Gonzalo Torne - Divorce Is in the Air

“Poor John, poor John, my dear John, we’re going to suffer a lot if you don’t leave me. You’re going to suffer.”

“My father, my daddy has come back, and he wants me dead.”

It was one thing to be sick of interrogating her, and quite another for me to swallow that nonsense, which at best promised domestic drama and at worst a bit of criminality. My family was a disaster, agreed, but an honorable one. Skirting adultery, Dad had managed to maintain a fairly civilized arrangement with Mother. I was living with Helen because of a series of random events that in no way made me responsible for the grotesque complications starting to foment in Unfathomable America. I hadn’t married her past! To calm myself down I repeated like a mantra that Helen’s Daddy and mother (whose name I don’t even remember, so you can see how much attention I paid her) were an ocean and several seas away. They couldn’t stick their noses into our lives.

Helen’s grandstanding was all about how, by moving away from her splendid homeland (Fuokville, land of Lewis and Clark) to marry me, she’d abandoned (abandoned!) her family. All the Thrushes were left bottled up (bottled up!) in the past, adrift and at the mercy of the waves. Of course, the standout word of Helen’s private journal (which, when she left the apartment, I read with the justifiable goal of learning more about her) was “special”; when she extrapolated about herself, the girl could pass for an optimist. She was still joined to Daddy Rupert by flesh-and-blood ties, and when those ties took it upon themselves to transmit an electric charge to her, my Helen threw herself into transatlantic conversations that didn’t exactly match his supposed indifference. Not to mention how they cut from my bank account (the phone expenses never went to the joint account we opened, I never knew why) another slice of the inheritance I was counting on. Not to mention the three boxes (“hidden” under our bed) where she kept half a set of baby teeth (a barbaric American custom), her third poem to Daddy ( Thank you, daddy/your smile cheers me/your words nurture me/your beard caresses me/Thank you, daddy ), three Valentine’s Day cards (from three different admirers), an herbarium of romantic petals, and her first running shoes mended with blue thread. As she “distanced” herself from her parents, Helen was putting space between her senses and the school walls, the country dances, the array of cakes and pastries that would later flow in fatty rivers to settle on her hips, the family nicknames whose existence she acknowledged only when she was drunk, the Christmas dinners with Christmas silverware and Christmas tablecloths, the endless reruns of the same anecdotes about cousins and aunts and neighbors, the cavalcade of births, baptisms, weddings, and funerals whose respective rites comprised the main public entertainment modest people offer one another. Plus the visits to Glacier National Park, the preachers’ sermons on local radio, the chewing gum, the regional baseball leagues, the kids’ covetous way of fornicating after high school graduation, the deep-seated feminine rivalries, the shame with which people received the news of another tourist decapitated by a bear. The chain of reliable ingredients you can never be entirely weaned off and that, if you’re not careful, will end up compacted into a vital paste that is the only dish you spoon into your mouth your whole life long. At the end of the day, only frigid girls and handicapped people choose to stay and live in the town they’re born in.

What Helen told me while she sat there on the sofa with her legs crossed Indian-style; what she said while in her robe in front of the half-open refrigerator door, waiting for her hand to steady so she could finally pour some milk into her cup; what I could make out while she was tossing and turning on the sheets (and my eye captured at every half-turn the brand on the elastic in the area under her buttocks: a furrow in the flesh less than a centimeter deep); what I gleaned and thought I understood all led to the same short conclusion:

“I spent my childhood trying to please him.”

Sipping vegetable juice, convinced that concoction would cleanse the alcohol from her blood, Helen told me that as a child she’d willed herself to grow up pretty so she wouldn’t disappoint him. She told me how she would seize his arms and shout, “I love you, I love you,” and that it would have been enough simply to hear a “me too,” an “of course,” a “ditto”—some echo of approval. She told me she offered herself like a gift, that she sang and drew just to gladden one of Rupert’s hours. As a teenager she tormented herself about her figure so she would be a good jumper, to win a modicum of paternal respect. She never did.

All in all it took me a couple of hours even to understand that the Rupert she was talking about, so desperate to engender a son, was her Daddy , her father (who her grandfather baptized with the name Rudolf — the first Thrush to receive a sacrament on American soil — in the white church planted out on the prairie, in a baptismal font that was the town’s artistic pride and joy). And that baby would grow into the expectant father who, overcome, peered at the ultrasound (whose fluorescent undulations reminded him of the granulated images in UFO documentaries) where the suspended boiling mass of his daughter was growing embryonic lungs, extremities, a stomach surrounded by arteries. The man who observed his wife and was moved when he superimposed the familiar face smiling at him onto that new creature on the inside of the belly’s wall, mutating to the beat of a plan engraved in the DNA he bequeathed her the moment he spilled his seed in her mother. I didn’t ask her how that memory was so clear in her mind. With one look, Helen made it very obvious that if I started to question those Montana-forged myths, she might just claw my eyes out.

Nor did it help that, on entering the world, Helen pushed her mother’s ovaries out ahead of her. Or she tore up the placenta — what do I know? — some unpleasantness that ruins the oven. Covered in mucous and free of ideas, Helen was clearly innocent, but from that first moment on, Rupert saw her as one of those little meteorites that hit the Earth trailing a somber wake of sterility behind them.

“To Daddy, I will always be the murderer of my future brothers.”

I tried to defuse her past, and told her that she’d have the opposite problem with me, since I would rather have a girl. She recoiled. It was like I’d squirted a drop of lemon onto one of those half-alive slimy things that spend their dismal existence hidden inside a shell. Then she started to slap me with open palms, and when she finished her eyes were dry but shot through with red. I learned that I couldn’t mix the central episodes of her family saga with the erotic interlude she’d chosen to enjoy in Barcelona. The epicenter of her existence was the interminable dispute with Rupert; what she and I had was a vicarious romance. However good a time she may have been having in that temperate city of serene skies, the only thing Helen read in the recap of her life was that she had always lost.

You’re going to laugh, of course you’ll laugh, but for months I’d believed that I had seduced her; I’d stopped in front of shop-windows and looked at those price tags as if they were meaningless numbers, signs for idiots blind to life’s most intense pleasures: to win an argument, to possess a woman. My thoughts had been fuzzy. I’d felt like a bull with its snout smeared triumphantly with mud, but the eyes of the cows, the lionesses — of the subhuman female of your choosing — always waver between surrender and an instinctive shine of pride. Anyway, there’s really nothing you can compare to Helen’s scintillating and avaricious eyes, those little fragments that moved aside so my big body could take its place in the center of their enigmatic circles and I could play the part of the male companion she’d been ruminating on ever since she got her first period. It was a role that had fallen to me randomly, and not through conquest as my vanity had led me to fantasize.