Divorce Is in the Air (30 page)

They must have bumped into each other in the doorway of my apartment. Or maybe someone had given him Helen's number and, spurned as she was, she threw herself into his arms like a castaway who, with a storm threatening overhead, latches onto a slimy life buoy. I hope you're happy with that analogy, because I can come up with less flattering ones. Bicente took her to a place he rented by the week and that they optimistically called an apartment. Part of my brain rebelled against the aberration of those two idiots seeing themselves as a “couple,” even if it didn't go beyond a tacit, instrumental association—temporary, very temporary. Part of me still believed in a cosmic justice that makes people disappear when they become too stupid, that, when they pass certain limits of shamelessness and self-humiliation, just freezes them out of pity. Still, I've always been naive. I don't even think she had to touch his cock, bathed as he was in the pleasure of being taken for a white knight. Though of course, between a man and a woman these things can never be assumed.

What Bicente wanted was to teach me a lesson, which any way you look at it was a much more powerful motive than libido. I remember him only too well, hunched on that sofa (surrounded by Buddhas!), trying to convince us that smoking marijuana was very bad. I guess at a certain point you get sick of your guests forgetting your name; you want to shake yourself out of the sad, stupefied role that your stand-ins act out on the stages of other people's minds. Maybe he was hurting from being cheated on, who knows? When you look a certain way not even money can protect you, and he wasn't that loaded by the standards of get-rich-quick Spain, where
bandolero
-investors and moneymen swoop about like bloody Baron von Munchausens. Anyway, Bicente saw the chance to give a performance in the role of his life, to score a goal on the other team's field; he'd be a champion of pure love, the defender of marriage.

“If you stick your nose into this again, Vicente, I'll rip it right off.”

It was a reasonable answer to the five daily messages that Helen left on the machine, with the restrained tone Bicente advised, and the fifteen she spat at me like poisoned arrows when she was alone in the apartment.

One of those days, I started to get a sharp pain in my back. The disks were coming out of their cushions of bone; I had to stand up or lie down, I couldn't even think about sitting. The tension irritated the tissues of my back, and waves of pain radiated outward. When it comes to other people I'm very much against painkillers, but I was quite indulgent with my own suffering. I started to take something stronger than Nolotil. I never got rid of the pain; it stayed there, scraping away at my fibers. But at least the drug separated it from my brain—I could see it floating there in an isolated capsule, and it didn't touch me. The downside was that I went around practically sleepwalking, and given the situation, a clear mind would have come in handy.

Bicente's plan was to tail me. He gathered information from the “friends” I turned to back then for some crumbs of social sustenance. He was trying to “catch me by surprise”—or so said the people who came to visit me after the debacle was over, happy to find me alive, consoling me in my convalescence.

I imagine the two of them there in the apartment, by the light of those candles that stink of sandalwood (these invented memories are as vivid as ever), eating pizza (Bicente with a knife and fork), using all four hands to draft their convoluted plan to intercept me. All they needed to do was come see me at the door to my office. If I'd known they weren't even capable of that, I could have saved myself the hassle of synchronizing my exit to the street with the arrival of the 45 bus, and the pathetic little race across Via Augusta, one hand bracing my burning back. Just let them spend three or four nights feeling like intelligent creatures whose “ideas” could actually influence the course of events; I certainly won't be giving them any credit for a simple plan in an open world. We humans with our games, what a spectacle we'd be for the extraterrestrial heavens, if only they weren't deserted. I suppose Helen didn't want to meet me in the open; she was looking for a chance to confront me in an apartment with walls and doors, among other people. And so the two of them go on puzzling it out: Helen is lying on the floor, covering (and emphasizing!) her loins with a napkin soaked in pepperoni juice, while she incites the “strategist” to devise the best way to catch me unawares. Bicente paces about in shirtsleeves, feeling like a titan in the waves of humid air. Then he sits down and takes off his glasses, folds them up, and leaves them on the bedside table, because once upon a time a girl (his cousin) told him he had sad and dreamy eyes. She left that flower pinned to his breast and he's not ever going to let it dry out.

