Gonzalo Torne: Divorce Is in the Air

And now we come to my second motive: when I gave Pedro my mobile number, I was so miserable I would’ve thrown myself into a grave if its diggers could guarantee me in writing a bit of human company. But don’t start gloating just yet. Aside from your ignominious departure, something else was weighing on me: my stupendous health was starting to fail.

A fairly Siberian day had encroached on Barcelona’s climate. I was heading down Calle Muntaner, too furious to take shelter in a taxi. I’d just visited my mother, and if asking to borrow money once you’re over forty is already more debasing than at twenty (it’s harder to convince yourself the situation is temporary and things will soon get better), I can assure you it’s even worse when you’re given the runaround in reply. I’d found my mother livelier than usual, and the cause for her sudden euphoria — a newfound group of septuagenarian friends — should have made me happy. I was surprised, of course, but I didn’t waste my time inquiring about her new companions. I was too busy fuming over her refusal to advance me what I needed to avoid descending yet another rung down the proverbial ladder.

“Let’s talk about it in two weeks. I’m sure I’ll have an answer for you by then.”

I called my sister and got her voice mail, but it wouldn’t let me leave a single message; I called six times and was charged for each of them. I wasn’t wearing gloves or a scarf, and I went into one of those Pakistani or Brahmin shops that don’t pay taxes and will be the only kind of business to survive after the imminent crisis has devoured all the rest: the shops selling collectible stamps, the bookstores, tailors, and all the fine liquor stores. Who knows, maybe you ran off with a Syrian, but I’ll have to watch as the Eixample’s diverse commercial landscape simplifies into a bunch of yucca dispensaries, hotels, outlets, Chinese wholesale shops, and Internet cafés that smell like feet. I bought a big bag of chips — kettle-cooked, 2.35 euros — telling myself I needed the energy. I searched all my pockets, hoping to avoid breaking my fifty-euro note.

The fabulous power of saturated fats propelled me home, which obviously is no longer the charming apartment in Diagonal Mar I can’t afford without you. Now I have a low-ceilinged matchbox stuck on top of a building with no elevator and no central heating, where I moved because the landlord (a friend Vicente met in rehab) agreed to let me pay the deposit of 1,200 euros over three months, which are up next week. Also because, like an idiot, I bought into the romance of the word “attic,” even though the place faces inward and the living room windows look onto an alley featuring trash cans and the fluorescent lights of the Adam sauna, whose main service you can well imagine.

Calle Rocafort is half an hour from the beating heart of the Gayxample, and the common species around here is the old lady walking a repulsive dog that will start to lick your shoes and trouser leg if you don’t cross the street; even so, the Adam is packed to the gills every Friday. It can’t hope to attract the queer VIPs that flock to Barcelona from northern Europe looking for easy sex or streets where they can walk openly hand in hand. But the Adam has no competition for the closeted flamers from Sants and La Bordeta, from dramatic Creu Coberta or that strange neighborhood that opens up as the Gran Via breaks away from Paral-lel (a street that in any other city would be called Perpendicular), so the managers have a guaranteed full house every weekend.

And while I juggle things so I can pay the VAT, the land tax, the water bill, the taxes for parking, garbage collection, and weed trimming in those neighborhood parks that only depress me the second I think of walking through them…not to mention the indirect taxes on tobacco, alcohol, and gas…all that municipal reverse dialysis that sucks the clean blood from my bank account and replaces it with an infusion of debt and requests for payment…while I try to stop them cutting off my electricity, or the water (full of lead particles and other carcinogens), I’m sure the folks at the Adam don’t have to cough up even half. Those fairies function like a mafia of mutual support — forget about the heart’s network of capillaries, that crowd is all irrigating each other. And don’t get me wrong, I’ve got nothing against dykes and even less against gays. But if on top of letting two-husband couples adopt kids, they get tax breaks to boot, just what do the rest of us get for being normal?

I gathered my courage to climb the stairs. If I hadn’t been ashamed at the thought of eating in front of the peepholes, I would have saved some chips to replenish my energy on the landings. Luckily, I was only two floors up when the pain hit me. It felt like fingers were plucking my nerve endings, pulling them toward the side where I felt my heart beating. I stood stock-still like a rodent surprised by artificial light, repeating “it’s OK, it’s OK.” Some afternoons I go swimming at the local pool, and if I push my body too hard nausea overcomes me when I grab the float to rest. I never thought it was important — my mental life is so tangled there’s bound to be the odd physical repercussion. I realized right away this was more aggressive. It wasn’t just the pain that coiled through my arm, ribs, and throat, leaving a burning wake behind it: what really scared me was the crystal-clear impression, as if my own myocardium were whispering it in my ear, that my heart was suffocating.

Somehow I hailed a taxi, and three blocks before we reached the Quirón hospital the pain started to fade. I ruled out going back home. I know I promised you I’d try to rein in my hypochondria, and no one could deny I’ve stopped confusing headaches with tumors or thinking every red spot is a fermenting melanoma. This time, though, I was sure something truly malignant was afoot in those veins of mine. This was serious; my sweat reeked of adult trauma.

If the universe were a fair place, I would have gotten something out of our separation. My spirit was swirling with enough foul gunk as it was — a scare would have been enough, there was no need for anything so drastic. If the world were at all rational, there would be a cap on suffering. Of course, if there were, Vicente wouldn’t have lost the hearing in his right ear, just like that. He was taking a walk, and suddenly it felt like his inner ear was sucking up all the sound and replacing it with a whistling that didn’t go away at night. The ENT specialist was encouraging: he might recover some of his hearing at any moment, though in the meantime he had to get used to living with tinnitus that kept him awake one in every three nights. They told him it could be caused by an allergy, a virus, the stress they use to explain everything, or a common antibiotic. So Vicente lived like a deaf man until the day he had a migraine that almost knocked him over in the middle of the street. In the hospital they drugged him and handed him off to a specialist who rummaged around in his head with lasers and X-rays until he reached a diagnosis: a benign tumor was growing between Vicente’s inner ear and his brain. They cut it out, because even in all its benignity the lump threatened to damage his temporal lobe. During the operation, with half Vicente’s skull open and his brain propped up in cotton and bloodied gauze, the surgeon slipped and nicked the nerve that regulates facial muscles on Vicente’s left side. He recovered 70 percent of his hearing, and maybe it’s even better now — we don’t see each other too much anymore. For one thing, there’s what he did to me with Helen. For another, it’s pretty off-putting talking to a guy who can’t move half his face. Doctors can go on all they like about odds, but just try telling the people who actually suffer that kind of weird illness. When it happens to you, it’s like you bet the farm on a single hand.