Leaving the Atocha Station

3

INSTEAD OF CONFESSING TO ISABEL THAT MY MOTHER, MY BRILLIANT and unwaveringly supportive mother, was well, that I was a liar of the most disgusting sort, I decided to imply more and more that my father, the gentlest and most generous man I knew, was a thug, a small — time fascist, El Caudillo of his household. Not only did this lie, in my view, draw Isabel’s attention away from whatever discomfort she had regarding the initial dishonesty about my mom, replacing that discomfort with sympathy, but it also served to decrease my guilt; I felt much better about blaspheming both my parents, about distributing my failure as a son between them. And because this lie about my father was comically absurd, because he was the man of all the men I knew most free from any will — to — domination, it felt more like a harmless joke than a morbid tempting of fate or karmic gambling with parental health. I also felt that, in order to avoid any future confusion, I needed to get my stories straight, and so decided to replay the confession I had made to Isabel and Rufina to Teresa, who would then tell Arturo and Rafa, all of whom believed I had, when we first met, recently suffered one of life’s profoundest losses. Surely some part of the mystery I liked to think I held for Teresa derived from the fact that, after my dramatic performance at the party, I made no subsequent reference to my suffering, although suffering could be read into my silences. That I was thousands of miles away from the rest of my family so soon after such a tragedy, although I never specified the timeframe, prepared the ground for my lie about my impossible father, and my new claim that I might not return to the U.S. after the completion of my fellowship furthered my image as exile. At any rate, when the rains and early dark began to give way to warmer, longer days and milder nights, and the accordion player was back in La Plaza Santa Ana and the streets were again alive, I began to see more of Teresa, who did not seem to have a job, although in theory she was employed at the gallery. I would walk to Salamanca after “working” in El Retiro and Teresa would leave the gallery in someone else’s hands and accompany me to movies, bookstores, cafés.

Whenever I was with Teresa, whenever we were talking, I felt our faces engaged in a more substantial and sophisticated conversation than our voices. Her face was formidable; it seemed by turns very young and very old; when she opened her eyes wide, she looked like a child, and when she squinted in concentration, the tiny wrinkles at their outer corners made her seem worldly, wise. Because she could instantly look younger or older, more innocent or experienced than she was, she could parry whatever speech was addressed to her. If you were to accuse her, say, of reading too much into a particular scene in a movie, she would widen her eyes and look at you with an innocence that made you feel guilty of projection; if you accused her of some form of naiveté, her squint would bespeak such expanses of experience that the accusation was instantly turned back upon you. Her eyes could deflect or reflect or ironize, and then her smile, which was wide, would instantly restore a tabula rasa, benevolently forgiving any claim against her.

I believed the dialectical movement of her face, however, was challenged by our particular circumstance; I never spoke English with Teresa, not since the first night of our meeting when my volubility had swelled. I told her that this was to promote my acquisition of Spanish, but it was, in fact, to preserve the possibility of misspeaking or being misunderstood, and to secure and amplify the mystery of that inaugural outburst. I believed my rant on the way to Rafa’s party had impressed her, and I was determined not to ruin it with banalities. With my performance in the car her sole sample of my English, I hoped she would always translate my fragmented Spanish in her head, transforming my halting and semicoherent utterances into the most eloquent English she could imagine. She would not, like Isabel, merely intuit depths, but would actually sound them in her painstakingly mastered second language. Of course she would never arrive at a satisfactory English formulation of whatever my Spanish negatively figured, but this would further preserve the mystique of my powers in my mother tongue. Such conversations would be the counterpoint to her ongoing work with Arturo of translating my poems, work she had almost entirely taken over; there she tried to imagine every possible Spanish correlative to my English, such as it was; here, she tried to extract from my remedial Spanish the poet’s native eloquence.

As a result of these interpretations and projections, Teresa, during our conversations, was often at a loss as to what to do with her face, or at least her facial machinations were delayed; the widening and squinting of her eyes was more in response to her own internal ruminations, to what she imagined I would have said, than it was to my actual speech. I was therefore able to raise an eyebrow and communicate that I was watching Teresa attempt to translate whatever I had said, or rather, failed to say, and thus my face reclaimed from her face the powers of metacommentary. And yet as we spent more and more time together, I found myself avoiding her eyes, because when I looked at or into them, I believed I saw she saw right through me. Or I saw her see herself reflected in my eyes, saw that she knew, or was coming to know, that what interest I held for her, all of it, was virtual, that my appeal for her had little to do with my actual writing or speech, and while she was happy to let me believe she believed in my profundity, on some level she was aware that she was merely encountering herself. This anxiety was characteristic of my project’s fourth phase.

One afternoon Teresa and I saw Citizen Kane, which was playing at El Circulo Bellas Artes, then had some chalky white wine at an adjacent sidewalk café. After making various ambiguous pronouncements about cinema, but experiencing Teresa as unusually distracted, I decided to make my confession.

“I told you before,” I said slowly, “that my mother was dead. This isn’t true.”

“What?” she asked, suddenly interested, but not sure she’d understood.

“I told you my mom was dead, but my mom is alive,” I said.

“Oh. I had assumed,” she said, smiling, “that you were just drunk and high and homesick and wanted some attention.” Then she leaned over and started twirling my hair and said in English, “You have a poetic license.”

I blinked at her, first surprised not to feel relief, then surprised to feel an intense anger rising, as though my mother were in fact deceased and now she was calling me a liar. “I didn’t want attention. I didn’t have homesick,” I said, my gravity cancelled by my grammar. She opened her eyes wide as I pulled away from her but said nothing, awaiting my explanation. As one part of me insisted to some other part of me that this was wonderful, a reprieve, that I could let go of my guilt and laugh about it with Teresa, I heard myself proclaim, “My mom is sick. And because—” I pretended it was difficult to go on. The smile drained quickly from her face. “I am scared … I was trying to imagine …” Her eyes grew a little wider. “I thought if I said it, I would have less fear.”

“What is she sick with?” Teresa asked, which I experienced as insensitive, maybe because, while she had stopped smiling, her voice wasn’t any more tender than usual, or maybe because she was interrupting my presentation. I signaled for the check, although our drinks were far from finished, then regretted signaling.

