by Richard Gwyn
Parts of her monologue were in practically accentless English and sounded almost rehearsed. She was fluent, but sometimes seemed to be weighing up the effect of her words silently, her lips pursed, before uttering them. She carried on with her memories of London, talking in a matter-of-fact tone, while working her way through a serving of octopus. She looked up at me from time to time while chewing on the rubbery meat, or picking scraps from the wooden platter.
“It’s funny,” she said, at one point. “I had always dreamed of travelling alone in a desert. I remember having these nomadic dreams since early childhood. For instance, I would be in an empty landscape when a single feature would mark it out as definably mine: a woven bracelet in the sand, a cat stretched along the flowering branch of a solitary tree. An otherwise withered tree, with this one flowering branch, completely out of place in such a desert. But the desert was not always one of sand. On occasions it was a heath, or a marsh, under low-lying grey cloud. Like in Britain. In a way, I suppose, I believed that in London, in places with names like Barking, Hoxton, Dalston, Stoke Newington, I had the same sense of walking through an impersonal landscape, the only unchanging feature being me, myself, walking, under grey skies. The knowledge of my two feet stepping out in front of me, directed towards no place special.”
The main dish of suquet was brought to the table in a simple china tureen, which the waiter set down between us. Big chunks of monkfish floated in a rich stock, strengthened with a picada of crushed hazelnuts laced with brandy. We applied ourselves to the meal in silence for a while. Then Nuria spoke again.
“This thing about your postcard. It’s kind of weird” (a favourite word of hers, it seemed), “but I might as well tell you. When I first saw you in the gallery, looking at that painting, before you spoke to me—well, my first reaction was that I knew you. In fact I was about to greet you, but could not place where I knew you from. I’ve been searching my memory all day, trying to figure out if I have met you before. This sense of recognising someone you happen to like the look of is supposed to be a common delusion, isn’t it? But it isn’t for me. It’s very real, and very er, particular.” Here her enunciation conveyed the Spanish meaning of the word: personal, private. “When you came up and spoke to me on the roof, I was almost, you know, relieved, as though at least one of us had the nerve to break through some ridiculous convention about who you do or do not speak with. I have never felt this certainty about a stranger before. I’m sure I shouldn’t be telling you either—it’s a very bad idea for, well, especially for women to disclose their intuitions at a first date.”
I grunted noncommittally. “I don’t know. Isn’t that more to do with protecting ourselves against receiving wounds, of giving too much away?”
“Perhaps. Reserve certainly has its advantages. What I’m trying to say is that with you, the pretence at reserve seemed pointless, since I had this feeling that I was just picking up something I’d left off some time before. Does this sound ridiculous?”
I shrugged. “I haven’t thought about it. I suppose I singled you out as the person I was intended to meet, because of all the people at the gallery you were the person I most wanted to meet.”
That bit at least was true.
Nuria looked at me steadily.
“Really? I find it hard to believe you haven’t been thinking about this, this question of our having met before. It seems so strong to me.”
“I can’t say I’d have expressed it quite like that. But yes, there was a familiarity about you. I think part of my trouble is that I don’t really know what my first perceptions of people are any more. I’m sure I used to know. It’s something that has just gone. But when I first meet someone now, my brain starts all the usual machinations, the acting out of roles. I lack that purity, that certainty of who I am that says, “This is how you feel”—because fast on the tail of the first perception comes a second, and then a third, which all conspire to contradict each other. I don’t know what I think half the time.”
“Pobrecito.” Poor thing. Half-mocking.
I realised immediately that I was giving her a dose of weary and vulnerable, a transparent but, for me, trusted seduction technique. I checked myself. It was obvious that Nuria did not require this kind of posturing on my part. A lot more was going on right now than I was capable of coming to grips with, and it was becoming obvious, too, that Nuria was smarter than me, certainly quicker at anticipating my reactions than I could hers, and more ready to express herself directly. Her eyes were like interrogatory antennae, seeking out clues, reading situations, not just those immediately in front of her, but always sweeping the peripheries to take in more: passers-by, conversations at a nearby table, the movements of the waiter. That single word, the Spanish diminutive pobrecito, seemed to chide me.
I felt duly reprimanded. She could, of course, have just let me continue, acting out the role of weary and vulnerable to my heart’s content, but she had seen through it, recognised it for what it was (even in this moderated form), and decided to stifle it before it became established as a part of my ritual dance with her. She might even have felt insulted by me for adopting such a role, and she would have been justified if she had.
Just then a blast of music was carried on the wind, and hovered briefly around us, before being abruptly turned off—music for clarinet and orchestra by Mozart that seemed entirely out of place amid the frayed informality and bustle of Barceloneta on a Saturday night. It was an incongruous moment that cut in on the conversation, and on the pressure to perform which I had felt accumulating in me. The temptation to produce a role for Nuria dissipated rapidly with this translucent and uncomplicated music.
Nuria picked up on my changed expression.
“What is it?”
“Oh, nothing. Just that you’re probably right. I have a bad habit of laying things on a bit thick on a first date.”
“This isn’t a first date,” she said coolly, contradicting herself. “We’re having dinner.” As though in response to the unexpected burst of Mozart, she changed the subject. “What exactly did you study at university, or was it a conservatoire?”
“University. Composition and piano. I could never play piano very well, though. I just wanted to compose music that didn’t sound like anybody else’s. When I got there I realised that that was what everyone else wanted too. And that most likely we would all wind up writing theme tunes for television soaps, if we were lucky.”
“That wasn’t enough to put you off, surely?”
“No. But I became distracted.” I was being evasive, not wishing to re-visit that period of my life. “And then Greece and the bouzouki thing. In parts of Greece at the time there was a musical tradition that was still relatively uncorrupted. And I thought, If I’m going to compose music, I’ll set about it in my own way, whether it pays or not. But that dream kind of slid away, and without the discipline of exercising it daily, of composing a certain amount of music as a matter of routine, I drifted into forgetting what it was I wanted. I ceased to aspire, I suppose. Became happy, if that’s the word, which it isn’t, to be a kind of pseudo-sophisticated delinquent. I never really found my feet.”
“Your putting yourself down in this way: is it a British Thing?”
“Or just another aspect of the chat-up technique? A Man Thing.”
“Okay then. A British Man Thing.”
“Perhaps. Except about the feet. I still haven’t found them.”
I looked down, wondering whether I had meant what I had just said. This was often the case: not knowing whether I was saying things for effect or because I really believed them.
The waiter cleared the table and then returned with bowls of strawberries. The restaurant was full now, and people were milling casually around the streets, looking for places which still had free tables. I watched the passing faces, and gave a start as I recognised the woman from the Miró Foundation that morning—the thin reader of Kierkegaard. She passed by without looking at us directly, but I could have sworn that
she had caught my attention, because she had been staring at us the moment that I looked up. The unmistakable sense of being observed. I touched Nuria’s arm.
“That woman,” I said, indicating the figure as it passed along the promenade, “she was in the Miró Foundation this morning. Sitting on a sofa by the Woman in the Night.”
Nuria followed my gaze.
“Coincidence?”
“Perhaps.”
In a city of two million, how often do you notice the same stranger twice in one day, in distant parts of town? I didn’t pursue the topic with Nuria, but the possibility that we had been followed, were somehow under surveillance, struck me forcefully for the first time.
Nuria yawned and stretched again, lazily. I ordered coffee, and a brandy for myself, which Nuria declined. During the silence at the end of the meal, Nuria’s complicity and grace were company enough.
It was she who eventually spoke. “Well, are you going to show me where you live, or not?”
We paid the bill, and I followed Nuria out onto the street. There was a full moon rising above Tibidabo, and a breeze had begun to blow in from the sea.
