by Becky Blake
By 8:00 a.m., the train had picked up speed, and there were people around me again, sitting tall and self-important in their church clothes. The artificial light exposed everyone’s flaws: their undyed roots, razor-burned chins and sweat stains. I closed my eyes and didn’t bother to open them again, even when passengers sat down beside me. For a long time, there was only the weight of strangers’ bodies coming and going.
One particular body eventually caught my attention because it smelled like the outdoors: sea air mixed with soil and exhaust. I shifted slightly away, then thought I felt something touch me. I reached my hand into my pocket before remembering – I had no keys, no money to protect. Instead I felt the brush of retreating fingers. I straightened up and opened my eyes.
Sitting beside me was a young guy with gold-brown skin and dark eyes. He wore a folded bandana over a mess of black hair and a dirty leather cuff around each of his wrists. Both hands were on his knees now where I could see them. He was looking down at his fingers.
“Mejor quédate despierta,” he said.
The sense of his words burst in on me without knocking. Growing up, when my mom was working late, our neighbour Rosa had always said the same thing to me if I started to fall asleep on her couch. “It’s better if you stay awake.”
I took a moment to rearrange my limited Spanish vocabulary, then told him that I didn’t need to stay awake; there was nothing in my pockets.
He turned to study me, and the light in the metro flickered. For a second he looked like a small boy, vulnerable, then he was a young man again, a thief. Something raw and open passed between us. It felt like recognition.
He handed me the paint chip he’d taken from my pocket and stood up.
I watched him walk down the length of the train, nobody looking as he passed. A tourist couple was blocking one of the doors, pointing up at a metro map. The woman had a knapsack on her back and the pickpocket stopped behind her. The train made a sudden snaking motion as it entered a new tunnel, and the woman stumbled, then regained her balance. It had happened so fast, I wasn’t sure I’d really seen him do it – just a quick flash of motion behind her back. I almost called out to the tourists, but I changed my mind. They were laughing together, the woman holding onto the man’s arm. Honeymooners maybe. It was stupid to live like that, like children in adult bodies, so trusting and unprotected.
A recorded voice announced the name of the next station, Urquinaona, and the train began to slow. The pickpocket glanced back at me then disappeared through the open door.
All the blood in my body rushed to my legs as I stood up, propelled by one thought only: I needed to go where he was going. I stepped off the train just as the doors were closing. The pickpocket was already on the escalator, halfway to the top. I squeezed my way around people until I was almost close enough to touch him. Through his thin T-shirt, his shoulder blades looked like handles I could grab.
Outside, the sunlight was blinding. I followed him for a block, keeping a little distance between us. At the corner, he stopped at a red light, and I came up beside him, my heart knocking hard. He turned, and I forced myself to meet his gaze. One of his dark eyes was a little sleepy, and beneath it a constellation of freckles was scattered across his cheek. His nose pointed slightly in the other direction as though it had been badly broken.
When the light changed from red to green, he gave me a small nod, and I felt like we were making a deal; I wasn’t sure for what. We began to walk together, first along the top edge of the Gothic Quarter, then into El Raval, the neighbourhood on the opposite side of La Rambla. I’d been to El Raval a few nights before with Peter. We had planned to eat dinner there, but we hadn’t really felt safe. There were fewer street lamps, and after taking a wrong turn, we’d ended up in a dark alley full of beggars and junkies that led to a street lined with prostitutes. I’d seen a splash of fresh blood on the cobblestones.
The pickpocket shifted closer to me on the sidewalk as we squeezed by a group of men gathered in front of a butcher shop. They were talking in a language I didn’t recognize, and they watched us as we passed. Above my head, laundry flapped from balconies. I heard babies crying, and somewhere a car alarm was going off.
A tall man in a suit shuffled by. There was something wrong with his feet. When I turned to look, I saw that one of his legs was fake – it had twisted around and was pointing in the wrong direction. The sadness in the city kept creeping up behind me, tapping me on the shoulder. Look, it seemed to be saying. Look here, and here, and here.
I followed the pickpocket through a stone archway. A tarnished plaque said we were entering the grounds of the city’s first hospital, no longer in use. There was a damp, hurt smell coming from inside the courtyard. When we walked toward it, I saw a man pulling a needle out of his arm. Another washing his shirt in the fountain. Two others were yelling back and forth, hands in the air. All of them stopped as we entered, and I stopped too.
The pickpocket looked back to see if I was coming, and I searched his face for a promise of safety that wasn’t there. When I moved toward him again, he led me into a shadowed corner that smelled like piss and orange blossoms. Behind a pillar he bent down and swung open a metal grate. Inside was a dusty green knapsack. I heard him rummaging through the pockets, and when he turned, he handed me a cream-filled pastry in a plastic wrapper. His fingernails were dirty.
“Tienes que comer,” he said. “You have to eat.”
I took the pastry. “Gracias.”
“De nada.”
He lifted his T-shirt and pulled the tourist’s wallet from the waistband of his jeans. He was very thin, and he had a shiny pink scar snaking across his stomach.
I took a couple small bites of the pastry, then stuck the rest of it back in the wrapper. Eating sweet things always made me feel sick – they weren’t really food.