Not wanting to name a particular disease for fear of somehow condemning my mother to suffer it, I ignored the question. I reached out and touched her arm, a gesture out of character for me. “I have felt horrible about the lie. I’m sorry.” Withdrawing my hand, but leaving it on the table nearly touching hers, I explained, “I came here 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.” I downed my warming wine. “And I was glad to be away from my father.”

While I believed the speech was working in the sense of convincing Teresa my mom was ill, or at least entreating her to suspend her disbelief, I also sensed a lack of translation, that Teresa was experiencing me as merely inarticulate. I barely resisted the temptation to wax eloquent in English, but realized my actual English was nothing compared to her image of it.

“My father,” I said, “is basically a fascist.”

“What do you mean by ‘fascist’?” she said. Nobody, at any stage of my project, had ever asked me what I meant by “fascist” or “fascism.” I felt the anger again.

“He is a man of right — wing politics,” I said, meaninglessly. “He only respects violence.” As I said this, I thought of my dad patiently trying to get a spider to crawl from the carpet onto a piece of paper so he could escort it safely from house to yard.

“But your mom is a feminist,” she said in a voice suspiciously free of all suspicion. I’d no memory of discussing my mother’s politics with Teresa.

“Yes, and publicly so is he,” I said, implying everybody knew that fascists marry feminists in order to evade detection. “And what do you mean by ‘feminist’?” I threw in. She just smiled ambiguously.

The check arrived. I overpaid with large euro coins, which always struck me as particularly fake, and we stood to leave; it was rare for me to pay for anything with Teresa. We walked in the direction of El Retiro. The nicotine and white wine mixed nicely with the light and still — tentative warmth and I felt confident as we walked that Teresa would give me, if nothing else, the benefit of the doubt, and I remembered, in order to buttress this belief, the time I had been stern with her at the reading and she had seemed genuinely hurt. Young women were testing their new dresses, teenagers were skateboarding in the plazas, failing again and again to land their kickflips, and we saw ourselves reflected vaguely in the silver of passing buses. I was surprised to find myself taking Teresa’s hand, although I did so with the faintest trace of irony, implied, at least potentially, in the childish way I slightly swung our arms; if the intimacy were unwelcome, she would dismiss it as frivolity. At the same time I was careful to communicate, mainly with my pace, that if I was acting unburdened and optimistic it was to cover the great sadness arising from the situation with my family. I was probably aided in this representation of concealed suffering by the guilt that was beginning to spread through me, displacing nicotine and wine; it was not yet causing pain, but it was positioning itself everywhere in my body, lying in wait till evening.

We entered El Retiro through the main iron gates. It was the beginning of a long dusk and, as it was one of the first true spring evenings, people were out in force. There were young couples displaying their mutual absorption on nearly every bench, kids racing tricycles or playing tag or football, and the men who would soon be selling shaved ice were selling chipped potatoes. The voices and laughter and birds and wind and traffic combined and separated gently. As we made our way toward El Estanque, which would be full of pedal boaters, I felt that I could, in fact, imagine remaining in Spain indefinitely; I would live with and off of Teresa, my lover and translator, I would assemble a body of work, I would walk every evening through the park, I would master Spanish; a little wave of euphoria broke over me. But why was I imagining this with Teresa, not Isabel, given that I was in fact the lover of the latter, and had had no real romantic contact with the former? I had, however, so often kissed Teresa hello or good — bye, deliberately catching the corner of her mouth, or lingering near her face a second longer than necessary, that I felt we had a physical relationship, that we had been, if nothing else, in a stage of protracted courtship. But as we walked around El Estanque toward the colonnade, I was struck by the fear that this was only in my mind; Teresa must have noticed that I was catching her mouth, flirting, but surely that was not to be taken very seriously; after all, Teresa hadn’t taken it seriously when I told her about the death of my mother and wept down her elegant back. I had never attempted to initiate anything with Teresa, but this was in part because I always assumed I could, that she was, if not exactly waiting for my advances, open to them, and that keeping such a possibility alive was for both of us, at least for the moment, more exciting than any consummation. While I had never thought I was in love with Teresa, whatever that might mean, I had on more than one occasion thought that she was maybe a little in love with me. And if we never slept together or otherwise “realized” our relationship, I would leave Spain with this gorgeous possibility intact, and in my memory could always ponder the relationship I might have had in the flattering light of the subjunctive. I’d never formulated this notion before, but had felt it, and only now, half an hour after our conversation at the café, was I beginning to realize my mistake; she had assumed I was lying about my mother, a goofy, drunken foreigner wanting a hug; it hardly mattered to me that her assumption was true, but it mattered to me that it mattered so little to her. When we reached the colonnade, we sat on the cool steps not far from a circle of drummers and she began to roll a spliff. I looked at her and she was aureate in the failing light and humming something to go with the drums and the prospect of her not being at least a little in love with me was crushing.

I wanted to kiss her or say something dramatic in English, but I knew I would make myself ridiculous. Instead, as we finished smoking, I pretended to remember with a start:

“I have to meet someone,” I said, standing with a suddenness that declared the someone important.

“O.K.,” she said, her face registering no curiosity, let alone jealousy. I hoped against hope this was affectation. “Soon we should talk about the new translations,” she said. The gallery was going to print a small bilingual pamphlet of my poems.

“Claro,” I said, and kissed her twice quickly far from the mouth and walked hurriedly back the way we’d come. Without paying attention to where I was going, I retraced our steps and found myself, cold and sober, back in front of El Circulo de Bellas Artes. I bought a ticket for the next show, which I thought was Campanadas a medianoche. I sat in the same seat, Teresa’s absence beside me. I took a yellow pill and waited; I was half an hour early. I drifted off, but was awakened by the movie’s opening strains: it was the second showing of Citizen Kane.

__________________________

Isabel and I were smoking in bed in the early evening and she was reading Ana María Matute and I was reading Tolstoy’s The Kreutzer Sonata when I mentioned apropos of nothing that I would like to see Granada at some point and she said there was a night train that took about five hours so we packed what we could in the bags we always carried and walked to Atocha; I bought our tickets. We killed an hour drinking coffee in the atrium and then we boarded the archaic — looking Talgo train and found our seats and opened our respective books again, looking up at each other when with a jerk the train began to move.

