Leaving the Atocha Station (8 page)

Isabel came to me and pulled my head against her and said something to comfort me that included the word “poet.” Rufina was rubbing my leg. I saw myself as if from the yard, amazed.

__________________________

That winter my research fell, my research was falling, into two equally unrepresentable categories. All December, there was rain, record amounts apparently; the city was strangely empty, emptied; even if it were merely drizzling, the Spaniards seemed to suspend all nonessential activity. Besides young men delivering the orange canisters of butane, or elderly women protected by plastic slickers hurrying between grocers, I saw next to no one on the streets. That December, if someone rang my buzzer, and that someone could only be Isabel, Teresa, or Arturo, their cars illegally parked in La Plaza Santa Ana, I wouldn’t answer, and because it was raining, they wouldn’t linger.

These periods of rain or periods between rains in which I was smoking and reading Tolstoy would be, I knew, impossible to narrate, and that impossibility entered the experience: the particular texture of my loneliness derived in part from my sense that I could only share it, could only describe it, as pure transition, a slow dissolve between scenes, as boredom, my project’s uneventful third phase, possessed of no intrinsic content. But this account ascribed the period a sense of directionality, however slight or slow, made it a vector between events, when in fact the period was dilated, detached, strangely self-sufficient, but that’s not really right.

During this period all like periods of my life were called forth to form a continuum, or at least a constellation, and so, far from forming the bland connective tissue between more eventful times, those times themselves became mere ligaments. Not the little lyric miracles and luminous branching injuries, but the other thing, whatever it was, was life, and was falsified by any way of talking or writing or thinking that emphasized sharply localized occurrences in time. But this was true only for the duration of one of these seemingly durationless periods; figure and ground could be reversed, and when one was in the midst of some new intensity, kiss or concussion, one was suddenly composed exclusively of such moments, burning always with this hard, gemlike flame. But such moments were equally impossible to represent precisely because they were ready-made literature, because the ease with which they could be represented entered and cancelled the experience: where life was supposed to be its most immediate, when the present managed to differentiate itself with violence, life was at its most generic, following the rules of Aristotle, and one did not make contact with the real, but performed such contact for an imagined audience.

This is what I felt, if it wasn’t what I thought, as I smoked and listened to the rain on the roof and turned the pages and smelled the wet stone smell of Madrid through the windows I kept cracked. And when I read the
New York Times
online, where it was always the deadliest day since the invasion began, I wondered if the incommensurability of language and experience was new, if my experience of my experience issued from a damaged life of pornography and privilege, if there were happy ages when the starry sky was the map of all possible paths, or if this division of experience into what could not be named and what could not be lived just
was
experience, for all people for all time. Either way, I promised myself, I would never write a novel.

When it was raining in the afternoon I would sometimes walk through El Retiro, which would be empty save for a few hash dealers, all African, passing the time under the awning of a shuttered kiosk or, if it was only drizzling, standing under one of the steaming trees. There were always hash dealers in El Retiro, most of them around my age, selling eggs of what they called “chocolate,” mainly to tourists, as there was much better hash to be had. I was surprised by how polite the polyglot dealers were, the prices highly negotiable in whatever language, no threat, however vague, of violence, and their sheer numbers startled me: one for every fifty yards of the park in good weather. While they must have known each other, one sensed that each man worked alone. As far as I could tell, the police tolerated the dealers in the park, although I’m sure they could be, and occasionally were, rounded up and deported. The police tolerated hash in general; I could never quite tell if it was legal or illegal to smoke. A policeman or park official of some sort might pass by on a golf cart, see you conversing with one of the dealers, and shoot you a dirty look, but never, in my experience, would he stop; if the look were dirty enough, the dealer might walk away from you, but typically with more annoyance than concern.

In the rainy period of my research, I would buy an egg or half an egg from whatever dealer I first encountered, the dealer surprised to have a customer in such weather, then walk to the semicircular colonnade built around the statue of Alfonso XII overlooking El Estanque. When I found a relatively dry, sheltered place, I smoked and watched the faint rain fall into the artificial lake. I had never smoked hash before coming to Spain and, unlike the weed I smoked in Providence, which instantly made me an idiot, the hash usually allowed me to maintain, or at least to believe I was maintaining, the semblance of lucidity, especially after months of habituation. I experienced it as a tuning of the world, not, as with strong weed, its total transformation or obliteration, and I could read or “work” while smoking hash, or at least believed I could, whereas when smoking stronger stuff I could not follow, let alone form, whole sentences. But the alterations effected by the hash were somehow all the more profound for being understated, in part because one could forget or at least discount the role of the drug in one’s experience. If, say, a group of trees that had previously been mere background suddenly stood forth a little and their slender and strictly symmetrical forms became an elegant if unparaphrasable claim about form in general, you could write that observation down without dissolving it in the process, or without the strangeness of your hands distracting you from however you’d planned to use them. If a slight acoustic heightening allowed you to perceive for the first time consciously that the sound of the leaves in the wind was, as it were, in conversation with the similar but ultimately distinct sound of distant traffic on Calle de Alfonso XII, or that a hammering noise was in fact two noises, one issuing from a nearby tree and the other from a construction site beyond the park, and if these realizations inspired some meditation on the passing into one another of the natural and the cultural, the meditation, if not profound, could at least achieve coherence, could be formulated as it was experienced, not retrospectively, after coming down. Many people, I believed, used similar drugs to remove themselves from their experience, but because, for as long as I could remember, I always already felt removed from my experience, I took the drug to intensify the vantage from said remove, and so experienced it as an intensification of presence, but only at my customary distance from myself; maybe, when I panicked, that distance was collapsing.

