Divorce Is in the Air

by Gonzalo Torne

  “I want to meet people. Everyone you can introduce me to.”

  While I was enjoying life as a newlywed, Helen had been busy cooking up fresh ambitions. She’d convinced herself there were select circles of artists, wealthy, interesting, and glamorous people, or some such nonsense. She had only to learn to wield me like a key and she’d be able to access those secret spaces, and fulfill the fantasy that she’d been put on this earth to enchant the eyes and ears of the most refined society—whose specifics she’d never paused to consider. She nagged me stubbornly, with the sulky face I’d already learned to recognize as the sign she wasn’t going to let it go. We had so much without leaving the circle of our marriage—why kill ourselves to leave the house? Why, when we would only be exposing all the precious things that germinate in intimacy to the corrosive atmosphere of gossip? It’s one of the blind spots you two share, both the women I’ve loved. After all, didn’t you take home the best guy at the party? Didn’t we have fun together? Didn’t your orgasms come without complications beyond the ones we imposed by ludic agreement? Wasn’t the apartment you decorated comfortable? Didn’t we live in the city of your choice?

  And so we began to visit places whose names are pronounced with an eye roll. In Barcelona they weren’t as into time travel as in Madrid. Here, the draw was the exoticism of the place itself: hotel terraces, ships, museums that opened their doors at night, towers, greenhouses. I had to get back in touch with people I’d cut off four years before because of the slime that oozed from them: phony cousins, Dad’s business colleagues, classmates from ESADE, occasional hook-ups, confidants…They didn’t receive me coldly—no sooner did we show our faces than a curtain of congratulations came down between us and them. I was the guy who’d been left out of the good life: some said because of misguided ambition, while others mentioned one hell of a family mess. Now that I was returning on the arm of an American stunner, why would they close their doors on me? They had no qualms—the eroticism of return and the anguish of the first-born’s departure were fodder for mass-market dramas, and we fancied ourselves sophisticates, we flattered ourselves that our minds were open and cosmopolitan, that we weren’t really Spanish. Plus, they thought Helen was funny.

  Helen went mad with excitement. She compared my friends favorably to the rich people she saw on TV in the United States, whose weddings and divorces and parties and jewels she followed in magazines. She knew the details of every liaison conducted by people whose only purpose in life was consuming (you couldn’t call what they did “drinking”) cold martinis on boats. She knew who slept with whom, who sat beside whom at every dinner and at every race, who slipped from the spotlight, who fell into disgrace. If she hadn’t spent so much time too drunk to hold a pen, she could have written a gossip column.

  At home, while she tried to stuff herself into stockings that would have been tight on a little girl, or in the taxi, where she would keep smoothing her hair, I tried to fill her in on backstories. I tried to prepare her, but she was too excited to absorb the raw truth of what I had to tell her, and I’ve never had the patience to make news digestible: this was no longer my scene, we were out of place, they would never accept someone like her. So I chose to arrive late, once the conversations were under way, and cross the room avoiding the bored looks from other guests. It was better than arriving at the beginning, when the groups were still unformed and hanging in the air like interstellar gas.

  Helen walked into those living rooms, strolled among the tables, exchanged glances with people, and chewed on slices of ham, all the while convinced that something golden was stirring within her, a motor of human allure. She sashayed around with her chin held high as if she were a sliver of America itself, or a shard of meteorite just landed from outer space so we could admire its shine. She was desperate to reveal her hidden social talent to the world, though what that talent consisted of neither of us knew.

