Divorce Is in the Air (5 page)

Pedro-María was divorced, lived in the city, worked for himself, and had free time—it all sounded good. It took us three e-mails to set things up. I boldly proposed a vegan restaurant, but some people just can't get past the idea of wilted spinach on a plate. He proposed a brasserie in Poblenou and I didn't protest; my courtesy was stronger than my sense of responsibility as an invalid. I was going to give myself a break.

I spent two days rehearsing speeches that would give the impression of a successful man going through a rough patch—I didn't have the audacity to hide that—but it got harder and harder as more details of my “temporary” hard time came to light: economic, emotional, health-related. If I was honest about my circumstances, it was easy to confuse me with a newly divorced guy exploiting social networks to vent about his problems. Pedro-María would realize I was at the end of my tether, the kind of guy to be avoided like the plague—that's me. I couldn't let that loser humiliate me. If he thought I was going to be his doormat, he was sorely mistaken.

The day wasn't terribly cold but I ruled out walking. The 54 bus left me on Gran Via, and from there I left behind the regularity of the Eixample for the delirium of Poblenou: its sloping streets, underground walkways, little village houses and rashes of modern buildings; its stairways, blind alleys, and kilometers of warehouses sporting broken windows. I got lost twice; luckily I'd left with time to spare.

While I was trying to find my way, I thought back to how alone I'd felt on my first day of school in Barcelona. Before that move, I hadn't even imagined you could change cities or houses. The furniture still hadn't arrived and my sister and I were spending our nights in sleeping bags. The walls and ceiling of my room looked like the canvas of a camping tent; there was the same fear of the dark, there were the same wild sounds (boiler, freezer, cistern). At school I made friends with all the boys I met. My sister had a tougher time: whenever Mother dropped her off she started crying and embarrassed us. So many mothers, so many fathers, so many half-told stories that must be over by now. An entire generation at the nursing-home doors, and back then I peered at them through the fog of preadolescence, without any subtlety of feeling. Those boys (Jacobo, Eloy, Antolín) saved me from isolation, but they gradually broke away from me. By any adult yardstick, they couldn't have been worth much as friends.

The street curved twice before descending toward the sea. Before I saw the brasserie's sign I recognized Pedro-María's lanky figure dragging a motorcycle, and back came his school nickname. We called him Serrucho, the Saw, because he was long and pliant and he walked as if his limbs were coming out of their joints: a kid who was easy to bend. He greeted me by waving his entire arm, then he took off his helmet, shook his head, and smoothed a great mop of graying hair. I wasn't prepared for the hug he gave me, nor did I remember those blue eyes, misty and cold. He flattered me by saying I looked well.

“Wait till you see the view here.”

La Brasa was styled with vine-covered trellises, and its decor featured fake wine barrels. He had reserved a table with a garden view; the whole place smelled like ashes.

“You can eat like a fucking king here, Johan.”

I could imagine the food, but that “Johan” caught me off guard. Who would ever believe I was Saw's best friend? Could I really make him the confidant of my second marriage? What was this really about—confessing our little secrets? I waited for help from the past, but no shimmering flashback came to save me, nor were we rescued by a fade to black. Since I didn't dare to flee, we sat down together at the table instead.

Two beers and a plate of olives came to the rescue. We talked about the temperature, about whether I'd had trouble finding the place; it's not so awkward to fall back on that kind of thing. Unless you're some kind of professional friend, one of those who's spent two decades meeting up with the same people to dissect the Barça game, slurp snails, or go on bike rides together, the years will probably put a distance between you and your old friends. Your day-to-day will bring all kinds of new people into your life: colleagues, additions to the family, neighbors who want to show off their apartment—there just aren't enough hours for them all. You don't lose sight of your old pals, echoes reach you from the distant zones they occupy—who they're seen with, approximately what they do, and how much they spend—but you gradually replace them. I mean, they're like an insurance policy, and you can rely on them when you need someone willing to grant you half an hour's honest conversation (bodily failings, fevered corners of the heart), free of the misunderstandings, suspicions, and presumptions that surround new relationships. With these people there's no need to hide the fact that in the relatively near future we'll begin to disappoint each other, because with these guaranteed friends placed within our reach by search engines, nobody's trying to take each other for a ride: we've botched things enough as it is.

