Gonzalo Torne - Divorce Is in the Air

He stayed standing, holding on to the sideboard. Everything pointed to him falling flat on his face if he let go. He made to reach out, but with a combination of gestures and looks I managed to persuade him not to pick up the bottle. I should have helped him to bed, but the linguistic twist the conversation was taking struck me as terrific and unexpected.

“…but just tell me what the masculine equivalent of ‘gynoecium’ is? It’s just taken for granted that women have the right to band together and stay in the shadows. There’s a space reserved in language for that. And for us? Why wouldn’t we want to withdraw from the world and live together under the same roof and share costs, without bringing God and his son into it? Oh, no, our only option is to be exposed to the elements, the streets, the struggle. If you consider us individually, maybe men aren’t so great, but when we’re together we understand each other, we laugh, we have a good time. We don’t tear each other apart beneath all the social niceties like they do. Why don’t we just quit? Do you know? Me neither. Good-bye to all of them, they can go fuck themselves.”

“Because we want them….Well, I do, anyway.”

From deep inside him grew a smile that brought him onto his tiptoes. He took two steps and fell onto the sofa again; I was starting to feel awkward about lying down there later to sleep. Lately, people have been knocking at my door (it’s an expression — Saw’s the only person I see, and I write only to you) trying to persuade me that sex isn’t all that great, really, and the deep layers of physical attraction that can turn your head inside out are all in my imagination.

“Descarrega had the best solution.”

After a second I heard some cogs in my brain start creaking after having lain dormant for at least ten years. But there was no clarifying the rumpus of my disjointed memories. The acid aftertaste of astonishment concentrated into a single first name.

“Eloy?”

“Eloise Larumbe, our own Eloy Descarrega.”

“Eloy?”

He realized I’d gotten confused and was stuck in a loop, and he rummaged around for the right words to orient me.

“You didn’t know? He bought himself some tits, injected hormones, got fully lasered, had his cheekbones reconstructed and a good dose of noninvasive filler put in his lips, the full works. And you don’t have to spend a fortune anymore, or have them saw open your face or cram you with silicone. It’s getting cheaper and faster, and less painful. And reversible. Eventually we’ll switch in and out of genders like we go from country to country. The only hitch is the nervous system — they can’t give you a female brain. You bring home the body of a woman, but the soul driving the thing is a boy who understands you. Paradise. The only possible harmony.”

As far as I remembered Eloy’s features, they specialized in a sort of expression that was the dictionary definition of “befuddled.” He liked Star Wars figures; he’d had hundreds of them, the brat. He was effective on the court, a shooter, not very generous. It was hard to talk seriously with him, one of those crossword puzzles that we got tired of soon enough and solved by filling in the blanks with the word “faggot.” I didn’t think about it at the time because I tend to relate homosexuality to vice. I don’t know how to deal with boys who are just gay because they like other boys, then fall in love and go live together. And there was no denying that Eloy with tits must be a sight to see.

There were other questions I wanted to explore: Had Pedro seen him? Was the transformation complete? Could you buy a cunt, with all its complicated folds? Did it react the same way, get turned on the same? I knew doctors didn’t have a great track record with cerebral nerves. The awful state of my heart’s plumbing, the terror that an obstruction would snuff me out, had driven me to study the possibilities carefully, and I knew that even if they managed to isolate the mental meat, submerge it in a tank of collagen with its consciousness intact, they still didn’t know how to graft the brain onto a fresh spinal cord.

But I didn’t get to ask him anything, because Pedro-María lost the thread of the conversation and fell into the babble that generally preceded silent inertia. I grabbed him by the armpits and led him (or practically dragged him) to his room. The impulse to take off his boots for him ended there. He assumed an astonishing pose, almost indescribable, more typical of a creature with soft bones; neurologists should really start investigating alcoholic contortionism properly. Luckily that cretinous yogi couldn’t see himself. It shows the intelligence of our design that we sleep with our eyelids shut, that our faces remain beyond our field of vision, that the spirit or the soul or the character can scarcely recognize itself from outside, and we have to fall back on interpreters. And it’s lucky that psychologists and priests are a bunch of charlatans incapable of really opening our eyes. What good would it do Saw for a true reality tutor to sweep away the fine shroud of protective ideas the poor man wove about himself? Better that he not self-assess, better to live lethargically, wreathed in greenish shadows. Because the day he looks at himself with a cold and exacting eye, the day he takes the measure of the wreckage he’s buried in up to his eyebrows and that’s mingled with his very being — that day not even Petra can stop him tearing out his windpipe.

I left the bedroom with a decisive urge to be a better person. I smoothed the sofa cover, and it was only when I started to gather the glasses from our last few nights that it occurred to me how a liver specialist might interpret the last week’s alcoholic fugue state as a sophisticated suicide attempt.

You could develop a comparative theory of drunkards, using Helen and Pedro-María to illustrate it; they’d taken different routes to end up in the same class of bebedores . For Saw, the demands on him had made his headaches chronic, and alcohol helped him keep going in all his weakness. Helen wanted to devour the world, but she lacked the head for it. She soon got tired, and the few ideas she did have came out twisted, as if she were thinking with the wrong organ. Her tonsils, maybe. So Helen started dusting off the notion that she was strong, and could overcome the world’s resistance by the force of her body. And there you have the two of them, in their respective living rooms, wallowing in their alcoholic delirium, destroying reputations, sowing infamies, passing through euphoric periods when they convinced themselves that their isolated words — words that could never hurt anyone — pierced their targets like the marble letter opener I eventually gave to Helen so she’d stop opening envelopes with her teeth. The best medicine for Saw would have been to land himself one of those pretty and determined women who move up the ladder at work and leave you at home taking care of plants and small animals. As for Helen, her supposed salvation from the pit of alcohol and low self-esteem was that strapping boy stepping onto the Corb’s riverbank, matted with reeds, fearful of tripping and falling into the water that flowed with unusual ferocity in that stretch. After all, that was why we’d gone to the spa, whose idiotic lights were floating among the vegetation: to start over again together, rise above the everyday maliciousness that had diminished us. To give ourselves the kind of experience of forgiveness and renewed enthusiasm that love supposedly entails, to fall under the power we assume it possesses.

So I was happy to see her stop swaying and wobbling at the edge of the water. I took two long strides toward her like a valiant prince in a story, and even if I did grab her arm with more force than was strictly necessary, the main thing was to get her feet away from the edge and onto solid ground.