Gonzalo Torne - Divorce Is in the Air

There are some men like that, fighting either to contradict or to please fathers who, if they aren’t burned and scattered, are living off an IV drip and who never even loved or hated their sons all that much. Who knows if women’s self-esteem depends as much as everyone says on the male gaze. I can tell you, though, that far too many grown men feed off the approval or rejection of a ghostly father, some fake giant who fills their heads and enjoys the Final Judgment every day.

He asked me to go with him to the laundry sink. I was convinced that was the moment when all our “friends” would jump out with paper hats and party blowers shouting “gotcha!” But that marble anachronism wedged into the present didn’t stink of damp and mites, but of bleach and chemical soaps with traces of mint; it smelled of use. He took a box from the shelf (a simple, unfinished wooden plank) and showed me hundreds of photographs in bundles, tied with twine.

“These are the oldest ones. I also have some in black and white.”

The bundle he showed me was in various shades of sepia. They were depthless portraits, three-quarter shots of smiling people, snapped with no aesthetic intent. He showed me one of his mother in the old botanical garden of Montjuïc. It was hard to relate those fresh features to the worn-out face of the forty-year-old woman I met at an age when I had no clue about adult life; back then all humanity seemed split cleanly between young and old. What did one do after turning forty-five? Why even make it to fifty? What interest could those fantastic numbers hold? The modest style of her dress couldn’t hide the size of her belly, its burden of proto-life mutating to a genetic beat as it changed from reptile into fish and grew networks and tissues ever more complex. Until, finally, it made the mammal who now smiled before me, gauging my reactions.

We come home from vacations with four hundred photographs. Parents document every detail of their children’s baths, and even I took maybe twenty of you the day you introduced that exhibition. We save them on hard drives, put them up on the Web, shift them from one device to another. The images surround us like a living fog, bearing witness to our passage through the world. They’ve lost their sparkle of mystery; they’re like an app that lets the eye shorten distances in a shrunken world. But in the laundry room of the museum-house, photographs recovered their captivating energy: an old barite paper retaining time’s emulsions, conserving vestiges of light from the past. When they struck the nerves of the species’ current, transitory representatives, those outlines of the dead could stir up complicated responses.

“Now you’re here and now you’re not.”

He didn’t understand. He paused on one of those windows (what else would they be?) onto another decade: a tall man, prematurely gray, stood at the mouth of a mine. He was holding the arm of another man who was almost a dwarf, who clearly wanted to offer his best side to the camera for when the graying man told his wife, in some Barcelona salon, who he was and what he was doing next to him. I wonder what he’d say if he knew that two boys, who hadn’t even been born that day he was so eager to be photographed on his friend’s arm, would someday see right through his posing.

“The one in the middle is my father. He was thirty years old, working on the Porma Dam — they changed its name later, but I’m used to the real one. He told my mother a lot of stories from back then.”

From his other arm hung a woman in an incongruous white dress, with a timid look on a smiling face. It looked like the photo had been doctored, like she was a humorous addition by the studio that developed it.

“When I went to live with Isabel, I took a photo of Dad with me. He had messy hair and the dam was in the background, half built. I carried it in my wallet for five years, folded in half. One day I took it out and left it somewhere, and I’ve never seen it since. I suppose I should admit it’s lost.”

You could barely make out any color in all that sepia, but I would have bet any amount of money the girl was redheaded: skin spotted with freckles, that straggly hair that untangles into splendid waves when it’s brushed, the exaggeratedly, unmistakably sexual lips. I’ve always felt it was a stroke of luck to share the earth with that genetic anomaly, which has so many physiological peculiarities: you dark girls aren’t so dark, and blondes don’t play the part of blondes very well; you’re all more varied, maybe. But when it comes to acting the role of redheads, redheads are unbeatable. I’m very fond of carrot tops, even though I’ve never slept with one. The only one I kissed — well, I wouldn’t say she was bad, but she did something strange with her mouth, it made a weird sucking sound. It’s yet another debt in life’s array of possibilities that I need to collect before my heart suffocates.

“When you think about it, it’s a bit sad.”

“And the other two people?”

“I don’t know. That’s the thing. They’re my family photographs and I only know Mom, Dad, and Grandpa. I don’t know the others or what their names are. I don’t know what they were doing there.”

Turns out, the coffee grinder comes in handy, and I discovered that watering plants to music from the gramophone relaxes me. It so happened that we stayed out later and later and I spent more and more nights at Pedro’s house on Córcega. All that stopped me from officially moving into the museum-house and paying a share of the bills was that I had the claustrophobic premonition that if I did, I’d be burying myself in a social grave. If Pedro’s father or grandfather had collected stamps, bottle caps, or packets of sugar, we could have charged admission. But the apartment held only what Pedro’s dad left the day he’d gone out unaware that that very afternoon he would be crossing the symbolic threshold of his windshield, headed for the other world. It was a catalogue of aging furniture, an inventory of mediocrity, accumulated and held on to without forethought.

And though my heart problem called for more rest before putting my nose to the grindstone, I also didn’t move in because I’d already been plotting my next venture. I was taking inspiration from the Valencian shipowners: I was through with cheese-selling or bar-opening or apartment-showing. My specialization was going to be rich people. While I was falling at full speed, they’ve proliferated in this country: the upstarts, the climbers, riding high on scams either tolerated or encouraged by the city-planning authorities and other stables of corruption. An ocean full of fish weighed down by their full pockets, people who’ve accumulated constant streams of banknotes and bonuses and are just waiting for someone to introduce them to the refined pleasures they should be pouring their earnings into. Everyday guys who don’t know how to eat or drink or smoke (or fuck, if we’re going there, but I’ll specialize in families, I’m no age to start opening brothels), who get ripped off in hotels decked out in gold leaf, who get sold apartments with ceilings held up by cardboard Doric columns, who buy giraffes and let them die and rot in the garden because no one explained how to feed them. Builders, promoters, city planners, doctors who sell performance-enhancing drugs…people with those coarse but well-remunerated professions need someone like me, expelled from the fortress of the wealthy for breaking the rules, but with refined taste passed down by a father who’d been able to identify periwinkle blue and the notes of a Chypre cologne. Those poor men have heads full of blurry images of cars, watches, and fancy clothes, but they need a sherpa of luxury, a connoisseur. When you come back I’ll give you a job in the company, I’m going to need help if one of these johnny-come-latelies gets it into his head to start buying art.