Leaving the Atocha Station (16 page)

“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.