Gonzalo Torne - Divorce Is in the Air

“I guess he couldn’t afford full-time help anymore.”

And there you have the oh-so-nuanced version that my sister gave, sitting there on the sofa in the little house Dad had rented for her, with its views of the Charles River. There may have been a twelve-digit number between us, but how easy it was to imagine her moving that big mouth of hers, right above the frog-like double chin she gets whenever she tries to pass for a rational person.

“Just tell me why else he’d sink so low.”

But it didn’t seem to me like Dad was lowering himself. I figured he felt an intermediate kind of love for Mother: not ample enough to deprive himself of the transfusion of new life he was enjoying (or so we suspected), nor so exhausted he could just throw his old life overboard. Regardless, if God decides to remake the earth one day with a little more intelligence and forethought, we’ll all be better off if he opts to use my father’s tender patience as a model.

How could I complain? How could I ask him for explanations? Instead I chose just to be grateful he didn’t tell all three of us— incapable of earning a peseta of our own, our parasitic tentacles so well developed — to take a long walk off a short pier. I visited a lawyer on the sly to ask whether, if I got into a jam, I could demand my inheritance through registered fax. I loved (I love) Mother, but my world revolved around parties and the basketball court. If those things didn’t overextend me, I had plans to take advantage of the familial inertia to open a little business of my own; my hands weren’t made for nursing. Of course, “Mother’s situation” barely caused me any anxiety — it was more like a power outage. If she complained about anything, it was that Dad took up too much space in the apartment, that she couldn’t stand his chatter about business, that she’d grown tired of his voice and his conversation. If I found out someday she was the one who threw him out, it wouldn’t exactly be the surprise of my life.

I came out of the bathroom and resisted the urge to look at the room that, if I were ever to find myself separated from it by an ocean and its three billion fish, would still be mine. From the hallway door I could see my mother’s dear face trying to smile, and her hands embraced by Helen’s young fingers. The light, reduced by the glass into shades of green, illuminated particles and bacteria; around those two women, the micro-universe of the air orbited in slow ellipses.

“We’d better get going.”

And that was my great contribution to the soirée. I didn’t deign to spend more than five minutes with the three of us together. It didn’t matter to me if some pleasant exchange was going on between Mother’s glassy gaze and the compassionate blue shade glinting in Helen’s eyeballs. I knew all about the therapeutic value of physical touch to cheer up the patient, but that kind of preplanned fondling only seemed phony to me. It was just that we were never a very effusive family…it was just that the cream was melting out of the pastry in repugnant waves…it was just that my mother must have been tired, that the slice of the past she’d retrieved from her mental depths was enough; I needed to get back to my grown-up life. Helen rode the elevator down with her head lowered, ruminating on something that spelled trouble for me, I was sure; I merely tightened my tie, insinuating the magnitude of my displeasure through my body language, hoping to intimidate her. I wasn’t going to stand for any little moral lessons — if Helen wanted to play at that, she could start with the elk back in Montana. I prepared myself for a fight, and a full-blown one at that.

I opened the door for her and I let her go out first. By the way she moved her ass in that dress (the coat folded over her arm: another sign), I realized she wasn’t looking for a fight. She took my arm, pressed against me, kissed my neck.

“I’m so sorry about your father.”

She moved away, and with her feet perched atop those high heels she’d mastered at fourteen, she raised her arm to hail a taxi. She arched her body until the stretchy cloth of her dress displayed what well-mannered boys would call her “figure”: the voluptuous innocence of her curves. She reminded me then of her generous fullness as a woman in love, keen to make up for all the bad that had ever happened to me or the people I cared about, and she did it with a purity and guile that effortlessly laid me bare.

I’d also been riding in a taxi with leather seats the time I went on my first and last visit to Dad’s secret lair. I hadn’t heard from him in four months, and when he finally phoned me in Madrid, I had to hold back the tears. I made an effort not to mention that my bar was done for, that there was a chasm in its floor and all the money was draining out. A little loan to tide me over wasn’t going to cut it. I’d let it go for too long, and the unpaid bills were piling up. I needed at least a million pesetas to stem the bleeding.

