Gonzalo Torne: Divorce Is in the Air

Two bats fluttered past while I was entertaining the thought that I deserved a woman of better character, but then I shook off my self-indulgence. When it came down to it, we were all barreling toward old age at the speed of time, and Helen was the girl I wanted. And — why deny it — a large cross-section of my molecules was enjoying the unexpected surges of adrenaline the night had provided so far.

Through the glass wall I could see the black man at the hotel bar, holding what I guessed was a gin and tonic. The window was so dark it was hard to make out his skin; it was like his yellow shirt and the glass he held were floating in space. I couldn’t say why, but I felt heartened when the guy peered out at me from his gloomy fish tank, as if he were attaching me by an invisible thread to the world of sanity, far from the bitter sphere where Helen and I screeched like two lunatics. It seemed like he was pointing me in the right direction. I made a gesture of thanks that was quite eloquent — though with black people, who knows? — and I took off toward the forest at a trot, like a soldier on a mission. The peanuts made themselves known, bilious, in my stomach.

I had to cross a narrow canal in a no-man’s-land between the pool and the woods. The only light came from the sliver of raw-metal moon that hung in the sky beside a single amethyst-colored star. I felt a gust of wind; somehow in the villages it always blows coldly. I started to walk through the bushes. Here and there I came across cans and bottles and dirty newspapers — those old folks were real slobs. It wasn’t long before I reached the Corb River, blanketed by the stench of moldering vegetation. The light barely reached the opposite bank, and the currents shone and flowed over a mass of shadows. Near where the forest grew free of human intervention I could distinguish bubbles of greenery. I knew I’d find her any minute. It wasn’t Helen’s style to run around barefoot in the dark in a ditch. I was promising myself I would flatten her skull before I’d let her cross that river, when another damn bat came at me. It took half a minute to get rid of the rodent, but the fear was still in me when I came to a stretch where the river flowed luminously. The water reflected spotlights hung in the trees, presumably so any old codgers who decided to take a little midnight stroll wouldn’t end up at the bottom of the river. It looked like a miniature city had sunk right there, the lights still shining underwater. Right at the water’s edge I recognized Helen’s shape, trampling clumps of weeds: her figure tensed, her head bent, a living ghost. She looked unsteady and I took two long strides to catch her before she slid. I guess I must have forgiven her — if now I’m regretting not pushing her, it’s only because I know the last dirty trick she still had up her sleeve.

Believe me, I know very well what I’m saying here, I’m not just speculating, I’m no fortune-teller. One night two weeks ago I woke up at three in the morning, my mind addled, startled awake by the raw feelings that surprise us when our psychic defenses are down. I never even opened my eyes, but I flailed my arm over the sheet. I must have moved out of my usual area while I was sleeping, because I touched the cold left side of the bed where you never lie, where Helen used to be. It was that discomfiting feeling that made me think back more than ten years — the fifteen or twenty that have passed since I’ve seen Helen. So this is not a present-day report, this is only a story: my story with Helen, my story without you.

Only a couple of weeks ago, when I finally convinced myself that you’d left for good and weren’t coming back, that you might not even be reading my e-mails and were probably letting my messages languish in voice mail limbo, I made an annoying discovery: over the past five years, the friendships we’d begun at my initiative would fit on half a page. I had fewer than two hundred contacts on Facebook, and I didn’t even know how many of them were in the country. I accept every friend request I get: there are always people who give themselves odd pseudonyms, I have a bad memory, I don’t like to offend anyone, and you never know what contacts will be useful. So many people get brushed off unremarked from our lives like old hairs. If I had more time I’d find a better metaphor: old hairs are washed away but these guys stick around, starring in their own lives, with good or bad memories of us, a couple of out-of-date phone numbers, the blurred memory of our faces and some residual goodwill. In sum, files no one ever expects to reopen.

I turned to the social network in the hope it would revolutionize my single life — I couldn’t be seen with anyone contaminated by “us.” But the only thing I got (other than ads for cars, drinks, and insurance) was one dose of the past after another: people from La Salle, from ESADE, my sister’s friends. I was uncomfortable about returning to my school days. Sure, it had been a great time: the basketball games when everything goes your way, an unforgettable girlfriend, dinners to be framed and hung on the wall, parties it hurt to leave. But life must be lived in the present, it’s too wide and intense a terrain to let yourself go astray. So what are a bunch of big, forty-something boys — mature, healthy, and virile — doing digging into the past (so recent!) to find buddies who’d most likely been left behind for good reason?

I hardly went beyond the first greeting in my renewed friendships. I didn’t comment on people’s photos, didn’t update my status, and my only public photo was that close-up of you on a Neapolitan street, with your dark hair and an otherworldly smile, a photo you never let me show anyone — you were always so ashamed of your charm. And if I exchanged three or four messages with Pedro-María, it wasn’t out of any particular affection. It certainly wasn’t because, after I accepted his friend request, he wrote on his wall that he had finally gotten his best friend back — a phrase that made me gag. Rather, it was a conscious first step in my quest for experiences washed clean of you. I chose Pedro-María because, in spite of his enthusiasm, he was a fairly negligible burden: the emotional impact of seeing him again was pretty close to zero.

Our friendship had grown from a fertile soil of coincidences. It was my first year in Barcelona and, while we were waiting with our parents in the line of kids waiting to be distributed in classes, my mother told Pedro’s she thought we would become good friends. Mother was trying to help, to do whatever it took to give me my first friend, but the only reason I sat next to him was because we ended up with a teacher who arranged us by height rather than alphabetically. What a guy, Father Margarine. He always knew when you were silently mocking him, as if his eyes could cut right through your skull and read the words swirling inside. He used to tell me I would never amount to anything, and there was a time in my younger days when I’d have loved to track him down and give him a detailed rundown of my love life. But he’d be long dead by now. It’s crazy how those guys who were fifty when we were kids have all keeled over. Anyway, what would I have to boast about these days?

It was also because of our height that both Pedro and I were recruited for basketball, and three days a week, after practice and showers, we went home together while our mothers chattered about unfathomable feminine matters. If we were lucky they’d buy us a Swiss roll covered in cream and crowned with a cherry. And since I helped him with his math homework, and he got my technical drawings into a passable state, our classmates and teachers assumed we were closer than we really were. Actually, I distanced myself from him every chance I got. I was a vigorous kid, lively, the golden boy who always landed on his feet. And Pedro…well, Pedro was too skinny and angular, and I was never sure he had a motor of his own. He seemed content to feed off the surplus energy of another heart that had entered the world overflowing with vital juices. It was absurd that the powers above had bestowed a whole life on such a weak spirit. If you think about it, the house of our friendship was built from the materials supplied by my mother’s pushiness, Father Margarine’s idiosyncrasy, and a sport that favored the tall: all told, a shack of straw and reeds. How can you miss someone who’s been carried away on the wind of the years?