Divorce Is in the Air (22 page)

It was hardest on the weekends, when he started to drink five minutes after he was out of the shower.

“On Saturday, my strategy consists of keeping the bottles hidden away. I prepare myself mentally, but it doesn't help that I know my own best hiding places like the back of my hand.”

He'd given up going out. He traipsed around the apartment in his underwear (and a modest T-shirt in case a neighbor dropped by), alternating between phases of self-indulgence and fits of eloquent rage. Around mid-afternoon his brain managed to find some sort of clarity among the clouds brought on by the gin he sent streaming continuously toward his liver. The poor organ did what it could to dilate his spongy pores and drain the toxins.

“It's not such a bad life.”

He told me about the horror of finding himself without tobacco on a Sunday, the crippling sensation. He'd throw on some sweatpants and start to wander the neighborhood: he looked for places where it wouldn't be so humiliating to ask them to turn on the vending machine. In July and August the pavements seemed painted a sunny yellow, and he felt even more miserable.

“We're friends. Friends play tennis, they go on trips. They don't make themselves ill. Not so soon! Are we going to hug like a couple of diabetic old ladies?”

There you have an example of my grand attempts to bring him around: I was giving him a sermon! Just what my father would have done, though Dad wouldn't have gotten up from the sofa and spoiled the immaculate line of his cream suit to pace through rooms like an outraged lawyer before a jury. Nor was I so surprised to find myself imitating Dad. He was my role model in life, the one that had fallen to me; if you and I had had children (if you'd wanted them), I would have spent my days overacting. I learned to recognize in the incipient expression on Pedro-María's face the soft happiness of the child who discerns worry behind the scolding: the concern that those tall and strange characters, adults, had projected toward us when we were boys. And to hell with that stuff about friendship—since the moment he saw my photograph on Facebook he'd chosen me to give him a hard time, just so he could feel a little warmth again. The silly boy was looking for a daddy, Petra didn't hug him enough, and so it made sense he'd turned to me. I'd been the only one at school taller than him.

He liked my tone, sure, but he wasn't willing to listen to me. It was like when you hear a favorite song over and over, but it never occurs to you to shape your life to the lyrics. He'd fill another glass, turn on the transistor (sorry, but that's the only word that fits the thing) or glue himself to the Mac screen to watch BBC news, fishing shows, or the festival of anorexics on MTV.

“George Michael is still alive!”

Well, I guess I didn't really give it my all, either. I chastised him for drinking, for neglecting his projects (yeah, right), for flushing the best years of his life down the toilet, but it was just lip service. You cultivate friendships that allow you to shine, and what can I say—I'm vanity's sweetheart. In my wretched emotional state, Pedro was like manna from heaven.

And don't give me any crap about how I was overprotecting him, with maybe a little joke thrown in about how we were acting like a couple. That old chestnut of yours about how I repress my bisexual leanings—which according to you are latent in every Tom, Dick, and Harry—to the point of homophobia…I'm not in the mood. I understand that your literary aspirations mean you can't resist holding original points of view, but I'm not going to buy that crap like it's some age-old truism. How could I take anyone seriously who can't even be sure what kind of genitals they like to go to bed with? Pedro and I weren't even living together. We were just two guys recuperating from three bad marriages, taking a fresh gulp of male company, happy, stupefied, ignoring the clock, avoiding any exhausting domestic routines. It wasn't even a temporary fix, it was about regaining our strength before setting off in search of new women. Things aren't so bad out there for healthy-looking forty-year-olds: you have your contemporaries, intimidated by dark myths of never-ending singledom; then there are young women with their fantastic and favorable ideas about maturity; and then you have those astonishing fifty-somethings heading off to the gym. Not to mention the married cheaters, the dreamers, the unsatisfied, the adventurous, and the bored, all burning with libido. What an idea, that once you're past forty the passion stops!

I was so inspired by the possibilities my fantasies spread before me that my heart skipped a beat the night I heard him say:

“I'm done with fucking. It's just not worth it anymore.”

