Leaving the Atocha Station

by Ben Lerner

  On the day of the panel I left the apartment almost two hours early. I walked to the foundation’s building, which was not far from Teresa’s, then circled the block, practicing my memorized passages, reminding myself to breathe. I had three tranquilizers in the pocket of my jeans. I put my hand in my pocket to confirm their presence and contact with the denim made me exclaim internally: Why, in the name of God, was I wearing jeans? And worse: a T-shirt. In two days of panicky anticipation I had failed to concern myself with my appearance. I felt nauseated as I imagined the men in suits, María José and the professor in pantsuits; Teresa would appear elegant in whatever she wore. I asked a man at a kiosk for the time; I had a little more than an hour; if I hurried, nearly ran, I could make it. I was telling myself it was a terrible idea to get sweaty and risk being late, but I was telling myself this as I rushed back to my apartment, flew up the stairs, and looked for my suit. Thankfully, and uncharacteristically, I had hung it up after the single time I wore it, and if it wasn’t pressed, it was nevertheless passable. I changed as quickly as I could, checked myself in the mirror, and flew back down the stairs. I slowed down a block from the foundation, wiped the sweat from my face, and tried to catch my breath.

  I entered the building and made my way to the auditorium; to my horror, it was considerably larger than I expected, seating perhaps two hundred people, and it was full; I had anticipated a glorified conference room. I saw someone setting up a video camera on a tripod. There was a little stage, and on the stage a table with chairs, placards, a swan-shaped jug of water, glasses, and individual microphones; the stage was intensely illuminated. Four of the six panelists, including Teresa, were already seated, chatting with one another. I hesitated near the door, a little dazed; María José saw me, approached, and said, perhaps sarcastically, that I looked very elegant, then asked me to take my seat. The other fellow, she told me as she walked me toward the stage, was not able to join us. She arranged this, I told myself, enraged; as the only American, I would have to speak and the panelists or audience members would, if only out of politeness, ask me for my “perspective.” I took my place at the table and received Teresa’s smile; she looked no less comfortable on stage than in her living room, although she was wearing some kind of charcoal ensemble that made me glad I’d changed clothes. I tried to smile back and saw the other panelists had pens and paper, presumably to take notes, whereas I had brought nothing, a sign of presumptuousness.

  A movie I had never seen.

  Soon María José ascended the stage. The crowd quieted down as she walked to a standing microphone I had not seen. She thanked everyone for coming to tonight’s discussion. She then proceeded to introduce the panelists, noting, when she got to me, that a bilingual selection of my poems was shortly forthcoming, and she said we would begin the evening by asking each of the panelists to speak informally for one or two minutes about the topic, “literature now.” We would begin with Javier Torres, who was seated on the end of the table nearest María José, and work our way across; I was second from last.

  Again the anger rose inside me; surely María José had told the other panelists to prepare a few minutes of remarks, but had somehow neglected to say as much to me. But as Javier Torres began to speak in his politician’s voice, a voice that fit his headshot perfectly, a voice that sounded like it came not from a body but a screen, my anger was nothing compared to my anxiety; I had no idea what to say. I reached into my pocket for my tranquilizers and realized, no doubt blanching, that I had failed to transfer them to my suit pants from my jeans. I felt a surge of terror so intense I was dizzy; it was like I was looking down into the space between the winding stairs of the Sagrada Familia, a view I’d never seen. Somehow Teresa, next after Javier, was already speaking; soon it would be my turn. The audience was invisible from the stage because of the lights but I could sense its presence, its attentiveness; Teresa made a joke and they laughed and the many-headed laughter was terrible to me. Elena López Portillo was talking now; I wiped the sweat from my brow. If I’d brought paper, I managed to think, I could have composed something coherent. Use your memorized lines, I told myself, but could not remember them. I was going to flee or vomit or faint.

