by Ben Lerner
After I don’t know how long, I stood and walked back toward and then up El Paseo del Prado, ambulances and people rushing past me. As I got farther away from the station I saw crowds in the doorways of bars and restaurants watching televisions and I could hear people saying “ETA” and quoting the estimated numbers of the dead, looking down toward the station and then back up at the screens. I reached the hotel lobby that was now packed and loud and took the elevator to my room; Isabel was gone. I felt in my pocket for my keys and rediscovered the necklace. I left the room, left the hotel, and walked up Huertas to my apartment. I climbed the stairs and took off my jacket and turned on my computer. It was almost ten. Surprised at how much time had passed, I opened a browser, called up the New York Times, and clicked on the giant headline. The article described the helicopters I could hear above me.
I wondered where Isabel had gone. Then I didn’t. I made some coffee, took one white pill, climbed through the roof, and sat with the coffee and listened. After a while I dropped back down through the skylight, brushed my teeth again, and left my apartment. I went to the bank of pay phones in La Plaza Santa Ana and called Kansas with my calling card. For a while all the lines were in use and they could not complete my call. I kept trying and eventually got through. It was around four in the morning there. The phone rang its foreign ring and finally my mom picked up, still half–asleep. It’s me, I said, and she asked what time is it, are you O.K. I said I was fine but there had been a terrorist attack. My dad was on the phone now, and asked me how far my apartment was from Atocha and I said I had been staying at the Ritz. This of course confused them both and again they asked if I was O.K. I hesitated and, voice cracking, said I had done a terrible thing. What, they said, and I told them that I had claimed in the presence of various people that my mom was dead or gravely ill and my dad was a fascist. Why, one of them asked, confused, but not upset. To get sympathy, I guessed. After a brief silence, my mom said she’d like to hear more about this later, but how many people had been killed, who was responsible, what was I going to do now, thank God I was O.K. I said I was exhausted and was going to try to sleep. They said that was a good idea and asked that I call them later, when it was night in Madrid. We said we loved each other and, before we hung up, my mom suggested I give blood.
I went back up to my apartment and refreshed the Times; the number of estimated dead was now around two hundred, at least a thousand injured. I considered walking back to Atocha, but instead I opened El País in another window and the Guardian in a third. I sat smoking and refreshing the home pages and watching the numbers change. I could feel the newspaper accounts modifying or replacing my memory of what I’d seen; was there a word for that feeling? The only other feeling I registered was fatigue. I fell asleep and when I awoke it was dark; I could hear café noise, albeit less than normal, in the plaza. I ate what there was to eat and read the news but my head was clouded; I could not process the conflicting theories regarding responsibility. The government maintained it was the separatists. I returned to La Plaza Santa Ana and called my parents again and my mom and I had a calmer version of the morning’s conversation; I would explain the Ritz-Carlton thing later, I said. I returned to my apartment, undressed, and went back to sleep, this time in my bed, until late morning.
When I woke I read about the emerging link to Al Qaeda, although the government still claimed it was ETA, and I watched a terrible video online of Atocha’s security camera footage, or was that many months later: an orange fireball bursting from a train, engulfing commuters with smoke, leaving the platform littered with bodies and stained with blood. There was to be a giant public demonstration against terrorism of all kinds that night across Spain. Even the king was going to march. I had lots of e–mails from friends and family and the foundation, none of which I read. I showered and left the apartment and walked toward Sol. There were trucks set up where you could give blood. I stood in line for a while at one of the trucks. When it was my turn, the woman asked me various questions about drugs, when I had eaten last, and other things I couldn’t understand; I told her I felt sick and she impatiently waved me away and asked for the next person in line. I said to myself that, by that point, they didn’t need blood for the injured anyway; they were probably still there only so people could feel like they were contributing; hadn’t they done that in New York?
As I walked toward El Retiro I thought about how blood from my body might have been put into the body of someone injured by History. It was cloudy and cold. I didn’t see anyone, not even the hash dealers. I sat for a while and then walked to the gallery, where Arturo and Rafa were. Later I learned that, while I was in the park, the entire city had emptied into the streets for a moment of silence without me. I was glad to see Arturo and Rafa and I told them so. We hugged each other and Arturo unloosed a torrent of language, saying he knew people who knew people who died, and speculating on what all this meant for the election, which was Sunday. If ETA were responsible, the Socialists, who were seen as weak on the separatists, would get destroyed. If it were Al Qaeda or other Islamic terrorists, the right-wing Aznar and his handpicked successor, Rajoy, were doomed; they had supported Bush’s war, the fucking fascists. I asked them if ETA did it and they said they didn’t believe it and something about tapes the police had found and it being the eleventh. While we were talking, Teresa arrived. She kissed me on both cheeks and scolded me for not having been around or writing her but she didn’t seem angry. The conversation about the bombings and their political repercussions resumed and I was quiet. Then Arturo took a phone call and Rafa went to the back of the gallery for something, leaving Teresa and me alone. She said I looked tired and I said I had passed several long nights and she asked me, smiling, if I had passed them with this Isabel woman. Without emotion, I said I was never going to see Isabel again. Teresa squinted and said not to make any decisions on her account, but, smiling again, admitted she’d been a little jealous: very little. I waited to feel a thrill, however distant.
