Contents

About the Book

Joan-Marc’s out of work, he’s alone, he has a heart condition, his mother’s addicted to pills, he can’t stand his sister.
Otherwise, life is beautiful.

And there’s a lot that his estranged second wife doesn’t know about him. But in Divorce is in the Air he now sets out to tell her. He begins with the failure of his first marriage, describing a holiday taken in a last-ditch attempt to salvage a once passionate relationship.

Recalling this ill-fated trip triggers a life-story’s worth of flashbacks. From pivotal childhood scenes – his earliest sexual encounters, his father’s suicide – he moves on through the years, hopscotching between Barcelona and Madrid, describing a life of indulgence and of appetites.

The result is an unapologetic, daring, acerbic novel by an electrifying young writer about love and the end of love, and how hard it can be to let go.

About the Author

GONZALO TORNÉ is the author of two previous novels published in Spain, for which he won the Premio Jaén de Novela and was a finalist for the Premio Nacional de Narrativa. He has also translated work by William Wordsworth and John Ashbery into Spanish. He lives in Barcelona.

Divorce in in the Air is translated from the Spanish by Megan McDowell.

We went to the spa to save what was left of our damned marriage.

With only that goal in mind, I climbed into the driver’s seat of that rented red Citroën, its gear stick so hard to handle it could have run us off the road any second, and I got down to negotiating the curvy road under the vigilant gaze of those medieval towns that in Catalonia sprout from the hills like giant stone mushrooms.

The mountains were gathered into soft crests, and the arid landscape sloped gently down into fields of rye and wheat. We drove along a road still slippery after a storm that had forced us to hole up for hours in a service station, where Helen’s parents had shelled out two hundred euros for souvenirs.

The afternoon was warm, as if a touch of April had been mixed in with November, which for its part was still sloughing off poplar leaves into the rushing Corb River. It was oddly disheartening to watch the water’s muddy surface bucking like the back of a live animal as it flowed through the riverbed’s ravines and around its twists and turns. According to the map we were less than five kilometres away. As we rounded an unexpectedly wide bend that opened to our right I could see Helen in the passenger-side mirror, chewing on the nail of her index finger, her blue gaze fixed on the cigarette she was holding out the window so the smoke wouldn’t annoy her father. The boy in the back seat chewing gum couldn’t hide the fact that, with the set of his cheeks and the generous cut of his lips, he was a more stylised and robust combination of the genes of Helen’s parents, who sat on either side of him. The highway narrowed into a road that dipped towards a wooded area, and I heard the luggage start bouncing in the boot.

When the tortured river crossed the car’s path again, we drove over a bridge and came to the end of a ribbon of earthen road edged by tall, decorative trees that offered no shade. It led to the imposing manor house the local government had raised from ruin to turn the place into a health spa.

I parked on a stretch of gravel near a square swimming pool devoid of swimmers and a terrace with rustic tables and plastic chairs. I took my small suitcase from the boot, and while Helen’s parents organised their sacks and bags, American items, and the knick-knacks they’d bought as gifts, I looked out over the waves of grain that yellowed the mountains. In the distance I saw irrigation canals lined with sheds that perhaps housed animals. Before Helen – harassed by the boy and his curiosity – could start nagging me to help her with the giant suitcase she’d brought from Montana, I was startled by the movement of a toad bouncing in and out of the weeds, leaping like a viscous green heart. From every balcony hung a pot of pink dianthus.

We unloaded the car and I let Helen go ahead with her parents and the kid; I needed to stretch my legs before checking in. Here and there, pale patrons strolled. I noticed one jaunty figure in a dressing gown, fanning itself; it greeted me by doffing its hat. The head was shaved but there was a dusting of fuzz, like mocha sprinkles clinging to the skull. The most exciting thing on the terrace was watching the treetops absorb the light, so I headed inside to have a look around.

Helen and family were waiting in line at the other end of a large hall decorated with chandeliers and shelves where porcelain jars were displayed: pennyroyal, verbena, sarsaparilla and other herbs. I was greeted by an obese woman with a web of varicose veins that seemed to be barely holding the flesh of her shanks in place. When she flashed me a sexless smile I averted my eyes. My soul sank when I noticed the glass wall that looked onto the exercise room beyond: some old people were swimming, frog-like, and others were struggling to flap their arms to the rhythm set by an instructor.

I saw one woman with skin so covered in yellow spots she seemed to be rusting, and a guy so over-exerting himself it looked like he was swelling with helium; at any moment his face could have burst. I couldn’t imagine why they would submit to those sadistic exercises, what kind of promises they’d been made. Were they hoping to strengthen their hearts, make their skin less parchment-like, unclog their intestines? After seventy years of wear and tear, wasn’t it enough that they were still standing?

