Leaving the Atocha Station

5

I WAS IN NO POSITION TO EVALUATE HER TRANSLATIONS BUT I SENSED they were very good. When she read them to me I felt that she had carried a delicate, mirrored thing down a treacherous path, but what that thing was, I had no idea, and “path” isn’t really the word. Arturo had ceded the project entirely to Teresa. We had culled fifteen pages or so of what we thought were the better poems. I was flattered and mystified and made a little uneasy by Teresa’s apparently intense and sincere enthusiasm for my writing. Often when I slept at her place she would, instead of coming to bed with me, go to her desk and work, presumably on my poems. We never fucked or made love or had sex; I wasn’t sure why, but I associated that fact with the translations. And when she was smiling her inscrutable smile or attending to me with her uncanny grace, producing the match or coffee or phrase I wanted before I knew I wanted it, or when we were just walking around Madrid in silence, I felt she was observing me, observing me with interested detachment, ridiculous phrase, as if my behavior might hold clues for her regarding a resonance or inflection or principle of lineation. She never mentioned her own poetry.

In post — March 11 Madrid, I kept thinking things were going to explode; I would watch the planes making their way to Barajas and the sun would catch them briefly and I would believe for a second, with less fear than excitement, that they were aflame. Or I would take the Metro and experience a sudden jerk in the carriage as the first detonation. I would imagine my friends from the U.S., their amazement and maybe envy at the death I had made for myself, how I’d been contacted by History. Why I thought, why everybody thought, that dying in a terrorist attack was more bound up with the inexorable logic of History than dying in a car crash or from lung cancer, I couldn’t really say. I told Teresa that it derived from our impoverished sense of the political, that we could not think of the car or cigarette as Titadine because that would force us to confront our economic mode; when she said I sounded like Carlos, my face burned. Where is Carlos anyway, I asked her one afternoon as we walked slowly toward her apartment from La Filmoteca. We had seen two movies by Cocteau, the subject of a retrospective. It was one of the first hot days and the entire city, save Teresa, appeared sluggish. She said Carlos was in Barcelona, working. In my mind Carlos and Oscar, near anagrams, merged, and I had a sudden pang of longing for Isabel. I asked her what kind of work he did and she said, in English for some reason, “Organizing.”

“I have never been to Barcelona,” I said. The notion of Carlos “organizing,” I hoped she understood, was too preposterous to acknowledge.

“We can get there in a few hours on AVE,” she said, which was the high-speed train. I had thought it took much longer.

“Why, do you want to see Carlos?” I asked.

“We can go back to my apartment and get some clothes and go tonight, if you want,” she ignored me.

“O.K.,” I said, and we walked more quickly to the apartment, packed a few things, including, I saw, the notebooks of my poems and her translations, and then took a cab to Atocha to catch the next train. She bought the tickets because she bought everything and we walked past some red candles and boarded the train and after an initial jerk that I thought was an explosion we were speeding north, images from Cocteau’s Orpheus still flashing in my head. Three hours later we were in Barcelona. We walked from the station into El Barrio Gótico, labyrinthine, medieval streets largely closed to cars, and arrived at what looked like a fancy private residence but was in fact a small hotel. Teresa greeted a woman behind the tall desk and said something, to my surprise, in fluent Catalan. She gave her a credit card and we were provided an antiquated key. We ascended two flights of iron stairs and found our room. It had a giant wooden door, high ceilings, and the walls were white, so it recalled Teresa’s apartment. Teresa removed more clothes from her small bag than I would have thought possible and hung them in the closet. Why weren’t they wrinkled? We walked onto the balcony overlooking the street; it was only now dark.

She asked me what I would like to do and I said I was hungry; there was a restaurant she liked near the Sagrada Familia. We left the hotel, walked for a while, and emerged onto Las Ramblas. We took a cab to the Sagrada Familia, which was illuminated; it was the ugliest building I had ever seen. A few blocks away was the restaurant, Alkimia, full of fashionable people, and although it was crowded and we had no reservation we were immediately seated. I ordered a drink in Spanish and the waiter clarified my order in English, something that never happened in Madrid. Teresa ordered various small plates and they came quickly: tuna belly cut in the manner of Iberian ham and served over some kind of broad bean; white bread rubbed in oil and covered with tomato paste; a dish involving truffles and tiny pieces of sausage that might have been duck; it was all delicious. They brought us a bottle of white wine I hadn’t heard Teresa order and by dessert I felt pleasantly drunk. Dessert was a wonderful and unfamiliar ice cream and I asked the waiter what was in it and he said “Eucalyptus.” I was slow to recognize the gorgeous word as English.

After dinner we sat on a bench in a little park full of people and beneath a branching cast-iron street lamp a small wave of euphoria broke over me. Teresa let herself be kissed for a while and then we took a cab back to the outskirts of El Barrio Gótico and walked to our hotel and I thought we might make love. Instead we smoked another spliff on the balcony and I asked her how she learned Catalan. She said she had lived in Barcelona at various points, said it as if she were very old; Arturo had told me she was twenty-seven; she looked older and younger than her age in shifts. I said I would like to have a drink and we left again and after ten minutes or so we descended a few stairs into a bar that felt like a cave, cool and dark. We seated ourselves in green leather chairs in a corner around a little table that seemed to be made of petrified wood. A woman with an array of facial piercings appeared at our table and we ordered our drinks. Teresa asked me if I had seen the Antonioni movie partially set in Barcelona, The Passenger, and, lying, I said of course. She said I had his eyebrows, Jack Nicholson, that I called on my eyebrows to do important work, that if she were deaf she would read my eyebrows, not my lips. I said she was simply describing the personality of the translator, but I said it in my head. She said Arturo always claimed she looked like Maria Schneider, whom I knew from Last Tango in Paris, which I hated, and I could see what Arturo meant. I wondered what Maria Schneider’s relationship to Jack Nicholson was in The Passenger, what kind of statement Teresa was making about our relationship, and based on the Antonioni films I knew, I guessed it was unflattering.

“How do you understand their relationship?” I asked, trying to sound as though I’d pondered it for years.

“I don’t understand it,” she said, making it clear that was the point. Then she said things I could barely follow about the penultimate shot in the film, a continuous shot taken at “magic hour,” a phrase she said in English. I couldn’t understand what the shot looked like, but I understood that Antonioni had built, in order to achieve it, a special camera enclosed in a plastic sphere and fitted with various gyroscopes, whatever those were.

