Divorce Is in the Air: A Novel (43 page)

I took my leave of the coffee dregs and went down in that fabulous elevator. Outside, a splendid, stupid, limpid light awaited me, washing across the avenue.

I was dazed. The sky’s deserted plains, crisscrossed by the occasional urban bird (starlings, kestrels, gulls), seemed about to collapse onto my head. I took a detour away from the spacious solemnity of Bonanova and headed down a narrow street: low houses, damp patios, backyard smells, an almost rural landscape. Why was I mourning for that shitty apartment? None of our concerns stay with the furniture, none of the things that involve us; we can’t bequeath our personalities. Not even streets like Bonanova or Mandri or Iradier, which we’ve walked a thousand times, know anything about me or about Dad. We are welcomed into those apartments for years, they love us there, they are the backbone of our world. Then they become small, we leave them behind, furniture is brought in and carted away, the walls are painted, the old tenants die and the new tenants die, too, and no one says a word about whoever used to live there. The future is an expanse of homes where we paint nothing. The future is a city full of houses where we no longer live.

I walked for half an hour and then took a break in one of those dirty, sandy squares that dot the city, with their benches of dead wood that nothing can ever grow from again, and their grungy pigeons. I sat down at a pavement café with aluminium furniture and ordered a gin and tonic. I was finding it a bit warm.

I leaned my head back: the leaves were falling coldly, clutching at their color. I closed my eyes, and the sensation was like being in one of those documentaries in which the camera approaches the water’s surface and then submerges to swim among a school of fish. I saw myself on the other side of time, submerged in the past. I couldn’t have been more than ten, Dad was turning the pages of the Ascot almanac, and Mother had one eye on the TV and the other on my sister as she played. It was a winter’s day, the apartment was warm, and I felt so startled by the way life was gently rocking that I went running down the hallway and threw myself against the bed. I shook myself hard, it was difficult to breathe, I felt fully in harmony with the moment, as if the people to whom I was important and who were important to me had each at their own pace reached an optimal point of ripeness, as if the pulp were straining against their skin, about to break through and spill out; I was afraid of that moment. It was joy at being in that home, at being male, bearing the name Joan-Marc, at having that father and that tall mother. It was completely absurd that the scene had to keep moving forward, and that no one could stamp it on the flesh of time.

I opened my eyes suddenly and saw a milky sun that emitted hardly any light. I left the money on the tray and took off my dark glasses, shook the crushed ice in the glass, the water escaping its solid form.

I went down a street that opened up like a black path between lithic buildings. The portion of sky I could see looked soft. As a boy I couldn’t abide change of any sort. When Dad shaved off his mustache I howled and pestered him until he let it grow again: dark dots first, then threads that wove together until they covered his lip. Since that afternoon when I’d tasted a satisfied life—a world where Mother was healthy and Dad lived and anything bad could be washed away with the right words—ambition and sex and all the other rabid impulses had done nothing but drive us apart. As hard as I try, I can’t keep the water in the bowl, the liquid spills at every step and all that’s left are the words testifying to those golden impressions, long since melted. But words don’t have substance or weight; they’re waves we can’t hold on to.

Three or four pedestrian crossings later I started to hear the noise of traffic, like the sound of an old and eager beast that hasn’t given up yet. I came out on Via Augusta, the cars moved forward in their lanes, the traffic lights lit the fumes from exhaust pipes. A gust of arid wind shook the bars’ awnings. The idea of returning to Rocafort made me nauseous; I decided to go along Muntaner, between shopwindows that reflected a serene dream as it passed. I felt drawn by the descending streets, their asphalt shone like trembling rivers. I was conscious of the danger if I kept going in that direction—I could end up in one of those neighborhoods where even if I didn’t have to show my passport, an interpreter would certainly come in handy. I felt like staying a while longer in the Eixample’s happy grid of streets, among its beveled corners, its shops selling liquor, stamps, weapons, coins, its luminous bars.

I went into Dry Martini because it had been years since I’d sat in one of those booths. Really I just wanted to go in and receive the cold, dry liquid like a knife in my throat. I stared into the depths of my soul to ask how I could be so critical with Mother: I had bemoaned how my filial love hadn’t been strong enough to get her up and back out into the heaving streets, and now, out of love for herself, she’d shaken off the apathy and had dragged her carcass out to socialize with her prosthetic friends. But I was only disturbed, shaky like jelly taken from its mold. I told myself it wasn’t the kind of recovery I wanted for her.

