Gonzalo Torne - Divorce Is in the Air

The last thing I saw before falling asleep (it was dark, but my pupils managed to take in loose fibers of light) was enough clothing to fill a clothesline, two toppled chairs, and part of the sheet that had fallen off the bed, which from where I lay looked like a mass of flesh determined to flee its body and spill over the floor. Beside me a hot body slept, a little weepy, a bit of torn skin.

Somehow while I was sleeping the swell of light advanced surreptitiously from the globe’s antipodes until its luminous froth poured over the horizon. I missed seeing it open the first narcissus and set the lower plains on fire, and how it slipped like an innuendo among the resort’s fronds. I was sleeping the sleep of satisfied mammals. I opened my eyelids slowly and closed them again. Some words spoken during that endless night of struggle shamed me, but let’s not exaggerate: the innermost caverns of my body, which so often felt more spacious than they looked from the outside, were oozing serenity. I opened my eyes in a room invaded by southern light, bathed by a delicate atmosphere of feminine aromas; I even felt the soft tug of arousal and a gnawing hunger. Nothing a kiss and some yogurt couldn’t fix.

But Helen wasn’t there.

This time she’d taken her suitcase, collected all her clothes; maybe she was serious.

I didn’t leap out of bed, didn’t get dressed in a hurry or run barefoot into the corridor to look for her. I didn’t care. I brushed my teeth, urinated, took a really good shower and let the water slide over the skin of my arms, my fingers lathering my hair into foamy crests; I even burst into song. I came out of the bathroom with a pygmy-sized towel tied around my waist, showing half a buttock that in the room’s mirror assumed demotic proportions; how grand I felt. Through the window, two creamy clouds were sliding imperceptibly past. It was like I’d taken off a pair of glasses that had muted all the colors, like rediscovering a brilliant landscape, shimmering, full of just-wet shades; it was like my heart and my brain had broken away from a network of parasitic nerves and veins. That scent of living moss and vegetation came from the miracle of falling out of love.

I was optimistic and full of verve like a pony released from its bridle, half crazed at the sight of an open field washed by hopeful breezes, my tendons twitching with vitality. I put on the suit fit for a diplomat that I’d brought just in case, and in honor of Dad I folded a silk scarf around the open neck of my periwinkle shirt. The outfit made me look like a country squire nervous about attending the theater, but it wasn’t out of place among the mummies. Plus, there were my chin, my dimples, my mat of springy hair, my eyes with their noble clarity, all bestowing a little beauty on the humans who laid eyes on me.

I went down the stairs convinced that the sex we’d had, so hard-fought (the final fight with Helen), so aggressive, so sad, so satisfactory as a form of physical relief, was a good symbolic summary of our marriage: we had no more to give. At reception I stocked up on salty peanuts and inquired after Jack Mabus, the only man to whom I could confide the ending of my story. I was afraid that if I kept it in, it would turn sour; I wanted to say it and expel it, dissolve it in the immensity of the shared world.

“Mr. Mabus left this morning.”

I figured Helen had gone back to Barcelona, or that she’d locked herself in her parents’ room, or headed out on a hike among the cornfields; I imagined her enthusiastically looking at some fissured figs with red pulp, who knows? The only certainty was that just then, not only was Jack Mabus headed away from the resort at the speed of his chosen means of transportation, but Jackson and his grandparents were also packing their suitcases en route to the far-flung fields of Montana. So I had the sort of scare that can make your hair fall out when the receptionist pointed mutely down the corridor toward Daddy Rupert’s sagging body. He’d tried to call my room, he’d been waiting two hours for me, so soft and livid that if it weren’t too obvious a joke I’d say that the health spa was killing him.

He invited me to sit with him on the terrace. It was an emotionally charged scene; half an hour earlier I’d been sure I was free of Helen. A man can convince himself of incredible things when he’s singing naked in a hotel room (you should try it), but I guess two out of every three of my heartbeats were still pumping blood bewitched by the daughter of the Thrush clan. It’s no easy business to clean one’s matter, to sterilize it, expel the final atoms of shared expectations. In the end, I had to have a talk with the decrepit incarnation of the man responsible for the bestial daily life I’d enjoyed for the past year, the scoundrel who’d turned Helen’s spirit bitter with his inflexible gender preferences, the same man I wanted to see flayed alive every time my wife crawled back over our emotional garbage. It’s no surprise my leg was trembling.

He ordered a chamomile tea, and I decided it would be too much to ask if they could make me a gin and tonic. In the creases of his debilitated face shone cold, metallic irises; he smiled at me belligerently, pulled up a sock. The other was down around his ankle: my empty stomach fought back a heave when I saw that naked shin, pale and thick like those noodles the Japanese eat.

“Helen told us everything. My daughter is ready to charge you with rape, but she won’t do anything without our support. And we won’t support her in a case she’ll never win and that will only keep her chained to you. For all I know, that’s her motivation. What we are asking for is an effort on your part to get a fast divorce. The airline has had the courtesy to change the name on my ticket — the Spanish never kick up a fuss if you show them an American passport. The boy will leave with his mother and grandmother. The climate in this town suits me, and in three or four days we can have all the paperwork for your separation finished. Given the circumstances, it would be quite surprising if a gentleman like you, sir, were to start making strange requests now.”

He managed to say it all in Spanish with just a few supporting words in English. He had planned the speech, and made no effort to hide the currents of apathy swirling under his general feeling of relief at putting an end, once and for all, to his daughter’s disastrous Latin phase (which at least he’d come out of without another grandchild). He seemed more interested when he heard the sound of pigs grunting, turning his head from side to side, looking for the animals. Rupert put both hands on the table and tried to stand up; when he managed it, slightly hunched over, he was roughly the same size as Dad. Though, of course, Dad would never have stooped to wearing those Bermuda shorts.

“Why didn’t you love her?” I asked.

Rupert hadn’t given his deposed son-in-law a single line in his script, so my reply cracked the scene he’d anticipated and we were left to improvise: two people born in different decades, thousands of kilometers apart, whose trajectories would never have coincided were it not for the fact that men engender daughters in the bodies of women, and other men fall in love with those daughters, and that fluke muddles the expectations of the present into an unknowable future.

I think they came squealing out of the forest: three piggy Zeppelins. They skirted the pool like greased lightning and crossed the terrace toppling chairs in their wake. The pursuing gang of waiters struggled with them on the grass until they finally got the animals tied up. They dragged the pigs away through the pines along a hidden path.

“They’re females. Males are too big to be held down by two people. Smart animals. I owe them a lot.”