  When Helen embraced me and told me she loved me, I merely smiled. While she headed off to join the cliques, I avoided conversation, retreating to a corner to observe the swagger of that body into which she was emptying the second, the third, the fifth gin and tonic. From that distance, I could ignore the emotions that flowed from our shared life, and instead tune in to the wavelength of the men around us who shared my cultural makeup. Without the filter of my love, they would see this: long blonde hair; a wide-eyed innocent from Montana with a sinuous body, grown amid the heaps of dimwits that spring up every year in the Midwest (Montana was somewhere around there); a rube with a typing certificate, plus half a bachelor’s degree in Romance Languages that hadn’t even given her a sense of tact when it came to hammering out French phrases—she always sounded as if she was chewing gum (she thought it was a Parisian accent). They’d see a girl who was expert in mixing drinks with soda and who’d sprouted a pair of tits you couldn’t ignore—living proof that the only democratic force on this earth is the one that distributes sex appeal. Of course, Helen’s wasn’t going to help her at all as long as she denied them the festival of fluids she reserved for me alone.

  As for the women—well, I didn’t kid myself. I knew from the get-go they would be much worse. All those girls who knew how best to arrange their curves under well-tailored clothes, whose skill with color did an excellent job softening the heavy jaws they’d received as the twisted legacy of inbred generations. They were rivals to be reckoned with. Their parents’ money had kept them a long way from the real action, but they had a magnificent collective experience in getting what was “theirs.” They had no problem encircling Helen with an air of familiarity, but they didn’t let her into the murmur of their important, whispered conversations. They refused to make room for her. If they were debating some delicate point that could have created some complicity, they always lowered their voices. It was sad to watch her in those spacious rooms, flitting from one little group to the next, being tossed a handful of phrases like birdseed. A couple of times, I caught whichever girl Helen had chosen as a trial “best friend” fleeing to a remote corner to avoid her.

  Sometimes we stayed until the end, when the group was wrecked, disheveled, blundering through the cigarette butts of repetitive conversations, glasses in hand while we composed precarious tableaux, sprawled over tables and chairs. If they opened the windows, a pleasant breeze would make the hairs on our arms stand up, and then we’d settle again into a friendly lassitude. It was lovely to seek out Helen then, to watch her smoking slowly in that almost empty space, effortlessly emitting the essential notes of feminine charm. When I let that calm state enfold me, the fibers of my eyes once again knitted into a lover’s gaze that saw clearly how Helen’s spirit was being chipped away. When we got back to the Turret, instead of putting on an album or a film and relaxing, she’d tell me she wanted to be alone. But she’d end up sitting cross-legged on the living room floor, ruining my chances of watching TV. They showed good Westerns at that hour, heroes with morals and firm ideas about how to live them. Don’t you ever feel nostalgic for a simpler, unsullied world? With her jaw tensed that way, it wasn’t hard to imagine that Helen could spend the whole night awake, grinding the accumulated contempt between her molars until it turned to resentful dust.

  “I don’t want to see them again, John. I don’t ever want to see those people again.”

  If Helen’s ears had been open and her mind receptive, I would have told her the secret of polite society in Madrid and Barcelona, in Montana and among the Tuareg, who aren’t exactly known for their refinement: let the words slide right over you. Whatever they say, words are not knives, and they can wound you only if you go around with your chest bared, if you lower your guard, if you allow it. You have to disconnect, the way mushrooms spend their entire existence releasing spores, or sea horses devote their lives to swimming vertically. Get four people together in a house, at a restaurant, in a bar, and right away they’ll unleash their verbal poison. They don’t mean to hurt, they don’t even realize they’re doing it—they’re marking their territory, and the
y can’t help it. I’m sure you and your brother could recommend some author who’s written about this, but you’ll see it happening at any party, in every house, if you know how to look: people situate and redefine their insecurities in full view of everyone. You can’t hold it against them: once they stop measuring themselves against you and their position is clarified—once they confirm they’re sufficiently superior or inferior to you that they don’t have to compete—those same hateful people will do anything; you’ll find them jumping rope, yanking off their own ears, acting the fool to favor you and put themselves in a friendlier light.

