Gonzalo Torne - Divorce Is in the Air

Meanwhile, you’ll find dozens of volunteers willing to cut you down until you fit in a little box where they can mentally manipulate you, where your ambition, your initiative, your desires, your youth, the fire that drives you toward pleasure, her golden mane of glossy hair, her accent, her appetite to give her love to people who will let themselves be loved — where everything ends up dissolved in a neutral liquid. Just so they won’t be overshadowed, so they won’t be bothered, so they don’t have to explain (again!) what the hell they do with lives like theirs. They search for some ulterior motive for every glimmer of affection, they don’t rest until they find the immoral root of the most modest achievement; for once I barely even need to exaggerate. Simply, they were not going to tolerate some girl with wide hips (I tended to see them as powerful) who thought that life’s problems could be resolved by making her man happy baking cakes and then climbing into bed to combine naked skin with the tactile pleasures of satin. To them, tolerating that kind of racy innocence would be like letting a stranger spit thickly in their faces, and they weren’t going to let that happen. They did not let that happen.

But Helen didn’t want to listen or to learn. You’re too intelligent and refined to get involved in a social tug of war; you enjoy being mysterious, a fog of words. Helen was too direct and simple to stop them from dragging her through the mud, always with a smile on their lips — her performance didn’t allow for subtleties.

I gave her the short version:

“We’re too alive for them. They hold it against us.”

“And I want to meet your family. I’ve told you that. Les conocerés .”

That phrase (which she uttered parading around the Turret in some kind of poncho) isn’t a grammatical lapse, just what happens when I stop simultaneously translating the oddities of Helen’s Spanish into normal language.

My strategy consisted of letting days pass as if none of it had anything to do with me, like I was listening to rain fall. The contemplative life (which a philistine could confuse with indifference) had always been my fallback for facing difficulties. Why fight when I could just bore my adversary? Where you would have reacted with quiet withdrawal, Helen went for the usual routine: jealousy, shouting, fainting.

“How are we going to really love each other if you deprive me of family? You’re a bunch of missing pieces!”

It’s the story of my life: neither of you could recognize my obvious merits. She never appreciated that I didn’t keep up with saint’s days and birthdays, that I didn’t reserve Thursdays for exchanging marital advice with Dad, that I didn’t encourage her to keep my sister company on shoe-shopping trips to the Eixample. Do you think she ever thanked me for saving her from a clingy mother-in-law, a know-it-all brother-in-law, and a gaggle of cocksucking sisters? No she did not! She was even annoyed that I wasn’t more controlling of her — I didn’t ask her where she was going in those tight pants, I didn’t inspect the itemized bill from Telefónica, I didn’t kick up a fuss when she came back late from a trip into town wearing that necklace so obviously made to emphasize the curve of her breasts. It must be a pain to have a jealous husband, but apparently those are the things a real man grumbles about, and Helen was not about to accept anything less than the complete package:

“Aren’t I a jealous bitch for you ?”

Of course, if I’d had a family to show her, happy or otherwise, I wouldn’t have put up such a fight. But all I had to offer were a few burned ruins. I tried to tell her, but I couldn’t find the right words, so we decided to start with Mother, a trip to Bonanova. I spent the night before the meeting in the kind of sleep that does nothing to restore you, tossing and turning until I bumped against Helen’s body. I kissed her neck to turn her on; even half asleep it wouldn’t take long to get her ready. I almost liked her better that way than when she was really excited, when she’d brazenly spread her naked thighs and the lips protecting the purple flesh, the coffer where she renewed her unique, particular aromas.

That morning wasn’t much different from any other day we began by making love (even though the appointed hour was waiting, as if the word “Mother” was wrapped up in butcher’s paper). Helen jumped out of bed naked, showered, brushed her teeth, chose her skirt and blouse while in her underwear. She got dressed as she boiled water for my tea (she never got the message that she should turn it off before it boiled), and one of our electric gadgets turned white bread into toast. She sat down to breakfast with the TV on, squeezing peanut butter from a toothpaste tube (a repugnant touch), and thumbing the salmon-colored pages of the previous day’s La Vanguardia . She’d offer some comment about the Catalan politics that she never could make sense of, waiting for me to pee and bathe and vacate the bathroom so she could go back in and tackle the thankless tasks of beautification: painting her lips, lining her eyes.

I put on a pair of jeans and a blue cable-knit sweater — I wasn’t going to do up twenty-one buttons to go and see my mother. The green dress hugged Helen’s skin with modest satisfaction, like she was the head of the class who doesn’t have to make an effort to stand out. She’d pulled her hair back with a double bow I can’t even begin to describe, and fastened the soft wisps with transparent clips.

“You’re not wearing a tie?”

And there we were, two young newlyweds who left their rings hidden away (together, though) in the drawer of a bedside table so as not to frighten my mother, and piled into the taxi carrying a stupendous bottle of sparkling wine and a jelly roll filled with cream — Helen’s American palate was bored with pa de pessic . We headed off toward the apartment I’d spent my teens in, where we’d moved from Madrid because that fucker Franco was about to die and my father smelled business opportunities in the air. We drove up Balmes and through the racket of the Mitre intersection, which only exists as a reminder of the horror that always lurks in cities. We left behind the imposing start of Avinguda Tibidabo, then passed an elephantine bus as it off-loaded dozens of passengers, all bundled up for the two or three days in which winter had decided to remind Barcelona it’s still a major European city. Finally, we came to the Passeig de la Bonanova and its grand, deep-set entranceways, where the array of neighborhood stores (sweet shops, sewing shops, modernist pharmacies) that composed the landscape of my youth had given way to franchises, banks, and private clinics. Helen was chewing spearmint gum and the radio issued a flamenquito murmur. As we passed a line of banana trees with pruned tentacles sprouting from their trunks I patted my pockets, afraid (and hopeful) that I had left my keys at home. My mother was more than capable of not letting us in.

Helen was fascinated by the elevator trick: the cage that opened directly into the foyer of the loft where we lived had always impressed the kids I brought to visit. It had the same effect on the posh girls who were my sister’s friends, the ones who once they grew up passed for the prettiest girls in Barcelona, in spite of their slightly bovine air, as if where there should have been that thing that makes sparks fly — the metronome of ambition — they only had a yawning void. They were made idle by the security of knowing things would go well for them, that this business of living was only serious for people less fortunate, and if they just coasted along then everything would be simple, they could succeed without getting their hands dirty. The truth is that when I called them to mind a decade later under the same cadaverous elevator light, I preferred Helen’s features, her rapacious look, those furrows of calculation wrinkling the corners of her eyes: a face that reminded me why I was with that person, and that I’d planned well.