Read Online Divorce Is in the Air: A Novel by Gonzalo Torné - Free Book Online Page B

at the light striking the folds of my jacket, she was reaching a conclusion. That’s why she exhaled the smoke so slowly (enough that she thought she did it slowly); that’s why those dark corpuscles in the blue of her irises were set in motion. It was something subtler and less intuitive than rating my attractiveness—she was trying to see herself through my body, catch a glimpse of what her future would be like if she were to mingle it with mine.

    She emitted a sharper frequency than the other Madrid friends Vicente had invited. Together they composed a fuzzy and fanciful scene: figurines, fairies, and elves, ornamental effigies on a frame within which Helen swayed to the beat of the cloying music, full of that otherworldly American self-sufficiency. I can still see her moving among the minor players like a squirrel scampering among branches. I can see her now, holding her glass and wearing an aquamarine dress that was probably only green. I see her leaning with that torsion of the hips that is so her, as if propping her buttock atop her thigh….Now she’s wearing a dress the color of acorns, saffron, and beeswax. But no, I haven’t bought her that dress yet, we still haven’t even been introduced.
    We had a conversation, but the sentences we used were important not for their semantic value but for the part they played in the attack strategy I’d established before ever opening my mouth: I wanted to leave with that girl. I went to look for her coat (an unbearable combination of stripes and plaid) and I said good-bye to Vicente, host and eternal geography student. He’d papered the living room wall with an enormous, detailed map of the mountains surrounding Madrid, the topography like isobars on weather charts. When I see Helen’s figure against that background, my imagination, falling victim to the euphoria and ambiguity of the picture, will always think of that modest map as a hyperrealist painting of brain circuits. Glass in hand, Helen looked like an idea formed by the nervous stimuli of those neurons. She looked taller than she was (that was the only day I ever saw her without having taken a tactile measure of her body), and so young she had only to reach out her arm to effortlessly touch the end of her adolescence. And why not admit it: standing there, holding both of our coats, I felt a fearful hand grip my throat. I was afraid I wouldn’t be alive enough for her.

    I ruled out taking her to my apartment, so things went a step or two down toward more sordid settings. To make up for it I spared her public transportation, which was how she usually got around. We hailed a cab and headed off toward a house in Delicias where they rented rooms by the hour. It was two in the morning, and La Castellana was still humming. I remember how the car’s shocks were so worn out that the undercarriage scraped against the damp pavement, I remember all those fences Madrid has around gardens, houses, offices, banks—the vegetation of a secret city—and I remember I was ashamed to take her into a rathole where the same play had been performed by different actors over a good ten years. I diverted the taxi toward a decent hotel.
    The same play! I had no idea back then about the diversity of sexual appetites, the violence and the good they can do you. I was only a child, and though I passed myself off as an expert I wasn’t at the level of my peers, who had scrawled their first lusty paragraphs on the blank pages of prostitutes’ bodies. I only had to imagine that mechanical touch, the professional who kept one eye on the clock and added up the bill, to know that brothels weren’t for me. My sexual history was dominated by mutual nervousness and occasional girlfriends. Now I was going to face my first American girl with only a few basic tricks (I knew about the sensitive zones of the neck, the ears; I wasn’t sure if that one girl’s armpits had just been a personal preference). It hadn’t been even three years since