This Is Not America

by Jordi Puntí

  Then Emili says, “And you like soccer.” It’s more a statement than a question.

  “No, not especially,” says Ibon. “What makes you say that?”

  “Your radio. I thought you were listening to one of those sports programs with offensive yelling commentators and all the rest. They’re very popular now.”

  “No, not sports. I always listen to music. It’s a Walkman.” He shows it to Emili. “I like walking the dog and listening to songs I’ve known for ages. Sometimes I record tapes for particular situations. Like this one. It’s for coming to walk in the park at midnight.” He pauses, wondering if he should say what he wants to say, and the absence of personal ties emboldens him. “Sometimes . . . sometimes, if I’m alone here, I listen to a song and imagine I’m making a clip of it. I must have an actor inside me, you know, because I often want to play the part of what the words in a song are saying.”

  Emili smiles and tries to hide his bemusement but says nothing. Now they’re silent as they’re trying to see where their dogs are. They’re nearby. Boris, the German shepherd, is lying quietly on the grass, indifferent to the frolickings of Whisky, who keeps bounding over to him, trying to tempt him to play.

  “I’m very conventional when it comes to music. Too much so, probably, I admit,” Emili says finally. “I like the hits of the season, the typical stuff you hear all day long on the radio. Then, after a while, I forget them. What were you listening to just now?”

  “Yeah, well, as I say, nothing up-to-date. I doubt you’d know them. The thing is, I got stuck in the eighties. The ones I had on just now are some English guys called Orange Juice,” Ibon explains. Hearing the name, Emili raises his eyebrows. “I’ve known their songs by heart for years and I never get sick of them. This one, the one I was just listening to, is really great. It’s called ‘A Place in My Heart’ and it cheers me up.”

  “Well, I do know Orange Juice. How about that?” Emili’s amused. “It’s quite a coincidence, but seven or eight years ago I had a girlfriend who was really into them, and she was especially crazy about this song. Since she didn’t know English, she asked me to translate the lyrics. ‘There’ll always be a place in my heart for you . . . ,’ ” he recalls, without showing the slightest glimmer of nostalgia. “But, to tell you the truth, Orange Juice doesn’t do anything for me. They always sounded the same, but I went along with it because I was mad about her and everything she said was fine by me. At the time she was really obsessed with them . . . Who knows, maybe that’s why we split in the end. We had very different tastes.”

  Ibon feels a shiver under his skin, at first unpleasant and then agreeable. The coincidence, so glowing in his eyes, seems to be the recognition of some kind of biased alliance, with the balance tipped by someone who’s come between them. He feels strange, as if the scene were dreamed up some time ago by somebody else—written down, even—and now it only has to be acted out. So he shamelessly asks Emili the name of the woman who was enamored of Orange Juice. Emili smirks slyly and he, too, says what he must say.

  “Anna, her name was Anna Fuguet, but it’s been years since I had any news of her.” He goes quiet for a moment, as if trying to summon up her face, good and bad memories suddenly awakening, and then he says, “Life’s strange, huh? I guess you should have met her instead of me.”

  It’s late. They’re cold sitting there. They get up, call the dogs, attach their leashes, and say goodbye, confirming that they’ll see each other again for sure, here in the park someday.

  * * *

  On his way home with Whisky, Ibon winds the tape back three times to listen to the Orange Juice song and each time it sounds new. Now, with this latent input from the unknown Anna, he gets goose bumps more than once, remembering how he felt in those early days when he was fascinated by those satiny trumpets, the inlays on James Kirk’s guitar, the joyful, mocking voice of Edwyn Collins, and imagining this Anna (still faceless) ten or twelve years back, the whole Anna—also muzzy—levitating as she heard the song for the first time, after which she mentally repeated it over and over again like a wholesome mantra.

  Half an hour later, now at home, Ibon goes to bed and, lying there in the dark, listens to the song once more. He’s hoping it will filter into his sleep like a narcotic to become the soundtrack of his dreams, a fabulous movie, but in fact he drops off to sleep immediately and doesn’t dream about Anna.

