Leaving the Atocha Station (4 page)

Poor boy, poor boy, Teresa said, embracing me, and I let my head rest on her shoulder, careful to touch her skin where my face was wet; her skin was warm, almost hot. At first I felt something like accomplishment at my performance and excitement at the contact with her body but this quickly gave way to a sinking feeling as I began to imagine my mom, how she would feel if she knew what I had done, my self-disgust giving way in turn to the fear that somehow this lie would have material effects, would kill her, or at least that, when something did in fact happen to my mother, as happen it must, I would always feel and be at least in part responsible, that whatever she suffered would be traceable in some important sense to this exact moment when I traded her life for the sympathy of an attractive stranger. I began to cry, both arms around Teresa now, real tears falling down her back as she hummed to comfort me, maybe believing me only then. When my tears subsided, we both sat down and looked out over the slope in silence. She lit a cigarette and passed it to me and began to speak.

She described the death of her father when she was a little girl, or how the death of her father turns her back into a little girl whenever she thinks of it; he had been young when he died but seemed old to her now, or he had been old when he died but in her memories grew younger. She began to quote the clichés people had offered her about what time would do, how he was in a better place, or maybe she was just offering these clichés to me without irony; then she began to talk about how Arturo had taken it, so I guessed he was her brother, about describing heaven to Arturo, how daddy was in heaven, so I guessed that he was younger. The father had been either a famous painter or collector of paintings and she had either become a painter to impress him or quit painting because she couldn’t deal with the pressure of his example or because he was such an asshole, although here I was basically guessing; all I knew was painting was mentioned with some bitterness or regret. Then without a transition or with a transition I missed she was talking about her travels in Europe and then I heard her say New York and college and she paused and as she paused my breath caught because I realized what was coming.

In fluent English she described how one night she went alone to a movie somewhere in the Village, a boring movie, she couldn’t even remember which, but when she left the movie and was debating whether to take a train or a cab back uptown the full reality of her father’s death, it had been around a year, was suddenly and for the first time upon her, and she began to cry and found a pay phone and called her mother and cried and cried and eventually her calling card ran out and she went and bought another from a kiosk and returned to the phone and called her mother and cried into the phone until the second calling card ran out. She said she often wondered if that pay phone was still there, now that everyone uses cell phones, and then faced me smiling and said that when I was back home in New York I could look for it and if it was still there I could buy a calling card and call her and we could cry together for my mom.

I THOUGHT I HAD MADE IT CLEAR TO ARTURO OVER THE COURSE OF several conversations that I would not read, that I would be happy to come to the reading, but only to listen, not that I’d understand much of what I was hearing, and while I was very flattered that he wanted to attempt translations of my poetry, I was too shy and ambivalent about my “work” in its current state to read with his accompaniment at the gallery. I was embarrassed I’d given in to his repeated requests to see my writing in the first place, writing that I’d photocopied for him out of my notebook, and which I assumed he read with Teresa’s help, as his English was terrible, just a smattering of phrases. But when he picked me up and saw me empty-handed, he told me to hurry and get my poems, that we were already late, and he was so insistent that I found myself running back up the stairs, thinking maybe he just needed to make another copy, and I grabbed my notebook and bag, and then reiterated as we drove toward the gallery that I wasn’t going to read; claro, he kept saying, which means sure.

It was getting cold; I had somehow never thought Madrid would have a winter, but I was sweating, no doubt visibly, as Arturo greeted and introduced me to the shivering smokers milling around the gallery’s glass doors. I was too nervous to catch the names of the people with whom I exchanged handshakes, but I was aware that my kissing was particularly awkward, that I had kissed one of the women on the corner of her mouth, more on her lips than on her cheek. This was a common occurrence; with a handful of clumsy exceptions when I had met particularly cosmopolitan New Yorkers one kiss on the right cheek, and various relatives when I was a child, I had almost never, prior to my project, kissed a woman with whom I was not romantically involved. I wasn’t exactly sure what would have happened if I’d tried to greet a woman by kissing her in Topeka; certainly her boyfriend would kick in my teeth if she had one, or I would be at risk of becoming her boyfriend if she didn’t. It often occurred to me that my upbringing would have been changed beyond all recognition if kissing had been common; such a dispersion of the erotic into general social circulation would have had unpredictable effects. In Providence I could have gotten away with it, but not without an air of affectation and effeminacy; regardless, I had never thought to try. But in Spain I was guilty of abusing the kissing thing, or of at least investing it with a libidinal charge it wasn’t supposed to contain, and when you were drunk or high and foreign, you could reasonably slip up and catch the corner of the mouth.

