Divorce Is in the Air

by Gonzalo Torne

  “No old war stories. I’m begging you.”

  “I’m going somewhere with this and you know it. We carried the game. The best was in the semifinals, ten points down, only five miserable minutes left. Antolín had fouled out and those smart-asses from Joventud were strutting around the court with the ACB logo. You and me on the bench, who knows why, but we couldn’t give up, it was our home court and we were wearing the La Salle jersey.”

  “Descarrega and Miró in the game.”

  “A blizzard of three-pointers, a regular bombardment, Little Boy and Fat Man, Napalm. The three classes in our year cheering, the ref ignoring Jacobo’s last foul to let the clock run down. A big win for our team and a kick in the ass for Penya, and that bunch of lanky chickens went back to the suburbs with their tails between their legs. Ha! The warm-ups, the tension in the eyes, everything floating on surges of adrenaline. With those tits you’d be hard pressed to run the counterattack over the center line, but you could probably still catch a rebound for the first time in your sorry career. Don’t you miss it?”

  “Sometimes. It was one of the good things. That day my dad almost knocked yours over when he jumped up to cheer.”

  “And your parents? What do they see when they look at you?”

  “Nothing. Absolutely nothing. They’re trapped in the past, with Eloy. What about your father? Mr. Miró-Puig, I can just picture him, here in my living room, always so thin and well turned out. Think he was batting for the other team?”

  “If you stood over him he looked like a little bird. Remember?”

  “Better than you know. I remember all of you.”

  “He died. I cremated him. It was sudden and I had to take charge. So he’s also there, trapped in the past, for more than fifteen years now.”

  “You can’t imagine how sorry I am.”

  “The crematorium was at the end of a narrow white dirt road. It was all very well organized. They stuck the box, American pine, into an oven that in a few minutes can reach eight hundred degrees, it runs on diesel. They let me watch through the peephole. Glowing streaks started to open in the wood, which cracked before the thing turned red hot, until finally there was only black smoke billowing around cooling ashes.”

  “How long did it take?”

  “I don’t know why I always assumed it would be quick. My dad was thin, so he took under two hours to burn, but the attendant told me that to get rid of a fat man completely it can take up to three hours. Once, they had a guy who didn’t fit in any box, so they stuck him in as he was and in less than half an hour there was so much melted fat under the singed and crunchy skin they were worried about the oven.”

  “What did your dad die of?”

  “The guy handed me the urn with an expression that said ‘this is all we are’—but that’s a lie. Bullshit, I hate that idea. Those cold ashes are everything we are not. He also told me to pray for my father, which seemed like good advice. It doesn’t matter how he died, it’s not important.”

  “Don’t think you’re getting out of it. You owe me an answer. What do you see when you look at me?”

  “You asked what I think about when I look at you. That’s totally different, completely unrelated, because what I see is good, so congratulations. On the other hand, what I think isn’t so nice. I wonder whether it scares you to consider what will happen when these looks of yours get old. The old transvestites I’ve come across aren’t exactly attractive.”

  “That’s because you’re looking at me sexually. How many sixty- or seventy-year-old women do you know who aren’t sorry specimens in terms of attractiveness? Getting old is getting old.”

  “That’s one way of looking at it.”

  “Why did you come here? Why did you look for me? What are you doing?”

  “Fair question, Eloise. It’s because of what we’re talking about: I came because I’m getting old. Aging isn’t like a diseased molar you can just yank out of the gum, it’s something that happens to the whole organism, the only one I have. Also because I’m alone, because my life is absurd and my problems can’t be solved like before, by running, or with my hands.”

  “Another drink? I haven’t thought about that much. I’ve been busy with other things.”

  “They say that life starts to move faster, that everything goes by at top speed during your forties, while you’re turning soft and gray-haired. Further on it slows down again, supposedly. I’ve heard that later, your memory opens up in all its splendor, and you can explore it top to bottom. Sounds nice, but the guys who talk like that don’t have to live in my head, I don’t want to live among the husks of days gone by. How long will I have left once I reach that serenity? There comes a time when the prostate can swell up and burst at any moment.”