I’d driven over two hours from the Claris hotel in a cramped car with barely enough room to change gears; my knees hurt and hunger was starting to gnaw. I surveyed the tables to see if they were serving snacks with the drinks, and it was then I saw a black boy of twelve or so swoop across the room like a breath of fresh air, zigzagging among the chairs, his arms stretched wide. I figured he’d left something in his room, and had turned himself into a flying creature to go back and get it. I was happy for him: kids with imagination are never alone. The thing that made me saddest for Helen’s kid was that, when it came to make-believe, his head was all dried up. He’d just sit there in the hotel rooms looking at me like an idiot. I know it wasn’t an easy situation, but I’m sure his father had introduced him to one or two substitute mothers back in Montana, and for a clever boy three days should be long enough to adapt and to stop being paralysed every time he laid eyes on me. To be sure, I look more WASPy than any of those Midwestern farmers, so he should have felt right at home.

I searched for a black-skinned adult among the bathers emerging from the water, their hair in clumps like starfish hitched to their heads. Then I looked at the sedated mummies wavering between ordering a cup of tea and tempting a heart attack, and I finally caught sight of a long finger, dark like damp velvet, hovering over one of the tables. In his yellow shirt the man looked like a spot of Indian ink in human form. He was focused on pouring milk into his tea, which he did so slowly it curdled into a milky brain that he dissolved with two stirs of the spoon. I like black people, and although I’d never actually met one before, my feelings towards them were warm. I love how flexible their bodies are, though I think it’s probably their skeletons that keep them from being good swimmers – too much cartilage. The one at the spa was an impressive specimen. From his trunk sprouted legs and arms so long it looked like he could kick or pick up any object in the room without even rising from his chair. I must have been standing there admiring him a while, because when our gazes locked, the eyes floating in his sockets were hard.

I turned my head and saw Daddy dragging the suitcases and his feet down the corridor; only in the occasional gesture could you intuit the lion he’d been, still alive somewhere inside that disintegrating body. Helen’s mother followed a half-metre behind him, enveloped in a cloud of cosmetics. She and I were never exactly going to get cosy: the two occasions we’d been alone together she spent the whole time chewing English words into a mush that sounded Gaelic. In any case, the next day they’d be getting on a plane and vanishing from my life.

When I turned back, Helen was alone at the counter. I picked up her suitcase and let her go ahead with the key.

I love hotel rooms. They play such an important role in how a couple’s relationship develops: I adore those prologues and counterpoints to domestic sex, the injection of the clandestine. But I had spent the whole car trip feeling only apathy when I imagined the moment we’d be left alone in our room, and I didn’t know how my libido was going to respond after five months of separation. It seems supernatural, the way girls swell up and bulge out to become copies of their mothers. I’d spent the day with the flabby version of Helen’s pink and lively body, its soft, damp folds blurred in oily protuberances, and it hadn’t exactly been stimulating.

I got over that foolishness when I saw the way her shape (so full of vitality it always seemed the life would just come spilling out of her) climbed the stairs, managing to carry my small suitcase without losing the side-to-side sway of her hips. The whole time we’d been married that shimmy was all it took to make the voices in my head quit their absurd, disjointed chatter and join together in a chorus to demand a single thing: the very thing we were about to spend the next half-hour doing.

Helen couldn’t get the door open so I unlocked it, glancing surreptitiously at the surely creaky bed. We left the suitcases on the floor. A joke of a desk, a full-length mirror, a window displaying vistas of fir trees, and a bathroom with a shower cubicle. Helen started doing Jovanotti-style calisthenics, and the sight of the translucent down sprouting under her arm had me poised and about to dive in, but right then the boy barged into the room blaring like a trumpet, and I plopped down into a chair instead. The kid should have been off playing in the corridor; indignation crept up from my belly.

‘You’re sitting down? You’re not going to help me unpack?’

Despite the sharp edges of her shoddy Spanish, I knew she said it with the best of intentions, without a trace of reproach. She must have felt a bit dazed after that two-hour trip cooped up with Daddy; in her voice there was even a hint of tenderness she’d dredged up from who knows where. She was trying her best, for both our sakes.

‘Nagging already. We’re off to a bad start.’

Helen slowly turned, and for a split second she froze in a posture and angle that allowed a simultaneous view of her breasts and gluteus, and I caught myself savouring the sight. I knew her too well not to recognise the tide of indignation swelling in her light eyes. She had to choke something thick down her throat before calling her very sweetest vocal cord into action.

‘Don’t worry about it, John. I’ll just wash my hands and then unpack.’

She turned her back to me and went into the bathroom.

‘You must be exhausted.’

The boy stared at me for a few seconds and then stood on tiptoe to gaze out the window. I could see my legs in the full-length mirror, and I heard the sound of the shower. Helen was hoping to wash away the unexpected sting of my words; she might be a while. The minibar was right there, I grabbed two little bags of nuts.

And I won’t deny that I had already heard Helen turn off the shower and slide open the latch when I bellowed:

‘Are you ever coming out of there?’

The last syllables coincided with Helen’s entrance, wrapped in a towel knotted over her breasts, and I watched her face move through a series of furious contortions before it settled on a petulant expression. I tried to get hold of myself. Before we got to the kissing and biting, we’d have to try to heal the wounds of our most recent year of living together. Even a woman like Helen, almost indecently aware of the upper hand her figure gave her, could forget about her body for two hours and focus on fixing her emotional dissatisfaction.

