Gonzalo Torne - Divorce Is in the Air

I must have done something right for Helen to start building her new life project around our satisfied bodies. She never objected when I wanted to see her, sometimes with less than an hour’s notice and on the other side of Madrid. My business was getting going, meetings were multiplying, but Helen would take the metro, buses, or taxis (that I would pay for) and she’d wait for me with a patent-leather handbag and her arms pressed close to her sides. I allowed myself the pleasure of letting her enter the rooms before me, of watching the surprise on her face as she calculated the square footage while she undid the swan of folded towels. She loved the lace curtains and bathtubs, the TVs and remote controls that she always grabbed first. One of the good things about that period was that I still hadn’t learned the vast set of expressions Helen’s features could make. It was exciting not to know what face awaited me at the end of a kiss, or after she turned over, half asleep, or when, with one move in that game of bodies that settled us as a couple, her nose would come to rest a few centimeters from my eyes. She liked to order more food and drink than we could consume, and if I had to rush off, I’d let her stay draped over the unbound swan-skins, surrounded by the scent of bodies and the steam from the shower, dunking the succulent thighs of something like chicken into chemical sauces. We went back to the hotel from our first night, and we even visited the place that charged by the hour, though I regretted bringing her there. She was so lovely in the white shirt we’d bought at the market, the stockings with claret-colored thread that she wore to add a risqué touch. Girls in love can also be blank pages to paint upon.

It’s hard for me to visualize Helen without adding filters that belong to the future of that couple who used to seek each other out under the welcoming Madrid skies. I’m learning to adjust the viewfinder so it only lets in enough light to show the Helen that fits this part of the story. And so I discover again, among clumps of insignificant phrases and lovebird idiocies, that she was living in a poorly ventilated dump with three other students (Peter, Mark, and the amazing Ali), that they had revoked her scholarship, that she was supposed to go back to Montana in one month but she didn’t have the strength to write to her parents and tell them, or to buy a ticket (and I never did figure out how she managed to stay afloat in Madrid without any money). Ultimately, if for a few weeks she’d nursed the dream of a reckless life in a Spanish paradise of tapas and bullfights, it was time to start bidding it farewell. So for her, our first night must have been like the lucid hangover of her dream state: here was a guy to sink her teeth into, a southern specimen, not too dark-skinned, who appreciated the touch of her splendid body, which was the only thing Helen had to offer. We were two naked and confused kids (because things weren’t actually going so swimmingly for me, either: bonds, shares, letters of credit, benefits, preferred stocks, property, contracts, and loans…all orbiting the flame that was gradually cooking my family) who found themselves at the end of their teenage boredom marked by plans gone awry, discovering that the greed they have for each other can occupy their minds for hours on end. That together, they can compress their worries into something that fits inside a fist.

So when Helen showed up at my apartment in a green wool dress, wearing rain boots and dragging a suitcase with tags from suspicious airports, I thought about throwing her out — enough was enough. The impulse flashed into my mind the same way you realize you’ve cut your fingertip with a knife before you even see the wound or the blood. Helen stood stock-still with her feet together and her stomach sucked in, wheedling, with that lower lip of hers too thick to be taken for a sign of intelligence. She was quiet, she swallowed, she was solicitous. She told me that something beautiful depended on me, and I discovered I would have been a magnanimous god: I sent her out for bread and ham and half a liter of wine. I went into the bathroom and splashed water on my face. I understood fully, I knew perfectly well what that “you can stay here” really meant, but when I tried to make out the implications for my future, my sight grew dim. My gray matter has never been good at calculating the medium term, and for me the word “future” meant next Wednesday.

It wasn’t hard to force the little lock and open her suitcase, though it was slightly harder to convince her it had already been broken. In one week I’d seen three-quarters of her wardrobe: there was the suit skirt, the striped T-shirts, the jacket that was too big for her, the red blouse with shoulder pads, the tube miniskirt, the patent-leather mini, and some kind of polka-dotted garment. The panties and stockings and bras (which we’ll get to later) that she’d packed were proof she had no intention of leaving. My father had informed me of that female peculiarity while smoking a rancid cigar on the sofa, so it must have been a Sunday and I must have been anxious to escape. It was the kind of transfer of manly information that leaves both parties fairly disconcerted — it was hardly his intellectual legacy. It’s ridiculous how those half-heard ideas end up permeating our beings. But it was a good piece of advice: after I found your cruel note, the thing that convinced me you were serious this time was the fact that you’d taken the portion of the underwear that you wore. You only left behind a single green stocking, balled up where I found it later, at the back of the drawer where you couldn’t reach.

Helen came into my Salamanca bachelor pad with the intention of staying (I almost said “staying under my wing”). And not only did I open my home to her, I did something even more insane, just because it seemed the natural thing to do. I asked her to marry me in a civil ceremony. Her parents could meet mine later (neither of us noticed the other’s shudder of horror), and we would formalize our union on a grander scale, as only priests can do.

Granted, in one sense we’d only been fucking. Sure, our sexual fervor had formed canals that irrigated all our worldly activities: I’d be at the cinema or getting dinner, leaving a meeting, taking a short walk to a taxi stand, and my nerves would remind me of the singular pleasure of squeezing her breast, of removing her swimsuit, of kissing the lips of her cunt. It was the kind of relationship where what you want is not a safe distance from which to evaluate your partner with equanimity, but rather to get her into a house with you ASAP where she’s always in reach of your appetite. The kind of relationship that demands you live together or let the lust devour your thoughts down to the root of your brain; think of it like the fire of a biblical marriage — an unstoppable love.

A civil union was as sad back then as it is now, but the event was eroticized by its furtive unexpectedness. I showed up in morning dress, wearing a black tie that, since I’d arrived in Madrid, had led a sorry itinerant life through the offices of accountants, bureaucrats, and lawyers specializing in financial rescue. Though we’d promised to leave our families out of it, I couldn’t resist sporting Dad’s cuff links. Vicente, whose name Helen took pains to pronounce as if it were spelled “Bicente,” came as our witness. We paired him with a chubby Italian woman whom my fiancée presented as her “dearest friend” and whom my wife didn’t take half a morning to condemn to the abyss of traitors (and now that I think about it, I never found out why). The sky was lofty, blue, smooth, promising. The extremities on my left side trembled as Bicente and the other fifteen people we invited to round out the party threw rice at us. Someone blew a horn of German origin that for years afterward I thought was a tradition from Helen’s homeland (the Thrushes had migrated from the Neckar valley to the shuddering depths of America). For the first time ever, we kissed with our tongues tucked under the domes of our palates, and when the cold putty of her lips touched mine, I felt my nerves prickle lasciviously. Suddenly it didn’t seem a bad idea for Catholics to impose premarital chastity. With his eyes closed, the groom could follow his blood from heart to peripheral organs, letting it lick the walls of his veins as he anticipated the nakedness that, once uncovered in dread and excitation, he could savor all night long under the light of a honey-soaked moon.