Divorce Is in the Air (16 page)

“Your sister is right.”

From the tension around her eyes, the self-importance in the way she turned her head, from the repugnant wake those words sown by my sister trailed as they emerged from Helen's lovely mouth, I realized she was prepared to wage a long-term battle. Every week we spent in the Turret, where we were reasonably happy, began to needle her like an insult. Every day was confirmation that my sister wasn't talking nonsense, that she hadn't been wrong when she predicted I'd be unable to satisfy the basic needs of a girl joined to her man out of love.

“Why don't we go live with your mother? It's a big apartment, and families are supposed to support each other, right?”

I didn't have the strength to set straight an error of that magnitude; I didn't even have the energy to point out the absurd contradiction of demanding that we leave the Turret (which my sister had downgraded to the “garret”) to move into an apartment we'd have to pay for. And then came the sudden, disturbing prospect of my mother living under the same roof as that testosterone accelerator I was married to, with her makeup kit (which weighed as much as Galaxia's entire collection that you so pretentiously displayed in our living room), and the dregs of Evan Williams that nestled in unexpected crannies (that drink was my latest discovery, and it got our systems purring like motorcycles). The trick of suggesting we live with Mother transformed the repugnant prospect of leaving the Turret, with its view over roofs and terraces stretching toward the shining sliver of sea, into a reasonable option. I stopped giving her the runaround, and even while I was slogging through a storm of financial disasters (that pair of hucksters tasked with getting the family business “afloat” again must have been about to advise me to invest in cheeses, an idea that came from the Passgard people), I got down to apartment hunting. I visited over twenty real estate agents, where I learned that the children of the old working class were swallowing seventy-year mortgages, with interest rates subject to the ups and downs of various gloomy indices; they were even signing off on eviction clauses. Ah, you marvelous middle class, your shining greed, luxury cars and second homes, Far Eastern vacations paid for in installments: wonderful sons of sidereal Spain, that winter I loved you as never before. The apartments on offer looked like they'd survived a bombing in Kosovo. Broken stoves, cisterns that threatened to crack your skull open, paneled hallways. None of the places I could afford were up to Helen's standards (and when I say “none,” I'm talking about two months of traversing the Eixample and Sarrià and the disinfected parts of Gràcia like a herd of elephants after water). Those standards, of course, were informed by interior design magazines published for citizens who pay their taxes in countries swimming in oil—magazines my sister began sending her so they could go over them together in detail, sitting at the Mauri café.

“It doesn't have enough light.”

“I won't live on a mezzanine floor.”

“It smells. Barcelona smells damp.”

“The windows face a wall.”

“The ceiling is crumbling.”

“You won't want me walking up stairs when I'm pregnant, will you?”

“I can't live in this neighborhood.”

“The kitchen is old.”

“The bathroom needs redesigning.”

“We couldn't have friends over with this living room.”

It had already been hard for me, as a teenager, when I'd discovered that people don't get to choose where they cook, sleep, and cheat, that houses aren't just handed over for free, and questions of space and overcrowding, light-drenched salons or narrow living rooms weren't just matters of taste. So when the next Passgard report came, I had to lean against the wall and watch a few wagons loaded down with coal for the funeral pyre go by: we were left with the Bonanova apartment, the Turret, some questionable investments, and the ace of cheese (still up our sleeve). I had the miserable thought that people making their way up from the bottom, without family networks or contacts, have even less; that cheered me up for about half a minute. I got so nervous that a rash of small pimples broke out over my hands, and the hair on my chest and pubic area turned salt-and-pepper on the left side (the side of arterial problems). I think it was my disfigured appearance that finally moved Helen; she'd rather live in a small apartment (only not
that
small!) than let herself be seen with a prematurely aged geezer.

“I never said we had to move now. We can wait. You get so hysterical over money.”

And I was so candid, so disrespectful toward my own intelligence, that I sent a copy of the Passgard report to my sister. Enough of acting like children, I was going to convince her we had to “join forces,” “pull together”…that kind of thing.

My sister asked me for a meeting, and she showed up with a stuffed shirt in tow, sporting the obligatory pink tie and a hairdo that was a living, breathing example of the “law of excluded middle.” He put a briefcase smelling of new leather on the table, next to the Passgard report with underlining in red, and a calculator. That clown, who'd put on a brand-new jacket just to intimidate me, was the hit man my sister had recruited to stick a burning iron rod up my ass.

“We have to sell the garret.”

Her plan was to sacrifice my house to fix a problem that was bad news for both of us. She was demanding I become one of the huddled masses who have to use the first euros they earn every month to pay for a place to live. If we didn't stem the flow of toxic capital by turning my beautiful home into healthy euros, it wouldn't be long before the Bonanova apartment was threatened, and Mother's security with it. I took a sip of coffee, and I guess I must have ad-libbed some arguments.

“You should have learned to keep your mouth shut by now. The least you can do is not interrupt when someone serious is talking,” she said.

She sat there looking at me cruelly, defying me. We had shared our childhood; I just couldn't understand it. She'd stayed up all night practicing, exposing her fleshy insecurities before the mirror. My little sister was expecting me to throw my coffee in her face, to huff and puff, to fly off the handle. But instead she got the gaze of a compassionate older brother, the gentle indulgence that made her burn with rage. I didn't do it just to make her feel some of the discomfort I felt; over all these years, my dealings with my sister have provided the only glimmer of saintliness I've been able to display. I would even have donated a good portion of an organ if its fibers and cells and molecules could resuscitate the dried-up regions of her belly.

I was willing to play dumb in order to maintain our relationship, though I wouldn't go so far as to believe that plan of hers was born of any sisterly desire to lighten my load: so I wouldn't feel guilty, because she was tired of watching me suffer, for my own good. But I was convinced the Passgard report had scared her. It was her facial expressions, the bitter smell she gave off sitting opposite me. It's true, money doesn't smell, but the fear of being short of it reeks—the fear that the net beneath your feet will break, the fear of ending up in one of those jobs that slowly suffocates your dignity. Mauro's protection was provisional; he could always get tired of her, he could kick her out. She was afraid of having to take care of Mother, of being trapped in her marriage to Popo, of having to rely on his charity.

“It would be best for everyone if you were out in a week.”

And she left me with a brochure for some new apartments, seventy square meters, in L'Hospitalet.

“You'd be seven stops from the middle of town, and electricity and water are much cheaper there. And the mortgage is very low.”

The apartment I found, the apartment I finagled without paying a deposit, was on an uncomfortable hill below Diagonal; it had a bedroom with no balcony into which wafted the emanations from a repair shop, a living room that seemed fairly large until Helen decorated it with two four-seater sofas, wall shelves, and a table on which we could have sacrificed a buffalo. We bought flowers, pots, and a TV. I brought Dad's little Miró, whose blotches, in my worst moments, seemed to conspire mockingly. The utility room, the kitchen, and our bedroom looked onto a narrow courtyard that pigeons had singled out as a depository for their filth. The bathroom (with a shower stall) and the dining room were flooded with sunlight at noon; I liked the effect of the light slowly turning the windowsills golden, illuminating the air as if igniting the space between atoms. We bought three electric heaters and rotated them, so there was always one cold room; the radiators gave Helen headaches. And that was the apartment that guzzled my salary, that forced me to fall back on my savings, that left us without a vacation; the apartment that rationed our dinners and nights out, that obliged me to calculate the cost of drinks. The apartment that tied our hands, and that still wasn't good enough for Helen. In fact, she managed pretty well to imply (or remind me) a couple of times a week that the place was a dump.

Back in the Turret, Helen's reproaches had been so all over the place that we rarely clashed in earnest; it was just a way of relating to me, of letting out the currents of mean-spirited ideas before they festered. I listened to them, but it wasn't hard to convince myself she was directing them to someone else.

“If the electricity keeps going off you should talk to the landlord or the council. That's what a real man would do.”