Excepting subways, a few commuter trains, and the miniature train in a Topeka park, I had never traveled by rail, as archaic a method of conveyance, I thought to myself, as poetry; a few minutes later I offered this thought to Isabel. She laughed and leaned over and kissed me and I wished that Teresa could see us, dark fields sliding by. Isabel removed the silver sticks from her hair and leaned her head against my shoulder and drifted off while I flipped through the Tolstoy for a half — remembered passage about a train, but couldn’t find it. It didn’t matter; every sentence, regardless of its subject, became mimetic of the action of the train, and the train mimetic of the sentence, and I felt suddenly coeval with its syntax. Because the sentences of Tolstoy, or rather Constance Garnett’s translations of Tolstoy, were in perfect harmony with the motion of the Talgo, real time and the time of prose began to merge, and reading, instead of removing me from the world, intensified my experience of the present.

I put down the book and began to think: this strange experience of reading, the sense of harmony between the rhythms of a reproduction and the real, their structural identity, so that the subject of the sentence was precisely the time of its being furthered — this was what I valued in one of the only people I described as a “major poet” without irony, John Ashbery. I fished his Selected Poems from my bag, careful not to disturb Isabel, and opened it at random and read a little. Here also one could experience the texture of time as it passed, a shadow train, life’s white machine. Ashbery’s flowing sentences always felt as if they were making sense, but when you looked up from the page, it was impossible to say what sense had been made; while they used the language of logical connection—“but,” “therefore,” “so”—and the language that implied narrative development—“then,” “next,” “later”—such terms were merely propulsive; there was no actual organizing logic or progression. Reading an Ashbery sentence, an elaborate sentence stretched over many lines, one felt the arc and feel of thinking in the absence of thoughts. His pronouns—“it,” “you,” “we,” “I”—created a sense of intimacy, as though you were being addressed or doing the addressing or were familiar with the context the poem assumed, but you could never be sure of their antecedents, person or thing. The “it” in an Ashbery poem seemed ultimately to refer to the mysteries of the poem itself; in the absence of any stable external referent, the poem’s procedures invested its pronouns, and the “you” devolved upon the reader. I read:

As long as it is there

You will desire it as its tag of wall sinks

Deeper as though hollowed by sunlight that

Just fits over it; it is both mirage and the little

That was present, the miserable totality

Mustered at any given moment, like your eyes

And all they speak of, such as your hands, in lost

Accents beyond any dream of ever wanting them again.

To have this to be constantly coming back from—

Nothing more, really, than surprise at your absence

And preparing to continue the dialogue into

Those mysterious and near regions that are

Precisely the time of its being furthered.

The best Ashbery poems, I thought, although not in these words, describe what it’s like to read an Ashbery poem; his poems refer to how their reference evanesces. And when you read about your reading in the time of your reading, mediacy is experienced immediately. It is as though the actual Ashbery poem were concealed from you, written on the other side of a mirrored surface, and you saw only the reflection of your reading. But by reflecting your reading, Ashbery’s poems allow you to attend to your attention, to experience your experience, thereby enabling a strange kind of presence. But it is a presence that keeps the virtual possibilities of poetry intact because the true poem remains beyond you, inscribed on the far side of the mirror: “You have it but you don’t have it. / You miss it, it misses you. / You miss each other.”

Isabel shifted and I put the book away and leaned my head against the mass of her hair and fell asleep. We were both awakened when the train stopped, still a few hours from Granada. We stepped off the train and smoked in the dark, although you could smoke on the train; the night air was cool, laced with jasmine, if they have that in Spain. Isabel described a dream I couldn’t understand. The train made a noise that indicated it was preparing to leave and we went back to our seats, fell asleep again, then were both gently roused by a conductor, who said we were approaching Granada, last stop. It was a slightly lighter dark now that dawn was an hour away and when the train pulled into the station and eventually halted we disembarked and wandered out of the station in a state of not unpleasant fatigue.

We found a cab and drove to a hotel Isabel knew in the Albaicín, a neighborhood of impossibly narrow, winding streets on a hill facing the Alhambra. The hotel was surprisingly nice given the rates; Moorish medieval architecture, intricate woodwork, and a courtyard with a green mosaic. We were led to a simple room with exposed beams, a room for that reason reminiscent of my apartment, and we slept through the morning. When I woke I was for a moment unsure of my surroundings, then remembered the spontaneous trip, the train, and again wished Teresa could see me interleaved with Isabel, her jet hair splayed against the heavily starched sheets. We showered, dressed, and walked into the preternaturally bright day, wandering the threadlike streets until we found a sidewalk café, although there wasn’t much sidewalk, where we ordered orange juice, croissants, coffee. From the café you could see the Alhambra on a vast and hilly terrace across the river. Isabel was wearing her hair down and looked beautiful to me and I told her so. I paid and we descended into the city and visited the cathedral and a small modern art museum where I pretended to take copious notes.

When we were ready to eat again it was late afternoon and we returned to the Albaicín to find a restaurant Isabel knew. Within a few minutes of our arrival we were presented with giant plates of fried fish and squid that either Isabel had ordered without my knowing or that were the restaurant’s only dish. They also brought us a bottle of nearly frozen white wine and I drank several glasses quickly and felt immediately and pleasantly drunk. I said something to Isabel about the experience of braided temporalities in ancient cities and she nodded in a way that showed she wasn’t listening.

“What are you thinking about?” I asked her, refilling both of our glasses, the bottle almost empty.

She hesitated. “We never talk about our relationship, about the rules,” she said. I always thought the rule was that we wouldn’t. This was the first time I’d heard her refer to our “relationship” at all. I knew what was coming: she wanted to assure herself I wasn’t seeing anybody else, that at least for as long as I was in Spain, I was hers exclusively. Maybe she also wanted to know how long I planned to stay, if I was seriously considering remaining in Spain after my fellowship.

“I am in a relationship,” was the English equivalent of what she said. I felt the wind had been knocked out of me. I smiled to imply that of course we both had other relationships.

