly wave that washed over the whole room before subsiding.

Vicente’s apartment wasn’t up to the standard of Rétiz’s or Álvarez del Valle’s, but since his father’s widow traveled all the time, we convinced ourselves that the relative restrictions on space forced us to be more selective. Plus, Vicente was the kind who would work for it; that evening he’d covered his floor with a felt cloth, and in every corner stood a candelabra giving off a spicy aroma — incense or sandalwood — that almost concealed the impregnated nicotine. I assumed it was another vintage party, which were all the rage then. We were like a generation gone astray, puzzled by our own era; unable to give it a recognizable iconography, we flirted instead with decades past. Still, I was thrown by the gigantic pillows and the little Buddha statues. Vicente cleared it up with one of his unctuous phrases:

“It’s an ethnic party.”

Every night, after the girls and the more sporadic guests went home to sleep, we’d have a coda to the party: we cleaned up plates and glasses, straightened the lamps, we conjured spells against hangovers with cold water and amphetamines that we ventured down to the street to buy. It was all very “hail fellow well met”; when you have a comfortable couch and the caress of well-tailored clothes, it’s hard to convince yourself of life’s seriousness. It was too distant, off in a place I never planned to go, one not made for Vicente or for me: after all, someone had to benefit from our fathers’ efforts.

In a way those were still university parties (Vicente hadn’t quite finished), and names of students figured on the lists of possible invitees. So I suppose I heard about Helen before I ever saw her — something about the way she shook her mass of blonde hair when she laughed, her peculiar pronunciation, and her scandalous way of looking a person up and down. Her gaze didn’t creep along over skin and cloth like the eyes of those little English spiders. No, Helen’s pupils slurped down the world in gulps. She’d come to Spain on an athletic scholarship — hurdles, long jump, something like that. Imagine the kind of details that get tacked on when you add alcohol to intoxication: you let rip, box people up in a comic, improvised profile; no one is so respectable you can’t cut them down with words.

So I guess we invited her because we liked her way of savoring Spanish words and the way her pallid freckles danced when her expression changed; because she had caught my friends’ attention and now they wanted to talk to her far from the cafeteria and classrooms, in a territory foreign to Helen and familiar to them. Thanks to an annoying back sprain I got as I was leaving a dull meeting with Passgard, I missed the first evening that Helen spent among us. Vicente had told me about how she’d been unable to respect people’s personal space, but no one prepared me for the uninhibited relationship she had with her prizewinning anatomy, an ease on display every time she went for a canapé or another glass. In a country full of boys and girls defined by habits of expressive restraint (we were eager to get naked but didn’t know where to start), Helen could only astonish us.