Divorce Is in the Air (31 page)

“You're an absolute idiot, Juan.”

Best of all is that she showed up with one of those green cardboard folders that have charted the progress of my growing poverty. She'd summoned the Passgard people (though now they were Passgard & Helsengør) in order to confess that Dad had left her an apartment, a secret London flat: another love nest for that crow, or an expensive way of protecting my sister from our indifferent mother, who with or without the pills was capable of leaving everything to me. She told me that Dad had summoned her before she'd left for Boston. They hadn't gone to the replicant flat, but rather to a bar that was like a fried-food sauna.

“It was like having a conversation on a grill. I felt like crying. I didn't know what to make of his plan. I put off signing the papers, he kept insisting—he'd never paid so much attention to me before. He was waiting for the deal to close before he did
it
. I could have kept him alive longer.”

She told me the flat had made her feel guilty, that her property secret shamed her, and her aggression toward me had been an effort to shake off that burden. And she added that things were going to be different now, that she would arrange the papers so we shared the flat, she'd take care of me with her own two hands (and the combination of these words and her pinched little smile revolted me, as if they were extracting a live creature from my neck). She said I could use the place, go and live in London.

“It's beautiful there in spring. You'd be so happy starting a business there. The Catalans just don't appreciate you.”

I squirmed in my bed, making a frightening noise with the cables, the catheter, and the collapsible breakfast table, and I told her I was sick of having Mother ever-present in my head, of feeling Dad looming no matter where I went. I told her I'd just gotten rid of Helen and I couldn't possibly feel better, and I didn't want anyone dictating the rhythm of my days. I was done with following other people's demands, and I was going to take the reins of my own life.

“You're really not that good when it comes to taking the reins.”

OK, so that was pretty impolite, but she said it with a sweetness that ruled out clawing at each other's eyes: beneath the words stirred currents of sisterly concern, and I felt fine.

“You should have dragged that psychopath to court.”

I swallowed it all until the end; it was a stupendous performance. She made her only mistake when she got up to leave: the gold necklace, the marble pants tight around her flabby haunches, the brand of her sunglasses easily legible on the arm, and the princess diamond sparkling on her left index finger. People can't just shed their skins; they may think they've cut something loose, but their old selves survive. My sister hadn't given up on competing in attractiveness (women of her size have a very faithful fan base); it was only a passing disenchantment: the most repulsive aspects of her character would come crawling right back into place sooner or later. Her animosity was too deep-seated to be soothed with a salve of fat. My sister belongs to that class who only lift a finger the better to slap you; she can't help it, she doesn't even realize she's doing it.

The fact is that when Helen called and begged to visit, I encouraged her and let her come. Not because she swore she wouldn't see Bicente again (what a strategy), but because she had managed to emerge from the garbage can where she'd spent almost a year with only her Daddy for company. I was testing her, because it's one thing to hear how a woman's passion is more imperative, no wells of cynicism or safe distances, and it's quite another to see a girl scrape her initiative off a floor slippery with low self-esteem, then cross the city to fight to keep you.

“Stay.
No váyaste.
I love you with all my heart. There is nothing more important than a woman in love.”

Her swollen eyes, disheveled hair, her enormous tits, the chewed-up nail of her left index finger (the only one she allowed herself, the one she'd always hidden from Rupert), the peanut shells on the table, that terrible accent when she pronounced the word “soirée,” her little box of pills shuttling from one pocket to another as if they burned her, the unnatural shapes that her lips could adopt, and the expressiveness of her eyes when something didn't go the way she expected…the echo of so much that had become futile between us, and that now appeared in memories like dead extremities I was too disgusted and frightened to amputate. But on the other hand, there were the hours we had drunk of so deeply without noticing them pass, and there was the inconceivable number of people who were not Helen and I: people who don't reheat our leftover stew on our stove, who never think to call our house or ask how things are going for us. She'd sorted out everything with her parents over the phone, without resorting to spells and incantations, and now she was feeling better; and, honestly, how many girls do you know who can say they love you with all their heart and not die of embarrassment at the cheesiness of it all? She convinced me that nothing should be more important in this shitty world where people break down and get lost and grow old and die than a silly blonde from Montana who was in love with me. That's why I let her stay.

