Divorce Is in the Air: A Novel (11 page)

I put on a pair of jeans and a blue cable-knit sweater—I wasn’t going to do up twenty-one buttons to go and see my mother. The green dress hugged Helen’s skin with modest satisfaction, like she was the head of the class who doesn’t have to make an effort to stand out. She’d pulled her hair back with a double bow I can’t even begin to describe, and fastened the soft wisps with transparent clips.

“You’re not wearing a tie?”

And there we were, two young newlyweds who left their rings hidden away (together, though) in the drawer of a bedside table so as not to frighten my mother, and piled into the taxi carrying a stupendous bottle of sparkling wine and a jelly roll filled with cream—Helen’s American palate was bored with
pa de pessic
. We headed off toward the apartment I’d spent my teens in, where we’d moved from Madrid because that fucker Franco was about to die and my father smelled business opportunities in the air. We drove up Balmes and through the racket of the Mitre intersection, which only exists as a reminder of the horror that always lurks in cities. We left behind the imposing start of Avinguda Tibidabo, then passed an elephantine bus as it off-loaded dozens of passengers, all bundled up for the two or three days in which winter had decided to remind Barcelona it’s still a major European city. Finally, we came to the Passeig de la Bonanova and its grand, deep-set entranceways, where the array of neighborhood stores (sweet shops, sewing shops
,
modernist pharmacies) that composed the landscape of my youth had given way to franchises, banks, and private clinics. Helen was chewing spearmint gum and the radio issued a
flamenquito
murmur. As we passed a line of banana trees with pruned tentacles sprouting from their trunks I patted my pockets, afraid (and hopeful) that I had left my keys at home. My mother was more than capable of not letting us in.

Helen was fascinated by the elevator trick: the cage that opened directly into the foyer of the loft where we lived had always impressed the kids I brought to visit. It had the same effect on the posh girls who were my sister’s friends, the ones who once they grew up passed for the prettiest girls in Barcelona, in spite of their slightly bovine air, as if where there should have been that thing that makes sparks fly—the metronome of ambition—they only had a yawning void. They were made idle by the security of knowing things would go well for them, that this business of living was only serious for people less fortunate, and if they just coasted along then everything would be simple, they could succeed without getting their hands dirty. The truth is that when I called them to mind a decade later under the same cadaverous elevator light, I preferred Helen’s features, her rapacious look, those furrows of calculation wrinkling the corners of her eyes: a face that reminded me why I was with that person, and that I’d planned well.

“Too weird for your mother?”

I must have been staring. She thought I was censuring her for painting her eyes with those wine-tinted shades that must have been in style in some corner of the planet. To Helen’s mind, the goth palette of her eye makeup said something about what was proper and what was not—she was being bold. Well, my mother was weirder than Helen could possibly expect, and without trying: it came naturally to her.

When we got there, Mother had the nerve to greet us in the living room wearing the robe that had been her official uniform for five years. Her hair was matted in greasy tangles as if she were wearing a mop-inspired hat. I guess under all those layers of bewilderment—the result of the pills she took to flee the pain—she hadn’t even remembered we were coming. She was toying with her pillbox; I saw the chewed and peeled skin around her fingernails. I introduced them and we sat down. It bothered me to see her like that, and after five minutes I got up with the excuse of going to the bathroom. Helen wouldn’t mind being left alone with her: if women aren’t trying to claw out each other’s eyes, they’re turning blind ones to each other’s failings, and some neuron cluster had dumped a load of feminine solidarity all over Helen’s brain. As I walked down the hallway I admired the tolerance you women have for illness and decline. Sure, you’re the ones who have to let a polyp grow inside you, and then expel it once it can suck and feed itself on your secretions. But that doesn’t explain the bravery of those girls who, at twenty, can face raw and empty eye sockets, wounds that stretch from chin to thigh, jaws corroded by cancer.