“He must have an open mind,” I said, holding the smile, “to allow you to travel with other men.” I was surprised to feel devastated.

“He has been working in Barcelona this year. He was here at Christmas and a couple of other times. He’ll be back in Madrid starting in June.” The way she said “June” hinted she would like to know where I planned to be then. I remembered I hadn’t seen Isabel much around the holidays.

I pushed my plate away a little and lit a cigarette. “So what happens to us in June?” Now the seafood looked alien, arachnoid, repulsive.

She smiled in a way that said, “I really like you, we’ve had a lot of fun, but in June our time is up.” Then she said, “I don’t know.”

“What’s his name?” I asked, suggesting with my tone that whatever his name was, I thought he was a harmless little boy.

“Oscar,” she said, and her voice declared he was a man among men. “We decided to break up when he had to move to Barcelona for work. Or to at least be open to other people. But now we both feel that we should be together when he returns.” In English I thought “Oscar” sounded silly; in Spanish: very serious.

I had let the smile slip away. “Does he know about me?” I felt like crying. I tried to long for Teresa, but could not.

“We’ve both been seeing other people. We don’t ask each other about it,” she said. I wondered how many other people she had been with recently. “Just like you and I don’t ask each other,” she added. It was clear she hoped I had other relationships.

“Claro,” I said, recomposing my smile to indicate I’d slept with half the women in Madrid. “You love him?” It was a stupid, clichéd question.

“Yes,” she said, her tone confirming it was a stupid, clichéd question.

“Well,” I said, “there is still some time before June.” I imagined breaking the bottle over her head then raking my throat with the jagged glass.

“Yes,” she said, and leaned over and kissed me. “There is a lot of time before you go back.”

“I didn’t say I was going back,” I said, flatly.

“But your mom,” she said.

I was grateful for a reason to be upset. “I don’t want to talk about my mother with you.” Then, after a pause: “I have to piss.” I went to the bathroom and splashed water on my face and looked in the mirror and let out a single ridiculous sob. Then I laughed at myself, applied some more water, dried off my face, and returned to the table, sad but stabilized. “Sorry,” I said. “It can be hard to think about my mom.”

“Of course,” she said, “I’m sorry.” I kissed her to assert my spirits were ultimately unaffected by our talk and resumed my increasingly fragmented and incoherent speech about time in ancient cities. She seemed interested now, although I suspected it was charity.

We left the restaurant and walked back down through the Albaicín into the center of the city. Isabel put her arm around me in gesture that expressed less affection than relief at having clarified things between us. As we walked and dusk began to fall and Isabel wrapped herself in a shawl, I thought back to the scene at the lake when Miguel hit me; that was probably around the time she’d broken up with Oscar. And who knew if Rufina’s suspicion of me was the issue of her disdain for Oscar or her affection for him. We sat on a bench in a little plaza and watched the goatsuckers spar. My mind was revising many months’ worth of assumptions; I felt something like a physical change as my recent past liquefied and reformed. What was left of the light burnished what it touched; Isabel was half shadow and half bronze, boundless and bounded. We got high.

When it was unmistakably night we walked down toward and then along the Darro; there was some sort of small festival and part of the river was illumined by torches. Little kids dressed in white, glowing softly, darted through the streets. It had been a while since either of us had spoken, and whereas for months I had imagined Isabel’s silences as devoted to me entirely, I was now unsure if I was even in her thoughts.

“When I am near a river,” I heard myself say, “I think of my time in Mexico.”

“When were you in Mexico?” she asked.

“I spent some time with my girlfriend in a town called Xalapa before I came to Spain.” I paused to suggest she might still be my girlfriend. “We went on a trip one weekend. We found a place to swim. There was a violent current, but we decided to swim anyway. There was another man. He wanted his girlfriend to swim. But she was afraid of the current. In the end she entered the river.” I paused again, lighting a cigarette. Why was my Spanish so halting? “She did not know how to swim. She had bad luck and the current carried her. We followed her. We found her body in the river. I gave her”— here I touched my mouth and then gestured toward Isabel’s—“to make her breathe. But it was too late. We took her body to a place with phones. We called the police. An old woman gave us limes.”

“Limes,” Isabel confirmed.

“She gave us limes for sucking because we suffered shock.”

“My God,” Isabel said, and took my hand. I wanted her to ask about my girlfriend, I was preparing a speech about Jane, but she didn’t. We sat down on the low stone wall that ran along the river and watched the reflections of the torches in the water and after a while Isabel began to talk. First she described a house or home or apartment, a description vaguely familiar from her first speech at the lake, but I was still unsure if her words attached to a household or the literal structure where she lived. I could understand more now than then; my Spanish had, despite myself, significantly improved, but this fact itself got in the way of understanding: I was measuring the time that had elapsed since the night at the lake by virtue of my increased comprehension, but this attention to the quality of my own attention crowded out Isabel’s meaning. Eventually I shook free of my self — absorption and came to grasp what she was saying, aided by how slowly she was speaking. That summer her brother died — she referred to his death as if we’d discussed it before — and she was looking through his stuff, records and books, deciding what to take with her when the family moved, she had found a notebook, a notebook from school, what grade she wasn’t sure, and it had numbers written all over its pages: 1066, 312, 1936, 1492, 800, 1776, etc. At first she didn’t know what these were, didn’t recognize them as years, significant years he probably had to memorize for a history test, and so had written the numbers again and again, filling an entire notebook with them, and she convinced herself that it was an elaborate coded message, a message to her. She must have known, she was sixteen, that this was impossible, but she had let herself be convinced, and the notebook became her most treasured possession. She never attempted to decipher the code, the point was not to read the message; the point was that there was an ongoing conversation between her and her brother, an unconcluded correspondence. A few months before Oscar left for Barcelona he found the notebook, which Isabel had never mentioned to anybody, although she hadn’t really hidden it either, keeping it in a box with various childhood possessions on the top shelf of her closet. It suddenly occurred to me that we never went to Isabel’s apartment not only because my apartment had more privacy but also because she probably wanted to keep me away from her roommates and/or reserve her bed for Oscar exclusively. Oscar asked why she had this notebook with years written all over it and this was the first time she let herself realize they were in fact just years. She was furious at Oscar for destroying her fantasy and screamed at him and then burst into tears and then told him the whole story and cried and cried as though only then, many years after the accident, did she fully confront the reality of her brother’s death. They sat on the bed together carefully turning the pages and Isabel wept and ran her fingers over the years, which were written in blue and red.