  “Do you have trouble sleeping?”

  “I sleep like a baby—until I wake up at three or four. My biological alarm clock alerts me to the time for thinking about death, and my pores start gushing a cold liquid that can’t be only sweat. You know what I’m talking about, it must happen to everyone.”

  “It never happens to me.”

  “I’ve studied it. I think within twenty years they’ll be able to transplant a mature brain into a younger body, cultivated expressly in a nursery courtesy of your DNA. There’ll be all kinds of protests, but if you have money no one can stop you. We’ll move beyond the ultimate limitation, people will be born who will never know the final experience.”

  “But if the brain gets sick, it will be horrible.”

  “That’s almost solved, too. The streets are full of people walking around with pig ventricles and aortas stapled to them. They’ll do the same kind of thing with the brain, until they learn to grow brain cells resistant to aging.”

  “And does it have to be from a pig?”

  “Don’t panic. That’s just prejudice talking, and you should be familiar with that. Look at you. Thousands of people see a walking transgression where there’s only a pretty girl living her life.”

  “Thank you, Joan-Marc. But this is all good news, right? With your pig-human brain transplanted onto a freshly hatched body, there’s no more aging, and—”

  “Did you just use my name? No one does that.”

  “I don’t like abbreviations or nicknames. Things are confused enough already.”

  “I’m afraid of the operating room. The gowns, the lights, the anesthesia sucking out your conscience. The body laid open, defenseless, a fleshy wound. And even if everything goes well, you’ll still be left with flashes of memories from the pigsty floating around in there. Can I ask you a question?”

  “Go right ahead.”

  “How could you stand it? Everything you did to yourself?”

  “You think I’ve transformed myself, but from my point of view this is my true body, and it’s made its way out through the ridiculous and masculine and hairily filthy false skin I used to wear that fucked my life up. Don’t you think I’m better now?”

  “Much better. That scalpel was your fairy godmother.”

  “It was a long process. Do you feel dizzy, too? Don’t give me any more booze.”

  “Have you ever told anyone about it?”

  “No. A finger, pour me one finger.”

  “Tell me, if you want.”

  “It’s a story with no beginning, or it began when I did, if you like. Since the very first sexual signs I’ve known they gave me a body with the wrong gender, that I was covered in the wrong skin. I denied it, I signed up for basketball, I tried to live like a gay boy. I dressed as a woman, in my mother’s clothes, or things I’d buy and then throw in the trash—all it did was make me feel like a creature whose ideas were grotesque once put into practice. I didn’t enjoy wearing dresses, or perfume, or imitating female gestures. I didn’t want to disguise myself as a girl, I was a girl, and I was disgusted with my body. Your brain transplant would have been a good solution for me.

  “I didn’t start taking hormones until I was over twenty. I’d put in time researching what I could exp
ect, and the messages were confusing. I started with a gentle hormone replacement therapy, I didn’t want to rush my body or wear it out. The theory is that they block the male hormones and substitute them with estrogen. In practice it makes your voice soften, you grow breasts like little cones. You might get a little whitish fluid leaking from the tips of your nipples, but it’s not milk, it’s a warning that some hormonal reading has skyrocketed. I felt dizzy, I stopped studying, I couldn’t stand the pressure of the questions or the sound of my own answers. I had to move. Even at the beginning the treatment is expensive, and then you go into a spiral: as the regimen demands more and more money to achieve your look, work possibilities diminish. I would have slit my wrists without the Internet, without the forums where girls talk about what they’ve gone through, what they’re waiting for. I don’t see any moral problem; I didn’t ask to be stuck in a man’s body. The Web put me in contact with girls from Madrid, from Valencia, but also from villages in León, bedroom communities. There was a Galician woman who got her skull split open with a stone—we’d been missing her for a week in the forums when we read about it in the papers. Luckily Barcelona is an open-minded city. You can laugh at that idea when you’re straight and you have kids and an apartment in the Quadrat d’Or and a well-paid job, but you don’t know how good it is here until you stumble and need some community support. Some of the girls made photo albums, recorded videos of the process. I promised myself I wouldn’t leave a trace, I’d put it all behind me as soon as I could.

