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

no need to hide the fact that in the relatively near future we’ll begin to disappoint each other, because with these guaranteed friends placed within our reach by search engines, nobody’s trying to take each other for a ride: we’ve botched things enough as it is.

    Pedro-María ordered salad and two T-bone steaks. I didn’t make a peep—it was too sad a day to be vegetarian. I promised myself, though, that I wouldn’t touch the wine. I’d do what you used to when you didn’t feel like drinking: just wet my lips.
    If we’d been introduced as adults it would have been hard for us to break the ice: ever since Barça stopped being also-rans I only watch football occasionally, the nicest thing I can say about politicians is that they’re a bunch of deadbeats, I don’t think Pedro-María would be that interested in my BBC science documentaries, and it was too soon to start talking about my new field of interest—the neurotic neurons of my successive female companions. Of course, it didn’t even take us five minutes to turn to our shared history. We’d spent only eight years together, but time had passed so slowly on the way to school, the hours of boredom in the classroom had been innumerable, it was like we’d been moving through a heavy liquid that embedded those few years into a layer of our souls as deep as it was accessible.

    While I went bounding up the stairs two at a time to plead on behalf of the class that the teacher postpone the geography test…while I was lacing up my shoes on the basketball court as my teammates took up their positions…it made me sad to think that all those golden bodies brimming with youthful energy would head off to different universities, marry strange girls, buy distant apartments. All the boys in our class came into the world and consumed so much energy as our bones matured…I swear, when I was twenty you could never have convinced me how fast I would pass thirty, that all it took was one month running into the next. It seemed marvelous, being blessed with a pair of hands with which to act upon the world, but it was really just a trick, too common and widespread a phenomenon for any single manifestation to warrant much concern. They knotted a tie around Pedro-María’s neck for the graduation photo in 1979, and you could think of that photo as the critical mass from which we would all emerge, propelled every which way. Before long we would separate into the ugly ones, the idiots, the ladykillers, the beautiful souls, the health freaks, the caretakers, the dupes, the slackers, the men of mystery, the armchair generals, the worriers, the cowards, the ones who founder when they hit the first heavy weather, the tyrants, the wimps, the bosses, the humanitarians, the leaders of charmed lives, the prodigies and the late bloomers, the shrinking violets, the filthy pigs, the brawlers, the weaklings, the shut-ins, those who seemed destined never to grow but then started growing, or never to fall ill, never to die, now scattered among various clinics, savoring their various phases of resignation and united by the same muffled farewell song, bound together by the secret filaments of a shared sense of shame.
    Our conversation turned to the lives of our old classmates. Pedro pronounced their names in a tone that implied he was personally offended by the years that separated him from them, and I silently filled in their nicknames: Tapia (the Jew), Maureso (Cheese Face), Aurelio (Minor), Jiménez (the Bean)…Pedro-María (the Saw) had entertained himself by finding these guys out there wherever life had dragged them unawares and dissolved their distinctive youthful traits into an indistinguishable smudge: they get married, have kids, name them; they get divorced, land jobs, lose them. A kind of predictable and pleasant existence if you’re starring in it, but you’d need a novelist’s imagination to find the excitement in those worn-out grooves.

    Jacobo was the only one I was