Pedro-María ordered salad and two T-bone steaks. I didn't make a peep—it was too sad a day to be vegetarian. I promised myself, though, that I wouldn't touch the wine. I'd do what you used to when you didn't feel like drinking: just wet my lips.

If we'd been introduced as adults it would have been hard for us to break the ice: ever since Barça stopped being also-rans I only watch football occasionally, the nicest thing I can say about politicians is that they're a bunch of deadbeats, I don't think Pedro-María would be that interested in my BBC science documentaries, and it was too soon to start talking about my new field of interest—the neurotic neurons of my successive female companions. Of course, it didn't even take us five minutes to turn to our shared history. We'd spent only eight years together, but time had passed so slowly on the way to school, the hours of boredom in the classroom had been innumerable, it was like we'd been moving through a heavy liquid that embedded those few years into a layer of our souls as deep as it was accessible.

While I went bounding up the stairs two at a time to plead on behalf of the class that the teacher postpone the geography test…while I was lacing up my shoes on the basketball court as my teammates took up their positions…it made me sad to think that all those golden bodies brimming with youthful energy would head off to different universities, marry strange girls, buy distant apartments. All the boys in our class came into the world and consumed so much energy as our bones matured…I swear, when I was twenty you could never have convinced me how fast I would pass thirty, that all it took was one month running into the next. It seemed marvelous, being blessed with a pair of hands with which to act upon the world, but it was really just a trick, too common and widespread a phenomenon for any single manifestation to warrant much concern. They knotted a tie around Pedro-María's neck for the graduation photo in 1979, and you could think of that photo as the critical mass from which we would all emerge, propelled every which way. Before long we would separate into the ugly ones, the idiots, the ladykillers, the beautiful souls, the health freaks, the caretakers, the dupes, the slackers, the men of mystery, the armchair generals, the worriers, the cowards, the ones who founder when they hit the first heavy weather, the tyrants, the wimps, the bosses, the humanitarians, the leaders of charmed lives, the prodigies and the late bloomers, the shrinking violets, the filthy pigs, the brawlers, the weaklings, the shut-ins, those who seemed destined never to grow but then started growing, or never to fall ill, never to die, now scattered among various clinics, savoring their various phases of resignation and united by the same muffled farewell song, bound together by the secret filaments of a shared sense of shame.

Our conversation turned to the lives of our old classmates. Pedro pronounced their names in a tone that implied he was personally offended by the years that separated him from them, and I silently filled in their nicknames: Tapia (the Jew), Maureso (Cheese Face), Aurelio (Minor), Jiménez (the Bean)…Pedro-María (the Saw) had entertained himself by finding these guys out there wherever life had dragged them unawares and dissolved their distinctive youthful traits into an indistinguishable smudge: they get married, have kids, name them; they get divorced, land jobs, lose them. A kind of predictable and pleasant existence if you're starring in it, but you'd need a novelist's imagination to find the excitement in those worn-out grooves.

Jacobo was the only one I was interested in; we'd been true friends, and then his father was ravaged by a fast kind of cancer. He had to give up his sleepaway camps and English lessons, and the fact that he stayed on the team and at that school was thanks to scholarships that all the other families subsidized, and which required him to get the best grades. To me it was normal for a housekeeper to heat up my milk at breakfast—I couldn't imagine what it meant to grow up poor, trying hard to be grateful, with all the exhaustion that entails. Jacobo was a bit dense, but he made up for it with tenacity. He started passing everything, and in exercises that required only perseverance he was unbeatable. On the court we understood each other; he was short, wolfish, well developed for his age, and he ran around like a dervish. Every time I caught a rebound I knew he'd be there, hounding the rival defense. He was the kind misfortune can't cut down, the kind who ends up bowed but tougher.

