by Ben Lerner
Toledo itself was lousy with tourists despite the fact that it was winter. We dodged and mocked them as we ascended the narrow streets toward the giant Alcázar, a stone fortification built on the city’s highest point, which Isabel assumed I would find of particular interest because of its famous role in the Civil War, or at least its role in Nationalist lore: a bunch of fascists held out against the Popular Front, which laid siege to it, until Franco arrived with the Army of Africa, an early and highly symbolic victory for the Nationalist cause. As we walked around the giant structure, which had to be largely rebuilt after the war, she recounted facts I barely followed about historical figures of whom I’d never heard. Then she began to ask me questions about my project, which had never interested her before.
“How did you choose Spain over, for example, Chile?”
“So much has been written about Allende,” I said, although I had only the vaguest sense of who Allende was.
“What makes the poem an effective form for a historical investigation?” I inferred from the words of hers I understood. I was surprised to find myself inclined to defend a project I’d never clearly delineated, let alone ever planned to complete, as opposed to conceding its total vacuity.
“The language of poetry is the exact opposite of the language of mass media,” I said, meaninglessly.
“But why are Americans studying Franco,” she asked, gesturing toward a group of Americans being led around the Alcázar, “instead of studying Bush?” She said it as if every American tourist were planning a monograph on El Caudillo.
“The proper names of leaders are distractions from concrete economic modes.” I was trying to sound deep, hoping concrete and mode were cognates. My limited stock of verbs encouraged general pronouncements.
“Why aren’t you studying the American economic mode?” She was angry.
“You can’t study a mode of production directly.” And with my manner, I said, “I am delivering a fact so obvious it pains me.”
“I’m sure the people of Iraq are looking forward to your poem about Franco and his economy.” It was the first unkind thing she’d ever said to me.
I met this with silence, so as to allow her to imagine an array of responses I was in fact incapable of producing, and I held this silence as we left the Alcázar and descended back into town toward the cathedral, where there were some famous El Grecos, although if I never saw his torturously elongated figures or phantasmagorical, sickly coloring again, it would have been too soon. What disturbed me as we walked was not that Isabel was pissed off, and certainly not that she thought my project was absurd or that she found me to be a typically pretentious American, but that our exchange, despite my best efforts, and perhaps for the first time, had involved much more of the actual than the virtual. I’d said, as usual, nothing of substance, but the nothing I’d said just languished between us; I didn’t feel her opening it up into a chorus of possibilities, and the silence we were now maintaining was the mere absence of sound, not the swelling of potential meanings. This was in part because my Spanish was getting better, despite myself, and I experienced, with the force of revelation, an obvious realization: our relationship largely depended upon my never becoming fluent, on my having an excuse to speak in enigmatic fragments or koans, and while I had no fear of mastering Spanish, I wondered, as we walked past the convents and gift shops, how long I could remain in Madrid without crossing whatever invisible threshold of proficiency would render me devoid of interest.
It was early dusk by the time we reached the cathedral, and in a Spanish cathedral it always felt like dusk, dull gold and gray stone and indeterminate distances, so I had the feeling less of going indoors than of entering a differently structured but nonetheless exterior space. I was alarmed to find myself wanting to produce an elegant formulation of this experience for Isabel, alarmed not only because I couldn’t formulate anything elegantly in Spanish, but because this was the first time in her company that I had desired to get my point across instead of attempting to make its depth a felt effect of its incommunicability. Now I feared I’d neither be able to be eloquent positively nor negatively and, as we made the rounds of the capillas, I realized with a sinking feeling that the reduction of our interactions to the literal and the transformation of our pregnant silences into dead air, a flat spectrum over a defined band, would necessarily strip my body of whatever suggestive power it had previously enjoyed, and that, when we made love, she would no longer experience her own capacity for experience, but merely my body in all its unfortunate actuality.
I tried hard to imagine my poems or any poems as machines
that could make things happen.
I could feel the initial creep of panic, and as I reached around in my bag for a yellow tranquilizer, I encountered one of my notebooks, which I took out; I found a pen and quickly jotted down the idea about the dusk and the cathedral, aware and encouraged that Isabel was watching as I wrote. I arranged my face into a look of intense concentration, a look that implied I’d had a lightning flash of intellection, that there was no time to waste on speech as I hurried to give my insight a more enduring form. Isabel broke our silence, maybe half an hour old, to ask what I was writing, and I said I’d had an idea for a poem, possibly an essay. She waited for me to elaborate, which I didn’t, and I believed she looked with real curiosity at my notebook as I returned it to my bag. This, I thought to myself, as we finished our circuit around the cathedral and emerged into the darkling street, would allow me to retain my negative capability, although that wasn’t the phrase; I could displace the mystery of my speech onto my writing, the latter perhaps recharging the former. If our conversations were no longer shot through with possibility, if what I said no longer resonated on many potential levels simultaneously, what I wrote in a language she could not read would have to preserve my aura of profundity. And since the raw material for these notes that were the raw material for poems emerged out of our time together, she would in some important if unnamable sense have a hand in their genesis; there would be traces of her presence, she might imagine, in subject or formal process. Indeed, if the poems did not prove powerful, maybe she shared in the responsibility, as it would mean, if she had faith in my talent, that our time together failed to inspire me, and why wouldn’t she have faith in my talent, given that I’d attended a prestigious university and received a prestigious fellowship. She would experience the present as suffused with the possibility of eventual transfiguration into a poem, and this future poem was a fund each moment could draw upon; my notebook, not my fragmentary Spanish, would become the sign of the virtual, enabling my project to advance. I was so calmed and encouraged by this new narrative, I forgot about the tranquilizer, and as we walked toward the ramparts near where Isabel had parked, I said to her:
“I read my poems and a friend read translations at a gallery in Salamanca the other night.” This was intended to hurt her a little and it seemed to. Since I’d never planned to read, I’d never thought to invite her, and besides, I had a policy of keeping Isabel away from Arturo and Teresa, not because I didn’t think they’d like each other, but because I wanted them to believe I had an expansive social life. But I knew she would be stung to think I’d given a public performance without her, stung and impressed I was receiving such attention, and that all of this would improve her image of my poetry, lend it mystery, while also making her jealous of my other friends.
