Divorce Is in the Air (9 page)

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.

You have to understand: we were good together. We weren't even a couple with problems—our days were full of happy hours. I'd accepted a job while we sorted out the mess of my inheritance, and the people there treated me like an emergency fund. They thought that if we found ourselves in trouble, I could inject enough healthy capital to get through four or five bumpy months. I never set foot in the office before eleven. Helen and I went out almost every night to try exotic gins, trailing a boozy wake behind us; for three months Barcelona conspired to show us exactly what it could do for a pair of newlyweds disposed to act like nocturnal animals. I suppose I already sensed that Helen should find herself a job sooner rather than later, that an active and healthy woman should spend her days doing something more fulfilling than shaking off a hangover. I started to look more kindly on the prospect of reining ourselves in: we'd be like those spermatophytes that wait for night to fall and then spread open stupendous, fleshy petals, as big as ships, and we'd pollinate the most trivial of tasks with gentle excitement. But I was in no hurry.

“I want to meet people. Everyone you can introduce me to.”

While I was enjoying life as a newlywed, Helen had been busy cooking up fresh ambitions. She'd convinced herself there were select circles of artists, wealthy, interesting, and glamorous people, or some such nonsense. She had only to learn to wield me like a key and she'd be able to access those secret spaces, and fulfill the fantasy that she'd been put on this earth to enchant the eyes and ears of the most refined society—whose specifics she'd never paused to consider. She nagged me stubbornly, with the sulky face I'd already learned to recognize as the sign she wasn't going to let it go. We had so much without leaving the circle of our marriage—why kill ourselves to leave the house? Why, when we would only be exposing all the precious things that germinate in intimacy to the corrosive atmosphere of gossip? It's one of the blind spots you two share, both the women I've loved. After all, didn't you take home the best guy at the party? Didn't we have fun together? Didn't your orgasms come without complications beyond the ones we imposed by ludic agreement? Wasn't the apartment you decorated comfortable? Didn't we live in the city of your choice?

And so we began to visit places whose names are pronounced with an eye roll. In Barcelona they weren't as into time travel as in Madrid. Here, the draw was the exoticism of the place itself: hotel terraces, ships, museums that opened their doors at night, towers, greenhouses. I had to get back in touch with people I'd cut off four years before because of the slime that oozed from them: phony cousins, Dad's business colleagues, classmates from ESADE, occasional hook-ups, confidants…They didn't receive me coldly—no sooner did we show our faces than a curtain of congratulations came down between us and them. I was the guy who'd been left out of the good life: some said because of misguided ambition, while others mentioned one hell of a family mess. Now that I was returning on the arm of an American stunner, why would they close their doors on me? They had no qualms—the eroticism of return and the anguish of the first-born's departure were fodder for mass-market dramas, and we fancied ourselves sophisticates, we flattered ourselves that our minds were open and cosmopolitan, that we weren't
really
Spanish. Plus, they thought Helen was funny.

Helen went mad with excitement. She compared my friends favorably to the rich people she saw on TV in the United States, whose weddings and divorces and parties and jewels she followed in magazines. She knew the details of every liaison conducted by people whose only purpose in life was consuming (you couldn't call what they did “drinking”) cold martinis on boats. She knew who slept with whom, who sat beside whom at every dinner and at every race, who slipped from the spotlight, who fell into disgrace. If she hadn't spent so much time too drunk to hold a pen, she could have written a gossip column.