When I got home I looked up Jacobo on Facebook. I hadn't found him before because he used his first initial and his father's aristocratic last name. In his profile picture he was wearing a suit and showing off his watch. Three weeks later we ran into each other by chance. Jacobo was coming from his dentist; his face was so numb his voice sounded padded. He shook my hand warmly. He was still in good shape—short guys are really made for the gym. I guessed he made fourteen payments of about 4,500 euros, plus a company car and expenses: that's the kind of security he exuded. Something masculine drove me to present myself on his level, and I told him about my cheese business. I got a little too into it, and then I had to listen to myself reciting selected fragments of the ruin of my most recent marriage. I remember it well, because I illustrated the tale with a passport-sized photo of you that I don't think I've ever taken out of my wallet. I think I bored him. If it had been up to me we would have met up again. I suggested it but he didn't show much interest.

Pedro-María also updated me on Veiga, on Lacayo and on Portusach…that nutter had looked up relationship and work information on every one of our classmates I could think of. I don't remember what lie I made up when he asked me what I did for a living.

“You have no idea how happy I am to know that you've stayed true to our spirit.”

I took a deep, reckless gulp of wine. We'd been schoolmates, we'd ascended the podium together to have medals hung around our necks (though if you passed him the ball in the low post, he'd spin with the grace of a pro at the speed of a paralytic, then they'd take the ball from him and block him—he had a silken wrist he could barely shoot with). Together we learned about the rich array of sexual possibilities (he told me what condoms were all about, I explained to him why it was cool to smile when the teacher said “sixty-nine”), and we were still there, together, seated and tense, the first time we shared the classroom with girls: the soft features, the sweet perfume. We went to buy our first jackets together, felt the first sways of drunkenness, commented on the international news in the paper, simulating a virile interest in the world. What I mean is, he was no alien to me, we'd grown from the same vine, and not enough time had passed nor would life last long enough to exhaust that shared memory.

“I opened a Facebook account to find interesting people, Johan, and I can really talk to you.”

Saw just sat there looking at me with that cloying smile. I waited for one of those automatic replies that can save a situation, but I couldn't string together a coherent phrase. I think that's called blanking, and it's an odd feeling.

How do people lose each other?

It's not deliberate. You don't know if you want to hear from them, you don't know if they'll want to hear from you.

You go traveling, you change neighborhoods, you have a girlfriend who doesn't want to hear about your past, who brings you too much happiness, too many problems. Work swallows your free time, your parents get ill and gobble up any extra energy, you have children who grow into bottomless pits, you're worried about the economy, you're ashamed to have become one of those responsible citizens who brush their teeth three times a day, you're annoyed by your background, frightened of it, you envy them—who knows what you'll find, what they've turned into? It's funny to think they might still be what they were, to speculate about what they've become.

You let the months slide by because you're confident those people will still be there when you get in touch, and by the time you finally get around to it they've changed too much or are too unchanged, expecting old gestures that you've lost, recalling aspects of you that no longer match the person you've convinced yourself you are, a person they no longer recognize.

The time goes too fast or too slow and one day you find yourself with old photographs, unsent e-mails, unfulfilled plans, the whole affair becomes too dense to flow freely, you no longer know what to do with the distance, how to grasp it. Friendship is rooted in shared activity, it's nourished by everyday challenges. Keeping up to date, notifying each other of changes, sharing projects that prevent the erosion of your shared substrate. But to remain close to the same people for so many years and not grow apart—it's a bit repugnant. We're charmed by the idea but we grow tired of the same faces.

What did I matter to Saw? What interest could he have in a childless, divorced, chronically ill man? Why would he care about the layers time had deposited on my body? The lesson I'd learned from the heart scare was that we will never be as young as we are right now, but Pedro-María wasn't interested in having a forty-something guy remind him how precious his remaining healthy days were. He wanted me to help him immerse himself in the past, the time of promise: his memory of the past, and the past of his dreams.