  Meanwhile, you’ll find dozens of volunteers willing to cut you down until you fit in a little box where they can mentally manipulate you, where your ambition, your initiative, your desires, your youth, the fire that drives you toward pleasure, her golden mane of glossy hair, her accent, her appetite to give her love to people who will let themselves be loved—where everything ends up dissolved in a neutral liquid. Just so they won’t be overshadowed, so they won’t be bothered, so they don’t have to explain (again!) what the hell they do with lives like theirs. They search for some ulterior motive for every glimmer of affection, they don’t rest until they find the immoral root of the most modest achievement; for once I barely even need to exaggerate. Simply, they were not going to tolerate some girl with wide hips (I tended to see them as powerful) who thought that life’s problems could be resolved by making her man happy baking cakes and then climbing into bed to combine naked skin with the tactile pleasures of satin. To them, tolerating that kind of racy innocence would be like letting a stranger spit thickly in their faces, and they weren’t going to let that happen. They did not let that happen.

  But Helen didn’t want to listen or to learn. You’re too intelligent and refined to get involved in a social tug of war; you enjoy being mysterious, a fog of words. Helen was too direct and simple to stop them from dragging her through the mud, always with a smile on their lips—her performance didn’t allow for subtleties.

  I gave her the short version:

  “We’re too alive for them. They hold it against us.”

  “And I want to meet your family. I’ve told you that. Les conocerés.”

  That phrase (which she uttered parading around the Turret in some kind of poncho) isn’t a grammatical lapse, just what happens when I stop simultaneously translating the oddities of Helen’s Spanish into normal language.

  My strategy consisted of letting days pass as if none of it had anything to do with me, like I was listening to rain fall. The contemplative life (which a philistine could confuse with indifference) had always been my fallback for facing difficulties. Why fight when I could just bore my adversary? Where you would have reacted with quiet withdrawal, Helen went for the usual routine: jealousy, shouting, fainting.

  “How are we going to really love each other if you deprive me of family? You’re a bunch of missing pieces!”

  It’s the story of my life: neither of you could recognize my obvious merits. She never appreciated that I didn’t keep up with saint’s days and birthdays, that I didn’t reserve Thursdays for exchanging marital advice with Dad, that I didn’t encourage her to keep my sister company on shoe-shopping trips to the Eixample. Do you think she ever thanked me for saving her from a clingy mother-in-law, a know-it-all brother-in-law, and a gaggle of cocksucking sisters? No she did not! She was even annoyed that I wasn’t more controlling of her—I didn’t ask her where she was going in those tight pants, I didn’t inspect the itemized bill from Telefónica, I didn’t kick up a fuss when she came back late from a trip into town wearing that necklace so obviously made to emphasize the curve of her breasts. It must be a pain to have a jealous husband, but apparently those are the things a real man grumbles about, and Helen was not about to accept anything less than the complete package:

  “Aren’t I a jealous bitch for you?”

  Of course, if I’d had a family to show her, happy or otherwise, I wouldn’t have put up such a fight. But all I had to offer were a few burned ruins. I tried to tell her, but I couldn’t find the right words, so we decided to start with Mother, a trip to Bonanova. I spent the night before the meeting in the kind of sleep that does nothing to restore you, tossing and turning until I bumped against Helen’s body. I kissed her neck to turn her on; even half asleep it wouldn’t take long to get her ready. I almost liked her better that way than when she was really excited, when she’d brazenly spread her naked thighs and the lips protecting the purple flesh, the coffer where she renewed her unique, particular aromas.

  That morning wasn’t much different from any other day we began by making love (even though the appointed hour was waiting, as if the word “Mother” was wrapped up in butcher’s paper). Helen jumped out of bed naked, showered, brushed her teeth, chose her skirt and blouse while in her underwear. She got dressed as she boiled water for my tea (she never got the message that she should turn it off before it boiled), and one of our electric gadgets turned white bread into toast. She sat down to breakfast with the TV on, squeezing peanut butter from a toothpaste tube (a repugnant touch), and thumbing the salmon-colored pages of the previous day’s La Vanguardia. She’d offer some comment about the Catalan politics that she never could make sense of, waiting for me to pee and bathe and vacate the bathroom so she could go back in and tackle the thankless tasks of beautification: painting her lips, lining her eyes.

