Gonzalo Torne - Divorce Is in the Air

Pedro and Cris had natural attraction on their side, which helped — it’s what happens when a man and a woman find themselves finished with their respective turmoils, it’s how bodies come to rest together. Cris took her clothes off too quickly; he saw the soft folds of her belly, the stretch marks that opened like a dry delta. He hadn’t touched a woman in years (they’d fallen by the wayside, one, two, three, without making much noise). He was surprised again at the temperature, a hot-water balloon; he made her blush when he let his gaze fall between her thighs, to the burgeoning, straggly fuzz that made him think of threads in a living fabric.

“She wanted me and I wanted her, I really did. I felt it in my thighs and stomach, but nothing happened down there, it didn’t respond to anything we did. Like it was disconnected from the rest of my body.”

Cris’s caresses as she tried to stimulate him only reminded him that his virility was buried deep within him; her touch kept him company as the black tide of shame and guilt engulfed him.

“I even started talking to my dick. I encouraged it, bullied it, tried to convince it to wake up, I apologized for making it enter a girl without asking its permission. And when I finished all that, and it was clear nothing was going to happen, I realized for the first time ever the thing is just an overrated flap of skin.”

And she took it like a grown-up: she kissed him, ruffled his hair, got dressed, and took him down to the living room. She didn’t even try to get off using Pedro’s lips, fingers, or nose. She started washing dishes, telling him she wasn’t one of those dirty girls, that she’d rather order pizza and beer. And “dirty girl” sounded in Cris’s mouth like the kind of woman who can extract a man’s prostate juice with a massage, who can transform an impotent man into a sexual smorgasbord. Pedro-María didn’t take it too much to heart; she gave him a slap on the back, smiled at him; she cooed at him like a mother to her harmless son.

“I told myself I’d never been that attracted to her anyway. That I’d rather stay outside the lips than stick my swollen dick in there.”

Cris took out a deck of cards, I suppose they must have been tarot, and asked him to draw six. She made some calculations on a napkin, and things looked good for the couple. Turned out they were twinned souls, it was a cosmic coincidence. He would call her, and by talking they would reduce the separation they seemed condemned to by the comedy of work. It was a connection they would have to try hard to put a stop to, and they didn’t want to stop it. They kissed, and after years of underuse he felt his cock start to fill with blood, overcome gravity, and become the master of that impending moment of gratification. It had only been a delay, now they would synchronize. Under that ginger hair, Cris revealed herself to be an engaged lover, who compensated for a meager imagination with her positivity and a sense of humor between the sheets that he found disconcerting.

“You can’t imagine what it was like, Johan, she was alive and crazy for me.”

They lay there smoking like actors in a film’s transition scene. Cris alternated formless puffs of smoke with neat circles that slowly broke apart above their disheveled heads. The skin of her chest was softly dotted with oil nodules, and the dark and voluminous protuberances of her nipples disturbed him. She said to him, bawling like a suckling animal inebriated by being alive under a sky inundated with light:

“This fire is new, Peter, and I’m the one who lit it.”

They bundled up and went out for a walk under some scraggly trees with lilies sprouting from their roots. Stray words of their conversation went on spinning around them, severed from their original phrases. They sat on a restaurant terrace and dined again: ham and scrambled eggs and half a liter of wine. He took out his camera and shot against the streetlights’ bulbs, as if his eyes were sensitive to ghostly charms hidden to other mortal eyes. They brought back beers and spent the rest of the night kissing, looking at photos on the camera screen, and hatching plans that would not only bring him back to Zaragoza, but also involved the apartment on Córcega. Because if one thing was for sure, it was that before she could take a relationship seriously, Cris immediately had to check out the place where her man slept and pissed, look at herself in the same mirror that reflected him, open his closets, feel his shirts.

“Give me time.”

That was what he asked her for: time, no less. He didn’t let himself be bewitched by the beers they’d shared or by the dawn light that shone through the living room windows. He couldn’t get past the reaction he knew she would have when he showed her the museum-house: what Cris would think of those rooms, the plans she would make for the furniture. He couldn’t stand to see her in that imagined scene, her every move tearing apart the tapestry of white lies and exaggerations he had wrapped the portrait of his life in. As she dozed on his shoulder, his resolve weakened; he liked Cris, but he couldn’t suggest they go on seeing each other in Zaragoza every time her kids stayed over at a friend’s house or went on a field trip. He couldn’t afford that rhythm of life. He started to convince himself that Cris was a woman with rapacious and magnificent desires, one who wanted all love’s tenderness and violence, the exalted energy of infatuation that would infect her cell by cell, so she could gather the strength to pry open the doors guarding the greatest things life has to offer.

After agreeing on some vague terms, Pedro returned to Barcelona and received her two e-mails with a mix of happiness and reproach. In the first, Cris updated him on the tarot cards that augured a splendid future together for them (he regretted having made up the time of his birth): “In our four hands there is strength to lift up two lives.” That ridiculousness moved him. The second ruminated over pleasant possibilities and some memories of the ever so complete day they’d spent together.

The proposal came in the third e-mail. Cris’s mother had just died, and that gave her the opening to unveil the plans for the future she was envisioning for the two of them. She had inherited a spacious apartment that was too big for her by herself, near a green and landscaped area, a twenty-minute walk from the city center. It occurred to her that she could rent it out, then she’d have enough to cover the mortgage, and with the remainder plus her salary from the supermarket, she could cover Pedro’s first expenses if he wanted to move into a space filled with her. She’d also taken the liberty (she knew he’d forgive her) of showing his “work” to a friend of her cousin’s who was looking for wedding photographers. Of course, he could move in anytime he wanted, regardless of the apartment. No mention of her children.

The plan was drawn in the trembling hand of wishful thinking, so Cris made sure to slip in a bit about how they could start afresh in a different place, far from Zaragoza, how if he asked her to she would be willing to sell the apartment. And all that Cris begged him for, in exchange for those generous proposals, was that he go with her to her mother’s funeral; she was afraid of facing the father of her children, and her children, whom she hardly ever saw, and she didn’t want to do it alone. Pedro wouldn’t even have to set foot in the funeral home; it would be enough if she could hold him afterward, once they were alone.

Obviously Pedro-María didn’t go. In fact, he didn’t even reply. He blocked her e-mails, let his mobile phone ring for a week and a half — another advantage of not paying for a landline — and then Cris tired of calling.

“Why didn’t you go and see her?”