Leaving the Atocha Station (3 page)

In the first phase of my research, I knew no one except Jorge and his friends and they never invited me to do anything on weeknights; I’m not sure how they would have invited me, since I saw Jorge only on Fridays at the language school. I didn’t have a phone, and they didn’t know exactly where I lived. Since I had failed to attend any of the social events the foundation arranged, there was no one whose company I could join if I wanted to do the things one was supposed to do while in Madrid: progressing from one bar to another while getting progressively fucked up, then arriving at a multistory discoteca and dancing, if that’s even the word, to horrible techno, making out for hours, hours, then having chocolate con churros and stumbling home near dawn. This was apparently routine for a remarkable range of ages; certainly people of several generations were out very late; kids were still playing in the plaza at midnight; the late middle-aged drank into the early morning. I was unaccustomed to such hours or so much public space. While I thought of myself as superior to all the carousal I was in fact desperate for some form of participation both because I was terribly bored at night and because I was undeniably attracted to the air’s vulgar libidinal charge. Of course I could not sit in the plaza alone, although I saw men do that, guidebooks beside their beers, and I could not approach one of the innumerable roving bands and just ask to join their company, but I came to realize that I could leave my apartment and enter the flow of the night unashamed so long as I walked purposefully, pretending I had somewhere to be.

I would roll one or two spliffs and put them in a pack of cigarettes, drink a glass of water, brush my teeth, walk down the stairs and out of the apartment into the plaza. I felt as I crossed the plaza that I was observing myself from the roof of my apartment; from there I could see that I was walking too fast and I’d stop, light a spliff or cigarette, then resume walking at a less frantic pace toward Puerta del Sol, the literal center of the city, which I could reach in a few minutes. From Sol I would pause and decide where to pretend I needed to be.

Most often I walked down Gran Vía, where the prostitutes were out, smoking in front of the shuttered storefronts, dull glow of orange and purple lipstick, and eventually made my way into Chueca, a largely gay neighborhood known, so the guidebooks said, for its vibrant nightlife, but where there tended to be fewer Americans. The streets in Chueca were so narrow and its plaza so full in those months that it was easy to mill around in such a manner that people on your right assumed you were with the people on your left and vice versa. This was also true in its various overflowing bars; I could order a drink and stand looking bored in the middle of the bar and people would suppose I pertained to one of the adjacent parties; indeed, people in one large group or another often began to speak to me, assuming I was one of their number whom they hadn’t had the chance to meet. Over the general din I could hear next to nothing, but I smiled and nodded and sometimes slightly raised my glass, and henceforth turned a little more toward the group whose member had addressed me; slowly, I would be absorbed.

Which is how I met Arturo, a turning point in my project. I was at a very crowded bar in Chueca, a mixed bar with Moroccan decor and sequined pillows everywhere, drinking a cloying mojito when he arrived and began greeting the group I was orbiting. He embraced me warmly after he embraced the others and, since I was the closest to the bar, asked if I wanted a drink. While we waited to be served he asked me how I knew so and so, who I assumed had convened the gathering. I shrugged in a way that indicated everybody knew so and so. Then he asked where I was from and I lied: New York. He said either that he had recently been to New York or that he was going to New York soon. For what, I asked. He answered for a musical performance, or to perform music, or for some sort of performance art. What are you doing in Madrid, he said. Here I delivered a version of the answer I had memorized for my Spanish exam in Providence, a long answer composed by a fluent friend, regarding the significance of the Spanish Civil War, about which I knew nothing, for a generation of writers, few of whom I’d read; I intended to write, I explained, a long, research-driven poem exploring the war’s literary legacy. It was an answer of considerable grammatical complexity, describing the significance of my project in the conditional, the past subjunctive, and the future tense. To my surprise and discomfort Arturo’s interest was piqued and he peppered me with questions: have you met so and so, the scholar or poet; have you visited such and such museum or archive. It’s difficult to hear in this bar, I said. He ordered two beers and when they arrived he paid and motioned for me to follow him outside.