I don’t know why I changed tables. I went to sit at the back of the bar, and from there I observed the young couples, suspended between the extremes of human time, who had two full decades yet to squander before they reached my age. More or less at that instant I switched from my reasoning to another archetypal memory: as a boy I’d felt attracted by empty building plots, the cement blocks, the rubble of urban demolition. Mother thought I liked the cables, the twisted steel bars, the plastic blown around by the wind like a mischievous ghost. But what really transfixed me was a deep sense of indignation: I tried to use my mental strength to put the debris back in place, I tried to introduce some human warmth into the cold objects, I begged my mother to have someone take care of cleaning up the space. I dug my heels in, and I wouldn’t move on until they promised me.

I had to leave the Dry because I got paranoid that if I stayed there, sooner or later I’d run into Pedro-María. A smudge of a moon cast a soft and sad light, surrounded by darkening clouds, heavy with electricity. The air brushed by the pigeons’ wings was full of damp particles. I walked slowly, as if a sudden elephantiasis had transformed my feet and ankles into hooves, or as though I were stepping on ripe fruit. I watched as the buildings lost their color, I saw the purplish night approaching and the Agbar tower shining like a radiant monolith, so I kept on toward the creamy beach. I ended up in the Raval: foul-smelling streets, multicolored neon, baskets of fruit and vegetables, livid faces, dozens of dark shades of skin, beat-up suitcases, elderly whores made up to bring the old softness back to their eyes. I hadn’t planned to drink a drop more, and you couldn’t pay me to go into one of those dives, but an evil rain started to fall, and I am a man of the Castilian plain, a creature made for dry land. The joint I went into was tight, narrow, and had at least six corners. I put on a criminal expression so I wouldn’t clash with my surroundings. I counted my loose cash; I wouldn’t get out of this place without paying. Have you been in a dump like this, Dad? Did you ever set foot in this neighborhood? I ask because it strikes me as the perfect place to unclog the heart’s latrines. The advantage of having a ruined family is supposed to be that you won’t spend your life trying to fix small imperfections, that you’ve already shaken off hope’s impossible demands, but it’s not like that, how could it be like that, Dad? I still carry the weight of them all.

When I was a kid I didn’t even appreciate that I’d been granted a life all my own, so how could I ever have believed that others enjoyed a complete existence? I thought that when they left me they disappeared, waiting to be summoned back. I’d never seen a dead person, I had no experience of suffering or illness—those were problems that could be avoided if people just stayed near me, within my field of vision. My mother wouldn’t have believed it, but I asked her to stay with me a while longer at night so I could protect her. I wasn’t afraid of the dark, I was afraid of the damage the distance could do to her. Fortunately, I was gradually convinced that all those people breathed independently of me, that they were moving along their own paths.

Of course, all those paths are deadly, and only life survives itself. The passage of time washes the world, renews the earth, and although I recognize that it’s a fine idea, what good does it do us? What can we do to avoid feeling it so acutely? It would be best if sunlight worked like those legendary rivers that, as they wet the edges of the land, revive it—our breath should renew us. Really, it’s all about making room inside yourself, ever more room to erect the stage for a lifeless fantasy populated with bloodless visions. There were no more drops falling onto the pavement, it was just a passing shower. The gin scraped my throat, the boys were mulatto, and the girls had tattoos; I left a red bill on the table. Melancholy is a pretty poor currency when it comes to collecting for everything we leave behind. As a boy I’d also feared walking down the hallway, turning a doorknob slowly, and peering into a scene from the future. It wasn’t so much the fear of catching a glimpse of the everyday disgraces hidden behind the future’s curtain, but rather concern about how everything would have looked to those child’s eyes: my fights with Helen, Dad’s swaying body, my mother’s pills, the loneliness of the Rocafort attic. Now there would be no shock to it. Now I know that in the house of the past, everyone will be dead.

