Gonzalo Torne - Divorce Is in the Air

Although it would have been exciting to stay home in monastic calm, pirating the flicks Muñoz the locksmith told me about, with the phone disconnected, starting at every sound, expecting Helen to begin pounding at the door (do police get involved to defend the husband in domestic arguments?), I decided to go ahead with my plan and leave. Istanbul is cheap, the sun shines, you can drink iced tea, and I had never seen a real mosque up close, in its habitat. But I did something besides visit the Bosphorus and photograph cupolas: I brought with me the new set of keys and the invoice for what that last-minute intervention had cost me. And while my body was swimming at the private beach on Büyükada or eating dinner on a terrace overlooking a stream of detritus borne along on a soft current, the most turbulent part of my soul was feeling envy toward this society that still protected women from their own initiative. Bicycles whizzed past, Polish vans, orange carts, crippled street vendors, almost every one of them crazy to get into the EU. I felt sorry for all those Orhans and Omars (did you know they’re not even Arabs?) whose eyes jumped out of their heads when some little European beauty went by, squeezed into linen showing every line of her behind. They were ignorant of the costs that come with that visual freedom: if the West is unstoppable, well then, Cide Hamete, hold on to your minaret, because you don’t know what’s coming for you.

What can I say? I followed the plotline that best fit my character. You can look for heroes in any movie, in songs on the radio, in books that fill your head with ideas about Fate and personal betterment. Here we’re talking about a guy who couldn’t even visit his own mother once a month — do you really think I’d go see Helen off at the airport? Viewed unsentimentally, that sad good-bye wasn’t going to do either of us any favors. My plan was pretty humane — she could wallow as long as she liked in my selfish macho insensitivity (and forget about the fact that I had supported her for almost three years), but by the time I opened the door to our building, carrying a stupendous hookah and several boxes of apple tea, Helen would already have spent three days gazing out over the electrifying Montana prairies. Those people may be barbaric, but they must get some great sunsets over there.

She couldn’t hide drugs in my apartment, but when I came back I was met at the door by a garbage bag the size of a red kangaroo. It held every dress I had ever given her, mixed with mayonnaise, cans of tuna, dried-up apple cores, gobs of ketchup, rotten vegetables, and more sanitary pads than she could have dirtied on her own in a single month: all of it perfectly equal in its level of filth.

The girl who cleaned the stairwell cost me fifty euros a month, so I put on a white jacket to go and seduce her with a formal complaint that she’d forgotten the bag on the landing. She was the first Russian I’d ever spoken to, a specimen of disconcerting size. I didn’t want to sleep with the help, I was only reawakening the social skills without which a single man is nothing. My pants were tight around the thighs, too much Turkish pastry, too many nerves soothed by steaming portions of junk food — excess weight Natasha wasn’t going to hold against me. It had been three years since I’d folded a handkerchief in the pocket of my jacket.

“A woman left it there this morning. She had the key to the front door.”

So we’d missed each other by only an hour or two. I calculated what it was going to cost me to convince the other tenants to change the lock on the front door. If it weren’t for the closed-circuit camera, I would have broken it myself.

“She gave me this for you.”

And with Chechen cunning she slid me an envelope from which peeked, intact, Helen’s plane ticket. I went into the apartment and flopped down on the sofa without unpacking my bags. I listened to the messages Helen had left on the answering machine: one of those cassettes that dragged the tape as if time itself were turning inside it. How could a woman incapable of going out into the street alone manage to find a room (and pay for it!) in the Mediterranean’s most expensive city?

Of course, I also thought about “my folks.” But even with her brain turned to mush, my mother wouldn’t have let Helen take the fabulous elevator up to the living room alone, and Señora Popo had been trying to mend fences with me for months: it’s one thing to torment a brother, but quite another to side with an in-law.

The explanation was ridiculous and efficient, like life itself. In vaudeville there is always the useful dunce, the guy who opens the door at the wrong time to stop the action tiring, hired so the audience stays glued to their seats. If you’ve been paying attention, you’ll have already guessed that the willing dupe of this interlude could only be Bicente (did you really think I’d shine the spotlight on him only to let him sink back into the shadows?). Bicente needed to regroup after the end of his marriage to a posh little chick who’d come into the world to smooth her hair and make demands, and who’d ended up with their apartment in Madrid. So Bicente allowed himself a period of calm to “find himself again” in the Catalan paradise of warm weather and multicolored girls. He’d spent half a week in the “Ciudad Condal,” as he called it in the unmistakable provincial-capital way of the madrileños (tender little partridges that they are, lost in this lair of hyenas). And after seeing all the famous buildings and getting tired of beauty at the exhibitions and looking out over the bobbing sea, he decided to strike up our friendship again, which he remembered with alarming warmth.

They must have bumped into each other in the doorway of my apartment. Or maybe someone had given him Helen’s number and, spurned as she was, she threw herself into his arms like a castaway who, with a storm threatening overhead, latches onto a slimy life buoy. I hope you’re happy with that analogy, because I can come up with less flattering ones. Bicente took her to a place he rented by the week and that they optimistically called an apartment. Part of my brain rebelled against the aberration of those two idiots seeing themselves as a “couple,” even if it didn’t go beyond a tacit, instrumental association — temporary, very temporary. Part of me still believed in a cosmic justice that makes people disappear when they become too stupid, that, when they pass certain limits of shamelessness and self-humiliation, just freezes them out of pity. Still, I’ve always been naive. I don’t even think she had to touch his cock, bathed as he was in the pleasure of being taken for a white knight. Though of course, between a man and a woman these things can never be assumed.

What Bicente wanted was to teach me a lesson, which any way you look at it was a much more powerful motive than libido. I remember him only too well, hunched on that sofa (surrounded by Buddhas!), trying to convince us that smoking marijuana was very bad. I guess at a certain point you get sick of your guests forgetting your name; you want to shake yourself out of the sad, stupefied role that your stand-ins act out on the stages of other people’s minds. Maybe he was hurting from being cheated on, who knows? When you look a certain way not even money can protect you, and he wasn’t that loaded by the standards of get-rich-quick Spain, where bandolero -investors and moneymen swoop about like bloody Baron von Munchausens. Anyway, Bicente saw the chance to give a performance in the role of his life, to score a goal on the other team’s field; he’d be a champion of pure love, the defender of marriage.

“If you stick your nose into this again, Vicente, I’ll rip it right off.”

It was a reasonable answer to the five daily messages that Helen left on the machine, with the restrained tone Bicente advised, and the fifteen she spat at me like poisoned arrows when she was alone in the apartment.