  “My face softened smoothly, the feminine features fitted together nicely as they settled in. It’s always a lottery—if you win it opens doors for you, both personally and work-wise. They weren’t pleasant people or jobs, but when you want something so expensive, something that puts such a strain on your life, you reduce your appetites, you learn to put the brakes on them. I came from a good family, from a school where they taught you how to land on your feet. I learned different skills in the bars, on the streets, at night, but the skill of interpreting people’s intentions when they approach you, of arranging your words to persuade or intimidate, that’s something you can’t improvise.

  “I earned money to have laser depilation, and also had shaping done on my backside and on my thighs. When the testosterone falls, the fat layer changes and you get irregular blocks of cellulite. I welcomed that kind of complication. I discovered I could please a man looking like that. They were men who wouldn’t have gone out for a walk holding my hand, they wouldn’t have known how to reconcile me with the rest of their lives. But masculine sexuality doesn’t have to fit into a coherent whole, men will pay to have a passing desire catered to. I got lucky with the agency, and money is a magic potion. I found out I was good at it, I had a high libido: just brushing against their small desires, fleeting, avid, and brief, was enough to set me on fire.

  “I reached a certain equilibrium, but it wasn’t enough, I was in limbo. Some nights I pulled out my hair, I called myself a coward, but now I’m proud I didn’t rush a single thing. I was patient, I researched every step of the way in the forums, I burned the midnight oil on open threads, I saved more money than I needed so I’d avoid any surprises. I barely let myself think about how while I was moving toward being a woman, my cells were using up the best years of their lives. I started with an Adam’s apple reduction—they didn’t even put me under. A fine incision along the crease in the skin of my neck was all they needed to file down the cartilage, but I had to pay for good hands. With a bad surgeon, you risk damaging the structure of the larynx, it can ruin your voice.

  “I went to expensive specialists and didn’t let their first answer convince me. I demanded to know everything about the operation, how they were going to cut me and where. I demanded a detailed, day-by-day breakdown of the postoperative period, a list of possible outcomes. It seemed to me that the doctors looked down on patients who were in a hurry, who abdicated all responsibility—my attitude annoyed them at first, but they ended up respecting me. I was afraid they were hiding things so they could charge me for my rashness later in the operating room. They could always claim there’d been unforeseen complications, an accident, it would be so easy to disfigure me. I didn’t take all their advice, either. I knew it was a bit of a risk with the anesthetic, but I got through the fasts before operations by taking sips of J&B until the room started spinning. I was asleep, though, when they dissected the cartilage to reshape my nasal dome, and when I woke up slowly through the fog of leftover anesthesia, my nose was covered with a bandage and my nostrils blocked with gauze. On top of the discomfort and the problems eating, I had to give up smoking, because nicotine contracts your veins and stops scar tissue forming. I spent a feverish week oozing blood and saline. It was like incubating a live, half-formed animal in the middle of my face.

  “I wanted to get there, but I never forgot the risk, I never stopped feeling that a cautionary hand was holding me back. Wasn’t that what our posh education was all about? I can’t hold it against them. Those priests knew what the world was like, they taught us how jagged it could be. Sometimes it seemed I was running on a track with hundreds of parallel lanes on either side of me. Others drew ahead, and then I’d overtake them while they were bewildered at finding themselves with noses that wouldn’t heal, or detached jaws, gangrene in their breasts, burst silicone. Others got exhausted, you’d find them lying in a squalid room. One girl went into her bedroom in the apartment she shared with three others, and flayed the skin from her face before sticking a pair of scissors in her neck, just because there was no way to correct the line of her jaw. Entire lives dedicated to extracting an imagined body from the real, and to have to die like that, without ever finding it.

