Leaving the Atocha Station

4

I WOKE UP IN THE FIFTH PHASE OF MY PROJECT AS IF IN RESPONSE TO a loud noise. Isabel was still sleeping, maybe because of all the wine. I got out of bed, dressed, splashed water on my face, brushed my teeth with the complimentary brush, gargled the designer mouth-wash, and smoked a cigarette near the window. It was still early, rush hour. A few fire trucks passed by on El Paseo del Prado, sirens blaring. I was hungover, disoriented. Then several police cars passed. I leaned out the window and looked down the street, but couldn’t see anything. I told Isabel I’d be back soon; she shifted in her sleep as I left the room. I took the elevator to the lobby where people were huddled around TVs. I asked the bellboy in English what happened but he was distracted by other guests; I left the hotel and walked into the sun. Or was it cloudy?

Now trucks full of what looked like soldiers or special police were passing. I followed them toward Atocha, about a ten-minute walk, more and more fire trucks flashing by me, until I arrived at what they call a scene of mayhem. It was cloudy. There were police and medical workers and other people everywhere, many of them weeping and/or screaming, and, as I got closer to the station, more and more confusion. People streamed from the various exits, some of them wounded, lightly I guess, and emergency workers rushing in. I saw, I might have seen, a dazed teenager with blood all over his face and a paramedic who took his arm and sat him down and gave him something that looked like an ice pack, instructing him to sit and hold it to his head. There was an odor of burnt plastic. Someone asked me what had happened. Helicopters beat the air overhead. I wandered around for a few minutes, found a wall to sit against, shut my eyes, and listened.

After I don’t know how long, I stood and walked back toward and then up El Paseo del Prado, ambulances and people rushing past me. As I got farther away from the station I saw crowds in the doorways of bars and restaurants watching televisions and I could hear people saying “ETA” and quoting the estimated numbers of the dead, looking down toward the station and then back up at the screens. I reached the hotel lobby that was now packed and loud and took the elevator to my room; Isabel was gone. I felt in my pocket for my keys and rediscovered the necklace. I left the room, left the hotel, and walked up Huertas to my apartment. I climbed the stairs and took off my jacket and turned on my computer. It was almost ten. Surprised at how much time had passed, I opened a browser, called up the New York Times, and clicked on the giant headline. The article described the helicopters I could hear above me.

I wondered where Isabel had gone. Then I didn’t. I made some coffee, took one white pill, climbed through the roof, and sat with the coffee and listened. After a while I dropped back down through the skylight, brushed my teeth again, and left my apartment. I went to the bank of pay phones in La Plaza Santa Ana and called Kansas with my calling card. For a while all the lines were in use and they could not complete my call. I kept trying and eventually got through. It was around four in the morning there. The phone rang its foreign ring and finally my mom picked up, still half — asleep. It’s me, I said, and she asked what time is it, are you O.K. I said I was fine but there had been a terrorist attack. My dad was on the phone now, and asked me how far my apartment was from Atocha and I said I had been staying at the Ritz. This of course confused them both and again they asked if I was O.K. I hesitated and, voice cracking, said I had done a terrible thing. What, they said, and I told them that I had claimed in the presence of various people that my mom was dead or gravely ill and my dad was a fascist. Why, one of them asked, confused, but not upset. To get sympathy, I guessed. After a brief silence, my mom said she’d like to hear more about this later, but how many people had been killed, who was responsible, what was I going to do now, thank God I was O.K. I said I was exhausted and was going to try to sleep. They said that was a good idea and asked that I call them later, when it was night in Madrid. We said we loved each other and, before we hung up, my mom suggested I give blood.

I went back up to my apartment and refreshed the Times; the number of estimated dead was now around two hundred, at least a thousand injured. I considered walking back to Atocha, but instead I opened El País in another window and the Guardian in a third. I sat smoking and refreshing the home pages and watching the numbers change. I could feel the newspaper accounts modifying or replacing my memory of what I’d seen; was there a word for that feeling? The only other feeling I registered was fatigue. I fell asleep and when I awoke it was dark; I could hear café noise, albeit less than normal, in the plaza. I ate what there was to eat and read the news but my head was clouded; I could not process the conflicting theories regarding responsibility. The government maintained it was the separatists. I returned to La Plaza Santa Ana and called my parents again and my mom and I had a calmer version of the morning’s conversation; I would explain the Ritz-Carlton thing later, I said. I returned to my apartment, undressed, and went back to sleep, this time in my bed, until late morning.

When I woke I read about the emerging link to Al Qaeda, although the government still claimed it was ETA, and I watched a terrible video online of Atocha’s security camera footage, or was that many months later: an orange fireball bursting from a train, engulfing commuters with smoke, leaving the platform littered with bodies and stained with blood. There was to be a giant public demonstration against terrorism of all kinds that night across Spain. Even the king was going to march. I had lots of e — mails from friends and family and the foundation, none of which I read. I showered and left the apartment and walked toward Sol. There were trucks set up where you could give blood. I stood in line for a while at one of the trucks. When it was my turn, the woman asked me various questions about drugs, when I had eaten last, and other things I couldn’t understand; I told her I felt sick and she impatiently waved me away and asked for the next person in line. I said to myself that, by that point, they didn’t need blood for the injured anyway; they were probably still there only so people could feel like they were contributing; hadn’t they done that in New York?