  But a line materialized. Elena López Portillo had ceased to speak and I could feel a change in pressure on my face, the effect of the audience focusing its eyes upon me. I heard myself say, my voice sounding to me as though it issued from the back of the auditorium, from deep within the audience itself, “Ortega y Gasset wrote ‘By speaking, by thinking, we undertake to clarify things, and that forces us to exacerbate them, dislocate them, schematize them. Every concept is in itself an exaggeration.’” I paused, and could feel the silence tighten, as the audience attempted to take the quotation in. I was encouraged enough by my own prefabricated fluency and by the fact that I did not sound nervous or crazy, to add: “My fear about this panel is that we are in a hurry to define a period, to speak of literature now; every period, like every concept, is in itself an exaggeration. I hope to hear from others what changed on March 11 that permits we to speak,” my grammar faltered, but I could see the sentence’s end, “of a new now, of a new period, without dislocation.” I stopped there, making my brevity seem the issue of my pithiness and courage, the courage to contest the concept of the panel, when in fact I didn’t want to use up any more of my quotations. A murmur of interest ran through the crowd; a current of adrenaline coursed through my body. I glanced at Teresa as Francesc Balda began to speak and I thought her smile communicated pride in me. Now I could attempt to listen to the other panelists; Francesc Balda began by stressing the importance of my point; he shared my healthy suspicion of neat distinctions between a pre-this and a post-that; indeed, perhaps literature’s role was to help us keep our perspective, to take the long view, to allow us to link our “now” to various past “nows” in order to form an illuminating constellation. He then went on to describe something about Catalan literature and its relation to political violence that I failed to follow.

  After our brief remarks, María José thanked us and said we’d now take questions from the audience, that microphones were in the aisles, if needed. The house lights were raised a little. The first questions were for particular panelists, but not for me, and I felt increasingly confident that I would be required to speak very little for the remainder of the panel. Someone asked Teresa how she thought her perspective on the relationship between politics and art differed from, say, Elena’s because she had never experienced Franco, being born so near his death, and at some point during her answer, she said something about everyone reflecting his or her historical moment. In a burst of bravado I leaned into my microphone and added: “I agree. No writer is free to renounce his political moment, but literature reflects politics more than it affects it, an important distinction.” Again the murmur, whether of agreement or disagreement, I couldn’t tell, but certainly no one suspected me of being a monolingual fraud; it was a respectable point made well.

  But it was stupid to have talked; now Elena, distinguished professor, directed a question at me: “Then why write at all?” She said it without malice, but I was unequivocally the addressee, and I was now required to respond, and against the backdrop of my memorized quip, my speech would seem all the more halting and confused. Any answer would do, cryptic or funny, but I was unable to locate my Spanish; time was passing and I’d parted my lips, but I could not formulate any response. Finally, I said: “I don’t know.” Luckily, Javier took this up as a serious answer, offering a cliché about the art choosing the artist as much as the artist chooses the art. I would not repeat, I promised myself, the mistake of speaking unless forced to speak. The panel continued and there was a long exchange with Francesc about a Catalan writer I’d never heard of, and a skirmish with Javier about El País’s coverage of some political affair. There were multiple questions for Teresa about her participation in the protests, the possibility of literature as protest, and so on, but I had trouble comprehending her answers. Whenever
my fear decreased, a profound fatigue, a fatigue that made concentration as impossible as the fear, broke over me. It was when I was emerging from a spell of fatigue that I realized a question had been addressed to me.

  “Can you repeat the question, please?” I asked.

  “What Spanish poets have had the greatest influence on your writing and your thinking about the relationship between poetry and political events?” was more or less what I thought he said.

  To avoid a long period of silence resulting in another “I don’t know,” I threw him a quotation barely related to his question, if at all: “I’m hesitant to speak,” I said, “about Spanish literature as if I were an expert; to do so would be to fulfill the stereotypes regarding American presumptuousness.” Why it was presumptuous to list Spanish poets I admired was anybody’s guess.

