Divorce Is in the Air (44 page)

How's it going, Helen? I imagine you as an old woman because I'm afraid of going out to find you in the real world, where you haven't yet turned fifty. You're out there, doing your thing, whatever it is, and sometimes you'll listen to and other times you'll tune out the little voice that now and then talks to you about me. Over the years I've thought I caught your reflection in the window of the metro, in a puddle, in the treetops on summer nights. I hear certain words intoned in your voice (
soirée
,
globo
,
váyaste
,
Daddy
), and if something brushes against the sleeve of my jacket, almost two decades can be erased in a second. If I'm lucky, one of my hands touches you again in the Turret, above the roofs scattered out in the distance, while Daddy digs the cold grave of our separation.

I'm doing fine, abandoned, with too much sugar in my blood and some ridiculously low social security payments. I might look pathetic, but I'll have you know I'm not done for yet. It's just that it isn't the way of the world for plans to unfold neatly, from the trembling idea all the way through to completion. It's just that the agenda included bucketfuls of strife and weekly infusions of chaos. It's just that I've only been playing at being the tough guy, Freckles; I said good-bye to all my friends, I married a woman you wouldn't have liked, one we would have laughed at together under the sheets. I've treated my past as if my soul were a road covered in dry dust, but tonight, maybe because of the alcohol or the closeness of the sea, I feel like the earth is starting to open in wet channels and streams, and before long I'll be gushing nostalgia. So let me celebrate your vitality, your naiveté, your cunning, your stupid opinions, the complicity with which you lifted a tit for me to suck on with all the force I had in the vain hope of making your body into a geyser, the malice with which you calculated my future weight, your keen gaze over the realm of the small that you couldn't make the most of, because your head got loaded down with demands that were too much for you, because even though they've told me stories, and even though each is worse than the one before, when I was at your side I thought that because I was young and in love I could escape unscathed. And if you'll allow me to be extravagant like in the old days, I will tell you now that today is the first day of the rest of my life. It's been hard for me to get used to the idea that we move through existence shifting everything around, but this twilight is sharpening everything that's happened recently. I want to grow as old as I can, old until my eyelids and ears fall off. If I survive this night, Freckles, I'll make old age my new vocation.

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?

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.