Divorce Is in the Air: A Novel (20 page)

It was one of the peculiarities of single-sex education: you discovered from one day to the next the effect you had on girls. There were inveterate cowards who, because they boasted blue eyes or fine proportions, randomly found themselves recalculating their social value upward. I was one of the best athletes in the class, so I had it made. Even so, during the first weeks of shared classrooms, before I learned to interpret the code of approach and rejection girls camouflage themselves with as naturally as desert vipers in the sand, my six foot two inches trembled top to toe at the prospect of running the gauntlet of those pretty dwarves with their little looks, their smells, their giggles and discouraging silences.

For Pedro-María it was disastrous. With that Saw-body, he had all the charm of seaweed. It’s also true that I could name twenty boys who started out from a similar place, but were not deterred. They took on the female species with the same determination as when they tried to get to grips with algebra, learn prepositional phrases, or master the plinth: they rolled up their sleeves and set about the task with a steady hand. But Pedro-María didn’t have that kind of temperament. His most lively sentence moved at the speed of a provincial train.

I took the initiative and brought him to parties. It wasn’t entirely altruistic, because it’s better not to go alone, and you’re much better off if your accomplice is like the dark eye shadow you use to emphasize the light in your eyes. But you can imagine how long it takes for even the best intentions to wither if you’ve got no vested interest in a guy’s success. Plus, the way Pedro presented himself made me look bad, too:

“My genre is the ballad.”

As you may have guessed, back then music was the artistic ambition shining on his hopeful horizons. What I mean is, there was no convincing any of those girls. A good coach would have recommended he make use of the wide margin he had to humiliate himself. And there
was
one afternoon he got down on his knees at the traffic light at Plaza Kennedy, begging Eva Prim (the girl who deigned to kiss him) to go all the way with him; not to mention that fateful afternoon when he took it into his head to pound on the door of the girls’ changing room shouting:

“Just give my dick a chance, it’s huge!”

But those were the exceptions to a manner characterized by abstention; in general, Pedro-María stifled his appetite. The result was a simple boy with crystalline, emotive eyes, not an ounce of evil in him, always willing to come running when you needed a hand with your antivirus or the new version of Windows. I guess I got used to thinking of him like that, one of those dependable classmates who never show up for a game of pool with any interesting news. Failing repeatedly is comfortable; it relieves you of false hope.

I can’t even imagine what it would have been like to spend those formative years without girls, without feeling their dilated eyes observing me. Without the girl who, if she also happened to be near the top of the ever-changing list of favorites, could provoke a surge of pleasure if you merely ran your fingertips through her flowing locks. If you were denied those easily inflamed, ambitious innocences, you ran the risk of never growing up. You’d remain locked inside your masculine tastes, or within the defensive irony that protects you from what you don’t understand, from what you don’t know how to reach, among people who never spread their wings. Even the ugliest little thing—who’d have all the necessary anatomy, and fantasies and soft ideas about the future, and who’d give off that gentle aroma if you embraced her tightly—could save you from having to discover physicality at an age when everyone else had moved on to more sordid business. They put your problem-solving abilities to the test, and in return they’d conveniently free you from the wasteland of role-playing games, comics, and science fiction, where single teenagers would spend their twenties and even their thirties, from zits to alopecia. Those antisocial little monsters are now the lords of your cultural world, but they don’t fool me—it was Pedro-María who took me to manga parties, to the Wookie soirée, and I know what I saw there: beady little eyes, cheap beer, dandruff, Cro-Magnon chicks who’d been kidnapped with a time machine. And always the smell of cold sweat, mildewed clothes, and even worse things: fear, the unmistakable stench of losing. It was never a place you’d go by choice.

Of course, that miserable start hadn’t stopped him pairing off and procreating. Guys much more offensive than him manage it, it’s the specialty of our species. Our dumpy little sisters get impatient, too, and we’ve all seen them descend the staircase of their expectations two by two. After putting up with so many adolescent slights, that’s when masculinity settles scores: you need us. If it were only women ever born, you wouldn’t have gotten very far; you all don’t even have enough drive to move house.