I let her stay because, as the effect of the painkillers ebbed away from the empty crevice in my flesh, the sliced veins, arteries, and capillaries sent out waves of pain that were too distracting; really, I asked her to stay because the hospital food was rubbish and Helen managed to bring in some delicious Japanese; I asked her to stay because I couldn't resist her idiotic idea, stolen from Colombian soap operas or women's magazines, of fixing our relationship by going to a spa hidden in the pines; I begged her to stay because I saw something alive in her eyes that might let us regain some of our intimacy, and although I wasn't in great shape and hand jobs are the bottom rung of teenage fantasies, it was delicious to watch as she managed the doctors, the nurses, the family of the blind guy they'd unzipped from pubis to throat to remove an invasive vine of ganglia, all so we could have a little privacy. And you tell me what other body part is connected more closely to the brain and its innumerable ideas about life and love and death than the hand: hundreds of nerve bunches encouraging contact between the delicate sensibility of what you would probably call the penis, and the body of the wife in love, so gentle in its touch, so soft in its handling. I think it was while we were in transit between dry and wet (me simulating the sort of abominable pain that drags you feetfirst toward death, Helen smiling the way a person can only smile if they're born in the United States, call their father Daddy, and have hair that grows in vexing waves, blonde and healthy) that she took the opportunity to say what she'd come there to say:

“Now you can't leave me, it would be a mistake to leave me, don't you see? It's impossible to leave.”

So Helen proposed we spend a few days at the spa. She asked to visit her parents first (Daddy would pay for the ticket) and bring Jackson (she mentioned the kid's name before clarifying where he fit into the family framework), and although the roots of my spirit were still buried in damp, dark earth, rich in the minerals of fear and alarm, I took shelter in the cliché of foolish minds, I ignored my sense of foreboding: I said yes.

Aren't intuitions odd? No more than two months ago, while I was gathering Pedro-María's dirty clothes (but not his underwear) to try out the laundry sink, I thought of the word “
chicle
,” which had been our cue to execute the suicide play that could bring us back from a ten-point deficit in two minutes. The afternoon we played on IPSI's court, a premonition had flashed before me that things weren't going to turn out well; and it really was a mess, they'd practiced escaping our trap with a simple throw from the baseline. We found ourselves losing by a lot and on the opponents' court, with the stands full of middle-class parents just dying to teach a lesson to those posh snobs from Bonanova, whose representatives were a bunch of teenagers in shorts. Doesn't that happen to you all the time—don't you get warnings? I have a theory, though I haven't worked out the equations to prove it, and so far the astrophysicists have ignored it. If our universe is surrounded by an almost infinite number of other universes, there's no reason that at any given instant each of them couldn't occupy a different point in time, and if a godlike eye were to observe all of them simultaneously, it would understand that there is a universe for every past, present, and future second, that time is concurrent. It's hard to explain how I reached this conclusion; what I need now is for you to empty your mind of prejudices, because if the different universes move in gentle undulations, forming folds like the frills of a summer dress, you'll see that there must be fleeting moments when one plane of experience moves so close to another wave of the cloth that you get glimpses of the future, like smooth, bloodless visions, broadcasts about what we will become. So if I'm right, being alive is like having a conversation with other “me's” dispersed throughout the cosmic ocean.

Just as I'd unclogged the laundry sink, Pedro-María came home with an envelope and a smile: he'd bought two tickets to Sónar.

“I had to get back to the hunt sometime, Johan. Plus, Jeff Mills is DJing.”

