Divorce Is in the Air (35 page)

I know they scorched the animal to get rid of its stiff hair. I know that once it was hot they pulled off its hooves. I know they cleaned it using cork. I know they pulled out its guts and organs. I know they cut it from top to bottom along the spinal column, that they left it hanging for the white and bloody meat to cure, that they extracted its ribs, its backbone, and its loins, which they cut up into strips of meat. And I know that among the entrails floating in a bucket of ice water, I saw the pig's heart. It was the same color of concentrated blood as the raw kidneys that I've never again put in my mouth, but triple the size of the little rabbit hearts you could break out of their membrane with your fingers and toss in the bin.

Two months later, I got onto a bus, my knees grass-stained and the ball hidden away in a backpack. I got off a little before the last stop and I left the ball in an empty field the neighbors used for parking, where garbage rotted and cottony rounds woven of vegetation and dust rolled by, looking like desiccated animal carcasses. I felt lighter on the way back. Every time I'd stumbled over that garnet-colored ball, I'd imagined the enormous, beating organ stuck in the middle of the hog's hulking body: a muscular pump designed to distribute blood to its extremities, to its pig organs, to its glands.

I stood there admiring that knot of fibers in the bucket. If no one did anything, it would start to dry out in a few hours. And who was going to take the time to keep it moist? I went closer to the window; floating particles were turning the water murky. Living bodies are strange inside, they have galleries, caves, arches, and domes. They're wet. Even if they let me take the pieces out of the bucket, I couldn't put them back together; no matter how hard you concentrate in class, living things can't be reassembled once they're broken. I know my attention was caught by the fine and firm veins of fat, which struck me then as a frame to support the maroon pulp. Years have passed, and I've come to think of them as the marks that a lifetime of lashes had opened in the flesh.

So, as I was saying, I climbed the hotel stairs briskly, convinced I was about to untangle an annoying knot so that life could unfurl once and for all toward my authentic future: the easy life. I opened the door with a kick (I thought the surprise would work in my favor), and I found Helen kneeling on the floor with her face painted vermilion. She'd used the same thick, organic red to draw on the wall the outline she used to represent her Daddy (her fingerprints were stamped where the line curved to change direction). Sure, I saw the stains on the floor; it was just that I wondered at first where that maniac had gotten hold of paint—maybe they'd given her a bottle of ketchup in the kitchen? It was just that the window was open and a fresh, pleasant breeze was blowing in; it was just that it took me a few seconds to orient my brain in the correct, delirious, abject direction: her own body had supplied the paint, she'd extracted it from inside herself.

I had to concentrate on curbing the oily, nauseating taste that made me shudder as it traced a rising arc up my esophagus. I leaned against the wall to let the shudders of disgust pass. Helen was still kneeling on the floor, invoking in her little voice forces that weren't going to save us, her face smeared with menstrual blood: a magic philter to retain the lover whose back she'd broken.

“What are you doing? What do you think you're doing?”

“Shut up, get out of here, you couldn't begin to understand. This is too personal and spiritual for an animal like you, you're just a collection of missing pieces.”

And if you stop to think about it, blood is already pretty mysterious in itself. There you have it, spinning through your veins, irrigating organs and tissues, drenching them in vitamins and iron; you find it in birds, you won't believe how fish bleed, even those shitty little insects less than a centimeter long have their drop to defend; a baby is born covered in blood, and it is blood that congeals in the arteries of corpses. It's a vital juice we pass on, generation after generation, a scarlet thread that traces the figure of life inside the body. You could write a good book with an idea like that. We'd watched the video together, eating popcorn, entwined on the sofa (how you would disapprove of the new domestic habits, Dad) while on the screen Jovanotti spouted off about how women were creatures who bled, and men trained them to be ashamed of their cycles, their processes, their phases, their…well, you can add any idiotic word you like, take your pick. And, unperturbed by so much crudeness, he added that with the nutrients of fecundation that went unused every month any woman could put right broken relationships, or get rid of traumas so deeply rooted they can't be torn out without irreparable harm. Naturally, my reaction was to laugh in that fraud's face, and because I heard her laughing I thought Helen was following my lead. But it seems her feet were dragging her in the direction of magical, fantastical thinking, toward the marvelous catalogue of easy answers: spells and charms.

