Leaving the Atocha Station

by Ben Lerner

  After dinner we sat on a bench in a little park full of people and beneath a branching cast-iron street lamp a small wave of euphoria broke over me. Teresa let herself be kissed for a while and then we took a cab back to the outskirts of El Barrio Gótico and walked to our hotel and I thought we might make love. Instead we smoked another spliff on the balcony and I asked her how she learned Catalan. She said she had lived in Barcelona at various points, said it as if she were very old; Arturo had told me she was twenty-seven; she looked older and younger than her age in shifts. I said I would like to have a drink and we left again and after ten minutes or so we descended a few stairs into a bar that felt like a cave, cool and dark. We seated ourselves in green leather chairs in a corner around a little table that seemed to be made of petrified wood. A woman with an array of facial piercings appeared at our table and we ordered our drinks. Teresa asked me if I had seen the Antonioni movie partially set in Barcelona, The Passenger, and, lying, I said of course. She said I had his eyebrows, Jack Nicholson, that I called on my eyebrows to do important work, that if she were deaf she would read my eyebrows, not my lips. I said she was simply describing the personality of the translator, but I said it in my head. She said Arturo always claimed she looked like Maria Schneider, whom I knew from Last Tango in Paris, which I hated, and I could see what Arturo meant. I wondered what Maria Schneider’s relationship to Jack Nicholson was in The Passenger, what kind of statement Teresa was making about our relationship, and based on the Antonioni films I knew, I guessed it was unflattering.

  “How do you understand their relationship?” I asked, trying to sound as though I’d pondered it for years.

  “I don’t understand it,” she said, making it clear that was the point. Then she said things I could barely follow about the penultimate shot in the film, a continuous shot taken at “magic hour,” a phrase she said in English. I couldn’t understand what the shot looked like, but I understood that Antonioni had built, in order to achieve it, a special camera enclosed in a plastic sphere and fitted with various gyroscopes, whatever those were.

  We ordered fresh drinks and Teresa talked about films, almost none of which I knew; maybe because we’d seen Orpheus, a movie about fluid boundaries, earlier that day, or because we were suddenly and impulsively arrived in a new city, or maybe because the bar was like a cave, I projected images to accompany her speech. Teresa appeared in those images, entered the films she was describing, and soon the films collapsed into one film, and it was her life I was imagining. She didn’t so much recount plots as shots and sequences as though they were plots. I pictured her at various ages and at the center of each scene, as if she had organized it around herself, and this struck me as a higher form of biography than the mere detailing of events. The more she talked the less aware of my presence she seemed; after several rounds, she asked for the check without consulting me and paid.

  We left the bar and wound through the narrow streets and soon were back at our hotel. I rolled a spliff and asked her if she wanted any and she said no and I lay in bed smoking while she sat at the little table in the corner and worked on the translations, opening my notebook and hers. I asked her if she wanted to read me some and she again said no. I didn’t understand her method. She had no dictionary and asked no questions and I wondered if she was translating at all. After a while she came to bed and shut her eyes and I tried in my clumsy way to initiate some contact but she was totally if somehow gently unresponsive and soon she was asleep. For a long time, I watched her breathe.

  When I woke she was reading Ashbery beside me. I wondered if she’d seen the pills in my bag. She smiled to indicate whatever distance had established itself between us the previous night had closed. Her breath smelled terrible and I told myself to commit that fact to memory, to remember it the next time I was intimidated by her unwavering grace. I told her I was going out for coffee. I got dressed, took my bag, and stumbled downstairs and out onto the street and walked until I found a café. Right as I was about to order, I realized I had no money; I left the café to find an ATM. Eventually the stone street widened into a modern avenue and I found a Deutsche Bank, where I withdrew the unreal currency. Still half-asleep, I put the cash in my wallet, and began to walk in what I thought was the direction I had come from, but after a few blocks I realized I was wrong. I retraced my steps and passed the bank but my confusion deepened; maybe I’d been right before. I asked a man, probably Roma, who was sitting in a doorway, where El Barrio Gótico was. He pointed and, although I headed in that direction for many minutes, I couldn’t find the ancient streets. I decided to have some coffee and entered the next café and ordered an espresso, asking the man who served me for directions. He drew me a confusing map on a napkin and I thanked him, deciding to take a cab.

