Gonzalo Torne - Divorce Is in the Air

“See for yourself.”

And she tossed one of those touchscreen phones onto the table. She did it like someone laying down a hand of aces, so we probably were indeed playing at something with winners and losers. I had to concentrate because the icons on those crappy things are too small for my fingertips, but before I saw anything she whipped it out of my hands, a slightly unhinged tone to her laughter.

“How silly. I made a mistake. They’re on this one, Juan.”

She handed me a simpler mobile, but I waited for her to come back with the coffeepot before looking at the photos. The brew was very strong, and some of the grounds had come through the filter. She recited the names of all the monuments. Most of the images were blurry on the little screen, covered in a fuzz of snow, as if when we’re pushing seventy we no longer have a margin to go on pretending that we’re recording and saving ourselves for later: at that point we’re not seeking to recapture the past or disguise the onset of age, those images won’t protect us, we’re only looking for a bit of company before being left alone with the end of time.

I poured another glass of sherry.

“Take your time, finish the bottle if you want. I’m going to lie down. As I said, they’re coming at six to pick me up.”

I left the coffee and finished the sherry. Mother had forgotten the smartphone on the chair, and I swear I only picked it up to practice with those little icons. The photo folder was empty; she used it to record videos. I skipped over “Berlin” and “Berlin1” and “Berlin2” and “Berlin3,” and among the three files of “Party” I chose “Party2.” The background noise was a bombardment of shouts and sounds that gave me the physical sensation of arriving at a party where everyone else has been drinking for hours. The table was the same one where the “coffee” was now growing cold, and the sofa the same one that, twenty-five years earlier, I’d flopped onto after practice to rest. I didn’t know the woman who was dancing, writhing in catlike contortions, or the pot-bellied man. They were lost in that no-man’s-land between fifty-five and seventy-five. The video was recent — there was the air conditioner. The man pushed his belly forward and the woman started to bend her knees and lower her shapeless behind until her eyes were at the height of his crotch. The background noise got louder, approaching pandemonium, and in the living room of our home she unbuckled his belt, freeing a mass of fat and flesh, and stuck her fingers into his underwear. I didn’t want to see any more. I dropped the phone and let the video finish with my eyes fixed on the greenish-yellow foliage of the banana trees. The sound went on for a good ten minutes.

What I did next was leave the glasses in the kitchen, wash my hands, and make sure the gas rings were turned off. I went down the hallway and into the bedroom to say good-bye. She’d fallen asleep with the TV on, something about a talk show host whom they suspected was an extraterrestrial, a subject I certainly want to look into further. In her apron-robe uniform, the sleepy expression on her face had relaxed her features and she was showing her vulnerable age again. The tiny lines that started at her upper lip were there, lines that were also beginning to show on my sister’s face: twenty thousand genes unleashing packets of information in the eukaryotic cells, working the flesh from within. With her hair messed up and in her stocking feet, she reminded me again of what she no longer was, what she in no way still was: a big, old doll they’d left there, half rotten.

I took my leave of the coffee dregs and went down in that fabulous elevator. Outside, a splendid, stupid, limpid light awaited me, washing across the avenue.

I was dazed. The sky’s deserted plains, crisscrossed by the occasional urban bird (starlings, kestrels, gulls), seemed about to collapse onto my head. I took a detour away from the spacious solemnity of Bonanova and headed down a narrow street: low houses, damp patios, backyard smells, an almost rural landscape. Why was I mourning for that shitty apartment? None of our concerns stay with the furniture, none of the things that involve us; we can’t bequeath our personalities. Not even streets like Bonanova or Mandri or Iradier, which we’ve walked a thousand times, know anything about me or about Dad. We are welcomed into those apartments for years, they love us there, they are the backbone of our world. Then they become small, we leave them behind, furniture is brought in and carted away, the walls are painted, the old tenants die and the new tenants die, too, and no one says a word about whoever used to live there. The future is an expanse of homes where we paint nothing. The future is a city full of houses where we no longer live.

I walked for half an hour and then took a break in one of those dirty, sandy squares that dot the city, with their benches of dead wood that nothing can ever grow from again, and their grungy pigeons. I sat down at a pavement café with aluminium furniture and ordered a gin and tonic. I was finding it a bit warm.

I leaned my head back: the leaves were falling coldly, clutching at their color. I closed my eyes, and the sensation was like being in one of those documentaries in which the camera approaches the water’s surface and then submerges to swim among a school of fish. I saw myself on the other side of time, submerged in the past. I couldn’t have been more than ten, Dad was turning the pages of the Ascot almanac, and Mother had one eye on the TV and the other on my sister as she played. It was a winter’s day, the apartment was warm, and I felt so startled by the way life was gently rocking that I went running down the hallway and threw myself against the bed. I shook myself hard, it was difficult to breathe, I felt fully in harmony with the moment, as if the people to whom I was important and who were important to me had each at their own pace reached an optimal point of ripeness, as if the pulp were straining against their skin, about to break through and spill out; I was afraid of that moment. It was joy at being in that home, at being male, bearing the name Joan-Marc, at having that father and that tall mother. It was completely absurd that the scene had to keep moving forward, and that no one could stamp it on the flesh of time.

I opened my eyes suddenly and saw a milky sun that emitted hardly any light. I left the money on the tray and took off my dark glasses, shook the crushed ice in the glass, the water escaping its solid form.

I went down a street that opened up like a black path between lithic buildings. The portion of sky I could see looked soft. As a boy I couldn’t abide change of any sort. When Dad shaved off his mustache I howled and pestered him until he let it grow again: dark dots first, then threads that wove together until they covered his lip. Since that afternoon when I’d tasted a satisfied life — a world where Mother was healthy and Dad lived and anything bad could be washed away with the right words — ambition and sex and all the other rabid impulses had done nothing but drive us apart. As hard as I try, I can’t keep the water in the bowl, the liquid spills at every step and all that’s left are the words testifying to those golden impressions, long since melted. But words don’t have substance or weight; they’re waves we can’t hold on to.

Three or four pedestrian crossings later I started to hear the noise of traffic, like the sound of an old and eager beast that hasn’t given up yet. I came out on Via Augusta, the cars moved forward in their lanes, the traffic lights lit the fumes from exhaust pipes. A gust of arid wind shook the bars’ awnings. The idea of returning to Rocafort made me nauseous; I decided to go along Muntaner, between shopwindows that reflected a serene dream as it passed. I felt drawn by the descending streets, their asphalt shone like trembling rivers. I was conscious of the danger if I kept going in that direction — I could end up in one of those neighborhoods where even if I didn’t have to show my passport, an interpreter would certainly come in handy. I felt like staying a while longer in the Eixample’s happy grid of streets, among its beveled corners, its shops selling liquor, stamps, weapons, coins, its luminous bars.