Gonzalo Torne - Divorce Is in the Air

I tried to reach an agreement with Dad. I decided to believe, without submitting to any belief system in particular, that his consciousness would not disperse, but would go on wandering the earth with his mind almost intact, receptive and able to hear me whenever I talked to him. It wasn’t in my best interest if he could just watch me any time he wanted, of course. Not that I worried about him observing my more intimate moments (death would have to change him a lot before he’d glimpse his son and Helen half naked and not avert his eyes). No, I was more troubled at the thought of him spying on my conversations with Mother, or my domestic arguments, or my botched job with Passgard. His sticking around could be a complicated business, crisscrossed with shadows. I decided to believe he could only make contact with my reality when I summoned him. It was, naturally, too capricious an agreement ever to be taken seriously.

Before leaving and shutting the door behind me, spitting out wine-soaked cork particles, I started opening and closing drawers until I found the robe I hadn’t seen him wear since my mother told him she’d had enough of him walking around the house in that rag. An animal instinct made me thrust my snout into the folds of cloth. It smelled of tobacco and old clothes, of little-aired material; only deep within it did a more personal layer unfold, one that could call up no other name but his. And as the scent moved from my nostrils to the crown of my brain, it reminded me of the softness of his manners, so incapable of offending, and the speed with which his eyes would grow calm after he said something cross, as if they wanted to rid themselves of an emotion that was too muddy, too coarse. It was a habit that for years I’d confused with a cold compassion. Now I understand it came from the way he held his feelings in check: methods of emotional management that I neither inherited nor will ever learn. Character traits that were as much his as the line of his lips, the shape of his knees, his fingerprints.

I took the robe with me.

“You really didn’t think to take him down?”

Even Helen had the nerve to reproach me, her feet buried up to the ankles in sand as we passed back and forth the bottle of murky wine the bar had lent us in exchange for a blue note. Of course, she wasn’t the one who’d had to confront our family’s financial wasteland. As I started to unravel the catastrophe Dad left behind, things weren’t so bad in the practical sense: I paid the bar’s debts, I convinced myself we had enough property, I didn’t have to worry too much, Mother wouldn’t end up on the streets and my sister could find whatever she had gone to Boston to look for. It was an interpretation with more text, you might say, but it was still a valid one. The only company that wasn’t boiling in bad debt paid me a salary: I bought suits, shirts, ties, and a pair of shoes so soft I miss them still.

They were emotional days. I pretended to be strong for Mother’s benefit, organized the funeral, went to the lawyer, signed papers and checks. I had two conversations with the regional director of the bank, I bought a coffin for Dad and went with him to the incinerator, and while his carcass burned I focused on sending him supportive vibes. I’m not sure that his ashes could hear my thoughts, but it never hurts to try. Why not admit it? I was sedate, contained, so suave in my three-piece suit, the feel of my black tie so pleasant. But there were all kinds of turbulent emotions teeming inside me. But I’d had enough of the joke: the only humane end to that whole performance was for Dad to get up from the casket. And if that resurrection was too theatrical for the heavenly powers that be, I’d have been happy just to find him at home in the living room, his legs crossed and his eyes buried in his almanac.

Among the swarming emotions, a cautious, paranoid current had begun to flow when I saw the calluses on Dad’s feet. And I couldn’t look away from the sad yellow enamel, corroded right down to his cuticles. Dad had plenty of defects (though I can’t think of any right now), but no one can deny that he always looked his best. He taught me the difference between stylish clothing and clothes that were truly elegant, that I shouldn’t wear button-down collars with a tie, and never to unbutton my cuffs. He taught me how to choose a good spencer, how to combine the wide range of beiges and sandy shades, to lose all respect for the color yellow, to value a Ferragamo design, and to take off my hat with my right hand when I greeted someone (a flourish whose academic equivalent would be to study a dead language). So for weeks, the state of his toenails and their shameful exposure drove me to suspect that someone had murdered him. My father’s idea of a discussion about ethics included recommending a dental checkup and a reminder to wash one’s hands before (as well as after) urinating. He was certainly not one to shrink from talking about his physical ailments. He embarrassed my mother and sister no end, because he didn’t seem to consider anyone enough of a stranger to spare them updates on his heart or intestinal issues. I understood them, of course I understood their mortification when he couldn’t resist telling some total stranger (a cashier, the mechanic, one of those people who look after cars in the plaza) all about the frequency and strength of his stomach cramps. I especially understood them when, without telling anyone and with my face burning, I swiped a personal notebook Dad had used to keep track of his bathroom visits, annotated with precise impressions of each evacuation. On the other hand, they should have known that if we’d been able to listen comfortably to his health problems, he wouldn’t have had to embarrass us by subjecting neighbors and friends to those interrogations, in search of a little solace and complicity. We just never understood that his chattiness about bodily functions (veins, stomach cramps, gases, intestines) was the other side of his grooming: the basic preoccupations of a life.

If I let the murder idea slide, if I never managed to consolidate a sordid theory, it was thanks to my inability to imagine any context in which a murderer would take the trouble to hang my father and then remove his socks, which I found a few days later beside the bed. As I calmed down (that is, as the growing avalanche of financial worries sidelined any troubles that didn’t reek of money), I understood that the most shocking aspect of that scene — which had branded itself white hot into my heart, and if I’m honest I don’t think it will ever cool — was to think that Dad had neglected and ignored his nails long enough to let them turn into those rough, lemon-colored claws. Something had been pounding at him pretty hard for almost a year to make him disregard what mattered most to him in life. It was more forgivable for him to have overlooked the fact that, once he was hanging from the ceiling, his nails would be floating level with my eyes (assuming he had indeed planned for me to find him). After all, when a guy is thinking about killing himself, he can’t have many things on his mind, but they sure as hell must be absorbing.

“I’m going to be your sister’s best friend, John. Your sister needs a best friend, there’s no denying that.”

My sister’s favorite activity was keeping a detailed catalogue of my defects and mistakes. At some point she’d decided that I was an utterly hopeless idiot, and in spite of the condescension she’d found it necessary to display ever since, her sentence had been liberating for both of us. It was strange, if you think about it. We were both children of a crazy mother and a suicidal father (the very same ones, in fact!), and we’d both unexpectedly been left penniless: we should have gotten along quite well. The fact that I’d ended up painted as the hopeless one and she as levelheaded was a dirty trick of the gender distribution of roles. It was me (so much for any feminist sentiment) they sent as the family’s representative, me who stood before the board of specialists who bled us with the fees they charged for exercising their incompetence. “Circumstances,” they said. “Our hands are completely tied,” they said. And they called themselves professionals! Seriously, I’d been brought up to manage my life within a range of pretty comfortable circumstances. They hadn’t prepared me to survive in the wild. I was created (and I say this swallowing my pride) to be a comic character. I didn’t even hear the death knell when they recommended I invest in cheese.