Divorce Is in the Air (32 page)

“OK, gouge us all you like.”

It was a joke from back when we used to find it amusing to challenge adult authority. It didn't matter that the joke was wearing thin by now—it opened a crack in the present and we let ourselves follow teenage rules. We shot out of the cab toward the front door, without waiting for our change or the receipt we had demanded so we'd seem important. My calves tensed, my heart couldn't pump enough blood to my thighs so I could speed up, and Pedro-María with his flamingo stride pulled half a length in front of me; I let him go. He waited for me in the doorway with his fingers brushing the wood and a smile on his lips.

“Sprint, wall, return.”

I touched the wall a second after him, enough to give him an advantage. It was the phrase we'd heard every time we went onto the court after classes ended, our warm-up exercise, only now it entailed crossing Córcega in the dark, wasted, dodging taxis and motorcycles. I suppose we were lucky, although it's also true that the years between us and the agile boys we used to be were imperceptible to the metallic sky above and the stars spinning slowly around their inconceivable axes. He beat me again. I think he was spurred on by fear—I was always the braver one. He fell to the ground in celebration of his victory, and I threw myself on top of him.

“We used to be twice as fast.”

“Twice, the man says. More, much more!”

The roots of my teeth hurt from the effort, the lactic acid flowed as if my hypothalamus had gone crazy: crystals in my veins, micro-tears in the muscles; I had a week of aches ahead of me. It was true—and what an incredible truth it was—that the juvenile vigor I'd longed for so impatiently as a boy, when the older kids caught the rebound, touched the basket, fought for position at the post, had come to pass: it had entered my body, and then it had left.

Pedro-María was doubled over in laughter, but I didn't want any advantage. I let him calm down, regain his competitive composure.

“That was the warm-up. Now comes the grand finale, the deciding race.”

“For the World Crown.”

“Sprint, wall, return.”

This time I made sure to get up before him (my hand holding on to his ankle), and I moved a good few meters ahead. When a motorcycle wouldn't let me cross, I had to stop short. Pedro-María passed me, but he lost his lead when a bus came barreling down in front of him; the driver leaned on his horn and I managed to catch up. He had a slight advantage that under normal conditions would have been decisive, but the thing is I'd taken a lot of beatings recently, I was sick of my shitty losing streak, so I grabbed him by his coattails and I more or less threw him to the pavement. He managed to stand up, crane that he was, before a car could run him over, but now nothing on earth could stop me. I even let myself take the last steps imitating the Pink Panther (though I don't think he got the reference).

“I won! I won!”

“You cheated A LOT.”

“How?”

“You grabbed me, stepped on me, pushed me.”

“All that counts, it was for the World Crown, no holds barred. I won and you lost.”

What came next was a lecherous surge of adrenaline from my gonads to my chest. The old feeling of competing and winning was burning in my veins, a medulla breathing at full capacity; our bodies give us so much. I expected Pedro to be offended, but here was an intoxicated and smiling boy who moved toward me with open arms. It was as if, after that exertion, our fiftyish skins were turning transparent, and peeking through were the generous youths we had once been, overflowing with vitality and burgeoning energy, who had accidentally fallen into middle age. As we hugged, I swore I could hear the pounding of our hearts.

We took turns trying to get the door open, and when we finally managed it we were greeted by a blast of reheated dust. I was about to make a comment about how the past was angry at being kept locked up in there—surely it would rather mix with the present and be subject to changing styles and depreciation—but I'd hardly gotten his coat off before he collapsed on the sofa.

Since he wasn't going to die of drunkenness anymore (I took his pulse), and when it came to sleeping and blowing saliva bubbles with his thick lips I thought he could manage on his own, I promised I'd be right back and I started nosing around.

Before I reached the kitchen, I was drawn to the laptop's shining bluish light. Of course I had some qualms, what do you take me for? It's just that the only discipline I've seen in Pedro-María during my brief vacation at his apartment is his practice of turning off the machine before leaving the room. It couldn't be a mistake—it was a plea for me to visit his spiritual cyber storeroom. Wasn't he already throwing enough money down the drain with that shrink? I lived with him, I was his friend. If I let the opportunity pass to collect information on his other habits, I'd be acting irresponsibly. I'd be a real traitor.

I entertained myself trying to guess his e-mail password (“Isabel,” “chicle,” “Rastabú”), but I grew tired of battling a mud-coated mind, and I opened Safari. He had cleared his history recently, but there was a trail of two hours of activity: UFO sightings, a Wikipedia page on cockroaches (which turned my stomach) with special focus on the “German” kind, two articles in
El Mundo
about the future of Spain's monarchy, and a list of pornographic sites.

I know teenagers aren't the only people who use those sites to discover what sex has in store. There are bachelors who relieve themselves at home before heading out into the fray, and even partnered citizens who want to add a little carnal edge to their desire, a hygienic relief for the intricate detours the sexual imagination takes. I know that stuff is out there, within reach of any router. It's just that, though I learned the technique of jerking off when I was young, I didn't much take to it. Girls came on to the scene soon enough, and they were so willing to be kissed and caressed I was afraid of turning into a fag if I indulged in a habit that didn't require them. It was so much warmer as a couple than with the carousel of filth you could summon to your lonely den. As I was striking out on my humanitarian mission, I already knew I'd find it unpleasant to see living beings who weren't me coupling and grunting. No one has to explain to me what sort of fantasies can take shape in a brain burning with excitement, but I certainly wasn't prepared for the level of specialization private licentiousness had achieved: “public humiliations,” “dwarves in disguises,” “black women tied up and crying,” and my favorite, “pregnant women who come stamping on apples.” Compared to those filigrees, my tastes are very plain.

It must be amazing to have all that within half a dozen clicks as you're becoming sexually aware. For us, Swedish porn had already been a major leap forward. It supposedly trained you for recreational sex, though in my case I was quite relieved to learn that most girls aren't that interested in double penetration. But none of those magazines you'd buy on the sly and keep in a bag until the house was empty could hold a candle to the bottomless pit the Internet excavates on your screen, with all those possibilities illustrated and animated. Those poor parents who put their trust in Google's “safe search” (ha!) and Apple's “content filter” (ha ha!). Nothing is going to hold back the curiosity of a fourteen-year-old specialized in the production of semen and pus. Nature likes its fathers callow; ours (although not Dad, specifically) would laugh when they found us with that kind of material, and play the bad boy: “You're not going to find anything there I don't already know.” Don't think your stepfather was a prude, Jackson. It's just that the map of human arousal is full of places your girl isn't going to like, ones I doubt even your precocious mother (wherever she is) knows about.

I didn't have the courage to go on investigating the digital trail of the desires of Pedro-María (whom I spent a long week afterward looking at in disgust), but since it felt good to take a break from his actual presence, I headed over to his Facebook page. The same photos, songs, and comments I could see from my own profile; I had never delved into his list of “friends,” and my attention was caught by a lump of pink flesh that could only be my sister. They must have met in the Bonanova apartment, or when Dad made her come and cheer for us on game days. I took it as a mutual intrusion that entitled me to address a few fresh words to that twit under the digital mask of Saw's identity. They ranged from self-indulgent (
You have no idea what a wonderful person your brother is
) to mean harassment (
He never talks about you, but if he happens to mention your name, it's only to refer to your weight
), passing through crude obscenity (
Suck my ass, nitwit
), but then my ideas dried up while I wondered if Popovych was aware that his wife was offering herself to the world like an odalisque advertising her availability. She was smiling with her arms crossed, two heaps of meaty fat that hung like broken tools. Maybe Popo tolerated it, maybe he encouraged her, who knows? After all, the only thing you learn as part of a couple is that marriages are inexplicable.

I went on looking through names, profiles. It was funny to see how people handle their profile pictures: complicated framings, cars that oozed status, photographs they “identified” with. I was amazed by the girls, flirtatious idiots, alternating photos of kids (they've given birth to so many it's a joke, they used to seem so different from their mothers and aunts) and vignettes of them in bikinis under an August blue that stretched out behind them with the sole purpose of providing a lively backdrop for their poses.

The men take care not to let their bellies show on Facebook, but when they're on the beach they reach opportunistic truces with their extra weight. What the women decide to show the world—after snapping two hundred selfies—is the happy maternal expansion that rounds their breasts, cheeks, and hips, with the frame cut off just where the flesh spills past their idea of what's tolerable. There was Sonia with the explosion of lascivious freckles on her cheeks, and the insinuating pleats of skin on Carmen Calvo's underarms, and the handlebar of fat that hung over Vanesa's elegant rump (wasn't she the one who used to jump hurdles?). They were unable to resist both displaying and hiding the bodies they cultivate, and that mortify them. I should visit them one by one wherever they're spending their lives, have a little chat to convince them that, as much airtime as the lithe young things may receive, what really gets me going isn't low-fat diets. It's when I'm out and about and I come across one of those behinds belonging to a girl from school, molded by almost fifty years of life and lavish lunches. It's always a good day when we can greet each other (Mancebo, Sandra, Laura, Cardelús, some called by first names, others by last) and catch up, exchange amiable lies and half-withered memories. They were priceless, those melancholic asses that were impossible to ignore during our conversations (where do you work, how do they treat you, do you have ambitions still to satisfy, what do you fear, do you think that in twelve years much has happened that was really worth it, do you think about it constantly?). How erotic a shared past can be! Sandra, Vanesa and Vanessa, Laura, Mancebo, Díaz, Laura, Carmen-Olga Calvo, only now do we see things clearly: we were presumptuous, too young to calculate the emotional advantages of being mammals who can ruminate on past experiences the way dromedaries spit and swallow. We should have slept together more! But don't think I'm the one turning melancholic now—that kind of girly sentiment isn't my style. The only thing I've saved of Helen's is one of her bras, stored away in a secret compartment that you never noticed. I mentally superimposed it on the lovers who came later, measuring the exact amount of pleasure my hands have sacrificed. That's all the nostalgia I allow myself.

I took a second to consult the oracle of Safari about Eloy Larumbe. It seemed like the perfect night to satisfy the curiosity I'd been repressing because I'd never looked closely at a transsexual before. Let's just say the photos I found were ads for his new line of work—his rates weren't bad at all, though the line where he claimed to be twenty-seven was certainly funny. I wasn't clear whether it was guys or girls who paid to sleep with her or him, but Eloise was certainly an alluring creature. You really had to look hard under the makeup to find his simpleton's features in the nose and cheekbones reworked with a scalpel. The luxuriant mane, implants in the breast and gluteus—not even the defiant gaze recalled Eloy's doubtful expression (maybe there were drugs that changed how the pupil and iris worked)—but if I snatched my fingers from the keyboard as if it were on fire, it wasn't because my body was reacting to Larumbe's little poses in a catsuit, but because my host's voice sounded through the apartment's stillness:

“Johan!”

I expected to find him much worse off; he was sitting up with his coat draped over his shoulders.

“I dreamed I was drowning. Sit down. I want to talk. Please.”

A cold and bright light shone in from Córcega—an office building, cleaning women, open files. But he asked me to turn on the little lamp; we would talk enveloped in a green radiance. An intimate touch.

“I have to tell you. I can't keep it bottled up any longer. I was unfaithful to Isabel.”

He didn't even hide that the whole mess was set in motion long after the harpy had robbed him of his daughter. In a way, he was savoring the wiry bond of imagined guilt that kept him tied to them.

I watched as he took the photographs out of another one of his envelopes. This time, the woman's name was Cris. They had met on a forum for photography enthusiasts, they sent each other private messages, and soon enough they found shared tastes: Leonard Cohen,
Knight Rider
, Al Pacino films; they were both unconvinced by Bob Dylan's electric phase. They met in person at a forum get-together, and before long they split off from the group and did what they could to laugh. He found Cris attractive in her own way: red hair, wide hips, naive accent (she was from Zaragoza). They wandered into a grove of fir trees, the conversation flowed easily and their defenses gradually came down. They talked of relationship troubles: they'd both been through nasty divorces, both were terrified of entering the next decade alone, they didn't feel like dodging suitors if they ever decided to look in earnest. There were children in circulation: three for Cris, one for Pedro (he didn't miss the chance to joke that his daughter didn't really circulate much). They came to a meadow shaded by a chestnut tree whose branches seemed to be bleeding. It was irresistible for these aficionados, so they took out their Nikons, and Cris told him that when he was shooting he seemed to come alive. They sat down on a bed of crunchy leaves and talked about their jobs. Her vagueness didn't escape Pedro's notice, but he let it go when she repeated that he couldn't let talent like his go to waste.