“I don't think we came here for these demented tricks. I, for one, came because I believed in us. I still believed. I came for love.”

She replied with some whistling noises; I suppose the ritual continued apace. And at this point it's sorely tempting to put Helen in a clinical category and expel her from the ranks of the sane. It wouldn't be the first time—her silky buttocks had experienced being kicked. But it isn't that easy, of course. If you counted all the men who knock on wood, and girls who leave the house carrying magic stones, convinced that the future leaves signs etched into the constellations, you'd come up with a seven-digit number, and I refuse to believe that those millions are all cuckoo. This huge, intricate machine we're hurled into and expected to find our way in is too confusing, stubborn, and volatile to interpret with scientifically approved theories or ideas handed down to us by our parents; it does us all good to wield a daring hypothesis or two. Personally, I believe in sympathetic telepathy and in vitamin C's influence on love. Helen's concoction was lower quality; it included more irrational bullshit than mine did, that was all. I'm just saying that Helen hadn't come up with her bloody ritual in an injured area of her brain; Jovanotti had whispered it to her via the prestigious channels of public radio and private television. Helen was only a silly creature trying to do things right. How could I hold that against her?

“Touch me and I'll kill you.”

I hadn't moved with any intention of touching her, but that warning acted as a map of where to channel the indignation burning my hands. I grabbed her arms and dragged her to the bathroom, leaving her sprawled while I adjusted the water in the shower. When I pulled off her shirt she started to struggle, but without conviction, as if she wanted neither to surrender nor conquer, as if my violence were the force she'd been trying to invoke all along. I stuck her face under the water and cleaned her lips and teeth and her armpits and belly, I lathered her all over. The drain wasn't working well, and I saw a pinkish substance swirling, the color of guts, crowned with rapids and crests of foam. I didn't let go of her neck, just in case.

It's funny (mind you, “funny” isn't exactly the word, but the moment didn't lend itself to finding a better one) how we can call up the past in a fixed image and leave it frozen on the mind's projector screen, preventing time from speeding it up. To remember is like passing those images one after another, scrutinizing them, altering their color, classifying them. In one, I drag Helen out of the bathroom, in another I throw her onto the bed, confident in my superior strength, then I throw myself onto her and I hear her face (an expression of vague repulsion marbled with veins of outrage and impotence) repeat in a thread of a voice:

“Touch me and I'll kill you.”

While I thrust into her viciously, it seemed to me that a little gray figure that could only be the shadow of my father was projected onto the wall; he was trying to communicate to me from the other side (I liked that euphemism because it left open the hope of a return) his manly advice on how to dominate a marriage, which he'd never dared to impart in life. Because while he was alive, the most valuable guidance he managed to transmit (and that I assimilated, though it went against the current of my actions) was what could be taken from that little man's daily habits (the father of my flesh, who breakfasted each morning on buttered toast and went down to Balmes to buy himself a beige handkerchief): the conventional search for moderation. But in the end you flew the coop, Dad, living in secret, taking care of Mother on the sly. If you're going to tell me something in an attempt to cover the open wound at the heart of your marriage, I'm not sure I want to hear it, and nor did you arrive in time to straighten out what I had with Helen. Even if she grabbed my back (her finger on my scar) as we surrendered ourselves lasciviously, neither of us expected any sweet words. I felt her tremble and emerge from the trance and we broke apart, she moved away and turned over, and I heard her breathing beneath the mass of messy hair. When I recognized the pink mark of my hand on her opulent buttocks, my body felt filled with a kind of paste, disgust for both of us, a final feeling. It occurred to me to reach out and caress her, but the impulse went no further.

The last thing I saw before falling asleep (it was dark, but my pupils managed to take in loose fibers of light) was enough clothing to fill a clothesline, two toppled chairs, and part of the sheet that had fallen off the bed, which from where I lay looked like a mass of flesh determined to flee its body and spill over the floor. Beside me a hot body slept, a little weepy, a bit of torn skin.

