Gonzalo Torne - Divorce Is in the Air

I began to think seriously about things I thought I’d outgrown in adolescence: I spent hours searching online for a way to preserve my mind — all those impressions accumulated over forty-something years of observations and hormone fluctuations — once my organism fell apart. I wore my eyes out staring at the screen for entire nights. It’s a disgrace they still can’t download consciousness to a machine, where it can be preserved until those shady guys doing stem cell research finally figure out how to cultivate host bodies. Surely my unique point of view is worth something, even though the birth rate keeps going up and up year after year. Consciousness is stuck to the cerebral jelly — you can’t separate the two — and it’s lights out once the brain is used up. All this goddamn progress and we still have to break down and die.

“Never again.”

The point is, I didn’t update my Facebook profile so I could contact survivors from a shared past I couldn’t care less about. It was just the first idea I’d had of a way to distract myself from my waning future. And since finding a buddy is less exhausting than looking for a girlfriend, I started prowling through my “friends,” and the “friends” of my “friends.” I was embarrassed to put anything on my wall; unless you run a nightclub or work as a spy, what kind of news can guys like us really come up with? Most had posted photographs full of incipient jowls, those hair implants that only advertise the baldness they’re trying to disguise, age spots, and misshapen blubber. It would have been more elegant if they’d simply vanished after finishing their senior year. Girlfriends, children, wives — it was disheartening to think that by now all my classmates (for the love of God, mere boys) had been baptized in sexual waters.

Pedro-María was divorced, lived in the city, worked for himself, and had free time — it all sounded good. It took us three e-mails to set things up. I boldly proposed a vegan restaurant, but some people just can’t get past the idea of wilted spinach on a plate. He proposed a brasserie in Poblenou and I didn’t protest; my courtesy was stronger than my sense of responsibility as an invalid. I was going to give myself a break.

I spent two days rehearsing speeches that would give the impression of a successful man going through a rough patch — I didn’t have the audacity to hide that — but it got harder and harder as more details of my “temporary” hard time came to light: economic, emotional, health-related. If I was honest about my circumstances, it was easy to confuse me with a newly divorced guy exploiting social networks to vent about his problems. Pedro-María would realize I was at the end of my tether, the kind of guy to be avoided like the plague — that’s me. I couldn’t let that loser humiliate me. If he thought I was going to be his doormat, he was sorely mistaken.

The day wasn’t terribly cold but I ruled out walking. The 54 bus left me on Gran Via, and from there I left behind the regularity of the Eixample for the delirium of Poblenou: its sloping streets, underground walkways, little village houses and rashes of modern buildings; its stairways, blind alleys, and kilometers of warehouses sporting broken windows. I got lost twice; luckily I’d left with time to spare.

While I was trying to find my way, I thought back to how alone I’d felt on my first day of school in Barcelona. Before that move, I hadn’t even imagined you could change cities or houses. The furniture still hadn’t arrived and my sister and I were spending our nights in sleeping bags. The walls and ceiling of my room looked like the canvas of a camping tent; there was the same fear of the dark, there were the same wild sounds (boiler, freezer, cistern). At school I made friends with all the boys I met. My sister had a tougher time: whenever Mother dropped her off she started crying and embarrassed us. So many mothers, so many fathers, so many half-told stories that must be over by now. An entire generation at the nursing-home doors, and back then I peered at them through the fog of preadolescence, without any subtlety of feeling. Those boys (Jacobo, Eloy, Antolín) saved me from isolation, but they gradually broke away from me. By any adult yardstick, they couldn’t have been worth much as friends.

The street curved twice before descending toward the sea. Before I saw the brasserie’s sign I recognized Pedro-María’s lanky figure dragging a motorcycle, and back came his school nickname. We called him Serrucho, the Saw, because he was long and pliant and he walked as if his limbs were coming out of their joints: a kid who was easy to bend. He greeted me by waving his entire arm, then he took off his helmet, shook his head, and smoothed a great mop of graying hair. I wasn’t prepared for the hug he gave me, nor did I remember those blue eyes, misty and cold. He flattered me by saying I looked well.

“Wait till you see the view here.”

La Brasa was styled with vine-covered trellises, and its decor featured fake wine barrels. He had reserved a table with a garden view; the whole place smelled like ashes.

“You can eat like a fucking king here, Johan.”

I could imagine the food, but that “Johan” caught me off guard. Who would ever believe I was Saw’s best friend? Could I really make him the confidant of my second marriage? What was this really about — confessing our little secrets? I waited for help from the past, but no shimmering flashback came to save me, nor were we rescued by a fade to black. Since I didn’t dare to flee, we sat down together at the table instead.

Two beers and a plate of olives came to the rescue. We talked about the temperature, about whether I’d had trouble finding the place; it’s not so awkward to fall back on that kind of thing. Unless you’re some kind of professional friend, one of those who’s spent two decades meeting up with the same people to dissect the Barça game, slurp snails, or go on bike rides together, the years will probably put a distance between you and your old friends. Your day-to-day will bring all kinds of new people into your life: colleagues, additions to the family, neighbors who want to show off their apartment — there just aren’t enough hours for them all. You don’t lose sight of your old pals, echoes reach you from the distant zones they occupy — who they’re seen with, approximately what they do, and how much they spend — but you gradually replace them. I mean, they’re like an insurance policy, and you can rely on them when you need someone willing to grant you half an hour’s honest conversation (bodily failings, fevered corners of the heart), free of the misunderstandings, suspicions, and presumptions that surround new relationships. With these people there’s no need to hide the fact that in the relatively near future we’ll begin to disappoint each other, because with these guaranteed friends placed within our reach by search engines, nobody’s trying to take each other for a ride: we’ve botched things enough as it is.

Pedro-María ordered salad and two T-bone steaks. I didn’t make a peep — it was too sad a day to be vegetarian. I promised myself, though, that I wouldn’t touch the wine. I’d do what you used to when you didn’t feel like drinking: just wet my lips.

If we’d been introduced as adults it would have been hard for us to break the ice: ever since Barça stopped being also-rans I only watch football occasionally, the nicest thing I can say about politicians is that they’re a bunch of deadbeats, I don’t think Pedro-María would be that interested in my BBC science documentaries, and it was too soon to start talking about my new field of interest — the neurotic neurons of my successive female companions. Of course, it didn’t even take us five minutes to turn to our shared history. We’d spent only eight years together, but time had passed so slowly on the way to school, the hours of boredom in the classroom had been innumerable, it was like we’d been moving through a heavy liquid that embedded those few years into a layer of our souls as deep as it was accessible.