We went outside to smoke and I remembered the argument after my reading. I considered telling Teresa I had lied about my family but it no longer seemed significant. We decided to walk to a nearby restaurant for lunch. I tried to buy El País but the kiosks were out of them. “Collector items,” Teresa said in English.
Neither of us ate much. We walked back to the gallery and I asked Arturo if they were still having the opening. He looked at me like I was crazy and said no. I must have looked ashamed, because he added, a little apologetically: but the paintings would still be on display and maybe people would gather in the gallery after the demonstration. I heard myself saying that he should cover one of the larger paintings with a black cloth as a memorial, a visual moment of silence. He thought this was a great idea and he started speaking at incomprehensible speed with Teresa; soon the decision was made that all the paintings would be covered for a couple of days, if they could get the painters to agree. Arturo started making calls again and Teresa asked me after a while if I wanted to look over my poems; I didn’t. I told her I had written a lot of new stuff and pointed to the notebooks that were still on Arturo’s desk. She opened the one on top and began to read with what looked like serious attention. Would they also cover the little placards bearing painters’ names and prices?
Teresa read and read and I sat there blankly and every twenty minutes or so would go and smoke. Arturo had reached almost all of the painters and everyone had said yes; he had sent Rafa out for cloth. When Rafa returned he said the streets were filling for the demonstration and I could see from his hair that it had started raining. Teresa tore a corner of one of the pages of a book she had in her purse, a novel I think, and put it in my notebook to keep her place, which I knew I would, in retrospect, find touching. The gesture made me think of giving blood, but there was no real analogy. It looked like there was a crowd outside the gallery and I wondered if these were people Arturo knew who were waiting for us to join them, but when we exited the gallery, I realized this was the demonstratio
n, that as far as I could see, the streets were full. A current of people, some with signs or candles, was moving slowly toward Colón, the central gathering point; from there the plan was to process toward Atocha. Many people weren’t moving at all, as one was, wherever one was, already demonstrating. Teresa took my hand and I followed her into the current and we made our way to Colón, where the crowd was densest. Someone was speaking through a megaphone about peace and maybe about resilience. The rain intensified and umbrellas opened everywhere. I pictured how it must have looked from the helicopters. People were chanting that it wasn’t raining, that Madrid was crying, and I thought this was a complicated chant, especially since it appeared to be spontaneous. Teresa and Arturo and Rafa were chanting, so I chanted too, but my voice sounded off to me, affected, and I worried it was conspicuous, that it failed to blend. I couldn’t be the only one not chanting, so I mouthed the words. Eventually some portion of the crowd began to move in the direction of Atocha. We were walking slowly but it felt to me like we were standing still because so many people were moving in tandem. At one point I bent down, maybe to tie my shoe, and from my kneeling position I saw thousands of legs and I looked up a little and saw a more-or-less unbroken canopy formed by the umbrellas above me. Nearby some little kids were running around in this enclosed space formed by the bodies and umbrellas, maybe playing tag, hiding behind one pair of legs and then another. In retrospect, I would find this beautiful. When I stood up, Teresa was several feet away, other people between us. She was looking for but somehow didn’t see me. I could have easily caught or called her, but I just stood there, letting the stream of bodies bend around me.
When she was gone I resumed moving toward Atocha. It must have been dark by then. I tried chanting, but quickly stopped. When we got to Huertas I turned away from the current and walked toward my apartment. Every street, even the little side streets branching off of Huertas, was packed with people. I eventually reached my apartment and pulled myself through the skylight and looked down at the sea of umbrellas, some of them softly illuminated, I guessed because they sheltered candles. I was looking away from Atocha but the crowd was continuous.
I realized at some point that I was freezing, dropped myself back through the skylight, and checked my e–mail. I answered friends and family, then read through the various e–mails from María José. The first e–mails addressed to the group asked that all the fellows write her to confirm they were O.K. Then an e–mail addressed to the group said they had heard from all but one fellow. Then there was an e–mail just to me asking where I was. Two hundred people had been killed in a city of three million, I thought; what was the probability I had been among them? I went to El País’s home page and viewed the aerial photographs I had pictured in my mind. The crowds were audible in the apartment, but the noise was so constant it kept receding into the background. I opened the Tolstoy at random and started reading.
A few hours later I left my apartment. There were still people everywhere, but the demonstration was over. I walked, maybe through rain, back to the gallery; it was packed. There was a huge pile of umbrellas in the corner, an interesting sculpture. I thought some people recognized me, but I wasn’t sure. The paintings were covered in what looked like black felt. I wondered if that would damage the paintings. The placards were uncovered. Toward the back of the gallery there was a bright light and I saw Arturo being interviewed by a reporter, presumably about the covered paintings. I was afraid that if he saw me he would credit me with the idea and would pull me in front of the camera, so I kept my distance. People were looking at the covered paintings as if they weren’t covered, looking long and thoughtfully at the black felt and then reading the placard. I wondered if any of them would sell.