We entered the gallery and I saw Teresa and Rafa, Arturo’s boyfriend, standing next to a table with tapas and wine. I was heading in their direction, considering breaking my rule and speaking English to Teresa, asking her to explain to Arturo that I would not read and why, when I recognized, to my horror and surprise, María José from the foundation among the people perusing the gallery walls, which featured glossy black-and-white photographs of idle industrial machinery. I had met her only twice, once upon my arrival to fill out paperwork and once to turn in a brief report in English about my activities so far, a report upon which my stipend’s continued disbursement depended; both encounters were sufficiently uncomfortable to have rendered her image indelible. I had been convinced that she could see through me, that my fraudulence was completely apparent to her, which wouldn’t have required too much perspicacity on her part given the state of my Spanish, and given the fact that each time she recommended, as a way of making small talk, a poet or authority on the Spanish Civil War, I blinked and said something about the name sounding familiar, although I wasn’t sure I used the right word for “familiar.”

She saw that I saw her and approached me smiling and we exchanged kisses far from the mouth and she said something about the opportunity to hear my work, an opportunity I thought she said was particularly welcome because she hadn’t seen me at any of the foundation’s social events. Then she indicated some other Americans who I assumed were also foundation fellows; they were speaking very competent Spanish, much better than mine, but speaking it too loudly, and I managed to ask how she had heard about the reading. Apparently the gallery had added the foundation to its e–mail list starting with “my” reading.

I managed to disengage from María José and kissed Teresa and embraced Rafa and stared as coldly as possible at Arturo while I tried to figure out an escape. Arturo patted my shoulder and said everything would be fine and started flipping through his own notebook, which I assumed contained the translations, and asked me which poems I planned to read. I thought about claiming I was too ill to continue, surely I looked sufficiently pale, but I was worried that failing to appear in front of María José would somehow constitute the breaking point of my relationship with the foundation, that the total vacuity of my project would finally be revealed and I would be sent home in shame. My mouth was dry and I poured myself a glass of white wine and said I didn’t care which poems I read but that I would only read one or two. Teresa said to read the one about seeing myself on the ground from the plane and in the plane from the ground and I said, in my first expression of frustration in Spanish, that the poem wasn’t
about
that, that poems aren’t
about
anything, and the three of them stared at me, stunned. I said I was sorry, drained and refilled my glass, noting that Teresa seemed genuinely hurt; I found that to be a greater indication of her affection for me than the fact that she had favorites among my poems. We’ll read it, I said.

Everyone began to take their seats; the gallery was long and narrow with high ceilings and white walls and it was full; there were probably eighty people. There was a podium with a lamp and microphone and a small pitcher of water and as I sat with Teresa and Rafa in the fourth row, pissed off, nauseated with anxiety, searching my bag for a tranquilizer as inconspicuously as possible, Arturo approached the podium, thanked everyone for coming, then talked about the night’s program. We were lucky to have two of the most interesting new voices in Spanish and American poetry in the gallery. We would first hear from Tomás Gomez or Gutiérrez, who had won such and such prizes, and whose work had such and such characteristics, and who was also a talented painter. Then we’d hear from Adam Gordon, who was in Madrid on a prestigious fellowship, whose work was having some sort of effect on something, whose poetry was intensely political and reminiscent of a Spanish poet I’d never heard of, only instead of protesting Franco, it took on the United States of Bush. This amplified my nervousness, as it had nothing to do with my poetry, such as it was, and as Arturo sat down to applause and Tomás Gomez or Gutiérrez approached the podium, I imagined beating Arturo’s face in with the microphone or lamp.