The sky was growing soft again, only one or two clouds floated by, lit by dusk. I left behind the labyrinth of Raval and crossed a park: masses of odorless vegetation, and a fountain where pink petals floated, soon to rot. From far away, the Towers reminded me again of two pieces of carved marble rising above a sea of shit. I walked through the Borne, which was getting busier again after the rain, and the globes of light hanging from the metal lampposts seemed to be waiting for a vapor of fog, a stagecoach. Punctuating the streets’ corridors, the train station appeared, then petrified official buildings, the School of Nautical Studies. The heavens were coloring slowly in a fugue of reds: intense, purple, edema reds. The downpour had excited the sea and it was moving restlessly, like a strange creature lifting and stretching portions of its body before plunging back down in sandy waves, a soft stairway. Two bicycles sped past me, and in the distance shone the dirty dampness of the Columbus monument, an extinguished lighthouse put there to dissuade travelers. I’d never wanted to come to this city, but in the end I like it—even the pigeons, so indescribably filthy, even the vulgar banana trees that scatter their allergen spores. The Catalan rumblings don’t bother me, neither does the secessionist drift. I’m only saying we’ve traveled some distance together already, and no one’s going to keep me from feeling like the city is mine, too, these neighborhoods stretching like nervous tissue from the bony spine of Diagonal. I saw two pregnant girls strolling arm in arm, sweet foreigners sipping from a soda can, the weight of children in their bellies, gestating bundles of time and new blood that will unspool into the future. That sight was all it took for my mind to turn to delicate thoughts. The last rays of sparkling red revealed the port’s ghostly outlines. Maybe when it gets dark it will be one of those nights when all you need is an amateur telescope to see the disk of Jupiter or some Venusian twinkles. But even ironclad Mars is exhausted, even the moon hangs at an immense height.

Still, I concentrated, in case one of those oscillations of the cosmos wrapping its folds of time would bring me the image of a pregnant Helen, a memory that didn’t include me. No such luck. Anyway it’s hard to imagine Helen willing to compromise her flirting with attractive men. The years pass faster for the body; the mind stays home (where else could it go?), but it doesn’t feel too comfortable there. Do you think any of these young girls, traipsing along the same roads as if they’d just been paved, ever stops to consider this: an old woman’s smile echoes the laughter of a girl who went up the stairs of her first European hotel, wearing her only dress, intent, with the help of a stranger, on changing the course of her life?

How’s it going, Helen? I imagine you as an old woman because I’m afraid of going out to find you in the real world, where you haven’t yet turned fifty. You’re out there, doing your thing, whatever it is, and sometimes you’ll listen to and other times you’ll tune out the little voice that now and then talks to you about me. Over the years I’ve thought I caught your reflection in the window of the metro, in a puddle, in the treetops on summer nights. I hear certain words intoned in your voice (
soirée
,
globo
,
váyaste
,
Daddy
), and if something brushes against the sleeve of my jacket, almost two decades can be erased in a second. If I’m lucky, one of my hands touches you again in the Turret, above the roofs scattered out in the distance, while Daddy digs the cold grave of our separation.

I’m doing fine, abandoned, with too much sugar in my blood and some ridiculously low social security payments. I might look pathetic, but I’ll have you know I’m not done for yet. It’s just that it isn’t the way of the world for plans to unfold neatly, from the trembling idea all the way through to completion. It’s just that the agenda included bucketfuls of strife and weekly infusions of chaos. It’s just that I’ve only been playing at being the tough guy, Freckles; I said good-bye to all my friends, I married a woman you wouldn’t have liked, one we would have laughed at together under the sheets. I’ve treated my past as if my soul were a road covered in dry dust, but tonight, maybe because of the alcohol or the closeness of the sea, I feel like the earth is starting to open in wet channels and streams, and before long I’ll be gushing nostalgia. So let me celebrate your vitality, your naiveté, your cunning, your stupid opinions, the complicity with which you lifted a tit for me to suck on with all the force I had in the vain hope of making your body into a geyser, the malice with which you calculated my future weight, your keen gaze over the realm of the small that you couldn’t make the most of, because your head got loaded down with demands that were too much for you, because even though they’ve told me stories, and even though each is worse than the one before, when I was at your side I thought that because I was young and in love I could escape unscathed. And if you’ll allow me to be extravagant like in the old days, I will tell you now that today is the first day of the rest of my life. It’s been hard for me to get used to the idea that we move through existence shifting everything around, but this twilight is sharpening everything that’s happened recently. I want to grow as old as I can, old until my eyelids and ears fall off. If I survive this night, Freckles, I’ll make old age my new vocation.