  Then I saw Isabel pass by. I had often thought I’d seen Isabel over the last month or two. This time I felt sure, despite the improbability, and I put down various large coins without finishing my coffee and set off after her. It wasn’t until I was in pursuit that I wondered why I wanted to catch her; I had nothing to say, though I had the indeterminate sense I owed her an apology. She crossed a busy street and by the time I got there the traffic was flowing and I had to wait. It took forever for the light to change and I wasn’t sure it was still her I was trailing but I pursued a woman with something in her hair; she ultimately disappeared around a curve. I stopped again and asked a woman selling cut flowers how to get to El Barrio Gótico and she gave me Metro directions. I thanked her and flagged a cab. When we arrived at the neighborhood’s edge, I went again in search of coffee. I found a café, bought two espressos to go, and walked deeper into the neighborhood, turning onto a street I thought I recognized. I did not know the name of the hotel. Soon I noticed the coffee was cold and I drank mine quickly and threw both cups away. I felt irritated and stupid and sat down on a bench to let my head clear. A blind man was selling lottery tickets nearby, shouting something about fate. I felt like a character in The Passenger, a movie I had never seen.

  When I resumed my search I gradually realized I no longer remembered what the façade of the nameless hotel looked like exactly; I could have passed it many times already. I didn’t have Teresa’s phone number. I estimated an hour and a half had elapsed since I left. Hungry, I entered yet another café and ordered yet another coffee and also a piece of tortilla, which I hated before it arrived. I told the waiter I was looking for a hotel whose name I didn’t know on a street whose name I didn’t know and could he help me; we both laughed and he said: Aren’t we all. When I finished eating I tried again, feeling like an actor whose wanderings were being used as an excuse to shoot the scenery. After I don’t know how long, surely more than an hour, I found myself in a small plaza and sat down, defeated. My irritation turned to worry; it simply would not be believable to me if I were Teresa that I had left the hotel to get us coffee and had gotten lost for however many hours would have passed by the time I found her. And even if it were somehow believable, I didn’t like what such a story would do to her image of me, an image about which I was actively, maybe increasingly, concerned. I would fare better in her eyes, I thought, to disappear mysteriously for several days than to show up like a lost child, dirty and exhausted, as night fell. With something like desperation, I resumed my wanderings. I started to feel a little crazy, space curling around the edges, which reminded me to take my white pill. I found another bench and sat down, stomping to scatter the pigeons. Without texture, time passed.

  I arose and walked until I emerged onto Las Ramblas, where there were crowds around various men who were covered in body paint and pretending to be statues. They moved suddenly, scaring the children, when you gave them coins. I continued down Las Ramblas and onto the pier. There was a small outdoor bar on the little stretch of beach and I sat under the red plastic awning and ordered patatas bravas and a beer. I drank the beer quickly and ordered another. A funicular descended from the hills to a point near the beach. There were many teenagers in bathing suits althoug
h the water must have been cold. A small wave of sexual desire broke over me. When I finished the second beer I walked back to Las Ramblas, drifted for a while, then flagged down a cab and went to the Picasso Museum. Teresa had mentioned wanting to show it to me; maybe she would be there.

  I stood, I made myself stand, in front of the early portrait of his mother. It yielded nothing. The woman, in profile, is half-asleep; her head is leaning slightly forward and her eyes are closed. Pastel on paper. 1896. He was what, fifteen? A freak of nature. I could convince myself I saw space curling around the figure or areas where space flattened suddenly, but I did not see this. Maybe I did see, however, the self-assurance of a painter who assumed his juvenilia would one day be scoured for the seeds of genius, embarrassing phrase. If the work felt uncanny, it was because it was mortgaged; it was borrowing from future accomplishment as much as pointing to it. It had started to rain a little; I could hear it falling on the skylight.

  I wondered how my project would have differed if I’d come to Barcelona instead of Madrid. I thought of this in order to avoid thinking about Teresa, wherever she was. That I was contingent, interchangeable, I took as a given. Slightly more impetuous brushstrokes in the self-portrait, also 1896. A shameless celebration of his own lips. The left eye, however, blackened by shadow, looked like it was blackened by a fist. I tried to imagine myself at fifteen. I remembered my brother teaching me to drive in the parking lot of the V.A.