Outside we lit cigarettes and before he could repeat his questions I hurriedly said: my Spanish is not good. I read very well, I lied, but I don’t speak. He laughed and asked if I knew various people and when I said no, he would say, with excitement, that he had to introduce me. You’re very nice, I kept saying, which struck him as very funny. Fashionable people kept greeting him as they passed. He told me he owned or worked at a gallery in Salamanca, the ritziest neighborhood in the city, and that his brother or boyfriend was either a famous photographer, sold famous photographs, or was a famous cameraman. He said something about how his gallery was a place where poets gathered, held readings, and he spoke at length in terms I could barely follow about his own love for poetry, listing several Spanish poets of whom I’d never heard, plus the obligatory mention of Lorca. He gave me the gallery’s card, first writing a cell phone number on one side of it, then put his arm around me warmly and returned me to the group inside the bar. There everyone assumed I was a friend of Arturo’s and we exchanged names and, with the two women nearest me, Teresa and Ester, kisses on both cheeks. Arturo immediately entered into conversation and I slipped away to the bar to order another mojito, and every time thereafter I thought I might be called upon to speak, I absconded to the bar. I would ask, largely by indicating my glass or theirs and raising my eyebrows, if I could bring anyone anything; Ester disappeared after a while but I bought Teresa and Arturo several mojitos and it was when I found myself enthusiastically explaining my project to Teresa that I realized I had had too many.

I need air, I said, and left the slowly spinning bar; I intended to walk home and pass out. While I was leaning against the wall of the bar collecting myself for the walk I was surprised to find Arturo and Teresa suddenly beside me, asking if I was all right. Yes, I said, and straightened myself abruptly, causing the spins to resume, redouble; I realized I would vomit. I walked across the street where there were fewer people and a public trash can and, just before I reached it, vomited indeed. When I finished being sick, I stood up and there they were just across the street, waiting for me, Teresa smoking and Arturo proffering a bottle of water, smiling. I crossed, washed out my mouth, drank some of the water, and thanked him. We’ll drive you home, he said, we’re going to another party anyway.

I was embarrassed to tell Arturo once we were in his car that I was a ten-minute walk from home, but, as it turned out, I didn’t have to tell him anything; the joint Teresa lit and passed back to me produced a cone of intense heat in my throat, which then migrated to my chest, where it unfurled against my rib cage. I realized my tongue was numb or at least tingling and I couldn’t summon the name of my street, a situation that struck me as horrifying and hilarious. I turned my head and watched the lights slide by and found it lovely and then I realized I was saying so in English, that several minutes had elapsed and I was enumerating everything I found beautiful as we passed; streetlights, fountains, plane trees, if that’s what those were. While in the first phase of my project I very rarely spoke Spanish, I had almost never had occasion to use my English, and the latter erupted as we left the city and merged onto a highway, Arturo and Teresa having decided to take me with them to the party; maybe I had asked. With what I thought was remarkable eloquence and rhythm I described Cyrus feeding bats at dusk in Providence and seeing myself from above; I elaborated something like a theory of poetry, deadest of all media, in cadences that rose and fell so movingly I imagined Arturo and Teresa would find themselves compelled to acknowledge my profundity, all the more compelled for not comprehending me, save for occasional cognates; they would experience the periodicity of my thinking without the distraction of particular thoughts. I was speaking grammar, pure and universal, but also suggesting a higher form of music: as I listened to myself I was amazed by the exquisite sonic patterning of my English, small changes rung on fricative and glide, and these subtle aural variations were little enactments of whatever the words denoted, language becoming the experience it described. At some point I passed out.

We were parked along with many other cars in a long circular driveway and Arturo and Teresa were discussing something, Teresa playing with Arturo’s hair, calling him Arturito. We sat in front of an aggressively modern house, low to the ground, expansive, white stone and acres of glass. I caught Teresa’s eyes in the rearview mirror and she asked how I was. Arturo opened his door and we all got out of the car; I asked where we were and Arturo said, my boyfriend’s. Teresa entered the house on my arm, whether out of irony because I was a drunken American idiot brought to the party as a joke, or because she felt a vague solicitude toward me after my strange performance in the car, I didn’t know, but I could hope. As we entered the party I reminded myself to breathe. There were a lot of handsome people in the sweeping white-carpeted living room with minimalist furniture and monumental paintings on the carefully lit walls. Various people greeted us and Teresa detached from me to kiss them and I was acutely aware of not being attractive enough for my surroundings; luckily I had a strategy for such situations, one I had developed over many visits to New York with the dim kids of the stars: I opened my eyes a little more widely than normal, opened them to a very specific point, raising my eyebrows and also allowing my mouth to curl up into the implication of a smile. I held this look steady once it had obtained, a look that communicated incredulity cut with familiarity, a boredom arrested only by a vaguely anthropological interest in my surroundings, a look that contained a dose of contempt I hoped could be read as political, as insinuating that, after a frivolous night, I would be returning to the front lines of some struggle that would render whatever I experienced in such company null. The goal of this look was to make my insufficiencies appear chosen, to give my unstylish hair and clothes the force of protest; I was a figure for the outside to this life, I had known it and rejected it and now was back as an ambassador from a reality more immediate and just.