Tomás looked less like he was going to read poetry and more like he was going to sing flamenco or weep; he did not say thank you or good evening or anything but instead paused dramatically as if to gather his strength for what would be by any measure a heroic undertaking. He had shoulder-length hair that kept falling in his eyes as he arranged his papers and he kept smoothing it back with a gesture I found studied; he struck me as a caricature of himself, a caricature of El Poeta. A few more people were trickling into the gallery and he looked at them gravely until they found seats. Then he looked back down at his paper, looked back up at the crowd, and when the silence had intensified to his liking, he uttered what I assumed was the title of his first poem: “Sea.” To my surprise this poem was totally intelligible to me, an Esperanto of clichés: waves, heart, pain, moon, breasts, beach, emptiness, etc.; the delivery was so cloying the thought crossed my mind that his apparent earnestness might be parody. But then he read his second poem, “Distance”: mountains, sky, heart, pain, stars, breasts, river, emptiness, etc. I looked at Arturo and his face implied he was having a profound experience of art.

Maybe, I wondered or tried to wonder, I’m not understanding; maybe these words have a specific weight and valence I cannot appreciate in Spanish, or maybe he is performing subtle variations on a sexist tradition of which I am not in possession. As Tomás read a third poem, “Work Dream” or “Dream Work,” I forced myself to listen
as if
the poem were unpredictable and profound, as if that were given somehow, and any failure to be compelled would be exclusively my own. The intensity of my listening did at least return strangeness to each word, force me to confront it as a sound, and then to recapture the miracle of sound opening or almost opening onto sense, and I managed to suspend my disgust. I could not, however, keep this up; it required too much concentration to hear such familiar figurations as intensely strange, even in Spanish. It was not until I began to consider the scene more generally that my interest caught: there were eighty or so people gathered to listen to this utter shit as though it were their daily language passing through the crucible of the human spirit and emerging purified, redeemed; or here were eighty-some people believing the commercial and ideological machinery of their grammar was being deconstructed or at least laid bare, although that didn’t really seem like Tomás’s thing; he was more of a crucible of the human spirit guy. If people were in fact moved, convincing themselves they discovered whatever they projected into the hackneyed poem, or better yet, if people felt the pressure to perform absorption in the face of what they knew was an embarrassing placeholder for an art no longer practicable for whatever reasons, a dead medium whose former power could be felt only as a loss—these scenarios did for me involve a pathos the actual poems did not, a pathos that in fact increased in proportion to their failure, as the more abysmal the experience of the actual the greater the implied heights of the virtual. Then I was able to hear the perfect idiocy of Tomás’s writing as a kind of accomplishment, especially combined with his unwitting parody of himself, doing that thing with his hair, gripping the podium as though the waves of emotion breaking over him might wash him from his feet, and I began to relax a little about my own performance, the tranquilizer no doubt also having its effect. I told myself that no matter what I did, no matter what any poet did, the poems would constitute screens on which readers could project their own desperate belief in the possibility of poetic experience, whatever that might be, or afford them the opportunity to mourn its impossibility. My own poetry, I told myself, would offer this to the gathering as, or even more effectively, than Tomás’s, as my poems in their randomness and disorder were in some important sense unformed, less poems than a pile of materials out of which poems could be built; they were pure potentiality, awaiting articulation. And translation would further keep my poems in contact with the virtual, as everyone must wonder what Arturo or Spanish was incapable of carrying over from the English, and so their failure, their negative power, was assured.

Tomás’s increasingly histrionic manner signaled his reading was drawing to a close, and after yet another terrible poem he paused, looked at the audience again, and then abandoned the podium without a word, at which point everyone applauded. When the applause died down Arturo nodded to me. We approached the podium and he explained that I would read the poem in English and then he would offer the translation. He might also have claimed that, even if one had no English, some of the power of the original would be palpable. While he was saying this or something like it I poured myself a glass of water, nearly spilling it when I drank, and opened my notebook. When he turned and looked at me to signal I should start, I said thank you into the microphone and began to read my poem, to read it in a deadpan and monotonic but surprisingly confident way, considering my knees were shaking and my hands were freezing, to read it as if either I was so convinced of the poem’s power that it needed no assistance from dramatic vocalization, or, contrarily, like it wasn’t poetry at all, just an announcement of some sort: this train is delayed due to trackwork ahead, etc. I fantasized as I listened to myself that the undecidability of my style—was it an acknowledgment of the poem’s intrinsic energy or a reading appropriate to its utter banality—would have its own kind of power, especially in Tomás’s wake: