Divorce Is in the Air: A Novel (6 page)

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.

Nothing good could come of this meeting. I had made a mistake; our roots had rotted from damp.

“I’m going to take a piss.”

It was good timing, but I wasn’t faking: one of the side effects of the pills I was taking to thin my blood was diuretic. The drug liquefied my fat and sent streams of toxins to my bladder. I’d lived for years without knowing that the walls of that gourd grew slack with use. No more pissing before going out at night and holding it till dawn. These days I need to go every half hour, and I never really feel empty. I’ve had to overcome my fears and make my way into the toilets of bars, restaurants, cinemas, and burger joints, where surprises left by other ghastly people, intentionally or not, await me. We old folks are truly adventurous.

The bathroom at La Brasa was clean, courtesy of a gallon of bleach dumped over the floor; my eyes watered. I turned on the tap, and I had gotten so used to the role of senescent that I was surprised to see in the mirror the skin of a still-taut face, healthy lips, my wavy golden hair. I scrubbed my hands with soap and water; men who only wash afterward don’t appreciate their most delicate part. I unzipped my fly and confirmed the mismatch between the urgency I felt and the paltry amount of urine. Going for a piss is hell: all that wasted time while you wait for it to finally dribble out.

I went back to the dining room and the view was still crummy, but the light slid honeyed and cold over the table, and my glass shone with greasy fingerprints. Pedro had knocked back what was left of the wine, and he looked at me with crystalline eyes: he didn’t wear contacts.

“Should we order another bottle?”

I missed my chance to tell him my body had forgotten how to process cholesterol, that the residues of that wine, the slab of red meat with its blackened edges, would build up like gravel and threaten to burst my heart, or blow a blood vessel in my brain and leave me a half-wit.

“Don’t let me stop you.”

Then he told me about how tired he was of working for other people, how sick of trading his time for a subsistence wage. Also, he’d had enough of programming, designing websites for guys who were unable to learn the basics themselves. He told me he wanted time for himself, that when he headed out with his Nikon he felt he was better, healthier, a good person. He told me that ever since signing his first employment contract he’d been waiting for the ideal moment to dedicate himself entirely to photography: he had a real feel for light, he felt his talent deserved recognition. He’d tried to steal hours from work, but by the time he left the office he was too tired, he couldn’t find a second wind. He was swamped by the shopping and the washing and all the other tasks that pile up, oblivious to the artistic spark that burned within him.

“I’m not fooling myself anymore. The perfect time is never going to come. You have to force things along, you have to dare to jump from the train while it’s moving.”

He gave me his Instagram.

“That’s what I do. That’s my calling.”

He told me not to miss the comments, which would show me what his photographs evoked in other aficionados. Their words were injections of energy that kept him from giving in to the zombie life, the office life, the life all the rest of us lead.

“I’m tired of dreaming of a shadow life. I want to attack it head-on, get inside it, live at its center.”

He told me he planned to ask for fewer hours and less pay, or at least to be absolved of all the meetings: staff, department, sales, purchasing, empathy and synergy trainings. He told me that at big corporations they keep track of every minute you spend having breakfast, going upstairs to smoke a cigarette, or to the bathroom.

“It’s despicable.”

He told me that there is life throbbing within each of us, and we have the chance to feed it. He told me that our forties are a creative decade, that he felt he had the strength and imagination to reinvent himself, and he wasn’t going to let anyone get in his way. He wasn’t about to stay stuck in the hole they’d dug for people like him: people who had gone to school, fulfilled their responsibilities, people who let themselves be hoodwinked. He told me it was a good moment for entrepreneurs, that the atmosphere was charged with energy and banks were giving credit away.

“I don’t know about you, but I can’t waste any more time.”

He told me he was sick of being tested. They demanded an output he couldn’t keep up with, his nerves were as exposed as stripped wires (and he reached out his arm as he said it, as if I could see right through his skin). The envy he felt, which diminished him and left him dwelling on his own insignificance, wasn’t a sign of small-mindedness—it would disappear once he’d embraced a life equal to his ambitions. He was willing to live on as little as it took; he felt compensated because a good photograph brought beauty into the world. He was going back to basics: money in his pocket, straightforward adventure—that’s why he’d sought out old friends online who were single or divorced, undomesticated boys who weren’t going to surrender, who wouldn’t give up until the final whistle blew. And that’s why he didn’t ask anything about me: he had me all figured out.

“No one can understand me like you.”

Why would I understand him? Because we’d shared eight years of classes, a hundred training sessions, a thousand physical exertions? We’d had similar experiences, but they had gone through different heads that they’d imbued with different characters, before being integrated into constellations of events, fears, and expectations we could never share.

“Of course I understand you, Pedro, I understand you perfectly.”

He invited me to have another coffee, he invited me to take a shot, he invited me on a walk, he invited me to have a drink, he knew a stupendous gin bar at the foot of the mountain, he could take me on the back of the motorbike. If I’d proposed going to the dog track he would have accepted—any plan struck him as better than going home. Even though I thought Pedro was a cretin, a certain congeniality was starting to pervade our conversation, a dangerous camaraderie that smoothed over any friction. One more step and there’d be no turning away from that friendship. I was saved from dragging out the night any longer because I find it vaguely gay to ride on the back of a motorbike, and also because of the lingering fear left by my heart scare; I was going to behave. We said good-bye, exchanging assurances that we’d never let our friendship lapse again. Then I told him I’d lost my mobile, and I switched a digit in the address I gave him.

I watched as he got on the bike, looking for all the world like a string of sausages on a hook. I turned around and headed uphill to avoid his little wave. Once I was alone I walked—gastric fluids slogging away at the bolus in my stomach—through empty lots as spacious as hangars, down unexpected slopes, across bridges and down blind stairways, along streets so open and deserted it was like there’d been an outbreak of a deadly virus. The alcohol began to dissipate, leaving a naked remorse for having injected myself with that hunk of meaty blubber; the lipid polyps must be playing deadly Tetris in my veins. Joan-Marc and Pedro-María, Pedro-María and Joan-Marc: those compound names are hilarious. I wouldn’t be giving him a second chance—that farce ended right there. Friendship is overrated, it makes you overvalue the past, and nostalgia is a leech that sucks the blood from your brain. As soon as I’d gotten rid of the weight in my stomach, that very day, I’d get started on a girlfriend.

Once I’d reached my building on Rocafort and made it up the stairs, I could just picture my heart slumped exhausted in my chest, so I spent the rest of the evening on the couch, flipping through channels, all fifty-two, and back again to the beginning. I got sick of cooking shows, tennis matches, skinny teenagers shaking their asses, talk shows, movies that were half over, those dramas that always end with a cliff-hanger, and the news feed on repeat, programmed by the CIA. My neighbor had gone on vacation and this time he’d remembered to turn his router off, and I knew all my DVDs by heart. Nor could I sleep with the thunder of taxis and buses from the Gran Via, so I got up and poured myself a proxy: a tumbler full of cold water with lemon. I’ve read somewhere that taste is a mental construct, that those yogis who spend their lives upside down have such control over their enzymes and taste buds that they can call up at will the flavor of crunchy chicken wings, or a curry, or whatever they eat in Tibet. And I’m not saying that a good placebo can’t cure a cold, or appendicitis or AIDS—I won’t be the one to deny the power of positive thinking. I’m just saying that my own brain let me down when I asked it to imbue that tap water, between the insipid foretaste and the chlorine aftertaste, with just a hint of Tanqueray.