Leaving the Atocha Station

2

I THOUGHT I HAD MADE IT CLEAR TO ARTURO OVER THE COURSE OF several conversations that I would not read, that I would be happy to come to the reading, but only to listen, not that I’d understand much of what I was hearing, and while I was very flattered that he wanted to attempt translations of my poetry, I was too shy and ambivalent about my “work” in its current state to read with his accompaniment at the gallery. I was embarrassed I’d given in to his repeated requests to see my writing in the first place, writing that I’d photocopied for him out of my notebook, and which I assumed he read with Teresa’s help, as his English was terrible, just a smattering of phrases. But when he picked me up and saw me empty-handed, he told me to hurry and get my poems, that we were already late, and he was so insistent that I found myself running back up the stairs, thinking maybe he just needed to make another copy, and I grabbed my notebook and bag, and then reiterated as we drove toward the gallery that I wasn’t going to read; claro, he kept saying, which means sure.

It was getting cold; I had somehow never thought Madrid would have a winter, but I was sweating, no doubt visibly, as Arturo greeted and introduced me to the shivering smokers milling around the gallery’s glass doors. I was too nervous to catch the names of the people with whom I exchanged handshakes, but I was aware that my kissing was particularly awkward, that I had kissed one of the women on the corner of her mouth, more on her lips than on her cheek. This was a common occurrence; with a handful of clumsy exceptions when I had met particularly cosmopolitan New Yorkers one kiss on the right cheek, and various relatives when I was a child, I had almost never, prior to my project, kissed a woman with whom I was not romantically involved. I wasn’t exactly sure what would have happened if I’d tried to greet a woman by kissing her in Topeka; certainly her boyfriend would kick in my teeth if she had one, or I would be at risk of becoming her boyfriend if she didn’t. It often occurred to me that my upbringing would have been changed beyond all recognition if kissing had been common; such a dispersion of the erotic into general social circulation would have had unpredictable effects. In Providence I could have gotten away with it, but not without an air of affectation and effeminacy; regardless, I had never thought to try. But in Spain I was guilty of abusing the kissing thing, or of at least investing it with a libidinal charge it wasn’t supposed to contain, and when you were drunk or high and foreign, you could reasonably slip up and catch the corner of the mouth.

We entered the gallery and I saw Teresa and Rafa, Arturo’s boyfriend, standing next to a table with tapas and wine. I was heading in their direction, considering breaking my rule and speaking English to Teresa, asking her to explain to Arturo that I would not read and why, when I recognized, to my horror and surprise, María José from the foundation among the people perusing the gallery walls, which featured glossy black-and-white photographs of idle industrial machinery. I had met her only twice, once upon my arrival to fill out paperwork and once to turn in a brief report in English about my activities so far, a report upon which my stipend’s continued disbursement depended; both encounters were sufficiently uncomfortable to have rendered her image indelible. I had been convinced that she could see through me, that my fraudulence was completely apparent to her, which wouldn’t have required too much perspicacity on her part given the state of my Spanish, and given the fact that each time she recommended, as a way of making small talk, a poet or authority on the Spanish Civil War, I blinked and said something about the name sounding familiar, although I wasn’t sure I used the right word for “familiar.”

She saw that I saw her and approached me smiling and we exchanged kisses far from the mouth and she said something about the opportunity to hear my work, an opportunity I thought she said was particularly welcome because she hadn’t seen me at any of the foundation’s social events. Then she indicated some other Americans who I assumed were also foundation fellows; they were speaking very competent Spanish, much better than mine, but speaking it too loudly, and I managed to ask how she had heard about the reading. Apparently the gallery had added the foundation to its e — mail list starting with “my” reading.

I managed to disengage from María José and kissed Teresa and embraced Rafa and stared as coldly as possible at Arturo while I tried to figure out an escape. Arturo patted my shoulder and said everything would be fine and started flipping through his own notebook, which I assumed contained the translations, and asked me which poems I planned to read. I thought about claiming I was too ill to continue, surely I looked sufficiently pale, but I was worried that failing to appear in front of María José would somehow constitute the breaking point of my relationship with the foundation, that the total vacuity of my project would finally be revealed and I would be sent home in shame. My mouth was dry and I poured myself a glass of white wine and said I didn’t care which poems I read but that I would only read one or two. Teresa said to read the one about seeing myself on the ground from the plane and in the plane from the ground and I said, in my first expression of frustration in Spanish, that the poem wasn’t about that, that poems aren’t about anything, and the three of them stared at me, stunned. I said I was sorry, drained and refilled my glass, noting that Teresa seemed genuinely hurt; I found that to be a greater indication of her affection for me than the fact that she had favorites among my poems. We’ll read it, I said.

Everyone began to take their seats; the gallery was long and narrow with high ceilings and white walls and it was full; there were probably eighty people. There was a podium with a lamp and microphone and a small pitcher of water and as I sat with Teresa and Rafa in the fourth row, pissed off, nauseated with anxiety, searching my bag for a tranquilizer as inconspicuously as possible, Arturo approached the podium, thanked everyone for coming, then talked about the night’s program. We were lucky to have two of the most interesting new voices in Spanish and American poetry in the gallery. We would first hear from Tomás Gomez or Gutiérrez, who had won such and such prizes, and whose work had such and such characteristics, and who was also a talented painter. Then we’d hear from Adam Gordon, who was in Madrid on a prestigious fellowship, whose work was having some sort of effect on something, whose poetry was intensely political and reminiscent of a Spanish poet I’d never heard of, only instead of protesting Franco, it took on the United States of Bush. This amplified my nervousness, as it had nothing to do with my poetry, such as it was, and as Arturo sat down to applause and Tomás Gomez or Gutiérrez approached the podium, I imagined beating Arturo’s face in with the microphone or lamp.

Tomás looked less like he was going to read poetry and more like he was going to sing flamenco or weep; he did not say thank you or good evening or anything but instead paused dramatically as if to gather his strength for what would be by any measure a heroic undertaking. He had shoulder-length hair that kept falling in his eyes as he arranged his papers and he kept smoothing it back with a gesture I found studied; he struck me as a caricature of himself, a caricature of El Poeta. A few more people were trickling into the gallery and he looked at them gravely until they found seats. Then he looked back down at his paper, looked back up at the crowd, and when the silence had intensified to his liking, he uttered what I assumed was the title of his first poem: “Sea.” To my surprise this poem was totally intelligible to me, an Esperanto of clichés: waves, heart, pain, moon, breasts, beach, emptiness, etc.; the delivery was so cloying the thought crossed my mind that his apparent earnestness might be parody. But then he read his second poem, “Distance”: mountains, sky, heart, pain, stars, breasts, river, emptiness, etc. I looked at Arturo and his face implied he was having a profound experience of art.

Maybe, I wondered or tried to wonder, I’m not understanding; maybe these words have a specific weight and valence I cannot appreciate in Spanish, or maybe he is performing subtle variations on a sexist tradition of which I am not in possession. As Tomás read a third poem, “Work Dream” or “Dream Work,” I forced myself to listen as if the poem were unpredictable and profound, as if that were given somehow, and any failure to be compelled would be exclusively my own. The intensity of my listening did at least return strangeness to each word, force me to confront it as a sound, and then to recapture the miracle of sound opening or almost opening onto sense, and I managed to suspend my disgust. I could not, however, keep this up; it required too much concentration to hear such familiar figurations as intensely strange, even in Spanish. It was not until I began to consider the scene more generally that my interest caught: there were eighty or so people gathered to listen to this utter shit as though it were their daily language passing through the crucible of the human spirit and emerging purified, redeemed; or here were eighty-some people believing the commercial and ideological machinery of their grammar was being deconstructed or at least laid bare, although that didn’t really seem like Tomás’s thing; he was more of a crucible of the human spirit guy. If people were in fact moved, convincing themselves they discovered whatever they projected into the hackneyed poem, or better yet, if people felt the pressure to perform absorption in the face of what they knew was an embarrassing placeholder for an art no longer practicable for whatever reasons, a dead medium whose former power could be felt only as a loss — these scenarios did for me involve a pathos the actual poems did not, a pathos that in fact increased in proportion to their failure, as the more abysmal the experience of the actual the greater the implied heights of the virtual. Then I was able to hear the perfect idiocy of Tomás’s writing as a kind of accomplishment, especially combined with his unwitting parody of himself, doing that thing with his hair, gripping the podium as though the waves of emotion breaking over him might wash him from his feet, and I began to relax a little about my own performance, the tranquilizer no doubt also having its effect. I told myself that no matter what I did, no matter what any poet did, the poems would constitute screens on which readers could project their own desperate belief in the possibility of poetic experience, whatever that might be, or afford them the opportunity to mourn its impossibility. My own poetry, I told myself, would offer this to the gathering as, or even more effectively, than Tomás’s, as my poems in their randomness and disorder were in some important sense unformed, less poems than a pile of materials out of which poems could be built; they were pure potentiality, awaiting articulation. And translation would further keep my poems in contact with the virtual, as everyone must wonder what Arturo or Spanish was incapable of carrying over from the English, and so their failure, their negative power, was assured.

