Gonzalo Torne - Divorce Is in the Air

I’ll tell you, I’ll tell you what the secret is. It seems like a choice but we are gripped by tenderness just as we are by the fingers of excitement that testosterone sends forth from the gonads. If Saw was thinking about retiring it was for reasons of comfort, not out of weakness. It wasn’t because any flame had gone out in him, what rubbish that is. If there’s anything that doesn’t degenerate in this ruin of flesh, it’s the old mass of muscles stuck in the middle of the body. We can go gray, we can get tired, the walls of our lungs can dry out, our retinas can separate and our veins clog up, and there’s no way to keep the joints from hardening; cancerous blooms can flower, and maybe they slice out your prostate and anal tissues and reduce your manhood to the dimensions of early infancy; they can cut open your skin, flesh, and fat, make their way through the sternum with a surgical saw among clouds of bony dust to patch, numb, or restart the heart with electrical stimuli; as long as the thing goes on beating, you’re not going to stop it. That stubborn and muddled organ will go on pumping oxygenated blood until the day it dries out, shiny with symbolic functions, lighting cerebral pathways with the electricity of infatuation. The flesh rusts and wears out, but love is part of consciousness, it’s our species’ vocation, it’s going to shake us till the end.

Oh, will it ever shake us.

It had been almost three months since I’d exchanged a word with my mother. I magically associated her sporadic improvement with your eruption in my life, and I didn’t have the courage to tell her you’d run off. Back in May I’d dodged a barrage of phone calls, and then I forgot her until last Thursday, when I was watching something harmless and ridiculous on TV — it’s like taking a hot bath; I could feel the self-pity oozing from my pores. They were showing a documentary about old people who waste away in their bedrooms, alone and bewildered, abandoned by children who no longer believe in rewards in the afterlife and have their hands full keeping themselves on their feet in this vicious life. The program was interrupted and the darkened screen reflected my image back to me, wearing little Magnum-style shorts, an old T-shirt (Batman), all five depraved fingers delving into the bag of cashews for another dose of cholesterol. My excuse was that African gusts of heat had invaded Barcelona (a wind that burned when it touched your skin), and I was in no shape to invest in an air conditioner. I felt prematurely orphaned, I jumped up, tense with genuine concern. I called my mother, twice; she didn’t answer, but since it was two in the morning I wasn’t all that worried; she must have been asleep. I felt better imagining how at breakfast she would have the pleasure of seeing my number recorded in the memory of her mobile, and I fell asleep.

Three days (and some fifty calls) later, I started getting really nervous, imagining her corpse sitting there in the living room rocking chair. I decided to go see her. I would have gone sooner, but the last time I’d visited I found her so improved I thought she must be breathing her last. I’d deliberately left my set of keys at the apartment so she couldn’t call on me in an emergency. I put on a linen jacket and went from Rocafort to Via Augusta by bus, up the shady side of Muntaner on foot, but I still couldn’t avoid the sweat starting to prickle. I almost collapsed at Pàdua, and I asked a taxi driver to take me up the steep narrows of Balmes. I was still moved by how the street opened into wider lanes before circling the rotunda to face Passeig de la Bonanova, which greeted me with a light that looked like gold dust. I had the taxi stop two doors before the Miró-Puig building, not out of nostalgia, but because I wanted to keep more of the last twenty-euro note I had to spend this month. It was disheartening, in order to pay the rent, to have to resort again to the waning mass that out of habit and convenience I continue to call my “savings.” And if Mother really was dead it still wouldn’t salvage my situation — my sister would refuse to sell the apartment. She wouldn’t even look for an elaborate excuse, she’d have enough just by smearing a few sentimental arguments on top of some other shit: prices were going down, the market was weak, she wasn’t willing to give up the family’s property just because of my lack of planning. Before I see any of that money, I’ll have to wait until the gonorrhea that stopped her giving birth spreads and cleans her out entirely, and she’s corroded down to her bones.

Four years earlier I would have been able to turn to one of the neighbors, but the area had been filled with German and Japanese executives and I didn’t know anyone. I saw myself reflected in the glass door, the same shank of hair as when I’d stood a few feet lower. It’s a characteristic of our class that we remain loyal to the same parting of our hair as we grow old; really, they should subsidize me as an endangered species. Since I left home, they’d redone the hallway half a dozen times: parquet, stucco, plastic plants.

I cupped my hands and saw the doorman’s empty booth, a Barcelona curiosity you can still see in the streets that radiate from Diagonal’s elegance. But no one had taken the trouble to plant a new Señor Man in the vacant space — that little guy who’d known how to change a flat tire on a bicycle, keep track of visitors, deliver the mail, scare my sister without moving a muscle, and dictate complicated orders over the phone. Crammed like a fake Chinaman with a woman and two strange children into a cramped dwelling; my mother must be the only one in the whole building who remembers his cold, subservient manner, his subaltern tone that suited the tiny furniture they lived among. You can’t blame the world for taking down a womanizer like my father, but that it would take the trouble to expel Man de Togo, the sort who watches the world from such a low vantage point he can scarcely glimpse reality…now that just seems like abuse. People like him should get to live for two hundred years as compensation. I buzzed the intercom, but my mother’s corpse didn’t answer. I looked closely at the grooves of the speaker; the African wind carried dry leaves, and I tried to interpret the message they held for me. It’s odd how the brain gets superstitious as soon as it feels impotent. I was already searching for Muñoz the locksmith in my mobile’s contacts list when I heard the creak of the buzzer.

My legs were trembling and I felt a coil of heat winding up my forearm, but I couldn’t allow myself a heart attack. However many nuts I may have swallowed that week, they had to bear with me for a couple more hours. I rested with my hands on my knees, my eyes fixed on the mailboxes; I couldn’t remember when my mother had removed Dad’s name. When I felt better I was overcome by a softer, nuanced version of the same nervousness I’d had back when his home was my home and there was always news to share, when I was a boy edging into life and the world extended only as far as my parents could see. Señor Man’s old booth was where the new tenants stored their folding bicycles, but the renovations and departures and new residents had not dissipated the familiar odor those walls gave off.

I didn’t dare take the elevator up. The door had to be opened from inside, and Mother might be moribund beside the sofa — it seems incredible, but those things happen to old people all the time. I opted for the stairs, six floors, and I heard how my organs churned inside me. When I reached the top it took me five minutes to catch my breath. I knocked on the door, then rang the bell: short rings, long ones, intermittent, continuous; I leaned on it to call forth an unbroken clamor. Nothing worked. I ruled out Muñoz, I wasn’t going to profane my parents’ home. Then my sister wouldn’t answer her phone — for all I knew she was in cahoots with social services to leave all the horror to me. When we were little and took the bus together, we’d play a game where we worked out what age I’d be when she turned ten, fifteen, the improbable eighteen: the same span moving along a changing series of numbers. But I’d been frightened at the thought of Mother passing forty, or of her seeing me at that age. Our relationship was based on a certain freshness, and whatever went on between an old lady and a mature man was sure to be polluted. I threw myself to the floor, as if a note might be waiting for me in the space under the door, or as if my fingers could slide underneath like flexible tentacles and reach up to the lock.