As I walked toward El Retiro I thought about how blood from my body might have been put into the body of someone injured by History. It was cloudy and cold. I didn’t see anyone, not even the hash dealers. I sat for a while and then walked to the gallery, where Arturo and Rafa were. Later I learned that, while I was in the park, the entire city had emptied into the streets for a moment of silence without me. I was glad to see Arturo and Rafa and I told them so. We hugged each other and Arturo unloosed a torrent of language, saying he knew people who knew people who died, and speculating on what all this meant for the election, which was Sunday. If ETA were responsible, the Socialists, who were seen as weak on the separatists, would get destroyed. If it were Al Qaeda or other Islamic terrorists, the right-wing Aznar and his handpicked successor, Rajoy, were doomed; they had supported Bush’s war, the fucking fascists. I asked them if ETA did it and they said they didn’t believe it and something about tapes the police had found and it being the eleventh. While we were talking, Teresa arrived. She kissed me on both cheeks and scolded me for not having been around or writing her but she didn’t seem angry. The conversation about the bombings and their political repercussions resumed and I was quiet. Then Arturo took a phone call and Rafa went to the back of the gallery for something, leaving Teresa and me alone. She said I looked tired and I said I had passed several long nights and she asked me, smiling, if I had passed them with this Isabel woman. Without emotion, I said I was never going to see Isabel again. Teresa squinted and said not to make any decisions on her account, but, smiling again, admitted she’d been a little jealous: very little. I waited to feel a thrill, however distant.

We went outside to smoke and I remembered the argument after my reading. I considered telling Teresa I had lied about my family but it no longer seemed significant. We decided to walk to a nearby restaurant for lunch. I tried to buy El País but the kiosks were out of them. “Collector items,” Teresa said in English.

Neither of us ate much. We walked back to the gallery and I asked Arturo if they were still having the opening. He looked at me like I was crazy and said no. I must have looked ashamed, because he added, a little apologetically: but the paintings would still be on display and maybe people would gather in the gallery after the demonstration. I heard myself saying that he should cover one of the larger paintings with a black cloth as a memorial, a visual moment of silence. He thought this was a great idea and he started speaking at incomprehensible speed with Teresa; soon the decision was made that all the paintings would be covered for a couple of days, if they could get the painters to agree. Arturo started making calls again and Teresa asked me after a while if I wanted to look over my poems; I didn’t. I told her I had written a lot of new stuff and pointed to the notebooks that were still on Arturo’s desk. She opened the one on top and began to read with what looked like serious attention. Would they also cover the little placards bearing painters’ names and prices?

Teresa read and read and I sat there blankly and every twenty minutes or so would go and smoke. Arturo had reached almost all of the painters and everyone had said yes; he had sent Rafa out for cloth. When Rafa returned he said the streets were filling for the demonstration and I could see from his hair that it had started raining. Teresa tore a corner of one of the pages of a book she had in her purse, a novel I think, and put it in my notebook to keep her place, which I knew I would, in retrospect, find touching. The gesture made me think of giving blood, but there was no real analogy. It looked like there was a crowd outside the gallery and I wondered if these were people Arturo knew who were waiting for us to join them, but when we exited the gallery, I realized this was the demonstration, that as far as I could see, the streets were full. A current of people, some with signs or candles, was moving slowly toward Colón, the central gathering point; from there the plan was to process toward Atocha. Many people weren’t moving at all, as one was, wherever one was, already demonstrating. Teresa took my hand and I followed her into the current and we made our way to Colón, where the crowd was densest. Someone was speaking through a megaphone about peace and maybe about resilience. The rain intensified and umbrellas opened everywhere. I pictured how it must have looked from the helicopters. People were chanting that it wasn’t raining, that Madrid was crying, and I thought this was a complicated chant, especially since it appeared to be spontaneous. Teresa and Arturo and Rafa were chanting, so I chanted too, but my voice sounded off to me, affected, and I worried it was conspicuous, that it failed to blend. I couldn’t be the only one not chanting, so I mouthed the words. Eventually some portion of the crowd began to move in the direction of Atocha. We were walking slowly but it felt to me like we were standing still because so many people were moving in tandem. At one point I bent down, maybe to tie my shoe, and from my kneeling position I saw thousands of legs and I looked up a little and saw a more-or-less unbroken canopy formed by the umbrellas above me. Nearby some little kids were running around in this enclosed space formed by the bodies and umbrellas, maybe playing tag, hiding behind one pair of legs and then another. In retrospect, I would find this beautiful. When I stood up, Teresa was several feet away, other people between us. She was looking for but somehow didn’t see me. I could have easily caught or called her, but I just stood there, letting the stream of bodies bend around me.

When she was gone I resumed moving toward Atocha. It must have been dark by then. I tried chanting, but quickly stopped. When we got to Huertas I turned away from the current and walked toward my apartment. Every street, even the little side streets branching off of Huertas, was packed with people. I eventually reached my apartment and pulled myself through the skylight and looked down at the sea of umbrellas, some of them softly illuminated, I guessed because they sheltered candles. I was looking away from Atocha but the crowd was continuous.

I realized at some point that I was freezing, dropped myself back through the skylight, and checked my e — mail. I answered friends and family, then read through the various e — mails from María José. The first e — mails addressed to the group asked that all the fellows write her to confirm they were O.K. Then an e — mail addressed to the group said they had heard from all but one fellow. Then there was an e — mail just to me asking where I was. Two hundred people had been killed in a city of three million, I thought; what was the probability I had been among them? I went to El País’s home page and viewed the aerial photographs I had pictured in my mind. The crowds were audible in the apartment, but the noise was so constant it kept receding into the background. I opened the Tolstoy at random and started reading.

