Gonzalo Torne - Divorce Is in the Air

“I could still give you grandchildren, Mother.”

“With that girl? With the girl you brought over here? I suppose you still haven’t managed to sort out the numbers your father left.”

“I’m working on it, Mother.”

“You know what I like most about spring, now that I hardly ever leave the house? I like it when they light those paper lanterns at the restaurant on the corner, the ones they hang to give the place some atmosphere. They sell mussels and fries with white and pink sauces. It sounds a little questionable, I know, but the men go in suits and the women wear blouses that are so soft. Beautiful couples. I like to see people having a good time; I don’t hold it against them. How could I, when they’re all heading where I am eventually? Make the most of these years, Joan-Marc, they’ve been well designed.”

She picked up a pill and placed it on her tongue: the pearl on its pillow. She pushed it down her throat with a sip of the linden and mint infusion I’d made her. The liquid in the cup settled back down in yellow and greenish waves.

“What a sad family we are. A suicide, a sick woman, a sterile girl. Who would have thought it when we were starting out, eh? But that’s how things ended up, and that’s fine, that’s fine.”

Who were you talking to, Mother? People who’ve known you for a long time, they do that sometimes: when you’re there in front of them, they see through the man going numb from fidgeting with his napkin, and they start to talk to the boy who made the swing squeal, who kicked along a maroon ball, or the brat they sent away one day to live in another city. And if I’m honest, I didn’t let my mother’s harsh words get to me. What do you think you’d find if you started looking into people who say, filling out their forms, that they’re lawyers, doctors, experts, salespeople, teachers, or nurses? They’re all hiding some rupture, they’re all dragging emotional handicaps along behind them. The time you get is too short to renounce any of the travel, the cars, kisses, and cuisines the world has to offer, so at first glance everyone seems caught up in the present, but just let them talk for twenty minutes or so, and you’ll soon make out the scars beneath the chatter. It’s scary to imagine the extent of the emotional leprosy our self-sufficient high-tech society works so hard to conceal; to think how, beneath that security blanket of photographs attesting to the good time we’re all having, we walk around dissembling, on the lookout, stalking a ration of warmth.

Some of us bear it with more dignity than others. My dear sister was of the sort who bleed when you touch them; she’d rush to scratch your eyes out first so she could protect herself. And this was the woman to whom Helen, her lips damp with saliva and cloudy wine, had decided to reveal her private life, to offer her arm in support and “save her.”

“Your sister is my age, we’d get along well. It would be strange if you didn’t introduce me.”

Ensconced in her living room, my sister had Helen figured out before she ever opened her mouth. She realized Helen had plans to give her a supporting role in a pantomime of incipient sisterly friendship, and she decided to play along. She left Mauro and me in the living room for us to act out at our leisure the scene best suited to us: a deep-sea meeting between an anemone and a sea horse, Mauro waving fibrously while I nodded impassively. My sister led Helen by the arm to admire the spectacle of boiling water in the kitchen, the ideal room for free-flowing confessions. It did not escape her — as if it could escape her — that dissatisfaction was gnawing at Helen’s core.

“I don’t want to keep living in the garret.”

I had prepared Helen for the possibility that my sister would give me a hard time: tell her what a fraud I was, how I was letting our inheritance drain away by the minute, that I was pitifully afraid and ultimately useless. Not to mention how I ignored my mother…

“A family needs a home. Anything else is a bad way to start. Too temporary. Way too temporary.”

But what my sister had actually set about doing in the kitchen (while Mauro trotted out the full range of his interests: bank balances, types of knots, royal lineages…a monody that led me to think about women fighting, and not in sexy little poses — I’m talking all-out rage) was to gently undermine Helen’s confidence, to chip away at our complicity as a couple, to tease out problems.

“The family just wants what’s best for you. It’s up to you to know what that is.”

