Gonzalo Torne - Divorce Is in the Air

We leaned against the Miramar’s balcony, suspended over a city that seemed animated by the lifeblood of electricity, and he told me his daughter’s name. I watched him move his tongue inside his mouth, searching for a broken piece like he was extracting a thread of meat. He told me that Isabel had gone to live with an uncle in Seattle, and she’d taken the little girl with her; there was nothing the Spanish divorce laws could do. A cold fog of pollution quivered over the well-lit streets. He didn’t see her at all anymore, they barely spoke. It hurt him that something that had left an open wound in his flesh could be condensed in phrases recited in two or three minutes.

On another of those endless nights, I gave in and told him my story with Helen, and my life with you. I don’t know if it was in that order — I have no reason to respect chronology, time does what it wants with me, and doesn’t ask my permission. He sat there in the bar’s armchair, sucking on his cigarette; his pose emphasized the impression of an erudite Indian when he declared:

“You are no good at marriage.”

Of course, we did more than tell each other sad stories. Even when men are on the ropes, we have our pride; I told him about the day I put my sister in her place, and he filled me in about something much more important to him than photography: his apartment on Calle Córcega.

He invited me over one afternoon at five. The sky was covered in a layer of dirty clouds, and he’d drawn the curtains, plush and thick. So I had to wait for my pupils to adjust to the floating remnants of light before I could take in the height of the ceilings and the well-preserved plasterwork, a fugue of vegetable motifs. We entered slowly, with the respectful silence demanded in sacred spaces, although the ashtrays, cans, and bric-a-brac (bell, music box, mosaic) set about like souvenirs gave the room the air of a shop waiting for its final customer before closing down.

He looked at me attentively, anticipating my admiration and savoring it. The place smelled of the dregs of alcohol: sickly sweet liquids carelessly distilled. The cups and glasses were all over the room, as if he’d decanted them, one into another, over the course of several nights. It wasn’t hard to imagine how the hours here must have chased each other in tedious circles, caught unawares in a yawn that couldn’t be stifled.

Flowing straight from the wellspring of intuition, from the preverbal part of my brain, the impression hit me that everywhere you looked, you felt the absence of a woman. And it wasn’t just about cleaning and straightening (although that would have helped); what was missing was the spirit of renewal, the sense of space, the aromas.

“Impressive.”

I took two steps in, to avoid looking him in the eye. An air of familiarity washed over me. I’d been in apartments like this one, they’re all over Barcelona. They call them fincas regias— royal indeed — and twenty years ago you could have found the same hand-painted wallpaper and plum-colored curtains keeping the cornucopias and carillons (words you’ll only find in the dictionary by accident) company. If the place seemed to belong to another era, it wasn’t because hundreds of years had passed, but because no one decorated houses that way anymore, or lived in them. They’d gone out of fashion.

He showed me the vinyl records that he stacked without their covers, the little toy theater, the walnut knickknacks. He showed me furniture and objects torn from their intended uses, selected for their thick aura of the past. I would have ended up figuring it out anyway, but his little smile, smeared with satisfaction and a peculiar pride, lubricated the idea that this apartment served deeper purposes than merely sleeping and eating (nor was it just a bar). I was stepping into a space that was easier to profane than break into.

“It’s really something.”

We slung our jackets on a chair and he went into the kitchen to make tea. This turned out to be lukewarm water with a greenish tinge, in which charred fragments of vegetation floated.

“It’s roasted.”

I found myself juggling two ideas: on one hand, that apartment; on the other, the incredible fact that during the twenty nights we’d gone out, Pedro-María had not made a single off-color remark. Divorce happens to us all, but that reticence signaled some secret caution. If I could fit the two pieces together, I got the feeling I could shine a light on Saw’s state of mind.

It’s very difficult to drink tea while filtering out singed particles with your tongue. If I failed, it was because I got distracted thinking back to when we’d first entered the labyrinth of girls, and Pedro-María unwrapped the truth of his erotic potential.

It was one of the peculiarities of single-sex education: you discovered from one day to the next the effect you had on girls. There were inveterate cowards who, because they boasted blue eyes or fine proportions, randomly found themselves recalculating their social value upward. I was one of the best athletes in the class, so I had it made. Even so, during the first weeks of shared classrooms, before I learned to interpret the code of approach and rejection girls camouflage themselves with as naturally as desert vipers in the sand, my six foot two inches trembled top to toe at the prospect of running the gauntlet of those pretty dwarves with their little looks, their smells, their giggles and discouraging silences.

For Pedro-María it was disastrous. With that Saw-body, he had all the charm of seaweed. It’s also true that I could name twenty boys who started out from a similar place, but were not deterred. They took on the female species with the same determination as when they tried to get to grips with algebra, learn prepositional phrases, or master the plinth: they rolled up their sleeves and set about the task with a steady hand. But Pedro-María didn’t have that kind of temperament. His most lively sentence moved at the speed of a provincial train.

I took the initiative and brought him to parties. It wasn’t entirely altruistic, because it’s better not to go alone, and you’re much better off if your accomplice is like the dark eye shadow you use to emphasize the light in your eyes. But you can imagine how long it takes for even the best intentions to wither if you’ve got no vested interest in a guy’s success. Plus, the way Pedro presented himself made me look bad, too:

“My genre is the ballad.”

As you may have guessed, back then music was the artistic ambition shining on his hopeful horizons. What I mean is, there was no convincing any of those girls. A good coach would have recommended he make use of the wide margin he had to humiliate himself. And there was one afternoon he got down on his knees at the traffic light at Plaza Kennedy, begging Eva Prim (the girl who deigned to kiss him) to go all the way with him; not to mention that fateful afternoon when he took it into his head to pound on the door of the girls’ changing room shouting:

“Just give my dick a chance, it’s huge!”

But those were the exceptions to a manner characterized by abstention; in general, Pedro-María stifled his appetite. The result was a simple boy with crystalline, emotive eyes, not an ounce of evil in him, always willing to come running when you needed a hand with your antivirus or the new version of Windows. I guess I got used to thinking of him like that, one of those dependable classmates who never show up for a game of pool with any interesting news. Failing repeatedly is comfortable; it relieves you of false hope.

I can’t even imagine what it would have been like to spend those formative years without girls, without feeling their dilated eyes observing me. Without the girl who, if she also happened to be near the top of the ever-changing list of favorites, could provoke a surge of pleasure if you merely ran your fingertips through her flowing locks. If you were denied those easily inflamed, ambitious innocences, you ran the risk of never growing up. You’d remain locked inside your masculine tastes, or within the defensive irony that protects you from what you don’t understand, from what you don’t know how to reach, among people who never spread their wings. Even the ugliest little thing — who’d have all the necessary anatomy, and fantasies and soft ideas about the future, and who’d give off that gentle aroma if you embraced her tightly — could save you from having to discover physicality at an age when everyone else had moved on to more sordid business. They put your problem-solving abilities to the test, and in return they’d conveniently free you from the wasteland of role-playing games, comics, and science fiction, where single teenagers would spend their twenties and even their thirties, from zits to alopecia. Those antisocial little monsters are now the lords of your cultural world, but they don’t fool me — it was Pedro-María who took me to manga parties, to the Wookie soirée, and I know what I saw there: beady little eyes, cheap beer, dandruff, Cro-Magnon chicks who’d been kidnapped with a time machine. And always the smell of cold sweat, mildewed clothes, and even worse things: fear, the unmistakable stench of losing. It was never a place you’d go by choice.