Teresa took my arm again and led me to a bar in one corner of the giant room; when we’d fixed drinks, she walked me out onto a vast patio where there was another bar and a large teardrop-shaped pool, faintly illuminated, its floor blue tile, in which more handsome people, a few women topless, splashed around. As I tried to hold the look, Teresa led me beyond the pool into a rock garden of some sort where there was a smaller group of people organized around a central figure singing and playing the guitar, the performer on a stone bench, the others on the ground, Arturo already among them; we sat down.

There ensued a battle between the music and my face. I was at first put off and threatened by the handsome countenances of the other listeners, faces that displayed an absorption I refused to believe was felt, each face carefully positioned to imply a lively interior world, faces that invited others to admire their obliviousness to others. The men tended to look down, the women slightly up; the former as if in painful concentration, the latter beatific, half-smiling, but close to tears—everyone seemed to be having a profound experience of art. Several joints were being passed among these various private worlds and I was returning to my previous heights, losing coordination in my face, my eyes still wide but now a little too wide, the hint of smile lost and with it all suggestion of detachment.

As I struggled to recompose my aspect I began to hear the music, to hear it as addressing me and not just as an excuse for the other faces to assume their poses. He was an unmistakably good singer, his range and control bespeaking years of training, not that I would know, and his guitar competent and understated in a way that showed he was an experienced performer, not competing with himself. He was careful not to raise his voice, or to let it raise itself a little on its own, and he had a delicate lilt, his phrasing wavering between speech and song, mundanity and sorrow, the melody reasserting itself only to dissolve. The lyrics were composed almost entirely of vowels and it took me a while to realize the song was Portuguese, not Spanish; I experienced the slow shading of one language into another, a powerful effect only my ignorance of both enabled. As I listened the day rewound, but not just my day: the drive, the bar, the roof of my apartment, seeing myself on the roof from a plane, boarding that plane in New York, leaving Providence, arriving in Providence when I was eighteen, etc., all the way back to Bright Circle Montessori, my dad gentle but insistent that I had to leave the car. Then Teresa was playing with my hair, as she’d been playing with Arturo’s, and I looked at her and felt an agitation I could not name. I stood quickly but quietly and left the group, walking farther away from the house and party and into the dark until I reached a wooden fence, the end of the property and the beginning of a downward slope, a few lights far below.

I no longer felt much of anything as I smoked and looked back toward the group and saw that someone, probably Teresa, was approaching, the ember of her cigarette describing little circles as she walked, the ice audible in her glass as she drew nearer, and I realized with some anxiety that she would expect me to be upset, very moved, that I needed to be so in order to justify my abrupt departure from the others. I turned back toward the fence, licked the tips of my fingers, and rubbed the spit under my eyes to make it look like I’d been crying, repeating this until I felt there would be enough moisture to catch a little light or at least make my face damp to the touch. It was Teresa, humming the song as she approached. When she reached me she asked gently if I were O.K., what was bothering me. Fine, nothing, I said, but in a way I hoped confirmed incommunicable depths had opened up inside me. We stood side by side looking down the slope and because I felt she was waiting for me to say something, I said: This is a difficult time for me. It was a stupid thing to say, but it was the only sentence I could form sufficiently freighted with mystery. Why, she asked, which surprised me, and I tried to calibrate my silence to convey less that I wasn’t comfortable telling her than that the circumstance wasn’t tellable, save maybe by guitar, certainly exceeding my Spanish, if not language in general. Tell me, she said and started to do the thing with my hair again and I thought she could see the wetness on my cheeks and I said, I was shocked to hear myself say: My mother died.