Gonzalo Torne - Divorce Is in the Air

I entertained myself trying to guess his e-mail password (“Isabel,” “chicle,” “Rastabú”), but I grew tired of battling a mud-coated mind, and I opened Safari. He had cleared his history recently, but there was a trail of two hours of activity: UFO sightings, a Wikipedia page on cockroaches (which turned my stomach) with special focus on the “German” kind, two articles in El Mundo about the future of Spain’s monarchy, and a list of pornographic sites.

I know teenagers aren’t the only people who use those sites to discover what sex has in store. There are bachelors who relieve themselves at home before heading out into the fray, and even partnered citizens who want to add a little carnal edge to their desire, a hygienic relief for the intricate detours the sexual imagination takes. I know that stuff is out there, within reach of any router. It’s just that, though I learned the technique of jerking off when I was young, I didn’t much take to it. Girls came on to the scene soon enough, and they were so willing to be kissed and caressed I was afraid of turning into a fag if I indulged in a habit that didn’t require them. It was so much warmer as a couple than with the carousel of filth you could summon to your lonely den. As I was striking out on my humanitarian mission, I already knew I’d find it unpleasant to see living beings who weren’t me coupling and grunting. No one has to explain to me what sort of fantasies can take shape in a brain burning with excitement, but I certainly wasn’t prepared for the level of specialization private licentiousness had achieved: “public humiliations,” “dwarves in disguises,” “black women tied up and crying,” and my favorite, “pregnant women who come stamping on apples.” Compared to those filigrees, my tastes are very plain.

It must be amazing to have all that within half a dozen clicks as you’re becoming sexually aware. For us, Swedish porn had already been a major leap forward. It supposedly trained you for recreational sex, though in my case I was quite relieved to learn that most girls aren’t that interested in double penetration. But none of those magazines you’d buy on the sly and keep in a bag until the house was empty could hold a candle to the bottomless pit the Internet excavates on your screen, with all those possibilities illustrated and animated. Those poor parents who put their trust in Google’s “safe search” (ha!) and Apple’s “content filter” (ha ha!). Nothing is going to hold back the curiosity of a fourteen-year-old specialized in the production of semen and pus. Nature likes its fathers callow; ours (although not Dad, specifically) would laugh when they found us with that kind of material, and play the bad boy: “You’re not going to find anything there I don’t already know.” Don’t think your stepfather was a prude, Jackson. It’s just that the map of human arousal is full of places your girl isn’t going to like, ones I doubt even your precocious mother (wherever she is) knows about.

I didn’t have the courage to go on investigating the digital trail of the desires of Pedro-María (whom I spent a long week afterward looking at in disgust), but since it felt good to take a break from his actual presence, I headed over to his Facebook page. The same photos, songs, and comments I could see from my own profile; I had never delved into his list of “friends,” and my attention was caught by a lump of pink flesh that could only be my sister. They must have met in the Bonanova apartment, or when Dad made her come and cheer for us on game days. I took it as a mutual intrusion that entitled me to address a few fresh words to that twit under the digital mask of Saw’s identity. They ranged from self-indulgent ( You have no idea what a wonderful person your brother is ) to mean harassment ( He never talks about you, but if he happens to mention your name, it’s only to refer to your weight ), passing through crude obscenity ( Suck my ass, nitwit ), but then my ideas dried up while I wondered if Popovych was aware that his wife was offering herself to the world like an odalisque advertising her availability. She was smiling with her arms crossed, two heaps of meaty fat that hung like broken tools. Maybe Popo tolerated it, maybe he encouraged her, who knows? After all, the only thing you learn as part of a couple is that marriages are inexplicable.

I went on looking through names, profiles. It was funny to see how people handle their profile pictures: complicated framings, cars that oozed status, photographs they “identified” with. I was amazed by the girls, flirtatious idiots, alternating photos of kids (they’ve given birth to so many it’s a joke, they used to seem so different from their mothers and aunts) and vignettes of them in bikinis under an August blue that stretched out behind them with the sole purpose of providing a lively backdrop for their poses.

The men take care not to let their bellies show on Facebook, but when they’re on the beach they reach opportunistic truces with their extra weight. What the women decide to show the world — after snapping two hundred selfies — is the happy maternal expansion that rounds their breasts, cheeks, and hips, with the frame cut off just where the flesh spills past their idea of what’s tolerable. There was Sonia with the explosion of lascivious freckles on her cheeks, and the insinuating pleats of skin on Carmen Calvo’s underarms, and the handlebar of fat that hung over Vanesa’s elegant rump (wasn’t she the one who used to jump hurdles?). They were unable to resist both displaying and hiding the bodies they cultivate, and that mortify them. I should visit them one by one wherever they’re spending their lives, have a little chat to convince them that, as much airtime as the lithe young things may receive, what really gets me going isn’t low-fat diets. It’s when I’m out and about and I come across one of those behinds belonging to a girl from school, molded by almost fifty years of life and lavish lunches. It’s always a good day when we can greet each other (Mancebo, Sandra, Laura, Cardelús, some called by first names, others by last) and catch up, exchange amiable lies and half-withered memories. They were priceless, those melancholic asses that were impossible to ignore during our conversations (where do you work, how do they treat you, do you have ambitions still to satisfy, what do you fear, do you think that in twelve years much has happened that was really worth it, do you think about it constantly?). How erotic a shared past can be! Sandra, Vanesa and Vanessa, Laura, Mancebo, Díaz, Laura, Carmen-Olga Calvo, only now do we see things clearly: we were presumptuous, too young to calculate the emotional advantages of being mammals who can ruminate on past experiences the way dromedaries spit and swallow. We should have slept together more! But don’t think I’m the one turning melancholic now — that kind of girly sentiment isn’t my style. The only thing I’ve saved of Helen’s is one of her bras, stored away in a secret compartment that you never noticed. I mentally superimposed it on the lovers who came later, measuring the exact amount of pleasure my hands have sacrificed. That’s all the nostalgia I allow myself.

I took a second to consult the oracle of Safari about Eloy Larumbe. It seemed like the perfect night to satisfy the curiosity I’d been repressing because I’d never looked closely at a transsexual before. Let’s just say the photos I found were ads for his new line of work — his rates weren’t bad at all, though the line where he claimed to be twenty-seven was certainly funny. I wasn’t clear whether it was guys or girls who paid to sleep with her or him, but Eloise was certainly an alluring creature. You really had to look hard under the makeup to find his simpleton’s features in the nose and cheekbones reworked with a scalpel. The luxuriant mane, implants in the breast and gluteus — not even the defiant gaze recalled Eloy’s doubtful expression (maybe there were drugs that changed how the pupil and iris worked) — but if I snatched my fingers from the keyboard as if it were on fire, it wasn’t because my body was reacting to Larumbe’s little poses in a catsuit, but because my host’s voice sounded through the apartment’s stillness: