Divorce Is in the Air

by Gonzalo Torne

  I watched as he took the photographs out of another one of his envelopes. This time, the woman’s name was Cris. They had met on a forum for photography enthusiasts, they sent each other private messages, and soon enough they found shared tastes: Leonard Cohen, Knight Rider, Al Pacino films; they were both unconvinced by Bob Dylan’s electric phase. They met in person at a forum get-together, and before long they split off from the group and did what they could to laugh. He found Cris attractive in her own way: red hair, wide hips, naive accent (she was from Zaragoza). They wandered into a grove of fir trees, the conversation flowed easily and their defenses gradually came down. They talked of relationship troubles: they’d both been through nasty divorces, both were terrified of entering the next decade alone, they didn’t feel like dodging suitors if they ever decided to look in earnest. There were children in circulation: three for Cris, one for Pedro (he didn’t miss the chance to joke that his daughter didn’t really circulate much). They came to a meadow shaded by a chestnut tree whose branches seemed to be bleeding. It was irresistible for these aficionados, so they took out their Nikons, and Cris told him that when he was shooting he seemed to come alive. They sat down on a bed of crunchy leaves and talked about their jobs. Her vagueness didn’t escape Pedro’s notice, but he let it go when she repeated that he couldn’t let talent like his go to waste.

  “She’s good, too.”

  Cris’s photos insisted on using a contortionist’s perspective; they were better, livelier than Pedro’s. She wasn’t fooling herself—she was aware that she and Pedro had too many gaps in their training, that they could only play at being photographers in the forum’s limited and somewhat artificial atmosphere of mutual admiration. But the camera gave them a conversational territory and a road to follow, their reciprocal flattery sped the friendship toward a more intimate place. The heart is prone to be dazzled.

  On Tuesdays and Thursdays they used e-mail like an instant messaging service. Pedro tended to write his responses emboldened by alcohol, to the point that he improvised a promise to visit her in Zaragoza. Cris replied that on the date he proposed she wouldn’t have the kids. I’m sure that whatever day Pedro had suggested, she wouldn’t have had the kids. The AVE train cost him an arm and a leg, and he spent the journey cursing himself: the landscape dotted with border shrubs, that immense dry plain below folds of sandy mountains that he watched out the window, it crushed his spirit. He didn’t even find Cris that attractive, it was an adventure that wasn’t going to leave any permanent mark on his life.

  The train pulled into the immense station at Delicias and Cris was waiting for him, looking like a diminutive doll in the middle of the platform, hands folded, feet together, wearing a blue raincoat. She gave him a tour that consisted of two plazas and a garden. It was Cris’s lively voice that gradually won him over, and he was impressed by her welcome: clean apartment, light-filled and cool, topped off with the aroma of onions and peppers in a homemade meat stew. He didn’t plop onto the sofa, but sat down at the already-set table. While Cris headed into the kitchen to add the final touches to the meal, he savored every second as his body sank into the upholstery’s firm sponginess. When he saw the napkin holder engraved with her initials, his hands quivered with pleasure.

  “Do you like rosé?”

  He volunteered to uncork the bottle. Cris brought him a pair of slippers in case he wanted to take his shoes off, but they weren’t the right size. It turned out she worked in a supermarket; twice, she specified she was a manager. She cleared plates and the leftovers of that poignant stew with a magician’s skill, and served him a bowl of strawberries with fresh cream. What a coincidence—she couldn’t have known it was his favorite dessert. She told him she’d spent two years in art school, only to learn that she didn’t like competition. Also, she’d had to take care of her mother. Photography was her passion, and so was drinking a half-dozen beers in a bar where you could hear real music. One day, they could go together.

  “Look at her, Johan. We can’t all rob cradles like you. She’s pretty.”

