Gonzalo Torne - Divorce Is in the Air

But, who was this Rupert? Who was the man behind the myth? Who was Rudolf Thrush III? Daddy’s story went like this: the son of a communist émigré from Hamburg, he had received the baton passed by his father after a life dedicated to survival, one that had been the lever for raising a prosperous business (in a humble sense of the word). For years he’d been his father’s only employee (his brother Beryl enlisted in the Marines, and once they considered him crazy enough they sent him back to Montana with a certificate and a pension that helped cover the costs of the twenty years he’d spend building model planes). Rupert passed the decades delivering milk, cheese, and yogurt in a van that he never took to the mechanic. He changed its tires and shined its hood with the very same hands that delivered date and walnut cakes, that avidly dished out the goulash that year by year lost its Central European nuances until it was diluted in the genus of common savory stews. At the wheel of that van, Rupert drove the Thrushes into the comfortable territory of the middle class.

This was the father, with a soft and dark mustache, to whom age had added varicose veins and bluish spots in his left eye, iridescent like bruises. An average man, a prejudiced, sixty-something man. You need a fair amount of invisible misery to turn him into some sadistic creature; it’ll make you dizzy just thinking about it. But the father and the father’s contempt made up the precursor that, fattened by distance and imagination, assailed Helen and made her tremble until the color left her face. This was the beast that devoured our best hours, until the days collapsed in upon themselves.

I considered a possibility that was more humiliating for me yet more favorable to both of us. Maybe her despondence and the story of the sinister father were just a smoke screen to hide the simple, conventional explanation: a lover. I felt better prepared to handle a splendid cuckolding than the delights of family trauma. I promised myself that I would welcome adultery like an anniversary gift. If only Helen’s nervous state would turn out to be the toll taken by hiding the fact that she went to bed naked with a gentleman who wasn’t me: that they sent each other idiotic messages, that they fondled each other, that he stuck his index finger into her nostril (who knows what got it up for the filthy pig).

I made a fool of myself going through her papers, inspecting her call history, going over café receipts, even following her in the street! I imagined a rough composite: a kind of casual provincial, some guy from Solsona or Reus — places where it’d take you two weeks to notice if a virus wiped out the entire population — with a shiny, wet cleft lip (there’s something maternal about women who experiment with the weird side of masculinity — you know, dwarves, three-hundred-pound lard-asses, redheads). And don’t think I ruled out successive infidelities: a series of flings, Ethiopian-style. I’d have given her a hug. And I would have forgiven her immediately if she’d come to me and confessed that her abject state was because, before landing in Europe, she’d given birth to an illegitimate child outside the five-city radius in the United States where the law put up real obstacles to polygamy. Still, she managed to hide Jackson from me for another six months.

Once we were watching a nature program, and I waited for her to get bored with hunting and fishing and fall asleep before I started fondling her; this time, I was interested only in the asexual function of her breasts. But Helen wasn’t showing any gestational signs, and I dismissed the idea of a phantom pregnancy. I didn’t have the skill I do now when it comes to the Internet, and I had to make do with the Larousse Medical Dictionary . I remember molar inspections, and that one night I delicately separated her toes to rule out the possibility that she was growing fins. It may seem excessive, but it was very important to me to be sure that the emotional darkness squeezing Helen’s spirits was temporary, that it wouldn’t be impossible for me to pull her out of that state. The wretched reason couldn’t be rooted that deep in the past. I needed to convince myself that we weren’t going to live like a couple of stinking rags from then on just because Rupert had imagined his old age would be spent with a little Mike, John, or Brad beside him (didn’t matter, just someone who could pee standing up), watching baseball on TV, hunting butterflies, or whatever it is that macho Montana men do.

When she started to go really downhill, I bought a couple of serious books on depression, and it felt as if I were rolling up my sleeves to take on a physical task: force open a door, carry furniture up the stairs, push a car until the motor starts. I faced Helen’s sadness the same way I had overcome my juvenile problems: by injecting the heart with a shock of adrenaline. Of course, Daddy Rupert wasn’t a window or a motor, nor could I grab him by the wrist or wring his neck. He was little more than a slippery impression, and we were defenseless before him.

Enlisting the same passion with which I’d turned to the classic repertoire of the jealous and paranoid husband, I launched her into rounds of appointments with psychiatrists I paid to find a physical cause for that rampant anxiety. I know no one who passed her on the street and saw the rack on her would believe me, but the truth is that during that time the only part of Helen that interested me was her brain: the very marrow of our problems.

Last Thursday at Pedro’s apartment I found a BBC documentary about some neurologists who injected a chemical dye into a brain and could trace the movement of a thought. When the cycle of reason is short and obsessive, it’s spectacular — you know, those people so terrified by germs they need to wash their hands every three minutes. You can see the electrical tracks of the ideas biting their own tail; it reminded me of a carousel. Back then, though, they just stuck Helen into a sarcophagus and irradiated her head until they had a blueprint of her brain. Dr. Fronkonstine showed us some small dark spots: weak material, areas that didn’t get enough minerals, something like that. It was amazing to think that all our malaise could depend on those shady areas moving across the dunes of cerebral material like clouds’ shadows. But I wasn’t about to buy any lithium or mercury tablets. I’d already seen what they could do when we set them loose in Mother’s brain.

“Other than that, there is no lesion. You can always go to a psychologist; they’re the best-equipped healers of the soul — we’ve got them more controlled than any other kind of shaman.”

Healthy atoms, clean molecules, robust fibers. In the taxi I realized that a smile was showing through Helen’s usual sad rictus, as if in the end she were happy not to have to dilute Daddy’s black influence within a broader scheme of neural deterioration. She seemed pleased to keep the face-off going.

Rupert was hoping for a son and he got a daughter, a girl he had not wished for with all his heart — that was it? Are we really so simple, so predictable? None of the people who had known me six years earlier (living it up on the southern coast, celebrating the degree that qualified me to direct the businesses Dad started and that, as I boasted to my friends back then, pretty much ran themselves) would have believed that some girl born five thousand miles away was going to stick me with her family mess and impose a lifestyle on me that consisted of growing old next to a head case. Of course, Helen denied that her torment would last long: it would be over once Daddy was “no longer alive.” The sinister echoes of that decree held me obliquely responsible that Rupert hadn’t kicked the bucket yet. What did my sweet love expect me to do? Buy a plane ticket and drive along back roads to Fuokville, where I’d stab my father-in-law with a marble-handled letter opener? If a continent of salt water wasn’t enough to cauterize her wounds, I didn’t believe putting the planet of the dead between the two of them would work either. That imbroglio was the most interesting part of her past, it was stuck to her, so hot you couldn’t separate it without pulling off her whole skin. Freud rules because he lets you interpret your pathetic sex life as if it were some extraordinary entanglement, so complicated and steamy. Really though, it should be against the law to dump all that shit on yourself.