A few hours later I left my apartment. There were still people everywhere, but the demonstration was over. I walked, maybe through rain, back to the gallery; it was packed. There was a huge pile of umbrellas in the corner, an interesting sculpture. I thought some people recognized me, but I wasn’t sure. The paintings were covered in what looked like black felt. I wondered if that would damage the paintings. The placards were uncovered. Toward the back of the gallery there was a bright light and I saw Arturo being interviewed by a reporter, presumably about the covered paintings. I was afraid that if he saw me he would credit me with the idea and would pull me in front of the camera, so I kept my distance. People were looking at the covered paintings as if they weren’t covered, looking long and thoughtfully at the black felt and then reading the placard. I wondered if any of them would sell.

“I wonder if any of them will sell,” Teresa said, suddenly beside me. Then she said, “Sorry we were separated.” Maybe she’d seen me standing still, watching her get swept away. She had changed her clothes.

“Where do you live?” I asked her, apropos of nothing. I knew she had an apartment in Madrid but she had never invited me there and I had never asked to see it. She seemed to stay, at least half the time, at Rafa’s.

She laughed at the question and said, “A fifteen-minute walk from here. You’ve walked me home before, remember?” I didn’t.

“Can we go there?” I said. “I don’t mean to fuck”—I couldn’t think of any subtler Spanish word—“or anything. I am tired and the crowds—” I switched to English: “I’m just really out of it.”

“I’ll need to come back to help Arturo,” she said in Spanish, “but we can go there for a while. You can stay there if you want. Arturo and Rafa will probably come back there later.”

Teresa went to tell Arturo she was leaving and we emerged from the gallery into the rain and walked in silence until we reached Calle Serrano; I remembered her narrow, fancy building when we got there. She was on the top floor and we took the elevator, which had mirrored paneling. She had to turn her key in the elevator in order to get it to take us to her floor and when the elevator doors opened we were in her apartment. Besides the bathroom, the apartment was just one giant room with a very high ceiling and a balcony that overlooked Serrano. What furniture there was, was low to the ground: a desk in one corner, a red couch with a cat on it near the center of the room, and against one of the walls a low, Japanese-looking bed that was probably Swedish. There was a long coffee table near the couch. Piles of books were everywhere, but the piles somehow looked considered, tastefully arranged. The walls were empty save for various expensively framed and carefully grouped series of black-and-white photographs. I walked to the nearest bank of photographs. They showed very elegantly dressed men and women smoking and smiling. They looked like they were taken in the fifties. “Is this your family?” I asked Teresa, who was fixing drinks. “Distant family,” she said. I wondered what it meant about your politics if you managed to be rich and fashionable in the Madrid of the fifties, but didn’t ask.

I walked to another group of photographs and saw that they were Abel’s idle machines, but much smaller than the photos in the gallery.

“You don’t like them,” she said, handing me a drink involving whiskey.

“They don’t do much for me,” I said in English. She squinted, maybe because of what I said, maybe because I’d once again used English.

“Make yourself at home,” she said in English, as if quoting a movie, and I sat on the couch and the cat and I considered each other suspiciously. I asked if I could smoke, a silly question, and she indicated the ashtray and sat beside me and we both lit cigarettes. She walked with her cigarette and drink to a closet and somehow drank and smoked and changed her clothes in front of me without burning or spilling anything and without it seeming like a striptease.

“That’s amazing,” I said, vaguely.

She smiled as though she understood what I was referring to and sat back down beside me. I asked her if she knew anybody who died in the bombings. She said no. She said many of the dead were immigrants. She said that it was a crime against working people and that she didn’t know many working people. Do you, she asked, and I thought for a while, then said I wasn’t sure. She launched into a very detailed and, so far as I could tell, sophisticated projection of the political ramifications of the bombings. She was sure ETA had nothing to do with it. I didn’t say anything. She went to a stereo I hadn’t noticed and put on music.

The music filled the room and for a moment, maybe two measures, I felt intensely present. She said she should go back but that there was food and drink and clean towels. She had noticed I had smoked my last cigarette and pointed to a pack on the desk. She kissed me good-bye on the lips but it did not feel like an event.

When I was alone in the apartment I walked to her closet and looked through her clothes. I smelled one or two of the hanging dresses. There was a dresser inside the closet and I opened and shut the drawers. Then I went into the bathroom and looked around. Everything was spotless and I wondered if she cleaned it herself. Maybe an immigrant cleaned her apartment, an immigrant who’d been blown apart. There were a few bottles of pills behind the mirror but I couldn’t tell what they were. Then I rolled a strong spliff with the last of the hash from my bag and smoked it on the balcony. When I was finished I took off my shoes and lay down on her bed. In the stack of books nearest her bed I saw a small poetry magazine from the U.S., an issue in which I was published. I was astonished that a tiny magazine published in New York featuring poems I had written in Providence about Topeka was here, in this gorgeous apartment in Madrid. Not that poems were about anything. Then I remembered I had given her the magazine. I removed it from the stack, knocking the stack over, and found my poem:

Possessing a weapon has made me bashful.

Tears appreciate in this economy of pleasure.

The ether of data engulfs the capitol.

Possessing a weapon has made me forgetful.

My oboe tars her cenotaph.

