Gonzalo Torne - Divorce Is in the Air

Of course, if instead of this chatter projected into sterile nothingness I had you here with me, I’d tell you that I’d also slept with women my own age, girlfriends from before. And I’d be careful not to give you her name or Facebook page, where you could easily follow my very first illustrated romance. I took so many photos of her (what am I here for?) and she took so many of me (no comparison) that I stopped thinking of photography as a salvaged instant that years later will help animate lost landscapes of memory. When I saw them arranged on Instagram like cobblestones that don’t leave an inch of earth in sight, the minimal time between the photographs (several hours, a few days, never a week) worked as a spell to create the illusion of seamless continuity.

The gap between what she saw in the photographs and what I saw was one of the many problems that complicated her project of building something stable with me. Ours was a love without roots, without a shared home. If Helen made my heart beat faster, it wasn’t just because of her beauty and youth; it was also because she secreted the same innocence and wonder as the boy I used to be. What I want in my life is her emotion, her fear, her tremor — my safety and confidence embracing her inexperience and doubts, opening doors together. What I want, these young girls can’t give me; age will always come between us.

And though it may be a cheapened idea, I think it would have been good for me to have navigated the decades with a companion who’d known me from the beginning. The sense of responsibility that overwhelmed me when I said good-bye to Mabus was tied to the awareness that when I opened the door to the room in the hotel where Helen and I had tried to rip out each other’s tonsils, I was going to have the most important conversation of my life.

I didn’t go straight upstairs, I needed some fresh air first. The sleepless night, the three times I’d crossed the hotel’s threshold in very different states of mind, the confusion between the boy who lived and didn’t know and the man who tells and knows all there is to know about the things he has experienced — it all cohered into a tense, slippery, hallucinatory scene. I heard the pigs squealing again. They must have been waking up, the beasts are early risers. It felt like one of those undulations of the universe was bringing me close to a different sequence of my own life, and I could touch an episode from the past.

I wasn’t even three feet tall. We’d just come back from some excursion of which I remember only the road, the ruts from the wheels, and the ditches infested with thistles and sunflowers. Mother was watching over my sister, but her eyes only swelled with love when they turned to her son, playing as usual with the maroon ball until the darkness hid the basket from me. It wasn’t fair, but Mother had placed the better part of her love in her male offspring, so I felt no distrust when she told me, while she stirred a red infusion:

“Tomorrow is hog day, you’ll enjoy it. It’s in the barn.”

I wasn’t even put off by the wild, earth-colored cats, or the vivid suspicion that if my father had been there and not in one of the other places adults went without telling you, it wouldn’t have occurred to anyone to take me to a barn to see a hog. There was a time when it was enough that I just give my all, and things were fine; that time is gone, but it did exist.

I didn’t know the person they chose to take me. The two of us went in a truck, it was dusk, and since the man scared me, I concentrated on watching out the window as the little villages along the roadside gradually condensed into smatterings of electric light: they shone like the stars at night. The man only broke the silence when the farmyard’s outline appeared. The flagstones in the barn smelled of dry grass, of vegetable things, bitter and rancid. On the floor (lit by the sun’s last rays — there was a tear in the curtain), I saw viscous impregnations with the texture of bitumen, almost no shine. While we were waiting for whatever we were waiting for, some adults came in with buckets. I’d never seen two men wielding rags; they scrubbed with a solution of water and bleach, but they weren’t really serious about washing whatever it was off the floor. They just sloshed it around and diluted it.

Then we heard the piercing squeals of the pig.

They dragged it in between four or five men. The hog moved fast on those sickly little legs that could barely carry it, so worked up that its belly brushed against the ground. It realized very quickly that things weren’t going well. Those creatures aren’t idiots like cows or ducks, they have mature brains, and when they smell the blood of other hogs spread over the floor they go mad, you really have to fight to hold them down. These days they use a pistol that shoots compressed air and destroys the neural tissue instantly. I saw it one night, years later, over seven years ago: the pig shrieks like a chain saw and shits itself from struggling so much, but it’s cleaner than slitting its throat and waiting for the avalanche of viscera and mucous to finish falling through the gaping wound. We stayed there for some minutes. Another adult, among the many there, assured me the pig was no longer suffering. But its eyes were flickering, suspended, as if they were forcing it to lie there looking into the abyss. It seemed mute, but only because the flesh of its throat was bleeding out into the sand.

I went outside, and what I did there was play. Back then it was always playing, even if I only sat still.

When I got bored with playing, I peered in through the barn’s window.

They still had work to do with what remained of the pig. That beast might have weighed as much as four adult humans, maybe half a ton. The proteins in its brain hadn’t gotten used to being dead, and were sending chemical flashes to its muscles. The whole pink mass contracted in spasms, but the men didn’t appear to be at all afraid of that pig’s nervous ghost. They were strong, they were healthy, they were loud when they drank, they were nothing like my father. What could possibly frighten them? There was nothing left of the hog as such, it was just meat and lard. Death was something that left scraps behind. You could cut them, pound them remorselessly; death gave you an absolute power, and it left its victim entirely defenseless.

I know that they put an iron hook through the opening in its neck and that its tongue fell spongily out, flat like a sole fish. Its thick hide sagged to the ground (I had eaten it, but I still hadn’t seen it twist and wither in hot oil, I hadn’t associated it with anything living), and on its fatty inside were fluorescent bubbles, different from the oily veins of industrial bacon. I don’t know if what they did with the water spurting from the hose could be called cleaning; the ground was still covered with muck that was darker and shinier than the usual filth. They were juices and tissues of the type required to keep life on its feet, and now there they were, exposed on the floor of the barn.

I know they scorched the animal to get rid of its stiff hair. I know that once it was hot they pulled off its hooves. I know they cleaned it using cork. I know they pulled out its guts and organs. I know they cut it from top to bottom along the spinal column, that they left it hanging for the white and bloody meat to cure, that they extracted its ribs, its backbone, and its loins, which they cut up into strips of meat. And I know that among the entrails floating in a bucket of ice water, I saw the pig’s heart. It was the same color of concentrated blood as the raw kidneys that I’ve never again put in my mouth, but triple the size of the little rabbit hearts you could break out of their membrane with your fingers and toss in the bin.