  Only the juvenilia interested me. I walked indifferently through the rose rooms and blue rooms and nodded to the guards; I brought them greetings from the museum guards of Madrid. If Teresa were there, I would have asked her: what painting would you most like to stand in front of hour after hour, day after day? It wasn’t the same question as what is your favorite painting. Or what period would you most like to dwell in and protect. Would you prefer to have to see, month after month, the figurative or the abstract? I remembered learning to drive and bonfires at Lake Clinton and what they called “experimenting” with alcohol and drugs. A tentative procedure; an act or operation for the purpose of discovering something unknown or of testing a principle or supposition. Now I was an experimental writer.

  My mom, whenever we went to a museum, told me that painting seemed to have developed in reverse; that if an alien were to arrive at a museum, the alien would think the abstract canvases came first, hundreds if not thousands of years before the Renaissance. Unless the alien happened to look like a yellow triangle abutting a plane of blue. I always dismissed this theory in my mother’s presence, but if Teresa were with me, I would have offered it as my own. You could say it about Picasso’s particular development and it would sound intelligent, right or wrong. In the gallery devoted to Picasso’s relation to African art, there were two young kids, six or seven. I didn’t see the rest of the family. One walked up quickly to a large canvas and pawed it, clearly on a dare. Both kids ran out of the gallery, presumably back to their parents. There was no guard around. I approached the canvas the child had touched, a miniature precursor of, or study for, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. I double-checked no one was around and, since the world was ending, touched the painting myself.

  While I was attempting to hail a cab back to El Barrio Gótico, the rain intensified. I tried to reenter the museum, but couldn’t find my ticket, and the guard refused to let me pass. I crossed the street and ducked into a video-game arcade that had a few of the electronic gambling machines old men were always playing; such arcades were everywhere in Spain, but I’d never been inside one. I walked to the end of the arcade, past various flashing lights and blaring soundtracks and one or two kids, until I arrived at a car-shaped game in which I could sit down. I was dripping. I leaned my head against the wheel and felt the full force of my shame. I wasn’t capable of fetching coffee in this country, let alone understanding its civil war. I hadn’t even seen the Alhambra. I was a violent, bipolar, compulsive liar. I was a real American. I was never going to flatten space or shatter it. I hadn’t seen The Passenger, a movie in which I starred. I was a pothead, maybe an alcoholic. When history came alive, I was sleeping in the Ritz. A blonde woman, if that’s the word, with exaggerated breasts and exaggerated eyes, was waving a checkered flag on the screen before me. I dare you to play again, she said in English.

  I left the arcade. It had stopped raining. I hailed a cab to El Barrio Gótico. When the cabdriver attempted to make small talk, I said in Spanish that I didn’t speak Spanish. He said one or two things to me in English and, when I didn’t respond, French. When we arrived at the neighborhood’s edge, I overpaid him and resumed my search. After a few minutes, I thought I saw the first café, the one I’d entered upon leaving Teresa. I went down every street radiating out from the café but could not locate the hotel. It had been how many hours? I was beginning to find it a little difficult to breathe, the prodrome of panic. I asked an elderly man what time it was; it was six or seven something, alarmingly late. I entered what might have been the same café where I’d eaten the tortilla, all the cafés were by this point interchangeable, ordered sparkling water and tried to relax. I felt like the right thing to do should have been obvious. I felt another Isabel-related pang. I longed for the Alhambra and cursed the spidery Sagrada Familia. I ordered a real drink and considered calling my parents, asking their advice, and felt embarrassed; I considered getting a hotel room, going to sleep, figuring everything out tomorrow. By the third drink, I was considering leaving not only Barcelona, but Spain altogether, and never seeing Teresa again. Were the links that tenuous?

  When night was imminent the panic was upon me, a thin layer of cold foil under my skin. I took a tranquilizer. I left the café and began to walk the neighborhood again. Within three minutes of leaving the café I found myself before what was unmistakably our hotel. Only when illuminated by streetlights did I recognize the façade. My first reaction was fury, not relief; fury that it had been here all along. My fury dissipated into worry about what I would tell Teresa. The panic, at least, was gone, replaced with an almost painful sobriety. I wondered if Teresa was still there and entered the hotel to find out. The woman behind the desk looked at me significantly and picked up the phone. I ran up the stairs and knocked on the door and Teresa opened it. She turned immediately back into the room and I followed her. Her little bag was packed and on the bed.

