Gonzalo Torne - Divorce Is in the Air

My concern about Helen’s calls was still only skin-deep, and underneath swam more unpleasant currents: in an hour we would reengage with our day-to-day problems, which could be summed up by saying that Helen was switching off. She didn’t cook, she didn’t do laundry, she didn’t go out to parties with me. We didn’t laugh anymore, she just stayed on the sofa with the TV on. Her interest in working had diminished, and there’d even been a couple of afternoons when I jumped up to take her pulse, to be sure she was still breathing. I know that there are guys who can be satisfied alongside people who sit there and don’t do anything, but I am not one of them.

I let the pregnant women pass me, then two cripples, the children, a bunch of miscreants in ties. I let a band of Peruvians with their malicious little eyes go by (I didn’t trust them even if they had paid for their tickets — we only get the worst specimens here). I let a handful of girls cut from the same vigorexic cloth go past, I let by old men and women who still seemed to me ambassadors from a distant planet, and a Chinese man. I like the Chinese. You’ll never hear me say a hostile word about a Chinaman. And when it was my turn, I realized my ticket wasn’t numbered, I had to sit near the wing. My ears started hurting before we took off, but at least I got a window.

The attendant reminded us that it was “advisable” to turn off our mobile phones on the plane. A period of nicotine-phobia was bearing down on us then, but I managed to get in a few puffs in the bathroom before the flight. It wasn’t yet night when the plane entered its most absurd phase, when that vast metal machine made to cross the heavens starts moving across the runway on baby-buggy wheels. The plane taxied for a while, and at every turn the windows offered a new perspective on the same paved landscape. When I finally remembered to turn off the phone, I saw I had five new messages:

WHEN ARE YOU COMING HOME, WHEN?

I’M NOT FEELING SO GOOD.

I DON’T.

TELL ME WHAT’S HAPPENING? WHO ARE YOU WITH?

WHY AREN’T YOU ANSWERING?

Her mobile wouldn’t let me leave her a goddamn message, and the home line sounded like someone had pulled out the cables at their roots. But there was no point starting to fret then — the pressure in my ears was telling me that if I looked out the window I’d see how, second by second, the distance between the plane and the ground was widening, everything taking on the dimensions of an animated miniature. The plane made a splendid turn in the air that enveloped its body like a cushion. I saw the airport in perspective, and two roads making their way among fields dotted with pom-poms of vegetation that seemed to be growing there out of pity.

I only started to get really worried when I cast my mind back to one of our Madrid afternoons spent exploring the possibilities of the aroused body. Bicente must have lent us his apartment, I can’t find any other explanation for the fluffy, Bordeaux-colored cushions on which Helen was reclining while her tongue peeked between her lips like a citrus peel balancing on the edge of a glass. She seemed about to start laughing, but instead she gave a kind of sigh, as if to dislodge something caught in her throat. She started to sway forward and back, onto the cushions, faster and faster. I was afraid she’d end up cracking her skull open, but after a while she lay still, like a giant doll, her hair disheveled, savoring the vertigo with her eyes closed.

“I’m crazy.”

“Crazy from love?”

She slid her fingers along my torso, little insect antennae that got tangled in hairs that all too soon would turn gray. And while I felt like a hand was twisting uneasily in my guts, her hand, of flesh and blood, slid down my belly until I felt a pressure on my testicles.

“No, no. No!”

“Crazy from pleasure?”

“Cold.”

“Crazy from happiness?”

“Don’t be a fool, you have one try left.”

It started to hurt a little. I was caressing her throat with my open hand. Helen liked to feel my energy right where, if she’d been a man, her Adam’s apple would have stuck out. I felt the passage of saliva, felt her pulse, so it wasn’t a loose grip. Helen’s eyes were challenging when they opened, her expression shifted from playful to defiant to annoyed at discovering who was the stronger, then to impatience to sensuousness to trust to distrust to tenderness. I’m certain that my own pupils flashing in the aqueous white showed only the jubilation of being in love. She let go of my balls before I started to press in earnest.

“Crazy like an American in Europe?”

“Don’t be an idiot, John. Crazy from being crazy. Scary crazy. Crazy for real.”

I came out of that memory with the feeling I was moving through a tunnel that lasts longer than expected. We left behind a bank of clouds, purplish like cardinals. I prefer to travel at night; I like it when you can see a city’s luminous skeleton among the broad sheets of shadows. I think it does me good when I can reassure myself that all that urban agitation — the racket of people getting on and off buses, the traffic, the array of dreams, plans and goals growing in all those heads — all of it, at a certain distance, gets simplified into a cold radiance.

I let the most impatient passengers rush for the exit. I turned on my mobile, and against all odds the home phone rang: two, five, six rings. I tried again on the steps of the plane, the runway crowded with carts stuffed with suitcases. The bells sounded in the void; any one of them could overcome the distance and connect me to my wife. When I heard the familiar sound of her picking up, I felt for the first time the slimy mass of fear rising in my gullet.

“When are you coming home?”

“Helen…”

“When?”

“Are you all right?”

“No. I’m not. When?”

“I’m going to pick up my suitcase and catch a taxi. I’d say half an hour.”

“Don’t be long, please don’t be long.”

“No, of course not, but—”

“Don’t be long, I don’t feel well, I’m not doing so good. And bring water, there’s no water left. I’m thirsty. Don’t be late.”

I must have brought her up a bottle of water, but instead of giving me an explanation Helen chose to lie down on the sofa and pour herself something stronger. It was enough just to have me near, she didn’t even feel the urge to touch me. She wanted me there just in case, a living air bag. Nothing new, that was the sound track of our lives. I decided to push her that night, not only because she started lurching from one armrest to the other as if she couldn’t hold her head up anymore. The urgency in her messages had bothered me, the pitiful tone of her voice floating in the void through the phone. I didn’t let her twist my arm, I demanded a sensible explanation for her depressed energy, her recent spiritual lassitude. Unfounded crankiness is terrifying, you can’t argue against something inchoate — I needed something solid to confront. It wasn’t meant to be, though. While I was looking for her nightgown she flopped into bed. I kept at it for the next week (I delayed dinner, stamped down the hallway so she couldn’t sleep), until finally her adversary emerged from her mind to enter the real world and name the one responsible for all that mental chaos and indolence.

“You’re a good person, John, you don’t know what evil is like. You haven’t seen it, you don’t know how it smells.”

“That’s why I wanted to meet your parents, John, to know if I could count on you when he reappeared. But your father was good, you mother has grown old, and your sister is a pathetic woman, a fat, sad woman.”

“Now I know you’re not going to save me, that Barcelona isn’t far enough away, that this marriage isn’t going to protect me.”