Divorce Is in the Air

by Gonzalo Torne

  “Embryos make such a huge effort to get into the light of day. Of course, they’re not conscious. It took me a bit longer than nine months to develop a new body, and I did it with my eyes open, I was watching the whole time while it grew.”

  “Do you have orgasms like a chick?”

  “They can’t transplant a cunt—that, they cannot do. They cut your penis and testicles, and they use that tissue plus skin from your thighs to make a neo-vagina. That’s what they call it, can you believe it? The nervous system is still a man’s, so no female orgasms, but if everything turns out well you stay sensitive. They keep the nerves of the glans and move them to the inside of the genital cavity. They’re longer than a woman’s, that’s why it works.”

  “And are you going to operate down there?”

  “I don’t dare. The stitches, the Betadine, absorbent sheets, drainage, destroying the bacteria in the colon with shots from a syringe, the dilations so the pelvic wound doesn’t close while the other scars heal, the probes. I can’t stand the idea. You can lose your libido, you can experience sudden, irrational nostalgia for the flap of skin you’ve spent years hating as if it were a tumor. The absence can be as sensitive as an amputated arm. I’m going to stay like this, I’ve had enough. I want the world to consider me a woman without going through another operation. And depending on how you look at it, the thing does function like a clitoris.”

  Conversation is so mundane, full of words without any weight or intensity. So it’s really strange when it speeds toward intimate areas. I’m good at recognizing when words start to coil into blind curves, beyond which anything at all could be waiting.

  “Can I touch?”

  “Down there?”

  “The breasts, I mean.”

  “My breasts? Among people who’ve had the operation, mine are pretty ordinary. Don’t tell me you’ve never touched any?”

  She ran her fingers through the mass of her hair and let it fall. You’d think she hadn’t learned the gesture by studying women, that it came naturally.

  “Never fake ones. It’ll stay between friends. For old-time’s sake.”

  I almost put on a glove (that was Dad’s ghost in me). I reached out my hand, then she pulled down the neckline of the blouse. The filling was less suggestive than the natural, sensual mass, but the skin was skin: soft, hot, with all its pores and sensitive circuitry. Her attitude helped, too: wanting to have them, to put them on. I didn’t prolong the contact.

  “Thank you.”

  “I can’t believe you’ve never touched one, Joan-Marc, but then you always were so naive. I can still see you jumping around on the court, that finer version of you. And it’s not that you’ve gotten fat, you’ve hardly put on weight at all. It’s just that no one told you the impression you gave: in class, on the playground, always so far beneath your potential. A wasted boy.”

  I let him get away with all that sissy shit not because the shadow of touching him was still hanging over us, but because the overarching effect of the conversation, the alcohol, the enticing flirtation with the past, and the tug of camaraderie all came together, melting into an unconscious feeling of affectionate well-being: terrifyingly human sympathy. I didn’t want to leave. One more drink and I’d have asked her to dance.

  “It’s late. We’d better stop.”

  She didn’t say “get out,” she didn’t say “leave now.” She got up from the sofa, and the friendliness had vanished under the mask of cold serenity she’d perfected.

  “You’re right. But let’s meet again, Eloise.”

  She helped me on with the coat. She handed me my gloves.

  “I can hear the effort every time you think ‘Eloy’ and end up saying ‘Eloise.’ I can’t stay in contact with you guys. You know, I never liked women as much as I do now that I’m like this. The metamorphosis demands a lot of discipline if you don’t want to break down halfway there. Descarrega is still alive within Larumbe, but I’m not going to let him come back, there’s no going back. This is my normal.”

  “I understand.”

  “No. You couldn’t understand. I appreciate you trying, though. I always thought you were a good person, after all. I’ll walk you out.”

  We went down the stairs. From the ground-floor window the treetops reminded me again of an excited mammal. We must have an organ that still hasn’t been identified, because I sensed in the back of my neck that Eloise had stopped halfway down the stairs.

  “Do you want to smoke? I like to smoke here, if you don’t mind, it relaxes me. I’ve thought of loads of things I’d still like to say to you, how silly. It’s like my mind speeds up when it’s time to say good-bye.”