I was unable to establish a link between Pedro-María’s difficulties with girls and his taste for living in a museum. So I headed to the kitchen, ignoring my host’s gesticulations, planning to dump what was left of that nauseating swill. I was met with a mountain of dirty plates, covered with a once-edible paste. In the sink was two inches of standing water, a film of oil and grease floating on its surface.

Before I could leave the mugs on the counter he was behind me, wheeling out an elaborate excuse for that vileness:

“I don’t have a dishwasher.”

My eyes landed on a flat black box. I’d seen one like it in the living room, and they seemed to be strategically placed.

“Or a TV, or a radio, or a phone line. Have a look around if you don’t believe me, you won’t find a washing machine either.”

“Do you pile up dirty laundry, too? What do you do when there’s too much? Burn it?”

“No, the apartment has a laundry sink, fortunately. Have you heard of slow living? Society imposes those machines on us, and they all emit harmful waves. In ten years, the tumors we’re all incubating now will be rampant. We’re encouraged to consume, to live our lives in a hurry; the stress does incredible things inside your body, you can’t detect it because they rig the MRIs. It has political effects: it softens our brains, we put up less and less resistance, we’re grateful when they put us out on the street with a pocketful of small change as compensation. You know what comes next? Chips. They’ll implant them into our brains, we’ll be docile slaves, and we’ll barely notice the difference. It won’t be the government, don’t you believe that. They’re barely in charge. It’ll be the big corporations. We won’t have to worry anymore, they’ll tell us it’s for our own good. That’s why I don’t keep my money in the bank. I don’t pay the electricity or the water there, either, and I take my salary out the day after it’s deposited. I don’t want to do business with those people. They make things more and more difficult for me, but I know when the law’s on my side, and they can’t force me to let a private entity pay my bills for me.”

“And your computer?”

“That’s different. That’s got nothing to do with it. It’s a tool I use to channel my creativity. Also, I can counteract the positive ions with the salt lamp. If you use that, you can sit at the keyboard for hours and your head won’t hurt. The energy stays balanced—only a few people know this.”

OK, as an off-the-cuff explanation it wasn’t bad. Too wide-ranging not to hit a few targets: that idea about the chips is out there, and it worries me. Plus, any way you look at it we all like to feel we’re one up on our neighbors. We want to feel we’re making the planet better somehow, improving its health or whatever goodness it is that a five-thousand-trillion-ton ball three thousand kilometers in diameter has in it as it hurtles through space, laden with its six billion humans. But don’t think the only loose thread was the flat black boxes. There were also the clothes from fifty years ago (and three sizes too small), the salmon-colored photos from an era when both of us were barely dreamed of: calculations of the species floating like tadpoles in our respective fathers’ most vigorous testicle. The bastard still had a gramophone, and blankets and sheets were thrown over the furniture (I lifted an edge) to hide the rotting upholstery and the termites’ tunnels.

It only lasted a week, but I briefly entertained a notion that Pedro the Chaste had bumped off the landlord. Who knows, maybe the sadness that turned him almost phosphorescent at night came from some radioactive experiment in managing regret. Lying on the sofa, one eye half open, too drunk to go to Rocafort and deal with the stairs, I came to think that he wanted to pin the crime on me. Such ideas could only worsen the circulation of blood in my veins, so I had to take the initiative, for health reasons. I didn’t stop until I was convinced that the man in the photos displayed all over the apartment was Pedro-María’s father, the same gentleman (dry as a herring because he was separating from his wife) who used to pick us up in his Audi after the game and take me home. The apartment didn’t belong to a murderer, but rather one of those people dedicated to living locked in with an extra-large slice of the past. On top of being a divorcé with no job and no appreciable talent for photography, Pedro-María’s pride and joy was his museum-house.

“Are you going to tell me what all this shit is about?”