  I put on a pair of jeans and a blue cable-knit sweater—I wasn’t going to do up twenty-one buttons to go and see my mother. The green dress hugged Helen’s skin with modest satisfaction, like she was the head of the class who doesn’t have to make an effort to stand out. She’d pulled her hair back with a double bow I can’t even begin to describe, and fastened the soft wisps with transparent clips.

  “You’re not wearing a tie?”

  And there we were, two young newlyweds who left their rings hidden away (together, though) in the drawer of a bedside table so as not to frighten my mother, and piled into the taxi carrying a stupendous bottle of sparkling wine and a jelly roll filled with cream—Helen’s American palate was bored with pa de pessic. We headed off toward the apartment I’d spent my teens in, where we’d moved from Madrid because that fucker Franco was about to die and my father smelled business opportunities in the air. We drove up Balmes and through the racket of the Mitre intersection, which only exists as a reminder of the horror that always lurks in cities. We left behind the imposing start of Avinguda Tibidabo, then passed an elephantine bus as it off-loaded dozens of passengers, all bundled up for the two or three days in which winter had decided to remind Barcelona it’s still a major European city. Finally, we came to the Passeig de la Bonanova and its grand, deep-set entranceways, where the array of neighborhood stores (sweet shops, sewing shops, modernist pharmacies) that composed the landscape of my youth had given way to franchises, banks, and private clinics. Helen was chewing spearmint gum and the radio issued a flamenquito murmur. As we passed a line of banana trees with pruned tentacles sprouting from their trunks I patted my pockets, afraid (and hopeful) that I had left my keys at home. My mother was more than capable of not letting us in.

  Helen was fascinated by the elevator trick: the cage that opened directly into the foyer of the loft where we lived had always impressed the kids I brought to visit. It had the same effect on the posh girls who were my sister’s friends, the ones who once they grew up passed for the prettiest girls in Barcelona, in spite of their slightly bovine air, as if where there should have been that thing that makes sparks fly—the metronome of ambition—they only had a yawning void. They were made idle by the security of knowing things would go well for them, that this business of living was only serious for people less fortunate, and if they just coasted along then everything would be simple, they could succeed without getting their hands dirty. The truth is that when I called them to mind a decade later under the same cadaverous elevator light, I preferred Helen’s features, her rapacious look, those furrows of calculation wrin
kling the corners of her eyes: a face that reminded me why I was with that person, and that I’d planned well.

  “Too weird for your mother?”

  I must have been staring. She thought I was censuring her for painting her eyes with those wine-tinted shades that must have been in style in some corner of the planet. To Helen’s mind, the goth palette of her eye makeup said something about what was proper and what was not—she was being bold. Well, my mother was weirder than Helen could possibly expect, and without trying: it came naturally to her.

  When we got there, Mother had the nerve to greet us in the living room wearing the robe that had been her official uniform for five years. Her hair was matted in greasy tangles as if she were wearing a mop-inspired hat. I guess under all those layers of bewilderment—the result of the pills she took to flee the pain—she hadn’t even remembered we were coming. She was toying with her pillbox; I saw the chewed and peeled skin around her fingernails. I introduced them and we sat down. It bothered me to see her like that, and after five minutes I got up with the excuse of going to the bathroom. Helen wouldn’t mind being left alone with her: if women aren’t trying to claw out each other’s eyes, they’re turning blind ones to each other’s failings, and some neuron cluster had dumped a load of feminine solidarity all over Helen’s brain. As I walked down the hallway I admired the tolerance you women have for illness and decline. Sure, you’re the ones who have to let a polyp grow inside you, and then expel it once it can suck and feed itself on your secretions. But that doesn’t explain the bravery of those girls who, at twenty, can face raw and empty eye sockets, wounds that stretch from chin to thigh, jaws corroded by cancer.