Gonzalo Torne - Divorce Is in the Air

And so we began to visit places whose names are pronounced with an eye roll. In Barcelona they weren’t as into time travel as in Madrid. Here, the draw was the exoticism of the place itself: hotel terraces, ships, museums that opened their doors at night, towers, greenhouses. I had to get back in touch with people I’d cut off four years before because of the slime that oozed from them: phony cousins, Dad’s business colleagues, classmates from ESADE, occasional hook-ups, confidants…They didn’t receive me coldly — no sooner did we show our faces than a curtain of congratulations came down between us and them. I was the guy who’d been left out of the good life: some said because of misguided ambition, while others mentioned one hell of a family mess. Now that I was returning on the arm of an American stunner, why would they close their doors on me? They had no qualms — the eroticism of return and the anguish of the first-born’s departure were fodder for mass-market dramas, and we fancied ourselves sophisticates, we flattered ourselves that our minds were open and cosmopolitan, that we weren’t really Spanish. Plus, they thought Helen was funny.

Helen went mad with excitement. She compared my friends favorably to the rich people she saw on TV in the United States, whose weddings and divorces and parties and jewels she followed in magazines. She knew the details of every liaison conducted by people whose only purpose in life was consuming (you couldn’t call what they did “drinking”) cold martinis on boats. She knew who slept with whom, who sat beside whom at every dinner and at every race, who slipped from the spotlight, who fell into disgrace. If she hadn’t spent so much time too drunk to hold a pen, she could have written a gossip column.

At home, while she tried to stuff herself into stockings that would have been tight on a little girl, or in the taxi, where she would keep smoothing her hair, I tried to fill her in on backstories. I tried to prepare her, but she was too excited to absorb the raw truth of what I had to tell her, and I’ve never had the patience to make news digestible: this was no longer my scene, we were out of place, they would never accept someone like her. So I chose to arrive late, once the conversations were under way, and cross the room avoiding the bored looks from other guests. It was better than arriving at the beginning, when the groups were still unformed and hanging in the air like interstellar gas.

Helen walked into those living rooms, strolled among the tables, exchanged glances with people, and chewed on slices of ham, all the while convinced that something golden was stirring within her, a motor of human allure. She sashayed around with her chin held high as if she were a sliver of America itself, or a shard of meteorite just landed from outer space so we could admire its shine. She was desperate to reveal her hidden social talent to the world, though what that talent consisted of neither of us knew.

When Helen embraced me and told me she loved me, I merely smiled. While she headed off to join the cliques, I avoided conversation, retreating to a corner to observe the swagger of that body into which she was emptying the second, the third, the fifth gin and tonic. From that distance, I could ignore the emotions that flowed from our shared life, and instead tune in to the wavelength of the men around us who shared my cultural makeup. Without the filter of my love, they would see this: long blonde hair; a wide-eyed innocent from Montana with a sinuous body, grown amid the heaps of dimwits that spring up every year in the Midwest (Montana was somewhere around there); a rube with a typing certificate, plus half a bachelor’s degree in Romance Languages that hadn’t even given her a sense of tact when it came to hammering out French phrases — she always sounded as if she was chewing gum (she thought it was a Parisian accent). They’d see a girl who was expert in mixing drinks with soda and who’d sprouted a pair of tits you couldn’t ignore — living proof that the only democratic force on this earth is the one that distributes sex appeal. Of course, Helen’s wasn’t going to help her at all as long as she denied them the festival of fluids she reserved for me alone.

As for the women — well, I didn’t kid myself. I knew from the get-go they would be much worse. All those girls who knew how best to arrange their curves under well-tailored clothes, whose skill with color did an excellent job softening the heavy jaws they’d received as the twisted legacy of inbred generations. They were rivals to be reckoned with. Their parents’ money had kept them a long way from the real action, but they had a magnificent collective experience in getting what was “theirs.” They had no problem encircling Helen with an air of familiarity, but they didn’t let her into the murmur of their important, whispered conversations. They refused to make room for her. If they were debating some delicate point that could have created some complicity, they always lowered their voices. It was sad to watch her in those spacious rooms, flitting from one little group to the next, being tossed a handful of phrases like birdseed. A couple of times, I caught whichever girl Helen had chosen as a trial “best friend” fleeing to a remote corner to avoid her.

Sometimes we stayed until the end, when the group was wrecked, disheveled, blundering through the cigarette butts of repetitive conversations, glasses in hand while we composed precarious tableaux, sprawled over tables and chairs. If they opened the windows, a pleasant breeze would make the hairs on our arms stand up, and then we’d settle again into a friendly lassitude. It was lovely to seek out Helen then, to watch her smoking slowly in that almost empty space, effortlessly emitting the essential notes of feminine charm. When I let that calm state enfold me, the fibers of my eyes once again knitted into a lover’s gaze that saw clearly how Helen’s spirit was being chipped away. When we got back to the Turret, instead of putting on an album or a film and relaxing, she’d tell me she wanted to be alone. But she’d end up sitting cross-legged on the living room floor, ruining my chances of watching TV. They showed good Westerns at that hour, heroes with morals and firm ideas about how to live them. Don’t you ever feel nostalgic for a simpler, unsullied world? With her jaw tensed that way, it wasn’t hard to imagine that Helen could spend the whole night awake, grinding the accumulated contempt between her molars until it turned to resentful dust.

“I don’t want to see them again, John. I don’t ever want to see those people again.”

If Helen’s ears had been open and her mind receptive, I would have told her the secret of polite society in Madrid and Barcelona, in Montana and among the Tuareg, who aren’t exactly known for their refinement: let the words slide right over you. Whatever they say, words are not knives, and they can wound you only if you go around with your chest bared, if you lower your guard, if you allow it. You have to disconnect, the way mushrooms spend their entire existence releasing spores, or sea horses devote their lives to swimming vertically. Get four people together in a house, at a restaurant, in a bar, and right away they’ll unleash their verbal poison. They don’t mean to hurt, they don’t even realize they’re doing it — they’re marking their territory, and they can’t help it. I’m sure you and your brother could recommend some author who’s written about this, but you’ll see it happening at any party, in every house, if you know how to look: people situate and redefine their insecurities in full view of everyone. You can’t hold it against them: once they stop measuring themselves against you and their position is clarified — once they confirm they’re sufficiently superior or inferior to you that they don’t have to compete — those same hateful people will do anything; you’ll find them jumping rope, yanking off their own ears, acting the fool to favor you and put themselves in a friendlier light.