We ordered fresh drinks and Teresa talked about films, almost none of which I knew; maybe because we’d seen Orpheus, a movie about fluid boundaries, earlier that day, or because we were suddenly and impulsively arrived in a new city, or maybe because the bar was like a cave, I projected images to accompany her speech. Teresa appeared in those images, entered the films she was describing, and soon the films collapsed into one film, and it was her life I was imagining. She didn’t so much recount plots as shots and sequences as though they were plots. I pictured her at various ages and at the center of each scene, as if she had organized it around herself, and this struck me as a higher form of biography than the mere detailing of events. The more she talked the less aware of my presence she seemed; after several rounds, she asked for the check without consulting me and paid.

We left the bar and wound through the narrow streets and soon were back at our hotel. I rolled a spliff and asked her if she wanted any and she said no and I lay in bed smoking while she sat at the little table in the corner and worked on the translations, opening my notebook and hers. I asked her if she wanted to read me some and she again said no. I didn’t understand her method. She had no dictionary and asked no questions and I wondered if she was translating at all. After a while she came to bed and shut her eyes and I tried in my clumsy way to initiate some contact but she was totally if somehow gently unresponsive and soon she was asleep. For a long time, I watched her breathe.

When I woke she was reading Ashbery beside me. I wondered if she’d seen the pills in my bag. She smiled to indicate whatever distance had established itself between us the previous night had closed. Her breath smelled terrible and I told myself to commit that fact to memory, to remember it the next time I was intimidated by her unwavering grace. I told her I was going out for coffee. I got dressed, took my bag, and stumbled downstairs and out onto the street and walked until I found a café. Right as I was about to order, I realized I had no money; I left the café to find an ATM. Eventually the stone street widened into a modern avenue and I found a Deutsche Bank, where I withdrew the unreal currency. Still half-asleep, I put the cash in my wallet, and began to walk in what I thought was the direction I had come from, but after a few blocks I realized I was wrong. I retraced my steps and passed the bank but my confusion deepened; maybe I’d been right before. I asked a man, probably Roma, who was sitting in a doorway, where El Barrio Gótico was. He pointed and, although I headed in that direction for many minutes, I couldn’t find the ancient streets. I decided to have some coffee and entered the next café and ordered an espresso, asking the man who served me for directions. He drew me a confusing map on a napkin and I thanked him, deciding to take a cab.

Then I saw Isabel pass by. I had often thought I’d seen Isabel over the last month or two. This time I felt sure, despite the improbability, and I put down various large coins without finishing my coffee and set off after her. It wasn’t until I was in pursuit that I wondered why I wanted to catch her; I had nothing to say, though I had the indeterminate sense I owed her an apology. She crossed a busy street and by the time I got there the traffic was flowing and I had to wait. It took forever for the light to change and I wasn’t sure it was still her I was trailing but I pursued a woman with something in her hair; she ultimately disappeared around a curve. I stopped again and asked a woman selling cut flowers how to get to El Barrio Gótico and she gave me Metro directions. I thanked her and flagged a cab. When we arrived at the neighborhood’s edge, I went again in search of coffee. I found a café, bought two espressos to go, and walked deeper into the neighborhood, turning onto a street I thought I recognized. I did not know the name of the hotel. Soon I noticed the coffee was cold and I drank mine quickly and threw both cups away. I felt irritated and stupid and sat down on a bench to let my head clear. A blind man was selling lottery tickets nearby, shouting something about fate. I felt like a character in The Passenger, a movie I had never seen.

When I resumed my search I gradually realized I no longer remembered what the façade of the nameless hotel looked like exactly; I could have passed it many times already. I didn’t have Teresa’s phone number. I estimated an hour and a half had elapsed since I left. Hungry, I entered yet another café and ordered yet another coffee and also a piece of tortilla, which I hated before it arrived. I told the waiter I was looking for a hotel whose name I didn’t know on a street whose name I didn’t know and could he help me; we both laughed and he said: Aren’t we all. When I finished eating I tried again, feeling like an actor whose wanderings were being used as an excuse to shoot the scenery. After I don’t know how long, surely more than an hour, I found myself in a small plaza and sat down, defeated. My irritation turned to worry; it simply would not be believable to me if I were Teresa that I had left the hotel to get us coffee and had gotten lost for however many hours would have passed by the time I found her. And even if it were somehow believable, I didn’t like what such a story would do to her image of me, an image about which I was actively, maybe increasingly, concerned. I would fare better in her eyes, I thought, to disappear mysteriously for several days than to show up like a lost child, dirty and exhausted, as night fell. With something like desperation, I resumed my wanderings. I started to feel a little crazy, space curling around the edges, which reminded me to take my white pill. I found another bench and sat down, stomping to scatter the pigeons. Without texture, time passed.

I arose and walked until I emerged onto Las Ramblas, where there were crowds around various men who were covered in body paint and pretending to be statues. They moved suddenly, scaring the children, when you gave them coins. I continued down Las Ramblas and onto the pier. There was a small outdoor bar on the little stretch of beach and I sat under the red plastic awning and ordered patatas bravas and a beer. I drank the beer quickly and ordered another. A funicular descended from the hills to a point near the beach. There were many teenagers in bathing suits although the water must have been cold. A small wave of sexual desire broke over me. When I finished the second beer I walked back to Las Ramblas, drifted for a while, then flagged down a cab and went to the Picasso Museum. Teresa had mentioned wanting to show it to me; maybe she would be there.

I stood, I made myself stand, in front of the early portrait of his mother. It yielded nothing. The woman, in profile, is half-asleep; her head is leaning slightly forward and her eyes are closed. Pastel on paper. 1896. He was what, fifteen? A freak of nature. I could convince myself I saw space curling around the figure or areas where space flattened suddenly, but I did not see this. Maybe I did see, however, the self-assurance of a painter who assumed his juvenilia would one day be scoured for the seeds of genius, embarrassing phrase. If the work felt uncanny, it was because it was mortgaged; it was borrowing from future accomplishment as much as pointing to it. It had started to rain a little; I could hear it falling on the skylight.

I wondered how my project would have differed if I’d come to Barcelona instead of Madrid. I thought of this in order to avoid thinking about Teresa, wherever she was. That I was contingent, interchangeable, I took as a given. Slightly more impetuous brushstrokes in the self-portrait, also 1896. A shameless celebration of his own lips. The left eye, however, blackened by shadow, looked like it was blackened by a fist. I tried to imagine myself at fifteen. I remembered my brother teaching me to drive in the parking lot of the V.A.