She merely smiled, merely rubbed her hands together, started humming and removing feminine accessories from her bag, as if she had two children in her care and not one. I refrained from chiding her for the water she was dripping all over the floor. That’s the kind of generosity you get no credit for, since no one ever notices. The boy joined in her song; it was a trick too old to work, but it was friendly, cordial. I decided to speak to her plainly.

‘Don’t you think it’s time the boy went to see his grandparents? You and I need a little privacy.’

The sun was falling like a red coin. I squinted, and the fields of mature wheat looked like thousands of anemones waving underwater.

‘They’ll be calling us to dinner soon. There’s no time. And his name is Jackson.’

Helen, too, knew how to read the intentions in the whites of my eyes, to interpret the quick changes in my expressions. That’s what living together is all about: you learn to read the other person’s face like a proverbial open book. I started to take clothes out of my suitcase and scatter them around, marking my territory. But I recognised the taunting tone in Helen’s voice: she knew perfectly well what she was doing to me.

‘Plus, we came here to feel like a family, not like lovers.’

I suppose she couldn’t stop herself. There’s something so entertaining about setting all the wheels in motion and just seeing what happens next. I stretched my legs; my feet hurt, but I wasn’t about to take my shoes off in front of that little envoy from Helen’s other world. But if she thought the kid was going to make me keep my mouth shut, she was wrong.

‘Don’t give me that shit. You just won’t take the time.’

They’d turned on the lights out on the terrace. The grass called to mind the hide of a frightened animal, the red dots of the poppies heavy as blood. No getting around it: night was falling.

I don’t remember Helen saying anything in reply. It was the boy who let out a rat-like screech as his mother dragged him from the room by his arm. She had thrown some clothes on, I didn’t notice what. Once I was alone I took off my shoes and even my socks and tossed back a little bottle of gin. The tables on the terrace had emptied. I could hear the faint churning of a motor. It was all so calm it felt possible to dispel the darkness with a puff of air. The old folks must have scurried inside when it started to drizzle, and the cool was keeping them hidden away in their rooms.

The night was a blue clear enough that I could see the tree branches as they clapped together. The gin burned the walls of my throat but slid through my veins with benign warmth, softening the contours of the absurd scene I’d found myself in. I felt the tingling of a gentle impatience begin to move over my back and hands; really it wasn’t half bad.

‘There. I left him with his grandparents. Happy?’

When I saw the way her wet hair was regaining its golden hue almost strand by strand, when I watched as she turned and dripped (more) water on the floor, wearing those tracksuit bottoms and a dizzyingly vulgar top she’d thrown on, the folds of my heart, shrivelled and blackened during that damned car ride, flooded with a warmth somehow tied to being married and living together. I was drenched in an excellent mood. I wanted to take her into my arms, taste her right there from her forehead to the pulp of her buttocks, pull her hair and tickle her, all more or less at the same time.

Helen stayed in profile. She was still chewing the remnants of her rage, but finally she choked them down.

‘Sometimes I don’t know what to do with Jackson either. Everything will be different once the three of us are living together.’

‘Only if we can fix our relationship first.’

I tried to reel the words back in. It’s a shame that sound waves don’t have a tail I could have grabbed hold of before they crossed the space between us and rearranged themselves into linguistic information inside the prodigious maze of Helen’s inner ear.

The months we’d spent apart had been long. We certainly weren’t starting from scratch, but plenty of our knee-jerk responses had grown stiff from underuse. I know there are people whose moods can change if you just know the right words to use on them, but Helen wasn’t like that – she was dragged along by her emotions. So I was left open-mouthed at her submissive reply, the step she took to get beyond her grievance.

‘Of course, we have to fix things between us first. Sorry, that’s what we’re here for.’

The bathroom mirror answered our silence with fluorescent shine; it was like a round of applause. She smiled at me before pulling her hair back into a ponytail and wringing it out, drops of water falling to the floor. There’s something funny about sparring against the same lips, jaw, arms and hips that you’ve caressed as they rocked above you in different beds. Having that body right there when you finally break through the cloud of an argument is one of the true comforts of marriage. I took her by the shoulders, but she pretended some stockings were falling and ducked away. When she stood up she smiled at me again, but it wasn’t a clean smile. I felt privileged to be the only living mammal able to precisely interpret that cooling of her gaze. Her spirit wasn’t calm, the dregs of her anger were still sloshing around inside her. She took a step backwards to inspect me.

‘You eat too much, John. You’re heavy.’

Helen sank onto the mattress, changing position deftly in mid-air to end up with one leg crossed under her other thigh. I think it speaks well of me that I never confused Helen with a kitten, with some creature bred for confinement. We were in the early stages of something, and it didn’t bode well that neither one of us had any idea how it would end.

‘Come again?’

‘You’re getting fat. You have to take care of yourself. Tall people don’t wear extra kilos well. Plus, you don’t have the kind of face for a bag of skin at your neck.’

‘It’s called a double chin. And why don’t I have the face for a double chin?’