  “Give me one.”

  “You talk, talk, and talk, only to find you haven’t even gotten started. You know, when I spent two weeks swollen up like I’d been run over by a truck, instead of dreaming of someone who would give me a hand, I thought about basketball. Once I could chew again, I went down to the port to eat rice with lobster and drink half a liter of house wine. Unfortunately it wasn’t such a nice day, but I still took a dip at five o’clock. The water was murky, full of algae and oil, and there were boys swimming, and there was the smell of grilled shrimp and mussels coming from the restaurants. The air gave me goose bumps, little bubbles of skin, and the sun ignited and extinguished scales of light on the sea, like that infinite surface was made up of a flickering swarm of blue butterflies. The idea disgusted me and I got out, water sliding down my new body, every drop hardening the sand it fell on. The boys were sunbathing, playing football, laughing out loud. I would have liked to introduce myself to any one of them—they all eat and sleep and go to work—have him show up all nervous at six to pick me up, and walk around like two friends until it got dark.”

  “I get the idea.”

  “You’d have to see it inside me, now that would be something. But you know, it doesn’t matter how many times they cut you, what they add to you, what they take out, your thoughts are still hidden in the brain, inside the skull, behind the frontal bone. A triple protection.”

  “It’s not such a bad thing. Thoughts don’t tend to be all that pleasant.”

  “In isolation they’re unrepresentative and unfair, sure. But I like to think that if we were to spread them out at the end of a life, and someone were to take the trouble to read them sympathetically, the result would be reassuring. Phobias, aggression…everything more manageable when you place it within a larger whole.”

  I smiled at her. That was my only reply, all I was capable of. I’ve realized that I only know how to talk when I’m on the attack, going full speed, and as soon as my pulse calms I go blank. Eloise waited a second longer, leaning against the wall; it must have weighed her down to walk around with all that on her chest. For a while Helen had to sleep in a kind of harness, and even you had back pain sometimes.

  “I envy the trees. They really know how to grow upward, and they have that system of aging and expanding that moves the earlier filth away from the core. With us it’s different, of course—you know, abandoned years, ones that no longer fit. But even if you let them rot they don’t go away, you’ll always run into people who remember them.”

  She crushed her cigarette gently against the wall. I hadn’t even lit mine, and I put it in my pocket as a kind of souvenir. She tossed me the keys to the front door. We’d passed the ball thousands of times in practice, and I caught them in the air. It was a simple deadbolt lock. Behind the curtain of rain, the massed buildings trembled softly.

  “Can I ask one final question?”

  “I’m not saying a word about my prostate, Joan-Marc.”

  “I assumed the anatomy class was over. It’s about Star Wars. Do you still have any of those figures?”

  “Figures?”

  “Boba Fett, Chewbacca, Lando Calrissian, C-3PO. You had hundreds. In a box shaped like the Millennium Falcon. I was so jealous.”

  “You were jealous of me? Joan-Marc Miró-Puig was jealous, and of me—now that’s funny. No.
None. I don’t even remember where they went, I’m sorry.”

  We kissed each other on the cheek. Her perfume covered any hint of masculine aroma, and it was no more repugnant than any other thing you all spray on yourselves, reminiscent of burned wood, with the trace of cinnamon I grew up associating with Dad. My raincoat was getting soaked. I tried to open the umbrella and I felt her fingernails on my hand. A wall of water blurred the other side of the street.

  “Just stop it with all that age shit; you’re very young.”

  She let go of me slowly, and I followed the street until it opened onto Carretera de Sants, its shopwindows projecting shining brushstrokes over the pavement. Even though you grew up here, I’ve never understood this neighborhood, nor do I understand these good kids who whizz around the streets on their mopeds carrying lunch boxes full of crumbs, their backs weighed down with work and the temptation and the fear of never leaving these streets behind. Nor do I understand all these shoes, toys, hardware shops, shirts, keys, notebooks, and bars where they serve pork shoulder and rice and sandwiches, with all their heaters and air conditioners, the smell of fried food and chemical lemon air freshener. I understand the dog dragging himself along like a drenched mop, and I understand the SEAT and Renault cars that steam impatiently at the traffic lights. But don’t ask me to understand those thin girls who stand on tiptoe to kiss their boyfriends while their mobiles ring in their knockoff handbags; blue screens, sport socks. I was getting hungry, but I didn’t want to get on a bus. The foot traffic urged me to get walking, and I sped my steps toward Plaça de Sants and its trees. There were so many things I didn’t understand as a boy, and I still don’t understand them. My eye has grown wider but it hasn’t learned to let in more light. If you take away the civil demands on me, I’d be the same child, fascinated with the world, learning the names of hundreds of colored, creaking objects around him. Matter strikes me as a good thing and cities are impressive and how can I say a bitter word about the worst moments as long as I get to stick around here?

  An innocent, yes, a dreamer. What else are all these pigeons trying to tell me, swooping over the plaza’s pitiful sand with their racket of beating wings? The dark crowds moving like a finger into the mouth of the metro didn’t help me think, either. I moved away from the plaza, crossed a little island with two peeling benches, skirted a pile of shit—trampled and split like a ripe fruit—and passed a phone booth that looked like a monument to an obsolete technology. I entertained myself comparing the prices of eyeglasses, looking at orthopedic shoes, pricey high heels, sports gear, wooden chairs, cheese sandwiches, and in the window of a bakery I recognized the same Swiss roll with thick cream they used to buy for Pedro and me when we finished practice.

  And I may be innocent, but I’m not such an idiot that I didn’t notice what was cooking between Eloy and Dad. Another Australian clotheshorse? The sudden interest in his cremation? The giggling? The smell of cinnamon? Was it you, Eloy, who sought Pedro out so he could tell you the end of the story, your story with my father? Did you buy her that house, Dad? Did she blackmail you? Did she hang you herself? That would be one explanation, and a good one at that, for your calluses. I’d only have to force the chronology a little. OK, he was a woman now, but he’d played basketball, and you were always a weakling, Dad, a wimp. I was tempted to retrace my steps and interrogate Eloy, but if he had been important to you, how would we make up in the Great Beyond if I overdid things now?

  Why couldn’t you have been like other men and insist ad nauseum that we all go out to eat together: me, my sister, and your new girlfriend, to play at getting along as a new family? Why couldn’t she have been one of those affectionate, common girls who think their situation isn’t respectable unless they can knead their hands into the dough of your past? I can’t speak for my sister (OK, I’m convinced she would have managed to be fantastically rude), but I assure you, Dad (how I miss your voice, Dad), that I would have done my best to skirt around our sentimental mess; I, for one, would have lived up to my reputation: generous, friendly, loyal. A real champ, in the broadest sense of the word. I know loads of jokes for situations like that, I’ve built up a lot of experience with separations. I’m good at it, I know how to break the ice, I’d manage to make everyone feel comfortable. Let’s speak honestly, Dad: Why the secrecy? Was there still a thread of love that tied you to me and to Mother? Did it hurt? You know what I think? That you used us to hurt her. Pleurisy, diabetes, clogged arteries, hypertrophy of the prostate, omnivorous cancers, renal deficiency…long before one of those things does us in, our ridiculous private lives will. Sometimes I have the feeling that no matter what I do, life is impossible. That’s the only lesson to learn, the only one we don’t want to learn.

  I spent what was left of the afternoon taking bites of that log of cream wrapped in fragrant crepe dough, sitting at a table designed for pygmies. When the clouds in the sky parted, there was no longer any light, the pedestrians were moving in a mauve shadow, in their imitation leather jackets, Caramelo coats, and those impossible bomber jackets; many greeted each other as they passed, they looked like they were about to break into song. Pedro would have liked to know that they still made our pastry, but I’ve been avoiding him since the night we went to Sónar; I made the decision while I was fixing him a stomach-settling herbal tea, although ultimately I went instead with some fist-like buds that unfolded into surprisingly colorful petals on contact with the boiling water. I figured they’d do something good for him. I also made two pieces of toast for myself. I put it all on a tray and headed into the living room.