  She was one of those reasonable women who move through the world and wear themselves out trying to do it well. Surrounded by boys so tall and imaginative she couldn’t hold on to them with that unremarkable body—not to mention the healthy contents of her head—she’d never managed to truly set anyone on fire. She’d had to resign herself to an average husband: a serious guy, honorable, hardworking, able to impregnate her. A reasonable man with whom she’d had it reasonably bad, one who’d wanted to have three kids and shelter them in an atmosphere of everyday affection, and who after a rough patch had ended up leaving. And what Cris was looking for now was a companion to go drinking with, someone to laugh and to row the boat with, someone to plan totally unaffordable trips with, someone with whom she could revive the pleasure of being part of a couple, who would utter her name again with interest, a person who maybe doesn’t completely convince you, but who sticks around and whose touch protects you from the world’s coldness.

  Of course, a woman with three kids and a fugitive husband would catch on right away that this guy, frayed and forty-something, spent most of the week being neurotic and unsociable, and that she’d be better off not quitting her respectable job, because he wasn’t fit for the world. The most ambitious version of Cris—a girl who deemed her chances to still be on the rise—would have ruled Pedro out at first sight because he lacked any initiative of his own, the kind of ambition that drives a guy onward toward ever-better moments. You’ll struggle to understand, since you’re the kind of woman who always gets the most interesting man, the one who knows where to take you to dinner, what dresses to buy you, what sights to see when you travel to flashy-sounding foreign countries. But she was in the intermediate phase of life, when you have to cross the unknown territory that yawns between the plans of your thirties and the grandparent years of your seventies, and Pedro could supply her with the minimum. She could boast about her photographer boyfriend in circles where he’d win points just for being from Barcelona. What that woman wanted was to have a shot at the agreeable side of life, with a guy who was neither violent nor a Jehovah’s Witness.

  And after all, what good did it do you to marry a connoisseur if he couldn’t pay for a car or take you on vacation? What good did it do you to get married thinking I was going to be “someone”? It’s funny: we navigate our way among the expectations that others dream up for us in their own minds, as if it weren’t enough to go plunging into middle age wrapped in our own clouds of hopes, ideas, and fantasies about the future. Thirties, forties, fifty-five…and we still end up in strange places, small apartments, goals like boxes. Age is our reality tutor.

  Pedro and Cris had natural attraction on their side, which helped—it’s what happens when a man and a woman find themselves finished with their respective turmoils, it’s how bodies come to rest together. Cris took her clothes off too quickly; he saw the soft folds of her belly, the stretch marks that opened like a dry delta. He hadn’t touched a woman in years (they’d fallen by the wayside, one, two, three, without making much noise). He was surprised again at the temperature, a hot-water balloon; he made her blush when he let his gaze fall between her thighs, to the burgeoning, straggly fuzz that made him think of threads in a living fabric.

  “She wanted me and I wanted her, I really did. I felt it in my thighs and stomach, but nothing happened down there, it didn’t respond to anything we did. Like it was disconnected from the rest of my body.”

  Cris’s caresses as she tried to stimulate him only reminded him that his virility was buried deep within him; her touch kept him company as the black tide of shame and guilt engulfed him.

  “I even started talking to my dick. I encouraged it, bullied it, tried to convince it to wake up, I apologized for making it enter a girl without asking its permission. And when I finished all that, and it was clear nothing was going to happen, I realized for the first time ever the thing is just an overrated flap of skin.”

  And she took
it like a grown-up: she kissed him, ruffled his hair, got dressed, and took him down to the living room. She didn’t even try to get off using Pedro’s lips, fingers, or nose. She started washing dishes, telling him she wasn’t one of those dirty girls, that she’d rather order pizza and beer. And “dirty girl” sounded in Cris’s mouth like the kind of woman who can extract a man’s prostate juice with a massage, who can transform an impotent man into a sexual smorgasbord. Pedro-María didn’t take it too much to heart; she gave him a slap on the back, smiled at him; she cooed at him like a mother to her harmless son.

  “I told myself I’d never been that attracted to her anyway. That I’d rather stay outside the lips than stick my swollen dick in there.”

