Divorce Is in the Air: A Novel (9 page)

But when I tried to reason with her, Helen went off to hide in a corner. My arguments drove her away as if I’d thrown a bucket of boiling water over her. I thought she would come around, you see, but she didn’t. The invisible molecules of machismo in the air I breathed had me convinced that three out of every four girls (give or take) moved through the world like fog, dampening things but never touching them, never taking charge. I was convinced they didn’t have words that stemmed from solid beliefs, and that they simply went along with the shifting moods of the moment. I wasn’t prepared for the woman I was living with to refuse to comply when it came to important decisions. This wasn’t about what color we were going to paint the walls or whether we should assemble the bed in this room or in the goddamn hallway. This was about where we were going to settle down, in which streets: whether we would stay in Madrid where I could call in favors and stall until my prospects improved, or whether we would move to a city where the word “problems” would swell up and fill my mouth again with its vile taste. I had little experience with people who really mattered to me, people who, for the sake of economy—or hygiene!—or just to keep from jumping out the window, we find ourselves obliged to presume are sane. What I mean is that this was crucial, and even though Helen didn’t know what she was talking about, I threw in the towel, I gave in, I bent right over. And worst of all is that I didn’t even kid myself, I knew no good would come of it, I had to put my foot down and I didn’t, that’s all there is to it. That neck I could have wrung with my bare hands was propping up a head full of crazy ideas about Europe, but we were going to live according to its rules. Now
that
was cause for alarm.

We boarded the plane, and my worries were swept away by that cloud-soaked sky. I’ve never been afraid of heights; I love to look out the window and see roads crossing the land while the distance rearranges the far-off horizon. I well knew the terrain beneath us on that journey: the grass-covered stands of an open-air basketball court, the slopes of rosy mud, and the forest of oaks with their treetops full of birds that took flight, frightened by the plane’s sound. That trip I noticed the concrete ovens of a power station, and a dry area where bulldozers’ teeth had broken the earth into clumps. Helen hung from my arm, and I smelled the minty scent of the candy she was sucking on, soaked in sweet saliva. The same saliva that, when she kissed me, so intoxicated me I thought I could see the ants moving in the open furrows of the ground below. Then we flew over a swampy river formed by several streams converging, and it was exciting to watch as the channel swelled and invaded the green expanse of the plain, dotted with yellow, blue, and ochre flowers.

The afternoon sun was starting to wane by the time we reached the ocean. Helen’s elation was contagious. She pointed at the speedboats floating on the monotonous blue, and we flew over wild coves, far from any apartments, gray piers, or artificial beaches. The coast regained its old frontier power: the end of the road for men of dry land. Before discovering latitude, throughout all those numberless centuries, the ocean routes were invisible, unknowable. Who among our great-grandparents could ever have imagined we would make our way into the skies? I’m sorry that I’ll miss out on interstellar tourism. Just imagine having a drink while you watch the Earth shrink into a vivid blue ball suspended in profound blackness, all that life protected by a flimsy film of atmosphere.

Since it was a clear day, I could point out to Helen the bulge of the coastal mountains rising like a limestone dream. We left behind little villages ensconced in the foothills, broad industrial belts, desert polygons, suburbs that spread like gray stains, and by seven o’clock I was pointing out the Torre Mapfre skyscraper that shone as clean as porcelain above the beige expanse of sand. I explained the grid-like layout of the Eixample, its cubic blocks, I named the thick furrow where the traffic flowed so slowly that each car’s flash of sunlight was visible; it reminded Helen of a water snake’s scales. She had her face pressed so hard against the window it wouldn’t have surprised me if the glass melded to her shape: her skin was hot, her lips damp, the love we gave off bathed the city in a welcoming light. Some days earlier, I’d been reading about the labyrinth of sewers and water lines that extended beneath the pavement and the pedestrians’ footsteps, like an inverse city designed for rats. Of course, I didn’t mention all that to Helen; after all, we’d be living aboveground.

We were going to settle in Muntaner, between Via Augusta and Mitre, the area newcomers considered to be the rich neighborhood—a place that always smells like flowers, something like that. We were living up a hill on a street with four dirty lanes, like a filthy highway. It wasn’t even an apartment, although it had its charm. It was a kind of guard tower, seventy square meters, which the developer had built on the roof to live in while he completed the facade and applied the finishing touches, and they’d forgotten to tear it down when they were done. Two rooms, a kitchen, and a bathroom with a door that didn’t close properly. Parquet floors, low ceilings, and a half-finished round plaster molding adorning the center of the bedroom ceiling like a coin corroded by acid. My father had ended up with the place in some business deal, and he’d arranged to keep the other neighbors from using their keys to the roof, in the middle of which the Turret reared up. Helen and I came to consider it our most prized possession.