The surface is in process.

Coruscant skinks emerge in force.

The moon spits on a copse of spruce.

Plausible opposites stir in the brush.

Jupiter spins in its ruts.

The wind extends its every courtesy.

I have never been here.

Understand?

You have never seen me.

__________________________

I wasn’t sure if Teresa had slept in the bed with me; there were sleeping bags and pillows on the floor, but they might have been Arturo’s or Rafa’s, neither of whom was in the apartment now. The sleeping bags made me think of body bags lined up beside the tracks, although I hadn’t seen that yet. I had confused memories of people entering the apartment when I was half-asleep, snatches of their drunken conversation, the smell of marijuana, maybe a body next to me, breathing. Teresa was on the phone, speaking quietly so as not to wake me. I would not be able to ask her if she had slept in the bed; if she did, that would constitute a new level of intimacy and I could hardly admit I had no memory of it. For all I knew we’d kissed and fooled around; while I doubted that, I could imagine it in a way that felt like remembering.

The cat was still on the red couch, blinking. Although I had not made a noise or moved, Teresa knew I was awake, and brought me, phone tucked between ear and shoulder, an espresso; I hadn’t heard the machine. I couldn’t read her smile. I couldn’t believe how good the coffee was. She went back to her desk and I sat up and finished the coffee and tried to listen to her conversation; she was saying something about making or receiving a delivery; maybe she did real work for the gallery. After my coffee I went into the bathroom and turned on the shower and shat and took one white pill and then stepped into the shower. The showerhead was elaborate and could be adjusted so as to texture the water in various ways. Somehow the showerhead, more than any other object in the apartment or the apartment itself, made me feel that Teresa’s wealth was limitless. I realized I had not had water to drink, only coffee and alcohol, for what felt like an alarmingly long time. I opened my mouth and let it fill with water and swallowed.

I put on the same clothes and came out of the bathroom to find Teresa dressed, smoking and drinking her coffee on the red couch. She smiled at me, the cat blinked at me, and I said to her in English, “Everything here is beautiful. You are beautiful. The shower is beautiful. The coffee. How did you know I was awake? How was the beautiful coffee suddenly ready?” I sounded like I was translating from Spanish. “Why does everything in the apartment, from a pile of books to those papers on your desk, seem so beautifully arranged? How is it that your cat communicates so much intelligence, that it blinks so significantly?”

“Why are you speaking English?” she asked in English, widening her eyes.

“I don’t know,” I said in Spanish. Then I repeated in Spanish, to the best of my ability, everything I had just said about her, her dexterity, the shower, the coffee. She laughed at this but also looked a little sad. Then she said I must have really needed my sleep, that I’d slept deeply and for a long time. I wondered how she’d gauged its depth, if she’d tried to stir me. I did feel rested. The light in the apartment looked postmeridian.

“We should go to the protests,” she said. I blinked at her and she explained: “There are protests at the PP headquarters. The PP was blaming ETA when it knew it wasn’t responsible. People are furious,” she said.

“Are you furious?” I asked.

“Arturo texted me,” she said, ignoring my question. “He said there is a huge protest in front of the headquarters. A short walk from here.” Then in English: “It’s history in the making.”

“If I hadn’t woken up,” I asked her with something strange in my voice, maybe anger, “would you have woken me or gone without me or just not gone?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “You woke up.” Her eyes were wide again.

We left the apartment, walked a few blocks, and before we saw the crowd, we heard it, chanting about truth and lies and fascism. Police in riot gear stood between the crowd and PP headquarters. The crowd was young and angry and we joined them. Teresa, to my surprise, blended in gracefully, taking up the chant, although I couldn’t pick out her voice particularly, and pumping her fist in the air with the rest of the crowd without any of it seeming affected or silly. People were banging on drums and pots and pans and I followed Teresa deeper into the crowd. Finally I could go no farther and she disappeared in front of me. I felt she knew she’d lost me, and wondered if she was responding to my standing still at the protests the previous day. A police officer said something on a megaphone and the chants intensified. I thought the building might be stormed, but it wasn’t. I slipped back out of the crowd and crossed the street and watched the protest from there. For a second I thought I saw Isabel.

After I don’t know how long, Teresa emerged from the crowd and found me. She was with a man I didn’t recognize. Even from far away, I could tell that he was handsome. When they reached me she spoke to me in English.

“Where did you go?” she said. And when I didn’t respond, she said in Spanish, “This is Carlos.”

I shook Carlos’s hand as jealousy spread through my body. He was a full six inches taller than I was.

We stood together and faced the protest. The crowd had expanded so that now, while we were still apart from it, we were close enough that our presence expressed fellowship. Without warning and with improbable volume, Carlos started a chant about Rajoy. He was bellowing, and yet he seemed completely calm. At first he was the only one chanting his chant and I hoped nobody would pick it up, that he would have to abandon it, embarrassed. But then the other people who were near the crowd but not part of it joined Carlos in chanting. And once the people who were near the crowd were linked by the chant, they moved and we moved with them into the crowd and were absorbed. Then Carlos’s chant spread from our part of the crowd forward and grew deafening. Carlos’s voice was no longer distinct and I looked at his handsome face and hated it.

Again I retreated and Teresa saw me go and just waved good-bye and I felt annihilated. I tried to smile at her in a manner that doubted her politics, doubted her place in the crowd, but could not. I wound my way through various small streets until I found myself near Sol. From there I walked to my apartment and once in my apartment read about the unfolding events of which I’d failed to form a part. The elections were tomorrow. I tried to think about whether public outrage would cost the PP the elections, about blood on the platform and the makeshift morgue in the convention center near Atocha, but instead I imagined making love with Teresa as if I were remembering it. Then I imagined her fucking Carlos and felt sure that when I left they had gone immediately back to her apartment. I tried to think about Isabel, could not, but was reminded of the necklace, which I took out of its case. It felt like I’d been carrying it for years. I put it back in its case and left the apartment for the jewelers to see if I could return it. By the time I reached the jewelers I doubted I would have the courage to face the woman who sold it to me; I was relieved to find the store was closed.

I walked to the Reina Sofía, bought a ticket, and wandered through the giant Calder exhibit. The museum was almost empty. The large white rooms reminded me of Teresa’s apartment and I imagined sleeping with both Carlos and Teresa at the same time and being humiliated by his beauty and size. I pictured giving Teresa the necklace, how she would accept it graciously but without surprise or emotion and I was furious at her. There was a very young museum guard, a teenager, sending a text beneath a giant mobile. I approached her and said that I had bought a necklace for my girlfriend but that we had broken up and I was leaving the country the next day; I didn’t want the necklace, would she like it. Without giving her time to answer, I handed her the case and walked away.

From the museum I went to the café where I took my lunch almost daily and ordered one of the hard sandwiches and a watery beer. When I had finished my meal I was surprised that it was dusk, I must have slept very late, and I walked into El Retiro to buy more hash. I scoured the park but could not find a dealer anywhere. It occurred to me that they’d probably been rounded up by the police, questioned, and perhaps deported since, as I had read, there was some speculation that the bombers had come from North Africa. I sat on a bench and watched the wind in the old-world trees and said to myself that I would not go to Teresa’s apartment or the gallery. I swore that I would wait for her to come to me and if she never came, so be it. But then I said to myself that History was being made and that I needed to be with Spaniards to experience it; I should at least try to find Arturo. I knew I was only elaborating an excuse to see Teresa. I tried to justify my pettiness by meditating on the relation of the personal to the historical but my meditations did not go far; I stood, absently checked my pockets for tranquilizers, and began to walk quickly through the thickening dusk.

I was lost for a little while but eventually found her building, rang the bell, and was immediately buzzed in. As the elevator slowly ascended — it worked without the key — I began to hear music and voices and laughter; I was still attempting to compose my face when the doors opened. There were a lot of people, Teresa and Rafa the only two I knew, smoking and drinking and talking animatedly about the protests and elections. Several people were on phones. I looked around for Carlos but did not see him and a wave of relief broke over me. Teresa was on the red sofa admiring another woman’s earrings; she did not stand to greet me. I walked to Rafa, who was looking through Teresa’s music, and asked him where Arturo was as if it were important that I find him. Without listening to his response I walked out onto the balcony and lit a cigarette and there was Carlos, smoking with two other men. Carlos smiled a smile I experienced as triumphant, postcoital, and said hello. He did not introduce me to his friends, who struck me as stylish and hostile; they were heavily and expensively tattooed. I grinned at the friends in a way that suggested I would slit their throats if given the chance and echoed Carlos’s greeting. I wasn’t sure what to do; I could not return to the apartment without it seeming like a retreat and I was too full of jealousy to attempt casual speech. Finally Carlos said something to me about how this must be an interesting time to be an American in Spain. I said it was, ignoring the derision with which he’d pronounced “American.” What did I think, he said. About what, I asked. About everything, he said. I looked off in the distance as though I was making an effort to formulate my complex reaction so simply even an idiot like him might understand. Then, as if concluding this was an impossible task, I said I didn’t know.

“I enjoyed your poetry reading a few months ago,” said one of his friends. He sounded gentle and sincere and I was bewildered. I wondered if Carlos in fact was being completely friendly, if I was only projecting my jealousy. I felt a little crazy and remembered puking in the bathroom at Zalacaín.

“Thanks,” I said.

“Are you going to write a poem about the bombings?” Carlos asked, the mockery unmistakable. I wanted to throw him from the balcony. I finished my cigarette before saying no.

I walked back into the apartment, saw a space beside Teresa on the couch, and sat down. She started playing with my hair and I said to her in English that Carlos might get jealous; she ignored me. I wanted to kiss her but didn’t. I took a book from a stack nearby and feigned interest, thrilled she was flirting with me in plain sight. After a while Carlos and his friends returned and Carlos said something to a few of the other people milling around and then said to Teresa that they were going to rejoin the protest, that he would text her later. O.K., she said, smiling at him the same way she had smiled at me. They kissed each other on both cheeks and while he was near her ear he whispered something and she laughed. “Later,” he said to me, and I said good-bye as if I couldn’t quite remember who he was.

Soon the other guests, including Rafa, left the apartment, presumably for the protest. I continued to look at the book, a novel by Cela. Teresa went to her desk and when she came back she had a thin joint, which she lit and passed to me. It was weed, not hash. When we finished she went to her closet and began to change. I rose and walked to her and held her from behind and kissed her on the neck. She turned to me and we kissed for a while but for reasons mysterious to me, that was that. I sat back down and she finished changing and then sat beside me and resumed doing the thing with my hair and asked if I wanted to find the protests. I said I was too high and she squinted and said she felt she needed to go. I didn’t say anything. She said I could stay there and read or whatever until she returned. I thought of Carlos.

