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

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, garbage collection, and weed trimming in those neighborhood parks that only depress me the second I think of walking through them…not to mention the indirect taxes on tobacco, alcohol, and gas…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 crowd is 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 chips to replenish my energy on the landings. Luckily, I was only two floors up when the pain hit me. It felt like fingers were plucking my nerve endings, pulling them toward 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 nausea overcomes 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 realized 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 tumors 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.
    If the universe were a fair place, I would have gotten something out of our separation. My spirit was swirling with enough foul gunk as it was—a scare would have been enough, there was no need for anything so drastic. If the world were at all rational, there would be a cap on suffering. Of course, if there were, Vicente wouldn’t have lost the hearing in his right ear, just like that. He was taking a walk, and suddenly it felt like his inner ear was sucking up all the sound and replacing it with a whistling that didn’t go away at night. The ENT specialist was encouraging: he might recover some of his hearing at any moment, though in the meantime he had to get used to living with tinnitus that kept him awake one in every three nights. They told him it could be caused by an allergy, a virus, the stress they use to explain everything, or a common antibiotic. So Vicente lived like a deaf man until the day he had a migraine that almost knocked him over in the middle of the street. In the hospital they drugged him and handed him off to a specialist who rummaged around in his head with lasers and X-rays until he reached a diagnosis: a benign tumor was growing between Vicente’s inner ear and his brain. They cut it out, because even in all its benignity the lump threatened to damage his temporal lobe. During the operation, with half Vicente’s skull open and