“We are in an Escher drawing,” Tomas cried, strangely elated.
I smiled, too, but shivering, the wind a high whistle in my ears. Snow had clotted on my eyelashes, so that I blinked hard.
Two dark-haired women appeared then, a cluster of canisters at their feet. I was surprised to see a mild disappointment in Tomas’s face. I began to gesture and explain we were lost. They listened without expression, their wet wrinkles glistening. Then one turned to Tomas, and speaking shyly in Mandarin, she lifted her ancient hands and brushed the flakes of ice from his hair. He gave a boyish laugh, delighted.
The second woman drew from a canister by her feet two foam cups steaming with tea. When she had poured these, or how she’d managed to keep the water hot on so cold a day high up in those hills, I did not know. But Tomas took his with great ceremony. I waved mine away.
The women gestured behind them, and there they were—the cable cars. The glass domes swayed over the open black valley as if newly restored.
Tomas made a noise of astonishment. As we went toward the cable cars, he spoke in wonder at the feel of the woman’s palms on his head, their surprising weight, the roughness of her skin.
But on the drive back to Beijing, we said little. It felt strange not to talk, after so long. Tomas was always garrulous in his moments of happiness, but now he seemed emptied, as if something had been slowly forced out of him. As we reached the hotel, I could tell by the tension in his mouth that he was still troubled by a thing I couldn’t quite grasp. Gently, I took his hand. He gripped mine back, as if he knew where our lives were going, as if the ravages had already happened. All over the world there were lights going out, even then.
avi’s luck turned on Day 1 of the curfew. He’d been unemployed for a month, he told me—let go from a job selling homeowner’s insurance to defenseless little grandmothers over the phone—and he’d pretty much been in free fall since then; but the lockdown changed everything. Overnight, people stopped asking him if he’d found a new job yet, and if not why not, and how exactly he was figuring to pay next month’s rent. They blamed the “covirus” more or less automatically, saving Xavi the trouble of explaining that he’d actually been fired for showing up late, cold calling with his mouth full, and trying out goofy voices on the customers to keep himself sane. Suddenly none of that mattered. The whole city was laid off now, and the whole city was half-crazy, and the whole city was desperate to get the hell outside and walk the wrong way up La Rambla and stare mournfully through darkened shop windows at things they didn’t actually want to buy. Xavi’s life had become everybody’s life.
He himself was still allowed to do all of the above, strangely enough, in spite of the lockdown, on account of Contessa and Sheppo. Before the quarantine, he took them out once in the morning and once after dinner—Sheppo especially, a three-year-old Lhasa apso, lost his marbles if he didn’t get his daily 15 minutes at the dog run in the Parc de Joan Miró—but lately it was three, four, sometimes six or seven times a day. Xavi took this as a sign that his depression had finally lifted, and that was part of the explanation, no doubt; but there was also a more existential reason. Walking his dogs gave Xavi the feeling of gaming the system, of hacking the matrix, of thumbing his nose at the gods. Eight days into the lockdown, pedestrians without clearance were subject to hassling by the municipal police, not to mention by their own neighbors—but dogs, big or small, mongrel or pedigree, had the run of the town. It didn’t take Xavi long to see the business potential in this situation. His miserable employment record notwithstanding, he’d always thought of himself as an entrepreneur.
Xavi put the word out the very next day—first among the residents of his hulking Franco-era apartment complex on Carrer de l’Olivera, then among his friends and acquaintances in the neighborhood—that Sheppo and Contessa were available for “excursions,” in two-hour increments, for a discretionary fee. The response was instantaneous. The pitch of his fellow citizens’ eagerness disturbed him, in fact. He realized that some kind of vetting process was called for—he wasn’t just some sidewalk pimp, after all. He loved his dogs deeply. On the other hand, rent.
He sat down that night with a blue ballpoint pen and a handful of Post-its and drew up an official protocol. Step 1 was an email or text exchange, six messages minimum. Step 2 was an interview of no less than 30 minutes, in person, to be conducted either at the dog run or in Xavi’s living room. If Sheppo showed the least sign of ambivalence—Contessa jumped into anybody’s lap within seconds, literally anybody’s, and was not to be trusted as a judge of character—then the deal was off, with absolutely no exceptions.