Later, when Oscar and Isabel broke up or at least agreed to see other people because he was leaving for Barcelona, Isabel had fallen apart, and had somehow felt her brother’s death was upon her again, because Oscar was the only person she talked to about her brother, and because of the scene they shared with the notebook. One thing she loved about me, she said, and it was clear she meant “loved” in the weakest sense, was that I never asked her questions about her brother after she talked to me about him at the lake.

I said nothing. After a while we resumed our walk and wandered back up into the Albaicín and found our hotel. It was a steep walk and we were tired by the time we arrived. There were a few tables in the courtyard and I asked the teenager who was sweeping up if it was possible to have wine. He brought us a warm, unlabeled bottle of white wine and two tall glasses filled with ice. We drank and smoked until the bottle was empty and then went to our room and fucked quickly and I felt completely in love. Isabel went to sleep and I opened the tall wooden shutters and leaned out overlooking the street and smoked. There were no cars parked on the street and it was perfectly quiet and I thought it probably looked like this in 1066, 312, 1936, whatever. Then I thought it probably didn’t, got in bed, and fell asleep.

The next morning we had breakfast at the same café and I said to Isabel that the more I thought about it the more eager I was to get back as I had to work with someone named Teresa on a pamphlet of my poetry that was to be published. I said this as if I were nervous about saying anything regarding Teresa in front of Isabel, nervous I might hurt her feelings.

“We can take the train tonight,” Isabel said, and because she didn’t seem jealous I was furious.

“Let’s just go back now,” I said, which was ridiculous.

“Now? You haven’t seen the Alhambra,” she said.

“I’ve seen it before,” I lied. Now she looked jealous. I was elated.

“With whom?” she asked, and it was clear she was only pretending not to care.

“Teresa,” I said, and then pretended I wished I hadn’t. “And her brother.”

“When?” she asked.

“Around Christmas,” I said. I had the sense that Isabel wanted to be my only guide, that while she didn’t care who I slept with, she didn’t want another woman showing me the architectural wonders of Spain.

“But you said you wanted to see Granada — that’s why we came,” she said, remembering our conversation in bed.

“I did want to see it again,” I said. “And I’ll come back again.”

“Fine,” she said, angry. I wondered if I would be the only American in history who visited Granada without seeing the Alhambra.

After breakfast we took a cab to the train station, bought our tickets, and had around an hour and a half to kill before the Talgo left. It wasn’t until we actually bought our tickets that I realized the last thing I wanted to do was to go back. We found a café and ordered more coffee and the caffeine along with Isabel’s jealousy inspired me to say, “Look, when we get back to Madrid, let’s just stay one night. I can get my work done and we can pack for a longer trip. Then we can take another train to Galicia or Lisbon or wherever.”

Isabel smiled at me, having gone at an alarming rate from anger to something more like pity. “I can’t,” she said. “I have to work.”

“Take vacation,” I said.

“I can’t,” she repeated softly, as if I’d asked her to marry me. “Don’t you have work too?” There was gentle derision in the question. For the first time, I took a joke about poetry personally.

“Is your work more important?” I asked, as if her work were guarding paintings.

“No,” she said simply. I was crushed by how easily she ignored my implication.

We spent the rest of our downtime at the café, then boarded the train, and passed the next five hours reading, napping, smoking, but almost never speaking. I missed my parents terribly. By day the Spanish countryside looked a lot like Kansas.

__________________________

Late in the fourth phase of my project I decided to up the dosage, to take two white pills each morning instead of one. I had enough; before leaving the U.S. I had been given a year’s supply, which required a special letter from my doctor, and earned me strange looks from the pharmacist, and I had already had a month’s worth of medication on hand before acquiring the stockpile, which I had then divided into several small bottles. Besides, I could always see a psychiatrist in Spain — if, for instance, I stayed after my fellowship, maybe teaching English. Or I could just stop taking the white pills when I ran out; I wasn’t really convinced they did much for me in the first place. When I began taking them, I had a very pleasant insomnia, reading until dawn without fatigue; that was the only significant side effect and it passed with regrettable speed. After that, I was never sure what, if any, effect they had; I’d considered going off them at various points, but each time I hesitated, wondering if in fact they were buoying me; maybe my lows would be much lower, insufferably lower, without them.

The white pills certainly did not seem to work for me the way they worked for some people; I always felt a few strains of rumination away from full orchestral panic, I was almost always acutely aware of the bones beneath the face. But then I drank and smoked in a way that made tracking the specific effects of the white pills difficult. The ritual of taking them, however, had become important to me, not because of some possible placebo effect, where the mere fact of ingestion steadied me, but rather because they were a daily reminder that I was officially fucked up, that I was undergoing treatment, that I had a named condition. It was a Eucharistic rite of self — abnegation in which I acknowledged to myself that I was incapable of facing the world without designer medication and thereby absolved myself of some portion of my agency; it was a little humiliating, a little liberating.

