Gonzalo Torne - Divorce Is in the Air

“I want to see everything, take me to see it all.”

I took her for walks down the Rambla Catalunya, I took her to see the city from the top of Tibidabo, we strolled along the lookouts of Vallvidrera, we chased each other in the Parc del Laberint, and I led her into the damp Barrio Gòtic. If I resisted the Golondrinas boat rides, I more than made up for it with a guided tour of the modernist buildings of the Eixample, snapping photos of her in front of the Greek revivalist temple on Bailén. The factory chimneys surrounded by quaint plazas made her burst out laughing. Europe! So cozy and elegant, so many spaces planned down to the last detail, thought out over centuries. Twenty, at least.

“Take me to see all the important stuff, John. I studied art for a whole semester in college. I only missed class to go to track practice.”

She lingered in front of the worst paintings, commenting loudly (what a hard time Dad would have had getting used to a daughter-in-law who bellowed like that). She felt sorry for Nonell’s gypsies, and of the whole Fundació Miró the only thing that interested her was the sculpture garden; we spent a lovely afternoon there while she sipped from a can of Pepsi, bathed in a sensuous, impressionistic light. She told me that, as a little girl, she used to play at imagining how her boyfriends — she knew she wanted more than one — would smell, and that she’d never dreamed of a scent as delicate as mine. She also told me that she used to get down on her knees to pray every night to be spared the curse of a flat chest. Helen was wearing a white skirt that day, and I heard in her words the melody of the life left behind when you’re uprooted and moved to a new climate — she was a flower bed it was my responsibility to tend. We left the garden and went down a wide flight of stairs surrounded by dense red flowers that recalled a Mozarabic fantasy. Helen went ahead to stand in front of a Diana made of dirty stone, carved gracelessly; she started to scrutinize it as if she’d discovered a jewel that had been lost for centuries. The port air’s polluted damp had curled the ends of her hair. She wasn’t going to gain anything of aesthetic value from her contemplation, but her gracefulness when she concentrated fully on something was so delightful I didn’t hurry us on.

We had fights, I won’t deny it. We had our problems, but show me any young couple that doesn’t go through rough patches. When I got together with you I was already an old warhorse (innocence is gone so soon), but the boy who went to live with Helen was a mere pony, and fighting was a healthy and cheap way to get rid of our excess energy. We often clashed over condoms, and for some weeks she was even in favor of birth control pills, as if she wanted to try her luck smearing her insides with my sperm. Then she read in some women’s magazine about how my behavior was that of a selfish macho incapable of planning our sex life, unable to control myself every time the blood rushed to my balls. Of course I couldn’t contain myself! Of course I devoured her every time my appetite overflowed! That was what Helen expected, that’s why she had tied herself to me, and woe betide us if I ever stopped. The thing with condoms wasn’t just stubbornness, and it’s not just about the sensation, or the shape or even the smell of that repulsive latex. After decades of training as an adult copulator, I can definitively state that the technique of putting them on is beyond me. It’s for another branch of mankind to figure out. I’m convinced that men who can do it have, I don’t know, a retractable sixth finger, or the evolved dexterity of a second thumb. I had no intention of cultivating that skill: I was comfortable in my evolutionary niche.

Now I see clearly that I should have been more understanding. Helen was afraid that the pills would age her, that they would ruin her skin; she was afraid she would develop bags under her eyes and rolls around her stomach. She was extremely sensitive to aging — one gray hair could spoil her entire day. Watching her on her birthday was quite something: She’d skulk around the cake as if it were topped with an obscenity, a personal insult, rather than inoffensive candles dripping wax over scorched icing. She’d asphyxiate the candles in one breath and then leave; I’d have to cajole her, pry her from her bed with encouragement and a firm hand, just to get her back to the party. It was useless to tell her that I’d still find her attractive when all her hair was gray, her face wizened, her fingernails gnarled; her love of youth was stronger than her love for me. Or maybe she was resolved not to believe a word I said as long as I was in thrall to a youthful, fresh body. I’d often find her scrutinizing her legs in search of dead skin or a broken blood vessel, hunting for the floss of a white hair, or testing the firmness of her breasts (whose inevitable fall from splendor was going to be a sight only an idiot would miss out on). And if she caught me watching her out of the corner of my eye, she would rain insults upon me, as if I hadn’t seen her much more naked and in more compromisingly acrobatic positions, or as if those grooming sessions were so private they resurrected the barrier of modesty between us that had crumbled months before. The girl was very touchy about her looks; she was beset by ghosts from the future come to warn her about her decline. And now that worse paranoias have started to nest in my mind at the same rate as the plaque blocking up my arteries, I can sympathize with her: she’d been good; getting old (getting old!) was something that happened to other people, people who had done something to deserve that state. It never even crossed her mind that we might celebrate her youth while it was alive.

You have to understand: we were good together. We weren’t even a couple with problems — our days were full of happy hours. I’d accepted a job while we sorted out the mess of my inheritance, and the people there treated me like an emergency fund. They thought that if we found ourselves in trouble, I could inject enough healthy capital to get through four or five bumpy months. I never set foot in the office before eleven. Helen and I went out almost every night to try exotic gins, trailing a boozy wake behind us; for three months Barcelona conspired to show us exactly what it could do for a pair of newlyweds disposed to act like nocturnal animals. I suppose I already sensed that Helen should find herself a job sooner rather than later, that an active and healthy woman should spend her days doing something more fulfilling than shaking off a hangover. I started to look more kindly on the prospect of reining ourselves in: we’d be like those spermatophytes that wait for night to fall and then spread open stupendous, fleshy petals, as big as ships, and we’d pollinate the most trivial of tasks with gentle excitement. But I was in no hurry.

“I want to meet people. Everyone you can introduce me to.”

While I was enjoying life as a newlywed, Helen had been busy cooking up fresh ambitions. She’d convinced herself there were select circles of artists, wealthy, interesting, and glamorous people, or some such nonsense. She had only to learn to wield me like a key and she’d be able to access those secret spaces, and fulfill the fantasy that she’d been put on this earth to enchant the eyes and ears of the most refined society — whose specifics she’d never paused to consider. She nagged me stubbornly, with the sulky face I’d already learned to recognize as the sign she wasn’t going to let it go. We had so much without leaving the circle of our marriage — why kill ourselves to leave the house? Why, when we would only be exposing all the precious things that germinate in intimacy to the corrosive atmosphere of gossip? It’s one of the blind spots you two share, both the women I’ve loved. After all, didn’t you take home the best guy at the party? Didn’t we have fun together? Didn’t your orgasms come without complications beyond the ones we imposed by ludic agreement? Wasn’t the apartment you decorated comfortable? Didn’t we live in the city of your choice?