As soon as I had closed the door of my apartment, Nuria turned to face me. She pushed me firmly back against the door and, encircling my neck in both her arms, pressed her body hard against me and we kissed. She felt tight and warm, a furnace of energy and resolve. With a dancer’s ease, she lifted herself off the ground and into the cradle of my arms, the soft skin of her underthighs nestling on my upturned wrists, my hands supporting her buttocks. I stepped to one side and held her up against the white wall of the living room and we kissed again, her tongue flickering over my lips, my teeth. She kissed my eyes and cheeks, and ran her hands through my hair. I lifted her closer and felt the compact weight of her body under my arms, smoothing her with the palms of my hands as she unbuttoned my shirt and fell to kissing my chest and nipples. She edged away from the wall and her hands continued downward, unbuttoning my jeans and urging me, with persistent tugs, to step out of them, and when I did so she slid to the ground, cupping me in her hands, squeezing and massaging. Kneeling, crouching, she pulled me down towards her, and I lifted her thin dress up over her head. She grabbed my shoulders and began kissing my mouth and face again, with a greater sense of urgency. As my hands learned the shape and pattern of her shoulders and back and breasts, her body seemed to shimmer with an unchecked exuberance. She shuddered and turned in response to the slightest movement of my fingers, which ran up and down her spine, into the little hollows of her collarbone, the recesses below her arms, the smoothness of her breasts and stomach. She pressed tighter against me and I breathed onto and into her skin, my tongue burrowing into the warm space between her thighs. Her hands tugged at my back, nails scraping me, drawing me upwards, pulling me closer, then enfolding and absorbing me inside of her; and now any sense of levity and play suddenly became replaced by something altogether darker, more desperate, needy. We moved, were joined together, in a universe I had barely approached before in the act of sex.
I saw her sprawled out in front of me in luminous points of light, as though shrouded in orange mist. I felt her body rise, her hips raised, trembling, and she was gasping in small white cries, as I too cried out, a hoarse bellow from the pit of my stomach; and then eased forward, into the soft fragrance of her breasts, her arms, her hair. Silently, we caressed each other, she running her fingers over my ears and neck, and I massaging her temples and gently stroking her eyelids as we lay still on the hard wooden floor.
After a while, I felt Nuria loosen herself from me and get up. I heard her moving in the bathroom. There was a blast of cool air from the open veranda, and I rummaged about the floor for my jeans. The living room was only partly illuminated by a lamp near the bookcase. I went through to the kitchen, filled a glass with cold white wine and lit a cigarette, grateful for a few moments’ solitude to soak up the afterglow.
5. A FREAK SHOW
Sunday morning. Early sun bursting through the blinds of my bedroom, and a bristling sea-wind. We had slept late, or rather, late for me. I looked over at Nuria, touched her face gently with my fingertips. Her lips brushed my hand, half-asleep. She turned over and settled again into the pillows. I got up and looked at her, lying face down and naked on the bed, her brown legs partly covered by a white sheet, which fell away over her thighs. I pulled the sheet over her body, went to the bathroom and showered. Standing a long while under the stream of warm water, I basked in blissful inebriation with memories of the night’s foldings and unfoldings, broken by snatches of sleep. I washed with a coconut-scented soap and wrapped myself in a large blue towel, then dressed and returned to the bedroom. Nuria was still sleeping soundly. I decided to let her rest, and went down to the street to do some shopping.
Polyphony and a savage brightness on the street. I walked past the market and found a bar, ordered a coffee and a brandy, drinking the coffee first. I wanted to keep this feeling of dislocation with me, of being part of a fiction or a dream that had fallen about me like a purple cloak the night before. The brandy would help keep me there, I was sure. I could float for a while. But I knew I could not bear to float for long: the fly-boy hovering in some ethereal space kept banging his wings against the ribs of a steel cage. The drink was Fundador—heavy, dense and unsubtle. Fundamental. Hence, according to my private reasoning, its name. It was darker than many Spanish brandies, and with it, I hit the sea-bed fast. A large draught caused a minor explosion as the liquor hit the bloodstream. As if in direct response to the sexual alchemy of the night before, I was at once de-railed. I ignited a chain of projected details that would thwart any prospect of long-term happiness or even of a provisional contentment with Nuria. Like cinematic clips, my imagination provided scenes of seismic fights and fuck-ups. Of killing off this promise of abundance before it got too much to handle. All the familiar ecstatic strains surged upward, along with their constant counterpoint—despair and loneliness, dread and self-loathing. It was a pattern I knew well. I tried to shake it physically from me as I left the bar.