  Cris took out a deck of cards, I suppose they must have been tarot, and asked him to draw six. She made some calculations on a napkin, and things looked good for the couple. Turned out they were twinned souls, it was a cosmic coincidence. He would call her, and by talking they would reduce the separation they seemed condemned to by the comedy of work. It was a connection they would have to try hard to put a stop to, and they didn’t want to stop it. They kissed, and after years of underuse he felt his cock start to fill with blood, overcome gravity, and become the master of that impending moment of gratification. It had only been a delay, now they would synchronize. Under that ginger hair, Cris revealed herself to be an engaged lover, who compensated for a meager imagination with her positivity and a sense of humor between the sheets that he found disconcerting.

  “You can’t imagine what it was like, Johan, she was alive and crazy for me.”

  They lay there smoking like actors in a film’s transition scene. Cris alternated formless puffs of smoke with neat circles that slowly broke apart above their disheveled heads. The skin of her chest was softly dotted with oil nodules, and the dark and voluminous protuberances of her nipples disturbed him. She said to him, bawling like a suckling animal inebriated by being alive under a sky inundated with light:

  “This fire is new, Peter, and I’m the one who lit it.”

  They bundled up and went out for a walk under some scraggly trees with lilies sprouting from their roots. Stray words of their conversation went on spinning around them, severed from their original phrases. They sat on a restaurant terrace and dined again: ham and scrambled eggs and half a liter of wine. He took out his camera and shot against the streetlights’ bulbs, as if his eyes were sensitive to ghostly charms hidden to other mortal eyes. They brought back beers and spent the rest of the night kissing, looking at photos on the camera screen, and hatching plans that would not only bring him back to Zaragoza, but also involved the apartment on Córcega. Because if one thing was for sure, it was that before she could take a relationship seriously, Cris immediately had to check out the place where her man slept and pissed, look at herself in the same mirror that reflected him, open his closets, feel his shirts.

  “Give me time.”

  That was what he asked her for: time, no less. He didn’t let himself be bewitched by the beers they’d shared or by the dawn light that shone through the living room windows. He couldn’t get past the reaction he knew she would have when he showed her the museum-house: what Cris would think of those rooms, the plans she would make for the furniture. He couldn’t stand to see her in that imagined scene, her every move tearing apart the tapestry of white lies and exaggerations he had wrapped the portrait of his life in. As she dozed on his shoulder, his resolve weakened; he liked Cris, but he couldn’t suggest they go on seeing each other in Zaragoza every time her kids stayed over at a friend’s house or went on a field trip. He couldn’t afford that rhythm of life. He started to convince himself that Cris was a woman with rapacious and magnificent desires, one who wanted all love’s tenderness and violence, the exalted energy of infatuation that would infect her cell by cell, so she could gather the strength to pry open the doors guarding the greatest things life has to offer.

  After agreeing on some vague terms, Pedro returned to Barcelona and received her two e-mails with a mix of happiness and reproach. In the first, Cris updated him on the tarot cards that augured a splendid future together for them (he regretted having made up the time of his birth): “In our four hands there is strength to lift up two lives.” That ridiculousness moved him. The second ruminated over pleasant possibilities and some memories of the ever so complete day they’d spent together.

  The proposal came in the third e-mail. Cris’s mother had just died, and that gave her the opening to unveil the plans for the future she was envisioning for the two of them. She had inherited a spacious apartment that was too big for her by herself, near a green and landscaped area, a twenty-minute walk from the city center. It occurred to her that she could rent it out, then she’d have enough to cover the mortgage, and with the remainder plus her salary from the supermarket, she could cover Pedro’s first expenses if he wanted to move into a space filled with her. She’d also taken the liberty (she knew he’d forgive her) of showing his “work” to a friend of her cousin’s who was looking for wedding photographers. Of course, he could move in anytime he wanted, regardless of the apartment. No mention of her children.

  The plan was drawn in the trembling hand of wishful thinking, so Cris made sure to slip in a bit about how they could start afresh in a different place, far from Zaragoza, how if he asked her to she would be willing to sell the apartment. And all that Cris begged him for, in exchange for those generous proposals, was that he go with her to her mother’s funeral; she was afraid of facing the father of her children, and her children, whom she hardly ever saw, and she didn’t want to do it alone. Pedro wouldn’t even have to set foot in the funeral home; it would be enough if she could hold him afterward, once they were alone.

