Divorce Is in the Air (40 page)

“My face softened smoothly, the feminine features fitted together nicely as they settled in. It's always a lottery—if you win it opens doors for you, both personally and work-wise. They weren't pleasant people or jobs, but when you want something so expensive, something that puts such a strain on your life, you reduce your appetites, you learn to put the brakes on them. I came from a good family, from a school where they taught you how to land on your feet. I learned different skills in the bars, on the streets, at night, but the skill of interpreting people's intentions when they approach you, of arranging your words to persuade or intimidate, that's something you can't improvise.

“I earned money to have laser depilation, and also had shaping done on my backside and on my thighs. When the testosterone falls, the fat layer changes and you get irregular blocks of cellulite. I welcomed that kind of complication. I discovered I could please a man looking like that. They were men who wouldn't have gone out for a walk holding my hand, they wouldn't have known how to reconcile me with the rest of their lives. But masculine sexuality doesn't have to fit into a coherent whole, men will pay to have a passing desire catered to. I got lucky with the agency, and money is a magic potion. I found out I was good at it, I had a high libido: just brushing against their small desires, fleeting, avid, and brief, was enough to set me on fire.

“I reached a certain equilibrium, but it wasn't enough, I was in limbo. Some nights I pulled out my hair, I called myself a coward, but now I'm proud I didn't rush a single thing. I was patient, I researched every step of the way in the forums, I burned the midnight oil on open threads, I saved more money than I needed so I'd avoid any surprises. I barely let myself think about how while I was moving toward being a woman, my cells were using up the best years of their lives. I started with an Adam's apple reduction—they didn't even put me under. A fine incision along the crease in the skin of my neck was all they needed to file down the cartilage, but I had to pay for good hands. With a bad surgeon, you risk damaging the structure of the larynx, it can ruin your voice.

“I went to expensive specialists and didn't let their first answer convince me. I demanded to know everything about the operation, how they were going to cut me and where. I demanded a detailed, day-by-day breakdown of the postoperative period, a list of possible outcomes. It seemed to me that the doctors looked down on patients who were in a hurry, who abdicated all responsibility—my attitude annoyed them at first, but they ended up respecting me. I was afraid they were hiding things so they could charge me for my rashness later in the operating room. They could always claim there'd been unforeseen complications, an accident, it would be so easy to disfigure me. I didn't take all their advice, either. I knew it was a bit of a risk with the anesthetic, but I got through the fasts before operations by taking sips of J&B until the room started spinning. I was asleep, though, when they dissected the cartilage to reshape my nasal dome, and when I woke up slowly through the fog of leftover anesthesia, my nose was covered with a bandage and my nostrils blocked with gauze. On top of the discomfort and the problems eating, I had to give up smoking, because nicotine contracts your veins and stops scar tissue forming. I spent a feverish week oozing blood and saline. It was like incubating a live, half-formed animal in the middle of my face.

“I wanted to get there, but I never forgot the risk, I never stopped feeling that a cautionary hand was holding me back. Wasn't that what our posh education was all about? I can't hold it against them. Those priests knew what the world was like, they taught us how jagged it could be. Sometimes it seemed I was running on a track with hundreds of parallel lanes on either side of me. Others drew ahead, and then I'd overtake them while they were bewildered at finding themselves with noses that wouldn't heal, or detached jaws, gangrene in their breasts, burst silicone. Others got exhausted, you'd find them lying in a squalid room. One girl went into her bedroom in the apartment she shared with three others, and flayed the skin from her face before sticking a pair of scissors in her neck, just because there was no way to correct the line of her jaw. Entire lives dedicated to extracting an imagined body from the real, and to have to die like that, without ever finding it.

“My only complications came in the minor operations. For my lips I tried injections of hyaluronic acid, but my body rejected it, and my face broke out in cysts. It was horrible, but didn't last long. One of my girlfriends had a rash of yellow eczema on her arms that took two years to clear up. I found an expensive solution: liposuction. Instead of throwing away the fat, they injected it into my lips. The corners look pretty, it'll last for years. I'm pleased; mouth operations can cause irreparable disasters. I've read how American actresses are pressured into things by their agents, and some spend decades drugged up so they don't have to look at themselves in the mirror.

