Leaving the Atocha Station (7 page)

I squinted at Rufina, waiting for my eyes to adjust. She and Isabel were obligatorily catching up, the Spanish so fast and full of slang I didn’t even try to comprehend it; after a minute or two, the rush of small talk tapered into silence. Rufina took a long match from a box somewhere within her reach and lit a cigarette and I thought she looked mean and attractive in its light, her appeal perhaps amplified by the fact that I’d spent the day imagining a visit to an elderly aunt. Isabel looked nervous, adjusting her hair; it was clear this was the first time they’d seen each other since the aforementioned fight. Rufina held the match toward me, shook it out. Why Isabel had brought me I found baffling, she certainly made no effort to introduce me into the conversation; I could only suspect my presence was a restraint, that Isabel wanted to work out whatever was between them, and hoped Rufina would rein in her behavior and talk in the company of a stranger, especially talk about a previous boyfriend. The silence was evidently oppressive to Isabel, who knew I wouldn’t break it, and finally she rose and said she had to go to the bathroom, leaving me with Rufina. I was in fact very interested in Rufina, in how she made a living, where she was from, how long she had lived outside Toledo and why, not to mention how old she was, if she was married, if she was Isabel’s blood relation, what had happened with the boyfriend, etc., but I wasn’t about to speak. After another length of silence, Rufina stood up, saying something about my drink, which she took to the kitchen to refill.

Alone on the porch, I looked out into the dark; I imagined I could see the dogs moving somewhere in the yard, and far beyond the yard I could see a few ruby taillights disappearing on a curve. I began to imagine my apartment in Madrid, imagined it at that instant, dark, but filled with noise from La Plaza Santa Ana, imagined the espresso machine at rest, the cheap but inoffensive furniture the apartment came with, furniture that would remain when I left, the few old postcards I’d purchased from El Rastro and scotch-taped to the wall. Then my other rooms: Brighton Street, mattress on the floor, Hope Street, with its little drafting table, dorms, which were terrible, then Greenwood, Jewell Street, Huntoon and my crib, which I could not in fact remember, imagined them at that instant, now furnished and occupied by others. Then I could feel each room around me as I imagined it, and the dark beyond the porch would become the dark of Topeka or Providence. Then it was the dark of my seventh or fifteenth or twentieth year, each dark with a slightly different shape or shapeliness, the sky, when I was younger, more concave. And then it was Rufina’s porch again, but imagined from a future room surrounded by a future dark, a room where I was writing, maybe this.

At some point I realized I had been lost in these reveries, if that’s what they were, for longer than it took to make a drink or take a piss. I listened hard and could hear voices, voices I could tell were raised; Isabel and Rufina were arguing somewhere in the house, in a room whose door they’d shut. I became fascinated with this phenomenon of hearing loud voices at a distance, in trying to account for how I knew they were loud when I could barely hear them, something about their shape or shapeliness, or the way they filtered through the walls, and I reached for my notebook to write this down, although there wasn’t really light to write by, when suddenly I stopped and blushed, at least my face was hot. Why would I take notes when Isabel wasn’t around to see me take them? I’d never taken notes before; I carried around my bag because of my drugs, not because I intended to work on my “translations,” and the idea of actually being one of those poets who was constantly subject to fits of inspiration repelled me; I was unashamed to pretend to be inspired in front of Isabel, but that I had just believed myself inspired shamed me.

I took my notebook from the bag, but only to use it as a surface; I rubbed a cigarette between my thumb and forefinger to loosen the tobacco and emptied it onto the notebook cover. Then I took the little egg-shaped mass of hash out of my pocket, so shaped because it had been transported, wrapped in plastic, up someone’s ass, found my lighter, heated and flaked a quantity of hash into the tobacco, then blew carefully into the empty cigarette paper, inflating it a little, and shook the mixture back into the cigarette, twisting the end of the paper to keep it from spilling. Finally, I removed the cottony filter with my teeth. The voices were getting louder.