“The way you joke about religion isn't funny at all. I'm a believer, you know. I don't go to church because I don't have time, but I intend to invest in it later. It's a plan for the second half of my life, if you don't strangle me first. Ever since I was a little girl, I've felt very close to Jesus.”

“A girl's got to really excite men so she doesn't end up married to a fag. They can simulate the lewd way of looking, they learn it as teenagers from their single friends. Since they're all so depraved, they can perform acceptably at first. The real drama comes later. So I'm going to have to keep an eye on you.”

“You're just a little boy, John. You don't know what to do with a woman who loves you with all her soul.”

I should have replied that I wasn't even sure I believed in the soul. I'd read in a popular science magazine that the mind was a function of the brain, a kind of talkative and obsessive phantom, but those scientists never really convinced me. How do you prove that something doesn't exist? And how do you prove something you've never even seen? I wouldn't say I'm fundamentally a believer in some invisible existence, but scientists will have to come up with a lot of explanations—and good ones—to deny that there is something beyond the flesh, the spinal vertebrae, the network of veins. I discovered all this during the wake, when I was alone with my father's rigid body, his skin yellow under the makeup. It was Dad, all that was left of him, but it was missing the force that had stirred his muscles, the soft electricity that lit his expressions, the swell of his thoughts, his voice. Scientists have their fabulous tools for seeing ever further and deeper, but they're badly focused. For all the chemical power these balls of gray matter have, it still seems wrong to yank the soul out of the heart only to put a mind in the brain; I could identify my father or Helen easily by that stubborn pump. While Helen chopped vegetables, watched TV, tried on clothes, or spread lotion over her skin, her eyes and the play of her facial muscles were always palpitating with rage, desire, fear—all reflecting what was going on in the viscus in her chest.

“You're too intellectual.”

But what began to brew in our new apartment was something more disturbing than Helen's inclination to channel her baser emotions my way. Our arguments had a personal tinge now. My sister, camouflaged as doting sister-in-law, started to take Helen out. And what a pair they must have been: my little sister's perfumed rotundity beside Helen dressed in white, Helen in green, Helen in jeans, Helen in sandals, Helen dressed in a tunic and burka, it didn't matter. How the contrast must have pained my sister. And, honestly, our parents' DNA had demonstrated the vast range of its possible combinations when from the same ingredients it formed a son with the makings of an athlete and the mythical Fiera Corrupia beast in female form. In a city like Barcelona, with so much feminine beauty on display, every trip into town must have needled my sister terribly. And when Mauro took her shopping down Passeig de Gràcia, it must have been like dousing her hands in acid. I'm not saying that Hermès and company didn't have their soothing effect, but the problem is that people's clothes always come off in the end. Genetic destiny had been a bitch to my sister. She should have moved someplace where the human temperature was more lukewarm, to take the edge off her envy. Antwerp, maybe. They make jewelry there, it rains every day, and the people are so ugly I had to go into a shop and buy a magazine just to rest my eyes on a pleasant face.

And don't think you got away unscathed. When your time came, that tongue of hers had poison for you as well.

“You do everything backward, Juan. You don't even realize how predictable you are. Only you would think to marry the wild and sensual one first, then divorce her to set up house with a tame, snooty woman who doesn't fool me—if she spends all her time reading, it's only to make up for her nonexistent social life. And don't give me that about how she's a writer, that's just bullshit to make herself seem more interesting. Writers write, and if that girl, at her age, was destined for literature, she'd have published something by now. A couple of stories at the very least.”

It was no good reminding her I hadn't left Helen for you—my sister had no interest in chronological precision. The type who won't let any scrupulous adherence to facts get in the way of a moral tongue-lashing.

The simplest thing, and don't think I didn't consider it for years, was to conclude that her contempt for you, for Helen, for the girls in between en route to our marriage, was not only because of her cabbage face, but was also fed by an incestuous envy: she was secretly in love with me. These days I'm fairly certain that she was singing your praises in a roundabout way; I think you got her all horny, and she was really a Hummer-sized carpet muncher. Because just tell me how a woman who likes men could tie herself down to one like Popovych.