Leaving the Atocha Station

by Ben Lerner

  One afternoon Teresa and I saw Citizen Kane, which was playing at El Circulo Bellas Artes, then had some chalky white wine at an adjacent sidewalk café. After making various ambiguous pronouncements about cinema, but experiencing Teresa as unusually distracted, I decided to make my confession.

  “I told you before,” I said slowly, “that my mother was dead. This isn’t true.”

  “What?” she asked, suddenly interested, but not sure she’d understood.

  “I told you my mom was dead, but my mom is alive,” I said.

  “Oh. I had assumed,” she said, smiling, “that you were just drunk and high and homesick and wanted some attention.” Then she leaned over and started twirling my hair and said in English, “You have a poetic license.”

  I blinked at her, first surprised not to feel relief, then surprised to feel an intense anger rising, as though my mother were in fact deceased and now she was calling me a liar. “I didn’t want attention. I didn’t have homesick,” I said, my gravity cancelled by my grammar. She opened her eyes wide as I pulled away from her but said nothing, awaiting my explanation. As one part of me insisted to some other part of me that this was wonderful, a reprieve, that I could let go of my guilt and laugh about it with Teresa, I heard myself proclaim, “My mom is sick. And because—” I pretended it was difficult to go on. The smile drained quickly from her face. “I am scared … I was trying to imagine …” Her eyes grew a little wider. “I thought if I said it, I would have less fear.”

  “What is she sick with?” Teresa asked, which I experienced as insensitive, maybe because, while she had stopped smiling, her voice wasn’t any more tender than usual, or maybe because she was interrupting my presentation. I signaled for the check, although our drinks were far from finished, then regretted signaling.

  Not wanting to name a particular disease for fear of somehow condemning my mother to suffer it, I ignored the question. I reached out and touched her arm, a gesture out of character for me. “I have felt horrible about the lie. I’m sorry.” Withdrawing my hand, but leaving it on the table nearly touching hers, I explained, “I came here and nobody knows me. So I thought: You can be whatever you want to people. You can say you are rich or poor. You can say you are from anywhere, that you do anything. At first I felt very free, as if my life at home wasn’t real anymore.” I downed my warming wine. “And I was glad to be away from my father.”

  While I believed the speech was working in the sense of convincing Teresa my mom was ill, or at least entreating her to suspend her disbelief, I also sensed a lack of translation, that Teresa was experiencing me as merely inarticulate. I barely resisted the temptation to wax eloquent in English, but realized my actual English was nothing compared to her image of it.

  “My father,” I said, “is basically a fascist.”

  “What do you mean by ‘fascist’?” she said. Nobody, at any stage of my project, had ever asked me what I meant by “fascist” or “fascism.” I felt the anger again.

  “He is a man of right–wing politics,” I said, meaninglessly. “He only respects violence.” As I said this, I thought of my dad patiently trying to get a spider to crawl from the carpet onto a piece of paper so he could escort it safely from house to yard.

  “But your mom is a feminist,” she said in a voice suspiciously free of all suspicion. I’d no memory of discussing my mother’s politics with Teresa.

  “Yes, and publicly so is he,” I said, implying everybody knew that fascists marry feminists in order to evade detection. “And what do you mean by ‘feminist’?” I threw in. She just smiled ambiguously.

  The check arrived. I overpaid with large euro coins, which always struck me as particularly fake, and we stood to leave; it was rare for me to pay for anything with Teresa. We walked in the direction of El Retiro. The nicotine and white wine mixed nicely with the light and still–tentative warmth and I felt confident as we walked that Teresa would give me, if nothing else, the benefit of the doubt, and I remembered, in order to buttress this belief, the time I had been stern with her at the reading and she had seemed genuinely hurt. Young women were testing their new dresses, teenagers were skateboarding in the plazas, failing again and again to land their kickflips, and we saw ourselves reflected vaguely in the silver of passing buses. I was surprised to find myself taking Teresa’s hand, although I did so with the faintest trace of irony, implied, at least potentially, in the childish way I slightly swung our arms; if the intimacy were unwelcome, she would dismiss it as frivolity. At the same time I was careful to communicate, mainly with my pace, that if I was acting unburdened and optimistic it was to cover the great sadness arising from the situation with my family. I was probably aided in this representation of concealed suffering by the guilt that was beginning to spread through me, displacing nicotine and wine; it was not yet causing pain, but it was positioning itself everywhere in my body, lying in wait till evening.