“The poems you read—what were they about?” she asked, after a long silence that said, “Why didn’t you invite me?.”
I was also silent for a while, then stopped and turned to her and put my hands on her shoulders, which I never did, and looked her in the eyes, which sounds ridiculous, and said, tenderly, “Poems aren’t about anything.”
“Poems aren’t about anything,” she repeated, largely to herself, perhaps with a hint of incredulity or bemusement or scorn, and it wasn’t clear to me whether its significance was spreading out. I kissed her in case that helped the resonance expand.
By the time we reached the car I felt the balance of our relationship had been restored; I believed Isabel felt it too, and in a rush of optimism, she decided we should, in fact, visit Rufina. It was dark now as we drove across the ramparts and after fifteen minutes or so of confusing, curving roads, we pulled off into a gravel driveway. During the drive Isabel started and abandoned various descriptions of her aunt, attempting to avoid disparaging her in any way, which suggested affinity and respect, while also trying to warn me, it was unclear regarding what. Finally she managed, haltingly, to say something about a fight over Isabel’s ex-boyfriend, a fight arising, I thought she said, from Rufina’s protectiveness of Isabel, her sense that Isabel had been treated poorly, but a bad fight nonetheless.
Rufina’s house was small, white, boxy, two stories, but set on a large expanse of land, which I assumed, during the day, offered prospects of the distant hills, or were those mountains. Dogs appeared as we approached the house, recognizing Isabel, who greeted them in the dark by name. We rang the bell and I could hear the radio inside. The door opened and Rufina appeared; I was stunned by her youth, she looked thirty, shapely, and was made up as if about to go out for the evening—eye shadow and lipstick, clothes that seemed selected carefully—despite the fact that she was in the country, alone. I thought she might have missed a beat between seeing us and greeting Isabel warmly, but the greeting was, when it came, very warm; as she held Isabel’s face and wiped off her lipstick with her thumbs, I thought one or both of them might cry; Rufina was pressing hard. She released Isabel, kissed me quickly on both cheeks, and told us to come in, shutting out the dogs. We followed her into the kitchen where, without asking us what we wanted, she took out three tall glasses, gin from the freezer, and a bottle of tonic from the fridge. She put ice in the glasses and poured the cocktails in the Spanish manner, filling each glass almost entirely with gin, barely cutting it with tonic, then led us with our drinks to an enclosed and heated porch where we sat down in low cane chairs and near-dark.
I squinted at Rufina, waiting for my eyes to adjust. She and Isabel were obligatorily catching up, the Spanish so fast and full of slang I didn’t even try to comprehend it; after a minute or two, the rush of small talk tapered into silence. Rufina took a long match from a box somewhere within her reach and lit a cigarette and I thought she looked mean and attractive in its light, her appeal perhaps amplified by the fact that I’d spent the day imagining a visit to an elderly aunt. Isabel looked nervous, adjusting her hair; it was clear this was the first time they’d seen each other since the aforementioned fight. Rufina held the match toward me, shook it out. Why Isabel had brought me I found baffling, she certainly made no effort to introduce me into the conversation; I could only suspect my presence was a restraint, that Isabel wanted to work out whatever was between them, and hoped Rufina would rein in her behavior and talk in the company of a stranger, especially talk about a previous boyfriend. The silence was evidently oppressive to Isabel, who knew I wouldn’t break it, and finally she rose and said she had to go to the bathroom, leaving me with Rufina. I was in fact very interested in Rufina, in how she made a living, where she was from, how long she had lived outside Toledo and why, not to mention how old she was, if she was married, if she was Isabel’s blood relation, what had happened with the boyfriend, etc., but I wasn’t about to speak. After another length of silence, Rufina stood up, saying something about my drink, which she took to the kitchen to refill.
