Leaving the Atocha Station (11 page)

Those mysterious and near regions that are

Precisely the time of its being furthered.

The best Ashbery poems, I thought, although not in these words, describe what it’s like to read an Ashbery poem; his poems refer to how their reference evanesces. And when you read about your reading in the time of your reading, mediacy is experienced immediately. It is as though the actual Ashbery poem were concealed from you, written on the other side of a mirrored surface, and you saw only the reflection of your reading. But by reflecting your reading, Ashbery’s poems allow you to attend to your attention, to experience your experience, thereby enabling a strange kind of presence. But it is a presence that keeps the virtual possibilities of poetry intact because the true poem remains beyond you, inscribed on the far side of the mirror: “You have it but you don’t have it. / You miss it, it misses you. / You miss each other.”

Isabel shifted and I put the book away and leaned my head against the mass of her hair and fell asleep. We were both awakened when the train stopped, still a few hours from Granada. We stepped off the train and smoked in the dark, although you could smoke on the train; the night air was cool, laced with jasmine, if they have that in Spain. Isabel described a dream I couldn’t understand. The train made a noise that indicated it was preparing to leave and we went back to our seats, fell asleep again, then were both gently roused by a conductor, who said we were approaching Granada, last stop. It was a slightly lighter dark now that dawn was an hour away and when the train pulled into the station and eventually halted we disembarked and wandered out of the station in a state of not unpleasant fatigue.

We found a cab and drove to a hotel Isabel knew in the Albaicín, a neighborhood of impossibly narrow, winding streets on a hill facing the Alhambra. The hotel was surprisingly nice given the rates; Moorish medieval architecture, intricate woodwork, and a courtyard with a green mosaic. We were led to a simple room with exposed beams, a room for that reason reminiscent of my apartment, and we slept through the morning. When I woke I was for a moment unsure of my surroundings, then remembered the spontaneous trip, the train, and again wished Teresa could see me interleaved with Isabel, her jet hair splayed against the heavily starched sheets. We showered, dressed, and walked into the preternaturally bright day, wandering the threadlike streets until we found a sidewalk café, although there wasn’t much sidewalk, where we ordered orange juice, croissants, coffee. From the café you could see the Alhambra on a vast and hilly terrace across the river. Isabel was wearing her hair down and looked beautiful to me and I told her so. I paid and we descended into the city and visited the cathedral and a small modern art museum where I pretended to take copious notes.

When we were ready to eat again it was late afternoon and we returned to the Albaicín to find a restaurant Isabel knew. Within a few minutes of our arrival we were presented with giant plates of fried fish and squid that either Isabel had ordered without my knowing or that were the restaurant’s only dish. They also brought us a bottle of nearly frozen white wine and I drank several glasses quickly and felt immediately and pleasantly drunk. I said something to Isabel about the experience of braided temporalities in ancient cities and she nodded in a way that showed she wasn’t listening.

“What are you thinking about?” I asked her, refilling both of our glasses, the bottle almost empty.

She hesitated. “We never talk about our relationship, about the rules,” she said. I always thought the rule was that we wouldn’t. This was the first time I’d heard her refer to our “relationship” at all. I knew what was coming: she wanted to assure herself I wasn’t seeing anybody else, that at least for as long as I was in Spain, I was hers exclusively. Maybe she also wanted to know how long I planned to stay, if I was seriously considering remaining in Spain after my fellowship.

“I am in a relationship,” was the English equivalent of what she said. I felt the wind had been knocked out of me. I smiled to imply that of course we both had other relationships.

“He must have an open mind,” I said, holding the smile, “to allow you to travel with other men.” I was surprised to feel devastated.

“He has been working in Barcelona this year. He was here at Christmas and a couple of other times. He’ll be back in Madrid starting in June.” The way she said “June” hinted she would like to know where I planned to be then. I remembered I hadn’t seen Isabel much around the holidays.

I pushed my plate away a little and lit a cigarette. “So what happens to us in June?” Now the seafood looked alien, arachnoid, repulsive.

She smiled in a way that said, “I really like you, we’ve had a lot of fun, but in June our time is up.” Then she said, “I don’t know.”

“What’s his name?” I asked, suggesting with my tone that whatever his name was, I thought he was a harmless little boy.

“Oscar,” she said, and her voice declared he was a man among men. “We decided to break up when he had to move to Barcelona for work. Or to at least be open to other people. But now we both feel that we should be together when he returns.” In English I thought “Oscar” sounded silly; in Spanish: very serious.

I had let the smile slip away. “Does he know about me?” I felt like crying. I tried to long for Teresa, but could not.

“We’ve both been seeing other people. We don’t ask each other about it,” she said. I wondered how many other people she had been with recently. “Just like you and I don’t ask each other,” she added. It was clear she
hoped
I had other relationships.

“Claro,” I said, recomposing my smile to indicate I’d slept with half the women in Madrid. “You love him?” It was a stupid, clichéd question.

“Yes,” she said, her tone confirming it was a stupid, clichéd question.

“Well,” I said, “there is still some time before June.” I imagined breaking the bottle over her head then raking my throat with the jagged glass.

“Yes,” she said, and leaned over and kissed me. “There is a lot of time before you go back.”

“I didn’t say I was going back,” I said, flatly.

“But your mom,” she said.

I was grateful for a reason to be upset. “I don’t want to talk about my mother with you.” Then, after a pause: “I have to piss.” I went to the bathroom and splashed water on my face and looked in the mirror and let out a single ridiculous sob. Then I laughed at myself, applied some more water, dried off my face, and returned to the table, sad but stabilized. “Sorry,” I said. “It can be hard to think about my mom.”

“Of course,” she said, “I’m sorry.” I kissed her to assert my spirits were ultimately unaffected by our talk and resumed my increasingly fragmented and incoherent speech about time in ancient cities. She seemed interested now, although I suspected it was charity.

We left the restaurant and walked back down through the Albaicín into the center of the city. Isabel put her arm around me in gesture that expressed less affection than relief at having clarified things between us. As we walked and dusk began to fall and Isabel wrapped herself in a shawl, I thought back to the scene at the lake when Miguel hit me; that was probably around the time she’d broken up with Oscar. And who knew if Rufina’s suspicion of me was the issue of her disdain for Oscar or her affection for him. We sat on a bench in a little plaza and watched the goatsuckers spar. My mind was revising many months’ worth of assumptions; I felt something like a physical change as my recent past liquefied and reformed. What was left of the light burnished what it touched; Isabel was half shadow and half bronze, boundless and bounded. We got high.

When it was unmistakably night we walked down toward and then along the Darro; there was some sort of small festival and part of the river was illumined by torches. Little kids dressed in white, glowing softly, darted through the streets. It had been a while since either of us had spoken, and whereas for months I had imagined Isabel’s silences as devoted to me entirely, I was now unsure if I was even in her thoughts.

“When I am near a river,” I heard myself say, “I think of my time in Mexico.”

“When were you in Mexico?” she asked.

“I spent some time with my girlfriend in a town called Xalapa before I came to Spain.” I paused to suggest she might still be my girlfriend. “We went on a trip one weekend. We found a place to swim. There was a violent current, but we decided to swim anyway. There was another man. He wanted his girlfriend to swim. But she was afraid of the current. In the end she entered the river.” I paused again, lighting a cigarette. Why was my Spanish so halting? “She did not know how to swim. She had bad luck and the current carried her. We followed her. We found her body in the river. I gave her”— here I touched my mouth and then gestured toward Isabel’s—“to make her breathe. But it was too late. We took her body to a place with phones. We called the police. An old woman gave us limes.”

“Limes,” Isabel confirmed.

“She gave us limes for sucking because we suffered shock.”