He managed to get up from the sofa he was sprawled on, but the momentum wasn't enough for him to recover his human shape—he looked like an octopus with a tentacle trapped between two rocks. When he managed to reach something like a standing position, the idiot pointed to a box and told me to remove the contents: a bundle of photos, in splendid full color. They shone like fresh banknotes.

“My daughter.”

He told me again about the injustice of the divorce laws: defenseless men, female greed, the criminal belief that women are all delicate and weak and men are tough and selfish. He told me he never would have uprooted himself from Isabel's life. He talked to me about the Fathers for Justice group. And I said: “Yeah, of course.” I took his words in and gave him back a ration of empathy: cold, urbane, weary. Going through the motions.

“They're strong. Very strong. They put on feelings and take them off again like dresses. They're like those marsupials that can interrupt their gestation at will. They decide when they're going to stop loving. They complain about language, about how there's no feminine equivalent for ‘womanizer' that isn't degrading…”

He stayed standing, holding on to the sideboard. Everything pointed to him falling flat on his face if he let go. He made to reach out, but with a combination of gestures and looks I managed to persuade him not to pick up the bottle. I should have helped him to bed, but the linguistic twist the conversation was taking struck me as terrific and unexpected.

“…but just tell me what the masculine equivalent of ‘gynoecium' is? It's just taken for granted that women have the right to band together and stay in the shadows. There's a space reserved in language for that. And for us? Why wouldn't we want to withdraw from the world and live together under the same roof and share costs, without bringing God and his son into it? Oh, no, our only option is to be exposed to the elements, the streets, the struggle. If you consider us individually, maybe men aren't so great, but when we're together we understand each other, we laugh, we have a good time. We don't tear each other apart beneath all the social niceties like they do. Why don't we just quit? Do you know? Me neither. Good-bye to all of them, they can go fuck themselves.”

“Because we want them….Well, I do, anyway.”

From deep inside him grew a smile that brought him onto his tiptoes. He took two steps and fell onto the sofa again; I was starting to feel awkward about lying down there later to sleep. Lately, people have been knocking at my door (it's an expression—Saw's the only person I see, and I write only to you) trying to persuade me that sex isn't all that great, really, and the deep layers of physical attraction that can turn your head inside out are all in my imagination.

“Descarrega had the best solution.”

After a second I heard some cogs in my brain start creaking after having lain dormant for at least ten years. But there was no clarifying the rumpus of my disjointed memories. The acid aftertaste of astonishment concentrated into a single first name.

“Eloy?”

“Eloise Larumbe, our own Eloy Descarrega.”

“Eloy?”

He realized I'd gotten confused and was stuck in a loop, and he rummaged around for the right words to orient me.

“You didn't know? He bought himself some tits, injected hormones, got fully lasered, had his cheekbones reconstructed and a good dose of noninvasive filler put in his lips, the full works. And you don't have to spend a fortune anymore, or have them saw open your face or cram you with silicone. It's getting cheaper and faster, and less painful. And reversible. Eventually we'll switch in and out of genders like we go from country to country. The only hitch is the nervous system—they can't give you a female brain. You bring home the body of a woman, but the soul driving the thing is a boy who understands you. Paradise. The only possible harmony.”

As far as I remembered Eloy's features, they specialized in a sort of expression that was the dictionary definition of “befuddled.” He liked
Star Wars
figures; he'd had hundreds of them, the brat. He was effective on the court, a shooter, not very generous. It was hard to talk seriously with him, one of those crossword puzzles that we got tired of soon enough and solved by filling in the blanks with the word “faggot.” I didn't think about it at the time because I tend to relate homosexuality to vice. I don't know how to deal with boys who are just gay because they like other boys, then fall in love and go live together. And there was no denying that Eloy with tits must be a sight to see.

