Free Divorce Is in the Air: A Novel by Gonzalo Torné Page B

pads, the tube miniskirt, the patent-leather mini, and some kind of polka-dotted garment. The panties and stockings and bras (which we’ll get to later) that she’d packed were proof she had no intention of leaving. My father had informed me of that female peculiarity while smoking a rancid cigar on the sofa, so it must have been a Sunday and I must have been anxious to escape. It was the kind of transfer of manly information that leaves both parties fairly disconcerted—it was hardly his intellectual legacy. It’s ridiculous how those half-heard ideas end up permeating our beings. But it was a good piece of advice: after I found your cruel note, the thing that convinced me you were serious this time was the fact that you’d taken the portion of the underwear that you wore. You only left behind a single green stocking, balled up where I found it later, at the back of the drawer where you couldn’t reach.
    Helen came into my Salamanca bachelor pad with the intention of staying (I almost said “staying under my wing”). And not only did I open my home to her, I did something even more insane, just because it seemed the natural thing to do. I asked her to marry me in a civil ceremony. Her parents could meet mine later (neither of us noticed the other’s shudder of horror), and we would formalize our union on a grander scale, as only priests can do.

    Granted, in one sense we’d only been fucking. Sure, our sexual fervor had formed canals that irrigated all our worldly activities: I’d be at the cinema or getting dinner, leaving a meeting, taking a short walk to a taxi stand, and my nerves would remind me of the singular pleasure of squeezing her breast, of removing her swimsuit, of kissing the lips of her cunt. It was the kind of relationship where what you want is not a safe distance from which to evaluate your partner with equanimity, but rather to get her into a house with you ASAP where she’s always in reach of your appetite. The kind of relationship that demands you live together or let the lust devour your thoughts down to the root of your brain; think of it like the fire of a biblical marriage—an unstoppable love.
    A civil union was as sad back then as it is now, but the event was eroticized by its furtive unexpectedness. I showed up in morning dress, wearing a black tie that, since I’d arrived in Madrid, had led a sorry itinerant life through the offices of accountants, bureaucrats, and lawyers specializing in financial rescue. Though we’d promised to leave our families out of it, I couldn’t resist sporting Dad’s cuff links. Vicente, whose name Helen took pains to pronounce as if it were spelled “Bicente,” came as our witness. We paired him with a chubby Italian woman whom my fiancée presented as her “dearest friend” and whom my wife didn’t take half a morning to condemn to the abyss of traitors (and now that I think about it, I never found out why). The sky was lofty, blue, smooth, promising. The extremities on my left side trembled as Bicente and the other fifteen people we invited to round out the party threw rice at us. Someone blew a horn of German origin that for years afterward I thought was a tradition from Helen’s homeland (the Thrushes had migrated from the Neckar valley to the shuddering depths of America). For the first time ever, we kissed with our tongues tucked under the domes of our palates, and when the cold putty of her lips touched mine, I felt my nerves prickle lasciviously. Suddenly it didn’t seem a bad idea for Catholics to impose premarital chastity. With his eyes closed, the groom could follow his blood from heart to peripheral organs, letting it lick the walls of his veins as he anticipated the nakedness that, once uncovered in dread and excitation, he could savor all night long under the light of a honey-soaked moon.

    We ate dinner in a restaurant with tables set out under the shade of two oak trees. We treated ourselves to a banquet of salads and tempting