  Pedro was still sleep against the sofa’s armrest, with his knees folded up and his mouth open, his nose whistling like a teapot. When his mother gave him that name I don’t think she thought he’d turn out so big, such an impotent mammal. He’d fallen asleep with the windows closed, and the whole room smelled of him.

  I opened the curtains and raised the blinds. The room was soaked in light. I picked up the coats, straightened the chairs, emptied the glasses, and put away the bottles. Citizens flowed through the street (open kiosks, two bicycles, flowerpots tied down on the terraces): the dense mental foliage of regret, expectation, courage, and timidity writhing around in thousands of heads—what fabulous instruments. I ate a piece of toast. I got out a couple of cloths and dusted the furniture; what would my sister say? I felt the pleasant separation of the folds of my spirit; I made sure the murderous boxes were still in place and I sat down in the armchair to entertain myself with Pedro’s records. I guess I was waiting for him to wake up and restart the conversation, but he went on making faces and emitting noises. I looked for his wallet and took out forty euros, and I covered him with a blanket. I checked the taps and the gas and went around turning out the lights of the museum-house, but since I didn’t want Saw to wake up and think his eyes had been torn out (not everyone knows that blindness is thick and white), I turned on the lamp and left it glowing greenly.

  What advice could I give that poor idiot? I don’t know any painkillers that work against the passing of the years or the many beautiful things that have died, swept away by the current of everyday life: hours and hours of indescribable vulgarity. Nor could I convince him that in general terms, this delicate business of living was going to get any better: age arranges things so the outlook only gets worse and worse. In terms of women…well, there were my marriages and a dozen girlfriends, falling one after another, asphyxiating the beacon of sex. What disaster can compare to the separation of a human couple: wrenching out living nerves implanted in your very heart? Haven’t we had enough? Isn’t this a good moment to turn out the light and say: “OK, that was good, it’s over, this is it, good-bye, good-bye?” I’m just saying that it’s fairly difficult to access sex; it should be simpler to free oneself of desire. Ever since I’ve had rational thought I’ve liked girls, ladies, women—their various incarnations for my changing biological phases. I appreciate their gorgeous design, the way they measure and evaluate each other, that heron-like way
their eyes dilate when they see something shiny, what they can provoke in me using only their hair. I came to think: poor me, poor us, the ones who knew how to treat them. I told myself that I know when to remind them how pretty they are, how to act when they have those crises of confidence so deeply rooted in their hormones. I’ve always found myself willing to shelter them in my arms, to place the powers of my masculinity at their disposal. If it didn’t work out, it’s partly because the ones I found myself with weren’t what I’d been told to expect: no smiling creatures—serene, complicit, silent, and celestial—no humming or baking pies. The women who came and collided with my oh-so-sensitive present have all been complicated and ambitious, subject to shifting moods. If we’ve already played our cards, why don’t we fall into that armchair like lay monks, among crumpled socks and almost clean utensils, in the proud neglect of shared bachelorhood? Was that what Pedro was asking me from the sofa, rolled up like a question mark?

  I’ll tell you, I’ll tell you what the secret is. It seems like a choice but we are gripped by tenderness just as we are by the fingers of excitement that testosterone sends forth from the gonads. If Saw was thinking about retiring it was for reasons of comfort, not out of weakness. It wasn’t because any flame had gone out in him, what rubbish that is. If there’s anything that doesn’t degenerate in this ruin of flesh, it’s the old mass of muscles stuck in the middle of the body. We can go gray, we can get tired, the walls of our lungs can dry out, our retinas can separate and our veins clog up, and there’s no way to keep the joints from hardening; cancerous blooms can flower, and maybe they slice out your prostate and anal tissues and reduce your manhood to the dimensions of early infancy; they can cut open your skin, flesh, and fat, make their way through the sternum with a surgical saw among clouds of bony dust to patch, numb, or restart the heart with electrical stimuli; as long as the thing goes on beating, you’re not going to stop it. That stubborn and muddled organ will go on pumping oxygenated blood until the day it dries out, shiny with symbolic functions, lighting cerebral pathways with the electricity of infatuation. The flesh rusts and wears out, but love is part of consciousness, it’s our species’ vocation, it’s going to shake us till the end.