  “My only complications came in the minor operations. For my lips I tried injections of hyaluronic acid, but my body rejected it, and my face broke out in cysts. It was horrible, but didn’t last long. One of my girlfriends had a rash of yellow eczema on her arms that took two years to clear up. I found an expensive solution: liposuction. Instead of throwing away the fat, they injected it into my lips. The corners look pretty, it’ll last for years. I’m pleased; mouth operations can cause irreparable disasters. I’ve read how American actresses are pressured into things by their agents, and some spend decades drugged up so they don’t have to look at themselves in the mirror.

  “I was really scared when they reconstructed my cheekbones. You might think it wasn’t a necessary surgery, but I’m sure you remember how my cheeks drooped, like a sad puppy’s. The technique is simple: they insert a tube into the cheekbone and inject fat cells that the face muscles assimilate as their own. When you’re ready, they make an incision in your palate and cut the bones with a saw. I know I’ve been like that, my head tied down and my face open and full of holes, while files break and polish my cheekbones, but I still can’t imagine what it’s like. When I woke up I couldn’t laugh, I’d lost my voice, I had an enormous wine-colored swelling. They had to admit me to the clinic, and I got very depressed. I was horrified by what I was doing to myself, what I was subjecting myself to. I’d gone almost a year without working. I wondered what you or Jacobo would think, whether you’d approve—how silly. The girls from the forum who lived in Barcelona responded to my calls for help and stopped by to cheer me up. Nice ones, shy ones, crazy, obscene ones, a complete spectrum of characters.

  “One afternoon, I was alone with the girl who I got along with best: refined, pretty, from Molins de Rai, tormented by her size-ten feet. She was determined to have a sex change, only she was out of work and refused to be a prostitute. Her father was pressuring her to go to a psychiatrist to be ‘cured.’ She had chewed fingernails, skinned fingers.

  “There was one of those talk shows on TV with a lot of shouting, and one of the shouters was a transsexual reveling in the role. ‘Disgusting,’ my friend said. But it didn’t seem to me like the tranny made her tribe look any more ridiculous than the heterosexual woman who assured the audience that her cunt tasted like a cunt, or the host
who every half hour managed to dump a steaming bucket of shit over his head. Since I couldn’t talk I didn’t answer, and it took me a minute to understand that my friend from the forum wasn’t making any kind of moral judgment. She said: ‘All the money she earns, and she spends it putting on and taking off lips and chins, silicone inside and silicone outside. And she doesn’t realize that balloon of a forehead makes her look sub-normal. It kills her. With the money she spends fucking up her face, she could make four girls like me happy.’

  “We shared the feeling of being intruders in our own bodies, but our characters were as different as any two people. I ended up changing my number, I left the forum. I’m very grateful to all of them.

  “I didn’t have the nerve for breast implants until there was someone beside me to hold my hand. I chose the silicone gel and had them cut along the axillary dome. I wanted the implant between my pectoral muscle and ribs. For the first time, the money didn’t come from my bank account. I remember the lights in the corridor and an enormous wall clock that seemed to be waving good-bye as my consciousness dissolved into the sedatives. It turned out well, it all turned out well. I lost the feeling in my nipples for a week, and at first the breasts were too high and separated because my taut skin wasn’t used to carrying so much weight. The body reacts to implantation by wrapping the prosthesis with a fine covering. If the capsule of human tissue gets too hard, then complications begin, but everything turned out fine. I spent the post-op period listening to songs from the eighties, happy and buoyant music, lively, punky, wonderfully naive stuff. I held back from looking in the mirror until the implants had settled in, until the fat had absorbed the bruising and my back had gotten used to the new weight. They’d already cut into my face, neck, armpits, and inner thighs, but the breasts were something new, a revelation, as if a believer had grown angel’s wings. I lifted my shirt like a teenage girl wanting a photograph to document their roundness, and there they were, devoid of milk or mammary glands. I was so moved when I uncovered my new torso that I started laughing and crying at the same time. I wanted to call my boyfriend, but my voice wouldn’t come. Really, though, I’m glad I didn’t see him, it was a private moment.