Tomás’s increasingly histrionic manner signaled his reading was drawing to a close, and after yet another terrible poem he paused, looked at the audience again, and then abandoned the podium without a word, at which point everyone applauded. When the applause died down Arturo nodded to me. We approached the podium and he explained that I would read the poem in English and then he would offer the translation. He might also have claimed that, even if one had no English, some of the power of the original would be palpable. While he was saying this or something like it I poured myself a glass of water, nearly spilling it when I drank, and opened my notebook. When he turned and looked at me to signal I should start, I said thank you into the microphone and began to read my poem, to read it in a deadpan and monotonic but surprisingly confident way, considering my knees were shaking and my hands were freezing, to read it as if either I was so convinced of the poem’s power that it needed no assistance from dramatic vocalization, or, contrarily, like it wasn’t poetry at all, just an announcement of some sort: this train is delayed due to trackwork ahead, etc. I fantasized as I listened to myself that the undecidability of my style — was it an acknowledgment of the poem’s intrinsic energy or a reading appropriate to its utter banality — would have its own kind of power, especially in Tomás’s wake:

Under the arc of the cello

I open the Lorca at random

I turn my head and watch

The lights slide by, a clearing

Among possible referents

Among the people perusing

The gallery walls, dull glow

Of orange and purple, child

Behind glass, adult retreating

I bit hard to deepen the cut

I imagined the passengers

Could see me, imagined I was

A passenger that could see me

Looking up …

When I finished my portion of the reading I returned to my seat as the crowd applauded and then I realized I was no doubt supposed to stand with Arturo as he read his translations, but I was too relaxed now to rejoin him at the podium.

Arturo hesitated and I imagined he had expected my performance to be more like Tomás’s than it was, had undertaken the translation with a much more dramatic performance in mind, and now he was trying to figure out if he needed to read the translation in the manner in which I’d read the original or if he should deliver it as he had envisioned it prior to my reading; I was glad to see him struggle. Then he began to read the translation in what he must have thought was the midpoint between my style and Tomás’s, gripping the podium like the latter, but modeling my detachment, which had the strange and appropriate effect of making his voice sound dubbed.

At first I heard only so many Spanish words, but nothing I could recognize as my own; after all, there was nothing particularly original about my original poems, comprised as they were of mistranslations intermixed with repurposed fragments from deleted e — mails. But as the poem went on I slowly began to recognize something like my voice, if that’s the word, a recognition made all the more strange in that I’d never recognized my voice before. Something in the arrangement of the lines, not the words themselves or what they denoted, indicated a ghostly presence behind the Spanish, and that presence was my own, or maybe it was my absence; it was like walking into a room where I was sure I’d never been, but seeing in the furniture or roaches in the ashtray or the coffee cup on the window ledge beside the shower signs that I had only recently left. Not that I’d ever owned that particular couch or cup, but that the specific disposition of those objects, the way they had been lived with, required or implied me; not that I was suffering from amnesia or déjà vu, but that I was both in that room and outside of it, maybe in the park, and not just in the park, but also in innumerable other possible rooms and parks at once. Any contingent object, couch or cup, “orange” or “naranja,” could form the constellation that I was, could form it without me, but that’s not really right; it was like seeing myself looking down at myself looking up.

When Arturo finished reading there was a long pause followed by what I experienced as unusually loud applause, and Arturo gestured toward me, redirecting that applause, and then said something about Tomás into the microphone, the applause thickening to include him before it gradually tapered off. People rose from their seats and either left to smoke, I guess smoking was bad for the art, or broke for the wine and tapas. Teresa approached and congratulated me and said I had done a wonderful job. Rafa embraced me, Rafa never really talked, and then I saw that María José was waiting to speak with me, American fellows in tow.

I introduced Teresa to María José and vice versa, and Teresa let fly a barrage of compliments about my writing and said something about how wonderful it was that the foundation had brought me to Madrid. While I couldn’t understand much of what she was saying, it was clear it was eloquent, that Teresa spoke not as a friend but as a self-appointed representative of Spanish Art, and that María José was impressed, if a little put off. To me María José said she had enjoyed the reading very much, she looked forward to talking with me about how my new poems related to my research about the Spanish Civil War, perhaps at one of the upcoming events where fellows would be presenting their work, and I blinked a few times and said claro. Then one of the fellows introduced herself and said she too was a poet, basically yelled it, and that she would love to have coffee sometime and talk Spanish poetry. I blinked at her as well, but, before I could say claro, Arturo was pulling me away from the group to introduce me to Tomás, who had the air of a man badly misunderstood.

We shook hands and I said I liked your reading and he thanked me but didn’t say anything back, I guess because he didn’t like my poetry and because Tomás couldn’t lie for the sake of politeness when it came to the most sacrosanct of arts. I was surprised how furious I became and how fast, but I didn’t say anything; I just smiled slightly in a way intended to communicate that my own compliment had been mere graciousness and that I in fact believed his writing constituted a new low for his or any language, his or any art.

When I felt my face had made its point, I left him without saying excuse me, walked out of the gallery, and stood a few feet apart from the other smokers and lit my own cigarette, impervious to the cold. I sensed that the other smokers were whispering about me in respectfully hushed tones, and while I knew this was less because of any particular response they’d had to my reading than because I had been presented to them as a significant foreign writer, it nevertheless felt good. Eventually one of the group approached me and introduced himself as Abel. We shook hands and he said he enjoyed the reading, then explained that his photographs were hanging in the gallery and I said, although I hadn’t really seen them, that they were excellent. Perhaps because I paid him this compliment as if my knowledge of photography were considerable, he seemed eager to demonstrate some understanding of poetry, and he began to compare my writing with a Spanish writer I didn’t know. As he grew increasingly animated another smoker joined us, and after listening for a while he began to disagree with Abel, lightly at first, then with increasing intensity. The more heated the exchange, the more rapid the speech, and the less I understood; in the afterglow of what increasingly felt like my triumphant reading, however, I had the confidence to conduct or project a translation of pure will, and I came to believe I could follow the back and forth, which had the arc and feel of debates I’d heard before.

The poet to whom Abel likened me was a reactionary, the second smoker seemed to say, and his formal conservatism was the issue of his right-wing sympathies; my writing recalled him only in its sonority, but my formal openness signaled a supple capacity to take the measure of contemporary experience quite distinct from so-and-so’s fascistic longing for some lost social unity. My work, said the second smoker, was much more reminiscent of another poet, whose name I’d never heard, who fled Franco and died in exile, a poet whose capacity to dwell among contradictions without any violent will to resolution formally modeled utopian possibility. This Abel dismissed with a wave of his cigarette as a simplistic, knee-jerk association of formal experimentation with left-wing politics, when in fact the leading Modernist innovators were themselves fascists or fascist sympathizers, and in the context of U.S. imperialism, I thought he argued, reestablishing forms of sufficient complexity and permanence to function as alternatives to the slick, disposable surfaces of commodity culture was the pressing task of poetry.

