Divorce Is in the Air (17 page)

Anyway, my sister took Helen on the Grand Tour of things we couldn't afford, and she added the bitter aftertaste of “things you can't afford as long as you're with him” and the cynical finish of “a woman like you”: they went to Biosca & Botey, to the Jaguar dealership on Roger de Llúria (neither of them could drive). They licked their lips in front of the window displays on Passeig de Gràcia, and then she took Helen to Cartier. If she didn't reserve a table at the underwater restaurant in the Red Sea, it's just because it hadn't opened yet. And don't think I only see my sister's mean side—I'm almost proud of her for managing to design such a fantastic panorama, one in which Helen had more reasons to be ashamed of marrying me than my sister had for marrying Mauro. If I didn't give her a hug there and then, if I didn't jump up to applaud her, it was because my head wasn't clear. I'd been diagnosed with a terrible social disease: working. Not decoratively, or as an exotic way of finding myself, but as a necessity if we were to keep our bodily gears turning. I was so tense I almost didn't notice the new little battery of complaints that Helen started lobbing reproachfully from her sofa, legs crossed: she told me I had to try my best to get her into precisely what I was desperate to get away from.

“If I want to be a liberated woman, I need a job. And I
am
a liberated woman.”

The problem was not so much that Helen confused a certain style in bed with a true breadth of thought; it was not that the person encouraging her longing to labor had never done a day's work in her life. The real issue was that in order to find her a job, we were going to have to get past our “lifestyle,” which was incompatible with any form of employment. Incompatible, even, with the most permissive idea of healthy behavior.

Of course we were young (young—oh, truly young), with splendid livers and the kidneys of racehorses, and every night I dragged her out to drink. We whiled away hours in lounges and pubs, in the whisky bars that had come into fashion. We breathed it all in, fascinated by the array of nocturnal possibilities, the soft air of winter nights, walking a grid of streets where even the blind can't get lost, among the thousands of Barcelonans either passing through or living there with whom unexpected friendships crystallize on every night out, ready to dissolve like sugar in the liquid morning. We let ourselves be carried along on the same tide of parties and gossip and expensive drinks and attractive and stupid people that had swallowed up and sucked the bones of so many careers before us: students from the provinces, naive
madrileños
, Erasmus students who arrive with a moderately condescending idea about the superiority of northern ways and end up won over by the charms of the Barcelona night.

As you know, alcohol has never affected me. I know how to pace myself, when to take a break; I don't mix, and I never drink tequila or rotgut. Too bad Helen belonged to that group who refuse to learn the basic rules of drinking. Once she reached the point where alcohol starts “lubricating socially,” Helen would get drowsy. Then I could take her home and put her to bed, with no responsibility beyond breathing until late the next morning.

My days were simple: at eleven thirty I entered the office trailing cologne, because I hadn't yet learned that the vile stuff is made by mixing animal excrement and offal. If there were still traces of alcohol splashing around in my temples like those crazy seals that never tire of jumping for their sardine, I rode it out drinking coffee and water. My colleagues supplied me with reports, and when I got tired of leafing through folders I counted people through the window, with its view of the traffic on Via Augusta. I liked the pastry shop, where I watched spoiled grandchildren come and go, nibbling at puff pastries. And so my mornings passed; going off the rails is stressful, but it doesn't require much concentration.

I laid out a few safe zones: on Tuesdays and Thursdays we barely drank, we'd stay in and watch something Helen had rented at the video store, we'd eat dinner at home, high-calorie dishes of Tex-Mex inspiration—any kind of chili mixed with beef, with pork, covered in fronds of cheddar cheese. We fought for the good spot on the sofa (the armrest was loose on the left side), over who spooned whom, over the remote control (she got nervous in scenes where the sound track heralded a scare), she tickled me and I couldn't get her off me the way I can you: you may be five foot seven but you've always been manageable. I don't know if Helen topped five foot three, but with those thighs so abundant in flesh, and those scholarship athlete's powerful arms, it was a struggle for me. It wasn't unusual for both of us to end up on the floor in configurations that seemed pretty erotic to me but only made her laugh—a shuddering of the damp opening encircled by her lips—and from which she would emerge looking at me disconcertedly, drenched in a liquid gratitude, as if that kind of spontaneous happiness wasn't right there in the script she'd brought with her all the way from Montana.