Helen let herself fall under the sway of a creature so dominated by her brain’s reptilian layers that she secreted malice naturally, the same way her pores opened to let the sweat flow. In certain lights you could confuse her with a different kind of person, I’ll give you that. But it was just an optical effect, a trompe l’oeil . She’d also seem like a genuine world traveler if you let her wear out your eyes on the photographs of her and Mauro Polo in rice paddies, Asian temples, tropical rain forests, Australian savannahs, and places where it snows. Until finally you’d realize that the only thing she got out of all that globe-trotting was a comparative analysis of the locations and services of the Hilton hotel chain. I told Helen, of course I told her. The problem was that I had an urge to be frugal that day, and instead of hailing a taxi to make the trip from Vallvidrera back to the Turret, we took the train. I could feel my words twisting in the air, burning up and crashing to the ground, heavy as potatoes, making no impact on her. Men lose their authority over women when we lecture them on public transportation, that’s just how it is.

It had taken my sister two half-conversations to bewitch Helen and load her up with demands and responsibilities it was then my duty to satisfy. In contrast to the mockery and contempt Helen had received from our “friends,” my sister’s frank manner with her must have seemed like the start of a downright cozy relationship, in which floated the germs of affection. The dough of Helen’s brain had been kneaded with flour supplied by TV dramas and women’s magazines, to the point where my sister barely had to make an effort to convince her that she and Mother had forgiven my bachelor excesses only thanks to Helen’s charm. What could seem more natural? That was precisely the kind of wholesome effect she’d spent her adolescence convinced she would engender the moment she erupted onto the social stage.

“Your sister is right.”

From the tension around her eyes, the self-importance in the way she turned her head, from the repugnant wake those words sown by my sister trailed as they emerged from Helen’s lovely mouth, I realized she was prepared to wage a long-term battle. Every week we spent in the Turret, where we were reasonably happy, began to needle her like an insult. Every day was confirmation that my sister wasn’t talking nonsense, that she hadn’t been wrong when she predicted I’d be unable to satisfy the basic needs of a girl joined to her man out of love.

“Why don’t we go live with your mother? It’s a big apartment, and families are supposed to support each other, right?”

I didn’t have the strength to set straight an error of that magnitude; I didn’t even have the energy to point out the absurd contradiction of demanding that we leave the Turret (which my sister had downgraded to the “garret”) to move into an apartment we’d have to pay for. And then came the sudden, disturbing prospect of my mother living under the same roof as that testosterone accelerator I was married to, with her makeup kit (which weighed as much as Galaxia’s entire collection that you so pretentiously displayed in our living room), and the dregs of Evan Williams that nestled in unexpected crannies (that drink was my latest discovery, and it got our systems purring like motorcycles). The trick of suggesting we live with Mother transformed the repugnant prospect of leaving the Turret, with its view over roofs and terraces stretching toward the shining sliver of sea, into a reasonable option. I stopped giving her the runaround, and even while I was slogging through a storm of financial disasters (that pair of hucksters tasked with getting the family business “afloat” again must have been about to advise me to invest in cheeses, an idea that came from the Passgard people), I got down to apartment hunting. I visited over twenty real estate agents, where I learned that the children of the old working class were swallowing seventy-year mortgages, with interest rates subject to the ups and downs of various gloomy indices; they were even signing off on eviction clauses. Ah, you marvelous middle class, your shining greed, luxury cars and second homes, Far Eastern vacations paid for in installments: wonderful sons of sidereal Spain, that winter I loved you as never before. The apartments on offer looked like they’d survived a bombing in Kosovo. Broken stoves, cisterns that threatened to crack your skull open, paneled hallways. None of the places I could afford were up to Helen’s standards (and when I say “none,” I’m talking about two months of traversing the Eixample and Sarrià and the disinfected parts of Gràcia like a herd of elephants after water). Those standards, of course, were informed by interior design magazines published for citizens who pay their taxes in countries swimming in oil — magazines my sister began sending her so they could go over them together in detail, sitting at the Mauri café.