Gonzalo Torne - Divorce Is in the Air

That week I didn’t even have to replace any bottles of booze. It was hard to imagine how her personality was going to square with a job, but as I sank my hands into hot water to wash the dishes, I told myself that people can be very intelligent when they need to be. We humans are capable of change when faced with a new environment, and anyway it wasn’t up to me to solve this one.

“Amador wants to start making money from his old ships. We suggested he throw parties on deck, at sunset. He’s going to need girls to serve the drinks, and to spice things up. He’ll be inviting a lot of single men. Also, and you won’t believe your luck here, Amador has invited me and Mauro to the opening, so you won’t even feel lonely.”

She didn’t break anything, she didn’t shout, she merely hung up the phone, explained the situation matter-of-factly in English, and went into the bathroom. I heard the crunch of the lock. She didn’t even ask me to defend her, or to sort the situation out.

“I don’t ever want to see her again.”

And when I did pick up the phone to confront my sister, ready to make her choke on her arrogance and meanness, it was with a sense of burning shame at how slow I’d been. I was ashamed by the stinginess of my first reaction when Helen told me the news: I’d been happy about the extra income.

“You listen to me, Joan-Marc, you married a sorry excuse for a human, so don’t blame me. Dad went to great pains to teach us how to behave with people who go to shopping malls. You tell me how I’m supposed to deal with a creature who is 70 percent alcohol, and the rest a mishmash of lust, vulgarity, and resentment. Anyway, a job is a job.”

Helen stood firm. We cut my sister out of our lives, but in Helen’s head the same tune was still playing:

“What I need is a job.”

“Find a job.”

“You have to find me a job.”

She wheeled out her defeated voice, and with her feet and arms and her chest tensed, she reminded me of a storm cloud gathering electricity. It was odd: Helen was a woman who would leave things in a half-done mess just to go out and drink with me, who would rather rob a costume-jewelry stall at the flea market than unload laundry from the machine, who always forgot to replace the toilet paper and reduced the kitchen sponge to a pulp before she’d buy a new one, a woman who’d seemingly be able to adapt to life in a Tuareg encampment; but her demands came nonstop. Helen didn’t go out to hunt the buffalo for dinner; she demanded I do it, as if when she’d married me I’d taken charge of maintaining her. She kept her unrelenting mental torments to herself: it was as if she’d tied her body to an iron bar to keep herself tensed and alert in uncomfortable positions, poised on tiptoe.

And what job was I going to get for her? What could I find for a dropout from a university whose degrees almost certainly weren’t compatible with European humanism? The only money she’d ever earned was her scholarship check for being a promising long jumper, and the fact that jumping earns precious little in the job market was not something I could fix. Helen didn’t want to serve drinks, she refused to babysit, she felt faint at the very thought of improving her Spanish or learning Office for Windows; she wouldn’t even consider trying her luck as a tour guide. Where did the pulse of her aspirations beat? And based on what secret talent? What ability had I overlooked? In Helen’s world (the world of her diaries, her private conversations) all princesses are blonde and born in the UNITED STATES (the nitwit wrote both words in capital letters). And they were all named Helen! When you consider that, it makes sense that at the first job she got in Montana after a hip injury (which I later learned was really her pregnancy with Jackson) she managed to arrive three minutes late every day until they had the nerve to kick her out. What can I say — I understand her boss. The only qualification expected of a cashier at a baby-clothes shop is that she respect the set of basic social courtesies that include hygiene and punctuality. All because neither the first day nor the second did they ask her why she was late. Helen was fighting back against indifference. With her defiance, she was trying to make someone show an interest in her thoughts, her feelings, in the contours of her inner landscape. And there’s the mistake that causes so many people to slide into bitterness: the brain buys cheap materials and uses them to build its dreams. In contrast, let’s admire the foundations of my stupendous emotional equilibrium: I know what I’m worth, and I tailor my objectives to the capital at my disposal. Of course, you used to call this source of emotional solidity my “lack of ambition.” You used to hold it against me!

Helen had gotten used to just sitting there looking sour. That had been her winning strategy when she’d wanted to stay and live with me, when she’d wanted to change cities, and later when she’d wanted a bigger apartment. And since she combined a fantastical imagination with an exhaustive lack of knowledge about the concrete steps necessary to achieve something, she convinced herself that if a job didn’t “turn up,” it was all my fault. Because I wasn’t giving it the requisite attention, because to me the emptiness eating away at her was just one more passing complication — women’s problems — and we only had to sweep it under the sofa and wait for the day a servant would vacuum it up. Only we didn’t have any servants. And since she wasn’t about to give in and I was incapable of resolving the issue, we started to fight in earnest, engaging our entire nervous systems.

Helen had certainly learned from my sister. She tried to combine the precise proportions of arrogance and ignorance to stay on top in the argument. She took advantage of my strategic pauses to remind me I’d been incapable of rebuilding Dad’s business, or of starting something on my own initiative. She had the gall to accuse me of being unenlightened, just because she’d started taking refuge in the fashionable women’s pastimes that were booming then: patchwork quilting and Swedish gymnastics. Just because she went to a guru who, in exchange for some money (of mine), attached names of mystical seasons to her absurd behaviors. None of that got her anywhere with me — Helen didn’t have a rotten uterus, and I didn’t feel at all sorry for her. In fact, I found it satisfying to put her down till she couldn’t take it anymore and that cold mask of indifference thawed into stickier features.

Whenever I got the better of her, Helen would run away and hole up in our bedroom to pump her antistress balls or contort herself into a Pilates position. She’d stay quiet while my rage coagulated into streams of verbal garbage. I let her have the starring role: I was just a furious chatterbox while she, twisted up fakir-style, believed she was connecting to a pre-linguistic knowledge. But the only thing I got out of it was the handful of phrases she used to convey unfavorable and precise views on my value as a husband. I would have liked to tell her she was facing a Sisyphean struggle in trying to achieve an inner balance, because it was truly frightening to read the things she wrote on little slips of paper in her drunkard’s handwriting, minutes before or after we got into a fight:

An action committed in anger is an action doomed to failure.

Nothing is so serious it can’t be said with a smile.

Let your desires go.

I am an injured woman!

Once a problem is solved, its simplicity is amazing.

In the dew of little things the heart finds its morning and is refreshed.

Give me a lever long enough and I will move the world.

I don’t know what things are like in the Himalayas, but among us Westerners, greedy for cars, houses, restaurants (which, incidentally, Helen was not willing to give up), and travel, that kind of harmony, that pluperfect serenity, is unattainable. Helen would paint a dot on her forehead and repeat in a fluty voice: “There is no greater relief than to start becoming what one is,” or “A philosopher who couldn’t walk because he stepped on his beard, cut off his feet.” But it was the very same Helen who spent the week overusing a system of dirty looks to urge me on to a bigger apartment, far-flung vacations, a more glamorous job.