  Obviously Pedro-María didn’t go. In fact, he didn’t even reply. He blocked her e-mails, let his mobile phone ring for a week and a half—another advantage of not paying for a landline—and then Cris tired of calling.

  “Why didn’t you go and see her?”

  He could have replied: “When we are alone, men complain about female cunning and calculation, but if a woman opens up to us in gratitude, instead of breathing in her generosity deeply, more often than not we shrink away, tear what they give us to shreds, or flee.” But Saw went with an even more spectacular answer:

  “Commitment. I don’t ever want to commit again. I was already burned once by commitment. I’d rather be alone, and I owe it to the apartment. My stomach is burning. It’s hunger. I could use some food, would you make me something?”

  “The black boxes. If you want to eat, tell me what the deal is with the black boxes.”

  “Cockroaches. They’re roach traps. I turned on the light and caught dozens of them by surprise—I think they were playing football on the floor. They sit there looking at you, teasing, and then they run off on those little thread legs of theirs. Fumigating is no guarantee, they just fill your house with chemical shit, and when the air clears the bugs come out again, more resistant than ever. It’s not easy to fight them; first you have to figure out the race or the species. You’ve got your flying roaches, your Africans, and your Germans.”

  “Yours are German.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I have my ways.”

  “They live in kitchens, they’re very family-oriented, they can feed themselves for weeks licking a single drop of rotten milk. They reproduce like…like…well, there’s nothing else that reproduces so quickly….The traps were invented by a strategical genius. The roaches leave trails, and if one doesn’t come back to the nest they try out other routes, without ever leaving your house. The poison in the disks has a delayed effect. It doesn’t do them in until they go back to the nest, and since they eat each other’s corpses, the whole clan is wiped out in a few days.”

  “Impressive.”

  “And I’ll tell you something else. These days, with you, do you know what? I’ve been able to let things pass, start cooling off. I don’t hate women anymore, even if they�
��ve stolen my daughter and my self-esteem. I’m hardly afraid of them at all, really. I’m giving up. Understand?”

  I didn’t understand. I could accept how a strong and true man could kneel whimpering on the floor to assuage the fury of a woman, I could understand the impulse to stick an electric drill in her ear until it perforated the brain, but I couldn’t go a week without burying my nose in a woman’s hair, without smelling a woman’s neck, thighs, wrists, armpits. A life without women would be an artificial existence.

  “Perfectly.”

  “Everything has come to me too late. I’ve never been loved the way I deserve. And I wasn’t even asking for that much. Now I’ll ask for less. I’m going to stay here, not hurting anyone, not making any trouble. I don’t have the balls to set myself on fire, slit my wrists, or jump off a building. Fear is my firewall, and I’m not really so badly off. Then I’ll die and I’ll be nice and dead. And quiet, like a tomato vine.”

  I saw the retching movement; I had time to see the shine in his eyes that warned me that he’d lost control. But I’d barely started up when the torrent spread over the floor amid violent groans. It spattered my shoes, it spattered the sofa (my bed), the floor, and his own hands. In two minutes he’d spilled everything; it didn’t even occur to me that he could suffocate. Maybe feminists and anthropologists are right and the planet is overflowing with alpha males, but I only know guys who lack affection.

  I got to work. I already cooked for Pedro on an almost daily basis, simple but tasty recipes (grilled chicken breast drizzled in olive oil and garnished with hard-boiled egg; hake boiled with carrot, leek, and onion: it’s not crucial but I recommend putting all the vegetables in the blender and flavoring the puree with the first spice that comes to hand). I’d already helped him unclog the toilet, breathing in the effluvia, the smell of antibiotics rising from the pale and almost colorless yellow liquid; I looked for a bucket and filled it with hot water. I did for him what I hadn’t done for Mother, what I didn’t do for Dad, what I wouldn’t have done (sorry) for you: I mopped up that thick, reddish liquid. Masculinity’s dark hours—heaven forbid you surprise us when we’re alone! I didn’t do a bad job, though not even the dishcloth could absorb the dozen or so solid slivers that had escaped from his stomach. I had to take care of that matter with my fingers.