Going Home Again (22 page)

“And Ava? Where’s the little genius this evening?”

She, I was informed, was catching a movie just down the street at the Cine Ideal with a friend and the girl’s mother, who’d make sure Ava got home safe and sound.

The waiter came with a couple of gin and tonics, and the sky turned from blue to apricot, then purple to black, and the modernized streetlamps that were meant to look like something out of the 1800s came on, and the square was bathed in a warm glow. To my surprise, we talked about my life as a single man. She’d never shown any interest in what was going on over in Toronto, apart from updates on how the business was faring.

“It’s chugging along,” I said. “Some ups and downs. I guess it’s something I’m getting used to.”

“And the girlfriend situation?” she said. “Are you happy?”

“I see you’ve got your spies on me,” I said.

“Of course,” she said, smiling.

“And what are you hearing?”

“You mean apart from the fact that she’s a good swimmer?”

“She is that,” I said.

Sticking mostly to the ups, I told Isabel about my
life over there in distant Canada, a little bit about Hilary, and also Ava’s cousins and the good people working for me now.

“I’m glad you’re happy,” she said.

“Things work out in the end.”

I didn’t mention the phone call from Monica or what my brother had done. I was looking forward to the party and didn’t feel like spoiling the mood by dredging up what he’d just put me through. The air was finally starting to lose that sharp daytime heat, and we were having drinks in one of my favorite squares in the city, and the edge in Isabel’s voice that I’d come to expect was softer and more welcoming now than it had been in years. I wondered if we’d come to the point where we could actually talk like normal people instead of getting all twisted up and angry over the smallest detail or confusion. We stayed there drinking and talking pleasantly until just after midnight. And when it was time to walk her over to Atocha Street, where cabs were always circulating, she linked her arm through mine and then, without my expecting it, she kissed my face, not in parting but for no reason I could imagine.

“What’s that for?” I said.

“For a nice night,” she said. “For two nice nights.”

We walked for half a block without saying anything. I didn’t know what had gotten into her, but I felt good about that kiss. It had sent a warmth flooding into me, I won’t deny it. Still, some suspicion was mixed in there, too. I was considering asking how things were going with Pablo when she said, “I was never in love with him. You understand that, right?”

This comment took me by surprise. “Actually, there isn’t much about last year that I do understand,” I said. “But no, I didn’t know that. It’s something I’ve been meaning—” I wasn’t able to finish the thought.

She dropped my hand, and before I knew what was happening she was striding across the street toward a taxi double-parked on the opposite side. The driver’s door was thrown open, with a pair of legs sticking out. Two oversize sneakers, as garishly fluorescent as two flaming birthday candles, pulsated in the slashing glow of headlights.

Isabel reached in and grabbed hold of whoever was inside and yanked him out and upright. A junkie, most likely, he had a car radio and a carton of cigarettes pressed against his chest. More than that, he had fear in his eyes. He stood there for half a second, then dropped everything and disappeared up the street.

“Look at these people,” Isabel said when I caught up with her. “Everyone just standing around watching like it’s some sort of circus!”

She was right. A crowd had gathered, and no one was moving a finger.

“Let’s just get out of here,” I said.

I picked up the radio and the screwdriver the kid had used to jimmy the lock, and Isabel reached across and put the cigarettes on the passenger seat. I passed her the radio, and she tried to slip it back into the empty slot in the dashboard. “Come on,” I said. “Let’s get out of here. Don’t worry about it.”

The group of people pausing on their midnight stroll to check out what all the fuss was about split
in two when a man suddenly pushed through them, walking fast and wearing an unpleasant scowl on his face. The owner of the taxi, obviously. No one else around here had half as good a reason to look as angry as he did at that moment. Heavyset with all his weight in his shoulders, he crossed the street like a man who knows someone’s ripping him off and is going to do whatever it takes to stop that from happening.

When I raised my hand to slow him down, I saw this was the same cabdriver who’d driven me into the city the night before. Thinking it might help matters that barely twenty-four hours earlier I’d actually been a paying customer, I reached out to shake his hand. I don’t know whether the coincidence failed to impress him, or he simply hadn’t registered it, but he shoved past me and hauled Isabel out of the cab by the scruff of the neck. I put my arm around his head and pulled him off her, then he turned and hit me square in the face. It felt like I’d sprinted headfirst into a brick wall, everything in my sight line seeming to elongate and slant violently to the right when, for no reason I could tell, he slumped forward and dropped to one knee. Isabel, the car radio in her right hand, was standing behind him. She’d cracked him over the head with it. I saw that stub of a finger when he put his hand up against his skull, then sat back against the front wheel of his taxi and slowly closed his eyes.

 Thirteen

Three weeks after I stole
that silver picture frame up in Santander, I walked into a bicycle shop in Madrid and met Isabel for the first time. I remember the outline of her face before she turned and looked at me, the surprised smile, how she pushed up from leaning against the counter, her arms crossed over her chest.

José’s shop in those days was small and cramped, filled with mopeds and racing bikes and smelling of grease and rubber from the tires and inner tubes hanging on the walls. Isabel was wearing jeans and sneakers and a green Clash
Sandinista!
T-shirt, one of my favorite records of all time.

“Hola,”
she said.

The expression on her face was shy but welcoming enough to make me think she worked there, maybe selling bikes on her way through university. She looked the part, anyway, and held a book whose cover showed an illustration of a human head divided into mathematical sections.
“Son muy buenos,”
I said, gesturing to her shirt.

