Divorce Is in the Air: A Novel (7 page)

Thinking about Helen helped me get over my state of prostrate self-indulgence. Only a fool like her would ever decide to attempt a reconciliation in that storehouse for old fossils weighted down by arthritis, paresis, hearing aids, and the metal scars of pacemakers stuck into the flesh of their hearts. First wives are not the best topic of conjugal conversation, and you were a bit naive when I first met you, so we didn’t talk about Helen much. Though I must admit it was delightful to have my two ribs together in the same scene on the stage of my imagination—one of the tricks that makes having the thing worthwhile.

And at first glance, you wouldn’t have thought Helen held many secrets: a stupendous blonde, predictable as an innocent joke. You got more of a sense of her ambition with every breath she took…people are so blank at first, and they conform so well to our stereotypes…Of course, you can take even the dullest person around, stir her up with your words, and before long you’ll see rising to the surface all kinds of feelings and ideas that flow from her unique blend of interests, and you’d never have known they were there. There’s a private universe in every single vessel of flesh taking up its space on sidewalks, in chairs, on buses. Billions of brains pumping all kinds of mental matter. Nature overdid it with us—we’re a real waste of resources.

One of those brains was atop my shoulders twenty years ago as I went walking in Madrid. It was spring, and I went into a fruit shop with a craving to sink my teeth into the sweet pulp of a peach—and there you have the kind of boy I used to be. I’d received my master’s diploma in the mail, and I’d hung it beside my degree in management and business administration; I’d just bought myself a TAG Heuer with a round black face. Although I wasn’t the ambitious type, it wouldn’t be totally inaccurate to say I was in Madrid for work, only it wasn’t the kind of job that involves alarm clocks, metros, and salaries, or coming home at the end of the day with a brain turned to mush. I’d heard tales of that fantastic world, and my family had all concurred it wasn’t for me. My job involved meeting with Dad’s veteran clients: during lunches I wore a listening face, and if they asked me any questions, I replied that I’d rather understand the ins and outs of the business before making any decisions—they really liked that phrase. They introduced me to their kids and I met new people every night. We could spend two hundred euros on a single dinner—hell, on one bottle of wine. I let myself be carried along; I had no intention of letting Dad’s “business” embitter me; I was in Madrid at the end of May, my favorite city at the prettiest time of year.

They welcomed me into a circuit of house parties and we went out every night. I pretended to understand the in-jokes, the obscure allusions. In every little group we tossed around a set of names that it felt good to criticize, accuse, and belittle. People would collapse from boredom if we couldn’t bitch about those who aren’t here.

We’d stay seated until dessert, then drink coffee and digestifs standing up, in shirtsleeves, mingling freely in the space that yawned between the balcony and the terrace. The nights were starting to grow warm, and the parties were held with the windows open to the noise from the street: fragments of conversation, wafting laughter, improvised songs that filled the room with a sense of rushed delight. The little groups traded members, and it was always strange to see the moment when the various cliques melted together in a jolly wave that washed over the whole room before subsiding.

Vicente’s apartment wasn’t up to the standard of Rétiz’s or Álvarez del Valle’s, but since his father’s widow traveled all the time, we convinced ourselves that the relative restrictions on space forced us to be more selective. Plus, Vicente was the kind who would work for it; that evening he’d covered his floor with a felt cloth, and in every corner stood a candelabra giving off a spicy aroma—incense or sandalwood—that almost concealed the impregnated nicotine. I assumed it was another vintage party, which were all the rage then. We were like a generation gone astray, puzzled by our own era; unable to give it a recognizable iconography, we flirted instead with decades past. Still, I was thrown by the gigantic pillows and the little Buddha statues. Vicente cleared it up with one of his unctuous phrases:

“It’s an ethnic party.”

Every night, after the girls and the more sporadic guests went home to sleep, we’d have a coda to the party: we cleaned up plates and glasses, straightened the lamps, we conjured spells against hangovers with cold water and amphetamines that we ventured down to the street to buy. It was all very “hail fellow well met”; when you have a comfortable couch and the caress of well-tailored clothes, it’s hard to convince yourself of life’s seriousness. It was too distant, off in a place I never planned to go, one not made for Vicente or for me: after all, someone had to benefit from our fathers’ efforts.