Somehow while I was sleeping the swell of light advanced surreptitiously from the globe's antipodes until its luminous froth poured over the horizon. I missed seeing it open the first narcissus and set the lower plains on fire, and how it slipped like an innuendo among the resort's fronds. I was sleeping the sleep of satisfied mammals. I opened my eyelids slowly and closed them again. Some words spoken during that endless night of struggle shamed me, but let's not exaggerate: the innermost caverns of my body, which so often felt more spacious than they looked from the outside, were oozing serenity. I opened my eyes in a room invaded by southern light, bathed by a delicate atmosphere of feminine aromas; I even felt the soft tug of arousal and a gnawing hunger. Nothing a kiss and some yogurt couldn't fix.

But Helen wasn't there.

This time she'd taken her suitcase, collected all her clothes; maybe she was serious.

I didn't leap out of bed, didn't get dressed in a hurry or run barefoot into the corridor to look for her. I didn't care. I brushed my teeth, urinated, took a really good shower and let the water slide over the skin of my arms, my fingers lathering my hair into foamy crests; I even burst into song. I came out of the bathroom with a pygmy-sized towel tied around my waist, showing half a buttock that in the room's mirror assumed demotic proportions; how grand I felt. Through the window, two creamy clouds were sliding imperceptibly past. It was like I'd taken off a pair of glasses that had muted all the colors, like rediscovering a brilliant landscape, shimmering, full of just-wet shades; it was like my heart and my brain had broken away from a network of parasitic nerves and veins. That scent of living moss and vegetation came from the miracle of falling out of love.

I was optimistic and full of verve like a pony released from its bridle, half crazed at the sight of an open field washed by hopeful breezes, my tendons twitching with vitality. I put on the suit fit for a diplomat that I'd brought just in case, and in honor of Dad I folded a silk scarf around the open neck of my periwinkle shirt. The outfit made me look like a country squire nervous about attending the theater, but it wasn't out of place among the mummies. Plus, there were my chin, my dimples, my mat of springy hair, my eyes with their noble clarity, all bestowing a little beauty on the humans who laid eyes on me.

I went down the stairs convinced that the sex we'd had, so hard-fought (the final fight with Helen), so aggressive, so sad, so satisfactory as a form of physical relief, was a good symbolic summary of our marriage: we had no more to give. At reception I stocked up on salty peanuts and inquired after Jack Mabus, the only man to whom I could confide the ending of my story. I was afraid that if I kept it in, it would turn sour; I wanted to say it and expel it, dissolve it in the immensity of the shared world.

“Mr. Mabus left this morning.”

I figured Helen had gone back to Barcelona, or that she'd locked herself in her parents' room, or headed out on a hike among the cornfields; I imagined her enthusiastically looking at some fissured figs with red pulp, who knows? The only certainty was that just then, not only was Jack Mabus headed away from the resort at the speed of his chosen means of transportation, but Jackson and his grandparents were also packing their suitcases en route to the far-flung fields of Montana. So I had the sort of scare that can make your hair fall out when the receptionist pointed mutely down the corridor toward Daddy Rupert's sagging body. He'd tried to call my room, he'd been waiting two hours for me, so soft and livid that if it weren't too obvious a joke I'd say that the health spa was killing him.

He invited me to sit with him on the terrace. It was an emotionally charged scene; half an hour earlier I'd been sure I was free of Helen. A man can convince himself of incredible things when he's singing naked in a hotel room (you should try it), but I guess two out of every three of my heartbeats were still pumping blood bewitched by the daughter of the Thrush clan. It's no easy business to clean one's matter, to sterilize it, expel the final atoms of shared expectations. In the end, I had to have a talk with the decrepit incarnation of the man responsible for the bestial daily life I'd enjoyed for the past year, the scoundrel who'd turned Helen's spirit bitter with his inflexible gender preferences, the same man I wanted to see flayed alive every time my wife crawled back over our emotional garbage. It's no surprise my leg was trembling.