Divorce Is in the Air: A Novel by Gonzalo Torné

girlfriend who doesn’t want to hear about your past, who brings you too much happiness, too many problems. Work swallows your free time, your parents get ill and gobble up any extra energy, you have children who grow into bottomless pits, you’re worried about the economy, you’re ashamed to have become one of those responsible citizens who brush their teeth three times a day, you’re annoyed by your background, frightened of it, you envy them—who knows what you’ll find, what they’ve turned into? It’s funny to think they might still be what they were, to speculate about what they’ve become.

    You let the months slide by because you’re confident those people will still be there when you get in touch, and by the time you finally get around to it they’ve changed too much or are too unchanged, expecting old gestures that you’ve lost, recalling aspects of you that no longer match the person you’ve convinced yourself you are, a person they no longer recognize.
    The time goes too fast or too slow and one day you find yourself with old photographs, unsent e-mails, unfulfilled plans, the whole affair becomes too dense to flow freely, you no longer know what to do with the distance, how to grasp it. Friendship is rooted in shared activity, it’s nourished by everyday challenges. Keeping up to date, notifying each other of changes, sharing projects that prevent the erosion of your shared substrate. But to remain close to the same people for so many years and not grow apart—it’s a bit repugnant. We’re charmed by the idea but we grow tired of the same faces.
    What did I matter to Saw? What interest could he have in a childless, divorced, chronically ill man? Why would he care about the layers time had deposited on my body? The lesson I’d learned from the heart scare was that we will never be as young as we are right now, but Pedro-María wasn’t interested in having a forty-something guy remind him how precious his remaining healthy days were. He wanted me to help him immerse himself in the past, the time of promise: his memory of the past, and the past of his dreams.
    Nothing good could come of this meeting. I had made a mistake; our roots had rotted from damp.

    “I’m going to take a piss.”
    It was good timing, but I wasn’t faking: one of the side effects of the pills I was taking to thin my blood was diuretic. The drug liquefied my fat and sent streams of toxins to my bladder. I’d lived for years without knowing that the walls of that gourd grew slack with use. No more pissing before going out at night and holding it till dawn. These days I need to go every half hour, and I never really feel empty. I’ve had to overcome my fears and make my way into the toilets of bars, restaurants, cinemas, and burger joints, where surprises left by other ghastly people, intentionally or not, await me. We old folks are truly adventurous.
    The bathroom at La Brasa was clean, courtesy of a gallon of bleach dumped over the floor; my eyes watered. I turned on the tap, and I had gotten so used to the role of senescent that I was surprised to see in the mirror the skin of a still-taut face, healthy lips, my wavy golden hair. I scrubbed my hands with soap and water; men who only wash afterward don’t appreciate their most delicate part. I unzipped my fly and confirmed the mismatch between the urgency I felt and the paltry amount of urine. Going for a piss is hell: all that wasted time while you wait for it to finally dribble out.
    I went back to the dining room and the view was still crummy, but the light slid honeyed and cold over the table, and my glass shone with greasy fingerprints. Pedro had knocked back what was left of the wine, and he looked at me with crystalline eyes: he didn’t wear contacts.
    “Should we order another bottle?”
    I missed my chance to tell him my body had forgotten how to process cholesterol, that the residues of that wine, the slab of red meat with its blackened edges, would build up