Gonzalo Torne - Divorce Is in the Air

“You don’t have a suitable life-vision, John.”

What I understood quite clearly now was that Helen had escaped from her family as if from a pool of boiling water, only to shack up in a series of bad relationships. Also that once we find ourselves wrapped in the delights of a responsible life, most of us are stunned to see the loathsome ways our friends have matured. If things go well for us, by the time we turn forty we’ve morphed into suspicious, deceitful, irascible, and lazy creatures, crazy to photograph ourselves, broadcast ourselves. And if things go badly, there’s no need to add the burden of a perfect serenity we’ll never come close to achieving. I would have rather had Helen accept that the fetid breath our parents passed on to us, and all the other debilitating things that make up our lives and backgrounds, are no reason to be bitter. If you take it with a little spice, you can make it all worthwhile. Why else do people mostly go out kicking and screaming when they get old? I can understand if women get a little hippy-dippy once their hips stop bringing action into the bedroom (a lot have trouble developing intellectual pursuits, and they have those estrogen problems, the hot flashes and dry vaginas). But Helen was too young to give up on the good stuff in life.

If things were so bad, why did I stay with her? Was it just the sex? What a low suggestion, unbecoming to your intellect. I can refute it in half a minute. It’s not my fault that retinal cells can assess the possibilities of a woman’s body in two seconds flat. It’s not my fault my eye is perfectly adapted to calculate erotic maturity. I’ll tell you something, it doesn’t matter how smart you women think you are, how intelligent, cultured, sensitive, or pretty you are — most of you have no idea when it comes to the effect your fellow females provoke in men you desire. You’re blinded by a fog that not even the most jealous man would succumb to.

Which doesn’t change the fact that the bond of sex was still alive and well between Helen and me. You’d have to be a man to understand how hard it is to give up a woman who thinks like a man in the sack, who doesn’t show the slightest hesitation about starting the day with a session that renews your nerves, that leaves your spirit with the unbeatable feeling that you are putting something truly unrepeatable between life and goddamn death. As if seeing Helen every day, caught up in one of her trivial schemes, weren’t incentive enough to tie myself to the mast of a sinking ship. What Helen and I had wasn’t about masks and feathers; the kind of understanding grew between us that demands something more than complicity of the flesh: an entire brain ignited in passion. And those daily free-for-alls conspired to reshape the relationship; it makes life worth living, the feeling of devouring the girl whose neck you were ready to break half an hour earlier. They weren’t bad times: when the tenderness is still there, it takes a very deft touch to sodomize the woman of your dreams.

Helen made me feel alive, and without feeling alive I wouldn’t know how to live. You spent long enough with me (and those were my best years) to learn that shades of gray are not my strong suit. Or don’t you remember how you used to defend me, extolling the way I filled your days with light? How sad is a woman’s offended dignity when the flesh is not your own, when the sensual one is someone else. What hypocrites you all are — if I remember rightly, you didn’t exactly marry a mummy either, or some mama’s boy hard at work on your orgasm. You never complained when it was our sheets I was twisting up, and you knew perfectly well how to turn all that energy to your advantage.

What’s more, and to put an end to this lamentable dialogue once and for all, it wasn’t just me. Ask anyone: sex was the key, sex was enough, sex was the thing. How simple life must have seemed back when we were convinced that all we had to do was satisfy our erotic urges and the hard edges of the world would soften into a serene landscape. I know that era existed, and it must have been something worth living through. Our bodies came of age at a time when sexual initiation came easy. Forget the myth of the seventies — it was during the boom of second homes, with parents who left us alone to study on the weekends, when the true sexual revolution began. Sure, it could take a few months to find the right companion, but then some daring little chubster would appear, a timidly precocious girl, a wild child, a sensualist; you could take them by the hand and leap into the void, calming the spasms of excitement as best you could. You’d feel cold, afraid, but it was worth it, because what no one can save you from is the terror, the frustration, and the servility that hound you if you don’t lose your cherry on time. Believe it or not, it came as a shock for me too that sex was nothing like a cottony floating, that we’d hit bone against bone and plow on while breathing in that mixture of high and low aromas; in sum, that the cut separating pleasure from pain isn’t a clean one. It took me a while to get used to the warmth of a woman’s sex. The last thing you’d expect was that beneath the pubic fuzz that viscous texture would give off such a soft aroma. The first girls I was with didn’t know how to position themselves, or what to do with their hands, or how to move. I never know why I talk as if there were hundreds, and not the three or four little bodies I came to feel the touch, the pull with. Even in our best moments, I knew I could cast them off like changing a shirt, although it was good to be enjoying an almost-mature living specimen for a few hours, making the most of the cosmic miracle — absurd, if you think about it — that girls even like boys’ dry bodies.

I hadn’t even known what was in store for me — the things life hides are so surprising. Plus, I know I was lucky: I had cool rooms, good people, and wide beds. Did I ever tell you about poor Porras? He misjudged the distance between his head and the wall, and when he was already inside his girl he banged his head with every thrust; but the setup was so impossibly delicate he preferred a cracked skull to pulling out and risking never getting back in again. Looking back, I think I behaved well with those girls during those opening skirmishes — more tactical than pleasurable — though in the aloof way of a kid who hasn’t yet turned eighteen and is cutting himself the largest possible slice of life.

Helen was the girl I wanted, the one I opened wide and fucked during our bodies’ most glorious hours, while our two minds spun wildly inside their skulls. But it was also the first time I’d been penned in with another body I had such easy access to, and we only had to be left alone in a locked room for her smitten little motor to make her strip. We had to change the code of signs and symbols for when we could and couldn’t, when she was teasing me, when it was important I prevail and when it was better to let her win, when it was preferable to take a shortcut to a placid ending, when better to cross some arbitrary boundary, when it was nonnegotiable for Helen that we stop there, on the edge, if you like, not one step further. Because there are no rules, there never were, how would anyone enforce them when you’re talking about two people alone together? Do you think Dad was watching over us, that Daddy Rupert could see us, that God sent angels to record the things that fleshly beings do to one another? Those threats have never kept teenagers from wanking in bathrooms, and they certainly wouldn’t quiet the underground whisper of copulation that hums beneath society’s chorus. We were too young, too chock-full of energy, of healthy blood and enviable lymphatic systems you could glimpse in the tissues of our armpits, our thighs, necks, and the knee pits that drained our toxins. Never more than during that year and a half did I believe that the only thing I needed was to watch her walk around with wet hair and all those grueling problems that have been so hard on me would melt away, and the indifferent universe would whisper to me that I was doing things right, really right. And I would feel like — I’d really be — a winner. The Madrid hotels, the Turret, that apartment stuffed with elephantine furniture, they all showed me sex’s bracing energy, its true, essential depths that can’t be cheapened, and it seemed the pinnacle of everything a guy like me could ever achieve. The ideas that burned in that young mind of mine were so different from today’s: it’s outrageous to have been there, to have even lived through those teeming hours, one by one.