Gonzalo Torne - Divorce Is in the Air

And don’t think my heart’s wearing some kind of hair shirt (it’s just a weak lump, a mass in need of coddling). I admire down to my bones the thousands who, though they can’t say “hi” on a stage without their voices strangling into a falsetto, still manage to weave complex webs of deceit around themselves. They dupe the women and men who know them best in the world, and they happily stroll through their half-paid-off houses clutching a time bomb. What men! What women! It’s not a moral question, I follow my desire wherever it leads — frustration isn’t my style. It’s just that we inveterate monogamists don’t find it appealing to screw around with substitutes. The girls we choose are the ones we desire most.

And since Dad let slip once that battles against women are the only ones you can win by fleeing, when things got really bad (when I was standing paralyzed, washed by the cadaverous light from the fridge, convinced that if today she got the urge to make something to eat she would serve me a soup chock-full of hair), I left the apartment. I would kiss her good morning, and before she was up I’d be down in Barceloneta. The beach’s soft colors distracted me, the crests of sand and the white movement of the water. I’d just sit there. It scared me to live like a piece of damp wood, now unable to burn. The sea’s skin stretched to the horizon, a thickly drawn line. Beyond it, my imagination had me visualize that immense mass of water folding like a pliant cloth, to fall in a cascade toward the sidereal void, an optic trick that exists only on the stage of human vision. It’s almost funny to think how these messy years will be the only experience we’ll ever have of the universe. It really is a fine notion, enough to make you die laughing.

To keep myself entertained until night fell, I’d wander the streets, Casp and Ausiàs March. I felt calmed by that stretch between office closing-time and the hour the night owls emerge, an indeterminate period that separates two species with different nutritional needs. Those discreet hours give the sky a little privacy so it can finish its chromatic transformation and open its silvered eye. I’ll never tire of watching as the streetlights start to come on down an avenue, each absorbing its small portion of shadow.

On a Sunday I could cover several blocks without meeting anyone face-to-face, until I’d see the first group inside the cube of light in a bar, sipping their drinks and smoking. I had only enough energy to go into a dairy shop and order a glass of thick horchata; I knew one that closed late, and from inside you could watch the cable car over the docks, the cabins swaying in space like boxy metaphors for so many fragile and wandering souls.

But rarely did I dare return home later than seven. I’d go up to the apartment weighed down with paper towels, tins of food, margarine, fabric softener, and pasteurized milk. I’d pray a freestyle prayer that she would be asleep and I could save myself another sleepless night full of sobbing, rage, and reproaches. If I didn’t find her in the living room, if she didn’t respond to my first words, my heart would leap in my chest and start beating in my gullet. I was tormented by the fear of finding Helen’s corpse. By now I know that in the suburbs, in the rich neighborhoods, in countless matchbox apartments, there are hundreds of husbands ravaged by complicated emotions, but that year I was terrified of discovering I was the kind of man whose loved ones kill themselves; I’d filled my quota with Dad. I didn’t want to lose any more innocence (not that I really believe in God, but if one of his saints surprises me and is there to receive me in the hereafter, what other defense could I offer against my file of sins — laziness, mistakes, complacency, ignored calls for help — beyond a fistful of fresh innocence?). Most of the time Helen was waiting for me with part of her body outside the sheets, a trunk rooted to a dirt floor. But the thoughts that she fed on that sap could only bloom into infected flowers. She reproached me, insulted me. Sometimes in the middle of an argument a trace of reciprocal affection would tremble in her eyes, and she’d briefly remember that these scenes were the result of a mistaken calculation. I’m afraid that what Helen could read in my eyes was the suspicion that we’d already consumed the generosity we would need if we were ever to recover, that the last particles of mutual tolerance were gone. If she was asleep when I got home, I let myself be calmed by the sound of the refrigerator’s little motor as it worked to conserve the nutrients in our collection of animal cadavers. I barely ate — I was afraid she would poison me with mushrooms, mix crushed glass into the ice, stir bleach into the soup. I really believed she was capable of murdering me.

These are the thoughts of a young man unexpectedly trapped by the pressure of life’s complications. Sometimes (for the past five minutes now) I wonder (in a shamefully rhetorical manner) how I would have reacted if, of my two wives, you’d been the one to fall into that depression. The difference (and this should come as a surprise) is that when I tried to put myself in Helen’s head, I was surrounded by darkness. And this isn’t about gender difference. It leaves me in stitches every time they congratulate your brother on his female characters — he doesn’t deserve it. I, too, am a student of the female soul! Move in with a woman, observe her with your eyes wide open, with your senses bared, and soon you’ll feel that you share nerves, grow common organs, and your spoken identities melt into a common dialect. My brain sprouted feminine bits, and Helen’s was more full of testosterone than she was willing to admit when she wrapped herself in the feminist flag. No, what stopped me making sense of Helen’s worries wasn’t that the estrogen grew tits on her and hung some scraps on me; we were separated by an ocean, the culture of a foreign continent. It would be ten years before I matured into the man you met and fell in love with (because you did fall in love). You can’t even begin to compare the depth of those two relationships.

If I ever feel I was closer to Helen than to you, it’s not because of the sex. (How tempted I am to say that it was, just to piss you off. But I’m not so small-minded, yet, to deny that in spite of your affectations, our sex life was so good it terrifies me to think about a life without the body animated by your character.) It had more to do with the specifics of my relationship with her, so different from the one that joined (that joins) me to you. There you have it, it’s absurd to have gotten married twice and twice squandered what mattered to me most: my own home. The poisonous effects of this calamity on my well-being cannot be calculated. But I have no regrets (though some days I do nothing but regret). The priests taught us rules for survival, but we aren’t here to survive, we’re here to live, and these are the troubles that overcome a person when he forges ahead with his whole body engaged, his entire head and that skein of nerves that, if a forensic doctor were ever to entertain himself by unwinding it, would be long enough to lay a tightrope from Barcelona to Morocco. More life! I ask it of the deaf gods, the vacant heavens, indifferent Mother Nature: eternal life. But the only answer comes from a tree blackened like a mummified finger pointing to a hole in the earth, a niche in the wall, an incinerating oven. Don’t go believing that life’s journey lasts that long, either. It’s not worth applying for a mortgage, drooling over a job, it’s only wasted energy. I don’t think I ever told you (you’ll see why) that when Dad died I convinced myself that when I circled his carcass, what I was really doing was soaking up the leftover time he was no longer going to use, so I would live to be a hundred and twenty. Even if it had worked, it would still be too little. Let some other man regret his divorces, his weddings, his fights, kisses, greed, naiveté, and ambition. Don’t expect me to join the whiners, I don’t plan to disown my emotional mistakes. At least when I end up alone in the house (in some house), I can while away the time weighing them up against each other.