  We entered El Retiro through the main iron gates. It was the beginning of a long dusk and, as it was one of the first true spring evenings, people were out in force. There were young couples displaying their mutual absorption on nearly every bench, kids racing tricycles or playing tag or football, and the men who would soon be selling shaved ice were selling chipped potatoes. The voices and laughter and birds and wind and traffic combined and separated gently. As we made our way toward El Estanque, which would be full of pedal boaters, I felt that I could, in fact, imagine remaining in Spain indefinitely; I would live with and off of Teresa, my lover and translator, I would assemble a body of work, I would walk every evening through the park, I would master Spanish; a little wave of euphoria broke over me. But why was I imagining this with Teresa, not Isabel, given that I was in fact the lover of the latter, and had had no real romantic contact with the former? I had, however, so often kissed Teresa hello or good–bye, deliberately catching the corner of her mouth, or lingering near her face a second longer than necessary, that I felt we had a physical relationship, that we had been, if nothing else, in a stage of protracted courtship. But as we walked around El Estanque toward the colonnade, I was struck by the fear that this was only in my mind; Teresa must have noticed that I was catching her mouth, flirting, but surely that was not to be taken very seriously; after all, Teresa hadn’t taken it seriously when I told her about the death of my mother and wept down her elegant back. I had never attempted to initiate anything with Teresa, but this was in part because I always assumed I could, that she was, if not exactly waiting for my advances, open to them, and that keeping such a possibility alive was for both of us, at least for the moment, more exciting than any consummation. While I had never thought I was in love with Teresa, whatever that might mean, I had on more than one occasion thought that she was maybe a little in love with me. And if we never slept together or otherwise “realized” our relationship, I would leave Spain with this gorgeous possibility intact, and in my memory could always ponder the relationship I might have had in the flattering light of the subjunctive. I’d never formulated this notion before, but had felt it, and only now, half an hour after our conversation at the café, was I beginning to realize my mistake; she had assumed I was lying about my mother, a goofy, drunken foreigner wanting a hug; it hardly mattered to me that her assumption was true, but it mattered to me that it mattered so little to her. When we reached the colonnade, we sat on the cool steps not far from a circle of drummers and she began to roll a spliff. I looked at her and she was aureate in the failing light and humming something to go with the drums and the prospect of her not being at least a little in love with me was crushing.

  I wanted to kiss her or say something dramatic in English, but I knew I would make myself ridiculous. Instead, as we finished smoking, I pretended to remember with a start:

  “I have to meet someone,” I said, standing with a suddenness that declared the someone important.

  “O.K.,” she said, her face registering no curiosity, let alone jealousy. I hoped against hope this was affectation. “Soon we should t
alk about the new translations,” she said. The gallery was going to print a small bilingual pamphlet of my poems.

  “Claro,” I said, and kissed her twice quickly far from the mouth and walked hurriedly back the way we’d come. Without paying attention to where I was going, I retraced our steps and found myself, cold and sober, back in front of El Circulo de Bellas Artes. I bought a ticket for the next show, which I thought was Campanadas a medianoche. I sat in the same seat, Teresa’s absence beside me. I took a yellow pill and waited; I was half an hour early. I drifted off, but was awakened by the movie’s opening strains: it was the second showing of Citizen Kane.

  __________________________

  Isabel and I were smoking in bed in the early evening and she was reading Ana María Matute and I was reading Tolstoy’s The Kreutzer Sonata when I mentioned apropos of nothing that I would like to see Granada at some point and she said there was a night train that took about five hours so we packed what we could in the bags we always carried and walked to Atocha; I bought our tickets. We killed an hour drinking coffee in the atrium and then we boarded the archaic–looking Talgo train and found our seats and opened our respective books again, looking up at each other when with a jerk the train began to move.

  Excepting subways, a few commuter trains, and the miniature train in a Topeka park, I had never traveled by rail, as archaic a method of conveyance, I thought to myself, as poetry; a few minutes later I offered this thought to Isabel. She laughed and leaned over and kissed me and I wished that Teresa could see us, dark fields sliding by. Isabel removed the silver sticks from her hair and leaned her head against my shoulder and drifted off while I flipped through the Tolstoy for a half–remembered passage about a train, but couldn’t find it. It didn’t matter; every sentence, regardless of its subject, became mimetic of the action of the train, and the train mimetic of the sentence, and I felt suddenly coeval with its syntax. Because the sentences of Tolstoy, or rather Constance Garnett’s translations of Tolstoy, were in perfect harmony with the motion of the Talgo, real time and the time of prose began to merge, and reading, instead of removing me from the world, intensified my experience of the present.

  I put down the book and began to think: this strange experience of reading, the sense of harmony between the rhythms of a reproduction and the real, their structural identity, so that the subject of the sentence was precisely the time of its being furthered—this was what I valued in one of the only people I described as a “major poet” without irony, John Ashbery. I fished his Selected Poems from my bag, careful not to disturb Isabel, and opened it at random and read a little. Here also one could experience the texture of time as it passed, a shadow train, life’s white machine. Ashbery’s flowing sentences always felt as if they were making sense, but when you looked up from the page, it was impossible to say what sense had been made; while they used the language of logical connection—“but,” “therefore,” “so”—and the language that implied narrative development—“then,” “next,” “later”—such terms were merely propulsive; there was no actual organizing logic or progression. Reading an Ashbery sentence, an elaborate sentence stretched over many lines, one felt the arc and feel of thinking in the absence of thoughts. His pronouns—“it,” “you,” “we,” “I”—created a sense of intimacy, as though you were being addressed or doing the addressing or were familiar with the context the poem assumed, but you could never be sure of their antecedents, person or thing. The “it” in an Ashbery poem seemed ultimately to refer to the mysteries of the poem itself; in the absence of any stable external referent, the poem’s procedures invested its pronouns, and the “you” devolved upon the reader. I read:

  As long as it is there

  You will desire it as its tag of wall sinks

  Deeper as though hollowed by sunlight that

  Just fits over it; it is both mirage and the little

  That was present, the miserable totality

  Mustered at any given moment, like your eyes

  And all they speak of, such as your hands, in lost

  Accents beyond any dream of ever wanting them again.

