Divorce Is in the Air (34 page)

“Yours are German.”

“How do you know?”

“I have my ways.”

“They live in kitchens, they're very family-oriented, they can feed themselves for weeks licking a single drop of rotten milk. They reproduce like…like…well, there's nothing else that reproduces so quickly….The traps were invented by a strategical genius. The roaches leave trails, and if one doesn't come back to the nest they try out other routes, without ever leaving your house. The poison in the disks has a delayed effect. It doesn't do them in until they go back to the nest, and since they eat each other's corpses, the whole clan is wiped out in a few days.”

“Impressive.”

“And I'll tell you something else. These days, with you, do you know what? I've been able to let things pass, start cooling off. I don't hate women anymore, even if they've stolen my daughter and my self-esteem. I'm hardly afraid of them at all, really. I'm giving up. Understand?”

I didn't understand. I could accept how a strong and true man could kneel whimpering on the floor to assuage the fury of a woman, I could understand the impulse to stick an electric drill in her ear until it perforated the brain, but I couldn't go a week without burying my nose in a woman's hair, without smelling a woman's neck, thighs, wrists, armpits. A life without women would be an artificial existence.

“Perfectly.”

“Everything has come to me too late. I've never been loved the way I deserve. And I wasn't even asking for that much. Now I'll ask for less. I'm going to stay here, not hurting anyone, not making any trouble. I don't have the balls to set myself on fire, slit my wrists, or jump off a building. Fear is my firewall, and I'm not really so badly off. Then I'll die and I'll be nice and dead. And quiet, like a tomato vine.”

I saw the retching movement; I had time to see the shine in his eyes that warned me that he'd lost control. But I'd barely started up when the torrent spread over the floor amid violent groans. It spattered my shoes, it spattered the sofa (my bed), the floor, and his own hands. In two minutes he'd spilled everything; it didn't even occur to me that he could suffocate. Maybe feminists and anthropologists are right and the planet is overflowing with alpha males, but I only know guys who lack affection.

I got to work. I already cooked for Pedro on an almost daily basis, simple but tasty recipes (grilled chicken breast drizzled in olive oil and garnished with hard-boiled egg; hake boiled with carrot, leek, and onion: it's not crucial but I recommend putting all the vegetables in the blender and flavoring the puree with the first spice that comes to hand). I'd already helped him unclog the toilet, breathing in the effluvia, the smell of antibiotics rising from the pale and almost colorless yellow liquid; I looked for a bucket and filled it with hot water. I did for him what I hadn't done for Mother, what I didn't do for Dad, what I wouldn't have done (sorry) for you: I mopped up that thick, reddish liquid. Masculinity's dark hours—heaven forbid you surprise us when we're alone! I didn't do a bad job, though not even the dishcloth could absorb the dozen or so solid slivers that had escaped from his stomach. I had to take care of that matter with my fingers.

I went to make him an herbal infusion, and while the water was boiling I found that he had moved back to the sofa and was sleeping with his face wedged against the armrest. I had to turn him over like a sack of potatoes to rescue the blanket he'd draped over the upholstery to stop his guest staining the upholstery with crumbs and grease.

I hadn't missed his accusation of cradle robbing. You'll have already realized my arrangement with Pedro was comfortable, but I had more absorbing plans. I was heading down the classic road of sensitive pre-fifty-year-old men: I'd gotten involved with a girl young enough to be your niece. Where does my liaison leave all my jokes about men who break themselves on the treadmill so they can scratch around in a mismatched age group in search of sweet young things? Well, it leaves them wonderfully well placed, because I still don't think getting old is an abdication: I don't bleach or dye my hair or spread lotion on my hands. I'm a lived-in specimen, full of practical solutions to specific challenges.

In fact, my adolescent girl (only she wasn't so adolescent), who depended economically on parents whose surnames were not promising, believed she deserved to be loved like a real woman, and she tried to move in with me on Rocafort. I flatly refused, not only because it was a vice-ridden area, but also because I needed a refuge from her. In two weeks she spilled her entire life all over me: she took me to meet her friends, her girlfriends, her half-boyfriends (people she had kissed), and her rivals both real and imaginary, with whom she maintained contact because they gave her days a helpful touch of spice. And she presented me to them all as if to say: “Look, this is my new world.”