One cannot overcome the commodification of language by fleeing into an imagined past, the second smoker might have countered, which is the signature cultural fantasy of fascism, but rather one must seek out new forms that can figure future possibilities of language, which was what my work was somehow doing, unbeknownst to me, placing recycled archival materials in provocative juxtaposition with contemporary speech. We were all in one group now, the smokers, many of whom were lighting second or third cigarettes, and it was clear that I was expected to weigh in. I said or tried to say that the tension between the two positions, their division, was perhaps itself the truth, a claim I could make no matter what the positions were, and I had the sense the smokers found this comment penetrating.

I lit another cigarette to help my aperçu sink in, and in the ensuing silence I tried hard to imagine my poems’ relation to Franco’s mass graves, how my poems could be said meaningfully to bear on the deliberate and systematic destruction of a people or a planet, the abolition of classes, or in any sense constitute a significant political intervention. I tried hard to imagine my poems or any poems as machines that could make things happen, changing the government or the economy or even their language, the body or its sensorium, but I could not imagine this, could not even imagine imagining it. And yet when I imagined the total victory of those other things over poetry, when I imagined, with a sinking feeling, a world without even the terrible excuses for poems that kept faith with the virtual possibilities of the medium, without the sort of absurd ritual I’d participated in that evening, then I intuited an inestimable loss, a loss not of artworks but of art, and therefore infinite, the total triumph of the actual, and I realized that, in such a world, I would swallow a bottle of white pills.

__________________________

We tended to wake at the same time, Isabel and I, which gave us the sense of having been awoken by something, a noise external or internal to our dreams, and we listened, facing each other, blinking, for the noise to recur, which it didn’t, although I never mentioned this idea about the noise to her, so she might not have had the experience I ascribed her. She would get out of bed and wrap herself in the towel that was always draped across the chair, then shower while I put on the coffee. When the coffee was ready I would say so loudly enough that she could hear me over the water and she would turn off the water and rewrap herself in the towel and we’d take our coffee on the couch and smoke, moving the little butane heater close to us. Then I showered and did the things I didn’t do in front of her: shit, take pills, and when I came out of the bathroom she would be dressed, putting up her hair.

She was always wrapping or unwrapping her hair or body in some sort of cloth, winding or unwinding a shawl or scarf, and whenever I imagined her, I imagined her engaged in one of these activities; I couldn’t picture her standing still, fully dressed or undressed, but only in the process of gracefully entangling or disentangling herself from fabric. I tried to tell her this, as I thought it would sound poetic, but I didn’t have any of the relevant verbs, so I said something about not having the words to describe how she was always moving, how I couldn’t imagine her still, and I made a series of gestures that communicated this was a pale version of what I had intended to communicate, and left her to unfold my meaning.

Except for our most basic exchanges, pass me this or pass me that, what time is it, and so on, our conversation largely consisted of my gesturing toward something I was powerless to express, then guessing at whatever referent she guessed at, and gesturing in response to that. In this, my project’s second phase, Isabel assigned profound meaning, assigned a plurality of possible profound meanings, to my fragmentary speech, intuiting from those fragments depths of insight and latent eloquence, and because she projected what she thought she discovered, she experienced, I liked to think, an intense affinity for the workings of my mind.

As we walked through the Reina Sofía I would offer up unconjugated sentences or sentence fragments in response to paintings that she then expanded and concatenated into penetrating observations about line and color, art and institutions, old world and new, or at least I imagined those expansions; To photograph a painting—, I said with derisive mystery as we watched the tourists in front of Guernica, and then I observed her face as this phrase spread out into a meditation on art in the age of technological reproducibility. I would say, Blue is an idea about distance, or Literature ends in that particular blue, or Here are several subjunctive blues; I would say, To write with sculpture—,To think the vertical—, To refute a century of shadow—, etc., and watch her mouth the phrase to herself, investing it with all possible resonances, then reapplying it to canvas. Of course we engaged in our share of incidental talk, but our most intense and ostensibly intimate interactions were the effect of her imbuing my silences, the gaps out of which my Spanish was primarily composed, with tremendous intellectual and aesthetic force. And I believe she imbued my body thus, finding every touch enhanced by ambiguity of intention, as if it too required translation, and so each touch branched out, became a variety of touches. Her experience of my body, I thought, was more her experience of her experience of her body, of its symphonic receptivity, ridiculous phrase, and my experience of my body was her experience once removed, which meant my body was dissolved, and that’s all I’d ever really wanted from my body, such as it was.

Isabel did not own a car but there were apparently several cars to which she had access; weekends during the winter of my project she would drive us out of Madrid in a small red car, a small yellow car, or a brown station wagon to whatever nearby town might have a church or restaurant or relative of interest. She seemed to have innumerable aunts and cousins and, after visiting relics or yet another El Greco or eating partridge, baby pig, or some other regional delicacy lately slain, we would meet up with her family, smoke, and drink. I had been in Spain long enough that when I met her relations I felt compelled to appear more shy and reticent than monolingual; luckily, this was an impression it was easy to give, for as long as I remembered to change my expression in keeping with the tone of whoever was declaiming, I could affect comprehension, and if I spoke very quietly when I had to speak, and if I smoked a little sullenly, no one attempted to enlist me in conversation. This worked with everybody except her Aunt Rufina.

It was sunny but very cold on the day we drove to Toledo and I sensed from Isabel’s manner that her relationship with Rufina was complex, at least she kept thinking out loud about whether we should in fact visit Rufina after walking around the city, if we would have time or if she might be busy, whereas we normally just showed up at one of her relations’ houses or apartments, no matter the hour, and were absorbed with a flurry of kisses into whatever they were doing, usually drinking and watching TV. On the highway to Toledo we passed several tour buses full of what looked like Americans, digital cameras already in hand, and as we drew past them I expressed infinite disdain, which I could do easily with my eyebrows, for every tourist whose gaze I met. My look accused them of supporting the war, of treating people and the relations between people like things, of being the lemmings of a murderous and spectacular empire, accused them as if I were a writer in flight from a repressive regime, rather than one of its most fraudulent grantees. Indeed, whenever I encountered an American I showered him or her with silent contempt, and not just the loud, interchangeable frat boys calling each other by their last names, calling each other fags, and the peroxided, inevitably miniskirted sorority girls spending their junior year abroad, dividing their time between internet cafés and discotecas, complaining about the food or water pressure in the households of their host families, having chosen Spain over Mexico, where Cyrus was, because it was safer, cleaner, whiter, if farther from their parents’ gated communities. I had contempt not just for the middle-aged with their fanny packs and fishing hats and whining kids, or the barbate backpackers who acted as though failing to shower were falling off the grid; rather, I reserved my most intense antipathy for those Americans who attempted to blend in, who made Spanish friends and eschewed the company of their countrymen, who refused to speak English and who, when they spoke Spanish, exaggerated the peninsular lisp. At first I was unaware of the presence in Madrid of these subtler, quieter Americans, but as I became one, I began to perceive their numbers; I would be congratulating myself on lunching with Isabel at a tourist-free restaurant, congratulating myself on making contact with authentic Spain, which I only defined negatively as an American-free space, when I would catch the eyes of a man or woman at another table, early twenties to early thirties, surrounded by Spaniards, reticent compared to the rest of the company, smoking a little sullenly, and I knew, we would both know immediately, that we were of a piece. I came to understand that if you looked around carefully as you walked through the supposedly least touristy barrios, you could identify young Americans whose lives were structured by attempting to appear otherwise, probably living on savings or giving private English lessons to rich kids, temporary expatriates sporting haircuts and clothing that, in hard-to-specify ways, seemed native to Madrid, in part because they were imperfect or belated versions of American styles. Each member of this shadowy network resented the others, who were irritating reminders that nothing was more American, whatever that means, than fleeing the American, whatever that is, and that their soft version of self-imposed exile was just another of late empire’s packaged tours.