I lit the spliff and imagined what was happening inside, my first projections borrowed almost entirely from Spanish cinema: Rufina and Isabel were lovers, Rufina maybe a transvestite, and Isabel had brought me to get back at Rufina for the latter’s recent infidelity, but had underestimated Rufina; soon Rufina would return to the porch with a knife wet with Isabel’s blood, stab me, then stab herself. Or Rufina, unspeakably wronged by unspeakable men, all of whom resembled Franco in some sense, had sworn that no man would ever cross the threshold of her home again, and Isabel had violated this rule, hoping, for whatever reason, to reintroduce Rufina to the opposite sex; soon Rufina would return with a knife wet with Isabel’s blood, etc. As the hash had its effect, I took pleasure in picturing the flash of the knife reflected in Rufina’s eyes, having to wrestle her into submission or die. I was relieved and disappointed, then, when a light came on and Rufina and Isabel returned to the porch, Rufina now wearing a gray oversized Hard Rock Café Houston sweatshirt and holding our refreshed drinks, Isabel relaxed and smiling.

“You smoked without us, Adán,” Rufina exclaimed. She must have asked Isabel my name.

“I can make more,” I said. “I can roll another,” I corrected.

“So you’re a poet, Adán,” she ignored me. I just smiled. She repeated my name as if it were a one-word joke at my expense.

“He just read at a gallery in Salamanca,” Isabel said to spite me.

“Salamanca—elegant!” It was clear Rufina was going to ask me what kind of poetry I wrote. “What kind of poetry do you write?.”

“What kinds of poetry are there?” I was pleased with this response and made a mental note to use it from then on.

“Bad and worse,” Rufina said with mock derision. Isabel laughed a little. Maybe it relaxed them further to be allied against me, to taunt the new boyfriend after clearing the air of the old.

“I, too, dislike it,” I said in English.

“You must come from money,” Rufina said, ignoring me again. Then she said something idiomatic involving hands and clouds, which I assumed was a colorful way of saying the same thing. “Do you have to work at all?”

I wasn’t sure how to respond to this. I had encountered this association of poetry and money before in Spain, compounded, in my case, by the assumption that all Americans, I mean Americans abroad, were rich; compared to Isabel and Rufina, my family probably was. I had no clear sense of Isabel’s class position, let alone Rufina’s; I knew Isabel had graduated from college. had long worked at the language school, and now had a nice enough apartment, but she also had two roommates. I paid for almost all of our meals and drinks, but thought very little of it, even though it was a significant portion of my total funds, because euros always seemed fake to me. I had no idea, for instance, if the house we were in was of significant value, if land near Toledo was worthless or in high demand, if Rufina’s manner of dress or address indicated the working or middle or some other class, or if those were the relevant terms for Spain.

“I won’t have to work for several months, it’s true,” I said in a way that implied I would then have to work in a coal mine. “Unless you think writing is work.”

“What will you do when you go back to the United States?” Rufina asked. Perhaps the most important unspoken rule that Isabel and I had developed in our short relationship, our most important kind of silence, was never to refer to the time after my fellowship. I looked at Isabel. It had been a while since I’d thought what I would, in fact, do upon my return.

“I don’t know that I will go back,” I lied. Isabel remained quiet, but there was a change in the intensity of her silence. I lit a cigarette to distance myself from this statement.

“And your parents will send you money,” Rufina laughed, and then said something that involved the word “Bohemian.” “What,” she said, “do they do?”

I knew that no matter what I said my parents did, Rufina was going to find it hilarious, so I decided to tell the truth, although I knew it would be particularly funny: “They’re both psychologists.” I heard Isabel shift uncomfortably.

As expected, this cracked Rufina up. I assumed the flourish of talk that followed was about the preposterous image of a Bohemian poet supported by his psychologist parents. Isabel said something about not being too hard on me, but I smiled to indicate I was fine with being teased. “Isabel’s friends from the language school are always rich,” Rufina explained to me. “Friends” clearly meant “boyfriends.”

“What is your profession?” I asked, sounding intensely foreign.

“I lost my job,” she said, flatly. I blinked. “Maybe I’ll start writing poetry. Maybe,” she said, leaning forward and placing her hands on my thighs, “you’ll marry me and we can live off your family.” I thought I saw Isabel wince when Rufina touched me.

“O.K.,” I said.

“Do you think your parents would like me?” Rufina asked, sticking out her chest in a performance of her voluptuousness I didn’t quite understand, but enjoyed taking in.

“I think my mom and dad would like you,” I said.

“I can cook and clean,” she said, sarcastically, crossing and uncrossing her legs.