“My God,” Isabel said, and took my hand. I wanted her to ask about my girlfriend, I was preparing a speech about Jane, but she didn’t. We sat down on the low stone wall that ran along the river and watched the reflections of the torches in the water and after a while Isabel began to talk. First she described a house or home or apartment, a description vaguely familiar from her first speech at the lake, but I was still unsure if her words attached to a household or the literal structure where she lived. I could understand more now than then; my Spanish had, despite myself, significantly improved, but this fact itself got in the way of understanding: I was measuring the time that had elapsed since the night at the lake by virtue of my increased comprehension, but this attention to the quality of my own attention crowded out Isabel’s meaning. Eventually I shook free of my self–absorption and came to grasp what she was saying, aided by how slowly she was speaking. That summer her brother died—she referred to his death as if we’d discussed it before—and she was looking through his stuff, records and books, deciding what to take with her when the family moved, she had found a notebook, a notebook from school, what grade she wasn’t sure, and it had numbers written all over its pages: 1066, 312, 1936, 1492, 800, 1776, etc. At first she didn’t know what these were, didn’t recognize them as years, significant years he probably had to memorize for a history test, and so had written the numbers again and again, filling an entire notebook with them, and she convinced herself that it was an elaborate coded message, a message to her. She must have known, she was sixteen, that this was impossible, but she had let herself be convinced, and the notebook became her most treasured possession. She never attempted to decipher the code, the point was not to read the message; the point was that there was an ongoing conversation between her and her brother, an unconcluded correspondence. A few months before Oscar left for Barcelona he found the notebook, which Isabel had never mentioned to anybody, although she hadn’t really hidden it either, keeping it in a box with various childhood possessions on the top shelf of her closet. It suddenly occurred to me that we never went to Isabel’s apartment not only because my apartment had more privacy but also because she probably wanted to keep me away from her roommates and/or reserve her bed for Oscar exclusively. Oscar asked why she had this notebook with years written all over it and this was the first time she let herself realize they were in fact just years. She was furious at Oscar for destroying her fantasy and screamed at him and then burst into tears and then told him the whole story and cried and cried as though only then, many years after the accident, did she fully confront the reality of her brother’s death. They sat on the bed together carefully turning the pages and Isabel wept and ran her fingers over the years, which were written in blue and red.

Later, when Oscar and Isabel broke up or at least agreed to see other people because he was leaving for Barcelona, Isabel had fallen apart, and had somehow felt her brother’s death was upon her again, because Oscar was the only person she talked to about her brother, and because of the scene they shared with the notebook. One thing she loved about me, she said, and it was clear she meant “loved” in the weakest sense, was that I never asked her questions about her brother after she talked to me about him at the lake.

I said nothing. After a while we resumed our walk and wandered back up into the Albaicín and found our hotel. It was a steep walk and we were tired by the time we arrived. There were a few tables in the courtyard and I asked the teenager who was sweeping up if it was possible to have wine. He brought us a warm, unlabeled bottle of white wine and two tall glasses filled with ice. We drank and smoked until the bottle was empty and then went to our room and fucked quickly and I felt completely in love. Isabel went to sleep and I opened the tall wooden shutters and leaned out overlooking the street and smoked. There were no cars parked on the street and it was perfectly quiet and I thought it probably looked like this in 1066, 312, 1936, whatever. Then I thought it probably didn’t, got in bed, and fell asleep.

The next morning we had breakfast at the same café and I said to Isabel that the more I thought about it the more eager I was to get back as I had to work with someone named Teresa on a pamphlet of my poetry that was to be published. I said this as if I were nervous about saying anything regarding Teresa in front of Isabel, nervous I might hurt her feelings.

“We can take the train tonight,” Isabel said, and because she didn’t seem jealous I was furious.

“Let’s just go back now,” I said, which was ridiculous.

“Now? You haven’t seen the Alhambra,” she said.

“I’ve seen it before,” I lied. Now she looked jealous. I was elated.

“With whom?” she asked, and it was clear she was only pretending not to care.

“Teresa,” I said, and then pretended I wished I hadn’t. “And her brother.”

“When?” she asked.

“Around Christmas,” I said. I had the sense that Isabel wanted to be my only guide, that while she didn’t care who I slept with, she didn’t want another woman showing me the architectural wonders of Spain.