The tube of toothpaste

Mr Rodríguez was uneasy as he entered the judge’s chambers; timidly, he sat down in an old brown leather armchair and answered the judge’s question in the affirmative. He was absolutely certain of his decision: he wanted a separation. But when the judge asked his second question and wanted to know why, Mr Rodríguez seemed to falter, and then, visibly embarrassed and rather pale, he replied that it was because his wife had a habit of squeezing the tube of toothpaste in the middle. The judge, who had heard many similar answers before, accepted what Mr Rodríguez had just said and granted the divorce.

Once in the café on the corner, Mr Rodríguez asked himself once more why, and the absence of any clear answer helped, among other things, to feed the depression in which he lived for close to a year. Mrs Rodríguez, who had gone into the judge’s chambers before him, had answered the question with heavy sobs. Both of them, nevertheless, felt relieved by the divorce decree.

Hard as it may be to believe, a marriage is capable of surviving the most terrible disasters, but not a process of small daily destructions, impossible to retrace from a café table on the corner by the courthouse. For Mr Rodríguez knew it well: his wife had been carelessly squeezing the toothpaste tube since their wedding night, despite the smiling request he had made that she should not. Just as he, for his part, had never changed his habit of leaving his shoes at the foot of the bed, even though his wife was forever tripping over them.

And Mrs Rodríguez went on making the maté with sweetener, and Mr Rodríguez went on smoking in bed. And although Mr Rodríguez had swapped maté for tea, his wife remained attached to her sweetener, and they no longer had anything in common in the afternoon, after work, because Mr Rodríguez had never liked tea.

So many nights spent sleeping back to back because of that last cigarette of the day, almost the only one he really savoured; and then the anger, on finding that magma of toothpaste again:

And after the shouting, the slammed door. Mrs Rodríguez left alone in front of the breakfast she had laid out: waiting at first for her husband to come back and ask her forgiveness, then eating alone, then making her breakfast at ten in the morning, while her husband had his at the bar at eight and came home in a foul mood after a wretched day at work, with a great desire to have dinner and go to sleep, and found no dinner because Mrs Rodríguez, cross with him, had spent the day out shopping.

Agreements, and nothing but agreements

One might perhaps speak of immaturity; someone might also think of a lack of affection. But what is so distressing in this story is that Mr and Mrs Rodríguez loved each other deeply, and that they were nevertheless unable to prevent ruin upon ruin and rout upon rout from deepening the confusion. And it is precisely because they loved each other, and loved each other so much, that Mr Rodríguez did not dare impose his habit of quietly smoking his last cigarette of the day the way God commands (or commanded him, at any rate), lying on the bed, relaxing after love, letting the ash fall into a large bronze ashtray, the kind of ashtray he liked; and that Mrs Rodríguez did not dare either to push her husband’s shoes under the bed with her foot, so that on waking he would have to crouch down and look for them.

The fact is that Mr and Mrs Rodríguez had promised each other never to impose anything on one another: everything was to be obtained through agreements, clear and clean-cut agreements. And since it had never occurred to them that one might agree to disagree, and since neither could impose anything on the other, he preferred to smoke when he thought she was asleep, to hide his cigarette ends in the bedside table, or, overcome by the torpor of sleep, to decorate the bedspread with a sort of Brussels lace. And it never crossed his wife’s mind to buy a toothpaste for her own personal use — for the sensitivity of her gums, let us say — and to massacre it as she pleased.

Without impositions and by agreement, that is how he came to prefer his sugar to the maté, and how she went on stumbling over her husband’s shoes. Both chose the spontaneous, easy, clear… and false solution.

Mr and Mrs Rodríguez clung to their own convictions about how one ought to behave in marriage and about the laws that must always be respected: never impose a point of view on the other, never lie, always look for reasoned, adult agreements. And these laws and these beliefs, always respected on account of the very affection they felt for each other, meant that between quarrels and truces they passed from anger to resentment, from the toothpaste and a ruined bedspread to no longer greeting each other in the morning, then to no longer speaking to each other at dinner, and, having done everything they could and everything they had to, to wanting to separate and feeling relieved by the judge’s sentence, without knowing why.