“My mom is a well-known feminist,” I said, a statement that sounded as stupid as it was. Rufina laughed, Isabel asked what time it was, implying we should leave, but was ignored. I could see her staring at Rufina, mutely telling her to shut up; I didn’t understand the extremity of her concern. “You’d like my mom,” I said to get further away from the feminist thing, “but she’s not so rich.” I smiled again, in part to calm Isabel. “Neither she nor my father ever give me money,” I lied. Now Isabel was looking at me strangely. I had just finished saying maybe Rufina could meet my parents if and when they visited Spain, when I remembered I’d told Isabel that my mom was dead.

There were several ways I could have recovered from this mistake; I could have looked melancholy and later claimed that I simply refused to share such a loss with Rufina, or, if I’d kept my cool, I could have maintained to Isabel that she had misunderstood my terrible Spanish in the first place, that I’d never said or meant to say that my mom had passed away. But I could feel my face, which was burning, fully confess to Isabel that I had lied to her. I’d told Isabel the lie during one of our first nights together when, still guilty from having recently told it to Teresa, I had felt compelled to repeat it, maybe to deepen my guilt into a kind of penance; surely I’d been drunk. Instead of amplifying my guilt, however, repetition mitigated it. While she had responded tenderly, Isabel never asked me about my family, and I never returned to it; at first I’d been aware of needing to avoid talking about my mother, as I still was with Teresa, but with Isabel I avoided talking about almost everything, save for my cryptic aesthetic pronouncements.

Isabel said she had to piss again and left the porch. Rufina, confused about what had passed between us, didn’t resume her sarcastic inquiries, and in the ensuing silence, I tried to imagine how Isabel was going to react. My lie would be unforgivable in any context, but I felt it would be particularly unforgivable in Spain; had I told the lie about my father, that might have been O.K.; I could always say he was a fascist, whatever that meant, and that I’d merely engaged in wishful thinking. Almost every movie I had seen since arriving in Spain, maybe every Spanish movie made since 1975, was about killing, literally or symbolically, some pathologically strict, repressed, and violent father, or was at least about imagining a Spain without such men, a Spain defined by liberated women rediscovering their joie de vivre with the help of their colorful gay friends. But to have “killed” my mother, the “feminist,” for whatever reason, revealed me to be at heart a right-wing, jackbooted misogynist, and further called into question the legitimacy of my research.

“I told Isabel earlier,” I said slowly to Rufina, who, smoking again, appeared to have forgotten all about me, “that my mother was dead. This isn’t true.”

“What?” she asked, suddenly interested, but sure she’d misunderstood.

“I told her my mom was dead, but my mom is alive,” I paused. “Just now, I forgot I had lied.”

“My God,” Rufina said, and gasped. “Why did you do that, Adán?” She was more intrigued than disgusted. She was smiling, not unkindly.

“Because my mom is sick,” I said. “And because—” I pretended it was difficult to go on. The smile drained quickly from her face. Then it was difficult to go on: “I am scared … I was trying to imagine …” Rufina leaned forward, now all tenderness. “I thought if I said it, I would have less fear,” is how I must have sounded.

“Poor boy,” Rufina said, and looked like she wanted to embrace me. The thrill I felt at her gaze checked the advancing waves of guilt. Isabel appeared in the door.

“I want to go,” she said.

“Sit down, my love,” Rufina said with an authority that returned Isabel to her chair. Then to me: “Continue.”

“I came here,” I began, “and nobody knows me. So I thought: You can be whatever you want to people. You can say you are rich or poor. You can say you are from anywhere, that you do anything. At first I felt very free, as if my life at home wasn’t real anymore.” Isabel was trying to make herself believe I’d confessed my lie to Rufina. “And I was glad to be away from my father,” I threw in for color, implying my dad, gentlest of men, was some kind of tyrant. “But then the reality returns. And I have constant terror. I call her all the time. She says she is fine, but I don’t know for sure. I didn’t want to leave her, but she said I had to come here and do my work. That I had a responsibility to my writing. She insisted. I can’t imagine life if something happens to her. And then when I meet someone important,” I said, looking directly at Isabel, “I lied. To see. If I could say even the words.” Isabel appeared to understand. “I am crazy, I know,” I said, placing my head in my hands. Then I said, looking up at Isabel again, “I am sorry. I am sorry to her. I am sorry to you.” I contemplated crying.