Toledo itself was lousy with tourists despite the fact that it was winter. We dodged and mocked them as we ascended the narrow streets toward the giant Alcázar, a stone fortification built on the city’s highest point, which Isabel assumed I would find of particular interest because of its famous role in the Civil War, or at least its role in Nationalist lore: a bunch of fascists held out against the Popular Front, which laid siege to it, until Franco arrived with the Army of Africa, an early and highly symbolic victory for the Nationalist cause. As we walked around the giant structure, which had to be largely rebuilt after the war, she recounted facts I barely followed about historical figures of whom I’d never heard. Then she began to ask me questions about my project, which had never interested her before.

“How did you choose Spain over, for example, Chile?”

“So much has been written about Allende,” I said, although I had only the vaguest sense of who Allende was.

“What makes the poem an effective form for a historical investigation?” I inferred from the words of hers I understood. I was surprised to find myself inclined to defend a project I’d never clearly delineated, let alone ever planned to complete, as opposed to conceding its total vacuity.

“The language of poetry is the exact opposite of the language of mass media,” I said, meaninglessly.

“But why are Americans studying Franco,” she asked, gesturing toward a group of Americans being led around the Alcázar, “instead of studying Bush?” She said it as if every American tourist were planning a monograph on El Caudillo.

“The proper names of leaders are distractions from concrete economic modes.” I was trying to sound deep, hoping concrete and mode were cognates. My limited stock of verbs encouraged general pronouncements.

“Why aren’t you studying the American economic mode?” She was angry.

“You can’t study a mode of production directly.” And with my manner, I said, “I am delivering a fact so obvious it pains me.”

“I’m sure the people of Iraq are looking forward to your poem about Franco and his economy.” It was the first unkind thing she’d ever said to me.

I met this with silence, so as to allow her to imagine an array of responses I was in fact incapable of producing, and I held this silence as we left the Alcázar and descended back into town toward the cathedral, where there were some famous El Grecos, although if I never saw his torturously elongated figures or phantasmagorical, sickly coloring again, it would have been too soon. What disturbed me as we walked was not that Isabel was pissed off, and certainly not that she thought my project was absurd or that she found me to be a typically pretentious American, but that our exchange, despite my best efforts, and perhaps for the first time, had involved much more of the actual than the virtual. I’d said, as usual, nothing of substance, but the nothing I’d said just languished between us; I didn’t feel her opening it up into a chorus of possibilities, and the silence we were now maintaining was the mere absence of sound, not the swelling of potential meanings. This was in part because my Spanish was getting better, despite myself, and I experienced, with the force of revelation, an obvious realization: our relationship largely depended upon my never becoming fluent, on my having an excuse to speak in enigmatic fragments or koans, and while I had no fear of mastering Spanish, I wondered, as we walked past the convents and gift shops, how long I could remain in Madrid without crossing whatever invisible threshold of proficiency would render me devoid of interest.

It was early dusk by the time we reached the cathedral, and in a Spanish cathedral it always felt like dusk, dull gold and gray stone and indeterminate distances, so I had the feeling less of going indoors than of entering a differently structured but nonetheless exterior space. I was alarmed to find myself wanting to produce an elegant formulation of this experience for Isabel, alarmed not only because I couldn’t formulate anything elegantly in Spanish, but because this was the first time in her company that I had desired to get my point across instead of attempting to make its depth a felt effect of its incommunicability. Now I feared I’d neither be able to be eloquent positively nor negatively and, as we made the rounds of the capillas, I realized with a sinking feeling that the reduction of our interactions to the literal and the transformation of our pregnant silences into dead air, a flat spectrum over a defined band, would necessarily strip my body of whatever suggestive power it had previously enjoyed, and that, when we made love, she would no longer experience her own capacity for experience, but merely my body in all its unfortunate actuality.

I tried hard to imagine my poems or any poems as machines

that could make things happen.

I could feel the initial creep of panic, and as I reached around in my bag for a yellow tranquilizer, I encountered one of my notebooks, which I took out; I found a pen and quickly jotted down the idea about the dusk and the cathedral, aware and encouraged that Isabel was watching as I wrote. I arranged my face into a look of intense concentration, a look that implied I’d had a lightning flash of intellection, that there was no time to waste on speech as I hurried to give my insight a more enduring form. Isabel broke our silence, maybe half an hour old, to ask what I was writing, and I said I’d had an idea for a poem, possibly an essay. She waited for me to elaborate, which I didn’t, and I believed she looked with real curiosity at my notebook as I returned it to my bag. This, I thought to myself, as we finished our circuit around the cathedral and emerged into the darkling street, would allow me to retain my negative capability, although that wasn’t the phrase; I could displace the mystery of my speech onto my writing, the latter perhaps recharging the former. If our conversations were no longer shot through with possibility, if what I said no longer resonated on many potential levels simultaneously, what I wrote in a language she could not read would have to preserve my aura of profundity. And since the raw material for these notes that were the raw material for poems emerged out of our time together, she would in some important if unnamable sense have a hand in their genesis; there would be traces of her presence, she might imagine, in subject or formal process. Indeed, if the poems did not prove powerful, maybe she shared in the responsibility, as it would mean, if she had faith in my talent, that our time together failed to inspire me, and why wouldn’t she have faith in my talent, given that I’d attended a prestigious university and received a prestigious fellowship. She would experience the present as suffused with the possibility of eventual transfiguration into a poem, and this future poem was a fund each moment could draw upon; my notebook, not my fragmentary Spanish, would become the sign of the virtual, enabling my project to advance. I was so calmed and encouraged by this new narrative, I forgot about the tranquilizer, and as we walked toward the ramparts near where Isabel had parked, I said to her:

“I read my poems and a friend read translations at a gallery in Salamanca the other night.” This was intended to hurt her a little and it seemed to. Since I’d never planned to read, I’d never thought to invite her, and besides, I had a policy of keeping Isabel away from Arturo and Teresa, not because I didn’t think they’d like each other, but because I wanted them to believe I had an expansive social life. But I knew she would be stung to think I’d given a public performance without her, stung and impressed I was receiving such attention, and that all of this would improve her image of my poetry, lend it mystery, while also making her jealous of my other friends.

“The poems you read — what were they about?” she asked, after a long silence that said, “Why didn’t you invite me?.”

I was also silent for a while, then stopped and turned to her and put my hands on her shoulders, which I never did, and looked her in the eyes, which sounds ridiculous, and said, tenderly, “Poems aren’t about anything.”

“Poems aren’t about anything,” she repeated, largely to herself, perhaps with a hint of incredulity or bemusement or scorn, and it wasn’t clear to me whether its significance was spreading out. I kissed her in case that helped the resonance expand.

By the time we reached the car I felt the balance of our relationship had been restored; I believed Isabel felt it too, and in a rush of optimism, she decided we should, in fact, visit Rufina. It was dark now as we drove across the ramparts and after fifteen minutes or so of confusing, curving roads, we pulled off into a gravel driveway. During the drive Isabel started and abandoned various descriptions of her aunt, attempting to avoid disparaging her in any way, which suggested affinity and respect, while also trying to warn me, it was unclear regarding what. Finally she managed, haltingly, to say something about a fight over Isabel’s ex-boyfriend, a fight arising, I thought she said, from Rufina’s protectiveness of Isabel, her sense that Isabel had been treated poorly, but a bad fight nonetheless.

