Gonzalo Torne - Divorce Is in the Air

He could have replied: “When we are alone, men complain about female cunning and calculation, but if a woman opens up to us in gratitude, instead of breathing in her generosity deeply, more often than not we shrink away, tear what they give us to shreds, or flee.” But Saw went with an even more spectacular answer:

“Commitment. I don’t ever want to commit again. I was already burned once by commitment. I’d rather be alone, and I owe it to the apartment. My stomach is burning. It’s hunger. I could use some food, would you make me something?”

“The black boxes. If you want to eat, tell me what the deal is with the black boxes.”

“Cockroaches. They’re roach traps. I turned on the light and caught dozens of them by surprise — I think they were playing football on the floor. They sit there looking at you, teasing, and then they run off on those little thread legs of theirs. Fumigating is no guarantee, they just fill your house with chemical shit, and when the air clears the bugs come out again, more resistant than ever. It’s not easy to fight them; first you have to figure out the race or the species. You’ve got your flying roaches, your Africans, and your Germans.”

“Yours are German.”

“How do you know?”

“I have my ways.”

“They live in kitchens, they’re very family-oriented, they can feed themselves for weeks licking a single drop of rotten milk. They reproduce like…like…well, there’s nothing else that reproduces so quickly….The traps were invented by a strategical genius. The roaches leave trails, and if one doesn’t come back to the nest they try out other routes, without ever leaving your house. The poison in the disks has a delayed effect. It doesn’t do them in until they go back to the nest, and since they eat each other’s corpses, the whole clan is wiped out in a few days.”

“Impressive.”

“And I’ll tell you something else. These days, with you, do you know what? I’ve been able to let things pass, start cooling off. I don’t hate women anymore, even if they’ve stolen my daughter and my self-esteem. I’m hardly afraid of them at all, really. I’m giving up. Understand?”

I didn’t understand. I could accept how a strong and true man could kneel whimpering on the floor to assuage the fury of a woman, I could understand the impulse to stick an electric drill in her ear until it perforated the brain, but I couldn’t go a week without burying my nose in a woman’s hair, without smelling a woman’s neck, thighs, wrists, armpits. A life without women would be an artificial existence.

“Perfectly.”

“Everything has come to me too late. I’ve never been loved the way I deserve. And I wasn’t even asking for that much. Now I’ll ask for less. I’m going to stay here, not hurting anyone, not making any trouble. I don’t have the balls to set myself on fire, slit my wrists, or jump off a building. Fear is my firewall, and I’m not really so badly off. Then I’ll die and I’ll be nice and dead. And quiet, like a tomato vine.”

I saw the retching movement; I had time to see the shine in his eyes that warned me that he’d lost control. But I’d barely started up when the torrent spread over the floor amid violent groans. It spattered my shoes, it spattered the sofa (my bed), the floor, and his own hands. In two minutes he’d spilled everything; it didn’t even occur to me that he could suffocate. Maybe feminists and anthropologists are right and the planet is overflowing with alpha males, but I only know guys who lack affection.

I got to work. I already cooked for Pedro on an almost daily basis, simple but tasty recipes (grilled chicken breast drizzled in olive oil and garnished with hard-boiled egg; hake boiled with carrot, leek, and onion: it’s not crucial but I recommend putting all the vegetables in the blender and flavoring the puree with the first spice that comes to hand). I’d already helped him unclog the toilet, breathing in the effluvia, the smell of antibiotics rising from the pale and almost colorless yellow liquid; I looked for a bucket and filled it with hot water. I did for him what I hadn’t done for Mother, what I didn’t do for Dad, what I wouldn’t have done (sorry) for you: I mopped up that thick, reddish liquid. Masculinity’s dark hours — heaven forbid you surprise us when we’re alone! I didn’t do a bad job, though not even the dishcloth could absorb the dozen or so solid slivers that had escaped from his stomach. I had to take care of that matter with my fingers.

I went to make him an herbal infusion, and while the water was boiling I found that he had moved back to the sofa and was sleeping with his face wedged against the armrest. I had to turn him over like a sack of potatoes to rescue the blanket he’d draped over the upholstery to stop his guest staining the upholstery with crumbs and grease.

I hadn’t missed his accusation of cradle robbing. You’ll have already realized my arrangement with Pedro was comfortable, but I had more absorbing plans. I was heading down the classic road of sensitive pre-fifty-year-old men: I’d gotten involved with a girl young enough to be your niece. Where does my liaison leave all my jokes about men who break themselves on the treadmill so they can scratch around in a mismatched age group in search of sweet young things? Well, it leaves them wonderfully well placed, because I still don’t think getting old is an abdication: I don’t bleach or dye my hair or spread lotion on my hands. I’m a lived-in specimen, full of practical solutions to specific challenges.

In fact, my adolescent girl (only she wasn’t so adolescent), who depended economically on parents whose surnames were not promising, believed she deserved to be loved like a real woman, and she tried to move in with me on Rocafort. I flatly refused, not only because it was a vice-ridden area, but also because I needed a refuge from her. In two weeks she spilled her entire life all over me: she took me to meet her friends, her girlfriends, her half-boyfriends (people she had kissed), and her rivals both real and imaginary, with whom she maintained contact because they gave her days a helpful touch of spice. And she presented me to them all as if to say: “Look, this is my new world.”

I’m not going to say where we met. I only did it because I felt lonely — I’ve always been married or had a girlfriend, and I missed having someone want to put their arms around me. I didn’t give her any hopes for a shared future; to protect us both I gave her a pack of lies. I think she hadn’t entirely ended things with her boyfriend, and I didn’t want to deprive her permanently of the guy who will be there when everything else collapses.

I liked her because she swung suspended in a limbo of allure, where one day she’d be convinced she was incontestably beautiful, and another she’d be irrationally afraid she was ugly. I liked her because in one short hour she could span every mood; because one day she’d stop smoking, another she’d stop drinking, and the next she’d wear out her shoes, burn her lips, and put her liver to the test. I liked her because she sat atop youth as though she’d conquered it, as though it weren’t a state that would be snatched away so another game could begin. She was going to defend her youth, because it was as much hers as the coffee-colored stain that crossed her face from one cheek to the other, overcoming the bridge of her nose. I liked her because she treated me like I belonged to a different species that had been born into adulthood and couldn’t even guess at the forces and conflicting emotions surging through her. I liked how she pretended to know everything about feelings whose depth and hardness she barely intuited. I liked her because there are girls with wise eyes who know more than they have lived, and she was not one of those girls. I liked her because it’s a luxury to listen to a person who still looks for a rational (even ethical!) justification for her choices, convinced that every impulse springs from a considered decision, and that one day she will finally harmonize that daily tumult into a coherent idea of herself, and I kissed her because all young people are evangelists. I kissed her because I like people and it’s wonderful that their little inner voices never stop. I kissed her even though a kiss meant little to her, because she confused sexual maturity with a list of erotic “experiences” organized according to difficulty: tests that you take and pass and drop like party streamers, never to be picked up again. I liked how she told me she lost her virginity when she was fifteen years and three months old, and that in his urgency the boy had forced her a little and hurt her. She’d developed negative feelings toward penetration and then she gradually overcame them so as not to be left out of life; and although she was almost old (nearly twenty-two), she knew she could achieve something important. I liked how her myopic eyes regarded me when she came out of the shower, and I liked her because out of all that nebulous wealth of women and men she’d decided she preferred males, and out of all the ones she could have chosen to star in the adventure of her life, she’d opted for me.