The pickpocket was looking through the wallet and pulling out the money. It was a sensible, beige canvas wallet with snap pockets for change. Empty plastic photo sleeves dangled from its spine. The tourists would be mourning its loss now, their day refocused around cancelling their credit cards, making expensive phone calls, trying not to blame each other.
The pickpocket wrapped the wallet in a piece of newspaper and walked over to stuff it in a trash can. When he returned, he asked for my name.
“Jane,” I said. It was an alias I hadn’t used since I’d been caught shoplifting as a teen.
He put his hand on his chest. “Manu.”
It was either his name, or the name of something that lived inside him. “Manu,” I repeated, and he nodded.
As it got dark, more people joined us in the courtyard, flopping down on the grass, tired or drunk, and calling out to each other in loud friendly voices. Manu and I were sitting on his blanket, and he was trying to organize his belongings. He repacked his knapsack, starting with a pair of workboots and a small stack of clothes, then a collection of papers and photos sealed in a Ziploc bag. Into the side pockets, he tucked some items he’d been carrying with him: a pack of cigarettes, some money and a folding knife. We weren’t talking too much, but other people kept coming over to visit. Many of them seemed to be missing something: a shoe, an eye, a finger. It was hard not to stare at them, to wonder what Manu might be missing.
A foul-smelling old man in a ripped overcoat stood looking down at us for a moment, then lurched in my direction, laughing and grabbing at his crotch. He didn’t have any teeth. As I leaned away from him, my thumb moved instinctively to the band of my engagement ring. It was a gesture of security: I am loved, I am safe. But those things were no longer true.
Manu asked the old pervert to leave me alone, assuring him that we both knew what a ladies’ man he must have been in his prime. The old man seemed to like this, and immediately began telling Manu a story about a woman he’d slept with. I waited until neither of them was looking, then slipped off my ring and put it in the inside pock
et of my coat. Maybe I could sell it. I wondered how much it was worth.
The old man looked over at me again. “¿De dónde eres?” he asked.
“De Canadá.”
“¿Y por qué estás aquí?”
I didn’t know if he was asking why I was in Spain, or why I was in the courtyard. Before I could find out, two policemen in black-and-yellow jackets arrived, and the old man grumbled and wandered off, heading toward the exit.
“Mossos,” Manu explained, glancing toward the cops. He shoved the rest of his stuff back into his knapsack, and we joined the others who were filing out of the courtyard.
One policeman stared at me as we passed. He probably thought I seemed out of place, but the truth was I’d been around rundown people for most of my life. Growing up, the streets around my apartment building in Parkdale were full of them. At school, I pretended I was from a nicer part of the neighbourhood, making sure I only hung out with girls who lived in the big houses further north, girls who came from proper two-parent/two-job families and had braces and university funds. Brigid was the only one of those girls who knew where I really lived. As teenagers, my apartment was a good place for us to hang out because my mother was hardly ever home. After I got kicked out, Brigid’s parents took me in so I could finish high school. Staying in the guest room of their giant house, I had thought maybe the memories of my mother’s building and street would fade, but they hadn’t.
Manu and I exited through the archway. The others from the courtyard were all heading off in different directions, some of them trailing blankets, like children who were half asleep. Manu looked uncertain, as if he didn’t know what to do with me.
“Let’s go somewhere else,” I said. “I don’t care where.”
“Okay.” He indicated a direction, and we crossed the street, then walked down the same dark alley that I’d stumbled into with Peter – the one that led to a street full of prostitutes. Tonight, I looked at them more closely. They were young mostly, a wide selection of Eastern European and sub-Saharan girls with gold or silver hot pants and dark glossy lips. Unloved and far from home. The city’s sadness was heavy now, two hands pressing on my shoulders instead of tapping.
A woman with an orange Afro beckoned to us with a long fingernail as we passed. Manu said something to her that I didn’t catch, and she smiled, leaning back against the wall.
At the end of the street we came to a construction site enclosed by a temporary fence of whitewashed boards. One part of the fence featured a picture of how the finished building would look. It was going to be a hotel; tall, black and cylindrical, modern and expensive. Someone had spray-painted the fence with graffiti. Two words jumped out at me: gentrificación, PIGS.
Above the fence, the hotel’s half-finished skeleton rose into the night sky, its inner workings exposed: iron girders, rusted piping, thick cables. We walked around the perimeter until we came to a gap in the fence. Manu pushed his bag through the opening and squeezed in sideways after it. To follow him I had to suck in my breath, and even still, raw-edged wood scraped me front and back. Inside the fence, I froze. There was a security guard sitting on a chair, listening to a small radio. I was ready to run, but he didn’t look up. Manu took two cans of beer from his knapsack and placed them on the ground near the guard, then motioned for me to keep moving. There were wires and broken bricks underfoot. I held out my arms to the sides as we climbed a set of concrete stairs. After being underground the night before, it didn’t feel good to be going so high up. I tried to count the floors to distract myself, but I kept losing track.
