Gonzalo Torne - Divorce Is in the Air

“Where do your parents keep the sheets?”

She jumped up and put on some underpants that covered her entire backside (too scrawny to deserve the name “derrière,” whose lustful connotations made me feel faint) and that ever since then I associate with the flag of some impoverished country. I didn’t know where my mother kept the sheets, I’m not sure I could have even recognized a “bedspread,” I didn’t know techniques for covering mattresses, and since the most mature response I could offer to the vision of Dad’s curious finger moving over the dampness left by “my girl” was to throw a tantrum, I was grateful to the point of tears that she decided to ignore me and start opening and closing drawers in search of a set of the same color. When she found them, I hugged the Australian clotheshorse so she could remove the dirty sheets and fit the fresh ones with the same naturalness some people have when they pet strangers’ dogs. And although I was behaving like an idiot with defects in important areas of my brain, she had the courtesy to turn and offer me a smile. My hands were trembling too much to help with all that careful folding, so my contribution was to bundle the dirty sheets into a ball that I stuffed into her backpack. She promised to return them clean in two days. And that’s what she did, so well ironed and fragrant I had to crumple them a little so they’d pass for the kind of careless work our servants did.

“My mother trusts me.”

The incident gave us a feeling of camaraderie. I must admit that her fifteen years of experience had lent her a great deal of ease moving that big, friendly body of hers. The smile she gave me after her last invasive kiss announced possibilities that, consumed as I was by adolescent prejudices in favor of elegance, I’m sorry to admit I ignored. Anyway, I guess those memories aren’t worth all that much if I can’t even remember her name. I turned off the light and took my leave of the hunting scene that would remain hanging there until its very canvas rotted away.

Neither Helen nor Mother was complaining about my absence, so I went into the bathroom to freshen up. I loosened the knot of my tie, let the water run from the tap, and scrubbed my hands. There was something incredible about the fact that my parents had given me a life to occupy and I was still unable to remember the exact date that Dad left our apartment and my mother inside it. Don’t get me wrong, by that time it was barely my home anymore. My father had entrusted me with a sum of money, and I was thinking of using it to open a bar. I only went to Barcelona on Tuesdays and Wednesdays for my master’s degree classes; otherwise I moved around Madrid like a good catechism student repeating the plain facts that constitute all he knows and expects from society and its inhabitants.

Of course, they didn’t exactly summon me home to announce that he was leaving. It was a quiet process, with subtle outward signs, like when you slowly pull a bandage off hairy skin…you get the idea. Making a fuss wasn’t my parents’ style. They weathered any shocks and contrived to bottle them up in silence; they knew how to manage the ripples of emotion. If they ever fought, if they waged their own little wars, it all stayed within the walls of their bedroom. And Dad delayed the final separation by leaving behind books that were as much Mother’s as his, his music collection, most of his suits, his best pairs of shoes, and the letter opener with a faun carved into its marble handle. Mother had never opened a letter in her life, and though I didn’t dare take it with me to Madrid, I vainly fantasized that he’d left it in the drawer for me to find.

He never told us (never told me) where he had gone or with whom. Luckily my sister, who called me almost daily by reversing the charges from Boston (where she’d gone to live and from where she returned with halting English, determined to study something related to the arrangement of furniture), clarified the matter:

“Dad is a selfish pig. And if you don’t see that it’s because you’re nothing more than his lapdog who obeys after the first smack. Children are supposed to rebel against their parents, yell at them, reject their world to establish their own, storm out of the house, and slam the door behind them. But you, you still get choked up if he gives you a present, even if it’s your birthday, even if it’s the same thing he gave you last year. You’re like an appendix, a great big appendix, and you’ll only ever be independent if you actually manage to kill him with all your fussing.”

I tend to picture myself listening to my sister’s monologues (the stream of abuse barely let me get a few emphatic sighs in) in the Turret, but in those days I must have still been living in Madrid. Moving away from home made me feel rebellious — it was like being left alone in the dining room and sucking out a shrimp head filled with the juices of adult life. My spirit was too overstimulated for me to reproach Dad for anything. Months later, as I flew home from Madrid, soaring over stratonimbus clouds through which I could see the dense blue of the ocean, it would have been good to toy with the marble of the letter opener. Instead, my sweaty fingers clutched the leather handle of the briefcase where I’d stashed the innocuous-looking reports disclosing the waning profits of my first business. Which was really just ridiculous. I’d been educated so that things would go relatively well for us. I was going through a patch of human turbulence, and my parents’ separation made me feel less dense, as if the atoms that held molecules and cells and tissues together without ever touching each other had moved apart a few degrees in space: I was dematerializing. The anxiety had begun to manifest in a series of physical outrages: red spots, an itchy neck, a mocking wart on my shoulder blade. My parents’ love, the energy it had engendered, wasn’t enough to last an entire lifetime. Nor was it foreseeable that I would take the split so personally. Supposedly I was cutting the apron strings — what did I care whether they lived together or apart? As the sturdy plane moved onward over a narrower and narrower sliver of ocean, the outline of the Catalan coast began to show in relief, dominated by barrels, dry docks, containers, and those gangways of rock and mortar that bend into the water like insect legs. The plane turned inland on its route toward the runway, as if nothing were so important it couldn’t be left behind.

Dad only summoned me to “ask forgiveness” once there was no more hiding the separation. After that he started rationing himself, and I always had to be the one to chase him down with a barrage of phone calls. We stopped seeing him at Christmas and during Holy Week (which we used to celebrate properly, taking after the Mallorcan branch of Mother’s family). The real disappointment came when he didn’t bother calling on my birthday, an occasion that, more than twenty years before, had been one of the high points of his life: full of nerves, intensity, and expectations for a Joan-Marc who would be his and Mother’s almost completely.

Dad looked worse every time I saw him. I even flirted with the possibility that the reason behind his decline was that he missed us (missed me). He didn’t even have to act aloof: he was shielded by our good manners. During the years we’d lived together and I’d been his responsibility, Dad and I had developed a language that served well to communicate basic instructions, comment on current events, and cheer on Espanyol. But those conversational skills were no good for delving into each other’s “emotional makeup” (I got that phrase from your brother); the words became too quickly steeped in shame.

Again and again we would return to our traditional conversational territory and, a table always between us, he would update me on his health issues and digestive rhythms, on the stomach cramps that tightened the skin of his belly and left him with a residual pain he imagined as damp, like the trail of a slug. Sometimes I managed to forget that after talking and eating and paying (and after interrogating the waiter about the laxative or restrictive effects of the blue fruits peeking out between the layers of a puff pastry), Dad wouldn’t be walking back to the apartment. Instead, he’d head off in some unknown direction, to join other people who knew my name and other things about me, but who could never love me. If I didn’t try my hardest, Dad would become more and more distant, until he disappeared entirely. His paternity over me could not be taken for granted — if I didn’t work to keep his interest in me alive, I’d end up an orphan in all but name.