Gonzalo Torne - Divorce Is in the Air

I was already getting overly solemn when Rupert started emitting that teakettle sound. An invisible force was racking him like he was a cardboard doll, you could almost hear him crunch; Daddy was truly battling death. An aroma of reheated resin and flannel suits wafted in. I dialed Helen’s number but she still didn’t answer, convinced that a Spanish prefix could only portend her Latin rapist. Dad had also been alone when he climbed up onto the stool with the cable (I hadn’t told you that part — he looped half a meter of antenna cable around his neck: copper sheathed in rubber). I called the doctors in and they took him to emergency, on the floor for coronary patients, and somehow we ended up on a ward for the terminally ill. In the room with us were other crustaceans, in whose eyes you could still see a sliver of spirit, the last flash of conscious activity. For years I had silently given thanks (fighting to evade regrets, to dry them out in the sun of new events before they permeated me) that my father had saved me the horror of watching him ebb away slowly in a synthetic bed, perforated like a voodoo doll. In spite of all the hours I’d lived alongside him, not to mention my familiarity with his intestinal rhythms, the ordeal of accompanying him into that unknown would have been too much for me to bear.

I took Rupert’s pulse, and the smell on his arm was Chypre cologne, Dad’s favorite. Of course, I wasn’t fooling myself; the heart has its doubts but there are lessons we must learn: when we come into the world our parents are there to teach us how to live, but then they die before we learn the painful reverse birth by which we leave the earth. I wouldn’t be spared; I was inside death’s magnetic field again. In the light of that emotional impotence, the antagonism between the old horse and the pony, between the father and his son-in-law, was blunted. That I was keeping him company during his final earthly hours as a symbolic payback for having been spared Dad’s sufferings stopped being a crazy idea. It was just a difficult one, the kind we’ve grown used to after so many unforeseen events, coincidences, and randomness.

So it was Dad, using the transitory body of old Daddy Rupert (with his flowery Bermudas in the suitcase, his network of dirty veins, and the harshness with which a nurse with absurd hips removed the oxygen mask to brush his teeth), who taught me how life’s dynamics humiliate us, how our cells vanish one after another, how no one leaves this world alive.

I leaned over Rupert’s body and I spoke to Dad. That gaping mouth now could only be a tube whose other end opened onto the Great Beyond. And I told him (though I’ll deny it if ever anyone hints I could think something like this) that when he left that financial mess sandwiched in a file he had behaved like a pig. To love someone is to want them to go on being, and that tawdry suicide made it very clear that he wiped his ass with our love.

“You showed your true colors, Dad!”

Rupert started to gasp. Only it wasn’t Rupert, it was Dad’s shade trying to answer me, to communicate a message, to respond to my words. But the language of the dead is cold and hard to understand, it’s articulated in broken syntax, and I couldn’t decipher what Dad was trying to say to me in that suffocated murmur. The temperature of the deceased, everything they’ve lost, is pitiful, so I buried my reproaches down deep.

I wondered what good could come to Rupert from taking leave of life in the company of a son-in-law who detested him and who didn’t understand a word of his incoherent German, but I had to set aside those charitable thoughts when the third attack began. Since I didn’t know what people die of — how could I know? with so many pig cells, maybe he was growing a snout — I started shouting for the nurses. And while Rupert’s throat was filling with blood, he looked at me and in his two little eyes shone something dense and indefinable: the point of lucidity that struggles against the end. I felt so sorry for him that I hugged him and shouted:

“Rudolf, it’s Beryl, your brother! You won’t die alone!”

I took the road to the resort for the last time, intending to retrieve the luggage. The floor was covered in streamers and confetti, but the old folks must have been off stretching their carcasses or moving their arms in the pool. I challenged some of the minibar charges, knowing full well I wasn’t in the right, and I cast a last look at the water in the pool, a blue hide wrinkled by the same wind that had dispersed the clouds to spread above me an open sky, dumb and maliciously yellow. Four more documents in the separation process and I would have been free of the Thrushes. I turned off toward the farm. The yard around the pigs wasn’t in good shape: the grass curved drily, the ground didn’t give it enough water, a white fuzz was growing on the tree trunks. The greenery over near the road looked hard and contemptuous, but I was moved at the sight of a majestic tree covered in white flowers that defied the season: the buds were so open that the wind swirled them in small eddies as it pulled them off. I was young, and the timid minutes dancing before me would open into spacious years, a wide and shining time in my life that would be fresh and good.

I left the twisted river behind and started driving with no destination in mind. A savage energy spurred me faster around the curves; I don’t know how I didn’t kill myself. My mind was performing a last dance with Helen, she in the green dress and me in a bluish suede jacket, both of us laughing hard, our faces reflected in the crystal glassware scattered around Bicente’s apartment. Through the windows shone a reddish light that fell over the treetops of Retiro; Helen’s skin exuded the warm glow of grand occasions and we kissed, happy to have met each other, and to never see each other again.

I parked the car on a bend where the cliff overlooked the valley. If I squinted, those dotted rural houses could be taken for dice scattered randomly under a lemony light. I rolled up my shirtsleeves (they were too long) and leaned against the chassis; I hadn’t turned the engine off, I liked to feel it vibrate. It must have taken a lot of energy to excavate that fissure between the hills, not to mention patient long-term planning, waiting thousands of years for the meltwaters to erode the earth until it finally molded the valley where, at that sunset, a handful of men turned on their lights below my young, eager gaze, illuminating the little plots of land that coincided with their notion of home.

I took out Rupert’s letters. My plan was to destroy them without reading them. However, though I no longer thought of myself as his adversary, or felt I held in my hands the entrails of the man who did so much to corrupt my first attempt at happiness, I was too full of life and curiosity to let that fountain run dry. I wanted more, I felt I was capable of devouring the world; we’re just passing through, we breathe for a time, we want to win, we don’t know how to quell the desire, and no one wants to.

The last time I thought about those letters (an insignificant stream of demands from the woman that clearly showed Rupert had ended the affair, and badly) was when I left Pedro-María’s place, the night of Sónar. The accusations of some woman I’d never even seen got mixed up with the story of Cris, of Isabel, of my black year living with Helen, with my asymmetrical, futureless mess, and with you (with you, of course), and it was like following a trail of virile suffering, of overflowing masculinity. The morning broke charmless; I didn’t want understanding or support, nor did I feel like walking home or going down into the metro. The last night buses smell like armpits and the toxic substance they spray to make the smell less noticeable, and the people who ride them are so worn out it makes my soul ache. I saw the taxi’s green light approaching and I deployed the elegant gesture that cabdrivers the world over respond to by braking. I opened the door, composing an aristocratic face in greeting. I was still furious at you, and thinking about Helen wasn’t helping, but a playful mood danced in my chest.