Rufina’s house was small, white, boxy, two stories, but set on a large expanse of land, which I assumed, during the day, offered prospects of the distant hills, or were those mountains. Dogs appeared as we approached the house, recognizing Isabel, who greeted them in the dark by name. We rang the bell and I could hear the radio inside. The door opened and Rufina appeared; I was stunned by her youth, she looked thirty, shapely, and was made up as if about to go out for the evening — eye shadow and lipstick, clothes that seemed selected carefully — despite the fact that she was in the country, alone. I thought she might have missed a beat between seeing us and greeting Isabel warmly, but the greeting was, when it came, very warm; as she held Isabel’s face and wiped off her lipstick with her thumbs, I thought one or both of them might cry; Rufina was pressing hard. She released Isabel, kissed me quickly on both cheeks, and told us to come in, shutting out the dogs. We followed her into the kitchen where, without asking us what we wanted, she took out three tall glasses, gin from the freezer, and a bottle of tonic from the fridge. She put ice in the glasses and poured the cocktails in the Spanish manner, filling each glass almost entirely with gin, barely cutting it with tonic, then led us with our drinks to an enclosed and heated porch where we sat down in low cane chairs and near-dark.

I squinted at Rufina, waiting for my eyes to adjust. She and Isabel were obligatorily catching up, the Spanish so fast and full of slang I didn’t even try to comprehend it; after a minute or two, the rush of small talk tapered into silence. Rufina took a long match from a box somewhere within her reach and lit a cigarette and I thought she looked mean and attractive in its light, her appeal perhaps amplified by the fact that I’d spent the day imagining a visit to an elderly aunt. Isabel looked nervous, adjusting her hair; it was clear this was the first time they’d seen each other since the aforementioned fight. Rufina held the match toward me, shook it out. Why Isabel had brought me I found baffling, she certainly made no effort to introduce me into the conversation; I could only suspect my presence was a restraint, that Isabel wanted to work out whatever was between them, and hoped Rufina would rein in her behavior and talk in the company of a stranger, especially talk about a previous boyfriend. The silence was evidently oppressive to Isabel, who knew I wouldn’t break it, and finally she rose and said she had to go to the bathroom, leaving me with Rufina. I was in fact very interested in Rufina, in how she made a living, where she was from, how long she had lived outside Toledo and why, not to mention how old she was, if she was married, if she was Isabel’s blood relation, what had happened with the boyfriend, etc., but I wasn’t about to speak. After another length of silence, Rufina stood up, saying something about my drink, which she took to the kitchen to refill.

Alone on the porch, I looked out into the dark; I imagined I could see the dogs moving somewhere in the yard, and far beyond the yard I could see a few ruby taillights disappearing on a curve. I began to imagine my apartment in Madrid, imagined it at that instant, dark, but filled with noise from La Plaza Santa Ana, imagined the espresso machine at rest, the cheap but inoffensive furniture the apartment came with, furniture that would remain when I left, the few old postcards I’d purchased from El Rastro and scotch-taped to the wall. Then my other rooms: Brighton Street, mattress on the floor, Hope Street, with its little drafting table, dorms, which were terrible, then Greenwood, Jewell Street, Huntoon and my crib, which I could not in fact remember, imagined them at that instant, now furnished and occupied by others. Then I could feel each room around me as I imagined it, and the dark beyond the porch would become the dark of Topeka or Providence. Then it was the dark of my seventh or fifteenth or twentieth year, each dark with a slightly different shape or shapeliness, the sky, when I was younger, more concave. And then it was Rufina’s porch again, but imagined from a future room surrounded by a future dark, a room where I was writing, maybe this.

At some point I realized I had been lost in these reveries, if that’s what they were, for longer than it took to make a drink or take a piss. I listened hard and could hear voices, voices I could tell were raised; Isabel and Rufina were arguing somewhere in the house, in a room whose door they’d shut. I became fascinated with this phenomenon of hearing loud voices at a distance, in trying to account for how I knew they were loud when I could barely hear them, something about their shape or shapeliness, or the way they filtered through the walls, and I reached for my notebook to write this down, although there wasn’t really light to write by, when suddenly I stopped and blushed, at least my face was hot. Why would I take notes when Isabel wasn’t around to see me take them? I’d never taken notes before; I carried around my bag because of my drugs, not because I intended to work on my “translations,” and the idea of actually being one of those poets who was constantly subject to fits of inspiration repelled me; I was unashamed to pretend to be inspired in front of Isabel, but that I had just believed myself inspired shamed me.

I took my notebook from the bag, but only to use it as a surface; I rubbed a cigarette between my thumb and forefinger to loosen the tobacco and emptied it onto the notebook cover. Then I took the little egg-shaped mass of hash out of my pocket, so shaped because it had been transported, wrapped in plastic, up someone’s ass, found my lighter, heated and flaked a quantity of hash into the tobacco, then blew carefully into the empty cigarette paper, inflating it a little, and shook the mixture back into the cigarette, twisting the end of the paper to keep it from spilling. Finally, I removed the cottony filter with my teeth. The voices were getting louder.

I lit the spliff and imagined what was happening inside, my first projections borrowed almost entirely from Spanish cinema: Rufina and Isabel were lovers, Rufina maybe a transvestite, and Isabel had brought me to get back at Rufina for the latter’s recent infidelity, but had underestimated Rufina; soon Rufina would return to the porch with a knife wet with Isabel’s blood, stab me, then stab herself. Or Rufina, unspeakably wronged by unspeakable men, all of whom resembled Franco in some sense, had sworn that no man would ever cross the threshold of her home again, and Isabel had violated this rule, hoping, for whatever reason, to reintroduce Rufina to the opposite sex; soon Rufina would return with a knife wet with Isabel’s blood, etc. As the hash had its effect, I took pleasure in picturing the flash of the knife reflected in Rufina’s eyes, having to wrestle her into submission or die. I was relieved and disappointed, then, when a light came on and Rufina and Isabel returned to the porch, Rufina now wearing a gray oversized Hard Rock Café Houston sweatshirt and holding our refreshed drinks, Isabel relaxed and smiling.

“You smoked without us, Adán,” Rufina exclaimed. She must have asked Isabel my name.

“I can make more,” I said. “I can roll another,” I corrected.

“So you’re a poet, Adán,” she ignored me. I just smiled. She repeated my name as if it were a one-word joke at my expense.

“He just read at a gallery in Salamanca,” Isabel said to spite me.

“Salamanca — elegant!” It was clear Rufina was going to ask me what kind of poetry I wrote. “What kind of poetry do you write?.”

“What kinds of poetry are there?” I was pleased with this response and made a mental note to use it from then on.

“Bad and worse,” Rufina said with mock derision. Isabel laughed a little. Maybe it relaxed them further to be allied against me, to taunt the new boyfriend after clearing the air of the old.

“I, too, dislike it,” I said in English.

“You must come from money,” Rufina said, ignoring me again. Then she said something idiomatic involving hands and clouds, which I assumed was a colorful way of saying the same thing. “Do you have to work at all?”

I wasn’t sure how to respond to this. I had encountered this association of poetry and money before in Spain, compounded, in my case, by the assumption that all Americans, I mean Americans abroad, were rich; compared to Isabel and Rufina, my family probably was. I had no clear sense of Isabel’s class position, let alone Rufina’s; I knew Isabel had graduated from college. had long worked at the language school, and now had a nice enough apartment, but she also had two roommates. I paid for almost all of our meals and drinks, but thought very little of it, even though it was a significant portion of my total funds, because euros always seemed fake to me. I had no idea, for instance, if the house we were in was of significant value, if land near Toledo was worthless or in high demand, if Rufina’s manner of dress or address indicated the working or middle or some other class, or if those were the relevant terms for Spain.

“I won’t have to work for several months, it’s true,” I said in a way that implied I would then have to work in a coal mine. “Unless you think writing is work.”

“What will you do when you go back to the United States?” Rufina asked. Perhaps the most important unspoken rule that Isabel and I had developed in our short relationship, our most important kind of silence, was never to refer to the time after my fellowship. I looked at Isabel. It had been a while since I’d thought what I would, in fact, do upon my return.

“I don’t know that I will go back,” I lied. Isabel remained quiet, but there was a change in the intensity of her silence. I lit a cigarette to distance myself from this statement.

“And your parents will send you money,” Rufina laughed, and then said something that involved the word “Bohemian.” “What,” she said, “do they do?”