To make things even more rigorous, he decided, after long deliberation, that he’d let no one walk his dogs who voted for the Partido Popular in the most recent referendum, or smoked cigarettes, or was nearsighted or epileptic, or walked with a cane. He was providing a valuable service, he reminded himself: decent, law-abiding citizens got to visit their mothers or their girlfriends or their off-track-betting offices, and his dogs got their exercise, and he got out of debt. Overall, as a business model, it struck Xavi as innovative, streamlined, and socially conscious. By the time he’d screened his first client—whom Sheppo rejected in less than five minutes—he was beginning to feel like the Elon Musk of Poble Sec.
The first day’s haul of customers was a mixed bag at best: a devout-looking man with a perfectly round bald spot like a Capuchin monk who claimed to need to visit a diabetic aunt in Sarrià; a matronly woman in tennis shoes who told him she needed the dogs for “astral support”; then the same monkish man—who didn’t bother to give a reason this time—and lastly Fausto Montoya, a friend from Xavi’s old job who made use of his freedom to spy on his ex. Xavi rejected two candidates—one for voting for the Partido Popular (and for being a smoker), the other for referring to the illness that was decimating the global economy and killing Catalans by the hundreds as “Cobi,” which just so happened to have been the name of the mascot of the 1992 Barcelona Olympics. Xavi had felt downright righteous as he showed the man out.
Mariona entered Xavi’s life on Day 10 of the lockdown, his second active day of business, at the hour when he normally smoked his first joint. She rapped on the apartment door just as he was settling accounts with the Capuchin—who gave every sign of intending to come twice a day, regular as clockwork, for the rest of the pandemic—and stepped past Xavi without a word of explanation, as though they’d known each other for decades. This mystified Xavi, who had been trying for some time now to cut back on his pre-dinner hash intake. He asked her to sit down, partly to buy himself time, partly because she was at least five centimeters taller than he was and he was feeling more than a little overwhelmed already. He brought her tap water in a cracked Real Madrid cup, although he hated Real Madrid with all his heart, and stumbled through his standard interview, feeling less and less like the Elon Musk of anywhere. He began to get the suspicion that he was the one being vetted, not the woman sitting cross-legged on his futon. The slightly dilapidated zone of Xavi’s brain reserved for questions of ethics was starting to tingle: For the first time, for no reason he could put his finger on, he entertained the possibility that his fledgling business venture might not actually be something to be proud of. Nothing that Mariona said had raised this issue directly—her basic gestalt simply conspired to make Xavi feel unworthy. It didn’t help his moral clarity, either, that said business venture was the one and only reason for her presence in his room.
“Who did you vote for in the last election?”
“What has that got to do with anything?”
“Nothing, really. I’m just, you know, trying to get a more in-depth—”
“The CUP,” she said flatly. “My star sign is Taurus. I type fifty words a minute, and I’m allergic to garlic.”
Her joke allowed Xavi to laugh through his relief. Of course she voted CUP. How could someone so perfect vote anything else? “Power to the people,” he mumbled, lamely raising a fist, which he now saw had a musta
rd stain across two of its knuckles. “Catalunya for the Catalans—”
“And Covid-19 for no one.” She grinned. “Except maybe my landlord.”
“That’s—a beautiful sentiment. I couldn’t agree more.” He sucked in a breath. “Just one more question.”
“Thank God.”
“Would you mind telling me what you’ll be using them for?”
She blinked at him. “What?”
Xavi explained, not without a certain self-regard, that he preferred to know—purely for his dogs’ sake, of course—what each potential client’s motive was in taking them out.
“I don’t have a motive,” Mariona said.
“But you must have some reason—”
“Of course I have a reason.” She looked at him as if he might be slightly slow. “I like dogs.”
That shut Xavi up. He gave her the two leashes and the key card to the building and she was gone. It was only after she dropped Sheppo and Contessa off, two hours later exactly, that he realized he’d never asked for her ID.
