Divorce Is in the Air

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We went to the spa to save what was left of our damned marriage.

With only that goal in mind, I climbed into the driver’s seat of the rented red Citroën, its gear stick so hard to handle it could have run us off the road any second, and I got down to negotiating the curvy road under the vigilant gaze of those medieval towns that in Catalonia sprout from the hills like giant stone mushrooms.

The mountains were gathered into soft crests, and the arid landscape sloped gently down into fields of rye and wheat. We drove along a road still slippery after a storm that had forced us to hole up for hours in a service station, where Helen’s parents had dropped two hundred euros on souvenirs.

The afternoon was warm, as if a touch of April had been mixed in with November, which for its part was still sloughing off poplar leaves into the rushing Corb River. It was oddly disheartening to watch the water’s muddy surface bucking like the back of a live animal as it flowed through the riverbed’s ravines and around its twists and turns. According to the map we were less than five kilometers away. As we rounded an unexpectedly wide bend that opened to our right, I could see Helen in the passenger-side mirror, chewing on the nail of her index finger, her blue gaze fixed on the cigarette she was holding out the window so the smoke wouldn’t annoy her father. The boy in the backseat chewing gum couldn’t hide the fact that, with the set of his cheeks and the generous cut of his lips, he was a more stylized and robust combination of the genes of Helen’s parents, who sat on either side of him. The highway narrowed into a road that dipped toward a wooded area, and I heard the luggage start bouncing in the trunk.

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