I knew that no matter what I said my parents did, Rufina was going to find it hilarious, so I decided to tell the truth, although I knew it would be particularly funny: “They’re both psychologists.” I heard Isabel shift uncomfortably.

As expected, this cracked Rufina up. I assumed the flourish of talk that followed was about the preposterous image of a Bohemian poet supported by his psychologist parents. Isabel said something about not being too hard on me, but I smiled to indicate I was fine with being teased. “Isabel’s friends from the language school are always rich,” Rufina explained to me. “Friends” clearly meant “boyfriends.”

“What is your profession?” I asked, sounding intensely foreign.

“I lost my job,” she said, flatly. I blinked. “Maybe I’ll start writing poetry. Maybe,” she said, leaning forward and placing her hands on my thighs, “you’ll marry me and we can live off your family.” I thought I saw Isabel wince when Rufina touched me.

“O.K.,” I said.

“Do you think your parents would like me?” Rufina asked, sticking out her chest in a performance of her voluptuousness I didn’t quite understand, but enjoyed taking in.

“I think my mom and dad would like you,” I said.

“I can cook and clean,” she said, sarcastically, crossing and uncrossing her legs.

“My mom is a well-known feminist,” I said, a statement that sounded as stupid as it was. Rufina laughed, Isabel asked what time it was, implying we should leave, but was ignored. I could see her staring at Rufina, mutely telling her to shut up; I didn’t understand the extremity of her concern. “You’d like my mom,” I said to get further away from the feminist thing, “but she’s not so rich.” I smiled again, in part to calm Isabel. “Neither she nor my father ever give me money,” I lied. Now Isabel was looking at me strangely. I had just finished saying maybe Rufina could meet my parents if and when they visited Spain, when I remembered I’d told Isabel that my mom was dead.

There were several ways I could have recovered from this mistake; I could have looked melancholy and later claimed that I simply refused to share such a loss with Rufina, or, if I’d kept my cool, I could have maintained to Isabel that she had misunderstood my terrible Spanish in the first place, that I’d never said or meant to say that my mom had passed away. But I could feel my face, which was burning, fully confess to Isabel that I had lied to her. I’d told Isabel the lie during one of our first nights together when, still guilty from having recently told it to Teresa, I had felt compelled to repeat it, maybe to deepen my guilt into a kind of penance; surely I’d been drunk. Instead of amplifying my guilt, however, repetition mitigated it. While she had responded tenderly, Isabel never asked me about my family, and I never returned to it; at first I’d been aware of needing to avoid talking about my mother, as I still was with Teresa, but with Isabel I avoided talking about almost everything, save for my cryptic aesthetic pronouncements.

Isabel said she had to piss again and left the porch. Rufina, confused about what had passed between us, didn’t resume her sarcastic inquiries, and in the ensuing silence, I tried to imagine how Isabel was going to react. My lie would be unforgivable in any context, but I felt it would be particularly unforgivable in Spain; had I told the lie about my father, that might have been O.K.; I could always say he was a fascist, whatever that meant, and that I’d merely engaged in wishful thinking. Almost every movie I had seen since arriving in Spain, maybe every Spanish movie made since 1975, was about killing, literally or symbolically, some pathologically strict, repressed, and violent father, or was at least about imagining a Spain without such men, a Spain defined by liberated women rediscovering their joie de vivre with the help of their colorful gay friends. But to have “killed” my mother, the “feminist,” for whatever reason, revealed me to be at heart a right-wing, jackbooted misogynist, and further called into question the legitimacy of my research.

“I told Isabel earlier,” I said slowly to Rufina, who, smoking again, appeared to have forgotten all about me, “that my mother was dead. This isn’t true.”

“What?” she asked, suddenly interested, but sure she’d misunderstood.

“I told her my mom was dead, but my mom is alive,” I paused. “Just now, I forgot I had lied.”

“My God,” Rufina said, and gasped. “Why did you do that, Adán?” She was more intrigued than disgusted. She was smiling, not unkindly.

“Because my mom is sick,” I said. “And because—” I pretended it was difficult to go on. The smile drained quickly from her face. Then it was difficult to go on: “I am scared … I was trying to imagine …” Rufina leaned forward, now all tenderness. “I thought if I said it, I would have less fear,” is how I must have sounded.

“Poor boy,” Rufina said, and looked like she wanted to embrace me. The thrill I felt at her gaze checked the advancing waves of guilt. Isabel appeared in the door.

“I want to go,” she said.

“Sit down, my love,” Rufina said with an authority that returned Isabel to her chair. Then to me: “Continue.”

“I came here,” I began, “and nobody knows me. So I thought: You can be whatever you want to people. You can say you are rich or poor. You can say you are from anywhere, that you do anything. At first I felt very free, as if my life at home wasn’t real anymore.” Isabel was trying to make herself believe I’d confessed my lie to Rufina. “And I was glad to be away from my father,” I threw in for color, implying my dad, gentlest of men, was some kind of tyrant. “But then the reality returns. And I have constant terror. I call her all the time. She says she is fine, but I don’t know for sure. I didn’t want to leave her, but she said I had to come here and do my work. That I had a responsibility to my writing. She insisted. I can’t imagine life if something happens to her. And then when I meet someone important,” I said, looking directly at Isabel, “I lied. To see. If I could say even the words.” Isabel appeared to understand. “I am crazy, I know,” I said, placing my head in my hands. Then I said, looking up at Isabel again, “I am sorry. I am sorry to her. I am sorry to you.” I contemplated crying.

Isabel came to me and pulled my head against her and said something to comfort me that included the word “poet.” Rufina was rubbing my leg. I saw myself as if from the yard, amazed.

__________________________

That winter my research fell, my research was falling, into two equally unrepresentable categories. All December, there was rain, record amounts apparently; the city was strangely empty, emptied; even if it were merely drizzling, the Spaniards seemed to suspend all nonessential activity. Besides young men delivering the orange canisters of butane, or elderly women protected by plastic slickers hurrying between grocers, I saw next to no one on the streets. That December, if someone rang my buzzer, and that someone could only be Isabel, Teresa, or Arturo, their cars illegally parked in La Plaza Santa Ana, I wouldn’t answer, and because it was raining, they wouldn’t linger.

These periods of rain or periods between rains in which I was smoking and reading Tolstoy would be, I knew, impossible to narrate, and that impossibility entered the experience: the particular texture of my loneliness derived in part from my sense that I could only share it, could only describe it, as pure transition, a slow dissolve between scenes, as boredom, my project’s uneventful third phase, possessed of no intrinsic content. But this account ascribed the period a sense of directionality, however slight or slow, made it a vector between events, when in fact the period was dilated, detached, strangely self-sufficient, but that’s not really right.

During this period all like periods of my life were called forth to form a continuum, or at least a constellation, and so, far from forming the bland connective tissue between more eventful times, those times themselves became mere ligaments. Not the little lyric miracles and luminous branching injuries, but the other thing, whatever it was, was life, and was falsified by any way of talking or writing or thinking that emphasized sharply localized occurrences in time. But this was true only for the duration of one of these seemingly durationless periods; figure and ground could be reversed, and when one was in the midst of some new intensity, kiss or concussion, one was suddenly composed exclusively of such moments, burning always with this hard, gemlike flame. But such moments were equally impossible to represent precisely because they were ready-made literature, because the ease with which they could be represented entered and cancelled the experience: where life was supposed to be its most immediate, when the present managed to differentiate itself with violence, life was at its most generic, following the rules of Aristotle, and one did not make contact with the real, but performed such contact for an imagined audience.

This is what I felt, if it wasn’t what I thought, as I smoked and listened to the rain on the roof and turned the pages and smelled the wet stone smell of Madrid through the windows I kept cracked. And when I read the New York Times online, where it was always the deadliest day since the invasion began, I wondered if the incommensurability of language and experience was new, if my experience of my experience issued from a damaged life of pornography and privilege, if there were happy ages when the starry sky was the map of all possible paths, or if this division of experience into what could not be named and what could not be lived just was experience, for all people for all time. Either way, I promised myself, I would never write a novel.