  To have this to be constantly coming back from—

  Nothing more, really, than surprise at your absence

  And preparing to continue the dialogue into

  Those mysterious and near regions that are

  Precisely the time of its being furthered.

  The best Ashbery poems, I thought, although not in these words, describe what it’s like to read an Ashbery poem; his poems refer to how their reference evanesces. And when you read about your reading in the time of your reading, mediacy is experienced immediately. It is as though the actual Ashbery poem were concealed from you, written on the other side of a mirrored surface, and you saw only the reflection of your reading. But by reflecting your reading, Ashbery’s poems allow you to attend to your attention, to experience your experience, thereby enabling a strange kind of presence. But it is a presence that keeps the virtual possibilities of poetry intact because the true poem remains beyond you, inscribed on the far side of the mirror: “You have it but you don’t have it. / You miss it, it misses you. / You miss each other.”

  Isabel shifted and I put the book away and leaned my head against the mass of her hair and fell asleep. We were both awakened when the train stopped, still a few hours from Granada. We stepped off the train and smoked in the dark, although you could smoke on the train; the night air was cool, laced with jasmine, if they have that in Spain. Isabel described a dream I couldn’t understand. The train made a noise that indicated it was preparing to leave and we went back to our seats, fell asleep again, then were both gently roused by a conductor, who said we were approaching Granada, last stop. It was a slightly lighter dark now that dawn was an hour away and when the train pulled into the station and eventually halted we disembarked and wandered out of the station in a state of not unpleasant fatigue.

  We found a cab and drove to a hotel Isabel knew in the Albaicín, a neighborhood of impossibly narrow, winding streets on a hill facing the Alhambra. The hotel was surprisingly nice given the rates; Moorish medieval architecture, intricate woodwork, and a courtyard with a green mosaic. We were led to a simple room with exposed beams, a room for that reason reminiscent of my apartment, and we slept through the morning. When I woke I was for a moment unsure of my surroundings, then remembered the spontaneous trip, the train, and again wished Teresa could see me interleaved with Isabel, her jet hair splayed against the heavily starched sheets. We showered, dressed, and walked into the preternaturally bright day, wandering the threadlike streets until we found a sidewalk café, although there wasn’t much sidewalk, where we ordered orange juice, croissants, coffee. From the café you could see the Alhambra on a vast and hilly terrace across the river. Isabel was wearing her hair down and looked beautiful to me and I told her so. I paid and we descended into the city and visited the cathedral and a small modern art museum where I pretended to take copious notes.

  When we were ready to eat again it was late afternoon and we returned to the Albaicín to find a restaurant Isabel knew. Within a few minutes of our arrival we were presented with giant plates of fried fish and squid that either Isabel had ordered without my knowing or that were the restaurant’s only dish. They also brought us a bottle of nearly frozen white wine and I drank several glasses quickly and felt immediately and pleasantly drunk. I said something to Isabel about the experience of braided temporalities in ancient cities and she nodded in a way that showed she wasn’t listening.

  “What are you thinking about?” I asked her, refilling both of our glasses, the bottle almost empty.

  She hesitated. “We never talk about our relationship, about the rules,” she said. I always thought the rule was that we wouldn’t. This was the first time I’d heard her refer to our “relationship” at all. I knew what was coming: she wanted to assure herself I wasn’t seeing anybody else, that at least for as long as I was in Spain, I was hers exclusively. Maybe she also wanted
to know how long I planned to stay, if I was seriously considering remaining in Spain after my fellowship.

  “I am in a relationship,” was the English equivalent of what she said. I felt the wind had been knocked out of me. I smiled to imply that of course we both had other relationships.

  “He must have an open mind,” I said, holding the smile, “to allow you to travel with other men.” I was surprised to feel devastated.

  “He has been working in Barcelona this year. He was here at Christmas and a couple of other times. He’ll be back in Madrid starting in June.” The way she said “June” hinted she would like to know where I planned to be then. I remembered I hadn’t seen Isabel much around the holidays.

  I pushed my plate away a little and lit a cigarette. “So what happens to us in June?” Now the seafood looked alien, arachnoid, repulsive.

  She smiled in a way that said, “I really like you, we’ve had a lot of fun, but in June our time is up.” Then she said, “I don’t know.”

  “What’s his name?” I asked, suggesting with my tone that whatever his name was, I thought he was a harmless little boy.