The Turret enchanted Helen. She spent the first week scrubbing the roof tiles, using putty to fill in the baseboard that had come away from the wall in the humidity, scrubbing the hard-to-reach places with a wet toothbrush and scraping off the dirty paint, all while wearing white sweatpants and a handkerchief on her head. Ten years later, you told me that was called a bandanna.

Our electricity went off all the time, and we had fun lighting matches that left behind the smell of wood and traces of herbs that we couldn’t name in the other’s language: I knew a good amount of hers, and she knew some Spanish words that she placed haphazardly within a sketchy syntax. In between yawned a dark mass of objects not blessed with a name we both knew. Every night we emptied one or two bottles of white wine, sitting barefoot on the floor. She brought home chocolates, cheese, dried fruits, and nuts, and we’d put on soft music: compilations of romantic songs, the Italian singers in style then, I don’t remember their names. We let the conversation meander, we didn’t care where. She asked me about the humidity, whether it would really be cold in February, about the sights I would take her to see. She told me about the enchanting solitude of the long-jump pit, when the natural light drained away and she was focused only on the battle between her lower body and the sand, between the jump and the air. When the conversation grew sluggish, instead of listening to her, I would look at the dimples in her thighs, the awkward movements of her hands, her left earlobe that was a bit stubbier than the other: minute bodily flaws. My eyes would flit to them and I’d feel a shiver of tenderness. Gusts of salty air reached us through the windows; the sterile smells of a stuffy house and drying paint had been overcome by the scent of our clothes, the leather of our shoes, and the quince that I cut in half and left to ripen in the wardrobe. If she was wearing the green dress, her beautiful sweat drew dark circles under her armpits and at her inner thighs, looking like signs pointing to my destination. When it was too hot we went out to the terrace. We enjoyed watching the buses maneuver as they turned into a shadowy alley, narrow like a blind canal. Helen would bite her lip, and her skin shone under the industrial lamp that my father or the builder had tied to a post. I walked around in shirtsleeves—one of those exquisitely tailored shirts that didn’t survive our last move. It caressed the skin of my arms, the silky down I had back then. I could find no fault with my body, and I was more than satisfied with Helen’s.

From our perch, the city spilled out in all directions. She conceded it didn’t have the majestic charm of Paris (a city she’d never set foot in), but every night she enthused about a different mysterious corner: old reservoirs, packs of cats, improvised parties, and the hotel pools that at that hour look like unfurled sheets of blue light. I left her humming along with the notes coming from the stereo and went inside to top up our drinks. From that height, the great avenue of Diagonal stretched out like an unreal asphalt river. The night air, the sappy music, the glinting ice and the sweet effects of alcohol melted into a feeling of near-complete well-being. The windows of the buildings around us showed slices of intimate lives: living rooms, dining rooms, libraries, bedrooms, and other less straightforward backdrops. It was beautiful to watch them light up and go black as if obeying some secret pattern, an art exhibition where the paintings floated in the liquid dark of the air. It was exciting just to exist there among all those living beings, to think that we were made to take each other by the hand, to fantasize about flying off over the rooftops.

And when we went into the Turret and closed the door, I fucked Helen’s tipsy body with the combination of aggression, tenderness, and resolve of our first months together; and she would challenge me with her eyes, with unexpected positions, with whatever demands occurred to her, articulated in an improvised mix of Spanish and English. When we had to stop because we were laughing so hard, when I felt my dick engorged in her hand, I understood how wonderful it is to have someone to play with, to listen to, with whom you share an intimate space where you can talk without fear or hurry, until your characters reveal themselves completely. It wasn’t just her lack of inhibition as she displayed lips of pomegranate skin turned inside out, or how much she enjoyed having a young cunt with all of life ahead of it. It was also the way she maneuvered in the kitchen and the dining room, the pleasure with which she set her stubby little fingers to fixing domestic imperfections. My senses told me—and I believed them—that I had something to offer her in exchange for all that stimulation I slurped down greedily, feeding my confidence in my own social potential: I thought I could offer her a world to embrace.

“I want to see everything, take me to see it all.”