‘Because of your eyes, you don’t have clever eyes. Without a well-defined profile your face would look like a balloon, something swollen, an old thing . . .’

‘That’s why I married you, so you’ll take care of me when I’m old.’

I started nonchalantly to undress, going for a purely functional nudity – the air from the radiator was suffocating. I said nothing; when I sucked in my belly, my windpipe was cut off and I started to cough.

‘You’re sucking it in. You don’t have a blank cheque with me, you know. You can forget about me cleaning up your shit if you go and turn into a pig. Spanish women put up with anything: fat guys, bald, hairy, smelly ones . . . Well, I’m not Spanish.’

‘Leave me alone, Freckles. Just try finding someone else you can dump that kid of yours on.’

She jumped up from the bed, evidence that I hadn’t managed to varnish my words with a joking veneer (their doubting undertone probably made things worse). Though I don’t think she entirely understood the Catalan words I used, I know she grasped the general drift. Her eyes darkened, two open holes in pink flesh, and began to dart around the room, scanning the furniture for a hiding place or weapon. She spewed a stream of words, but what she really wanted was to find the door.

I tried to yell at her to stop, but she charged towards the exit with her hands over her ears, a gesture I’ve always found unbearably childish. In two long strides I was between her and the door. She stopped short of touching me and took two steps backwards, her calves tensed. She looked at me, and now there was no hint of circumspection in her eyes; whatever fire had ignited in her wasn’t going to be quenched by talking. It would last all night, and I could forget about touching her now. By some marvel of asymmetry, my head cooled just as Helen was passing the point of no return, a fury mounting in her that couldn’t be stamped out even by apologising (and I wasn’t about to do that anyway – the final embers of my anger were still smouldering). Helen would only be satisfied once she’d subjected me to a good dose of pain.

‘Move.’

‘You can’t leave now . . .’

‘Move.’

‘I’m not going to let you out.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because you’re going to ruin everything, you’re going to spoil our whole night. Just do me a favour and look at me, listen to me!’

‘I don’t want anything to do with you. Let me out or I’ll scream. Move!’

‘And what do you think you’re going to do? Hide out in your parents’ room?’

‘I’ll leave tomorrow. I can change the plane ticket with Daddy.’

‘You’re not serious, you’re talking nonsense. Try to think straight. Don’t be an idiot. You can’t walk out that door.’

‘Why are you naked, anyway?’

No matter how intense the argument got, there was always a little light of sanity alive, and now it regained control and the level of rage began to fall. The look in her eyes was, shall we say, tender; she doubled over with laughter. I joined in, and we were on our way out of the mess, taking our first steps through the valley, hand in hand like young lovers.

‘You were going to chase me like a naked, stupid balloon all the way down the hall! You wouldn’t get me, I’d never let a dumb bag of nuts catch me.’

Her tone was affectionate enough. Now I only had to absorb the venom; it was nothing I couldn’t bear if I kept my cool. Then we could move on, trusting in the harness of humour. Once we’d shared a smile we would be safe. I could remind her how she always confused cacahuetes with nueces; I could kiss her, squeeze one of her tits, I had the technique down cold. It was just that combination of ‘bag’ and ‘balloon’, the clear, lying impertinence of her slapdash attack . . . I felt my tantrum rearing back up.

‘You’ve done it again, Helen. Once again, you are incomprehensible. I can feel the rotten energy you give off when you sink into vulgarity.’

Even though I was down to my boxers, fine drops of sweat began to break out on my forehead. I was euphoric. Helen was a miracle of human strength: in just a few months she’d regained the desire to fight and to reconcile her life with me, adiós, pills, goodbye, self-indulgence. She was overflowing with greed, crafty calculation and the desire for a good time, all the essential components of the human spirit. I convinced myself I had the argument under control, I knew what I had to say to get a smile out of her so we could leap free of that oppressive atmosphere of aggression. But only a saint can listen to his own mollifying voice while his mind spins in a chaos of fierce emotion. Plus, I was teaching her a lesson, and I was enjoying it.

‘I wouldn’t be surprised if all that rage has burst a blood vessel. When a doctor cracks open your skull he’ll find that your thoughts have been fermenting in a brain soaked in blood . . . I don’t care if I’m shouting! I’m not yelling just to yell, I have a good reason! I need to be able to hear myself think when I’m fighting with you.’

I heard the ‘crash’, I saw the pieces on the floor, but it took me a second to compose a mental image of what had broken. She still hadn’t slipped from my grasp; it was in her best interests to go on loving me. Sooner or later the terrifying combination of her lack of drive plus Jackson would bring her back to my side, but when I saw how she was writhing like a creature in a trap, the hair along my spine stood on end.

‘Asshole, bastard.’

‘You should shut up.’

‘Bastard, bastard, asshole. Let me out.’

‘At least lower your voice, they’ll hear us.’

‘What do I care!’