In a way those were still university parties (Vicente hadn’t quite finished), and names of students figured on the lists of possible invitees. So I suppose I heard about Helen before I ever saw her—something about the way she shook her mass of blonde hair when she laughed, her peculiar pronunciation, and her scandalous way of looking a person up and down. Her gaze didn’t creep along over skin and cloth like the eyes of those little English spiders. No, Helen’s pupils slurped down the world in gulps. She’d come to Spain on an athletic scholarship—hurdles, long jump, something like that. Imagine the kind of details that get tacked on when you add alcohol to intoxication: you let rip, box people up in a comic, improvised profile; no one is so respectable you can’t cut them down with words.

So I guess we invited her because we liked her way of savoring Spanish words and the way her pallid freckles danced when her expression changed; because she had caught my friends’ attention and now they wanted to talk to her far from the cafeteria and classrooms, in a territory foreign to Helen and familiar to them. Thanks to an annoying back sprain I got as I was leaving a dull meeting with Passgard, I missed the first evening that Helen spent among us. Vicente had told me about how she’d been unable to respect people’s personal space, but no one prepared me for the uninhibited relationship she had with her prizewinning anatomy, an ease on display every time she went for a canapé or another glass. In a country full of boys and girls defined by habits of expressive restraint (we were eager to get naked but didn’t know where to start), Helen could only astonish us.

When I imagine those parties where the furniture fades into the background, I see myself standing among people whose names and features blur together. Entire hours have vanished, and what a bore it would be if we ever had to relive the past in real time. But Helen was sure she had seen me one night while I was holding court, seated like a Chinese emperor (an odd association) and attended by two beautiful girls (she herself was feeling ugly that day), sipping my gin haughtily, my sunglasses still on (it was cool then not to take them off inside). She didn’t even notice the ironed handkerchief I’d tucked into my breast pocket (in imitation of and homage to Dad), nor the toasty shade of my jacket, nor the waves drawn in the cloth of my white shirt with a very fine blue thread—sartorial details I’d calculated with the meticulousness of a nightingale choosing branches, leaves, and plants for its nest: mating rituals.

So I guess she was already thinking about me when she leaned against the upright piano as if it were the arm of a couch, and I guess her defiant smile was meant for me. I caught her turning her head several times—she seemed fascinated by her image in the mirror. She was having one of those evenings (later I learned to recognize them by the vibration of the air around her) when she felt comfortable in her skin, when the contours of her body coincided with her spirit’s intentions. She seemed to harbor a patient fury—a girl with a mind boiling furiously. If she looked so relaxed it was because she’d granted herself some time to calculate what her ambitions were worth, and where she should channel the energy she generated with those healthy young thighs. She was after someone who would help her propel her life forward, and judging from the way she looked at the light striking the folds of my jacket, she was reaching a conclusion. That’s why she exhaled the smoke so slowly (enough that she thought she did it slowly); that’s why those dark corpuscles in the blue of her irises were set in motion. It was something subtler and less intuitive than rating my attractiveness—she was trying to see herself through my body, catch a glimpse of what her future would be like if she were to mingle it with mine.

She emitted a sharper frequency than the other Madrid friends Vicente had invited. Together they composed a fuzzy and fanciful scene: figurines, fairies, and elves, ornamental effigies on a frame within which Helen swayed to the beat of the cloying music, full of that otherworldly American self-sufficiency. I can still see her moving among the minor players like a squirrel scampering among branches. I can see her now, holding her glass and wearing an aquamarine dress that was probably only green. I see her leaning with that torsion of the hips that is so her, as if propping her buttock atop her thigh….Now she’s wearing a dress the color of acorns, saffron, and beeswax. But no, I haven’t bought her that dress yet, we still haven’t even been introduced.