  “I have been lost all day,” I said. It sounded like a lie.

  “Why didn’t you call me?” she asked. She was disconcertingly calm.

  “I don’t have your phone number,” I said.

  “I have given you my number many times,” she said, which was true.

  “I don’t have it. I’m sorry. I have spent twelve hours walking around this neighborhood,” I said, feeling the exhaustion.

  “You walked around the neighborhood all day,” she asked, as if she knew everywhere I’d been.

  “And I walked down Las Ramblas to the water and I went to the Picasso museum. I thought that maybe you were there,” I said.

  “You went to the beach and you went to a museum,” she confirmed. It did sound outrageous.

  “I went to the beach to think before looking for the hotel again.” I couldn’t remember the Spanish expressions for “clear my head” or “gather my thoughts.” “And I went to the museum because I thought you were maybe there.” It didn’t sound right. Of course she wouldn’t have gone to the museum. “I’m sorry,” I said. I wanted to defend myself but my Spanish was crumbling. Somehow switching to English would mean conceding everything.

  “I have to go back to Madrid,” she said flatly.

  “Why?” was all I could manage.

  “I’m needed at the gallery,” she said. “The night train leaves in an hour or so. We should go to the station soon.”

  I blinked at her. “I’m not going back yet,” I said to our mutual surprise.

  She looked at me directly for the first time since I’d returned. “Why?”

  “I might not be in Barcelona again and there is a poet here I want
to see,” I lied. I did not want to stay without her, but I felt it would be humiliating to return with her now like a shamed child.

  She stared at me. “O.K.,” she said eventually, making herself smile. “The hotel is paid for through tomorrow at five. I’ll see you in Madrid.” She kissed me quickly on both cheeks and left. She always left a room like someone who would be right back.

  I took one of the longer showers of my project. I could not represent to myself the day I had passed; it was contentless and repetitious and thus formless; now, in the steam, it was fading. The exchange with Teresa had transpired with disorienting speed. I barely dried myself and lay down and smoked and was grateful to be too tired to ruminate for long. I thought of Levin sweating out his alienation in the fields. I thought of Picasso producing masterpieces in his sleep.

  __________________________

  In post–March 11 Madrid, there was a flurry of activity at the foundation; there were several panels with minor politicians and major professors and local journalists and one or two fellows about the bombings and their political effects. I never attended, but I skimmed the e–mails. When I got back from Barcelona, there was a message from one of María José’s assistants inviting me to join a panel about “literature now,” a panel that would involve another fellow and a few local writers and literary critics; I didn’t respond. I was still trying to formulate a way to excuse myself from the panel when, a few days after the first message, I received an e–mail from María José thanking me for agreeing to participate. The panel would be held in the foundation’s auditorium on such and such evening; she looked forward to seeing me.

  My terror at the prospect of the panel dovetailed with my increasing anxiety regarding what I would do when I completed my research; there were only two months of the fellowship left. I was not a sufficiently published writer to apply for jobs teaching what was called “creative writing”; Cyrus was threatening to move into his parents’ basement in Topeka if things weren’t repaired with Jane; whatever appeal Brooklyn held was diminished by the work I’d have to do in order to subsist there; I was determined never to set foot in Providence again. I had intended to apply to PhD programs in literature, but I knew people who’d intended to do that for years; I’d never gotten beyond bookmarking a few university home pages. The idea of law school occurred to me repeatedly, involuntarily, often with a shudder. In order not to worry about the particulars of what I would do upon my return, I framed my decision as a choice between staying and going, as if that decision had to precede, was independent of, where in particular I would go and what, in either event, I would actually do. In the final phase of my research, as the days continued to lengthen and warm, I evaluated every meal, conversation, and walk in terms of whether or not it justified or invalidated staying on. I was at once more distant and more proximal to my own experience than ever before; on the one hand, my attention was redoubled: every bite of food or phrase of overheard conversation or slant of light or corner of the museum was information for me to mull as I made my decision; on the other hand, whatever the object of my intensified attention, it was immediately abstracted into my ruminations about the future.