“Son, how are you? I’d like to see you.”

“It’s so good to hear from you. I’ve been wanting to talk to you, I don’t know if…”

“I want to tell you something — it’s fairly pressing, would you mind coming to see me?”

“At your office?”

“No. I’ll give you an address. Do you have paper?”

“What I was going to say is that I’ve had some problems, if we could—”

“We’ll talk about it on…how about Friday?”

“Couldn’t it be sooner? It’s a substantial problem, it’s about the bar…”

I’d managed to warn him about my business blunder without uttering a word about Mother. And there you have my true talent: the quitter, that’s me, and I’m not surprised he didn’t care about seeing me. In contrast, Dad was like an iron rod, conducting the conversation exactly as he’d planned.

“Don’t worry about that now. There are going to be big changes. I won’t be ready on Thursday. Better on Friday, at seven fifteen. Are you writing this down?”

“Ready.”

It was a street I didn’t know.

“Got it?”

“Yes.”

“Read it back.”

I racked my neurons — a city’s streets disappear when you’ve been gone for months, but no, I’d never heard that name in my life.

“I’ll make dinner, you bring the wine.”

Red, earthy, with mature tannins — I didn’t need to ask.

“Dress up. Seven fifteen. You know I like to see you in a tie. Until Friday, then, Joan-Marc. Buy the ticket today.”

“See you Friday, Dad. Bye.”

When I hung up, my arm was trembling. A grown man of twenty with a five-day-old beard, about to finish a master’s in something related to the labor yield of other people, my two suits bought at Bel’s…all held together by a nervous system that let itself be intimidated by the voice of that dry but friendly man who’d never raised a hand against me, who assumed my failures with a savoir-faire known only in Frank Capra films. I guess I turned then to those things that are so banal when you write them down: I made a cup of tea, plopped onto the sofa, went to another room, sat looking out the window — the aerials, gas cylinders, air-conditioning units, and dirty café awnings (white, green, maroon). I imagined what my father’s spacious apartment would be like — white furniture, plump cushions, lavender diffusers — and the people who might live with him.

I suppose I loved the man, and I’d enjoyed the manly embrace of his love when he had circulated among us, clean and noble. I used to feel delirous with happiness when he took me to see a football match at the old Sarriá stadium and told me stories about Marañon, the forward with such veiny legs, or when he studied art books so he could impress me the next day at the museum, or when he taught me to ride a horse, when he failed to pass on his passion for polo. I missed having him walk me to La Salle and repeat like a premature grandfather his theory about the benefits of a deep cleanse for a healthy gut. I missed his sartorial flourishes: the corner of a handkerchief peeking from his jacket pocket, the white leather gloves he put on when he drove, the bow tie he wore to make my sister laugh (but that I’d bet anything he longed for a good opportunity to sport in earnest). I miss his way of defusing problems, of looking at Mother, of tempering my outbreaks of insecurity, of falling asleep with a book in his hands on the sofa in the living room, in poses that would have horrified him if he’d seen himself with waking eyes; I miss the deep snoring that Mother called “the walrus attack,” his fingers smudged with ink from the newspaper, the disciplined disgust with which he dedicated himself to his vegetarian diet, the annoyance that accompanied his exit from the bathroom after falling off the wagon again, defeated by constipation and the effect of the word “constipation” on his mood. I missed the chemical odor of deep waste that he left in the bathroom like the sign of a partial victory in his prolonged battle with his insides. My only shame came from having grown until I was twice his size. I blushed at the size of my hands, my well-defined muscles; my feet and bones had grown, my face had caught up with my adolescent growth spurts and stabilized into fairly harmonious features. If what is expected of a son is confrontation, antagonism, and bust-ups, don’t hold your breath: I adored my father, and I missed him. If only he would take custody of me again!