It was only a matter of time before we'd run into each other. From a distance, every city is an archipelago of provincialism, a narrow colony, and that half-assed party in another sumptuous apartment was as good a place as any. I know it was planned because the guests couldn't help exchanging little glances. Terrible actors, so anxious to get me into the cage with the beast—how it entertains us when people separate, reconcile, intermingle, yell, kiss. Whatever nature-lovers may say, trees are a bore; they will always be far below even the most anodyne human in terms of entertainment potential, there's no comparison.

I don't think they put Lisandra in the mix as part of the plan, but who knows? I'd spent weeks with no stimulation except the occasional sex scene on late-night TV, but I've never been one for solo love. My veins were twisting like wires to restrain the built-up libido, which itself was developing a complicated system of inexplicably precise fetishes: fine ankles, rhomboid faces, names rich in fricatives. It was just that Lisandra liked tall boys, and I was wearing the blue jacket that night; it was just that I liked the delicate awkwardness of her body language when she started flirting, I liked the eagerness for fun that lit her face for half a minute, and the way that fire shrank, smothered in timidity, without going out entirely, smoldering like a hot ember. I liked that she was dark and thin, that she was so much the kind of girl I had always imagined for myself before Hurricane Helen ruined my juvenile expectations. I let the image of us together float calmly in an imagined future, and I liked what I saw.

So we started to exchange words that slid one over the other as if they were caressing or encouraging one another, smoothed by the foregone conclusion that a good impression would be made: words that were more mood-music than meaning. I won't say it could have gone on until her lips separated for a kiss, but certainly long enough to populate the nighttime mind with pleasant ideas. I was enveloped in that soft mood when I saw him slaloming through the guests, one arm raised and waving frantically. The parting in his hair drawn with a ruler, his collar starched, that little beard, the type on whom age will settle like a corrective to the anomaly of youth: Bicente.

My first impulse was to head him off and smash his face in, but it tends to be complicated explaining to a girl like Lisandra the curative powers of working out rage with your hands.

“Just let her talk to you, Juan-Marcos.”

And I did. I allowed Helen to come up to me in a corner of the room, while man-trays passed carrying cold cuts and canapés of margarine and imitation caviar and emu tartar. Helen's mouth and lips conspired to produce sounds directed toward my ear, but I paid no attention. I let myself be carried along by the fatigue of a boy who, burning with vital fire, dips his Boy Scout feet into a marriage and who ends up lost in the maze of female complications: a mere puppy still wet behind the ears. For almost three years I had been the one in love, the weak party in the agreement; I got used to following Helen's changing whims. But a furious convulsion had inverted the situation, driving me from the depths to the summit of our coupledom, where I enjoyed the luminous role of being the desired one. I felt like giving her a hug to celebrate our newfound freedom from that stagnant imbroglio, but Helen was still Helen, and she went on talking about commitment, about our shared project (though the apartment was rented in my name, her fallopian tubes weren't carrying anything fertilized by me, and a civil marriage is, well, a civil marriage), but I didn't bother answering or refuting her words. I looked at her from a distance of thousands of miles, protected by a splendid smile of new superiority.

“I'm bored, Helen. Let's talk another time. I'm sure we'll get the chance if you're going to stay with Bicente.”

And I turned my back on her, walked away from her pre-cooked words, left her chewing on her rage, soaked in the delicious acidic taste of her saliva. I don't even remember what she was wearing—her image no longer made my optic nerve vibrate. On the fly I caught a toasted rectangle spread with a creamy paste of something salmon-like, and I took my time chewing it and brushing away the crumbs with the back of my hand. And then I realized that the tables and plates and lamps were all the correct color: seeing Helen hadn't added an ounce of intensity to the material world, I was still surrounded by the matte of disenchantment. My feet moved to the rhythm of the background music, I could have burst into song, I felt like taking off my jacket and stretching my arms, I felt taller, a true champion. I ran into Lisandra, standing with another brunette who has an even smaller role in this story, though her eyes curdled with a flattering complicity. What friends we could have been in a different life, that creature and me, her humble servant. But it was Lisandra's face I first saw contort into a grimace of alarm stretching out for long seconds like spilled mercury, preceding the slice through the skin of my trapezius: an injection of cold pain that spread through my nerves to the top of my chest.