When it was raining in the afternoon I would sometimes walk through El Retiro, which would be empty save for a few hash dealers, all African, passing the time under the awning of a shuttered kiosk or, if it was only drizzling, standing under one of the steaming trees. There were always hash dealers in El Retiro, most of them around my age, selling eggs of what they called “chocolate,” mainly to tourists, as there was much better hash to be had. I was surprised by how polite the polyglot dealers were, the prices highly negotiable in whatever language, no threat, however vague, of violence, and their sheer numbers startled me: one for every fifty yards of the park in good weather. While they must have known each other, one sensed that each man worked alone. As far as I could tell, the police tolerated the dealers in the park, although I’m sure they could be, and occasionally were, rounded up and deported. The police tolerated hash in general; I could never quite tell if it was legal or illegal to smoke. A policeman or park official of some sort might pass by on a golf cart, see you conversing with one of the dealers, and shoot you a dirty look, but never, in my experience, would he stop; if the look were dirty enough, the dealer might walk away from you, but typically with more annoyance than concern.

In the rainy period of my research, I would buy an egg or half an egg from whatever dealer I first encountered, the dealer surprised to have a customer in such weather, then walk to the semicircular colonnade built around the statue of Alfonso XII overlooking El Estanque. When I found a relatively dry, sheltered place, I smoked and watched the faint rain fall into the artificial lake. I had never smoked hash before coming to Spain and, unlike the weed I smoked in Providence, which instantly made me an idiot, the hash usually allowed me to maintain, or at least to believe I was maintaining, the semblance of lucidity, especially after months of habituation. I experienced it as a tuning of the world, not, as with strong weed, its total transformation or obliteration, and I could read or “work” while smoking hash, or at least believed I could, whereas when smoking stronger stuff I could not follow, let alone form, whole sentences. But the alterations effected by the hash were somehow all the more profound for being understated, in part because one could forget or at least discount the role of the drug in one’s experience. If, say, a group of trees that had previously been mere background suddenly stood forth a little and their slender and strictly symmetrical forms became an elegant if unparaphrasable claim about form in general, you could write that observation down without dissolving it in the process, or without the strangeness of your hands distracting you from however you’d planned to use them. If a slight acoustic heightening allowed you to perceive for the first time consciously that the sound of the leaves in the wind was, as it were, in conversation with the similar but ultimately distinct sound of distant traffic on Calle de Alfonso XII, or that a hammering noise was in fact two noises, one issuing from a nearby tree and the other from a construction site beyond the park, and if these realizations inspired some meditation on the passing into one another of the natural and the cultural, the meditation, if not profound, could at least achieve coherence, could be formulated as it was experienced, not retrospectively, after coming down. Many people, I believed, used similar drugs to remove themselves from their experience, but because, for as long as I could remember, I always already felt removed from my experience, I took the drug to intensify the vantage from said remove, and so experienced it as an intensification of presence, but only at my customary distance from myself; maybe, when I panicked, that distance was collapsing.

That I smoked hash with tobacco was critical during this phase of my project, although I was resolved never to smoke a cigarette again after leaving Spain, and so smoked with particular abandon, critical because the cigarette or spliff was an indispensable technology, a substitute for speech in social situations, a way to occupy the mouth and hands when alone, a deep breathing technique that rendered exhalation material, a way to measure and/or pass the time. More important than the easily satisfiable addiction, what the little cylinders provided me was a prefabricated motivation and transition, a way to approach or depart from a group of people or a topic, enter or exit a room, conjoin or punctuate a sentence. The hardest part of quitting would be the loss of narrative function; it would be like removing telephones or newspapers from the movies of Hollywood’s Golden Age; there would be no possible link between scenes, no way to circulate information or close distance, and when I imagined quitting smoking, I imagined “settling down,” not because I associated quitting with a more mature self-care, but because I couldn’t imagine moving through an array of social spaces without the cigarette as bridge or exit strategy. Happy were the ages when the starry sky was the map of all possible paths, ages of such perfect social integration that no drug was required to link the hero to the whole.

I didn’t think these things, but might have, as I walked back through the park and home, then lay on my bed, only several feet beneath the downward-sloping ceiling, after having ignited the butane heater and drawn it near me. Once I was warm I would eat something, open a bottle of wine, and then write Cyrus, to whom I’d long since confessed I had internet access in my apartment, and who was in Mexico with his girlfriend and her dog. I was vaguely jealous of them; they’d driven to Mexico in her pickup with little money and no real plan in order to acquire experience, not just the experience of experience sponsored by my fellowship. His girlfriend, Jane, who had attended the same university as I, was the daughter of a very rich and famous man, but had foresworn her fortune, at least temporarily, in order to live lightly on the planet, make art, and write; before she left for Mexico, she had been squatting in one of Providence’s abandoned warehouses with a group of like — minded artists. Often around eight or nine p.m. in Madrid, Cyrus would be in an internet café in Mexico, and we could instant message. One Monday night:

ME: you there? what’s up in xalapa

CYRUS: Yeah. Went on a kind of trip this weekend. Planned to camp

ME: i was going camping here for a while

ME: hello?

CYRUS: I remember. It’s hard to imagine you camping, I must say. Anyway, we drove to the country to see some pueblos, walk around

ME: cool

ME: what did you see

CYRUS: There was a bad scene there

ME: you mean a fight with jane?

CYRUS: No. Although we’re fighting now, I guess

ME: stressful to travel together if you haven’t before

CYRUS: Well we were walking

ME: still there?

CYRUS: along a river and

CYRUS: I’m still here, yes. Jane wanted to swim, but I was a little worried about the current. Not to mention the water did not strike me as particularly clean

ME: my brother once picked up a parasite swimming in a lake and was sick for a month

CYRUS: Right. And Jane launched into this speech about — half joking — about how I was afraid of new experiences or something, how I was always happier as a spectator. Not a fight, just teasing, albeit

ME: i hate new experiences

CYRUS: emasculating teasing. Something about that being what was wrong with poets

ME: the new poems are great, btw

CYRUS: I guess I should mention we were smoking a lot of that Acapulco Gold

ME: so what happened with

CYRUS: or whatever it is. Very staticky. Or at least I’d been smoking it. Vaguely reminiscent, incidentally, of certain Topeka strains, but more powerful. Anyway we walked along the river and it eventually opened out and where it was wider we encountered some people swimming

ME: americans?

CYRUS: Locals. There are no tourists here in winter, it seems

ME: right

CYRUS: There were two men swimming, or one swimming and one more like wading. The current looked pretty strong. One of the men, his girlfriend was on the bank — in a swimsuit — and he was trying to convince her to get in, to swim

ME: don’t like where this is going. she was scared of the current?

CYRUS: Maybe. Maybe just the cold

ME: what is the weather like there

ME: madrid: cold and raining constantly

CYRUS: Warm to hot. It was like 80. Which is unseasonably warm, I guess. The air is filthy. But the water still chilly. Anyway, Jane — we were on the opposite bank as the swimmer’s girlfriend — Jane wanted to swim

ME: she had a swimsuit?

CYRUS: and did get in the water, although I told her I didn’t think

CYRUS: Yes, we both had swimsuits on under our clothes. It was not, I told her, a good idea, because of the current

ME: knowing her, i’m sure that was a goad

ME: might egg her on

CYRUS: Yes. She got in and while the current was strong was fine. Then the other swimmers, they were saying to the girlfriend, see, this girl got in, no problem, and then Jane started telling me to come into the water. So there I was opposite the girlfriend on the bank, both of us being pressured by the swimmers to join them. The girlfriend and I kept looking at each other with nervous smiles

ME: if one of you got in the other would have to

CYRUS: I felt that

ME: a game of chicken. you two should have left the others and gone off and had

CYRUS: Or at least if she got in I would have to. But she probably could have remained on the bank

ME: a wonderful life together!