There were other questions I wanted to explore: Had Pedro seen him? Was the transformation complete? Could you buy a cunt, with all its complicated folds? Did it react the same way, get turned on the same? I knew doctors didn't have a great track record with cerebral nerves. The awful state of my heart's plumbing, the terror that an obstruction would snuff me out, had driven me to study the possibilities carefully, and I knew that even if they managed to isolate the mental meat, submerge it in a tank of collagen with its consciousness intact, they still didn't know how to graft the brain onto a fresh spinal cord.

But I didn't get to ask him anything, because Pedro-María lost the thread of the conversation and fell into the babble that generally preceded silent inertia. I grabbed him by the armpits and led him (or practically dragged him) to his room. The impulse to take off his boots for him ended there. He assumed an astonishing pose, almost indescribable, more typical of a creature with soft bones; neurologists should really start investigating alcoholic contortionism properly. Luckily that cretinous yogi couldn't see himself. It shows the intelligence of our design that we sleep with our eyelids shut, that our faces remain beyond our field of vision, that the spirit or the soul or the character can scarcely recognize itself from outside, and we have to fall back on interpreters. And it's lucky that psychologists and priests are a bunch of charlatans incapable of really opening our eyes. What good would it do Saw for a true reality tutor to sweep away the fine shroud of protective ideas the poor man wove about himself? Better that he not self-assess, better to live lethargically, wreathed in greenish shadows. Because the day he looks at himself with a cold and exacting eye, the day he takes the measure of the wreckage he's buried in up to his eyebrows and that's mingled with his very being—that day not even Petra can stop him tearing out his windpipe.

I left the bedroom with a decisive urge to be a better person. I smoothed the sofa cover, and it was only when I started to gather the glasses from our last few nights that it occurred to me how a liver specialist might interpret the last week's alcoholic fugue state as a sophisticated suicide attempt.

You could develop a comparative theory of drunkards, using Helen and Pedro-María to illustrate it; they'd taken different routes to end up in the same class of
bebedores
. For Saw, the demands on him had made his headaches chronic, and alcohol helped him keep going in all his weakness. Helen wanted to devour the world, but she lacked the head for it. She soon got tired, and the few ideas she did have came out twisted, as if she were thinking with the wrong organ. Her tonsils, maybe. So Helen started dusting off the notion that she was strong, and could overcome the world's resistance by the force of her body. And there you have the two of them, in their respective living rooms, wallowing in their alcoholic delirium, destroying reputations, sowing infamies, passing through euphoric periods when they convinced themselves that their isolated words—words that could never hurt anyone—pierced their targets like the marble letter opener I eventually gave to Helen so she'd stop opening envelopes with her teeth. The best medicine for Saw would have been to land himself one of those pretty and determined women who move up the ladder at work and leave you at home taking care of plants and small animals. As for Helen, her supposed salvation from the pit of alcohol and low self-esteem was that strapping boy stepping onto the Corb's riverbank, matted with reeds, fearful of tripping and falling into the water that flowed with unusual ferocity in that stretch. After all, that was why we'd gone to the spa, whose idiotic lights were floating among the vegetation: to start over again together, rise above the everyday maliciousness that had diminished us. To give ourselves the kind of experience of forgiveness and renewed enthusiasm that love supposedly entails, to fall under the power we assume it possesses.

So I was happy to see her stop swaying and wobbling at the edge of the water. I took two long strides toward her like a valiant prince in a story, and even if I did grab her arm with more force than was strictly necessary, the main thing was to get her feet away from the edge and onto solid ground.

Helen was the type to argue for hours as if her life depended on it, until finally she crashed, exhausted. If I kept probing her once she was worn out, she'd forget all her crazy accusations, as well as the more reasonable parts of her argument. She didn't try to reconcile the various ideas she held of me, and I resigned myself to being two (or even three) different people in her mind.

She looked me up and down, gazing half a second longer than necessary at my lips.

“It's cold.”

The wind had raised goose bumps on her arms. I thought of the little bubbles that float up from the bottom of the pan and burst on the surface. She enveloped herself in my body, defeated by marital solicitude: Helen didn't know what to make of her escape, she was unable to turn it into anything useful that she could prolong. I smoothed her hair away from her face; that always calmed her down.