The first room on the left was the “grandkids’ room.” I was surprised to see the light on. I stuck my head in to be sure it was still unfurnished: nothing but the sewing machine, the rococo mirror, and the small Miró Dad had bought me and that I felt uncomfortable taking with me to hang in the Turret. Not even a mysterious shadow; I flipped the light switch. I heard Helen’s voice gushing in her most melodious idiolect, and instead of going into the bathroom, I ducked furtively into my parents’ room. There was his bedside table, the damask-covered lamp, that showy clotheshorse he’d brought all the way from Sydney. It was all arranged as if he might come in at any moment, fold his glasses, and put on his robe. Nor had Mother removed the painting of that hunting scene; the oil had lost its shine, and even under the influence of the electric light a muddy, ocean-floor tone prevailed. I breathed in deeply, but I could barely catch a trace of Dad’s spicy, hot cinnamon scent. I opened the wardrobe and was startled to see a row of old suit jackets hanging above two halves of a ripening quince; the shoulder pads and wide lapels looked like they’d been designed to satisfy anatomical possibilities that had long since lost the evolutionary struggle. I also found two green knit ties with soft sienna striping. He hadn’t taken them, and she hadn’t thrown them away. I did not, however, find his old robe.

When my parents were in here, they would almost never summon me unless it was to scold me. As a child I’d liked to wander around their room when I was alone, ramrod straight, talking to myself: anticipating my entrance into the adult world, which I could only guess at then. During my teenage years I’d lie on that mattress with half a dozen weekend girlfriends, and we’d kiss like wrestlers locked in a struggle that almost brought us tumbling to the floor. The bed frame would—who knows whether from use or disuse—squeal like one of those old country locks, rusted and corroded. I can hardly believe it was the same place, and that twenty birthdays really go by, you leave home and follow new rules, ten years pass and another ten and, just like that, you’re over forty.

If I put my mind to it I could even taste that thick nipple sprouting from a vein so blue it was scary to think I could sever it with my teeth. The girl’s name, though, wouldn’t come. If I saw her now I’d recognize the fantastic hips that led only to a couple of flat buttocks dotted with red-tipped pimples—disappointing, yes, in terms of what I expect in a woman these days, after being spoiled by you and Helen. But back then they were just as exciting as those little eyes dying to please me, or the armpits where the poor, silly girl had forgotten to shave off the soft mat of hair. I’m almost sure that this freckle-face and I struggled with something—it must have been the clasp of her bra, because not even in my dreams could I have hoped that that afternoon would get us to the finish line, the point of sweetness and strain where beauty is penetrated.

I threw myself on her—which was my way back then—ready to devour that moment so overflowing with life and health. My hands sought out swells and zips, and for once it wasn’t my tongue but the girl’s that started thrashing around in my mouth, like she was trying to crush something. My saliva took on an acidic tinge. I couldn’t concentrate; I pushed her away and there was a sucking sound. She started to laugh, and she took her clothes off as if unwrapping the gift of her own flesh. She kept her panties on. I didn’t dare look below her waist, I didn’t want to scare her, I kept my eyes busy on her breasts, two uneven masses crisscrossed with a network of veins. Her eyes and the opening of her mouth suggested warmth and wetness, an internal wave swelled her like a water balloon, and even though I wasn’t overjoyed with the package as a whole, the heady aroma emanating from her clefts held me to her, and in the confusion I stared right between her thighs: a ridge of flesh pressing thickly and wetly against the cloth. I threw myself on the girl, turning her, I found her breast and I started to suck hard on its tip, I heard her laughter, her protests and other kinds of noises, but I didn’t let up, and while I grant that it was not a subtle maneuver, I don’t believe it deserved the spasms that preceded the first drops of liquid that started leaking, gushing, from within her—a watery, sticky geyser.

The torrent flowed for two minutes; my heart ran riot with confusion, and I started shaking. I was getting information at different speeds: I saw the frilly sound of her hair, I heard the snowy color of her flat behind creak, I couldn’t stand the incoherent cushiony scent of her armpits. I would have liked to blind my touch, suffocate my ears, shut my nose. Among the ideas that piled up in the bottleneck in my mind were: she was dying, the girl was mutating, she was going into labor. But when she finally stopped writhing, it turned out she only wanted me to hold her, to wrap her skin in my arms, rigid like two fish just taken from the freezer. I shook as I embraced her, I was a big body about to black out, I could feel hypothermia tingling in my feet. The girl felt the desperation of my hug, but she interpreted it wrong:

“It’s not pee, it’s just what happens to me. It’s natural.”