“What did that guy say to you when he left?” I asked.

“What guy?” she asked.

“Carlos,” I said.

“Nothing,” she said.

“He whispered something to you when he was saying good-bye and you laughed,” I reminded her.

“I don’t remember,” she lied. I was furious.

“When do you think you’ll be back?” I asked, careful not to reveal my anger.

“I’m not sure,” she said.

“If it’s O.K., I will stay here for a while. Then I have to meet someone,” I said.

“O.K.,” she said. I couldn’t believe she wasn’t going to ask me who. “Take those keys,” she said, pointing to a hook by the door. “You can leave the elevator unlocked; the bigger key is for the front,” she said.

“O.K.,” I said, my fury tempered by the offer of the keys.

“Let’s go over the poems tomorrow,” she said. “I want to select a couple of the new ones to translate.”

“Sure,” I said. I didn’t care about the poems.

“Unless you don’t care about the poems,” she said. Her eyes were neither wide nor squinted and she was not smiling. I was pleased to see her angry.

“I’m not very interested in poetry at a time like this,” I said, suggesting she was focused on petty personal concerns at a moment of historical unrest. “Tomorrow is the election,” I said, as though she might have forgotten.

She looked angrier. “And what are you planning to do tomorrow?” she asked. “How are you going to participate in this historic moment?”

“It’s not my country,” I said, my face asserting this statement had many simultaneous registers of significance. I thought I saw her sound them in her head.

“Bueno,” she said, which can mean anything, and left.

I walked onto the balcony to find it was fully night and watched her go. When I couldn’t see her anymore I went back into the apartment. I looked around her desk, found what looked like a diary, and opened it; it was full of poems in what I supposed was her hand. They were replete with words I didn’t know and that I assumed must be very specific nouns: grackle, night-blooming jasmine, hollow-point shells — I had no idea. I assigned a meaning more or less at random to each unfamiliar word and then the poems were lovely. I began to read one aloud but my voice sounded strange in the empty apartment and I stopped, again remembering Zalacaín. I searched the journal to see if there were peoples’ names in any of the poems, Adán, Carlos, etc.; there weren’t. On one of the pages there was a stain, probably coffee, but it made me think of blood. I imagined Teresa writing in the journal on a train and I imagined the train exploding.

I put the journal down. I felt stupid for not going to the protests and decided I would find them, find Teresa. I took the keys and left, walking first to PP headquarters. Nobody was there except a few journalists, a few police. I asked a teenager on a bench where the protests were; he just laughed at me. I walked to Colón but the plaza was empty. From Colón I moved up El Paseo de Recoletos, which became El Paseo del Prado. It felt strange to be looking for a crowd, to be wandering around in search of History or Teresa. I walked all the way to Atocha. I saw candles and small groups of people but no protest. For the first time since I had been in Spain, I wished I had a phone. I walked back down El Paseo del Prado and onto Huertas. I passed a bar that had a TV on and I could see images of a swarming crowd. I went in and ordered a whiskey and saw the protestors in front of the PP headquarters. At first I thought it was footage from earlier in the day, but then I noticed it was dark. Is this living, I asked the bartender, pointing to the screen. He blinked at me. Is this live, I corrected myself. He nodded. I drank and watched and eventually went home and fell sleep.

__________________________

While Spain was voting I was checking e — mail. According to the internet, protests continued at the PP headquarters. Then, while Spain was voting, someone rang my buzzer. I thought it was Teresa and I was about to let her in when I realized it might be Isabel, whom I did not want to see. I decided to risk it, hit the buzzer, and heard someone running up the steps. By the time I heard a knock at my door I had deduced it was Arturo; he was the only person I knew who would run. I opened the door and he looked excited, like he hadn’t had much sleep. He sat down and asked for a cigarette and I gave him one and he lit it and began to speak. He said those fascist bastards were going to lose and Zapatero would win and while Zapatero wasn’t a radical, he was O.K. He said they had been up all night protesting and partying. I asked if those were the same thing, protesting and partying. He smiled inscrutably and I wondered where they had learned to smile that way, then thought I remembered that smile on the faces of the elegant people in the old photographs in Teresa’s apartment.

“Did you vote?” I asked him.

“I don’t vote,” he said.

“Why?” I asked.

“I don’t believe in it,” he said.

“Why?” I asked.

“I won’t participate in a corrupt system,” he said. He said it like he’d said it many times that day.

“Does Teresa vote?” I wondered.

“Yes,” he said, but it sounded like he wasn’t sure.

“And Carlos?” I asked, as if I knew all about Carlos.

“Carlos is a Marxist,” Arturo said, picking up one of the volumes of Tolstoy and flipping through it.

“A Marxist,” I repeated. “How long have you known Carlos?” It occurred to me that I didn’t know if there was an active Communist party in Spain.

“Forever,” he said, still looking at the book. “But Carlos votes.”

I don’t know why I was surprised: “Really?”

“Yes, but he votes for the wrong side on purpose,” he explained.

“He votes for the PP,” I exclaimed in disbelief.

“He votes to exacerbate the system’s contradictions,” is what I guessed Arturo said.

“That fucker,” I said in English. Arturo looked up at me. “He votes to make things worse,” I confirmed in Spanish.

“Yes,” he said, and repeated the thing about contradictions as though he’d said it many times that day. “Carlos wants a revolution.”

“What kind of revolution?” I asked, making no effort to contain my disdain.

