Gonzalo Torne - Divorce Is in the Air

One of those days, I started to get a sharp pain in my back. The disks were coming out of their cushions of bone; I had to stand up or lie down, I couldn’t even think about sitting. The tension irritated the tissues of my back, and waves of pain radiated outward. When it comes to other people I’m very much against painkillers, but I was quite indulgent with my own suffering. I started to take something stronger than Nolotil. I never got rid of the pain; it stayed there, scraping away at my fibers. But at least the drug separated it from my brain — I could see it floating there in an isolated capsule, and it didn’t touch me. The downside was that I went around practically sleepwalking, and given the situation, a clear mind would have come in handy.

Bicente’s plan was to tail me. He gathered information from the “friends” I turned to back then for some crumbs of social sustenance. He was trying to “catch me by surprise”—or so said the people who came to visit me after the debacle was over, happy to find me alive, consoling me in my convalescence.

I imagine the two of them there in the apartment, by the light of those candles that stink of sandalwood (these invented memories are as vivid as ever), eating pizza (Bicente with a knife and fork), using all four hands to draft their convoluted plan to intercept me. All they needed to do was come see me at the door to my office. If I’d known they weren’t even capable of that, I could have saved myself the hassle of synchronizing my exit to the street with the arrival of the 45 bus, and the pathetic little race across Via Augusta, one hand bracing my burning back. Just let them spend three or four nights feeling like intelligent creatures whose “ideas” could actually influence the course of events; I certainly won’t be giving them any credit for a simple plan in an open world. We humans with our games, what a spectacle we’d be for the extraterrestrial heavens, if only they weren’t deserted. I suppose Helen didn’t want to meet me in the open; she was looking for a chance to confront me in an apartment with walls and doors, among other people. And so the two of them go on puzzling it out: Helen is lying on the floor, covering (and emphasizing!) her loins with a napkin soaked in pepperoni juice, while she incites the “strategist” to devise the best way to catch me unawares. Bicente paces about in shirtsleeves, feeling like a titan in the waves of humid air. Then he sits down and takes off his glasses, folds them up, and leaves them on the bedside table, because once upon a time a girl (his cousin) told him he had sad and dreamy eyes. She left that flower pinned to his breast and he’s not ever going to let it dry out.

It was only a matter of time before we’d run into each other. From a distance, every city is an archipelago of provincialism, a narrow colony, and that half-assed party in another sumptuous apartment was as good a place as any. I know it was planned because the guests couldn’t help exchanging little glances. Terrible actors, so anxious to get me into the cage with the beast — how it entertains us when people separate, reconcile, intermingle, yell, kiss. Whatever nature-lovers may say, trees are a bore; they will always be far below even the most anodyne human in terms of entertainment potential, there’s no comparison.

I don’t think they put Lisandra in the mix as part of the plan, but who knows? I’d spent weeks with no stimulation except the occasional sex scene on late-night TV, but I’ve never been one for solo love. My veins were twisting like wires to restrain the built-up libido, which itself was developing a complicated system of inexplicably precise fetishes: fine ankles, rhomboid faces, names rich in fricatives. It was just that Lisandra liked tall boys, and I was wearing the blue jacket that night; it was just that I liked the delicate awkwardness of her body language when she started flirting, I liked the eagerness for fun that lit her face for half a minute, and the way that fire shrank, smothered in timidity, without going out entirely, smoldering like a hot ember. I liked that she was dark and thin, that she was so much the kind of girl I had always imagined for myself before Hurricane Helen ruined my juvenile expectations. I let the image of us together float calmly in an imagined future, and I liked what I saw.

So we started to exchange words that slid one over the other as if they were caressing or encouraging one another, smoothed by the foregone conclusion that a good impression would be made: words that were more mood-music than meaning. I won’t say it could have gone on until her lips separated for a kiss, but certainly long enough to populate the nighttime mind with pleasant ideas. I was enveloped in that soft mood when I saw him slaloming through the guests, one arm raised and waving frantically. The parting in his hair drawn with a ruler, his collar starched, that little beard, the type on whom age will settle like a corrective to the anomaly of youth: Bicente.

My first impulse was to head him off and smash his face in, but it tends to be complicated explaining to a girl like Lisandra the curative powers of working out rage with your hands.

“Just let her talk to you, Juan-Marcos.”

And I did. I allowed Helen to come up to me in a corner of the room, while man-trays passed carrying cold cuts and canapés of margarine and imitation caviar and emu tartar. Helen’s mouth and lips conspired to produce sounds directed toward my ear, but I paid no attention. I let myself be carried along by the fatigue of a boy who, burning with vital fire, dips his Boy Scout feet into a marriage and who ends up lost in the maze of female complications: a mere puppy still wet behind the ears. For almost three years I had been the one in love, the weak party in the agreement; I got used to following Helen’s changing whims. But a furious convulsion had inverted the situation, driving me from the depths to the summit of our coupledom, where I enjoyed the luminous role of being the desired one. I felt like giving her a hug to celebrate our newfound freedom from that stagnant imbroglio, but Helen was still Helen, and she went on talking about commitment, about our shared project (though the apartment was rented in my name, her fallopian tubes weren’t carrying anything fertilized by me, and a civil marriage is, well, a civil marriage), but I didn’t bother answering or refuting her words. I looked at her from a distance of thousands of miles, protected by a splendid smile of new superiority.

“I’m bored, Helen. Let’s talk another time. I’m sure we’ll get the chance if you’re going to stay with Bicente.”

And I turned my back on her, walked away from her pre-cooked words, left her chewing on her rage, soaked in the delicious acidic taste of her saliva. I don’t even remember what she was wearing — her image no longer made my optic nerve vibrate. On the fly I caught a toasted rectangle spread with a creamy paste of something salmon-like, and I took my time chewing it and brushing away the crumbs with the back of my hand. And then I realized that the tables and plates and lamps were all the correct color: seeing Helen hadn’t added an ounce of intensity to the material world, I was still surrounded by the matte of disenchantment. My feet moved to the rhythm of the background music, I could have burst into song, I felt like taking off my jacket and stretching my arms, I felt taller, a true champion. I ran into Lisandra, standing with another brunette who has an even smaller role in this story, though her eyes curdled with a flattering complicity. What friends we could have been in a different life, that creature and me, her humble servant. But it was Lisandra’s face I first saw contort into a grimace of alarm stretching out for long seconds like spilled mercury, preceding the slice through the skin of my trapezius: an injection of cold pain that spread through my nerves to the top of my chest.