  The next day his alarm clock installs him yet again in the hyperactivity disorder of his daily routine, and, once out of bed, he robotically performs his morning ritual. When he pulls up the blanket to give the impression that the bed is made, he finds the Walkman hidden in the recesses of a cave made by his pillow and the sheet but doesn’t wonder how it got there. Neither does he look for any particular trace of his conversation with Emili last night, and not even the sight of Whisky lying in his corner makes him think about the state he was in before he went to sleep. When he’s shaving, however, something special happens, and this is worth recalling. He lathers the shaving cream over his chin and cheeks and then, without looking in the mirror, scrapes the razor along its usual tracks. When he thinks it’s necessary he rinses it under the tap and then marks out a new path in the foam. But now his hand slips and he cuts himself just above his upper lip, a neat, surgical, painless slash. He moves closer to the mirror and sees that it’s bleeding a little. He squeezes the edges together with his fingers and sees that the blood’s flowing past the corner of his mouth and down to his chin. He licks it, trying to stop it—noting the plastic taste of the foam—but three dense round drops of blood escape and drop onto the white marble of the sink. The blood is then partly diluted by the drops of water already there, and the mingling liquids somehow sketch the features of a face, natural in color, fleshy looking, red on white. Ibon is absorbed in his contemplation of the image. He loses himself in it. He believes he’s discovered a portrait of the clear, beautiful features of Anna Fuguet.

  * * *

  That evening, after dinner in front of the TV set, Ibon is even more impatient than Whisky to go out and walk in the park. The prospect of another meeting with Emili has incredible appeal. Like an emblem of his new yearning, Anna’s recently outlined face has been with him all day long and has been growing into a dangerous, mythical, unattainable presence. He needs to put an end to this, and the sooner the better. He’s desperate to get some detail that will put her in the real world, in the same city, some clue that will make her tangible, carnal, sexual, and Emili is the only person who can supply this information. He heads for the park earlier than usual and starts strolling around, keeping the dog on the leash and wondering whether it might not be better to go directly to the same bench they sat on yesterday. Because of some strange superstition he hasn’t brought the Walkman, and without music in his ears he has the sensation that time has slowed down, that the silence in the park is congealing and becoming almost aggravating. He tries to distract himself by looking at the quiet pattern of sleeping trees and flowers, trash cans, shop signs on the other side of the street, windows of apartment blocks lit up among the foliage, and finally he hears a voice calling his name. It’s Emili. They greet one another and repeat platitudes about dogs with the odd variant, but Emili wastes no time in doing his bit to calm Ibon’s agitation, which is evident in his face.

  “You want to know more about Anna, huh? I got you intrigued yesterday.”

  Ibon nods. He’s moved by hearing another person pronouncing the name, because it makes her more alive, more present.

  “We called it a day six or seven years back,” Emili says, “and the last time I updated my phone book contacts I didn’t make a note of her number. But I recall a few things: I know where she was working and what she was doing then—real estate—remember that she wanted to move out of her apartment, and that she liked silent movie comedies: I gave her a poster with that image of Harold Lloyd hanging from the hands of a clock. And I remember what she was like, of course, but that would be more difficult for me to explain, becaus
e it’s mainly sensations. I can only say that it was a long time ago, that we didn’t end well, but now that you’ve made me think about her again, I realize that my memory of her has been getting warmer and more attractive. Some people have that virtue, don’t they? They know how to live without making a fuss about anything.”