I lifted my head and saw that once again neither the laws of physics nor the guardian angels watching over us were going to lift a finger for me. The sheets were soaked in juicy secretions, a constellation of stains. It wouldn’t take much for my parents to move from that evidence to the suspicion that their son took advantage of their absence to hijack their bed for his first erotic adventures. I closed my eyes and watched my promising career as a weekend Casanova collapse. Good-bye to sexual advances with more appetizing feminine specimens: I’d been shut down by the vaginal fountain of a girl I wasn’t even taken with (and I do give myself credit for not bashing in her head while she was covering my neck in kisses). I will say in my defense that even if she’d had Helen’s kind of beauty, the kind that leaves you unsure whether to caress her or cover her skin in bites, deep relationships and emotions were out of the question. Is it the same with middle-class boys and girls? Up here we used to change girlfriends like shirts—all it took was a shower to clear your pores, free your body of lingering hairs and smells. Though you’d walk them down to the street when they got dressed to leave, or to the bus stop or home, none of those half-formed girls left anything behind to take root in your heart. It was enough to file away a name and a face that, as you matured, would become part of your blurry erotic prehistory. And it’s funny how none of that really prepares you for your first love, the one for whom you thought you’d been training your hands, your words, and your cock all that time.

“Where do your parents keep the sheets?”

She jumped up and put on some underpants that covered her entire backside (too scrawny to deserve the name “derrière,” whose lustful connotations made me feel faint) and that ever since then I associate with the flag of some impoverished country. I didn’t know where my mother kept the sheets, I’m not sure I could have even recognized a “bedspread,” I didn’t know techniques for covering mattresses, and since the most mature response I could offer to the vision of Dad’s curious finger moving over the dampness left by “my girl” was to throw a tantrum, I was grateful to the point of tears that she decided to ignore me and start opening and closing drawers in search of a set of the same color. When she found them, I hugged the Australian clotheshorse so she could remove the dirty sheets and fit the fresh ones with the same naturalness some people have when they pet strangers’ dogs. And although I was behaving like an idiot with defects in important areas of my brain, she had the courtesy to turn and offer me a smile. My hands were trembling too much to help with all that careful folding, so my contribution was to bundle the dirty sheets into a ball that I stuffed into her backpack. She promised to return them clean in two days. And that’s what she did, so well ironed and fragrant I had to crumple them a little so they’d pass for the kind of careless work our servants did.

“My mother trusts me.”

The incident gave us a feeling of camaraderie. I must admit that her fifteen years of experience had lent her a great deal of ease moving that big, friendly body of hers. The smile she gave me after her last invasive kiss announced possibilities that, consumed as I was by adolescent prejudices in favor of elegance, I’m sorry to admit I ignored. Anyway, I guess those memories aren’t worth all that much if I can’t even remember her name. I turned off the light and took my leave of the hunting scene that would remain hanging there until its very canvas rotted away.

Neither Helen nor Mother was complaining about my absence, so I went into the bathroom to freshen up. I loosened the knot of my tie, let the water run from the tap, and scrubbed my hands. There was something incredible about the fact that my parents had given me a life to occupy and I was still unable to remember the exact date that Dad left our apartment and my mother inside it. Don’t get me wrong, by that time it was barely my home anymore. My father had entrusted me with a sum of money, and I was thinking of using it to open a bar. I only went to Barcelona on Tuesdays and Wednesdays for my master’s degree classes; otherwise I moved around Madrid like a good catechism student repeating the plain facts that constitute all he knows and expects from society and its inhabitants.

Of course, they didn’t exactly summon me home to announce that he was leaving. It was a quiet process, with subtle outward signs, like when you slowly pull a bandage off hairy skin…you get the idea. Making a fuss wasn’t my parents’ style. They weathered any shocks and contrived to bottle them up in silence; they knew how to manage the ripples of emotion. If they ever fought, if they waged their own little wars, it all stayed within the walls of their bedroom. And Dad delayed the final separation by leaving behind books that were as much Mother’s as his, his music collection, most of his suits, his best pairs of shoes, and the letter opener with a faun carved into its marble handle. Mother had never opened a letter in her life, and though I didn’t dare take it with me to Madrid, I vainly fantasized that he’d left it in the drawer for me to find.