Alone on the porch, I looked out into the dark; I imagined I could see the dogs moving somewhere in the yard, and far beyond the yard I could see a few ruby taillights disappearing on a curve. I began to imagine my apartment in Madrid, imagined it at that instant, dark, but filled with noise from La Plaza Santa Ana, imagined the espresso machine at rest, the cheap but inoffensive furniture the apartment came with, furniture that would remain when I left, the few old postcards I’d purchased from El Rastro and scotch-taped to the wall. Then my other rooms: Brighton Street, mattress on the floor, Hope Street, with its little drafting table, dorms, which were terrible, then Greenwood, Jewell Street, Huntoon and my crib, which I could not in fact remember, imagined them at that instant, now furnished and occupied by others. Then I could feel each room around me as I imagined it, and the dark beyond the porch would become the dark of Topeka or Providence. Then it was the dark of my seventh or fifteenth or twentieth year, each dark with a slightly different shape or shapeliness, the sky, when I was younger, more concave. And then it was Rufina’s porch again, but imagined from a future room surrounded by a future dark, a room where I was writing, maybe this.
At some point I realized I had been lost in these reveries, if that’s what they were, for longer than it took to make a drink or take a piss. I listened hard and could hear voices, voices I could tell were raised; Isabel and Rufina were arguing somewhere in the house, in a room whose door they’d shut. I became fascinated with this phenomenon of hearing loud voices at a distance, in trying to account for how I knew they were loud when I could barely hear them, something about their shape or shapeliness, or the way they filtered through the walls, and I reached for my notebook to write this down, although there wasn’t really light to write by, when suddenly I stopped and blushed, at least my face was hot. Why would I take notes when Isabel wasn’t around to see me take them? I’d never taken notes before; I carried around my bag because of my drugs, not because I intended to work on my “translations,” and the idea of actually being one of those poets who was constantly subject to fits of inspiration repelled me; I was unashamed to pretend to be inspired in front of Isabel, but that I had just believed myself inspired shamed me.
I took my notebook from the bag, but only to use it as a surface; I rubbed a cigarette between my thumb and forefinger to loosen the tobacco and emptied it onto the notebook cover. Then I took the little egg-shaped mass of hash out of my pocket, so shaped because it had been transported, wrapped in plastic, up someone’s ass, found my lighter, heated and flaked a quantity of hash into the tobacco, then blew carefully into the empty cigarette paper, inflating it a little, and shook the mixture back into the cigarette, twisting the end of the paper to keep it from spilling. Finally, I removed the cottony filter with my teeth. The voices were getting louder.
I lit the spliff and imagined what was happening inside, my first projections borrowed almost entirely from Spanish cinema: Rufina and Isabel were lovers, Rufina maybe a transvestite, and Isabel had brought me to get back at Rufina for the latter’s recent infidelity, but had underestimated Rufina; soon Rufina would return to the porch with a knife wet with Isabel’s blood, stab me, then stab herself. Or Rufina, unspeakably wronged by unspeakable men, all of whom resembled Franco in some sense, had sworn that no man would ever cross the threshold of her home again, and Isabel had violated this rule, hoping, for whatever reason, to reintroduce Rufina to the opposite sex; soon Rufina would return with a knife wet with Isabel’s blood, etc. As the hash had its effect, I took pleasure in picturing the flash of the knife reflected in Rufina’s eyes, having to wrestle her into submission or die. I was relieved and disappointed, then, when a light came on and Rufina and Isabel returned to the porch, Rufina now wearing a gray oversized Hard Rock Café Houston sweatshirt and holding our refreshed drinks, Isabel relaxed and smiling.
“You smoked without us, Adán,” Rufina exclaimed. She must have asked Isabel my name.
“I can make more,” I said. “I can roll another,” I corrected.
“So you’re a poet, Adán,” she ignored me. I just smiled. She repeated my name as if it were a one-word joke at my expense.
“He just read at a gallery in Salamanca,” Isabel said to spite me.
“Salamanca—elegant!” It was clear Rufina was going to ask me what kind of poetry I wrote. “What kind of poetry do you write?.”
“What kinds of poetry are there?” I was pleased with this response and made a mental note to use it from then on.
“Bad and worse,” Rufina said with mock derision. I
sabel laughed a little. Maybe it relaxed them further to be allied against me, to taunt the new boyfriend after clearing the air of the old.
“I, too, dislike it,” I said in English.
“You must come from money,” Rufina said, ignoring me again. Then she said something idiomatic involving hands and clouds, which I assumed was a colorful way of saying the same thing. “Do you have to work at all?”
I wasn’t sure how to respond to this. I had encountered this association of poetry and money before in Spain, compounded, in my case, by the assumption that all Americans, I mean Americans abroad, were rich; compared to Isabel and Rufina, my family probably was. I had no clear sense of Isabel’s class position, let alone Rufina’s; I knew Isabel had graduated from college. had long worked at the language school, and now had a nice enough apartment, but she also had two roommates. I paid for almost all of our meals and drinks, but thought very little of it, even though it was a significant portion of my total funds, because euros always seemed fake to me. I had no idea, for instance, if the house we were in was of significant value, if land near Toledo was worthless or in high demand, if Rufina’s manner of dress or address indicated the working or middle or some other class, or if those were the relevant terms for Spain.