Since I'd been bugging him for months, I didn't have the strength to dissuade him. So we ended up at a dance party, and while I was trying to adapt to the space and the electronic noises, Pedro-María started shaking out his psychic garbage with arm movements of aboriginal inspiration. He called over a guy who, after an impatient scowl, opened his hand, and in its creases were three capsules that reminded me of seeds in a fairy tale. The last gin and tonic had gone to my head too quickly, I wasn't up for pills. Neither was Saw, but his brain was demanding an altered sensibility. I watched as the girls came over and Pedro divvied up his magic beans. He interpreted my refusal as censure, but while he was rising to the role of man of the night, tracing wakes of obscene honey in the air to attract those girls so eager to show off their asses, I started feeling down. My spirit sank until it hit the safety valve that keeps us from collapsing entirely. I think that must be how people who don't secrete enough enthusiasm feel: I stopped feeling concerned with existence, I was too removed from living things. It was horrible, it didn't hurt, and I've never felt worse. But the moment passed.

Once things cleared up, I saw Pedro-María approaching. He was stumbling so much it seemed impossible he would stay upright. One of the girls (the one with the bandanna) was trying to hold him up with both hands. She was truly selfless when she stuck them under his armpits, but she couldn't support his weight. If she hadn't let go she would have gone right down with him.

He managed to stand up without help, almost with a jump, and he laughed either at the effort or at the fright of finding himself upright so suddenly. He tried to keep his balance by reaching out his arms like Christ, hardly staggering at all.

“We have to go home.”

“Now?”

I was annoyed by how he leaned against me with his entire weight, and it took me a few minutes to grasp just how drunk he really was: his fingertips, slimy with sweat, deposited in my palm the pill he'd only pretended to swallow.

“I've done something terrible. Let's go home or I'll die.”

As you can see, I've gained a fair bit of experience with scenes and hysterical episodes—I know how to recognize when a brain is seriously overheating. I said good-bye to the girls for both of us, regretting I wouldn't be there to help them through the difficult period of growing up that lay in wait for them. I assumed he would think it was a good idea to go to my place, since it was closer.

“I'm afraid of your apartment, John.”

We didn't have cash, and the machine spat our debit cards back out (his demagnetized; mine without enough credit for a ticket), so we jumped the turnstiles. I cut myself, I have no idea how, from my fingernail to the bone that sticks out at the wrist.

Pedro was having trouble breathing and I had to unbutton his shirt; the cloth was soaked in the sweat that seeps out when your pores open wide like buttonholes. I tried to help by fanning him with a free paper we found on the seat, but to be honest I don't really think those blasts of suffocating air did him any good. I couldn't get him to sit still, and at every toss of the metro—you really can't beat the L5 in that respect—he slid from one end of the seat to the other. I was out of tissues and the blood was still gushing from my wounded hand.

He was so white that the train's fluorescent light gave him a greenish hue, and he started shaking like an abductee. His eyeballs turned milky like a blind man's; it was pretty revolting, but I couldn't just get up and leave, it could have been an epileptic fit, or a brain fungus, who knows? I don't have the imagination to turn symptoms into a diagnosis. Really, I only gave him those two slaps to let off my frustration, but they worked. Now he was gasping and motionless, like a fish pulled from the water.

“Get me out of here.”

I tried to deter him, but he opened his shirt more, as if the oxygen were burning his lungs. I managed to get us back to the street (and it's laughable that a process involving such a tangle of arms and legs can fit into such a short phrase). Our new challenge was to cross La Meridiana; it seemed more important to stop a taxi on the opposite side of the street than to reach the pedestrian crossing fifteen meters away, and the cars swerved around us, leaving a wake of blaring horns in the air. From a certain distance (Pedro dragging his feet—the bastard made no effort at all) we looked like a kind of suicide commando unit: our shirts open, hair all over the place, in the unmistakable style of best friends.

“You hit me.”

“You were dying.”

“I'm not dying. Look at me, I'm alive.”

The next test consisted of convincing the taxi driver that giving us a free ride would make him feel better than ten shitty euros that wouldn't even cover lunch. I tried to focus on a strategy, but my thoughts skidded on a stream of adrenaline. I had determined to open the door and dash for the sidewalk when finally Saw came up with a blue bill.