Gonzalo Torne: Divorce Is in the Air

The doctor called me in. He used a remote that looked like a toy to lower the lights and run through slides with graphics and drawings of the heart. While I appreciated the staging — a gold star for public health — I was still too scared to take in the details. The jargon whizzed by and I couldn’t arrange the words into any sort of order, until finally I grasped the secret motive of his spiel: the guy was reprimanding me. He explained that the heart is an organ that cannot store oxygen, which entails — aside from embarrassment for whoever designed the thing — a constant demand for blood to move through the tangled channels of vessels toward our hungry organs. The complexity of the capillary network made me feel a little better about our genetic legacy — hats off to DNA’s handiwork.

My blood flow had been interrupted for half a minute, long enough to give a shock to my senses; a few more minutes and the tensed wall of my heart would have dried into dead tissue. Luckily (oh, so luckily) the flow had stabilized. It was hard to accept that I was actually seeing the inside of my artery, or to understand what it meant that it was only 30 percent clear. The rest was obstructed by a plaque of lipids and fat, cellular or molecular muck — I wasn’t sure which scale we were talking about, or what was really going on inside me, under the skin covering my hands and thighs and ribs.

“It’s like the mixture of hair, soap, and dead skin that clogs up the shower drain.”

This was the example that disgusting man gave me, and I smiled as if I had some familiarity with that filth. If my artery wall hadn’t held up, some member of his class would have sliced through the hairy layers and fat of my chest, then split my sternum with a surgical saw and conducted a life-or-death operation on my aging heart.

“One might say you were lucky.”

You know me, my appetites are basic but clear: I asked for something to eat.

“That’s part of the problem.”

I reacted like a child playing Parcheesi who sees the dice land on the combination that spells his defeat, but waits a few seconds to give reality the chance to backtrack. In the end I took it in, and the explanation was striking: from my myocardium to my pulmonary veins and optic nerves, my entire system was filthy and unstable with the toxic residue of forty years of extravagance.

“We are what we eat. You have to be careful, and the best thing you can do is go on a diet.”

To tell the truth, this doctor inspired confidence: he was around my age, but was the kind of guy who’s already given up on his appearance. With a hairless skull and slack skin over the flesh of his cheeks, his attractiveness was limited to the flashes of intelligence in his expression. But still, I wasn’t about to let him call me “diabetic” and be so pleased about it. That he was a doctor and I had no goddamn idea what I was talking about was neither here nor there — society is democratic now, and you can’t just go around imposing your point of view on people. I decided I’d investigate on my own: Wikipedia and the Discovery Channel. Because I couldn’t make head or tails of the diagnosis. In school we’d always had one or two diabetics: white as marble, shooting up insulin like junkies in training, useless at sports, and condemned to eat peas and cauliflower forever. I was never one of them — you only had to look at me to know that — and no one was going to rewrite my own history.

“It’s adult onset. Your pancreas is deteriorating.”

“You might find yourself getting more tired than normal. You might have nausea or vomiting, and polyphagia, polydipsia and polyuria, and prickling of the skin.”

“Your body will have trouble forming scars if you cut yourself, that’s another problem.”

“You are going to have to take care of yourself, Mr. Miró-Puig.”

Taking care of myself meant giving up, first of all (the doctor had enough empathy to ration the bad news), fried potatoes, nuts (innocent nuts!), sweets, alcohol (the doctor knows that the list of exceptions here will be long), tobacco (I don’t smoke), meat and seafood binges, and bingeing in general (even lettuce has too much carbohydrate): all the things that provide an ounce of bodily pleasure. Sure, he didn’t put a limit on sex, but your departure had left me without an accomplice — though toward the end our bedroom hadn’t exactly been a carnival — and I wasn’t feeling up to finding a girlfriend.

“There’s no cutoff date for this, Joan-Marc. You’re going to have to behave— fer bondat, forever.”

I knew I should be pleased, and not just because he’d moved to a first-name basis, which does make disease less intimidating; my muscle tissue had survived, and 30 percent of the light could still pass through my arteries. We’d caught it in time, problem detected, I was alive and they didn’t even have to slice me up like a chicken. I would go on breathing, and I still had a good thirty-two years or so left.

“It’s not a reversible situation. You’re going to have to say good-bye to certain habits and replace them with healthier ones.”

It was unfair: so many carnivores loose in the streets, so many people who’ve never spent five minutes considering the industrial torture techniques used to fatten up the animals whose cadavers are filleted into their servings of filthy protein. And yet, it’s the conscientious guy who suffers, the guy who’s practically vegetarian and whose worst sin was being a bit greedy when it came to fried tubers and sugary trail mix. It was asking a lot of me to kill the hours between cooked vegetables and a seaweed salad by snacking on tomato slices.

“Some habits must go for good.”

Of course it was bad — terrible — that you’d left me, and that financial worries crowded my doorstep, but it was that visit to the doctor that really brought me to despair. Obviously I rebelled at the prospect of spending the rest of my life watching through a thick pane of glass as steaming plates of delicious fried foods paraded past. But I need more to explain my utter collapse: I stopped writing to you, I stopped pairing my socks, ironing my clothes; I left the house with a slovenly beard and unkempt hair, I wore the same shirt for a week, I forgot to brush my teeth. I found myself sitting down on the toilet like a little girl, sniveling, unable to face my problems. I woke up in the middle of the night, closed my eyes and imagined my heart like a dry bean beating behind my ribs: shriveled, timid, wrinkled. I had attacks of rage while stretched out on the sofa. I lost all confidence in my body. My defenses against hypochondria were peeling off like damp parquet tiles. What would be next? My hands started sweating when I thought about how the consciousness I was so comfortable in, the only point in the whole grand universe where I was capable of living, could just give out at any moment. I got despondent every time I thought about that doughy muscle, coated in blood, beating to the rhythm of instructions screen-printed onto a DNA helix before I left my mother’s womb. It wasn’t only that my arteries were clogged, making me chronically ill in the eyes of Western doctors — after all, if you looked at me with a more discerning eye, I was healthy. My diabetes wasn’t the kind the kids at school had: I could exercise, argue, touch a woman; I would taste meat again. No, the thing that pierced me like a poison arrow was that word: “incurable.”

“Never again.”

I realized I had treated my body as if it were unchanging, and every slight malfunction as reversible; I was sure I could overcome anything with the power of my charm. The problem wasn’t that my youthful vigor had dissipated. Sure, I’ve never been one to spend hours running laps under polluted skies, but soon (as soon as I found an opponent who would pay for the court) I’d be playing tennis again, and no one could stop me from buying a set of dumbbells to turn those (slight) lumps of fat into high-quality muscles. The problem is I’ve started to notice bodily phenomena I never paid attention to before: I look for broken capillaries, I monitor the texture of my skin that yields in lax folds in places that can’t be exercised (cheeks, nape of the neck), the wrinkles that accumulate in the corners overworked by my expressions, the little white spots that spoil my easily tanned complexion…It’s as if youth and vigor were just matter’s fever dreams.