He brought into the living room a chest full of toys: scale models, a yo-yo, spinning tops,
Captain Thunder
comics…they’d all belonged to his father, who hadn’t grown up on Córcega; we were in his grandparents’ apartment. I breathed a sigh of relief: I’d been unsure what to do with my memories of going with Pedro-María to Calle Moragas, greeting the doorman and running up the flight of stairs. It was like coming out of a dizzy spell. The spinning top had a silver ribbon wound around it that must have glinted as it whirled over the floors, as Pedro’s father tried to fill the oceanic loneliness of childhood with feeling. Pedro’s father had inherited the apartment, but he’d never had time to empty it or strip the wallpaper and glue from the walls and paint them white, because he went headfirst through the Audi’s windshield. So deciding on the apartment’s fate fell to Pedro-María. And it turned out that Isabel didn’t want to live there, not that I blame her. He didn’t set out to keep it, but the months went by and he felt incapable of renting it out: he couldn’t think where to keep the furniture, and it hurt him to imagine how little respect new inhabitants would have for his ancestors’ belongings. If he’d confessed to having his father’s ashes in those damned boxes I would have believed him, but when I sounded him out indirectly he swore he’d buried the whole body, that he took flowers to the grave every month. He invited me to go with him.

“All this furniture has a story, even if it doesn’t know it.”

“I’ll grant you that the gramophone looks spectacular, but I don’t see how your relationship with the dead would suffer if you got yourself a dishwasher.”

“Memories get mixed up, they’re often wrong, they’re no use to me. Are they to you? I’d be surprised. We lose too much. Think about it, what do you remember about your grandfather? And your great-grandfather? I’m sure it would all fit into a tiny box. It’s not fair. It’s absurd to come into the world only to leave nothing behind when you go.”

“But your grandparents should have already had a good German dishwasher. It’s pretty suspicious—are you sure your dad didn’t take it? I’m just saying, these forebears already lived their lives, and they can’t have been so bad, no better or worse than billions who’ve gone before or are living now. If you go on like this, accumulating all kinds of crap, you’re not going to have room to live your own life.”

“Whoever told you that life consists of doing a lot of things, of buying new furniture and throwing out the old? What do I get out of living only my own life? Don’t think I do this just for them. I’m not that altruistic, I basically do it for my own benefit. In the end, I wasn’t much to my parents, I wasn’t much help when they got divorced. They fought over me when I was little. I guess they conceived me as a beacon of hope—that didn’t turn out so well. My mother wanted a girl, and I think when I was born I ruined something precious. I can tell you I spent some crazy years in some awful places later on. Then when that period ended, I got my head straight, I fell in love, I left their lives. I couldn’t behave normally in front of people whose presence took me back to my childhood. I had to fight my own wars, against laws written by women who hate men and who haven’t allowed me to bring up my own daughter. I know how things are out there, but here in my home they’re not going to meddle. I’m protected by the right to privacy, these walls are my castle. And this time, Johan, I’m going to take care of my father, this time I won’t fail. When it’s all over, I assure you, he won’t have anything to reproach me for.”

There are some men like that, fighting either to contradict or to please fathers who, if they aren’t burned and scattered, are living off an IV drip and who never even loved or hated their sons all that much. Who knows if women’s self-esteem depends as much as everyone says on the male gaze. I can tell you, though, that far too many grown men feed off the approval or rejection of a ghostly father, some fake giant who fills their heads and enjoys the Final Judgment every day.

He asked me to go with him to the laundry sink. I was convinced that was the moment when all our “friends” would jump out with paper hats and party blowers shouting “gotcha!” But that marble anachronism wedged into the present didn’t stink of damp and mites, but of bleach and chemical soaps with traces of mint; it smelled of use. He took a box from the shelf (a simple, unfinished wooden plank) and showed me hundreds of photographs in bundles, tied with twine.

“These are the oldest ones. I also have some in black and white.”

The bundle he showed me was in various shades of sepia. They were depthless portraits, three-quarter shots of smiling people, snapped with no aesthetic intent. He showed me one of his mother in the old botanical garden of Montjuïc. It was hard to relate those fresh features to the worn-out face of the forty-year-old woman I met at an age when I had no clue about adult life; back then all humanity seemed split cleanly between young and old. What did one do after turning forty-five? Why even make it to fifty? What interest could those fantastic numbers hold? The modest style of her dress couldn’t hide the size of her belly, its burden of proto-life mutating to a genetic beat as it changed from reptile into fish and grew networks and tissues ever more complex. Until, finally, it made the mammal who now smiled before me, gauging my reactions.