When I got back from Granada I began to spiral, not out of control, but downward, nevertheless, in a helix of small pitch. I had not realized how much I was invested in the idea that Isabel and Teresa were invested in me, and now that it seemed neither had the inclination even to feign serious investment, I felt not only rejected, but as though many months of research had evaporated. It occurred to me that I could at least feel less guilty regarding all the lies about my family, as nothing significant had been built upon them, but in fact I felt wave after wave of intensified remorse. It became increasingly clear to me that I would have to confess my slander to my parents at some point in order not to be consumed by it, which added dread to my guilt. My distress about Isabel and Teresa, coupled with my guilt about my parents, opened onto larger questions about my fraudulence; that I was a fraud had never been in question — who wasn’t? Who wasn’t squatting in one of the handful of prefabricated subject positions proffered by capital or whatever you wanted to call it, lying every time she said “I”; who wasn’t a bit player in a looped infomercial for the damaged life? If I was a poet, I had become one because poetry, more intensely than any other practice, could not evade its anachronism and marginality and so constituted a kind of acknowledgment of my own preposterousness, admitting my bad faith in good faith, so to speak. I could lie about my interest in the literary response to war because by making a mockery of the notion that literature could be commensurate with mass murder I was not defaming the victims of the latter, but the dilettantes of the former, rejecting the political claims repeatedly made by the so — called left for a poetry radical only in its unpopularity. I had been a small — time performance artist pretending to be a poet, but now, with an alarming fervor, I wanted to write great poems. I wanted my “work” to take on the United States of Bush, to shed its scare quotes, and I wanted, after I self — immolated on the Capitol steps or whatever, to become the Miguel Hernández of late empire, for Isabel and Teresa and everybody everywhere to read my poems, shatter storefronts, etc. This was a structure of feeling, not an idea, which made it harder to dismiss, and I felt it more intensely in direct proportion to its ridiculousness. And when I doubled my dosage, and the insomnia returned, I began to read and write feverishly. This was less a new faith in poetry than a sudden loss of faith in pure potentiality.

Besides the insomnia, which this time lasted, save for a few nights of long and total and dreamless sleep, for a couple of weeks, I experienced two other notable side effects: first, my jaw was constantly and involuntarily clenched; second, I had what the internet told me was sexual anhedonia, lovely phrase. Both side effects had a certain rightness of fit with my general despondency, which was not diminishing, and I found this correspondence comforting, the way one savors abysmal weather when one feels abysmal. Additionally, I began to convince myself that the white pills were responsible for the intensity of my suffering, that I was having an adverse reaction, and this mitigated my fear of feeling that way forever; if I went off the white pills, I’d feel better. But I was too scared to test this hypothesis, and so, after a few days, I upped my dosage even further, taking a third white pill each morning, and when, after reading or revising poems for several hours, I would suddenly start crying, burying my face in a towel so the neighbors wouldn’t hear, or, when shopping for wine or cigarettes or hash, I felt mild dissociation, the world curling at its edges, I would reassure myself by saying that the white pills were themselves the primary cause.

The relationship I might have had in the flattering light of the subjunctive.

After the first week of my new dosage, however, a week in which neither Isabel nor Teresa called on me, I achieved a new emotional state, or a state in which emotions no longer obtained. When I would try to describe this condition in chats with Cyrus it seemed utterly contradictory; on the one hand, I now felt nothing, my affect a flat spectrum over a defined band; I could watch videos of beheadings or contractors firing on Iraqi civilians or the Fox News commentators without a reaction and I did. I reread Levin’s most soul — wrenching scenes without the slightest affective fluctuation. Although I still did not leave my apartment because I was waiting for Isabel and/or Teresa to ring my bell and run up the stairs and confess her love for me, begging me to remain in Spain or to take her with me to the States, I waited now without feeling. And if one of them were to appear and make the most dramatic spectacle of her affection, I began to doubt I’d be moved significantly. At the same time, however, I felt a kind of euphoria at my sudden inability to feel, an exaggerated second order of feeling that did not alter the first order numbness. This euphoria, if that’s what it was, was very far from my body, and therefore compatible with my anhedonia; it was as if I were suspended in a warm bath outside of myself. I felt something like a rush of power, the power to experience the world as though under glass, and this detachment, coupled with my reduced need or capacity for sleep, gave me a kind of vampiric energy, although I was my own prey. I could read and write for hours on end with what felt like total concentration, barely noticing nightfall, and in the early hours of the morning, I would wander around Madrid, passing Isabel’s apartment or Teresa’s gallery just to show myself I could do so without a spike in agony. I would often watch the dawn from the colonnade in El Retiro or one of the benches on El Paseo del Prado or take the Metro to a stop I didn’t know and watch the sunrise there, return home, sleep for a few hours, wake and take white pills, hash, coffee, and with an uncanny energy resume my adventures in insensitivity. I was vaguely afraid, of what I couldn’t say; maybe that I would throw myself in front of a bus without knowing what I was doing or break into Isabel’s apartment and tear apart her brother’s notebook or put a trash can through the gallery window or otherwise act out, powerless to stop myself from such a distance. But I also felt, for the first time, like a writer, as if all the real living were on the page, and I had to purchase a stack of ruled notebooks from Casa del Libro to contain my poems and notes. I told myself I was going to write new poems of such beauty and significance that when Teresa translated and printed them and I gave a copy to Isabel, both women would realize that they had been in the presence of a poet who alone was able to array the fallen materials of the real into a song that transcended it.

Finally, Isabel came. It was late afternoon and I was reading “The Waste Land” online, stealing phrases. She said something about my apartment being dirty and arranged a few things and it was clear to me that all she felt for me was pity, convinced, no doubt, that she had broken my heart. After saying something about her work that I didn’t try to understand, she told me she was going to Barcelona, probably in the next few days, and would stay with Oscar until they both returned. I experienced the shape of pain but no pain, and said that while it was a shame I wouldn’t see her more, that I was going to miss her terribly, I wished her and Oscar all the best; indeed, if I stayed in Madrid beyond my fellowship, maybe we could all have a drink together at some point, although I understood if that would be difficult for him. My Spanish had never sounded so fluent. I heard myself saying that before she left I’d at least like to take her to dinner, drinks. She had probably planned not to see me again after this visit to my apartment, had imagined a difficult scene, but now that I was showing myself more or less indifferent to her departure, and capable of almost alarming lightness, she said yes, sure, that would be great. I told her for some reason that I was busy that night but that if she came by the next evening around nine we would have our good — bye celebration. She kissed me on the cheek, said how sweet I was, and left. After a momentary flash of anger, I felt nothing.

