Divorce Is in the Air: A Novel Read Online Free PDF Page A

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 what 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are washed away but these guys stick around, starring in their own lives, with good or bad memories of us, a couple of out-of-date phone numbers, the blurred memory of our faces and some residual goodwill. In sum, files no one ever expects to reopen.

    I turned to the social network in the hope it would revolutionize 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 school days. Sure, it had been a great time: 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 gotten 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 soil 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 in classes, my mother told Pedro’s she thought we would become good friends. Mother 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 silently mocking him, 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 rundown of my love life. 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 math 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