That I was a foreigner was apparent to her well before I opened my mouth, I’m sure, but I suppose my terrible accent would have only driven the point home.
When I ventured that opinion, she flew off into some further observations I couldn’t make heads or tails of. I think I might have caught some reference to Joe Strummer, but that was it. She looked at me expectantly when she finished speaking, like it was my turn now, which it was, then I said in my pidgin Spanish that I couldn’t agree more and I was looking for a used bicycle, something very cheap. She listened patiently, a sympathetic smile forming in the corners of her mouth, and then called out to someone in the back room.

“But the people doesn’t ride a bicycle in Madrid,” she said, turning back to me, her English just good enough to understand.

“Nobody?”

“Nobody. Is dangerous,” she said with a shy accent.

“But this is a bike shop, isn’t it?” I said.

“Yes. Vespas. Mopeds. Tour de France. That kind.”

She introduced me to José when he came up to the counter. He was tall and thin, my age, with short black hair and a stud in his ear, and almost two decades later he would give me some background on Pablo.

When she explained my dilemma, he raised a finger to let me know I should wait half a minute, disappeared and then returned with something that looked like it hadn’t been ridden in twenty-five years. He bounced it on the concrete floor with a jarring thump.

“Que tal esto?”
he said.
How’s this one?

I took it out for a test ride. The chain was rusted, and the handlebars and front wheel were crooked, pulling the steering to the left. It was the worst piece of junk I’d ever tried to ride. In ten minutes he straightened
everything out and oiled the chain and made a few adjustments. I tried to give him some money, but he said the thing had been cluttering up his back room for years, and he was glad to finally get rid of it. Though I tried to insist, he wouldn’t take my money and suggested as a compromise that I buy him a beer.

He put a sign up on his shop door saying he’d be back in ten minutes, then the three of us went across the street to the Estrecho Bar. It was a nondescript neighborhood watering hole with crumbling plaster walls and a bright, shining bar top.

“So what are you doing in Spain, anyway?” Isabel said.

I attempted a short Spanish version of the story that had brought me here, having gotten used to talking in what essentially amounted to shorthand. I’ve since decided that there’s nothing like crawling among the fundamentals of a second language to focus the mind.

“And for how long?” she said, rescuing me in English.

“I don’t know,” I said.

“Long enough to want a bike, anyway,” José said.

On the other side of the street a man stopped in front of the shop, read the sign and looked at his watch, so José shook my hand and wished me good luck in not getting killed on that bike.

“Looks like it’s just me and you,” I said to this beautiful girl.

“I can practice my English. I need to practice my English.”

“Your English is great.”

“Oh, yeah,” she said.

“No, really. You’re my official translator. You helped me with that bike. Without you I’d be bikeless.”

“Bikeless?”

“Without a bike.”

“Okay. Am I hired?”

“You’re hired,” I said, raising my glass. “But you’ll have to help me with my Spanish, too.”

After Isabel and I said good-bye, I rode through the city and down to the Retiro Park warmed by the thought that I’d actually had a good conversation with a cute Spanish girl and a friendly shop owner in a neighborhood bar, much of it in their language. Afterward, as I cycled, enjoying the sites and the warm evening sun, I was able for a few hours to forget about Holly and all the sadness I felt after leaving her, and then Carmen, and focus instead on that small, bright flame of hope. She’d laughed at a few of my jokes and stood there—sportingly, I thought—as I tried, in Spanish, to give her a sense of where I was from and my tastes in music and the books I liked to read and exactly what I was looking for when I came to Europe. It didn’t seem to bother her when I admitted that I really had no idea why I was here, other than a book I’d read that took place in the hills north of the city, and that I might stay for a month or a year. I didn’t mention Holly that afternoon, of course, or that I’d left Santander in the dark of night, and didn’t until we finally started dating a couple of months later.

•  •  •

Those first few days in Madrid I stayed at a pension in the centre of the city near the Puerta del Sol. Every morning I picked up a paper and scoured the classifieds for an apartment. My guidebook described one neighborhood in the north end as bereft of any notable history and therefore an area to avoid. Believing the rents might be more affordable up there, I strolled around it one afternoon. I had some addresses with me and managed to find a few of the buildings they belonged to. At the third or fourth place I buzzed from the street, an American answered the intercom, then invited me up to have a look around.

It was a decent-enough place, two bedrooms, if modest by every standard you could imagine. It didn’t even have a real stove, just a hot plate set on top of the kitchen counter.

I told him a little bit about myself, nothing important, then he said, “Okay, when can you move in?”

“There’s just one hitch,” I said.

“What’s that?” he said.

So I explained that I’d been robbed up north.

“That’s not good,” he said.

“I guess I’m in a bit of a bind.”

He sat down at the living room table and pulled a chunk of hash from his breast pocket and began drying it out with a lighter flame. He crumbled it into his palm, mixed it up with a pinch of tobacco, then rolled and lit the spliff and passed it to me after taking a hit.

“How much do you have?” he said, breathing out a lungful of blue smoke.

The flat was small and dark, and its carpets smelled of mildew and stale cigarette smoke, but I guessed it cost more than I could afford.

“Not much,” I said.

I took a puff on the spliff and listened to the story of how this painter from Ann Arbor had showed up in Madrid three years ago without a peseta in his pocket. He’d been robbed on the night train coming in from Lisbon, he said, on Christmas Eve, no less, and forced to spend Christmas morning at the Chamartin Station hitting up travelers for handouts.

He was happy to have someone to talk to in his own language. I told him a little about myself and about Holly and life back in Montreal. I didn’t know where I would go next, I said, or when, but Madrid seemed to have more than enough to keep me busy.