A few hours after Isabel’s visit I walked to the gallery, a half — hour walk, smoking and reciting some of my poems to myself, barely feeling the ground beneath me. It was a warm evening, or I was oblivious to the cold, and the streetlights and shop windows and lights of passing cars were intensely bright; the conversation of pedestrians and the sound of traffic and music from passing cars was intensely loud; I wondered if these were side effects. Teresa wasn’t there, but Arturo was, and appeared very happy to see me. I told him I had been in Granada with someone named Isabel and he smiled at me but asked no questions. Maybe his expression implied Teresa would be jealous. He asked me about my poems and I took four notebooks out of my bag and gave them to him and explained they were just from this week and I wondered which were his favorite poems and if there were any they wanted to include in the pamphlet. He seemed genuinely excited, and I thought to myself that that was both touching and somehow sad, but felt neither touched nor saddened. He said I must come to the opening on Friday for the show of several well — known Spanish painters and he added, maybe significantly, that Teresa would be eager to see me; I said fine. Then for some reason I embraced and kissed Arturo with an ambiguous passion I didn’t feel and walked home. For the first time in many days I was tired and quickly fell asleep.

When I awoke it was a little after three in the morning and I was perhaps hungrier than I had ever been. I’d been eating very little for two weeks, and the return of my appetite, I assumed, represented a shift in my body’s relation to the white pills. I ate an entire two — day — old baguette and as I ate I checked my e — mail and there was a message in English from Teresa, who had only e — mailed me once or twice in the past, saying that she had heard I was back from “traveling with Isabel” and that she missed me. I felt a small, distant thrill, further confirmation that my body had acclimated a little to the drugs, or that the drugs were already losing their effectiveness, and I went easily back to sleep and slept until the early afternoon.

After I showered, I went to a jeweler near my apartment and with my parents’ credit card, which I was only to use in emergencies, bought Isabel a hundred — and — fifty — euro silver necklace. It was the first time I’d used the card and it was by far the most expensive gift I’d ever purchased. I asked the handsome woman who sold me the necklace where I should take my girlfriend for dinner as it was our anniversary, what did she consider the nicest restaurant in Madrid, the fancier the better, given the occasion. She said she liked Zalacaín, but that it was probably difficult to get in. Smiling, I asked if I could use her phone to call them and beg. She said of course and I called and they said they could, owing to a cancellation, seat two that night at nine thirty. I thanked them and the woman gift wrapped the necklace and said something about how lucky my girlfriend was as I left.

I went to the Corte Inglés and bought a dress shirt, a stylish — looking knockoff black suit that they could tailor within the hour, and a pair of Spanish shoes. It all cost a few hundred euros and again I used the card. I went home and took a second shower, rolled and smoked a spliff, read the Quixote for a while, and then put on the suit. When Isabel arrived she seemed impressed by my appearance; I felt handsome, not, as I had expected, ridiculous. After she considered me for a while, Isabel said her own clothes weren’t elegant enough; she hadn’t thought we were going anywhere so formal. I said we were going to Zalacaín as though I went there all the time and she said she had heard of it but would have to go change. I told her there wasn’t time, although there was, and that she looked beautiful, which she did, but I said she looked beautiful with some condescension, as if I doubted she owned sufficiently elegant clothing. We took a cab and were early to Zalacaín and Isabel was visibly underdressed; people were staring at the scarf in her hair and the hostess hesitated before asking for my name. Isabel was too attractive for her casual attire to cause much of a scandal, but I smiled apologetically at the hostess, who smiled back at me as I gave her my name; I could feel Isabel blushing.

It turned out our table was ready and we were seated and I said to the waiter that my Spanish wasn’t good enough to order so I asked that he just bring us whatever the chef recommended, along with a bottle of his favorite Spanish white; my manner suggested I had made this request in several European capitals and languages. When I heard myself ask for a Spanish wine, which, no matter how expensive, would be several orders of magnitude cheaper than the others, I realized I was not entirely out of my mind, which meant I should stop acting as if I were: I was on track to spend more in one day than I’d spent in the previous two months including rent, and all of it in a manner entirely visible to my parents. How would my ailing mom and fascist dad respond to such acting out was the joke I made to myself; I heard my laughter in my head and it sounded foreign.

Isabel and I had nothing to say. She was nervous, angry, confused; she didn’t drink the aperitifs they brought us on a silver tray. I drank both of them in a manner that communicated I was entirely prepared to make a scene, whatever scene Isabel might like. But worried she would just stand up and leave, I asked her as though there were no tension in the air if she’d had to quit her job at the language school. She said she hadn’t and I realized she’d told me this already. I told her I was sorry about my insisting on such an abrupt return from Granada. She said it was fine and asked after my poems, how work on the little book was coming. I said good, great in fact, that I had never written so much, and I imagined I saw a spark of interest in Isabel as she perhaps remembered my notes and pondered the possibility that she was, in one way or another, involved in them. I told her I would send her a copy in a tone designed to demolish this fantasy if she had it, my voice suggesting I wouldn’t even remember her by the time the book came out, but her smile made it clear this was not a believable implication, that I was trying too hard to appear indifferent. I softened a little, felt myself sink into my chair, and for a second I feared I might let out the same sob, a sob very close to awkward laughter, that I’d released in Granada. Wine was served for me to taste and, making a face that expressed mild disappointment, a face I often made while reading, I said that it was fine.

A plate of steak tartare was brought to us and Isabel looked at it with muffled surprise and it was clear she had never imagined eating finely chopped raw beef. I asked her how Rufina was as I served her a punishingly large portion and it was suddenly obvious, much more obvious than I intended, that my clothes and the expensive meal were saying to Isabel: of course I never took our relationship seriously; I am a fabulously wealthy American from the United States of Bush, I have merely been acquiring experience, slumming, etc. I felt a wave of guilt and wanted to apologize and worried, having felt a wave of anything, that I was headed for a precipice. I could barely make myself eat. Isabel didn’t respond to my question, but I had the sense that, if she were embarrassed, it was only on my behalf.