I bought the last two croissants from my local baker, and a newspaper and cigarettes from the corner kiosk. Unlocking the street door of my apartment building, I bounded upstairs, taking the steps three at a time, and passed a bewildered-looking Manu outside his door on the third floor. I called out a greeting, but was inside my own apartment before I caught a reply.
After busying myself in the kitchen, I returned to the bedroom, carrying a jug of coffee and the croissants. I arranged her breakfast on the bedside table. Nuria rose on her elbows, watching me sleepily. Sitting on the edge of the bed, I handed her a cup of coffee. She took a sip, then put the cup down. She took my face between the palms of her hands and planted a kiss on my lips.
“How are you this morning?” she asked quietly.
My moment of panic in the bar had passed.
“Sensational,” I replied.
I had agreed to go to a party held by some British and other expatriates, English teachers, self-proclaimed writers, artists, and all-purpose time-wasters, in the Gothic quarter later that afternoon, a plan which my meeting with Nuria had caused me to forget. However, when I mentioned it, Nuria expressed an interest in coming along. For reasons bizarre to me, the expatriate British community within the city was a source of novelty and interest to her. For reasons equally unclear, I often went along to these functions when invited, drawn like a dog to the smell of its own vomit.
The party was held in a large apartment among the maze of narrow streets that lie between the Plaça de Sant Just and Mercè. It was, of course, a full-blown calamity, in the manner of British expatriate calamities everywhere, with the partygoers, in the majority, too inflated with booze for much other than their usual brand of loud and vacuous chatter, inevitable complaints about the host country and its occupants (tempered by an affectation of protective indulgence), and a singular inability to regard themselves as anything other than a beneficial presence in an ungrateful world. M
uch of this last sentiment was seasoned with a painful and trendily anti-British remorse. They were, on the whole, peculiarly unaware that they were themselves, by their chosen profession as English teachers either actively perpetrating a variant of the same attitudes and assumptions of their forbears in the traditional colonial service, or else stooges, co-conspirators in the world takeover by Corporate America. Why not, I wondered, teach flower-arranging instead, or bunjee-jumping? But I too had taught English as a means of income, and was simply trying to assuage my sense of collusion for having done so.
One or two of the guests had the ill grace to wear sandals with white knee-socks, an aberration which I thought had been abolished along with Imperial Rule in India. They brayed like donkeys and swore loudly, lurched around the kitchen to be nearer the supply of alcohol, and became, by turns, affectionate, sentimental and belligerent with each other.
They had hired a street-dancer, technically a midget, to come and perform for their amusement. This dancing midget was named Antonio de la Palma, and the Brits pawed him, patronised him, plied him with drinks (which he didn’t touch) and begged him repeatedly to dance some more. As a rule, Antonio de la Palma worked the streets for money. When there was a fiesta, he might make a little extra cash. Dancing at a private party was just another job for him. He needed to be sober to do his work. He appreciated an audience capable of regarding his work as a part of his cultural inheritance, rather than as a freak-show attraction. He was poor, but he had his dignity. This, of course, was something which the Brits, who had none, were entirely incapable of comprehending. They wanted to get drunk and fall about; they wanted to be entertained; and they wanted a mascot. Antonio had been hired by Gordon, a crop-haired Mancunian—whose belligerent and misogynist exterior closeted a stricken gay in the full throes of denial—as a fortieth birthday present for Alastair, a tall, lumbering public-school melancholic born into the Anglo-Scottish squirearchy. The birthday boy was delighted by his friend’s generous and highly original gift. They stood together talking and laughing throughout the midget’s performance, in love with the idea of exile but unable either to participate or to stand outside events.