  He still needs more details, he needs everything, but instead of feeling let down, Ibon clings to what there is with the instinct and tenacity of a newborn babe. He listens to Emili’s reminiscences—which are precise but, for all that, insubstantial—and avidly commits them to memory. He asks lots of questions, which Emili answers good-humoredly for the pure pleasure of reviving the Anna of those days, like someone recalling some especially madcap adolescent vacations. No—and this is incomprehensible—there are no photos of Anna. Yes, he’s seen her again a couple of times, in the distance and, oddly enough, in the neighborhood, but then, as he recalls, her parents lived nearby. Yes, he could say that back then, when he met her—it lasted only a year, so no worries, OK—she was attractive, slightly melancholy (sometimes she cried for no reason at all), and she had a special gleam in her eyes, which were a greenish blue, two wild grottos you wanted to dive into, believe me. And yes, yes, she loved Orange Juice. Oh, yeah, she was mad about them, and it wasn’t just one song but all of them. She venerated them, was almost snobbish about it, with the pride of belonging to a select club.

  Emili’s last words make Ibon more desperate to meet Anna. She’s becoming less hazy every second and he’s certain that he has to meet her right now. He can’t wait. Not even a day. She must become his center of gravity. With his heart racing out of control, he says good night to Emili, who notes, with a touch of envy, this crazy desire he’s triggered. Ibon wants to get home as fast as he can and listen to Orange Juice again, trying to find some clue, striving to imagine the emotions, the agitation, and the experiences that she—oh, she, divine stranger, distant love—must have associated with each song, and, finally, he wants Anna to appear before him, taking shape as an increasingly perfect hologram, like Princess Leia, and to stay by his side and never ever leave him.

  When they part ways, Emili has a sudden attack of fright—well, not exactly fright, but more like apprehension—and feels the need to call out. Ibon turns around.

  “Ibon, hey, I guess you’ll tell me if you find her,” Emili says. Ibon snickers nervously. “Don’t forget, it’s a long time since I last saw her. Everything might have changed.”

  “No, no, I don’t think so. I’m sure it hasn’t,” Ibon shouts elatedly, and then lets himself be pulled along by the innocent haste of Whisky, who keeps straining at his lead.

  * * *

  For Ibon, the next few hours that night are either a mortification he craves or an irritating balm, but what they unleash in the end is worth telling here. Most people have a predictable life, more or less set in stone, and chance alone—but only sometimes—holds out the opportunity to change and revamp it. This is often just a fleeting mirage, and things soon go back to being what they were; but this sense of being unmoored is so seductive that it’s not such a bad idea to be tempted, to see where it leads, even if it’s going nowhere. It must be said, then, that until dawn almost all the songs of Orange Juice stream nonstop from Ibon’s Walkman. As he listens to them and, full of emotion, sings them in his heart, he thinks again about what Emili said about Anna, and in his head the music and the images turn into a hopelessly tangled amalgam, the convincing result of an impossible exercise in archaeology of the future.

  He recalls that Emili said he’d bumped into Anna a couple of times in the neighborhood, and then it dawns on him that he might have seen her without knowing it, perhaps sitting next to her having a coffee in a bar, or buying bread, two strangers who chance has decided aren’t going to come together, no, not yet, and he’s immediately invaded by a feeling of regret for those wasted moments. After a sad song by Orange Juice he gets alarmed because the song seems to hint that Anna might be dead. Why not? There’s nothing to contradict the idea. Maybe she died months ago, in a traffic accident. Who knows? Or maybe that very afternoon, when he was coming home from work on the subway, uselessly checking out the women surrounding him in his coach. Or maybe she’s very ill and dying right now while he’s thinking these things. For a few seconds he’s swamped in fathomless sadness, and just when he’s about to surrender to it, annihilated with no hope of recovery, there’s a silence, then another song starts and it saves him. It’s “Consolation Prize” and, as the words suggest, he’d willingly be Anna’s consolation prize. And now he imagines her, very clearly, in slow-motion camera. He hears her happy, buoyant laughter as he listens to “I Guess I’m Just a Little Too Sensitive.” She’s in someone’s apartment, sitting in a chair with a beer in her hand, people all around her, and she’s smoking, drinking, and talking with her friends, but he can also see her slowly keeping time with her head, her eyes gradually going glassy, staring at some indefinite point, some point in the future, and he’s there waiting for her. The world around her evaporates and only Anna remains.