Plates were taken away and new ones arrived; Isabel appeared relieved by the familiarity of the artichokes and asparagus wrapped in bacon; I couldn’t taste anything. I was moving at inappropriate speed through the wine. I asked what Oscar was doing in Barcelona and she said either that he was a mechanic or was being retrained for something mechanical or that he sold cars or worked for a car company; I didn’t care. I asked what he looked like and she put her hand on my hand and said let’s not talk about Oscar, let this be our night. I smiled at her and tried to look relaxed but when the next dish was brought, something involving caviar and maybe quail eggs, I thought that I might vomit. I could not attempt a bite and my face felt hot and I could barely drink the wine, but did. I must have looked terrible; Isabel asked if I was all right. In my head I said no, my mom just died, and I laughed aloud and my laugh was aberrant. I said that I was fine, but as I said it, I realized for the first time that I was without my yellow pills; I couldn’t have brought my bag to such a restaurant and hadn’t thought to transfer the yellow pills to my jacket pocket because in the last week of my protracted neuropathy I hadn’t taken any. Still, I reached into the jacket pocket and felt the necklace in its case and began to panic; I was respiring no oxygen when I inhaled; it was like trying to drink through a straw with many holes. I said excuse me, stood on very weak legs, the floor uneven now, and walked to the bathroom, which was as lavish as everything else and smelled like roses. I splashed water on my face and told myself, aloud, to calm down, and for a second I felt better, that this would pass, and then I noticed for the first time that there was an attendant in the bathroom, which again made me feel crazy. The chemical taste I often experienced after panic was already in my mouth, an ominous sign; I spat in the sink despite the attendant, rinsed, but the taste intensified. I felt another wave of nausea and went into a stall and vomited. For a moment it occurred to me that I might be having a medical emergency; if I died, blood tests would reveal to my family that, as the saying goes, drugs were involved. The blood tests, the credit card bill, the notebooks filled with incomprehensible poems — had I tried to kill myself without my knowledge, were those so many suicide notes? I sat on the toilet with my head in my hands and cried as quietly as possible. Fortunately, the crying helped. Eventually I stopped heaving, left the stall, and again splashed water on my face. The attendant asked me if I was all right. I blinked at him, breathed deeply, mumbled something about my family, and deposited a handful of coins in the bowl beside him, which might have been for mints.

I felt much better now, that is, I felt next to nothing as I returned to the table where Isabel awaited me with genuine concern. I said I was sorry, that I’d had a dizzy spell, but it had passed, and I drank my wine and felt restored. I wasn’t sure how long I’d been gone but the table had been cleared and soon we were served lamb and something involving lobster along with a new bottle of red wine the waiter explained was related to the white. I wasn’t hungry but I was no longer repulsed by the food and as I ate a little I asked Isabel what she wanted to do after dinner. She said she didn’t know and I said that we could do anything she wanted. She thought for a while and smiled and said that she had never spent the night at a fancy hotel. I heard myself say we would stay in the Ritz — Carlton directly opposite the Prado. As I drank more I could eat more and as I grew drunker the money became increasingly unreal. This was accompanied by a wave of benevolence that I directed at Isabel, and I began to speak to her in a Spanish that sounded, at least to me, impeccable.

“I have been upset since we talked about Oscar. When you told me about him, I realized how much I cared about you, and it’s very hard to know that I won’t be able to see you again,” I said.

“Yes,” she said, without malice, “but what does it mean that you only realized how much you cared when you heard about Oscar?”

“I didn’t mean that exactly, but it’s difficult to express myself with subtlety in Spanish,” I said.

“You are fluent in Spanish, Adán,” she said, maybe sadly.

“I was angry and jealous and hurt and acting like a teenager,” I ignored her. “But now I just want to tell you how wonderful it’s been to spend time with you, how wonderful I think you are, and how, while it’s painful for me that you’ll be with someone else, I wish you only the best.” I started to reach for my glass to toast her but then thought that would be ridiculous.

She opened her mouth, but hesitated before speaking, and for some reason it suddenly occurred to me: there is no Oscar. Oscar was a test, it was revenge for my insisting on having a separate social life, for the reading in Salamanca. It was a trap to move me toward some kind of commitment. I was waiting for my emotional response to this revelation to declare itself when she refuted it: “You are very sweet. I will always love you.” Her tone made it clear that she loved a lot of people in a lot of ways.

Two men cleared our plates and scraped the tablecloth and gave me a dessert menu that I handed to Isabel and I asked if they had half bottles of champagne; they did, I ordered one, and Isabel asked me what I wanted for dessert. I wondered if she’d ever had crème brûlée. She said she hadn’t so we ordered it and they brought chocolate — covered strawberries compliments of the chef with our champagne. I began to make fun of the waiters’ seriousness and Isabel found it hilarious; we were laughing loudly, attracting glances. We had a few bites of the dessert and finished the champagne and were by then quite drunk. I did not look at the check when it came. The waiter returned my card, I signed the receipt, and left a large tip in cash, probably a faux pas.

They called us a cab and we stumbled into it and I asked for the Ritz, the very name of which struck us both as hysterical, and we made out for the length of the ride. I paid and we went into the hotel and I spoke to the receptionist in English.

“I’m just in from New York and need a room for the night,” I said, as if the words “New York” explained everything. Isabel seemed impressed by my English.

The receptionist typed on a computer and said, “We have available to you sir a classic room with a king bed and a balcony.”

“Remind me how much those rooms are,” I said, my eyebrows suggesting I was only curious how these rates compared to New York, Milan, Paris.

“They are three hundred and ninety euros per night sir,” she said.

I considered telling Isabel that no rooms were available, but even without English, she would discern it was a lie. “O.K.,” I said, thinking of my apartment two hundred yards away; my rent was three hundred and seventy — five euros a month.

I asked if I could pay in advance and did. The receptionist began to say something about luggage, then coughed her way out of it. A bellboy, if that’s the word, led us to our room, which was as fancy as the restaurant, and I asked him in English if he would bring us a bottle of the cheapest white wine they had; he said of course, but refused to return my conspiratorial smile. Isabel slipped off her shoes and opened the windows and said she was going to take a shower. The wine was there by the time she came out of the bathroom wearing one of the hotel’s plush white robes; we drank, made love, and then smoked near the window. I ordered another bottle, my affectedly formal manner on the phone uproarious to Isabel. Then we made love again and smoked again, Isabel now drunker than I’d ever seen her; she held my head in her hands, mumbling something I couldn’t understand, barely Spanish. Finally she passed out and I stood alone at the window, the room dark, and looked across the street at the Prado. I thought of the great artist for a while.