When we reached the top, maybe the tenth or twelfth floor, Manu walked straight to the unfinished edge of one of the rooms and sat down with his legs dangling out into the open air. I could see the lights of Montjuïc beyond him; we were as high up as the mountain. Some of those lights were coming from the art museum where Peter now worked. I wondered if he was looking for me somewhere in the city down below, wishing maybe that he’d bought me a cell phone that worked here.
Manu turned. “Venga.”
I shook my head. I was too dizzy to join him at the edge. Instead, I sat down on the dusty floor, but I couldn’t escape the view. I’d never been afraid of heights before, but now the open space was pulling me like a magnet while sadness pushed me from behind. There was a cemetery on the other side of Montjuïc – it was one of the first things I’d seen driving in from the airport – and I thought about how easy it would be to stand up and walk toward it. Five seconds to the edge, then five seconds of falling, maybe ten. I hugged my knees to my chest. I needed to contain those thoughts.
Manu got up and came over to where I was sitting. He took the thin blanket out of his pack and spread it on the ground. I shifted over and he sat beside me. From down below, the shouts of the prostitutes, beer sellers and drunken tourists rose up. Distorted and tangled by the distance, they combined into a racket that spiked and dropped in unpredictable patterns, impossible to block out. I was grateful for the noise; I didn’t want to fall asleep. I had a sudden urge to reach out my hand and slip it under the edge of Manu’s T-shirt. I wanted to trace the pink line of his scar, but that was just another thought I needed to contain.
I stared down at my empty hands, at the thin white tan line on my ring finger that looked like a scar of my own. “I don’t know what I’m doing here,” I said.
Manu picked up some pebbles from the floor and tossed them toward the edge of the room. A few of them skittered over the side and fell. “We’re looking at the city,” he said in Spanish.
Then we sat beside each other for a long time, breathing all the emptiness in and out.
3
When I woke, there was an absence of noise, and for a few seconds I didn’t know where I was. Then I saw Manu standing at the unfinished edge of the room, the sky a deep pre-morning blue beyond him. The smoke from his cigarette spiralled into the open space.
I sat up slowly. Every part of my body felt stiff and cold. I couldn’t believe I’d spent the night more or less outside.
Manu flicked his cigarette butt out into the air, and I remembered we were at least ten floors up. Not yet, I thought. It hasn’t hit the ground yet.
Manu turned. He was probably only a few years younger than me, maybe twenty or so, but his bandana made him look younger – like one of the teenage boys who hung out on the steps of the community centre in my old neighbourhood back home.
Now. Now it’s hit the ground.
I assumed the workmen would be arriving soon, so I stood and began to fold the blanket. Manu came over to help me, and our fingers touched when we came together with the corners. It was strange to have slept beside him. During the night I’d woken to find his hands clutching at me, but it had only been a nightmare he was having. When I’d asked if he was okay, he’d apologized, his voice travelling up from under something heavy. Neither of us had gone back to sleep for quite a while.
We finished packing up, and Manu shouldered the knapsack. At the top of the stairs, he turned and waited for me to pass. I shook my head. I wanted him to go first so I’d have something to focus on, rather than looking down. There was a sheer drop to the ground floor on the left side of the stairs and no handrail to steady myself.
When we reached the bottom, Manu led me back toward the fence. The security guard and the cans of beer were gone. We squeezed out through the gap, then stood for a moment on the other side, looking around. There wasn’t a single person on the street.
“¿Vamos a la playa?” Manu asked.
“Sure.” I had wanted to see the Mediterranean ever since my arrival, but I’d been holding off until Peter had time to join me. There was no longer any reason to wait.
Manu and I walked down to the port, then followed the line of coast around until we hit sand. I stopped for a moment to scan the Mediterranean’s curving length and took my first breath of sea air. Despite everything, I felt a surge of joy.
I was finally here. In high school, Europe had seemed like a different world, a kind of utopia where people sat around all day in cafés talking about painting and architecture. For months, I’d saved up any money my mother left for me on the kitchen counter, eating only stolen food, and hiding her ten-dollar bills in an overdue library book called Europe on a Shoestring. My bedroom walls had been covered with the pages I’d torn out: the Eiffel Tower, the Colosseum, the canals of Venice, the Louvre. I’d often wondered if those pages were still stuck to my old walls, if the money was still in the guidebook, if my mother even lived in the same apartment.
The Mediterranean looked less inviting in person than it had in pictures. Tall whitecapped waves smacked over and over against the breakwall, and a strong wind raced across the sand. Manu led me to an open-air shower and we took turns washing up a bit, splashing cold water on our faces and hands, our arms and feet. When we were finished, we sat down on his blanket to wait until we were dry. Nearby a tall sculpture towered above us: a stack of four rusted cubes with a window in each. The cubes sat atop each other at slightly off angles, like a four-storey apartment building in danger of toppling over.
A man in a windbreaker was coming toward us, a plastic bag of canned beverages swinging from one hand. He was one of the beer sellers. There seemed to be an army of them working the city, day and night. Most were South Asian, newcomers to Barcelona who were trying to make a bit of money by selling beer without a licence. Peter said the beer sellers stashed their bags in the sewer whenever police approached. Because of that, he never bought beer from any of them.