I admit it was a pretty bad sign when Helen spent the morning checking the clock out of the corner of her eye, urging it to strike the universally agreed hour when it's acceptable to start drinking. But I can assure you that was better than when she started warming up her gullet early in the morning and spent the whole day submerged in a bucket of alcohol; I'd come home at noon and find her with half-closed eyes, her upper lip sweating. I started to feel embarrassed for her. For months she lied to me, her tongue red from tannins and swollen like a plum. Catching others telling lies tends to give you a certain fleeting power over the relationship, so I suppose we entered a new phase when she stopped bothering to hide it when she was drunk. She would wait for me with goose bumps, in bed or on the sofa, and if I managed to make a noise horrible enough to penetrate the sensitive roots of her brain, Helen would turn with a mechanical movement that spoke very eloquently of her inability to stand up, and pierce me with her wooden gaze. It's terrible when women start to drink in earnest, much worse than when men get sloshed. I don't know why, but that's how it is.

I guess a grown-up husband would have taken the bull by the horns. Confronting problems head-on didn't come easily to me, though; you can't be good at everything. I couldn't even manage to ease up on our nighttime rhythm. I was very tense, and those excursions were my main distraction, my only source of daily gratification. I couldn't resist the sight of her buttocks swaying drunkenly, and I wasn't willing to go from being a beneficiary to a casualty just because no one had ever taught Helen to drink like a civilized person.

So, why lie to you? I went on taking her to parties, dunking her in basins of cheap alcoholic distraction that slowly gained ground on the dry areas of our life together. Plus, what do you think Helen would have to offer if you took away her masculine impulse to have a good time—to devour the dance floor and the bar, to impulsively challenge our occasional, itinerant friends, unforgettable as archetypes, to participate in burping contests, which I could never take part in without a shudder? What drove me crazy about Helen was her aggressive femininity, the fact that she kept her fragility well hidden in a corner of our apartment, in the box where she kept her family mementos. I didn't want a spoiled little girl. What I wanted was a sidekick for my nocturnal escapades, someone to set my blood on fire every day. If Helen had turned into a teetotaller, if I'd felt she wanted to start behaving like a lady, if she'd narrowed her ambitious and defiant eyes with the insipid demand that I take care of her, I wouldn't have known what to do. We would've really been in trouble then.

Unfortunately, the domestic life that best suited me made finding Helen a job somewhat more complicated, you might say. Of course, if you think something is impossible, you'll see an opportunity peek its head out from the least promising quarter. The Popovychs invited us over for what would be a jam-packed get-together, brimming with work opportunities, with no need for us to sweat for it. Since the fiasco that put an end to our attempt at integrating into Barcelona's social life, our policy outside our apartment was based on avoiding any gatherings or closed social circles—all those collective expectations.

“Don't be silly, Juan, it's going to be a stupendous party—it's my house! Also, it'll be full of people who can rustle up a job by snapping their fingers. If Helen's on her toes, or even just stays quiet, she'll get that job she wants so much. If you can get her to save some money, you can go on vacation again. I'm sick of watching you sulk. Listen to me, I'm your sister. Or don't you want her to work?”

And so we went up to Vallvidrera, me in a three-piece suit and Helen in a blue dress that showed the skin of her shoulders and the contours of her blunt allure. Helen herself, though, was down on her appearance that day: the diameter of her ankles, her thick wrists, the almost-chestnut down covering her arms. They were all barriers between her as she was and a more delicate slimness, her goal that night as she tried on dresses before the mirror. It's funny to discover the doubts and misgivings in people who please us entirely, not to mention how little we can do for them when they're wrestling with the spectral image of what they aspire to and will never achieve.