“I was really scared when they reconstructed my cheekbones. You might think it wasn't a necessary surgery, but I'm sure you remember how my cheeks drooped, like a sad puppy's. The technique is simple: they insert a tube into the cheekbone and inject fat cells that the face muscles assimilate as their own. When you're ready, they make an incision in your palate and cut the bones with a saw. I know I've been like that, my head tied down and my face open and full of holes, while files break and polish my cheekbones, but I still can't imagine what it's like. When I woke up I couldn't laugh, I'd lost my voice, I had an enormous wine-colored swelling. They had to admit me to the clinic, and I got very depressed. I was horrified by what I was doing to myself, what I was subjecting myself to. I'd gone almost a year without working. I wondered what you or Jacobo would think, whether you'd approve—how silly. The girls from the forum who lived in Barcelona responded to my calls for help and stopped by to cheer me up. Nice ones, shy ones, crazy, obscene ones, a complete spectrum of characters.

“One afternoon, I was alone with the girl who I got along with best: refined, pretty, from Molins de Rai, tormented by her size-ten feet. She was determined to have a sex change, only she was out of work and refused to be a prostitute. Her father was pressuring her to go to a psychiatrist to be ‘cured.' She had chewed fingernails, skinned fingers.

“There was one of those talk shows on TV with a lot of shouting, and one of the shouters was a transsexual reveling in the role. ‘Disgusting,' my friend said. But it didn't seem to me like the tranny made her tribe look any more ridiculous than the heterosexual woman who assured the audience that her cunt tasted like a cunt, or the host who every half hour managed to dump a steaming bucket of shit over his head. Since I couldn't talk I didn't answer, and it took me a minute to understand that my friend from the forum wasn't making any kind of moral judgment. She said: ‘All the money she earns, and she spends it putting on and taking off lips and chins, silicone inside and silicone outside. And she doesn't realize that balloon of a forehead makes her look sub-normal. It kills her. With the money she spends fucking up her face, she could make four girls like me happy.'

“We shared the feeling of being intruders in our own bodies, but our characters were as different as any two people. I ended up changing my number, I left the forum. I'm very grateful to all of them.

“I didn't have the nerve for breast implants until there was someone beside me to hold my hand. I chose the silicone gel and had them cut along the axillary dome. I wanted the implant between my pectoral muscle and ribs. For the first time, the money didn't come from my bank account. I remember the lights in the corridor and an enormous wall clock that seemed to be waving good-bye as my consciousness dissolved into the sedatives. It turned out well, it all turned out well. I lost the feeling in my nipples for a week, and at first the breasts were too high and separated because my taut skin wasn't used to carrying so much weight. The body reacts to implantation by wrapping the prosthesis with a fine covering. If the capsule of human tissue gets too hard, then complications begin, but everything turned out fine. I spent the post-op period listening to songs from the eighties, happy and buoyant music, lively, punky, wonderfully naive stuff. I held back from looking in the mirror until the implants had settled in, until the fat had absorbed the bruising and my back had gotten used to the new weight. They'd already cut into my face, neck, armpits, and inner thighs, but the breasts were something new, a revelation, as if a believer had grown angel's wings. I lifted my shirt like a teenage girl wanting a photograph to document their roundness, and there they were, devoid of milk or mammary glands. I was so moved when I uncovered my new torso that I started laughing and crying at the same time. I wanted to call my boyfriend, but my voice wouldn't come. Really, though, I'm glad I didn't see him, it was a private moment.

“Embryos make such a huge effort to get into the light of day. Of course, they're not conscious. It took me a bit longer than nine months to develop a new body, and I did it with my eyes open, I was watching the whole time while it grew.”

“Do you have orgasms like a chick?”

“They can't transplant a cunt—that, they cannot do. They cut your penis and testicles, and they use that tissue plus skin from your thighs to make a neo-vagina. That's what they call it, can you believe it? The nervous system is still a man's, so no female orgasms, but if everything turns out well you stay sensitive. They keep the nerves of the glans and move them to the inside of the genital cavity. They're longer than a woman's, that's why it works.”

“And are you going to operate down there?”