She leapt at me, she hit my chest, the tip of a fingernail pierced my skin. I don’t know how I got her off me. I must have grabbed her by the shirt because when she threw herself backwards, the cloth tore. She covered her breasts with her hands and her face turned red as if there were fire in her veins. She stayed there with her fleshy lips open around the hole she chewed and breathed through. I tried, but I couldn’t muster a single gesture of affection. Quite the opposite, in fact: I started to laugh. I hope the memory of pointing my finger at her is false.

‘I hate you.’

She picked up her shoulder bag and heaved it towards the window. A half-metre higher and it would have fallen to the patio below. She ripped apart a pillow before storming into the bathroom and slamming the door behind her. I heard the lock, and the sound of the taps in the shower and the sink. I dropped onto the sheets, my legs trembling.

‘Come out of there! You’re acting like a crazy woman! You are a rational creature, try to use your brain, you might surprise yourself!’

I turned my head and found my face in the mirror; my hair was plastered down and a spongy, bulging vein disfigured my forehead, but I liked the cut of my shaven jaw. I took the chance to fix my hair.

‘You’re behaving like a child! Don’t forget you are a mother!’

I was sweating and my pores were wide open. I started scratching my back and armpits. I stood up to inspect my body in the mirror, and I couldn’t see anything flabby about my stomach – she’d said that just to annoy me. I was getting hungry; it’s a good thing trail mix doesn’t get cold. Daddy and the Mrs would already be getting dressed for our dinner at the Hotel Monster. I missed Jackson, he would have calmed things down. Children force you to behave. If someone had told me, when I was his age, that people nearing thirty could behave like Helen and I had in that room, I would have thought they were crazy. Of course, after all that fuss, it wouldn’t exactly be easy to find the right combination of words to ask Helen to bring the kid back.

‘Come out right now, we can still fix tonight. We’ve come here to put things right, remember?’

The key was to control my impatience. She couldn’t stay in there forever, and any minute now she’d start to get hungry. I did think she was capable of holding out until dinner started, making the boy or his grandmother come up to look for us. I resisted the sensible urge to get dressed – I was comfortable there on the bed. My anger began to subside; I really didn’t feel like bickering and avoiding each other. I wanted to move on.

‘We came here because you wanted to make up, because you got down on your knees and begged me. This was your idea, so you can’t stay in there.’

She turned on the water again, the little fool, when she heard my voice. At least she was in a playful mood.

‘It makes no sense to stay in there!’

‘No sense at all, unless you’re trying to break some kind of weird record.’

‘And I can assure you that this is not the best day to play with world records.’

She opened the door. She’d managed to find a green dress that clung so tightly to her skin there was no mistaking her for some innocuous maternal figure. She still had that dark look in her eyes, but now the sparks they gave off seemed like stars so distant no one can tell if they’re alive or dead. It was the same gaze I’d woken up to every morning for almost a year, when I would brush the lush blonde hair back from her face to see her eyes, which were like screens where I could watch a sequence of slippery emotions flicker while I waited for one of them to coalesce. That emotion, though, didn’t tend to favour me. Helen was confused. Back when we first started living together, before she was corrupted from the inside by the combined effect of our shared present and the memories of her youth with Daddy, I could always hope she’d start crying. It was uncomfortable to see her breaking inside, but the tears had their advantages. They left her empty and clean, like a white wall on which we could start to write again.

‘You’re hateful. I’m trying my best, I’m putting all my energy into this.’

And then she turned that gaze on me, like a curved spoon that scooped effortlessly under my skin, as if to check the ripeness of the pulp inside. I’ve never found a defence against her drive to discover my worst aspects. I had an attack of modesty and I yanked off the sheet to cover myself, to shelter me from her scrutiny. It didn’t even occur to me that I was breaking a basic rule of cohabitation, even if we were in a hotel.

‘You messed up the bed!’

‘And why does the bed matter?’

‘You’re a disaster, this plan was stupid, I made a mistake . . . I’ve been wasting my time. I wouldn’t know how to go back to living together without feeling disgusted.’

Considering that all I’d wanted since the moment I’d got into the car was to run away, we should have made our peace and separated there and then. But the argument had altered my objectives, and I was moving along the tracks of a different logic. I wanted to avoid making a scene, I wanted to kiss her, I wanted her to apologise. I wasn’t ready to give up, by any means – I wanted to win every which way.

‘Shut up! I’ll tell you what you’re going to do. You’re going to sit there until you calm down, and when you’re finished getting dressed you will once again be a normal person. Then we’ll talk.’

‘You’re still naked.’

This time it wasn’t a joke. She realised a second before I did that I wouldn’t have time to block her exit lying on the bed like that, and I wouldn’t be capable of following her down the corridor in my underwear. She left the room.

‘You don’t have the nerve!’

Maybe back then I was caught unawares that her brain, which normally needed fifteen minutes to assimilate any new idea, was able to calculate so many possibilities so quickly. Now I know that when the situation calls for it, the brain sends out nervous commands to the muscles without troubling the conscious mind, and the mind only asks for explanations once the flesh and its precious functions are safe and sound. After our little drive, being left alone wasn’t the worst thing in the world, but I was fixated on bringing her back. I left the remaining words to orbit the centre of my rage until they burned up; the only indispensable thing was to find some trousers and a shirt.