I'm not going to say where we met. I only did it because I felt lonely—I've always been married or had a girlfriend, and I missed having someone want to put their arms around me. I didn't give her any hopes for a shared future; to protect us both I gave her a pack of lies. I think she hadn't entirely ended things with her boyfriend, and I didn't want to deprive her permanently of the guy who will be there when everything else collapses.

I liked her because she swung suspended in a limbo of allure, where one day she'd be convinced she was incontestably beautiful, and another she'd be irrationally afraid she was ugly. I liked her because in one short hour she could span every mood; because one day she'd stop smoking, another she'd stop drinking, and the next she'd wear out her shoes, burn her lips, and put her liver to the test. I liked her because she sat atop youth as though she'd conquered it, as though it weren't a state that would be snatched away so another game could begin. She was going to defend her youth, because it was as much hers as the coffee-colored stain that crossed her face from one cheek to the other, overcoming the bridge of her nose. I liked her because she treated me like I belonged to a different species that had been born into adulthood and couldn't even guess at the forces and conflicting emotions surging through her. I liked how she pretended to know everything about feelings whose depth and hardness she barely intuited. I liked her because there are girls with wise eyes who know more than they have lived, and she was not one of those girls. I liked her because it's a luxury to listen to a person who still looks for a rational (even ethical!) justification for her choices, convinced that every impulse springs from a considered decision, and that one day she will finally harmonize that daily tumult into a coherent idea of herself, and I kissed her because all young people are evangelists. I kissed her because I like people and it's wonderful that their little inner voices never stop. I kissed her even though a kiss meant little to her, because she confused sexual maturity with a list of erotic “experiences” organized according to difficulty: tests that you take and pass and drop like party streamers, never to be picked up again. I liked how she told me she lost her virginity when she was fifteen years and three months old, and that in his urgency the boy had forced her a little and hurt her. She'd developed negative feelings toward penetration and then she gradually overcame them so as not to be left out of life; and although she was almost old (nearly twenty-two), she knew she could achieve something important. I liked how her myopic eyes regarded me when she came out of the shower, and I liked her because out of all that nebulous wealth of women and men she'd decided she preferred males, and out of all the ones she could have chosen to star in the adventure of her life, she'd opted for me.

Of course, if instead of this chatter projected into sterile nothingness I had you here with me, I'd tell you that I'd also slept with women my own age, girlfriends from before. And I'd be careful not to give you her name or Facebook page, where you could easily follow my very first illustrated romance. I took so many photos of her (what am I here for?) and she took so many of me (no comparison) that I stopped thinking of photography as a salvaged instant that years later will help animate lost landscapes of memory. When I saw them arranged on Instagram like cobblestones that don't leave an inch of earth in sight, the minimal time between the photographs (several hours, a few days, never a week) worked as a spell to create the illusion of seamless continuity.

The gap between what she saw in the photographs and what I saw was one of the many problems that complicated her project of building something stable with me. Ours was a love without roots, without a shared home. If Helen made my heart beat faster, it wasn't just because of her beauty and youth; it was also because she secreted the same innocence and wonder as the boy I used to be. What I want in my life is her emotion, her fear, her tremor—my safety and confidence embracing her inexperience and doubts, opening doors together. What I want, these young girls can't give me; age will always come between us.

And though it may be a cheapened idea, I think it would have been good for me to have navigated the decades with a companion who'd known me from the beginning. The sense of responsibility that overwhelmed me when I said good-bye to Mabus was tied to the awareness that when I opened the door to the room in the hotel where Helen and I had tried to rip out each other's tonsils, I was going to have the most important conversation of my life.

