Gonzalo Torne - Divorce Is in the Air

Helen was the type to argue for hours as if her life depended on it, until finally she crashed, exhausted. If I kept probing her once she was worn out, she’d forget all her crazy accusations, as well as the more reasonable parts of her argument. She didn’t try to reconcile the various ideas she held of me, and I resigned myself to being two (or even three) different people in her mind.

She looked me up and down, gazing half a second longer than necessary at my lips.

“It’s cold.”

The wind had raised goose bumps on her arms. I thought of the little bubbles that float up from the bottom of the pan and burst on the surface. She enveloped herself in my body, defeated by marital solicitude: Helen didn’t know what to make of her escape, she was unable to turn it into anything useful that she could prolong. I smoothed her hair away from her face; that always calmed her down.

“Let’s go back to the bedroom.”

She said it in a resigned tone, as if giving in to a plan of mine. She didn’t miss the chance to qualify it, maybe unconsciously.

“Let’s go back to the hotel.”

We shared an instinctive optimism about our future as a couple, but we had to proceed carefully. We owed a good part of our reconciliation to exhaustion, and to our habit of leaning on each other. The raw zones of pride, distrust, and shame were still exposed and sensitive. One glancing blow and they would flare up all over again.

We crossed the filthy little forest and the canal. We followed the lights of the resort; the bright circle of the old clock tower was our North Star. The incongruous grunting of the pigs didn’t help me calm down — my spirit was still fouled with a bitter substance. The sexed aroma of Helen’s flesh reached me, mixed with clothing fibers and dust. I still couldn’t begin to guess at the movements of her mind. I suppose I was hoping our hearts would move closer to understanding all by themselves, and that a generous and completely spontaneous gesture would breathe life into their depths.

It didn’t help that since we’d been married we hadn’t taken any decent vacations, that we’d lived in small apartments with rooms the sun barely touched, feeding ourselves on the narrow economies allowed by two checking accounts. If we wanted to stay together, the only thing to do was apply the old remedy: bring in more money. I was going to have to find her a job, especially if the kid was going to spend time with us — a thought that filled me in advance with pride. I was turning these problems over when I felt her fingernail pressing into the skin between my index finger and thumb. That vestigial web is already pretty sensitive, and the next thing I felt was the touch of her lips on my neck: a kind of suction that we’d had a very precise name for when we were growing up, which I couldn’t think of just then.

“Jhaaapsn…”

“What?”

“Jhapsm…”

A blustery wind tore the sound from my ears, breaking the words into confused units of noise as it made the treetops rattle like coins in a pocket. But I only had to see her smile — her lips damp, that trace of playful greed growing out of her face like a second nose — and I was convinced that Helen was starting to take our reconciliation seriously. We were going to have a good time, our greatest joint asset. We’d return to the hotel hugging and laughing, ready to just skip dinner. Projected onto the wall, our shadows looked like the ghosts of a couple of lovers.

When we reached the bar, Helen turned her head and stared fixedly inside. She let go of my arm and approached the window, drawn by the sound of a magical flute that only she could hear. I stood where I was, enjoying the fresh air and the lassitude of the sweet, chlorinated pool water. I could only see the bottles floating on the shelves in the bar: the Cyrillic letters of the newly fashionable imported vodkas, the sandy color of the whisky, the red hues of the girly liquors with flavors of dried fruits, and the irresistible sapphire blue of Bombay. The overhead fluorescent turned on in two long flashes, and I caught sight of the black man pressed to the window, a dark-sheeted ghost; the glass in his hand looked filled with emerald light and he was smiling, intensely interested in us. Laugh all you like, but I found it soothing that a being of his demeanor, with the noble expression of a diplomat who’d traveled back from the future, was there to keep me company at the decisive point of my marriage.

Helen moved back toward me, and I don’t mean she put one foot in front of the other with the intention of coming closer. Rather, she took advantage of the basic step of human locomotion to display her hips and shake her upper cargo. She completed this demonstration of dynamic flirtation with the exact neck rotation needed to lift the mass of her hair and let it fall in a layered cascade, capricious and hypnotic, almost without affectation; I felt my blood start to pound. The waiter, the nocturnal drinkers, my somber guardian angel (sweet companion) were all there just to look at her. I saw it as a good sign that she was getting back her taste for flaunting herself.

“Did you see the black man?”

“What black man, Freckles?”

“The one who’s been looking at us since we got here, John. Well, looking at me, watching me. You never notice anything, it’s no wonder you don’t get jealous. He must be nearly sixty. It didn’t even discourage him that I was with Jackson, a child, for the love of God, those people have such dirty minds. I guess they can fool you Spaniards, they’re a novelty here, but they can’t pull one over on a girl from Montana — they only think about drinking and fucking, they’re full of sick half-thoughts. You really haven’t noticed? How can you be so careless? I don’t feel safe with you.”

“I was too focused on you.”

“Tall. Bald. Vicious eyes. But he won’t bother us again.”

“Oh, no? And what did you do, show him the butt of a gun?”

“This.”

And she bent her knees to give more force to that ghetto gesture that consists of gathering your fingers in a fist and letting one escape, stiff and erect, in the middle. And although I’ve never really known what it means (something to do with the anus) I know that had my father been there to see it, the shame would have corroded his flesh.

“He can go fuck himself.”

That’s what my wife said, my love, the mother of the child who was going to be “ours,” and in decent Spanish, before she took my arm once again, savoring the satisfaction of a job well done.

I was a guy who liked silk scarves and riding horses, who couldn’t drink cognac from a glass that didn’t have a narrow mouth to concentrate the aroma, who had to make an effort to repress the paternalistic habit of calling the waiter over with a clap, and who’d had, as a child, a woman employed for various purposes that all fit under the obsolete name of “service,” who came every morning to put on my socks and fold my pajamas (it’s not that I hid this from you, but you have to admit it’s not the kind of memory that fits easily into ordinary conversations). And Helen was the creature I had married: ignorant, rough, impertinent, but bold and full of energy and life; the girl who’d pulled off my husk of pretentiousness, the tegument of refinement that covered me. With no protection bar my own sensitive skin, she was the girl I had hurled myself with into the murky, hot, and tumultuous zones of the human breeding ground. Beneath the first layer of stars in that clear sky, under all that luminous dust sprinkling us with energy from celestial bodies packed with inert material, my racing pulse confirmed how much I loved her healthy and lively vulgarity. Those were the spiritual reasons I had married her, and they were still good ones.