ME: right. she would not be emasculated

CYRUS: but I was, I admit, feeling the pressure. Jane was there with these other men in the water, the current clearly manageable. I felt cowardly and American

ME: you have to stay strong — cowardice of your convictions

CYRUS: Yeah, well, I got in. The current was actually stronger than I imagined. There were pockets of strong current. Where the river narrowed a little farther down I could see what looked like serious rapids

ME: and then the girlfriend jumped in

CYRUS: Well

CYRUS: not at first. But now everyone kind of turned to her. We’d all become one group, somehow. And her boyfriend had changed from teasing her to encouraging her, his arms open, lovingly — it’s fine, I promise, I’ll protect you, etc. We were

ME: how bad is this going to get?

CYRUS: also encouraging her, I think. And laughing and screaming at the cold she jumped in. She was fine at first

ME:!

CYRUS: but as she kind of splashed around — she didn’t really know how to swim, it didn’t seem. I don’t know, she moved somewhat downriver where the current became pretty strong, and she was getting upset

ME: so someone went and helped her?

CYRUS: Things

CYRUS: things got very bad very fast. she went underwater for a second, and when she resurfaced, she was a little farther down and totally panicked

ME: jesus

CYRUS: She was screaming and water was

ME: jesus

CYRUS: getting in her mouth and she was struggling against the current in the wrong way

ME: couldn’t somebody get her

CYRUS: Her boyfriend was trying but there were enough stones and other shit that it was taking awhile. And he wasn’t much of a swimmer either, didn’t know, I don’t think, what to expect from or how to manage the rapids. Jane tried to go

ME: tried to catch her?

CYRUS: Yes. I held her back. As I was holding her back I saw the girlfriend go under again, then reemerge briefly another, I don’t know, ten feet down

ME: fuck

CYRUS: where the rapids were intense, and then she was really swept downriver. So

CYRUS: so Jane and I ran back onto the bank and to the truck and then, yelling something about what we were doing to the other swimmers — the friend was holding the boyfriend back who was now screaming — screaming in a very primal way, you understand — not screaming words. So we drove downriver hoping to get in front of her, to fish her out of the river or something

CYRUS: You there?

ME: i’m here

CYRUS: So we had to return to the main road and then floored it for a little while then jumped out of the truck and rushed back down to the water. We could still hear the boyfriend screaming

ME: but you got in front of her

CYRUS: The river had widened again and then there was some sort of dam, and she went over the dam before we could figure out what to do

ME: she was conscious?

CYRUS: She didn’t seem to be struggling. It was kind of hard to see, or at least it’s hard for me to remember. So we had to get back into the truck and drive farther down the river again — there was no other way

ME: go on

CYRUS: There was no other way

CYRUS: so on the other side of the dam there was a kind of pool — no current. And her body was there. And we rushed into the water and dragged her to the shore

ME: was she breathing

CYRUS: No

ME: so what did you

CYRUS: We laid her on the bank and I gave her or tried to give her mouth to mouth. She didn’t seem, I can’t really say what I mean by this, given that she wasn’t breathing, but she didn’t seem dead. Her white

ME: jesus, man

ME: i don’t even know how to give cpr

CYRUS: shirt, her undershirt, was pulled up over her head. I had to pull it back down over her breasts. Which was somehow embarrassing. She was cut up pretty bad

CYRUS: Neither do I, really. I tried. She kind of, I don’t know, threw up in my mouth

ME: you mean was revived — spit out water — so she was alive

CYRUS: No. There was vomit in her mouth I guess. And then I threw up onto the bank. She was dead

ME: jesus. i am so sorry you

CYRUS: I tried again. I didn’t know what I was doing. Our teeth, I can’t get this out of my mind, I accidentally clicked my teeth against her teeth at some point, like

CYRUS: like in a clumsy kiss or something. Prom. And I kept thinking of course that she had only got in the water because I had got in the water

ME: no way to blame yourself for any of this

CYRUS: And I was also worried that the cpr had killed her, I think I was pressing way too hard on her chest — or that

ME: what is jane doing during all of this

CYRUS: she would have been, at least, revived in better hands

CYRUS: I don’t really know. Helping me I guess

ME: so she was dead

CYRUS: She was dead

ME: fuck, man

ME: what did you do then

CYRUS: We could hear the boyfriend screaming again. Except now I think he was injured too. He was closer. He probably got in the water again and broke an arm or leg or whatever. But he was screaming “kill me” or something from the bank. He wasn’t screaming about his injuries. He knew she was dead

ME: what did you do

CYRUS: We took her body, Jane and I carried her body to the truck and raced toward the pueblo. We were maybe pretending a little to ourselves there was still something to be done, I mean, that fantasy was somewhere in our bodies — she was of course dead. But we, I mean, nobody had a phone

ME: i thought you had a cell phone

CYRUS: Broke a long time ago. So the first place we found that had people, phones, was a roadside restaurant a few minutes before the pueblo. We got out and I managed to scream out what had happened as I pointed to the body and a couple of men from the restaurant rushed out and helped us lay the body there, on the ground. Her eyes were wide open, by the way, and her mouth

ME: jesus

CYRUS: Various people gathered around, and somebody mentioned calling the police, and I guess we managed to communicate that there were others by the river — the injured boyfriend, his friend. A couple of people from the restaurant got in a car and went for them. And an old woman, she brought us some limes

ME: limes?

CYRUS: She brought us two lime wedges and said something about shock and that we should suck them and we did. Someone covered her with a blanket. I saw the pay phones and I had a calling card in the truck and I went to one of the pay phones in a daze. I think I threw up again. But I called my dad, I was desperate to ask him about the cpr, to see if I had maybe killed her or at least missed an opportunity to save her. Something like that. I wasn’t

ME: you did everything you could. i’m so sorry

CYRUS: thinking clearly. And my teeth were chattering and each time they clicked I remembered her teeth

CYRUS: I did get my dad on the phone. Who knows what I sounded like. I was very confused, certainly. Sobbing. Managed to ask about the cpr, if I had done it wrong. He reassured me, although I don’t remember what he said. That nothing was my fault. That she would have already choked on her vomit or something. Not that a psychiatrist knows anything about cpr. I also think he said something about my coming home

ME: none of this is in any way

CYRUS: I got off the phone and went back to the truck. One of the people who worked at the restaurant said we could go so we left

ME: your fault

ME: you didn’t wait for the police?

CYRUS: Fuck no. We just left. We drove back to the apartment in total silence. We had put our clothes back over our swimsuits but were dried off from the heat by the time we got home. Like I said it was in the 80s. But my teeth were still chattering

ME: you didn’t talk about what happened at all?

CYRUS: We did later. Kind of. After we showered, we both realized we hadn’t eaten all day and although I felt sick I felt hungry, really hungry. We went to a little restaurant near our place we always go to. We started

WHICH know I hate but which helped get this taste out of my mouth. We talked about it then

ME: what did she say

CYRUS: The taste is back, by the way

CYRUS: She was shaken up in her way. She said she wished she’d never got in the water. But she also seemed excited. Like we had had a “real” experience

ME: i guess you had

CYRUS: Yeah but I had this sense — this sense that the whole point of the trip for her — to Mexico — was for something like this, something this “real” to happen. I don’t really believe that, but I felt it, and I said something about how she had got some good material for her novel

ME: is she writing a novel

CYRUS: Who knows

ME: and she responded how

CYRUS: She’s probably writing a novel now

CYRUS: She was quiet. I’m sure she was angry/hurt. Then she said something about how this just is the world, that things like this happen, that one can be as cautious as one wants, can waste one’s life being cautious, but that there is no avoiding the reality of death. I remember laughing at the phrase “reality of death” to show I thought it was an embarrassing cliché

ME: have you two made up

CYRUS: No. Yesterday we were both in the apartment reading and smoking but barely talked. We haven’t really spoken to each other today

ME: well, you both probably just need some time, right? i mean, this would shake anybody up

ME: i am really sorry

CYRUS: Yeah

ME: about all of this

CYRUS: Thanks

CYRUS: How is Spain?