I managed not to say a single venomous word about the Corinthian columns my sister had installed in the dining room. I managed not to raise an eyebrow when she revealed that the theme of the party was the Mediterranean; and I transformed my annoyance into indifference when Popovych showed me the scale models of the
Pinta
, the
Niña
, and that other ship that he'd stuffed into a glass bottle. Still, the party's real stars were neither the sea nor any famous ships, but the shipowners who were fast becoming the season's sensation after one of them traded his discreetly built wealth for the acting directorship of some mid-sized city's football team—Zaragoza or Pamplona, who knows. His colleagues weren't going to be left out, they wanted their share of the high life, too, and they went to the experts with their brimming pockets and all the refinement of a quadruped fattened up in a herd. But don't get me wrong, I like blazers, and I have almost nothing against golf pants.

In any case, those people were no more boring or unimaginative than the property developers who were about to burst onto the scene. All of them investors on legs for Mauro and his jewels. Their wives weren't to be missed either, and my sister was a sight to see—she'd poured herself into some ivory trousers tailored perfectly to her sizable ass. I realized she was treating Helen like an equal and not a rival, and not saying a word against me. So I relaxed, loosened the knot of my tie, and poured myself several glasses of Mauro's extraordinary whisky that lights up your pituitary and conjures a spicy foretaste of a heaven more enjoyable than the Christian one.

As we were leaving, my sister gave Helen a kiss on the cheek and announced into her ear that she would call her to talk about the offer that was being cooked up between Mauro and a shipowner whose home for tax purposes was in Castellón, a city no one has been able to convince me actually exists, in spite of the dot right there on the map. The evening had been a success. I said good-bye to Mauro with a private joke. I was a bit tipsy and I was moved by the sight of a serene Helen wiggling her toes—which barely fit into the narrow shoes she'd forced on them—on the taxi floor. I forgave her for being fairly distracted in bed, for starting to laugh when I tried to get her going by kissing her between the thighs, for thinking it so sexy that night to move her toes over my face (I will die without ever finding an erotic function for what you women have below your knees). She just wasn't going to get turned on, some nights are like that: hormonal rebalancing, sudden changes in emotional temperature, too much happiness to give yourself over to the struggle of bodies. I let it go. My only consolation was seeing her get up and walk around the living room in the maroon bra and panties she'd agreed to wear for me, though still in the antic jester mode that made all my intentions wilt. She opened both doors of the wardrobe and began to evaluate her clothes, making lists out loud of the accessories she would have to buy. She ran out and came back with thread between her teeth to secure the buttons on a blouse she never wore because (according to her) she wore it too much, and carrying Dad's old atlas, its spine crossed with strips of tape that inspired sorrow and disgust and tenderness, to study the outline of the east coast, because she wanted to arrive on her first day of work well dressed and smoothly pronouncing the treacherous
z
's that her big mouth was unable to wrap itself around. I was lying on the bed with my shirt open, and I watched her while my blood ebbed out of the organ of our intimacy and made its way into my veins to be redistributed to more cerebral zones, which the higher functions of affection and attachment and sympathy inhabit. And then I thought how well it suited her to win—we can all do with a bit of good luck.

That week I didn't even have to replace any bottles of booze. It was hard to imagine how her personality was going to square with a job, but as I sank my hands into hot water to wash the dishes, I told myself that people can be very intelligent when they need to be. We humans are capable of change when faced with a new environment, and anyway it wasn't up to me to solve this one.

“Amador wants to start making money from his old ships. We suggested he throw parties on deck, at sunset. He's going to need girls to serve the drinks, and to spice things up. He'll be inviting a lot of single men. Also, and you won't believe your luck here, Amador has invited me and Mauro to the opening, so you won't even feel lonely.”

She didn't break anything, she didn't shout, she merely hung up the phone, explained the situation matter-of-factly in English, and went into the bathroom. I heard the crunch of the lock. She didn't even ask me to defend her, or to sort the situation out.