Divorce Is in the Air: A Novel (44 page)

I stumbled (quite literally) upon the new port. Clothes were hanging like bags of saline from the Barceloneta balconies. The kiosks and the shops were closed and you could mistake the sea’s edge for an abandoned pier. Until I reached the bars and restaurants, the night seemed made of dark atoms, not a speck of light. I was too drunk to recognize the constellations, and the stars seemed scattered by a careless hand. I finished my newest gin and tonic with a manly gulp and went to another bar, a terrace two or three meters above the sea’s wet bulk; the music wasn’t exactly Frank Sinatra. I just think a person should be able to dunk his heart into a vivifying liquid to hydrate its walls and arteries, and once it’s absorbed enough of the substance, we’d fit it back into place, and it could regenerate the body’s old tissues with new blood. The lights from the nightclubs traced harsh strokes over the dark area where the sea must have been heaving. An enormous German went by with a dog that stopped two meters from my table to scratch its ears. The names of animals are dark and there’s hardly anything beneath them. They can’t be other than what they are.

I heard the keening of a siren; at that hour, with the alcohol churning in my stomach and saturating the spongy tissues of my liver, my stomach and pancreas, the stroboscopic lights of the ambulances and police vans were frightening, like the first signs of an alien invasion. The night is a sentinel, was my rough impression, but its eye is imperturbable, and no one worries about tying up what is unleashed, or holding back what is set loose. Then I shook my glass to watch the liquid swirl, and I saw my mother again in the apartment she’d sold behind my back. And this time it occurred to me that every one of us is constantly broadcasting ghostly programs in his radio-brain, millions of shows for a single, exclusive listener, interminable nocturnal samplings with which we debate, shock, deform, accuse, and deflect our little patch of the shared world. So tell me, how are we to come to an agreement about the right recovery for everyone? How do we find the frequency where all those confused, discrete stories traveling along separate rails can crystallize into a vision that benefits all who matter, without leaving a single one outside the mystical circle of benevolence? You don’t know, of course, no one does. But I think that is how we’re living, driven by a dark inertia to separate from each other, and no one can renew anything. What is past is broken, what is broken can never be put back together.

The music (“
De pequeñita yo soñe
…As a girl I dreamed/love was a good thing/and it was all a lie”) was making me feel sentimental (“everything’s casual for you/thrill-seeker”). I raised my hand, intending to order the gin and tonic that would floor me once and for all, when the firmament exploded in fireworks that unfurled yellow, green, and blue palm trees in space. I heard a stabbing in my heart, the deep voice of the sea. I had to stand up because—among other shameful reasons—somewhere you are alive and you’re breathing, even if you’re sleeping now, and that is good.

The sea roiled in the moonlight, and across its body flashed lashes of color that faded quickly away; they looked like electrical spasms shivering in a brain, traces of thoughts. The world moved around me in slow spirals, and no one could convince me that what lay on the other side of that wet skin was just a pit infested with chemical algae and poison salt, that it wasn’t a friendly dimension beckoning me toward a past in harmony with all my fickle, shifting desires. And as I leaned toward those waters that were almost baptismal, that could cleanse me of all my roots, dirt, and worn-out veins, I thought how the wave spreading out from impact will reach you wherever you are, open your eyes, and compel you to partake in a renewal so urgent that it calls upon our very civil responsibility to propagate it. Because you tell me, my love (let me call you that one last time before I sink): if all you women go crazy, who will be left to take care of us?

A Note About the Author

Gonzalo Torné is the author of two previous novels published in Spain, for which he won the Premio Jaén de Novela and was a finalist for the Premio Nacional de Narrativa. He has also translated work by William Wordsworth and John Ashbery into Spanish. He lives in Barcelona.

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