  Caught up in this delirium, Ibon is so tired, he goes to sleep on the sofa. He wakes up a couple of hours later feeling cold. It’s another day, and he gets up to go to the toilet. He wets his face and hair and then, still not fully awake, calls the office and tells the receptionist that he’s not well today and won’t be coming in to work. As for tomorrow, he’ll have to wait and see. It depends. When he hangs up, he returns to the bathroom and goes very close to the mirror. He needs to return to the liquid portrait of Anna, profiled against the marble sink. With his finger he traces the small cut of the previous day, next to his upper lip, and starts squeezing it, trying to open it up again. That’s not difficult, but the wound must be healing, because he can’t get a single drop of blood. Nevertheless, in the gradually revealed pulpy, purplish flesh, he can discern Anna’s silky, lustful sex, opening up for him and for him alone, and he has to masturbate right then and there.

  * * *

  Not hungry and picking at his breakfast, he leafs through the previous Sunday’s newspaper, looking for real estate ads. He remembers the name of the agency Emili mentioned and wants to reassure himself that Anna’s still working there, even though so many years have gone by. He flips quickly through the pages without really looking and realizes that the headlines he’s glimpsing out of the corner of his eye seem remote, standard, as if, instead of having survived three days and that’s all, half a life has slipped away from him because she wasn’t at his side. So he begins to rip up the newspaper, crumpling the pages to make a ball, which he throws on the floor for Whisky to play with. But when he gets to the real estate pages he sets about examining the columns of tiny letters, the repetitive, specious phrases of housing market literature. He pores over them obsessively until his head is spinning. Even so, it’s not difficult for him to find the agency’s logo or an apartment for sale not far away and at a reasonable price for his illusory hopes. I have nothing to lose, he tells himself. His heart missing a beat, he dials the number in the ad and asks for information about the apartment. The switchboard operator tells him to wait a moment and forwards the call to an agent. A woman answers (but she doesn’t sound as if her name is Anna), singing the praises of that high, sunny apartment, with great views. It’s a gem, believe me, she says. He’s anxious, nodding all the while, yeah, hmm, yeah, and perhaps he’s a little too quick to ask if they can show it to him, because he really wants to see it. The few details she’s offered have given him good vibes—and that’s exactly what he said, “good vibes,” as if to encourage himself. Yes, certainly. Of course. They can meet tomorrow morning. But couldn’t it be today, late afternoon? Tomorrow doesn’t really suit him. Ibon’s quivering with impatience. He’d bite all his nails if his hands and mouth weren’t already occupied. The woman hesitates for a moment—three or four seconds, maybe—and he can hear pages of an agenda being turned in the background. Then she says OK, six o’clock will be all right, the last appointment of the
day. She asks him to jot down the exact address. Hearing this, Ibon is relieved but grips the phone tighter when he thanks her. Now there’s only one matter left to sort out, the most important thing, so, somewhat agitated, he hears himself saying, “Excuse me, but there’s just one more question.” Now he’s getting ready to lie. “About five or six years ago, when I rented the apartment where I live now, it was handled by a very nice agent. I think her name was Anna . . . Anna Fuguet?”

  “Oh, right, that’s me,” says Anna in a voice that is nothing like the one he imagined. Then she lets out a giggle that could be either playful or incredulous, confirms that she’ll see him at six this afternoon, and hangs up.

  * * *

  Ibon, however, takes almost four minutes to hang up. Standing there in a silence interrupted only by beeps from the phone, he hears Anna’s words harmoniously echoing over and over again in his head, swelling with that laugh, which he knows was one of deep understanding, coming from a long way back. Yes, that was her voice. How silly of him to have doubted it: it was gorgeous, musical, friendly, welcoming. The portrait is more and more positive, his senses increasingly fine-tuned, and he can’t believe he’s going to meet her and will be able to talk to her in just a few hours.