Gonzalo Torne - Divorce Is in the Air

“You’re too intellectual.”

But what began to brew in our new apartment was something more disturbing than Helen’s inclination to channel her baser emotions my way. Our arguments had a personal tinge now. My sister, camouflaged as doting sister-in-law, started to take Helen out. And what a pair they must have been: my little sister’s perfumed rotundity beside Helen dressed in white, Helen in green, Helen in jeans, Helen in sandals, Helen dressed in a tunic and burka, it didn’t matter. How the contrast must have pained my sister. And, honestly, our parents’ DNA had demonstrated the vast range of its possible combinations when from the same ingredients it formed a son with the makings of an athlete and the mythical Fiera Corrupia beast in female form. In a city like Barcelona, with so much feminine beauty on display, every trip into town must have needled my sister terribly. And when Mauro took her shopping down Passeig de Gràcia, it must have been like dousing her hands in acid. I’m not saying that Hermès and company didn’t have their soothing effect, but the problem is that people’s clothes always come off in the end. Genetic destiny had been a bitch to my sister. She should have moved someplace where the human temperature was more lukewarm, to take the edge off her envy. Antwerp, maybe. They make jewelry there, it rains every day, and the people are so ugly I had to go into a shop and buy a magazine just to rest my eyes on a pleasant face.

And don’t think you got away unscathed. When your time came, that tongue of hers had poison for you as well.

“You do everything backward, Juan. You don’t even realize how predictable you are. Only you would think to marry the wild and sensual one first, then divorce her to set up house with a tame, snooty woman who doesn’t fool me — if she spends all her time reading, it’s only to make up for her nonexistent social life. And don’t give me that about how she’s a writer, that’s just bullshit to make herself seem more interesting. Writers write, and if that girl, at her age, was destined for literature, she’d have published something by now. A couple of stories at the very least.”

It was no good reminding her I hadn’t left Helen for you — my sister had no interest in chronological precision. The type who won’t let any scrupulous adherence to facts get in the way of a moral tongue-lashing.

The simplest thing, and don’t think I didn’t consider it for years, was to conclude that her contempt for you, for Helen, for the girls in between en route to our marriage, was not only because of her cabbage face, but was also fed by an incestuous envy: she was secretly in love with me. These days I’m fairly certain that she was singing your praises in a roundabout way; I think you got her all horny, and she was really a Hummer-sized carpet muncher. Because just tell me how a woman who likes men could tie herself down to one like Popovych.

Anyway, my sister took Helen on the Grand Tour of things we couldn’t afford, and she added the bitter aftertaste of “things you can’t afford as long as you’re with him” and the cynical finish of “a woman like you”: they went to Biosca & Botey, to the Jaguar dealership on Roger de Llúria (neither of them could drive). They licked their lips in front of the window displays on Passeig de Gràcia, and then she took Helen to Cartier. If she didn’t reserve a table at the underwater restaurant in the Red Sea, it’s just because it hadn’t opened yet. And don’t think I only see my sister’s mean side — I’m almost proud of her for managing to design such a fantastic panorama, one in which Helen had more reasons to be ashamed of marrying me than my sister had for marrying Mauro. If I didn’t give her a hug there and then, if I didn’t jump up to applaud her, it was because my head wasn’t clear. I’d been diagnosed with a terrible social disease: working. Not decoratively, or as an exotic way of finding myself, but as a necessity if we were to keep our bodily gears turning. I was so tense I almost didn’t notice the new little battery of complaints that Helen started lobbing reproachfully from her sofa, legs crossed: she told me I had to try my best to get her into precisely what I was desperate to get away from.

“If I want to be a liberated woman, I need a job. And I am a liberated woman.”

The problem was not so much that Helen confused a certain style in bed with a true breadth of thought; it was not that the person encouraging her longing to labor had never done a day’s work in her life. The real issue was that in order to find her a job, we were going to have to get past our “lifestyle,” which was incompatible with any form of employment. Incompatible, even, with the most permissive idea of healthy behavior.

Of course we were young (young — oh, truly young), with splendid livers and the kidneys of racehorses, and every night I dragged her out to drink. We whiled away hours in lounges and pubs, in the whisky bars that had come into fashion. We breathed it all in, fascinated by the array of nocturnal possibilities, the soft air of winter nights, walking a grid of streets where even the blind can’t get lost, among the thousands of Barcelonans either passing through or living there with whom unexpected friendships crystallize on every night out, ready to dissolve like sugar in the liquid morning. We let ourselves be carried along on the same tide of parties and gossip and expensive drinks and attractive and stupid people that had swallowed up and sucked the bones of so many careers before us: students from the provinces, naive madrileños , Erasmus students who arrive with a moderately condescending idea about the superiority of northern ways and end up won over by the charms of the Barcelona night.

As you know, alcohol has never affected me. I know how to pace myself, when to take a break; I don’t mix, and I never drink tequila or rotgut. Too bad Helen belonged to that group who refuse to learn the basic rules of drinking. Once she reached the point where alcohol starts “lubricating socially,” Helen would get drowsy. Then I could take her home and put her to bed, with no responsibility beyond breathing until late the next morning.

My days were simple: at eleven thirty I entered the office trailing cologne, because I hadn’t yet learned that the vile stuff is made by mixing animal excrement and offal. If there were still traces of alcohol splashing around in my temples like those crazy seals that never tire of jumping for their sardine, I rode it out drinking coffee and water. My colleagues supplied me with reports, and when I got tired of leafing through folders I counted people through the window, with its view of the traffic on Via Augusta. I liked the pastry shop, where I watched spoiled grandchildren come and go, nibbling at puff pastries. And so my mornings passed; going off the rails is stressful, but it doesn’t require much concentration.

I laid out a few safe zones: on Tuesdays and Thursdays we barely drank, we’d stay in and watch something Helen had rented at the video store, we’d eat dinner at home, high-calorie dishes of Tex-Mex inspiration — any kind of chili mixed with beef, with pork, covered in fronds of cheddar cheese. We fought for the good spot on the sofa (the armrest was loose on the left side), over who spooned whom, over the remote control (she got nervous in scenes where the sound track heralded a scare), she tickled me and I couldn’t get her off me the way I can you: you may be five foot seven but you’ve always been manageable. I don’t know if Helen topped five foot three, but with those thighs so abundant in flesh, and those scholarship athlete’s powerful arms, it was a struggle for me. It wasn’t unusual for both of us to end up on the floor in configurations that seemed pretty erotic to me but only made her laugh — a shuddering of the damp opening encircled by her lips — and from which she would emerge looking at me disconcertedly, drenched in a liquid gratitude, as if that kind of spontaneous happiness wasn’t right there in the script she’d brought with her all the way from Montana.