Gonzalo Torne - Divorce Is in the Air

“Johan!”

I expected to find him much worse off; he was sitting up with his coat draped over his shoulders.

“I dreamed I was drowning. Sit down. I want to talk. Please.”

A cold and bright light shone in from Córcega — an office building, cleaning women, open files. But he asked me to turn on the little lamp; we would talk enveloped in a green radiance. An intimate touch.

“I have to tell you. I can’t keep it bottled up any longer. I was unfaithful to Isabel.”

He didn’t even hide that the whole mess was set in motion long after the harpy had robbed him of his daughter. In a way, he was savoring the wiry bond of imagined guilt that kept him tied to them.

I watched as he took the photographs out of another one of his envelopes. This time, the woman’s name was Cris. They had met on a forum for photography enthusiasts, they sent each other private messages, and soon enough they found shared tastes: Leonard Cohen, Knight Rider , Al Pacino films; they were both unconvinced by Bob Dylan’s electric phase. They met in person at a forum get-together, and before long they split off from the group and did what they could to laugh. He found Cris attractive in her own way: red hair, wide hips, naive accent (she was from Zaragoza). They wandered into a grove of fir trees, the conversation flowed easily and their defenses gradually came down. They talked of relationship troubles: they’d both been through nasty divorces, both were terrified of entering the next decade alone, they didn’t feel like dodging suitors if they ever decided to look in earnest. There were children in circulation: three for Cris, one for Pedro (he didn’t miss the chance to joke that his daughter didn’t really circulate much). They came to a meadow shaded by a chestnut tree whose branches seemed to be bleeding. It was irresistible for these aficionados, so they took out their Nikons, and Cris told him that when he was shooting he seemed to come alive. They sat down on a bed of crunchy leaves and talked about their jobs. Her vagueness didn’t escape Pedro’s notice, but he let it go when she repeated that he couldn’t let talent like his go to waste.

“She’s good, too.”

Cris’s photos insisted on using a contortionist’s perspective; they were better, livelier than Pedro’s. She wasn’t fooling herself — she was aware that she and Pedro had too many gaps in their training, that they could only play at being photographers in the forum’s limited and somewhat artificial atmosphere of mutual admiration. But the camera gave them a conversational territory and a road to follow, their reciprocal flattery sped the friendship toward a more intimate place. The heart is prone to be dazzled.

On Tuesdays and Thursdays they used e-mail like an instant messaging service. Pedro tended to write his responses emboldened by alcohol, to the point that he improvised a promise to visit her in Zaragoza. Cris replied that on the date he proposed she wouldn’t have the kids. I’m sure that whatever day Pedro had suggested, she wouldn’t have had the kids. The AVE train cost him an arm and a leg, and he spent the journey cursing himself: the landscape dotted with border shrubs, that immense dry plain below folds of sandy mountains that he watched out the window, it crushed his spirit. He didn’t even find Cris that attractive, it was an adventure that wasn’t going to leave any permanent mark on his life.

The train pulled into the immense station at Delicias and Cris was waiting for him, looking like a diminutive doll in the middle of the platform, hands folded, feet together, wearing a blue raincoat. She gave him a tour that consisted of two plazas and a garden. It was Cris’s lively voice that gradually won him over, and he was impressed by her welcome: clean apartment, light-filled and cool, topped off with the aroma of onions and peppers in a homemade meat stew. He didn’t plop onto the sofa, but sat down at the already-set table. While Cris headed into the kitchen to add the final touches to the meal, he savored every second as his body sank into the upholstery’s firm sponginess. When he saw the napkin holder engraved with her initials, his hands quivered with pleasure.

“Do you like rosé?”

He volunteered to uncork the bottle. Cris brought him a pair of slippers in case he wanted to take his shoes off, but they weren’t the right size. It turned out she worked in a supermarket; twice, she specified she was a manager. She cleared plates and the leftovers of that poignant stew with a magician’s skill, and served him a bowl of strawberries with fresh cream. What a coincidence — she couldn’t have known it was his favorite dessert. She told him she’d spent two years in art school, only to learn that she didn’t like competition. Also, she’d had to take care of her mother. Photography was her passion, and so was drinking a half-dozen beers in a bar where you could hear real music. One day, they could go together.

“Look at her, Johan. We can’t all rob cradles like you. She’s pretty.”

She was one of those reasonable women who move through the world and wear themselves out trying to do it well. Surrounded by boys so tall and imaginative she couldn’t hold on to them with that unremarkable body — not to mention the healthy contents of her head — she’d never managed to truly set anyone on fire. She’d had to resign herself to an average husband: a serious guy, honorable, hardworking, able to impregnate her. A reasonable man with whom she’d had it reasonably bad, one who’d wanted to have three kids and shelter them in an atmosphere of everyday affection, and who after a rough patch had ended up leaving. And what Cris was looking for now was a companion to go drinking with, someone to laugh and to row the boat with, someone to plan totally unaffordable trips with, someone with whom she could revive the pleasure of being part of a couple, who would utter her name again with interest, a person who maybe doesn’t completely convince you, but who sticks around and whose touch protects you from the world’s coldness.

Of course, a woman with three kids and a fugitive husband would catch on right away that this guy, frayed and forty-something, spent most of the week being neurotic and unsociable, and that she’d be better off not quitting her respectable job, because he wasn’t fit for the world. The most ambitious version of Cris — a girl who deemed her chances to still be on the rise — would have ruled Pedro out at first sight because he lacked any initiative of his own, the kind of ambition that drives a guy onward toward ever-better moments. You’ll struggle to understand, since you’re the kind of woman who always gets the most interesting man, the one who knows where to take you to dinner, what dresses to buy you, what sights to see when you travel to flashy-sounding foreign countries. But she was in the intermediate phase of life, when you have to cross the unknown territory that yawns between the plans of your thirties and the grandparent years of your seventies, and Pedro could supply her with the minimum. She could boast about her photographer boyfriend in circles where he’d win points just for being from Barcelona. What that woman wanted was to have a shot at the agreeable side of life, with a guy who was neither violent nor a Jehovah’s Witness.

And after all, what good did it do you to marry a connoisseur if he couldn’t pay for a car or take you on vacation? What good did it do you to get married thinking I was going to be “someone”? It’s funny: we navigate our way among the expectations that others dream up for us in their own minds, as if it weren’t enough to go plunging into middle age wrapped in our own clouds of hopes, ideas, and fantasies about the future. Thirties, forties, fifty-five…and we still end up in strange places, small apartments, goals like boxes. Age is our reality tutor.