“Don’t worry about Carlos,” he said, smiling again. “Teresa doesn’t love him.”

“I’m not worried,” I lied. “He should vote for the Socialists,” I said.

“Carlos doesn’t believe in socialism,” Arturo said. “If the Socialists win, we’re having a big party at Rafa’s. If the PP wins, there will be more protests. Maybe riots. Teresa wanted me to tell you, and to say that you should come with us.”

I thought about saying I was busy, but said, “O.K.”

“We’ll pick you up at nine either way,” he said. And, as he stood to leave, “If you’re going to stay in Spain, you should get a phone.” I wondered what he meant by “stay.”

The Socialists won. The American media were furious, claiming the Spanish had been intimidated by terrorism. Outside I heard people cheering. A little before ten the buzzer rang and I went downstairs and Teresa was there. She kissed me on the lips and I felt in love with her. We walked together to the car, where Arturo was waiting. It took us a long time to get beyond the city. Arturo talked to Teresa the whole drive, something about how Pedro Almodóvar had said on TV that the PP was planning a coup, but I might have misunderstood. When we finally arrived at Rafa’s expansive house I asked how Rafa made his money. They laughed. I said I meant how did his family make its money. Teresa said something about banks. And your own family, I asked, tentatively. Arturo said they didn’t make it by writing poetry and we laughed. Then Teresa said she had told me already, didn’t I remember. I hesitated and said yes, I remember now. She might have told me the first night I met her. Or she might have told me at various points and I failed to understand her Spanish. Or she might have been lying about having told me. We went inside.

Beautiful people were there again, a few of whom I recognized from the gallery or Teresa’s apartment. Everything was a little changed, a little charged. For whatever reason I thought again of the photographs of Teresa’s distant family. I didn’t know how to compose my face, if indifference tinged with vague disdain was still the right expression. If I could have smiled Teresa’s inscrutable smile, I would have. One of the paintings was covered with black felt. It didn’t look like a covered painting from the nineteenth century; it looked like contemporary art. People were talking about politics, or everything seemed suddenly political. I overheard conversations about the role of photography now, where “now” meant post — March 11. A “post” was being formed, and the air was alive less with the excitement of a period than with the excitement of periodization. I heard something about how the cell phone, instrumental to organizing the marches, was the dominant political technology of the age. What about Titadine, the form of compressed dynamite used in the attacks, I wanted to say; wasn’t that the dominant technology? I said this to Teresa, who corrected me gently as we poured ourselves drinks: these attacks were “made for TV”; she said the phrase in English.

I meant to pour myself gin, but when I tried it, I discovered it was silver tequila. At seventeen I had made myself violently ill drinking tequila and had never had it again, except to taste it every couple of years to see if it still disgusted me, which it always did. I thought back to that night in Topeka, vomiting for an hour near a bonfire and then sleeping in the bed of a pickup in the middle of the winter. I could smell the campfire and felt cold and a little dizzy. Then I thought of Cyrus trying to wash the taste out of his mouth. Teresa took the drink from me and handed me a fresh one, a vodka tonic, which smelled clean. You don’t want tequila, she said, as though she knew what I was remembering, as though we had known each other for many years. I was becoming almost frightened of her grace and gifts of anticipation; I worried that I would not be able to lie to her, and I worried, not for the first time, that whenever I’d thought I’d successfully lied to her, she had in fact easily seen through me. If I were forced to rely on only the literal truth, she would soon grow tired of me. I thought I would attempt to preempt or slow this situation by naming it, and as we walked out back with our drinks, I said to her in English, “You are the most graceful and protean person I know. The way you handed me the coffee right when I awoke or the way just now you took the tequila from me or,” I paused to think of an example not involving drinks, “the way you can move without apparent transition from your stylish apartment to a protest.”

“The proper names of leaders are distractions from concrete economic modes.”

“Why do you keep speaking to me in English?” she asked, with something like concern.

I ignored the question and went on, “But I’m worried you’re too cool for me, that you’ll realize I’m in fact a fraud. An inelegant fraud. I won’t be able to fool you and you’ll get bored.” As I said this, I thought it would be impossible to hide my pills from her. I had a sudden, involuntary memory of the Ritz.

“All you’re describing,” she said in Spanish, “is the personality of a translator. From apartment to protest, from English to Spanish.” If she had spoken in English, I would have found it a little grand; in Spanish I experienced it as profound. I wondered if she’d weighed the sentence in both languages before selecting the one that would produce the desired effect.

Teresa started to remove her clothes and for a second I thought she had lost her mind. But she had a swimsuit on underneath, and she left her clothes in a little pile and slipped noiselessly into the heated, lighted pool, as if to punctuate the ease with which she could move between media. There were a few other people in the pool, all of them women, all of whom appeared to know Teresa. I found a nearby patio chair and lit a cigarette, reiterating to myself my promise that I would never smoke another cigarette once I left Madrid, but that until then I gave myself permission to smoke without guilt. This little psychological mechanism, as crucial to my smoking as lighter or match, reminded me of Arturo’s comment about staying in Spain. I saw Teresa dive underwater and thought, why wouldn’t I stay? I could make enough money teaching English to keep the same apartment. Maybe Arturo would pay me to work at the gallery in some capacity. Maybe my parents would send me money. Or maybe Teresa would support me. I would write and she would translate and we would walk through El Retiro at dusk. I imagined people visiting from the U.S., imagined their amazement and envy at the life I had made for myself. How long would I stay beyond the fellowship, I wondered. Maybe another year; I would make myself really learn Spanish, which seemed dimly possible now, and I would also begin to translate Teresa’s poems into English. I would publish a book of poems and then a book of translations and I would come home, perhaps with Teresa, as a celebrated author imbued with Iberian mystery. Or would I never go home, except to visit? I finished my drink and went to the bar for another and there was the man who had argued with Abel after my reading, the man who believed the disjunction of my poetry was a radical political gesture.