It was too much to hope for that Mariona would come back the next day, like a better-smelling, less-pious version of the Capuchin; but Xavi was disconsolate regardless. There was nothing to do now but focus on work. Day 3 of business—Day 11 of the lockdown—brought him two teenage girls who claimed to have worked in a veterinarian’s office but couldn’t figure out how to buckle Contessa’s harness; the superintendent of Xavi’s building, who was letting his patchy beard grow out like some pudgy, cut-rate Che Guevara; and no fewer than three weed dealers, all of whom paid him in product. The Capuchin came twice, paying his 20-euro fee in a sealed blue envelope that smelled faintly of rosewater, which irritated Xavi intensely for no reason at all. He asked how the diabetic aunt in Sarrià was doing, in what he hoped was a tone of scathing irony. The Capuchin ignored him.
A day went by, two days, four days, a week. Contessa and Sheppo had never gotten so much exercise, and his thoroughly vetted customers appeared to be treating them well. Then—on Day 22 of the lockdown, long after he’d abandoned all hope—Mariona returned. She wore a mask this time, one that looked to have been made from a pair of pajamas; above the paisley-patterned silk, however, her eyes were distinctly more inviting than on her last visit. Xavi knew the desperation born of weeks of anguished boredom when he saw it. He invited himself along on her outing, not even trying to come up with a pretext, and she put up no objection. They strolled slowly up La Rambla to the Plaça de Catalunya, Mariona walking Contessa and Xavi walking Sheppo, and by the time they passed the public urinal by the little boarded-up electronics store at the corner of Pintor Fortuny, Xavi had become aware of a feeling that he hadn’t had since the start of the pandemic: the sense that he knew what the future would bring.
She was a graduate student at Pompeu Fabra, working toward a degree in community organizing, which Xavi hadn’t known you needed a degree for. She grew up in Pedralbes, a posh part of town, but only because her father worked as a gardener for a rich old man who did something borderline-illegal involving the labeling of wine. Xavi couldn’t remember the shape of her mouth, not exactly—she was charmingly strict about wearing her mask—but he had no reason not to think that it was lovely. The high point of their outing, and the true zero hour of their quarantine romance, came when they spotted none other than the Capuchin himself, decidedly not heading in the direction of the poor aunt’s apartment in Sarrià, walking an entirely different pair of dogs.
Within the week, Mariona was quarantining at Xavi’s place, smoking his weed and essentially running his business. Xavi had no objection—basically she talked, he told me, and he tried to keep up. She was too smart for him, or at least too high-functioning. It was a magical time—in the way you’d expect, but also in a disquieting way, because it all felt so dreamlike, so improbable, that it was difficult to fully believe in. But then again, Xavi reminded himself, everything felt like that these days. Life as he—and everybody else on the planet—had known it had been replaced, seemingly overnight, with some pulp-science-fiction approximation of itself. What was easy to believe in anymore?
Xavi told me this story—his personal lockdown fable, he called it—over virtual mojitos on a Zoom call in May. Barcelona’s lockdown had been lifted, and he was back to his old self: unemployed and melancholy, the way he got when he was smoking, slightly too stoned to bring his fable to a satisfying close. Things with Mariona had “run their course,” he explained—but he had no complaints. The sex had been great, he’d learned a lot about community organizing, and she’d genuinely appreciated his cooking; but once the restrictions were finally lifted, and everyone was able to circulate freely again, both his business and his relationship drifted off like smoke. He and Mariona had something in common for six surreal weeks; then suddenly they didn’t. Things like that happened all the time, especially in times of war or plague or famine. Still, they might have stood a chance, Xavi insisted—they might have made a real home, settled down, maybe even had a couple of kids—if the lockdown had never been lifted.
We were getting to the end of our 40 free minutes, and I tried to use what little time remained to boost poor Xavi’s spirits. You never know what might happen, I pointed out to him. Barcelona was an open city again. Who could say what the future might bring?