I went out without closing the door, without grabbing the key. I went out without checking the time: night had fallen, and from the corridor windows only the promenade lights and the blue rectangle of the pool were shining.

I felt my way down the stairs, my legs shaking. Helen could be anywhere. From the corridor I could see the waiters toiling away with the silverware and tablecloths before dinner. I was horrified at the sight of a stage with three microphones set up, ready for an hour or so of musical torment. I preferred not to imagine the food they’d be serving those used-up bodies, with their desiccated lungs and missing prostates: boiled potatoes, steamed fish . . . I thought I saw my mother-in-law’s expansive backside, but I didn’t hang around to make sure – there was no way Helen would choose to make a scene in front of her parents over humiliating me with a spectacular disappearance. I’d have bet our three years together that she’d left the building, and I only had to guess the direction she’d taken. I put my hand in my pocket to be sure I’d brought provisions: the second bag of peanuts and those other, bigger nuts – cashews, I think.

I went out to the terrace and wavered between heading for the forest to the left or the fields to the right. I stood there deliberating while my pupils adjusted to the dark and my nose detected that smell of tender wheat. At least I could see my own hands.

‘She went towards the woods.’

The voice came from one of the tables, and I recognised the androgynous face of my obese woman, the smile with its faint flirtatiousness. Out in the civilian world those bands of blubber act as insulation against desire. Those decades (twenties, thirties, forties) in which fat women are not really alive socially must seem long. I felt bad for her, although she looked delighted to find that age was tarring everyone else with the same brush. Anyway, I liked that her crystal ball was directing me away from the farm, where earlier I’d heard the unmistakable grunting of pigs – those animals have given me the willies ever since I was a child. If you ask me, it does nothing for their reputations that their heart tissues are compatible with ours.

‘She seemed pretty angry.’

I wasn’t so keen that the woman had noticed Helen and connected her to me. Of course, I couldn’t hold it against her. A health farm full of mummies isn’t exactly the best place to enjoy a little privacy; Helen and I looked like we’d just got out of a time machine.

‘Walk to the bar, then follow the light. If she hasn’t crossed the river she can’t get lost.’

I sped up. Though I hadn’t ruled out strangling her once I found her, I also hadn’t considered the danger that swampy channel posed to an overexcited woman.

I took two steps and brought a couple of peanuts to my mouth. A breeze carried the scent of the dianthus hanging from the balconies, and it was as if for a few seconds I’d stepped outside the loathsome circle of triviality I was trapped in. What was I trying to prove? Our marriage was an undeniable disaster, and even if we somehow managed to bring some equilibrium to our erratic behaviour, what sort of future would I have with a Helen desperate to protect her body against gravity’s effects? All that siliconed humanity (paid for by whom?) encasing Helen’s hysterical and paranoid voice, lording it over my little world of pills, secret stashes of food, naps, scarves, and hands that shook as I shaved. If now, when I could still scare her with my bare hands, I was out searching for her and trembling from cold and nerves and fear, what resistance would I have against her tyrannical impulses once my manhood had withered away? When, even if I wiggled free of all the orthopaedic gear, I’d still spend my days negotiating among hearing aids, routine doctor’s visits, soft cereals and heart surgeries?

Two bats fluttered past while I was entertaining the thought that I deserved a woman of better character, but then I shook off my self-indulgence. When it came down to it, we were all barrelling towards old age at the speed of time, and Helen was the girl I wanted. And – why deny it – a large cross-section of my molecules was enjoying the unexpected surges of adrenaline the night had provided so far.

Through the glass wall I could see the black man at the hotel bar, holding what I guessed was a gin and tonic. The window was so dark it was hard to make out his skin; it was like his yellow shirt and the glass he held were floating in space. I couldn’t say why, but I felt heartened when the guy peered out at me from his gloomy fish tank, as if he were attaching me by an invisible thread to the world of sanity, far from the bitter sphere where Helen and I screeched like two lunatics. It seemed like he was pointing me in the right direction. I made a gesture of thanks that was quite eloquent – though with black people, who knows? – and I took off towards the forest at a trot, like a soldier on a mission. The peanuts made themselves known, bilious, in my stomach.

I had to cross a narrow canal in a no man’s land between the pool and the woods. The only light came from the sliver of raw-metal moon that hung in the sky beside a single amethyst-coloured star. I felt a gust of wind; somehow in the villages it always blows coldly. I started to walk through the bushes. Here and there I came across cans and bottles and dirty newspapers – those old folks were real slobs. It wasn’t long before I reached the Corb River, blanketed by the stench of mouldering vegetation. The light barely reached the opposite bank, and the currents shone and flowed over a mass of shadows. Near where the forest grew free of human intervention I could distinguish bubbles of greenery. I knew I’d find her any minute. It wasn’t Helen’s style to run around barefoot in the dark in a ditch. I was promising myself I would flatten her skull before I’d let her cross that river, when another bloody bat came at me. It took half a minute to get rid of the rodent, but the fear was still in me when I came to a stretch where the river flowed luminously. The water reflected spotlights hung in the trees, presumably so any old codgers who decided to take a little midnight stroll wouldn’t end up at the bottom of the river. It looked like a miniature city had sunk right there, the lights still shining underwater. Right at the water’s edge I recognised Helen’s shape, trampling clumps of weeds: her figure tensed, her head bent, a living ghost. She looked unsteady and I took two long strides to catch her before she slid. I guess I must have forgiven her – if now I’m regretting not pushing her, it’s only because I know the last dirty trick she still had up her sleeve.