I didn't go straight upstairs, I needed some fresh air first. The sleepless night, the three times I'd crossed the hotel's threshold in very different states of mind, the confusion between the boy who lived and didn't know and the man who tells and knows all there is to know about the things he has experienced—it all cohered into a tense, slippery, hallucinatory scene. I heard the pigs squealing again. They must have been waking up, the beasts are early risers. It felt like one of those undulations of the universe was bringing me close to a different sequence of my own life, and I could touch an episode from the past.

I wasn't even three feet tall. We'd just come back from some excursion of which I remember only the road, the ruts from the wheels, and the ditches infested with thistles and sunflowers. Mother was watching over my sister, but her eyes only swelled with love when they turned to her son, playing as usual with the maroon ball until the darkness hid the basket from me. It wasn't fair, but Mother had placed the better part of her love in her male offspring, so I felt no distrust when she told me, while she stirred a red infusion:

“Tomorrow is hog day, you'll enjoy it. It's in the barn.”

I wasn't even put off by the wild, earth-colored cats, or the vivid suspicion that if my father had been there and not in one of the other places adults went without telling you, it wouldn't have occurred to anyone to take me to a barn to see a hog. There was a time when it was enough that I just give my all, and things were fine; that time is gone, but it did exist.

I didn't know the person they chose to take me. The two of us went in a truck, it was dusk, and since the man scared me, I concentrated on watching out the window as the little villages along the roadside gradually condensed into smatterings of electric light: they shone like the stars at night. The man only broke the silence when the farmyard's outline appeared. The flagstones in the barn smelled of dry grass, of vegetable things, bitter and rancid. On the floor (lit by the sun's last rays—there was a tear in the curtain), I saw viscous impregnations with the texture of bitumen, almost no shine. While we were waiting for whatever we were waiting for, some adults came in with buckets. I'd never seen two men wielding rags; they scrubbed with a solution of water and bleach, but they weren't really serious about washing whatever it was off the floor. They just sloshed it around and diluted it.

Then we heard the piercing squeals of the pig.

They dragged it in between four or five men. The hog moved fast on those sickly little legs that could barely carry it, so worked up that its belly brushed against the ground. It realized very quickly that things weren't going well. Those creatures aren't idiots like cows or ducks, they have mature brains, and when they smell the blood of other hogs spread over the floor they go mad, you really have to fight to hold them down. These days they use a pistol that shoots compressed air and destroys the neural tissue instantly. I saw it one night, years later, over seven years ago: the pig shrieks like a chain saw and shits itself from struggling so much, but it's cleaner than slitting its throat and waiting for the avalanche of viscera and mucous to finish falling through the gaping wound. We stayed there for some minutes. Another adult, among the many there, assured me the pig was no longer suffering. But its eyes were flickering, suspended, as if they were forcing it to lie there looking into the abyss. It seemed mute, but only because the flesh of its throat was bleeding out into the sand.

I went outside, and what I did there was play. Back then it was always playing, even if I only sat still.

When I got bored with playing, I peered in through the barn's window.

They still had work to do with what remained of the pig. That beast might have weighed as much as four adult humans, maybe half a ton. The proteins in its brain hadn't gotten used to being dead, and were sending chemical flashes to its muscles. The whole pink mass contracted in spasms, but the men didn't appear to be at all afraid of that pig's nervous ghost. They were strong, they were healthy, they were loud when they drank, they were nothing like my father. What could possibly frighten them? There was nothing left of the hog as such, it was just meat and lard. Death was something that left scraps behind. You could cut them, pound them remorselessly; death gave you an absolute power, and it left its victim entirely defenseless.

I know that they put an iron hook through the opening in its neck and that its tongue fell spongily out, flat like a sole fish. Its thick hide sagged to the ground (I had eaten it, but I still hadn't seen it twist and wither in hot oil, I hadn't associated it with anything living), and on its fatty inside were fluorescent bubbles, different from the oily veins of industrial bacon. I don't know if what they did with the water spurting from the hose could be called cleaning; the ground was still covered with muck that was darker and shinier than the usual filth. They were juices and tissues of the type required to keep life on its feet, and now there they were, exposed on the floor of the barn.