Leaving the Atocha Station (21 page)

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.

CREDITS

Page 11: Detail of
The Descent from the Cross,
by Rogier van der Weyden (ca. 1435).

Page 52: Photo of the bombing of Guernica, 1937. Reprinted from the German Federal Archives (Deutsches Bundesarchiv).

Page 90: “Clepsydra” from
Rivers and Mountains,
by John Ashbery. Reprinted by permission of George Borchardt, Inc., on behalf of the author.

Page 103:
The Alhambra,
by Esther Singleton—Original from
Turrets, Towers, and Temples: The Great Buildings of the World, as Seen and Described by Famous Writers,
by Esther Singleton (NY: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1898). Reproduction by Liam Quin (http://www.fromoldbooks.org).

Page 143:
Francisco Franco,
1958 is used by permission of Ramón Masats, copyright © Ramón Masats, 1958.

Page 173: Detail of a production still from
The Passenger
(1975).

COLOPHON

Leaving the Atocha Station
was designed at Coffee House Press,
in the historic Grain Belt Brewery’s Bottling House near downtown Minneapolis.
The text is set in Spectrum.

FUNDER ACKNOWLEDGMENT

Coffee House Press is an independent nonprofit literary publisher. Our books are made possible through the generous support of grants and gifts from many foundations, corporate giving programs, state and federal support, and through donations from individuals who believe in the transformational power of literature. Coffee House Press receives major operating support from the Bush Foundation, the McKnight Foundation, from Target, and from the Minnesota State Arts Board, through an appropriation from the Minnesota State Legislature and from the National Endowment for the Arts. Coffee House also receives support from: three anonymous donors; Elmer L. and Eleanor J. Andersen Foundation; Around Town Literary Media Guides; Patricia Beithon; Bill Berkson; the James L. and Nancy J. Bildner Foundation; the E. Thomas Binger and Rebecca Rand Fund of the Minneapolis Foundation; the Patrick and Aimee Butler Family Foundation; the Buuck Family Foundation; Ruth and Bruce Dayton; Dorsey & Whitney, LLP; Fredrikson & Byron, P.A.; Sally French; Jennifer Haugh; Anselm Hollo and Jane Dalrymple-Hollo; Jeffrey Hom; Stephen and Isabel Keating; the Kenneth Koch Literary Estate; the Lenfestey Family Foundation; Ethan J. Litman; Mary McDermid; Sjur Midness and Briar Andresen; the Rehael Fund of the Minneapolis Foundation; Deborah Reynolds; Schwegman, Lundberg & Woessner, P.A.; John Sjoberg; David Smith; Mary Strand and Tom Fraser; Jeffrey Sugerman; Patricia Tilton; the Archie D. & Bertha H. Walker Foundation; Stu Wilson and Mel Barker; the Woessner Freeman Family Foundation; and many other generous individual donors.