Believe me, I know what I’m saying here, I’m not just speculating, I’m no fortune-teller. One night two weeks ago I woke up at three in the morning, my mind addled, startled awake by the raw feelings that surprise us when our psychic defences are down. I never even opened my eyes, but I flailed my arm over the sheet. I must have moved out of my usual area while I was sleeping, because I touched the cold left side of the bed where you never lie, where Helen used to be. It was that discomfiting feeling that made me think back more than ten years – the fifteen or twenty that have passed since I’ve seen Helen. So this is not a present-day report, this is only a story: my story with Helen, my story without you.

Only a couple of weeks ago, when I finally convinced myself that you’d left for good and weren’t coming back, that you might not even be reading my emails and were probably letting my messages languish in voicemail limbo, I made an annoying discovery: over the past five years, the friendships we’d begun at my initiative would fit on half a page. I had fewer than two hundred contacts on Facebook, and I didn’t even know how many of them were in the country. I accept every friend request I get: there are always people who give themselves odd pseudonyms, I have a bad memory, I don’t like to offend anyone, and you never know which contacts will be useful. So many people get brushed off unremarked from our lives, like old hairs. If I had more time I’d find a better metaphor: old hairs are washed away but these guys stick around, starring in their own lives, with good or bad memories of you, a couple of out-of-date phone numbers, the blurred memory of your face and some residual goodwill. In sum, files no one ever expects to reopen.

I joined the social network thinking it would revolutionise my single life – I couldn’t be seen with anyone contaminated by ‘us’. But the only thing I got (other than ads for cars, drinks and insurance) was one dose of the past after another: people from La Salle, from ESADE, my sister’s friends. I was uncomfortable about returning to my schooldays. Sure, we’d had a marvellous year together: the basketball games when everything goes your way, an unforgettable girlfriend, dinners to be framed and hung on the wall, parties it hurt to leave. But life must be lived in the present, it’s too wide and intense a terrain to let yourself go astray. So what are a bunch of big, forty-something boys – mature, healthy and virile – doing digging into the past (so recent!) to find buddies who’d most likely been left behind for good reason?

I hardly went beyond the first greeting in my renewed friendships. I didn’t comment on people’s photos, didn’t update my status, and my only public photo was that close-up of you on a Neapolitan street, with your dark hair and an otherworldly smile, a photo you never let me show anyone – you were always so ashamed of your charm. And if I exchanged three or four messages with Pedro-María, it wasn’t out of any particular affection. It certainly wasn’t because, after I accepted his friend request, he wrote on his wall that he had finally got his best friend back – a phrase that made me gag. Rather, it was a conscious first step in my quest for experiences washed clean of you. I chose Pedro-María because, in spite of his enthusiasm, he was a fairly negligible burden: the emotional impact of seeing him again was pretty close to zero.

Our friendship had grown from a fertile ground of coincidences. It was my first year in Barcelona and, while we were waiting with our parents in the line of kids waiting to be distributed into classrooms, my mother told Pedro’s she thought we would become good friends. Mum was trying to help, to do whatever it took to give me my first friend, but the only reason I sat next to him was because we ended up with a teacher who arranged us by height rather than alphabetically. What a guy, Father Margarine. He always knew when you were laughing to yourself, as if his eyes could cut right through your skull and read the words swirling inside. He used to tell me I would never amount to anything, and there was a time in my younger days when I’d have loved to track him down and give him a detailed report of how much action I was getting. But he’d be long dead by now. It’s crazy how those guys who were fifty when we were kids have all keeled over. Anyway, what would I have to boast about these days?

It was also because of our height that both Pedro and I were recruited for basketball, and three days a week, after practice and showers, we went home together while our mothers chattered about unfathomable feminine matters. If we were lucky they’d buy us a Swiss roll covered in cream and crowned with a cherry. And since I helped him with his maths homework, and he got my technical drawings into a passable state, our classmates and teachers assumed we were closer than we really were. Actually, I distanced myself from him every chance I got. I was a vigorous kid, lively, the golden boy who always landed on his feet. And Pedro . . . well, Pedro was too skinny and angular, and I was never sure he had a motor of his own. He seemed content to feed off the surplus energy of another heart that had entered the world overflowing with vital juices. It was absurd that the powers above had bestowed a whole life on such a weak spirit. If you think about it, the house of our friendship was built of the materials supplied by my mother’s pushiness, Father Margarine’s idiosyncrasy, and a sport that favoured the tall: all told, a shack of straw and reeds. How can you miss someone who’s been carried away on the wind of the years?