That I smoked hash with tobacco was critical during this phase of my project, although I was resolved never to smoke a cigarette again after leaving Spain, and so smoked with particular abandon, critical because the cigarette or spliff was an indispensable technology, a substitute for speech in social situations, a way to occupy the mouth and hands when alone, a deep breathing technique that rendered exhalation material, a way to measure and/or pass the time. More important than the easily satisfiable addiction, what the little cylinders provided me was a prefabricated motivation and transition, a way to approach or depart from a group of people or a topic, enter or exit a room, conjoin or punctuate a sentence. The hardest part of quitting would be the loss of narrative function; it would be like removing telephones or newspapers from the movies of Hollywood’s Golden Age; there would be no possible link between scenes, no way to circulate information or close distance, and when I imagined quitting smoking, I imagined “settling down,” not because I associated quitting with a more mature self-care, but because I couldn’t imagine moving through an array of social spaces without the cigarette as bridge or exit strategy. Happy were the ages when the starry sky was the map of all possible paths, ages of such perfect social integration that no drug was required to link the hero to the whole.

I didn’t think these things, but might have, as I walked back through the park and home, then lay on my bed, only several feet beneath the downward-sloping ceiling, after having ignited the butane heater and drawn it near me. Once I was warm I would eat something, open a bottle of wine, and then write Cyrus, to whom I’d long since confessed I had internet access in my apartment, and who was in Mexico with his girlfriend and her dog. I was vaguely jealous of them; they’d driven to Mexico in her pickup with little money and no real plan in order to acquire experience, not just the experience of experience sponsored by my fellowship. His girlfriend, Jane, who had attended the same university as I, was the daughter of a very rich and famous man, but had foresworn her fortune, at least temporarily, in order to live lightly on the planet, make art, and write; before she left for Mexico, she had been squatting in one of Providence’s abandoned warehouses with a group of like–minded artists. Often around eight or nine p.m. in Madrid, Cyrus would be in an internet café in Mexico, and we could instant message. One Monday night:

ME: you there? what’s up in xalapa

CYRUS: Yeah. Went on a kind of trip this weekend. Planned to camp

ME: i was going camping here for a while

ME: hello?

CYRUS: I remember. It’s hard to imagine you camping, I must say. Anyway, we drove to the country to see some pueblos, walk around

ME: cool

ME: what did you see

CYRUS: There was a bad scene there

ME: you mean a fight with jane?

CYRUS: No. Although we’re fighting now, I guess

ME: stressful to travel together if you haven’t before

CYRUS: Well we were walking

ME: still there?

CYRUS: along a river and

CYRUS: I’m still here, yes. Jane wanted to swim, but I was a little worried about the current. Not to mention the water did not strike me as particularly clean

ME: my brother once picked up a parasite swimming in a lake and was sick for a month

CYRUS: Right. And Jane launched into this speech about—half joking—about how I was afraid of new experiences or something, how I was always happier as a spectator. Not a fight, just teasing, albeit

ME: i hate new experiences

CYRUS: emasculating teasing. Something about that being what was wrong with poets

ME: the new poems are great, btw

CYRUS: I guess I should mention we were smoking a lot of that Acapulco Gold

ME: so what happened with

CYRUS: or whatever it is. Very staticky. Or at least I’d been smoking it. Vaguely reminiscent, incidentally, of certain Topeka strains, but more powerful. Anyway we walked along the river and it eventually opened out and where it was wider we encountered some people swimming

ME: americans?

CYRUS: Locals. There are no tourists here in winter, it seems

ME: right

CYRUS: There were two men swimming, or one swimming and one more like wading. The current looked pretty strong. One of the men, his girlfriend was on the bank—in a swimsuit—and he was trying to convince her to get in, to swim

ME: don’t like where this is going. she was scared of the current?

CYRUS: Maybe. Maybe just the cold

ME: what is the weather like there

ME: madrid: cold and raining constantly

CYRUS: Warm to hot. It was like 80. Which is unseasonably warm, I guess. The air is filthy. But the water still chilly. Anyway, Jane—we were on the opposite bank as the swimmer’s girlfriend—Jane wanted to swim

ME: she had a swimsuit?

CYRUS: and did get in the water, although I told her I didn’t think

CYRUS: Yes, we both had swimsuits on under our clothes. It was not, I told her, a good idea, because of the current

ME: knowing her, i’m sure that was a goad

ME: might egg her on

CYRUS: Yes. She got in and while the current was strong was fine. Then the other swimmers, they were saying to the girlfriend, see, this girl got in, no problem, and then Jane started telling me to come into the water. So there I was opposite the girlfriend on the bank, both of us being pressured by the swimmers to join them. The girlfriend and I kept looking at each other with nervous smiles

ME: if one of you got in the other would have to

CYRUS: I felt that

ME: a game of chicken. you two should have left the others and gone off and had

CYRUS: Or at least if she got in I would have to. But she probably could have remained on the bank

ME: a wonderful life together!

ME: right. she would not be emasculated

CYRUS: but I was, I admit, feeling the pressure. Jane was there with these other men in the water, the current clearly manageable. I felt cowardly and American

ME: you have to stay strong—cowardice of your convictions

CYRUS: Yeah, well, I got in. The current was actually stronger than I imagined. There were pockets of strong current. Where the river narrowed a little farther down I could see what looked like serious rapids