“I don't dare. The stitches, the Betadine, absorbent sheets, drainage, destroying the bacteria in the colon with shots from a syringe, the dilations so the pelvic wound doesn't close while the other scars heal, the probes. I can't stand the idea. You can lose your libido, you can experience sudden, irrational nostalgia for the flap of skin you've spent years hating as if it were a tumor. The absence can be as sensitive as an amputated arm. I'm going to stay like this, I've had enough. I want the world to consider me a woman without going through another operation. And depending on how you look at it, the thing does function like a clitoris.”

Conversation is so mundane, full of words without any weight or intensity. So it's really strange when it speeds toward intimate areas. I'm good at recognizing when words start to coil into blind curves, beyond which anything at all could be waiting.

“Can I touch?”

“Down there?”

“The breasts, I mean.”

“My breasts? Among people who've had the operation, mine are pretty ordinary. Don't tell me you've never touched any?”

She ran her fingers through the mass of her hair and let it fall. You'd think she hadn't learned the gesture by studying women, that it came naturally.

“Never fake ones. It'll stay between friends. For old-time's sake.”

I almost put on a glove (that was Dad's ghost in me). I reached out my hand, then she pulled down the neckline of the blouse. The filling was less suggestive than the natural, sensual mass, but the skin was skin: soft, hot, with all its pores and sensitive circuitry. Her attitude helped, too: wanting to have them, to put them on. I didn't prolong the contact.

“Thank you.”

“I can't believe you've never touched one, Joan-Marc, but then you always were so naive. I can still see you jumping around on the court, that finer version of you. And it's not that you've gotten fat, you've hardly put on weight at all. It's just that no one told you the impression you gave: in class, on the playground, always so far beneath your potential. A wasted boy.”

I let him get away with all that sissy shit not because the shadow of touching him was still hanging over us, but because the overarching effect of the conversation, the alcohol, the enticing flirtation with the past, and the tug of camaraderie all came together, melting into an unconscious feeling of affectionate well-being: terrifyingly human sympathy. I didn't want to leave. One more drink and I'd have asked her to dance.

“It's late. We'd better stop.”

She didn't say “get out,” she didn't say “leave now.” She got up from the sofa, and the friendliness had vanished under the mask of cold serenity she'd perfected.

“You're right. But let's meet again, Eloise.”

She helped me on with the coat. She handed me my gloves.

“I can hear the effort every time you think ‘Eloy' and end up saying ‘Eloise.' I can't stay in contact with you guys. You know, I never liked women as much as I do now that I'm like this. The metamorphosis demands a lot of discipline if you don't want to break down halfway there. Descarrega is still alive within Larumbe, but I'm not going to let him come back, there's no going back. This is my normal.”

“I understand.”

“No. You couldn't understand. I appreciate you trying, though. I always thought you were a good person, after all. I'll walk you out.”

We went down the stairs. From the ground-floor window the treetops reminded me again of an excited mammal. We must have an organ that still hasn't been identified, because I sensed in the back of my neck that Eloise had stopped halfway down the stairs.

“Do you want to smoke? I like to smoke here, if you don't mind, it relaxes me. I've thought of loads of things I'd still like to say to you, how silly. It's like my mind speeds up when it's time to say good-bye.”

“Give me one.”

“You talk, talk, and talk, only to find you haven't even gotten started. You know, when I spent two weeks swollen up like I'd been run over by a truck, instead of dreaming of someone who would give me a hand, I thought about basketball. Once I could chew again, I went down to the port to eat rice with lobster and drink half a liter of house wine. Unfortunately it wasn't such a nice day, but I still took a dip at five o'clock. The water was murky, full of algae and oil, and there were boys swimming, and there was the smell of grilled shrimp and mussels coming from the restaurants. The air gave me goose bumps, little bubbles of skin, and the sun ignited and extinguished scales of light on the sea, like that infinite surface was made up of a flickering swarm of blue butterflies. The idea disgusted me and I got out, water sliding down my new body, every drop hardening the sand it fell on. The boys were sunbathing, playing football, laughing out loud. I would have liked to introduce myself to any one of them—they all eat and sleep and go to work—have him show up all nervous at six to pick me up, and walk around like two friends until it got dark.”