And now we come to my second motive: when I gave Pedro my mobile number, I was so miserable I would’ve thrown myself into a grave if its diggers could guarantee me in writing just a bit of human company. But don’t start gloating just yet. Aside from your ignominious departure, something else was weighing on me: my stupendous health was starting to fail.

A fairly Siberian day had encroached on Barcelona’s climate. I was heading down Calle Muntaner, too furious to take shelter in a taxi. I’d just visited my mother, and if asking to borrow money once you’re over forty is already more debasing than at twenty (it’s harder to convince yourself the situation is temporary and things will soon get better), I can assure you it’s even worse when you’re given the runaround. I’d found my mother more lively than usual, and the cause for her sudden euphoria – a newfound group of septuagenarian friends – should have made me happy. I was surprised, of course, but I didn’t waste my time inquiring about her new companions. I was too busy fuming over her refusal to advance me what I needed to avoid descending yet another rung down the proverbial ladder.

‘Let’s talk about it in two weeks. I’m sure I’ll have an answer for you by then.’

I called my sister and got her voicemail, but it wouldn’t let me leave a single message; I called six times and was charged for each of them. I wasn’t wearing gloves or a scarf, and I went into one of those Pakistani or Brahmin shops that don’t pay taxes and will be the only kind of business to survive after the imminent crisis has devoured all the rest: the shops selling collectable stamps, the bookstores, tailors, and all the fine liquor stores. Who knows, maybe you ran off with a Syrian, but I’ll have to watch as the Eixample’s diverse commercial landscape simplifies into a bunch of yucca dispensaries, hotels, outlets, Chinese wholesale shops, and Internet cafés that smell like feet. I bought a big bag of crisps – kettle-cooked, 2.35 euros – telling myself I needed the energy. I searched all my pockets, hoping to avoid breaking my fifty-euro note.

The fabulous power of saturated fats propelled me home, which obviously is no longer the charming flat in Diagonal Mar I can’t afford without you. Now I have a low-ceilinged matchbox stuck on top of a building with no lift and no central heating, where I moved because the landlord (a friend Vicente met in rehab) agreed to let me pay the deposit of 1,200 euros over three months, which are up next week. Also because, like an idiot, I bought into the romance of the word ‘attic’, even though the place faces inwards and the living room windows look onto an alley featuring rubbish bins and the fluorescent lights of the Adam sauna, whose main service you can well imagine.

Calle Rocafort is half an hour from the beating heart of the Gayxample, and the common species around here is the old lady walking a repulsive dog that will start to lick your shoes and trouser leg if you don’t cross the street; even so, the Adam is packed to the gills every Friday. It can’t aspire to the queer VIPs that flock to Barcelona from northern Europe looking for easy sex or streets where they can walk openly hand in hand. But the Adam has no competition for the closeted flamers from Sants and La Bordeta, from dramatic Creu Coberta or that strange neighbourhood that opens up as the Gran Via breaks away from Paral-lel (a street that in any other city would be called Perpendicular), so the managers have a guaranteed full house every weekend.

And while I juggle things so I can pay the VAT, the land tax, the water bill, the taxes for parking, rubbish collection, and weed trimming in those neighbourhood parks that only depress you the second you think of walking through them . . . not to mention the indirect taxes on tobacco, alcohol and petrol . . . all that municipal reverse dialysis that sucks the clean blood from my bank account and replaces it with an infusion of debt and requests for payment . . . while I try to stop them cutting off my electricity, or the water (full of lead particles and other carcinogens), I’m sure the folks at the Adam don’t have to cough up even half. Those fairies function like a mafia of mutual support – forget about the heart’s network of capillaries, that lot are all irrigating each other. And don’t get me wrong, I’ve got nothing against dykes and even less against gays. But if on top of letting two-husband couples adopt kids, they get tax breaks to boot, just what do the rest of us get for being normal?

I gathered my courage to climb the stairs. If I hadn’t been ashamed at the thought of eating in front of the peepholes, I would have saved some crisps to replenish my energy on the landings. Luckily, I was two floors up when the pain hit me. It felt like fingers were plucking my nerve endings, pulling them towards the side where I felt my heart beating. I stood stock-still like a rodent surprised by artificial light, repeating ‘it’s OK, it’s OK’. Some afternoons I go swimming at the local pool, and if I push my body too hard I feel nausea overcome me when I grab the float to rest. I never thought it was important – my mental life is so tangled there’s bound to be the odd physical repercussion. I realised right away this was more aggressive. It wasn’t just the pain that coiled through my arm, ribs and throat, leaving a burning wake behind it: what really scared me was the crystal-clear impression, as if my own myocardium were whispering it in my ear, that my heart was suffocating.

Somehow I hailed a taxi, and three blocks before we reached the Quirón hospital the pain started to fade. I ruled out going back home. I know I promised you I’d try to rein in my hypochondria, and no one could deny I’ve stopped confusing headaches with tumours or thinking every red spot is a fermenting melanoma. This time, though, I was sure something truly malignant was afoot in those veins of mine. This was serious; my sweat reeked of adult trauma.