“I wonder if any of them will sell,” Teresa said, suddenly beside me. Then she said, “Sorry we were separated.” Maybe she’d seen me standing still, watching her get swept away. She had changed her clothes.
“Where do you live?” I asked her, apropos of nothing. I knew she had an apartment in Madrid but she had never invited me there and I had never asked to see it. She seemed to stay, at least half the time, at Rafa’s.
She laughed at the question and said, “A fifteen-minute walk from here. You’ve walked me home before, remember?” I didn’t.
“Can we go there?” I said. “I don’t mean to fuck”—I couldn’t think of any subtler Spanish word—“or anything. I am tired and the crowds—” I switched to English: “I’m just really out of it.”
“I’ll need to come back to help Arturo,” she said in Spanish, “but we can go there for a while. You can stay there if you want. Arturo and Rafa will probably come back there later.”
Teresa went to tell Arturo she was leaving and we emerged from the gallery into the rain and walked in silence until we reached Calle Serrano; I remembered her narrow, fancy building when we got there. She was on the top floor and we took the elevator, which had mirrored paneling. She had to turn her key in the elevator in order to get it to take us to her floor and when the elevator doors opened we were in her apartment. Besides the bathroom, the apartment was just one giant room with a very high ceiling and a balcony that overlooked Serrano. What furniture there was, was low to the ground: a desk in one corner, a red couch with a cat on it near the center of the room, and against one of the walls a low, Japanese-looking bed that was probably Swedish. There was a long coffee table near the couch. Piles of books were everywhere, but the piles somehow looked considered, tastefully arranged. The walls were empty save for various expensively framed and carefully grouped series of black-and-white photographs. I walked to the nearest bank of photographs. They showed very elegantly dressed men and women smoking and smiling. They looked like they were taken in the fifties. “Is this your family?” I asked Teresa, who was fixing drinks. “Distant family,” she said. I wondered what it meant about your politics if you managed to be rich and fashionable in the Madrid of the fifties, but didn’t ask.
I walked to another group of photographs and saw that they were Abel’s idle machines, but much smaller than the photos in the gallery.
“You don’t like them,” she said, handing me a drink involving whiskey.
“They don’t do much for me,” I said in English. She squinted, maybe because of what I said, maybe because I’d once again used English.
“Make yourself at home,” she said in English, as if quoting a movie, and I sat on the couch and the cat and I considered each other suspiciously. I asked if I could smoke, a silly question, and she indicated the ashtray and sat beside me and we both lit cigarettes. She walked with her cigarette and drink to a closet and somehow drank and smoked and changed her clothes in front of me without burning or spilling anything and without it seeming like a striptease.
“That’s amazing,” I said, vaguely.
She smiled as though she understood what I was referring to and sat back down beside me. I asked her if she knew anybody who died in the bombings. She said no. She said many of the dead were immigrants. She said that it was a crime against working people and that she didn’t know many working people. Do you, she asked, and I thought for a while, then said I wasn’t sure. She launched into a very detailed and, so far as I could tell, sophisticated projection of the political ramifications of the bombings. She was sure ETA had nothing to do with it. I didn’t say anything. She went to a stereo I hadn’t noticed and put on music.
The music filled the room and for a moment, maybe two measures, I felt intensely present. She said she should go back but that there was food and drink and clean towels. She had noticed I had smoked my last cigarette and pointed to a pack on the desk. She kissed me good-bye on the lips but it did not feel like an event.
When I was alone in the apartment I walked to her closet and looked through her clothes. I smelled one or two of the hanging dresses. There was a dresser inside the closet and I opened and shut the drawers. Then I went into the bathroom and looked around. Everything was spotless and I wondered if she cleaned it herself.
Maybe an immigrant cleaned her apartment, an immigrant who’d been blown apart. There were a few bottles of pills behind the mirror but I couldn’t tell what they were. Then I rolled a strong spliff with the last of the hash from my bag and smoked it on the balcony. When I was finished I took off my shoes and lay down on her bed. In the stack of books nearest her bed I saw a small poetry magazine from the U.S., an issue in which I was published. I was astonished that a tiny magazine published in New York featuring poems I had written in Providence about Topeka was here, in this gorgeous apartment in Madrid. Not that poems were about anything. Then I remembered I had given her the magazine. I removed it from the stack, knocking the stack over, and found my poem:
Possessing a weapon has made me bashful.
Tears appreciate in this economy of pleasure.
The ether of data engulfs the capitol.
Possessing a weapon has made me forgetful.
My oboe tars her cenotaph.
The surface is in process.
Coruscant skinks emerge in force.
The moon spits on a copse of spruce.
Plausible opposites stir in the brush.
Jupiter spins in its ruts.
The wind extends its every courtesy.
I have never been here.
Understand?
You have never seen me.