Though she pulled the weapon out stained with the fibers and threads of my flesh, the Butcher of Montana repeated the operation, and any way you look at it, that's aggravation. But she must have used up all her strength, because—as they told me later—this second attempt didn't go as deep into my back. And they had to tell me about it later, because I collapsed before I'd really understood what was happening, what she was doing to me. Helen must have thought she'd killed me, maybe felt a tingling of horror in her hands; she ran out and took the weapon with her. From the width and depth of the wounds, she could easily have used ordinary scissors, but somehow I'm sure the object she drove into my flesh was the marble letter opener that disappeared when I kicked her out. It was Bicente who called the paramedics and climbed into the ambulance, which held up traffic as it carried me over damp streets, warm and blue, to the Hospital del Mar. They dumped me straight into a bed because they were afraid (because of the wound's location, because of my heroic faint; the doctor congratulated me for having fallen so well, I barely even bit my tongue) that I had a perforated pulmonary vein.

Under the heavy smell of chloroform, I wanted only to live. Lying between sheets that smelled of bitter fruits, I realized that dying is a pretty immodest affair. If Helen had hit my pulmonary wall, if she'd popped my consciousness like a balloon, I would have left behind several half-watched films, wet clothes in the machine, an unfinished tube of hand lotion, coffee dregs in cups, financial reports still to be deciphered, the bank account with an overdraft I was putting off resolving, a modest collection of more or less personal objects to be catalogued and which no one would ever use again…not to mention all the days that none of my senses would brush against, a mind-boggling luxury for other people to enjoy…not to mention the ideas ambushed by the primitive emotions, warm like stables, that overtake us as we sink into decrepitude. I'm not surprised Dad didn't think about how he'd end up with his calluses exposed.

I could barely move under the weight of the painkillers. I tried to protest—by now I wasn't going to die by Helen's hand, but if they went on like that they'd annihilate my immune system. And I was far from sure that my roommate, Mr. Ponç, a blind man who twisted with laughter at the jokes on TV, was free of viruses. Hospitals finish people off, you've got all kinds of microbes that breed in decomposing organs let loose in the air. Those bugs are just looking for a fleshy opening so they can lace up their boots and get to work, but try telling that to the surgeons with their white coats and sadistic flair for cutting and sewing. The patient is only there to keep quiet until he gets bedsores in his crack, and if you must know, I was too tired to argue. So tired I let Bicente approach the foot of my bed, and from there that toad—I picture him covered in slimy scales—told me in a soft, confessional voice how Helen wouldn't get out of bed, how she couldn't get over the idea that she would have to live with a murder (that she was a murderer!). Depressed and drugged, what a novelty. The only surprise was that she'd had the energy to chase me down and stab me. But still, he was so dejected, so weak, that I promised him I wouldn't press charges.

And the reason I made that promise was not a magnanimous one, oh no! I did it precisely to annoy my sister, who in the meantime had appointed herself the representative of the fragmented Miró-Puig family. Mother certainly wasn't going to leave her living room for anything less than six stab wounds, and my father remained stubbornly dead, so it was Madame Popo who parked her bulging backside on my bed each and every afternoon to offer advice, pampering, and admonitions. She hadn't exactly grown a triple chin—she'd be what your Grandma Rosa permissively calls “chubby”—but she'd definitely suffered a big jump in her calorific intake. The increase in body mass had blurred the wavering line of her self-esteem. She was entering a phase of bottom-feeding for affection.

Of course she reproached me for having married a murderer, and for being profligate, but I didn't hold it against her—her brain was too slow to realign her language with her new objectives. I could hear the goodwill in her tone, in the warmth of her speech: