Going Home Again (23 page)

“Oh yeah,” he said, smiling.
“De Madrid al cielo.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Next stop, heaven,” he said.

I didn’t know at the time that this refrain was meant to describe the city’s lasting impression on those who visited. People came from the outermost regions of the country, the argument went, and once they arrived they no longer wanted to go back to where they came from, such were its wonders. You stayed there, and there you died. From the provinces to Madrid, from Madrid to heaven.

I dug into my pocket and pulled out a handful of coins. “This is it, after I pay where I’m staying.” It
might have amounted to four hundred pesetas, three or four dollars.

When I placed the change on the table, one of the coins rolled off the edge and dropped to the floor. He picked it up and slipped it in his pocket. “This’ll do for now,” he said.

The next day I found the English-language bookshop highlighted by my guidebook as a hub of the ex-pat community and posted my name and services as an English teacher on the bulletin board.

I remember the beautiful light in the sky over Madrid in those early days. It seemed deeper and bluer, somehow. Everything to my mind seemed richer. The world thrummed with possibility. As the approach of early summer brought those beautiful colors down over the city, on its buildings and over the wild greens in the parks I visited almost every day, the small windows facing the interior courtyard of my new flat shimmered with heat in the late afternoon, exactly when I got home after a day of tutoring. By mid-June I had half a dozen private students, enough to cover rent and basics, but still had plenty of time to wander down a new street if something caught my interest. Back at the apartment, I’d read and prepare for the next day’s classes before going out again to explore the city by night, either alone or with my roommate. Between six and seven, for close to fifteen minutes, direct light entered the flat. I sat at the round black table where my roommate had gotten me stoned, and where I’d
since taken to eating my solitary meals, and basked for a short while in this private sunlight. It was around this time I realized that I had lost the sound of Miles’s voice in my ear. I couldn’t remember what he sounded like. And even when I was thinking hard about him, or dreaming about him, he was a vague and partial presence, as impermanent as that sliver of light.

My roommate usually left the apartment early in the morning in order to claim his preferred location at the park where four or five years later I would find myself pushing a stroller and whispering desperate lullabies to my colicky daughter. He spent his mornings chalk-drawing Raphael and El Greco imitations on the sidewalk. In the afternoons he carried his supplies to the Plaza Mayor, where he sold caricatures of Ronald Reagan and John Belushi and Helmut Kohl. He made a pretty good living at this. It was the sort of hand-to-mouth existence that appealed to us then, and for a short time we mastered it.

I started dropping by José’s shop once or twice a week. It wasn’t too far from the flat, and I went back the first time to buy a combination lock and ask for a couple of minor adjustments on the bike. But the real reason for going in was Isabel, of course. I hoped I’d see her again.

If it was later in the evening, near closing time, José and I grabbed a beer at the Estrecho Bar. Sometimes Isabel happened to pass by when walking home from the school where she’d been doing her practice teaching.
She was in the last year of a work-study program in early childhood education, with a focus on handicapped kids, at the University of Madrid. By then José had told me everything he could about her, principally, in my mind, that she was single and had been for more than two years. I liked the idea that she was in no hurry and was the sort of girl who didn’t need a boyfriend but was willing to wait till she found someone who truly interested her instead of just filling the empty space beside her.

Her father, Santiago, ran a hair salon three or four blocks from José’s shop. Orphaned during the Civil War, he had no schooling whatsoever but was a savvy businessman and an artist with a pair of scissors, according to José, who’d once brought his copy of
My Aim Is True
into the salon and asked if he could have a haircut like Elvis Costello’s, a sort of pompadour that was heavy in front and skinned down to the bristle up the back. The old women in the neighborhood lined up for Santiago’s latest stylings and for the flirtations that made their hearts flutter. He’d given his daughter not only his dark eyes but also the easy manner with people, a calm and reassuring nature, that I began to see and admire so much in her.

I’d visited the salon once or twice by then to pick her up for the language lessons we were using as our excuse to get together. At the salon her father had taken my hand and pressed hard and looked into my eyes with a smile and said that he was glad to meet someone like me because he loved his only child more than anything in the world and he could tell I was the
type of boy who understood how a father would take any bad behavior against his daughter as bad behavior against himself personally, that he would gladly and without any hesitation run such a boy out of town if anything happened to his daughter and that it was a great comfort to him to know I was of the same mind on this issue and everything between us was clear and up front. I agreed that everything was perfectly clear and up front, and he slapped me on the back and explained to his customers that I was from Canada and teaching his daughter English, and the ladies with their heads half consumed by the beehive hair dryers I’d seen only in episodes of
I Love Lucy
glanced up from their magazines and smiled politely and welcomed me to Madrid.

When Isabel walked by on the sidewalk while José and I were catching up at the bar across the street from his shop, I’d race out and haul her back in for a drink, and soon after that my friend would come up with an excuse to cut out, and the two of us would stay and talk for hours. Sometimes she’d take me around the neighborhood. The old men sitting in cafés or leaning on their canes against a storefront would greet her by name and warmly cock their heads and offer me a handshake, and for an hour I’d feel the privilege one gains when walking with a pretty girl in a foreign city, like suddenly everything is possible.

José and Isabel introduced me to their friends one night at the height of summer. Ten or twelve people
were gathered around a couple tables in a square. The guys shook my hand and slapped my back like we were childhood buddies; the girls kissed me and smiled like they knew something I didn’t.

After we took a seat, Isabel leaned forward and whispered in my ear that I was a big hit with all her friends. I hardly believed this was true at the time, but what I distinctly remember now was the smell of her hair and her skin—summer heat and sweet perfume and the faint taste of tobacco and the hint of her father’s salon. This was the first time I’d gotten close enough to smell these things, and it was rapturous. In a moment, she turned away, but I hung there like a man suspended, wishing she would lean back into me with some new whispers.

We dipped into a dozen bars and taverns that night, never staying longer than one drink in any of them. I’d never seen people move so fast before. Her friends filled me in on the basics of drinking in Madrid. They called themselves “cats,” they said, always on the move. The whole city came alive at nightfall and didn’t stop until dawn. They were all incredibly patient with my Spanish, each taking plenty of time with me and asking simple questions to help me along. At one point Isabel and I found ourselves separated from the crowd in a neighborhood where the view opened north to where that novel was set that I’d read up in rainy Santander. In half the bars in the city there were pictures of Hemingway having a drink; you just couldn’t get away from him. For some reason I’d always felt a little embarrassed to see those photographs. But on
that beautiful starry night as we stood side by side, I felt all the preconceived notions of Madrid dissolve, and suddenly the moment was ours.

“I’ll take you one day,” she said. “We have an old place there. It’s not much. But we like it.”

“Okay,” I said, leaned in and kissed her on the mouth.

She smiled and covered her lips with her hand. “Come on,” she said. “Let’s catch up.”

Had I just spoiled everything? I felt the thrill of that kiss burning inside me. But now I didn’t know if I’d made a fool of myself by misreading every signal she’d sent me over the last month and a half. In an instant I was convinced that I didn’t have a chance with Isabel. How could I have been such an idiot?

I didn’t see her the following week. I wondered if calling her might be just digging myself into a deeper hole. Maybe I’d write her a note to explain that I hadn’t understood what was going on between us and it wouldn’t happen again. I didn’t mention the kiss to José but started thinking about Holly again, and then Carmen, and all I could come up with were sad thoughts. While I tried to go about my business and stay focused, I couldn’t dodge the conclusion that I’d ruined my chances with Isabel.

The following Saturday José brought me to a bar in the Old Quarter where the same crowd as the week before was meeting. Isabel was there and as bright as ever.

“Where have you been?” she said, giving me two lovely kisses. “You’ve got to get a telephone!”

“You look great,” I said.

She hooked her arm into mine and led me around to her girlfriends, each of whom gave me that same smile again. They knew something that I didn’t, but what was it?

Near the end of the night we found ourselves in a small, dark basement bar where the party was starting to wind down. José’s wife, a Basque named Amagoya, had already left; they had a baby at home, something I still couldn’t believe. But he’d stayed on, watching the old piano player and smoking his heavy black tobacco cigarettes. Tomorrow morning wasn’t his shift, he said.

Tucking a strand of hair behind her ear, Isabel leaned forward and asked for a light.

“Sure,” I said.

Those girlfriends were still treating me like I’d saved her life, and the guys were acting like I was a long-lost brother. I thought I was making progress, or at least hadn’t guttered everything with that kiss. When the flame caught, I noticed she was missing a small piece of ear from her right earlobe.

“What happened there?” I said, pointing.

“Where?”

“The ear.”

“Aye, la oreja,”
she said, rolling her eyes in a funny-story sort of way.

“Seriously.”

“A hungry student.”

“What do you mean?”

“He bit me.
Me mordió
.” She gnashed her teeth.

“That’s terrible,” I said.

“
Hijo de puta
, more like it,” she said, leaning forward and pulling the hair back from her ear again. “Two
puntillas
.”

“Stitches?”

“That’s the word,” she said.

It was a forty-five-minute drive up to the mountain town where they’d all spent their summers as kids. That night she made a promise again to take me there, and I was hoping it wasn’t halfhearted. But she didn’t forget and stuck to her word. We drove up there the following weekend and met everyone at a bar on the main street. After an hour we drove higher up into the hills, to El Escorial, and pulled three aluminum tables together on an outdoor terrace and drank iced coffees and then walked through the old streets and a few rooms of the monastery. We ended up back at the square where we’d started, had another drink, then Isabel and I got back in her car and drove to her family’s chalet.

It was well after nine when we got there, the sky still blue and clear and thin wisps of feathery clouds touching the tops of the mountains farther north. The house, a modest three-bedroom stone building at the edge of town, was a beautiful old place, derelict, a nightmare to get back in shape, I thought, but it looked like something out of the last century and fit my idea of what a Spanish country house should look like. It
was surrounded by bramble and wild, untended fields strewn with rock. There were no other houses around. She produced a key hidden under a drain spout, and once we got inside we threw open the shutters and windows to let in the summer evening. The big stone fireplace in the main room, cold and dark, radiated the heavy dull scent of burned-down firewood.

All of her friends had chalets up here in the sierra. After a long night at the
discoteca
I’d likely end up going back to José’s place in the next village over and crashing on his couch. Maybe someone else’s, I wasn’t sure—but certainly it wouldn’t be here. That’s when Isabel took me by the hand, led me upstairs to her childhood bedroom and began undressing.

Do we fail love, or does love fail us? This was a question I couldn’t answer, and still can’t. But in a clarifying instant I was someone else now, rejuvenated by the tonic of new love. As Isabel slipped out of her clothes that night, the last of my sadness and regret slipped away from me, at least for a time. And that’s all I could ask. I had worn it too long, had tried too hard. Now I was a young man raked from the coals of his first love and brought back to flame. At that moment there was nothing more important or thrilling or hopeful in my life than the body and soul of this perfect Spanish girl standing naked in front of me.
Oh, the supple and poetic world of the heart
, I could have called out.
Oh, the endless mystery of this body
. I was taken by even more fantastical flights that evening, and after we returned from these heights, we lay fuck-drunk and soaked and smiling on Isabel’s childhood
bed and watched the sky darken and the August moon move resolutely across the open window.

After midnight we walked into the village and found our friends at a
discoteca
that sat at the end of the road overlooking a shallow valley now set in deep darkness. We went in and drank and danced. They were playing that summer’s big Spanish dance hits, great poppy music you couldn’t sit still to. Our friends knew we’d just done what we’d both wanted to do since the first hour we met. They were happy for us. They’d seen it coming from a mile off, those girlfriends and their knowing smiles.