We had a conversation, but the sentences we used were important not for their semantic value but for the part they played in the attack strategy I’d established before ever opening my mouth: I wanted to leave with that girl. I went to look for her coat (an unbearable combination of stripes and plaid) and I said good-bye to Vicente, host and eternal geography student. He’d papered the living room wall with an enormous, detailed map of the mountains surrounding Madrid, the topography like isobars on weather charts. When I see Helen’s figure against that background, my imagination, falling victim to the euphoria and ambiguity of the picture, will always think of that modest map as a hyperrealist painting of brain circuits. Glass in hand, Helen looked like an idea formed by the nervous stimuli of those neurons. She looked taller than she was (that was the only day I ever saw her without having taken a tactile measure of her body), and so young she had only to reach out her arm to effortlessly touch the end of her adolescence. And why not admit it: standing there, holding both of our coats, I felt a fearful hand grip my throat. I was afraid I wouldn’t be alive enough for her.

I ruled out taking her to my apartment, so things went a step or two down toward more sordid settings. To make up for it I spared her public transportation, which was how she usually got around. We hailed a cab and headed off toward a house in Delicias where they rented rooms by the hour. It was two in the morning, and La Castellana was still humming. I remember how the car’s shocks were so worn out that the undercarriage scraped against the damp pavement, I remember all those fences Madrid has around gardens, houses, offices, banks—the vegetation of a secret city—and I remember I was ashamed to take her into a rathole where the same play had been performed by different actors over a good ten years. I diverted the taxi toward a decent hotel.

The same play! I had no idea back then about the diversity of sexual appetites, the violence and the good they can do you. I was only a child, and though I passed myself off as an expert I wasn’t at the level of my peers, who had scrawled their first lusty paragraphs on the blank pages of prostitutes’ bodies. I only had to imagine that mechanical touch, the professional who kept one eye on the clock and added up the bill, to know that brothels weren’t for me. My sexual history was dominated by mutual nervousness and occasional girlfriends. Now I was going to face my first American girl with only a few basic tricks (I knew about the sensitive zones of the neck, the ears; I wasn’t sure if that one girl’s armpits had just been a personal preference). It hadn’t been even three years since I’d discovered the benefits of caressing the inner thighs and the vulva, of summoning between her lips with my middle finger the dampness so crucial to coaxing out her retractive organ—my great ally in that labyrinth of folds. If Helen let me—her attitude wasn’t like other girls’, with whose modesty I had to negotiate every elastic band—I was pretty sure the trick would work. It was a physical reflex, like closing your eyes when someone threatens to throw something in your face. Though I must say, if I thought about it much, natural lubrication still provoked discomfort, admiration, and a bit of apprehension in me. When I opened the taxi door for Helen, she managed to step onto the curb wrapped in an aura of innocence, as if that night we’d do no more than embrace.

The moon looked like a newly crystallized liquid. Helen was lively from the wine and the dancing and the fresh air, and she didn’t stay still for a second while I was checking in. Under the elevator’s light I had the thought that the cross formed by her septum and cheekbones was the skeleton of an unformed soul. Within Helen flowed all sorts of contradictory, intense emotions. Her turbulence didn’t repel me in the least, I didn’t kid myself about that. From her very first kiss (avid, ferocious, American) I knew I preferred her to a fully formed woman with clear and fixed ideas. It’s good when you find a simpler person, one whose entire story you can contain in a telling, and experience, for once, the power of the storyteller.

Helen didn’t complain about the dim bathroom or the paint peeling from the ceiling. If the smell of disinfectant bothered her, she kept it to herself. Like those little animals that focus the spotlight of their vision on a shiny object, she was fascinated by the rectangular shape of the bed, as if the sheets were emanating an inviting air. But she was so confident inside that body straining against the fabric of her jeans (who knows where that dress went?), there was really no confusing her with some little wallaby or wildcat—she was no shy creature.

She dropped backward onto the mattress, and the creak of the springs made the muscles in my back tense up. She laughed, she was laughing and her marvelous laughter filled that hovel to the brim, and she let me undress her and we fell upon each other, fascinated by the provocative design of our flesh, the indentations so wisely placed, the warm openings. It was like spreading out enormous wings that swept away the habits of everyday thought, all the coldness and distrust. I don’t remember the sequence of events or any details, but I know that at some point I summoned up my courage and it was as if my glans were searching for something in Helen’s mouth; she pushed me away with open palms and we fell laughing onto the sheets. The pupils of the girl who would be my first wife were moving under a watery film. I embraced her, trembling at the intuition that we were on the brink of something, only we didn’t know what. The path lay hidden by a whimsical orography, and we laughed because we felt complicit enough to travel it together.