Leaving the Atocha Station (20 page)

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.