Only the juvenilia interested me. I walked indifferently through the rose rooms and blue rooms and nodded to the guards; I brought them greetings from the museum guards of Madrid. If Teresa were there, I would have asked her: what painting would you most like to stand in front of hour after hour, day after day? It wasn’t the same question as what is your favorite painting. Or what period would you most like to dwell in and protect. Would you prefer to have to see, month after month, the figurative or the abstract? I remembered learning to drive and bonfires at Lake Clinton and what they called “experimenting” with alcohol and drugs. A tentative procedure; an act or operation for the purpose of discovering something unknown or of testing a principle or supposition. Now I was an experimental writer.

My mom, whenever we went to a museum, told me that painting seemed to have developed in reverse; that if an alien were to arrive at a museum, the alien would think the abstract canvases came first, hundreds if not thousands of years before the Renaissance. Unless the alien happened to look like a yellow triangle abutting a plane of blue. I always dismissed this theory in my mother’s presence, but if Teresa were with me, I would have offered it as my own. You could say it about Picasso’s particular development and it would sound intelligent, right or wrong. In the gallery devoted to Picasso’s relation to African art, there were two young kids, six or seven. I didn’t see the rest of the family. One walked up quickly to a large canvas and pawed it, clearly on a dare. Both kids ran out of the gallery, presumably back to their parents. There was no guard around. I approached the canvas the child had touched, a miniature precursor of, or study for, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. I double-checked no one was around and, since the world was ending, touched the painting myself.

While I was attempting to hail a cab back to El Barrio Gótico, the rain intensified. I tried to reenter the museum, but couldn’t find my ticket, and the guard refused to let me pass. I crossed the street and ducked into a video-game arcade that had a few of the electronic gambling machines old men were always playing; such arcades were everywhere in Spain, but I’d never been inside one. I walked to the end of the arcade, past various flashing lights and blaring soundtracks and one or two kids, until I arrived at a car-shaped game in which I could sit down. I was dripping. I leaned my head against the wheel and felt the full force of my shame. I wasn’t capable of fetching coffee in this country, let alone understanding its civil war. I hadn’t even seen the Alhambra. I was a violent, bipolar, compulsive liar. I was a real American. I was never going to flatten space or shatter it. I hadn’t seen The Passenger, a movie in which I starred. I was a pothead, maybe an alcoholic. When history came alive, I was sleeping in the Ritz. A blonde woman, if that’s the word, with exaggerated breasts and exaggerated eyes, was waving a checkered flag on the screen before me. I dare you to play again, she said in English.

I left the arcade. It had stopped raining. I hailed a cab to El Barrio Gótico. When the cabdriver attempted to make small talk, I said in Spanish that I didn’t speak Spanish. He said one or two things to me in English and, when I didn’t respond, French. When we arrived at the neighborhood’s edge, I overpaid him and resumed my search. After a few minutes, I thought I saw the first café, the one I’d entered upon leaving Teresa. I went down every street radiating out from the café but could not locate the hotel. It had been how many hours? I was beginning to find it a little difficult to breathe, the prodrome of panic. I asked an elderly man what time it was; it was six or seven something, alarmingly late. I entered what might have been the same café where I’d eaten the tortilla, all the cafés were by this point interchangeable, ordered sparkling water and tried to relax. I felt like the right thing to do should have been obvious. I felt another Isabel-related pang. I longed for the Alhambra and cursed the spidery Sagrada Familia. I ordered a real drink and considered calling my parents, asking their advice, and felt embarrassed; I considered getting a hotel room, going to sleep, figuring everything out tomorrow. By the third drink, I was considering leaving not only Barcelona, but Spain altogether, and never seeing Teresa again. Were the links that tenuous?

When night was imminent the panic was upon me, a thin layer of cold foil under my skin. I took a tranquilizer. I left the café and began to walk the neighborhood again. Within three minutes of leaving the café I found myself before what was unmistakably our hotel. Only when illuminated by streetlights did I recognize the façade. My first reaction was fury, not relief; fury that it had been here all along. My fury dissipated into worry about what I would tell Teresa. The panic, at least, was gone, replaced with an almost painful sobriety. I wondered if Teresa was still there and entered the hotel to find out. The woman behind the desk looked at me significantly and picked up the phone. I ran up the stairs and knocked on the door and Teresa opened it. She turned immediately back into the room and I followed her. Her little bag was packed and on the bed.

“I have been lost all day,” I said. It sounded like a lie.

“Why didn’t you call me?” she asked. She was disconcertingly calm.

“I don’t have your phone number,” I said.

“I have given you my number many times,” she said, which was true.

“I don’t have it. I’m sorry. I have spent twelve hours walking around this neighborhood,” I said, feeling the exhaustion.

“You walked around the neighborhood all day,” she asked, as if she knew everywhere I’d been.

“And I walked down Las Ramblas to the water and I went to the Picasso museum. I thought that maybe you were there,” I said.

“You went to the beach and you went to a museum,” she confirmed. It did sound outrageous.

“I went to the beach to think before looking for the hotel again.” I couldn’t remember the Spanish expressions for “clear my head” or “gather my thoughts.” “And I went to the museum because I thought you were maybe there.” It didn’t sound right. Of course she wouldn’t have gone to the museum. “I’m sorry,” I said. I wanted to defend myself but my Spanish was crumbling. Somehow switching to English would mean conceding everything.

“I have to go back to Madrid,” she said flatly.

“Why?” was all I could manage.

“I’m needed at the gallery,” she said. “The night train leaves in an hour or so. We should go to the station soon.”

I blinked at her. “I’m not going back yet,” I said to our mutual surprise.

She looked at me directly for the first time since I’d returned. “Why?”

“I might not be in Barcelona again and there is a poet here I want to see,” I lied. I did not want to stay without her, but I felt it would be humiliating to return with her now like a shamed child.

She stared at me. “O.K.,” she said eventually, making herself smile. “The hotel is paid for through tomorrow at five. I’ll see you in Madrid.” She kissed me quickly on both cheeks and left. She always left a room like someone who would be right back.

I took one of the longer showers of my project. I could not represent to myself the day I had passed; it was contentless and repetitious and thus formless; now, in the steam, it was fading. The exchange with Teresa had transpired with disorienting speed. I barely dried myself and lay down and smoked and was grateful to be too tired to ruminate for long. I thought of Levin sweating out his alienation in the fields. I thought of Picasso producing masterpieces in his sleep.

__________________________

In post — March 11 Madrid, there was a flurry of activity at the foundation; there were several panels with minor politicians and major professors and local journalists and one or two fellows about the bombings and their political effects. I never attended, but I skimmed the e — mails. When I got back from Barcelona, there was a message from one of María José’s assistants inviting me to join a panel about “literature now,” a panel that would involve another fellow and a few local writers and literary critics; I didn’t respond. I was still trying to formulate a way to excuse myself from the panel when, a few days after the first message, I received an e — mail from María José thanking me for agreeing to participate. The panel would be held in the foundation’s auditorium on such and such evening; she looked forward to seeing me.

My terror at the prospect of the panel dovetailed with my increasing anxiety regarding what I would do when I completed my research; there were only two months of the fellowship left. I was not a sufficiently published writer to apply for jobs teaching what was called “creative writing”; Cyrus was threatening to move into his parents’ basement in Topeka if things weren’t repaired with Jane; whatever appeal Brooklyn held was diminished by the work I’d have to do in order to subsist there; I was determined never to set foot in Providence again. I had intended to apply to PhD programs in literature, but I knew people who’d intended to do that for years; I’d never gotten beyond bookmarking a few university home pages. The idea of law school occurred to me repeatedly, involuntarily, often with a shudder. In order not to worry about the particulars of what I would do upon my return, I framed my decision as a choice between staying and going, as if that decision had to precede, was independent of, where in particular I would go and what, in either event, I would actually do. In the final phase of my research, as the days continued to lengthen and warm, I evaluated every meal, conversation, and walk in terms of whether or not it justified or invalidated staying on. I was at once more distant and more proximal to my own experience than ever before; on the one hand, my attention was redoubled: every bite of food or phrase of overheard conversation or slant of light or corner of the museum was information for me to mull as I made my decision; on the other hand, whatever the object of my intensified attention, it was immediately abstracted into my ruminations about the future.

Arturo had said in Rafa’s presence that if I stayed in Spain I could have a room at Rafa’s house for as long as I liked, and Rafa had nodded his assent; the prospect of being a writer in residence in a modern palace frequented by the beautiful was not without its allure, however exhausting it would be for my face. Or, with my Ivy League degree, I could certainly find a job teaching English for corporations or rich kids; most Americans in Madrid made a living thus; they paid you under the table in cash so you didn’t need a visa, and being in Spain illegally for a white American was no problem whatsoever. I didn’t need to worry about health insurance, it might also have occurred to me, especially with the Socialists in power. The people I loved could come and visit. But in certain moments, I was convinced I should go home, no matter the mansion, that this life wasn’t real, wasn’t my own, that nearly a year of being a tourist, which is what I indubitably was, was enough, and that I needed to return to the U.S., be present for my family, and begin an earnest search for a mate, career, etc. Prolonging my stay was postponing the inevitable; I would never live away from my family and language permanently, even if I could work out the logistics, and since I knew that to be the case, I should depart at the conclusion of my fellowship, quit smoking, and renew contact with the reality of my life; that would be best for me and my poetry.

In other moments, however, the discourse of the real would seem to fall on the side of Spain; this, I would say to myself, referring to the hemic taste of chorizo or the aromatic spliff or both of those things on Teresa’s breath, this is experience, not because things in Iberia were inherently more immediate, but because the landscape and my relation to it had not been entirely standardized. There would of course come a point when I would be familiar enough with the language and terrain that it would lose its unfamiliar aspect, a point at which I would no longer see a stone in Spain and think of it as, in some essential sense, stonier than the sedimentary rocks of Kansas, and what applied to stones applied to bodies, light, weather, whatever. But that moment of familiarization had not yet arrived; why not stay until it was imminent? Maybe if I remained I would pursue the project described so many months ago in my application, composing a long and research-driven poem, whatever that might mean, about the literary response to the Civil War, exploring what such a moment could teach us about “literature now.” My Spanish would rapidly improve; I would not read Ashbery or Garnett or anything else in English, but hurl myself headlong at the Spanish canon; I would become the poet I pretended to be and realize my project. I would buy a phone and consummate my relationship with Teresa.

I was amazed to find myself protective of my poetry, comparing my options’ conduciveness to writing as though obliged to do so by my genius, a genius I knew I didn’t have; no duende here, I would think to myself, checking my body for sensation, no deep song. But my research had taught me that the tissue of contradictions that was my personality was itself, at best, a poem, where “poem” is understood as referring to a failure of language to be equal to the possibilities it figures; only then could my fraudulence be a project and not merely a pathology; only then could my distance from myself be redescribed as critical, aesthetic, as opposed to a side effect of what experts might call my substance problem, felicitous phrase, the origins of which lay not in my desire to evade reality, but in my desire to have a chemical excuse for reality’s unavailability. But wasn’t my relationship with substance also fake? I never injected anything; if I started pissing blood, I’d go to a doctor, not a bar; I planned to quit everything except social drinking, the appropriate dosage of my pills, and an occasional, whimsical smoke; I was destined to reproduce the bourgeois family, no matter how much I dreaded the prospect or wanted it postponed. Or was that the lie, the claim that my excessive self-medication was simulated; was the lie that I was in fact bound for health and respectability and so should enjoy getting fucked up while I could; had I stepped into the identity I projected, the identity of an addict; had the effort to prolong my adolescent experimentation indefinitely shaded imperceptibly into fearsome if mundane dependence, had mythomania become methomania? I less thought than felt these things on my skin as I wandered the city.

I was surprised one afternoon when I returned from El Retiro to see mail sticking out of the mailbox I almost never checked; it was a flyer for the panel. My nervousness was compounded by how serious it looked, including photos of the foundation’s guests: Javier Torres, a novelist and book critic for El País, whose headshot made him look like a presidential candidate; Elena López Portillo, professor of literature at UCM, who looked distinguished, gray headed in front of her bookcases; Teresa Solano, translator, poet, visual artist, and curator, who was pictured squinting and smoking and engaged in conversation; and Francesc Balda, a thirty-something Catalan novelist and political journalist, handsome, also smoking, facing the camera, shaved head. Two fellows working in relevant fields would join the panel, the flyer said. I stood there looking at Teresa’s picture for a long time, letting it sink in. I had not mentioned the panel to her because I was afraid she would insist on attending, but that didn’t explain why she hadn’t mentioned it to me; I saw her almost every day. I felt her inclusion was an act of aggression, an attack on me from María José, who wanted to humiliate me in front of Teresa; Teresa wanted to humiliate me in front of the foundation. I was furious and felt betrayed, but I was also disconcerted to discover, to be discovering so late, that Teresa had a reputation that could justify her presence in such company; according to the internet, Balda and Torres were famous, López Portillo was the world’s leading authority on several Spanish poets, and then there was Teresa; why hadn’t I ever Googled her before? She wasn’t famous, but she had a forthcoming book of poems, her translations from Catalan and French had appeared in the major periodicals, and she had won various prizes for emerging writers. Visual artist? I knew she had published translations, but I didn’t know about the forthcoming book; we had never exchanged a word about her poetry, and it somehow never occurred to me to be curious about her standing in the literary circles, whatever they were.

When I finished reading about Teresa, I set out immediately for her apartment, a thirty- or forty-minute walk from Huertas. When I had returned from Barcelona, I had feared the worst, that Teresa was through with me, and for the first couple of days I could not find her at her apartment or the gallery. Finally she came by my apartment with new drafts of her translations; she betrayed no anger or irritation or newly established distance. Now that it was heating up, she was wearing a tank top and I could see her dark shoulders and the back I’d wept down. I apologized again for getting lost and told her how embarrassing the whole thing was. She said she had been worried and irritated but insisted, largely with her smile, that it was no big deal. When she asked me what poet I met up with, I gave her a name I had found on the internet and was relieved when she said she’d never heard of him. I said it was an awkward, boring conversation, and that I wished I’d returned with her. In fact I had awoken early and taken the first train back to Madrid. From that time on I saw Teresa almost every afternoon and often spent the night at her apartment; while we continued to kiss and fool around, we did not make love. This struck me as strange, but not worrisome; maybe I liked protecting the idea of our making love from clumsy attempts at its actualization. I told myself that we were taking it slow, that our connection to one another was so ardent, it had to be managed with extreme care; maybe Teresa was waiting to hear that I would stay in Spain before giving herself more fully to our relationship. That she made out with or maybe fucked Carlos and various other pretty boys, while filling me with jealous rage, only supported my theory of our exceptionality; if she didn’t find me attractive, she would have long since stopped seeing me; and if she did find me attractive, why would such a physically uninhibited person decline to sleep with me? Only, I reasoned, because she was shielding herself from the intensity of her own emotions. But now the panel somehow cast all this in doubt. As I cut through Chueca and passed near the site of our first meeting, I began to suspect she was merely toying with me, that for whatever reason, maybe because she thought I had seen Isabel in Barcelona, she was going to reveal to the foundation and her distinguished peers that I was, at best, a charlatan.

By the time I reached her building, I was hot and thirsty and indignant. Some kind of courier, cardboard tube tucked under his arm, was leaving the building when I arrived, so I didn’t ring the bell. The elevator did not require the key and when the doors opened, I did not see her. Then I heard the shower. I drank a glass of water, poured myself a real drink, and sat down on her couch. I was glad she would be shocked to see me, maybe scream; I was shocked to see her on the flyer. Fuck you, I said to the cat, who was blinking its knowing blink.

She wasn’t shocked. She emerged wrapped in a towel, saw me, approached and kissed me, then walked to her closet to select her clothes.

“We’re on the panel together,” I said flatly, watching the action of her shoulders as she searched through her wardrobe.

“Yes,” she said.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” I asked, attempting to betray no anger.

“I thought you knew. María José told me you were on the panel and I assumed you were the one who asked her to invite me.” I was reluctant to admit it was reasonable.

“I’m not going to do it,” I said.

“Why?” she asked, but didn’t seem particularly to care.

“Because I have nothing to say. Because I don’t speak good Spanish. Because literature isn’t politics.” My intensity was misplaced.

She pulled on jeans and a white tank top, which made her skin appear darker. She sat down beside me. “I have known you for six or seven months,” she said, almost sadly. “We only speak Spanish. When are you going to admit that you can live in this language?” she asked.

I was touched by this, mainly because I thought she was inviting me to live in Spanish with her, to stay beyond the fellowship. My anger dissipated. “I can live in this language with you, but not with María José and the foundation. Besides, I have nothing to say about ‘literature now,’” I said.

Again there was something like sadness: “Adam, you are a wonderful poet, a serious poet. If I weren’t sure about that, why would I be translating you? When are you going to stop pretending that you’re only pretending to be a poet?” She said only my name in English.

“You project what you pretend to discover in my poetry,” I said in English.

She took my cigarette from me and I lit another. “No,” she said simply, whether in English or Spanish I couldn’t tell.

We sat in silence and I wondered if Teresa was right; was I in fact a conversationally fluent Spanish speaker and a real poet, whatever that meant? It was true that when I spoke to her in Spanish I was not translating, I was not thinking my thoughts in English first, but I was nevertheless outside the language I was speaking, building simple sentences with the blocks I’d memorized, not communicating through a fluid medium. But why didn’t I just suck it up, attend the panel, and share my thoughts in my second language without irony? They wanted the input of a young American poet writing and reading abroad and wasn’t that what I was, not just what I was pretending to be? Maybe only my fraudulence was fraudulent. Regardless, Teresa’s presence would protect me, not humiliate me; that she had selected my work to translate would lend it prestige, underwrite it, so to speak, and she would intervene if I talked myself into a corner at any point. I would be nervous and maybe it would be awkward but it would not be disastrous; María José would be placated, and my relation to Teresa would be publicized, helping to establish us in our own minds as a couple. I could send a copy of the fancy flyer to my mother. I leaned over and kissed her; she smelled like smoke and, because of the soap, lavender.

“I’m not going back to the United States,” I heard myself say.

Her eyes widened and I thought her smile diminished. “Really?”

“I mean I’m not going back in June,” I said. “I will probably go back eventually,” I said. I was waiting for her to be excited.

“Good,” she said, but my stomach sank at her lack of emotion. Or was it my heart.

“I’ll write and teach English and travel,” I said to say something.

“Good,” she repeated, with more, but insufficient, emotion, as the smile returned fully to her face. “You can come with me to Córdoba in June and meet my family,” she said. I was reassured; she was thinking long term. She did not, however, seem to be thinking of the long term with excitement.

“I would like to,” I said, careful not to sound excited myself. “And I would like to spend more time in Barcelona,” I said, inviting her with my eyebrows to consider whether Isabel or another woman might be awaiting me there. “And to go back to Granada,” I added, to make sure Isabel was evoked. “I never saw the Alhambra.”

“You went to Granada but didn’t see the Alhambra,” she confirmed, squinting.

“Yes,” I said. I hoped she thought I was too busy making passionate love to Isabel to see the sights. “Arturo and Rafa said I could stay at Rafa’s,” I said, and stared at her hard, gauging her response.

“Yes, I know,” she said, implying they had discussed it, but not revealing which side of the discussion she was on.

“But I’ll probably just keep my apartment,” I said.

“Yes, stay in the city,” she said. Then, “Stay here, where I am.” Now she sounded excited. She kissed me with unusual intensity and boundless, if blurry, prospects opened up.

Only an hour or two later, when we were leaving the apartment to get dinner, did the fact that I did not in reality know if I was staying in Madrid begin to bother me, and the fact that it took so long for it to bother me also began to bother me. What would Teresa say if I told her I had changed my mind, that I had decided, after all, to return to the States? As we walked back into Chueca, the plaza bustling now in late spring weather, and stood in line for a table at the restaurant, Bazaar, I decided I didn’t care what she’d think; all of this, all of Spain, would cease to be real if I went back; it would be my year abroad, a year cast out of the line of years, a last or nearly last hurrah of juvenility, but it would not, in any serious sense, form part of my life. I would not stay in touch with Teresa or Arturo, not to mention Isabel; I would compose a one- or two-sentence summary of my time in Spain for those who queried me about my experience abroad, but I would otherwise recall a blur of hash and sun and maybe that kid with blood streaming down his face; everything else would be excised. If this didn’t strike me as a ruthless or stupid way to think, that was because I could not believe Teresa would ultimately mind; we would have the chapbook as a memento and she would begin her next project, thinking of me no more and probably less than she thought of Carlos, Abel, whoever that guy was at Rafa’s party, et al. Eventually we were seated, ate things draped in various oils, drank two or three bottles of dry cava, and discussed Gaudí, Topeka, Lorca, New York, Córdoba, Orson Welles. I believed I contributed intelligent things, speaking and understanding effortlessly. We were drunk by the time we finished dinner and as we wound our way back to her apartment I thought to myself, this is wonderful, the life I lead here, no matter if it’s mine.

The two days I spent before the panel, however, were not wonderful, were definitely my own; a low-level but constant panic had come upon me; I couldn’t stop grinding my teeth. Maybe I could just be silent, not say a single word, but use my face to modulate my silence and let that be my contribution; surely the more distinguished panelists would hold forth, hold court. I didn’t answer the buzzer and I didn’t leave the apartment. I wrote out a few sentences of wide applicability with the help of my dictionary and attempted to commit them to memory: “No writer is free to renounce his political moment, but literature reflects politics more than it affects it, an important distinction.” I searched the internet for short quotes from Ortega y Gasset, who I had at one time thought was two people, like Deleuze and Guattari, Calvin and Hobbes. I figured out how to say: “I’m hesitant to speak about the Spanish condition as if I were an expert; to do so would be to fulfill the stereotypes regarding American presumptuousness.” Each time I mangled a quote, I grew more nervous. I was less concerned about exposing my ignorance of Spanish poetry than I was about exposing my ignorance of Spanish period. I might be able to produce several grammatically perfect sentences on the cuff, or is it off, but I might not; better to mimic spontaneous if oblique pronouncements than to rely on real-time fluency.

On the day of the panel I left the apartment almost two hours early. I walked to the foundation’s building, which was not far from Teresa’s, then circled the block, practicing my memorized passages, reminding myself to breathe. I had three tranquilizers in the pocket of my jeans. I put my hand in my pocket to confirm their presence and contact with the denim made me exclaim internally: Why, in the name of God, was I wearing jeans? And worse: a T-shirt. In two days of panicky anticipation I had failed to concern myself with my appearance. I felt nauseated as I imagined the men in suits, María José and the professor in pantsuits; Teresa would appear elegant in whatever she wore. I asked a man at a kiosk for the time; I had a little more than an hour; if I hurried, nearly ran, I could make it. I was telling myself it was a terrible idea to get sweaty and risk being late, but I was telling myself this as I rushed back to my apartment, flew up the stairs, and looked for my suit. Thankfully, and uncharacteristically, I had hung it up after the single time I wore it, and if it wasn’t pressed, it was nevertheless passable. I changed as quickly as I could, checked myself in the mirror, and flew back down the stairs. I slowed down a block from the foundation, wiped the sweat from my face, and tried to catch my breath.

I entered the building and made my way to the auditorium; to my horror, it was considerably larger than I expected, seating perhaps two hundred people, and it was full; I had anticipated a glorified conference room. I saw someone setting up a video camera on a tripod. There was a little stage, and on the stage a table with chairs, placards, a swan-shaped jug of water, glasses, and individual microphones; the stage was intensely illuminated. Four of the six panelists, including Teresa, were already seated, chatting with one another. I hesitated near the door, a little dazed; María José saw me, approached, and said, perhaps sarcastically, that I looked very elegant, then asked me to take my seat. The other fellow, she told me as she walked me toward the stage, was not able to join us. She arranged this, I told myself, enraged; as the only American, I would have to speak and the panelists or audience members would, if only out of politeness, ask me for my “perspective.” I took my place at the table and received Teresa’s smile; she looked no less comfortable on stage than in her living room, although she was wearing some kind of charcoal ensemble that made me glad I’d changed clothes. I tried to smile back and saw the other panelists had pens and paper, presumably to take notes, whereas I had brought nothing, a sign of presumptuousness.

A movie I had never seen.

Soon María José ascended the stage. The crowd quieted down as she walked to a standing microphone I had not seen. She thanked everyone for coming to tonight’s discussion. She then proceeded to introduce the panelists, noting, when she got to me, that a bilingual selection of my poems was shortly forthcoming, and she said we would begin the evening by asking each of the panelists to speak informally for one or two minutes about the topic, “literature now.” We would begin with Javier Torres, who was seated on the end of the table nearest María José, and work our way across; I was second from last.

Again the anger rose inside me; surely María José had told the other panelists to prepare a few minutes of remarks, but had somehow neglected to say as much to me. But as Javier Torres began to speak in his politician’s voice, a voice that fit his headshot perfectly, a voice that sounded like it came not from a body but a screen, my anger was nothing compared to my anxiety; I had no idea what to say. I reached into my pocket for my tranquilizers and realized, no doubt blanching, that I had failed to transfer them to my suit pants from my jeans. I felt a surge of terror so intense I was dizzy; it was like I was looking down into the space between the winding stairs of the Sagrada Familia, a view I’d never seen. Somehow Teresa, next after Javier, was already speaking; soon it would be my turn. The audience was invisible from the stage because of the lights but I could sense its presence, its attentiveness; Teresa made a joke and they laughed and the many-headed laughter was terrible to me. Elena López Portillo was talking now; I wiped the sweat from my brow. If I’d brought paper, I managed to think, I could have composed something coherent. Use your memorized lines, I told myself, but could not remember them. I was going to flee or vomit or faint.

But a line materialized. Elena López Portillo had ceased to speak and I could feel a change in pressure on my face, the effect of the audience focusing its eyes upon me. I heard myself say, my voice sounding to me as though it issued from the back of the auditorium, from deep within the audience itself, “Ortega y Gasset wrote ‘By speaking, by thinking, we undertake to clarify things, and that forces us to exacerbate them, dislocate them, schematize them. Every concept is in itself an exaggeration.’” I paused, and could feel the silence tighten, as the audience attempted to take the quotation in. I was encouraged enough by my own prefabricated fluency and by the fact that I did not sound nervous or crazy, to add: “My fear about this panel is that we are in a hurry to define a period, to speak of literature now; every period, like every concept, is in itself an exaggeration. I hope to hear from others what changed on March 11 that permits we to speak,” my grammar faltered, but I could see the sentence’s end, “of a new now, of a new period, without dislocation.” I stopped there, making my brevity seem the issue of my pithiness and courage, the courage to contest the concept of the panel, when in fact I didn’t want to use up any more of my quotations. A murmur of interest ran through the crowd; a current of adrenaline coursed through my body. I glanced at Teresa as Francesc Balda began to speak and I thought her smile communicated pride in me. Now I could attempt to listen to the other panelists; Francesc Balda began by stressing the importance of my point; he shared my healthy suspicion of neat distinctions between a pre-this and a post-that; indeed, perhaps literature’s role was to help us keep our perspective, to take the long view, to allow us to link our “now” to various past “nows” in order to form an illuminating constellation. He then went on to describe something about Catalan literature and its relation to political violence that I failed to follow.

After our brief remarks, María José thanked us and said we’d now take questions from the audience, that microphones were in the aisles, if needed. The house lights were raised a little. The first questions were for particular panelists, but not for me, and I felt increasingly confident that I would be required to speak very little for the remainder of the panel. Someone asked Teresa how she thought her perspective on the relationship between politics and art differed from, say, Elena’s because she had never experienced Franco, being born so near his death, and at some point during her answer, she said something about everyone reflecting his or her historical moment. In a burst of bravado I leaned into my microphone and added: “I agree. No writer is free to renounce his political moment, but literature reflects politics more than it affects it, an important distinction.” Again the murmur, whether of agreement or disagreement, I couldn’t tell, but certainly no one suspected me of being a monolingual fraud; it was a respectable point made well.

But it was stupid to have talked; now Elena, distinguished professor, directed a question at me: “Then why write at all?” She said it without malice, but I was unequivocally the addressee, and I was now required to respond, and against the backdrop of my memorized quip, my speech would seem all the more halting and confused. Any answer would do, cryptic or funny, but I was unable to locate my Spanish; time was passing and I’d parted my lips, but I could not formulate any response. Finally, I said: “I don’t know.” Luckily, Javier took this up as a serious answer, offering a cliché about the art choosing the artist as much as the artist chooses the art. I would not repeat, I promised myself, the mistake of speaking unless forced to speak. The panel continued and there was a long exchange with Francesc about a Catalan writer I’d never heard of, and a skirmish with Javier about El País’s coverage of some political affair. There were multiple questions for Teresa about her participation in the protests, the possibility of literature as protest, and so on, but I had trouble comprehending her answers. Whenever my fear decreased, a profound fatigue, a fatigue that made concentration as impossible as the fear, broke over me. It was when I was emerging from a spell of fatigue that I realized a question had been addressed to me.

“Can you repeat the question, please?” I asked.

“What Spanish poets have had the greatest influence on your writing and your thinking about the relationship between poetry and political events?” was more or less what I thought he said.

To avoid a long period of silence resulting in another “I don’t know,” I threw him a quotation barely related to his question, if at all: “I’m hesitant to speak,” I said, “about Spanish literature as if I were an expert; to do so would be to fulfill the stereotypes regarding American presumptuousness.” Why it was presumptuous to list Spanish poets I admired was anybody’s guess.

“But who are the poets who have influenced you personally?” the man repeated. This question, perhaps offered out of sympathy for how few queries had been addressed to me, could not have been easier to answer. Just list a few names. “Lorca,” I lied. “Miguel Hernández.” But then, to my horror and amazement, I could not think of another poet; my head was emptied of every Spanish proper name; I couldn’t even think of common names to offer as though they were little known authors. Forget annotating the list, explaining how one poet’s sense of line or of the social influenced my own poetic practice, or relating these poets to my previous comments: just list a few fucking names. Finally I thought of two famous poets I’d barely read: Juan Ramón Jiménez and Antonio Machado, but the names collided and recombined in my head, and I heard myself say: “Ramón Machado Jiménez,” which was as absurd as saying “Whitman Dickinson Walt,” and a few people tittered. I corrected myself, but it came out wrong again: “Antonio Ramon Jimenez,” and now those who were baffled understood my unforgivable error, so extreme they might have at first suspected it was an ironic gesture; several people laughed. The celebrated American fellow cannot get four names deep into the list of the most famous Spanish poets of the twentieth century. “Jiménez and Machado,” I finally said, at least separating the poets out, but it was too late; I had embarrassed myself, the foundation, and I had ruined everything with Teresa. María José said we would take only one more question because of time, but surely she meant because of shame, because of the great shame the foundation felt at sponsoring an American phony, although she was no doubt personally delighted with the scene.