I took her for walks down the Rambla Catalunya, I took her to see the city from the top of Tibidabo, we strolled along the lookouts of Vallvidrera, we chased each other in the Parc del Laberint, and I led her into the damp Barrio Gòtic. If I resisted the Golondrinas boat rides, I more than made up for it with a guided tour of the modernist buildings of the Eixample, snapping photos of her in front of the Greek revivalist temple on Bailén. The factory chimneys surrounded by quaint plazas made her burst out laughing. Europe! So cozy and elegant, so many spaces planned down to the last detail, thought out over centuries. Twenty, at least.

“Take me to see all the important stuff, John. I studied art for a whole semester in college. I only missed class to go to track practice.”

She lingered in front of the worst paintings, commenting loudly (what a hard time Dad would have had getting used to a daughter-in-law who bellowed like that). She felt sorry for Nonell’s gypsies, and of the whole Fundació Miró the only thing that interested her was the sculpture garden; we spent a lovely afternoon there while she sipped from a can of Pepsi, bathed in a sensuous, impressionistic light. She told me that, as a little girl, she used to play at imagining how her boyfriends—she knew she wanted more than one—would smell, and that she’d never dreamed of a scent as delicate as mine. She also told me that she used to get down on her knees to pray every night to be spared the curse of a flat chest. Helen was wearing a white skirt that day, and I heard in her words the melody of the life left behind when you’re uprooted and moved to a new climate—she was a flower bed it was my responsibility to tend. We left the garden and went down a wide flight of stairs surrounded by dense red flowers that recalled a Mozarabic fantasy. Helen went ahead to stand in front of a Diana made of dirty stone, carved gracelessly; she started to scrutinize it as if she’d discovered a jewel that had been lost for centuries. The port air’s polluted damp had curled the ends of her hair. She wasn’t going to gain anything of aesthetic value from her contemplation, but her gracefulness when she concentrated fully on something was so delightful I didn’t hurry us on.

We had fights, I won’t deny it. We had our problems, but show me any young couple that doesn’t go through rough patches. When I got together with you I was already an old warhorse (innocence is gone so soon), but the boy who went to live with Helen was a mere pony, and fighting was a healthy and cheap way to get rid of our excess energy. We often clashed over condoms, and for some weeks she was even in favor of birth control pills, as if she wanted to try her luck smearing her insides with my sperm. Then she read in some women’s magazine about how my behavior was that of a selfish macho incapable of planning our sex life, unable to control myself every time the blood rushed to my balls. Of course I couldn’t contain myself! Of course I devoured her every time my appetite overflowed! That was what Helen expected, that’s why she had tied herself to me, and woe betide us if I ever stopped. The thing with condoms wasn’t just stubbornness, and it’s not just about the sensation, or the shape or even the smell of that repulsive latex. After decades of training as an adult copulator, I can definitively state that the technique of putting them on is beyond me. It’s for another branch of mankind to figure out. I’m convinced that men who can do it have, I don’t know, a retractable sixth finger, or the evolved dexterity of a second thumb. I had no intention of cultivating that skill: I was comfortable in my evolutionary niche.

Now I see clearly that I should have been more understanding. Helen was afraid that the pills would age her, that they would ruin her skin; she was afraid she would develop bags under her eyes and rolls around her stomach. She was extremely sensitive to aging—one gray hair could spoil her entire day. Watching her on her birthday was quite something: She’d skulk around the cake as if it were topped with an obscenity, a personal insult, rather than inoffensive candles dripping wax over scorched icing. She’d asphyxiate the candles in one breath and then leave; I’d have to cajole her, pry her from her bed with encouragement and a firm hand, just to get her back to the party. It was useless to tell her that I’d still find her attractive when all her hair was gray, her face wizened, her fingernails gnarled; her love of youth was stronger than her love for me. Or maybe she was resolved not to believe a word I said as long as I was in thrall to a youthful, fresh body. I’d often find her scrutinizing her legs in search of dead skin or a broken blood vessel, hunting for the floss of a white hair, or testing the firmness of her breasts (whose inevitable fall from splendor was going to be a sight only an idiot would miss out on). And if she caught me watching her out of the corner of my eye, she would rain insults upon me, as if I hadn’t seen her much more naked and in more compromisingly acrobatic positions, or as if those grooming sessions were so private they resurrected the barrier of modesty between us that had crumbled months before. The girl was very touchy about her looks; she was beset by ghosts from the future come to warn her about her decline. And now that worse paranoias have started to nest in my mind at the same rate as the plaque blocking up my arteries, I can sympathize with her: she’d been good; getting old (getting old!) was something that happened to other people, people who had done something to deserve that state. It never even crossed her mind that we might celebrate her youth while it was alive.