He recognized me, but he misremembered our conversation. “Do you still believe that poetry can change the world?” he asked me.

I paused. “It can exacerbate the world’s contradictions,” I said, mumbling the verb I didn’t really know.

“Well, it’s not poetry that makes things happen,” he said.

“Poetry makes nothing happen,” I said in English. He blinked at me. “What made all of this,” I said in Spanish, waving my hand to include the party in the events of the last few days, “happen?”

“Bodies in the streets,” he said. At first I thought he meant dead bodies; then I realized he meant the bodies of protestors. I tried to describe that confusion, the two ways one could understand his answer, but I garbled the Spanish and abandoned the thought.

I went back outside and sat in the same chair and drank my drink. Teresa was no longer in the pool and I looked around for her but couldn’t see her. When my drink was finished I fixed another, this time at the little outside bar, and then I walked beyond the pool toward the softly lit garden where I had once heard Rafa sing. When I encountered Teresa sitting on the stone bench kissing Carlos, my jealousy and rage felt like solid things, things formed over many years, so it seemed like they preceded their cause, were detached from the scene. It was a while before I noticed two of the other swimmers nearby, maybe five feet from the bench, faint glow of white towels, sharing a joint. I sat down beside them and one of them passed me the joint, saying something like, “Here is the poet.” Teresa had stopped kissing or letting herself be kissed by the man who I now saw was not Carlos, was another handsome man I didn’t know; she had noticed me, entirely without concern. I considered getting up and storming off to the edge of the property overlooking the hill where I had told Teresa my mother was dead. I imagined striking the man, who was walking back to the party now, repeatedly in the face. The joint was before me again and the woman who passed it began to speak to me and either because I was high or upset I couldn’t understand her Spanish, but that’s not really right. Her Spanish, like Teresa’s poem, became a repository for whatever meaning I assigned it, and I felt I understood, although I knew I was talking to myself. It was as if she said: Think about the necklace. Think about the making of the necklace. About Isabel’s brother’s notebook. I could hear what she was actually saying beneath this and I heard myself respond but all of that was very distant. It was as if she said: Imagine her brother writing. Think of the little scrap of paper Teresa tore from her novel and put into your notebook. Think of the hash transported inside one body as a solid and expelled and sold and then drawn into your body as vapor and gas. Think of the bombers purchasing the backpacks. Always think of the objects. Think of the necklaces and novels and bodies torn apart by the blast. Think of the making of the necklaces and the novels and the bodies and Isabel’s brother in the crushed red car. But then think of a poster of Michael Jordan on the wall of Isabel’s brother’s room while he wrote the years down in the notebook. Where is that poster now. And think of the field opposite the telephone pole her brother wrapped the car around. How you can turn your attention away from the crushed red car and his body and walk into the field where nothing is happening, just indifferent wind in the indifferent grass, but a particular wind in particular grass. You can stay there for as long as you want, easily blocking out the sirens. Or you can enter the poster with the sea of camera flashes as Michael Jordan jumps and you can leave the arena as the crowd is roaring and walk into the Chicago of the recent past where novels are being written and necklaces are being made and gases are being inhaled and dates are being memorized by brains and brains destroyed in crashes. You can see all of this from a great height and zoom out until it is no longer visible or you can zoom in on the writing hand or the face of the dead, zoom in until it’s no longer a face. Or you can click on something and drag it. You can adjust the color or you can make it black and white. You can view any object from any angle or multiple angles simultaneously or you can shut your eyes and listen to the crowd in the arena or the sirens slowly approaching the red car or the sound of the pen writing down the years as silver is hammered and shaped.

Teresa had sat down beside us and lit another joint and passed it to me and asked me something and I heard myself respond but all that was very distant and what I heard her whispering was something like: To join lips to express affection or as part of insufflation. To click the teeth while making love or trying to form a seal between your mouth and the victim’s or to place the tongue between your teeth to pronounce the z of Zalacaín or to place a tooth beneath a pillow or the bracelet made of baby teeth her grandma had. To attempt to move from one language into another without rotation or angular displacement and to fail in that attempt and call your father from a pay phone weeping or to weep before a painting so one can think of pay phones and of paintings as the same. Now I realized Teresa wasn’t speaking but was humming and playing with my hair but still I heard: To embrace the tragic interchangeability of nouns and smile inscrutably or to find a way of touching down, albeit momentarily, and be made visible by swirling condensation and debris and to know that one pole of experience is always caught up in the other but to know this finally in your body, cone of heat unfurling. To take everything personally until your personality dissolves and you can move without transition from apartment to protest or distribute yourself among a shifting configuration of bodies, saying yes to everything, affirming nothing, your own body “giving up / Its shape in a gesture that expresses that shape.”

Then I was on my back and Teresa was on her back beside me and all of the jealousy was gone or so far away I no longer thought of it as mine. I could see a particularly bright star that I then saw as a satellite but ultimately I knew it was a plane.