When I confirmed the last question wasn’t for me, I didn’t listen; I just counted the seconds until María José thanked us and asked the crowd to applaud, made some announcement about another panel, asked the crowd to applaud again, and then the lights were fully on and the audience slowly began to leave its seats. Before I could flee, Teresa was upon me, smiling as if nothing had happened, assuring me I had done wonderfully, then chatting with the other panelists. I sat there and said to myself: You’ll be gone in six weeks. You will never see any of these people again. María José cannot nullify your fellowship because you mangled names. None of this matters. Not Teresa or the panel or Spain or Spanish literature or literature in general. Now María José was thanking each of the panelists in turn; she reached me and said my contributions had been brilliant. I smiled a mirthless smile that communicated infinite disdain and thanked her. To myself I was saying: You don’t love Teresa and she doesn’t love you. None of this is real. You don’t like Madrid, with its tourists and dust and heat and innumerable Pietàs and terrible food. The fucking fascists. You are ready to quit smoking, to clean up, to return to friends and family. You have outgrown poetry. You will be a legitimate scholar or a lawyer but you are done with Teresa and hash and drinking and lying and lyric and the intersections thereof. I have never been here, I said to myself. You have never seen me.

__________________________

In the last phase of my research fireflies were disappearing. Bats were flying around confused in the middle of the day, colliding with each other, falling into little heaps. Bees were disappearing, maybe because of cell phone radiation, maybe because of perfume, maybe because of candy. It was the deadliest day since the invasion began. Unmanned drones made sorrowful noise overhead. It was 1933. The cities were polluted with light, the world warming. The seas were rising. The seas were closing over future readers. Confused trees were blooming early; you could view the pics from space online. It was 1066, 312. Why not let the children touch the paintings? You could see the hooded prisoners in orange jumpsuits behind the concertina wire. I was standing before The Descent, oil on oak, hash and caffeine; I hadn’t been there in a while and the blue was startling. 1936, 1492, 800, 1776. Meanwhile, life’s white machine. The great artist and the museum guard. Having nothing to say and saying it into a tiny phone. ¿Porqué nací entre espejos? I wondered if the guard in the Reina Sofía ever wore her necklace. Before the reading, I had a couple of hours to kill. Bajo el agua / siguen las palabras. I left the museum for the park.

It was a beautiful day, unseasonably cool, and the park was crowded; there were puppet shows and portraitists near El Estanque. The hash dealers were back, or reinforcements had arrived, milling around the trees. I found a bench and opened my chapbook; it was wonderfully made, its quality anachronistic, befitting a dead medium. Letterpressed on Italian paper, hand sewn. Arturo had printed a thousand copies. Teresa’s name only appeared on the front matter, as she had insisted. Arturo had invited everybody to the reading and celebration. I’d even agreed to forward the announcement to my entire inbox, although I only knew four or five people in Spain. I was wearing my suit. I’d received an e — mail María José sent out to all the fellows informing them about the event. Come celebrate a wonderful accomplishment, etc. For whatever reason, I wasn’t nervous. Maybe Elena López Portillo would attend and write an essay on my work. Maybe Isabel would bring Oscar, whom I imagined as Carlos. Teresa said her publisher was considering asking me for a book. Under the water / the words go on. I would have liked to kiss Rufina. Over the course of my research, I’d lost considerable weight. Other than that, I didn’t think I’d undergone much change.

It would cost a hundred euros to change an international ticket, less than a meal at Zalacaín. The museum guard, the bathroom attendant, the economic mode. I walked to the colonnade and listened to the drummers. The sun was just beginning to set, and the light had softened, but there would be some light until nearly ten. I sat and smoked and, for whatever reason, thought: Teresa should read the originals; I’ll read the translations. My accent, when I read, was good, much better, I didn’t know why, than when I spoke. I sat on the colonnade and read a poem or two aloud in Spanish; I didn’t hear an American accent.

I eventually made my way to the gallery, which I was pleased to see was overflowing. If I was nervous, it was only about the fact that I wasn’t nervous, which might mean something was wrong with me. I was greeted by various people: María José was surprisingly warm; we kissed each other without irony. One of the swimmers I had smoked with caught the corner of my mouth. I found Teresa, who looked stunning, and we kissed each other on the lips. She was wearing a dress that was probably satin, silver, very simple, but unmistakably expensive. We didn’t know many working people. I told her about my idea, that we’d swap parts in the reading, and although there were trace amounts of sadness in her smile, she agreed.

There was a bar and, to my surprise, a bartender. I asked him for white wine. While he was pouring my wine, Jorge approached me; he must have been in my inbox. We embraced each other warmly. He said something about how far my Spanish had come, about the fancy people I’d fallen in with, how he’d tell people in the future all about the famous poet he tutored and sold drugs to. I asked him if he could name a famous living poet. He couldn’t.

“Is Isabel back in Madrid?” I asked him.

“What do you mean?” he said.

“Is she back from Barcelona?” I asked.

“When did she go to Barcelona?” he asked, puzzled.

“Is she working at the language school again?” I asked.

“She never stopped working at the language school,” he said.

“Oh,” I said. I waited for an emotional reaction to this news, to be thrilled or angry or at least suspicious. Had she made up the Oscar story? Had she changed her mind? Had he come early? I waited, but only felt a little curious; I was otherwise unmoved. I wondered if she was in the crowd. I wondered again if there were something wrong with me.

There was a table with stacks of the chapbook for sale; it was strange to see so many copies of my name. They cost ten euros, which seemed like a lot. Arturo came up to me and hugged me and I thanked him for everything. You can make it up to me, he said, by sweeping the floors of the gallery in the coming months. He said we were about to begin and that I should sit in the front with Teresa, which I did. People stopped talking and those that couldn’t find seats sat on the floor or stood in the back. I was a little nervous now, but not unpleasantly so; I thought about my tranquilizers in my suit jacket pocket only because I was surprised not to want one. Arturo appeared at the podium and began to speak. Night-blooming flowers refused to open near the stadium lights. Freedom was on the march. Aircraft noise was having strange effects on finches. Some species synchronized their flashes, sometimes across thousands of insects, exacerbating contradictions. Why was I born between mirrors?

Teresa would read the originals and I would read the translations and the translations would become the originals as we read. Then I planned to live forever in a skylit room surrounded by my friends.