Gonzalo Torne - Divorce Is in the Air

But you’ll hear no more from me about that. Let the gossip dogs scrabble at other graves; the behind-the-scenes story of the Miró-Puigs’ descent into the pestilential waters of modest circumstances is the part I’ve decided to skip, while Helen and I dance in close-up. My mental well-being depends on me keeping some limits on the humiliation, and I will not…

Lawyers, administrators, consultants, notaries (words whose common root is “shamelessness”) put food on their tables by not solving your problems! Imagine if a “good” dentist, one who could afford a clinic on Via Augusta, was the one with the audacity to hide from his “patient” (this wit of language!) that he let his molars rot rather than lose him as a “customer.” You turn to specialists thinking that with their vast knowledge they can help you, and you’re taken in by con artists, cheats, illusionists, snake-oil salesmen, armchair generals, suit-and-tie-wearing malingerers (and what ties!); the only thing they give you are doses of hope, and we love hope so much that we send numbers full of zeros to their accounts, so they can assure us that our affairs are looking healthy and beautiful. I said to them: “You people are professionals, advise me how to put my business back on a good footing. And while you’re at it, please resuscitate my father.” Which they heard as: “Masters of illusion, please lessen my agony by helping me to dispense with my money as quickly as possible!” So many years at school, the institute, at university, those shoddy master’s programs….What would really have helped me was for someone to teach me how to manage my turbulent desires, my rebellious body, the maddening ideas I had and the sensory overload that one of these days will drown me — a reality tutor, now that would be priceless.

While they were taking what they imagined as my manly strength of character and squeezing it for all it was worth, it took my sister three months to find the man of her dreams. Mauro — get this! — Mauro Sanz Popovych, born of a mother from Ukraine or somewhere worse, was a professional jeweler and had a look about him that justified resurrecting the word “namby-pamby” in everyday conversation. I swear I made (almost) no comment, I tried not to raise an eyebrow. If I betrayed anything it was down to the spontaneous twitchings of strange muscles in my eyelids and my chin. It’s also true that Popo really needed no comment.

“You choose your girlfriends according to impractical criteria. You look for physical qualities, or intellectual ones — although not with this latest girl. And don’t go telling me how my husband is worse or you’ll be stepping in some shit. I know there’s nothing exceptional about him — that’s part of what makes him an excellent companion. You can’t base a marriage on an interesting person and expect it not to fail. People you’ve truly loved become annoying once your sights are set somewhere else. My motto is: leave the most interesting stuff for outside the house. I’m in no danger with Mauro, I assure you, his talent is to be insipid. And just so you’re clear I’m not at all jealous of Helen’s ‘glow,’ I’d encourage you to go find yourself a real teenager. Helen’s already showing her age in those big hips, she’s like a double bass. And of course I care about you, Juan, but you know how my life is, I don’t have the time to tell you all this tactfully.”

She’d jumped from our family ship as it was going down, to become the wife of a social-climbing jeweler. That’s when she started working in her current field: something between earring design and pastry criticism, it’s never been entirely clear. Like all women tend to do when a situation gets hairy and grows claws, she let herself fall happily back into the old chauvinistic routines: cultivate your femininity, become deserving of love — the world is full of men who don’t turn up their noses at flab, at bad tempers, at spoiled-little-girl whims, so just let yourself be seduced by a handsome gentleman (ha!) who won’t save you with a kiss, but with the wind in the sails of his burgeoning career. If your bedroom isn’t as exciting as that of some mechanic’s favorite girl when he comes home hungry from the garage, we can fix that: it makes more sense to change bodies than houses. Not to mention it’s much cheaper.

Of course, it was one thing for my canny sister to succeed in keeping the penthouses, cars, vacations, and the butchers at the Planas plastic surgery clinic…and quite another to be blind to the yawning gulf between the cushy life she would have lived with the money we’d thought Dad had and, well…life with Mauro. There you have a plausible reason for why her savage hatred for our father has never cooled. And after Dad packed in this worldly life, she started channeling all that contempt my way. She probably figured out pretty quickly that I was not the hero destined to rescue us from Dad’s tangled legacy; she lost all respect for me, and she didn’t mind undermining me in public.

“You should have learned by now to shut up, Juan. The least you can do is not interrupt when someone serious is talking.”

The truth is that I went along with everything my sister said. I didn’t rebel, I never even considered arguing with her, because there was a gaping and sorrowful mandorla spread open between the two of us, and also because I’ve never felt comfortable in the role of abuser.

In short: my sister suffered from a problem that would keep her from ever being a mother. She’d inherited a variant of Dad’s intestinal pestilence (like the white birthmarks that parents pass on to their children through their genes, depositing them on different areas of their bodies), which, as luck would have it, ended up in her reproductive organs. Salpingitis, gonorrhoea, I never really knew. It was one of those stories that go on and on, half hidden, half disguised by suppositions, misunderstandings, imaginings, partial truths. I know they took her into the hospital to yank out her ovaries or fallopian tubes. I remember it well, because I felt ashamed of the contrast with my own virile health: the splendid immune system that expelled viruses without any feverish scenes, my stupendous stomach busy secreting liters of gastric juices that no feast could withstand. I was proud to be equipped with genitals so receptive to sight and sound, so easy to bring to attention. No hiding inside the lips of any pelvic wound for me, no labyrinth of feminine dampness and complications: the impurity, the vapor, the viscosity. But I did want to kill that quack who I heard say under his breath:

“Female castration.”

The last time my sister hugged me and cried on my shoulder (in a hospital gown so thin it barely shielded me from the chubby touch of her arms), it was because she’d dreamed of a phantom birth. No fetus slid out through her dried-up pipeline — the thing that came from between her legs wasn’t alive, just a lumpy mass of blackened blood.

Ten days after introducing Helen, I went back to Bonanova with a bouquet of dahlias to get Mother’s impression of my American girlfriend. I found her sitting in her little chair; she looked transparent, as if she’d been woven from colorless thread. The expression on her face was soft and serene. For the first time ever, it occurred to me that the mask of her medicine might slip one day. I didn’t get a word out of her about Helen.

“Juan, if you go to the bathroom this time, don’t turn out the light in my grandchildren’s room.”

I was pierced to my marrow by an icy feeling. I’d always taken it for granted that the chemicals slowed her thoughts down; it hadn’t occurred to me that her brain could be damaged.

“Don’t look at me like that, son, don’t be silly. I know I don’t have grandchildren. It’s just that if I leave the light on in the room where I always thought they would sleep, it’s as if they’re keeping me company. Strange.”