“I’ve been thinking about that,” Xavi said, cheering up a little. “I was watching the news when you called. There might be a second wave coming this fall.…”
he is dreaming of caves and the rocks and minerals with which he’s obsessed. In the dream, he tells her that touching one of the columns rising from the cave floor could cause the stalagmite to die. She laughs and tells him that this might be one reason people no longer live in caves. He corrects her and says: “Maybe not in Brooklyn, but some people elsewhere do. Forced by weather, maybe during or after hurricanes, or during a war. Hiding, or for protection.”
He reminds her that there are breathtaking—though he’d no longer use that particular word—enviably beautiful, he might say, million-year-old caves he would love to see, caves with mile-long pits, canyons and shafts, even waterfalls, and with explosions of colors from marble arches, selenite crystals, ice pearls, or glowworms, caves that are so striking they could burn your pupils with their beauty.
He can no longer speak this way, his body vibrating with each word, his fists raised in exhilaration, his head bouncing from side to side, as though he’s always trying to generate a room’s worth of enthusiasm for the high school juniors and seniors to whom he teaches earth and environmental science. At home, his sentences had grown short and clipped even before he became visibly ill. He was beginning to sound like some of her newly arrived cousins, curtly speaking a borrowed tongue, while the language they’ve been hearing since birth slowly slipped away.
This summer, they were planning to visit the grottos and caves of their parents’ birthplace, near the town where her mother was born, in the south of Haiti.
“One of the caves is your namesake,” he said when they decided to solicit honeymoon funds for the trip on their wedding registry. The cave had, like her, been named for a nurse and soldier, Marie-Jeanne Lamartiniére, who dressed as a man to fight alongside her husband against the French colonial army during the Haitian Revolution.
“Who would I have to dress as to be able to see you, and fight for you, with you?” she asks him now. “Would I have to be a doctor, or a chaplain? Are you—the atheist—even allowed a chaplain, just in case you wake up and demand conversion?”
A recollection of his racing breath jolts her awake. What scares her most now, in this recent hierarchy of terrors, is not his silence, or the gasping beats of the ventilator, which is hours old, but when the shift changes and someone speaks into the phone that had been placed next to his ear. The exhausted female voice on the other end, a voice she imagines as a mezzo-soprano in an a cappella group, from the way her intonation rises and falls so quickly and dramatically—that voice purposely perks up and says: “Good morni
ng. Am I speaking to the love of Ray’s life?”
How did you know? she wants to ask. Of course they take notes, on iPads or notepads, for one another to read, small details to differentiate, individualize. The night nurse might have been able to make out her words after all. He might have written down exactly what Marie-Jeanne had bawled and blubbered through: “His name is Raymond, but we call him Ray. He is the love of my life.”
“What did you two spend the night talking about?” the morning nurse asks. And before reminding her to recharge the phone so she can speak in his ear again, later that morning, and maybe in the afternoon, and perhaps again tonight, Marie-Jeanne sleepily answers in her scratchy, mostly bass voice: “Caves. We were talking caves.”
They didn’t always talk about caves. During their four-month courtship, between the new science teachers’ orientation and their New Year’s Eve wedding in the Flatbush Avenue restaurant owned by his parents, they talked more generally of travel. This was one advantage of their profession, after all, their great fortune in having the summers to check off bucket-list items. He liked to describe their planned trips as though they’d already happened. He wanted them to ride a steam train between the river gorges of Zambia’s Lower Zambezi National Park and Victoria Falls Bridge, and hoped that before they had children they would climb Machu Picchu, swim with penguins in the Galápagos, gaze at the northern lights from inside a glass igloo. But first they had to go on the delayed honeymoon to her namesake cave.
As soon as she hangs up with the nurse, she imagines driving to the hospital and circling the main building. She’d park under the sweet gum tree by the front gate. In ordinary times, this street would be a conduit to a lobby where visitors sign in before finding their way inside the hospital maze. The day before, she dropped him off on the other side of that building, at the emergency-admission section. Two people in what looked like space suits had wheeled him inside. He could still breathe on his own then and was even able to turn his head and wave in her direction. It was not a goodbye wave. Go on now, he seemed to be saying under the face mask, his nightshade eyes obscured by fogging aviator glasses. There is a long line of people behind you.
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