Gonzalo Torne - Divorce Is in the Air

“I hear you.”

“And the truth is that, when they aren’t giving birth, that whole tide of out-of-control women is like an infection. I won’t tell you they’re all crazy, you won’t hear that from Doctor Bicente, because I’m a lover of precision and confirmed data, and statistics are lacking when it comes to women, Arabs, and the Eskimos who spend the day cleaning fish with their teeth. But in our cities it doesn’t matter if the newspapers plaster their front pages with sporting triumphs or the latest about the supposed crisis — what do those political clowns matter to us! Go to a cinema, go to a shopping center, get on the metro, line up to buy two tickets to the stadium, pay attention to the workers, to the couples going out to have fun, the groups downing their drinks in bars. Forget about words — sentences are spiderwebs of hope. Just look at how their lips move, how they wave their hands when they think no one is looking, the dampness of their eyes, the slow blinking: you’ll see greedy women and diminished men. It doesn’t matter if they’re in pairs, alone, reconciled, living with children who flow onward like tributaries until they spill into the river of a brand-new couple. Add clear and smooth skies so the picture doesn’t look so sinister, you still get the same exhaustion. They enter our manly young bodies and drain us of enthusiasm, energy, innocence, vigor. They rot our pulp, millions of healthy men reduced to slices of dried-out fruit. Haven’t you ever wondered why they live longer than us? When are we going to start really demanding our rights! Will no one come and rescue Western man?”

Carlos stopped the taxi at my door on Rocafort and vanished up the street without answering my questions. I hunted for my keys among the crumbs that had colonized my coat pockets. I climbed the stairs with my heart pounding, but I managed to get the door open. I poured a glass of rotgut, straight. I opened the window, and on the opposite pavement the abiding, luminous sparkle of the Adam nightclub was waiting. The night’s event was called an “On Fire” party, as if the rest of the week they just said their prayers. Those people really have a competitive spirit; maybe the thing involved sticking lightbulbs up their asses in tag teams. I raised my glass in a toast to the soda fountains where the poppers flowed freely: happy are the queers, for they shall inherit a nervous system free of feminine temptation. And like the aromatic vapor rising from a stew, the shouts of my new neighbor talking on the phone reached my ear; it sounded like she was hysterical and begging for help. Mother of two with the third on the way (what an idiotic expression, as if the fetus were traveling), chatting with a girlfriend about some guy with the proverbial blue eyes that drive you women crazy with the desire to swim in them. And according to this woman he had looked at her, which isn’t surprising if you consider the size of the eight-month-old ball growing between her hips. Scheming, fantasizing, implicating, and she only hung up because she thought the oven timer (she was making popcorn and it burned) was her husband coming home.

That was my welcome on completing the climb to the apartment, so I’m not troubled by what you wrote back when Doctor Bicente sent you a detailed report on his conversation with the good Carlos. This time you can’t deny that you replied, that you were thinking of me when you did it:

You’re a lost cause, Joan-Marc, and you’ve lost your mind. I won’t even bother reminding you that there are over 3.5 billion women in the world, because you are like a goat, and when it comes to goats (ask any vet), you just can’t reason with them.

I could answer you. Do you think I couldn’t? But I’d rather use the hints of personal investment I can make out in your short message (I’m sure you remember when you never sat down at the keyboard to type anything less than two full pages in Word, those furious letters that swept along all kinds of emotional debris, and I warn you that if you ever publish them, people will say that no one writes such long e-mails) to shine a little light on the bony structure I keep hidden under the flesh and blood of my tale of woe with Helen: I got to marry you, but I haven’t managed to keep you.

What kind of husband am I, if I didn’t even realize when I went to bed that it was the night you were going to leave me? I believe I took off my socks thinking it would have been a good night for you to be traveling — I could have continued my game of Age or stayed up late drinking. Instead, I deferentially fulfilled my tender obligation to lie down beside you, because you were supposedly no longer able to get to sleep without that contact.

I was rather annoyed when I turned on the light and found you gone. I felt like taking a lazy turn around your body, with one foot still in the world we build (and let crumble) while we sleep. I would have watched how your lips move, noticed the fine creases left by the pillowcase seams in the skin of your cheeks. I would have waited patiently for your eyes to open and reassume their natural fullness, return you to the quotidian abundance, the spectacle of the everyday.

I’m not fooling myself, I know that day wouldn’t have been that special. I would have taken off my pajamas and showered in a hurry, I would have made you toast and warmed the coffee while the sounds of you washing reached me from the bathroom. I would listen to them with a sense of loss, of irrational sadness, because you were the one leaving the house to go to work, and I was the one who’d stay home. I would have dangled some scandalous sound bite in front of you, something about the advantage of using babies with serious brain injuries in medical experiments instead of adult pigs. But you would dominate the conversation: what others thought of you, what they thought of us, of me through you. I never told you that your thinking was too fast for such slow hands.

I would try to guess what sort of meeting you had by the clothes you chose, what kind of men and women you were going to meet with. You’d look a little funny in those high heels, those stockings, the boots; not that they looked bad on you, just that they didn’t suit the señorita who doesn’t wear makeup, who leaves the house with bare eyes, whose ear piercing — made with a needle when you were a little girl — is closing up. Were you dressing up for someone? I can’t believe you’d dress like that just because that Diego guy was in the same building, but who knows? Very intelligent women of your caliber are like aliens, trapped between your less gifted sisters and your male equivalents, who are so much stronger. It must be complicated to live like that. The relief I would feel at hearing the door close and being left alone wouldn’t have lasted long; I was ashamed to go out in public like the common unemployed to buy bread, take a walk, head for the plaza. It bothered me that you questioned (with your eyes, with your annoyance) how my situation was any different, when I’d never really worked in my life. Why was it so hard for you to understand that no one ever expected me to sit in front of a computer for hours? The plan was always for someone else to waste their time earning money for me.

I’d spend the middle of the morning however I could, and then I’d make something fast to eat: spinach wrapped in filo; scrambled eggs with tuna, onion, and lime. But I couldn’t summon you at noon even by cooking up your favorite dish. So I would have restarted my game on the computer; I would have watched an episode of one of the series you downloaded and that I watched out of order since we couldn’t find the time to watch them together. Around mid-afternoon I would start to miss you, and I’d imagine you on your way out of the museum, your little handbag under your arm and wearing flat-soled shoes (a day without meetings), in jeans and the baggy red sweater, a tall dark girl with a refined beauty that you made an effort to tone down, who liked to be embraced while she slept, who read with a discipline and tenacity that made use of props — highlighters, pens, and adhesive page markers I spent five years trying to put into some order — and whose kisses were rushed because there was almost always something tugging at her curiosity.