  “But who are the poets who have influenced you personally?” the man repeated. This question, perhaps offered out of sympathy for how few queries had been addressed to me, could not have been easier to answer. Just list a few names. “Lorca,” I lied. “Miguel Hernández.” But then, to my horror and amazement, I could not think of another poet; my head was emptied of every Spanish proper name; I couldn’t even think of common names to offer as though they were little known authors. Forget annotating the list, explaining how one poet’s sense of line or of the social influenced my own poetic practice, or relating these poets to my previous comments: just list a few fucking names. Finally I thought of two famous poets I’d barely read: Juan Ramón Jiménez and Antonio Machado, but the names collided and recombined in my head, and I heard myself say: “Ramón Machado Jiménez,” which was as absurd as saying “Whitman Dickinson Walt,” and a few people tittered. I corrected myself, but it came out wrong again: “Antonio Ramon Jimenez,” and now those who were baffled understood my unforgivable error, so extreme they might have at first suspected it was an ironic gesture; several people laughed. The celebrated American fellow cannot get four names deep into the list of the most famous Spanish poets of the twentieth century. “Jiménez and Machado,” I finally said, at least separating the poets out, but it was too late; I had embarrassed myself, the foundation, and I had ruined everything with Teresa. María José said we would take only one more question because of time, but surely she meant because of shame, because of the great shame the foundation felt at sponsoring an American phony, although she was no doubt personally delighted with the scene.

  When I confirmed the last question wasn’t for me, I didn’t listen; I just counted the seconds until María José thanked us and asked the crowd to applaud, made some announcement about another panel, asked the crowd to applaud again, and then the lights were fully on and the audience slowly began to leave its seats. Before I could flee, Teresa was upon me, smiling as if nothing had happened, assuring me I had done wonderfully, then chatting with the other panelists. I sat there and said to myself: You’ll be gone in six weeks. You will never see any of these people again. María José cannot nullify your fellowship because you mangled names. None of this matters. Not Teresa or the panel or Spain or Spanish literature or literature in general. Now María José was thanking each of the panelists in turn; she reached me and said my contributions had been brilliant. I smiled a mirthless smile that communicated infinite disdain and thanked her. To myself I was saying: You don’t love Teresa and she doesn’t love you. None of this is real. You don’t like Madrid, with its tourists and dust and heat and innumerable Pietàs and terrible food. The fucking fascists. You are ready to quit smoking, to clean up, to return to friends and family. You have outgrown poetry. You will be a legitimate scholar or a lawyer but you are done with Teresa and hash and drinking and lying and lyric and the intersections thereof. I have never been here, I said to myself. You have never seen me.

  __________________________

  In the last phase of my research fireflies were disappearing. Bats were flying around confused in the middle of the day, colliding with each other, falling into little heaps. Bees were disappearing, maybe because of cell phone radiation, maybe because of perfume, maybe because of candy. It was the deadliest day since the invasion began. Unmanned drones made sorrowful noise overhead. It was 1933. The cities were polluted with light, the world warming. The seas were rising. The seas were closing over future readers. Confused trees were blooming early; you could view the pics from space online. It was 1066, 312. Why not let the children touch the paintings? You could see the hooded prisoners in orange jumpsuits behind the concertina wire. I was standing before The Descent, oil on oak, hash and caffeine; I hadn’t been there in a while and the blue was startling. 1936, 1492, 800, 1776. Meanwhile, life’s white machine. The great artist and the museum guard. Having nothing to say and saying it into a tiny phone. ¿Porqué nací entre espejos? I wondered if the guard in the Reina Sofía ever wore her necklace. Before the reading, I had a couple of hours to kill. Bajo el agua / siguen las palabras. I left the museum for the park.

  It was a beautiful day, unseasonably cool, and the park was crowded; there were puppet shows and portraitists near El Estanque. The hash dealers were back, or reinforcements had arrived, milling around the trees. I found a bench and opened my chapbook; it was wonderfully made, its quality anachronistic, befitting a dead medium. Letterpressed on Italian paper, hand sewn. Arturo had printed a thousand copies. Teresa’s name only appeared on the front matter, as she had insisted. Arturo had invited everybody to the reading and celebration. I’d even agreed to forward the announcement to my entire inbox, although I only knew four or five people in Spain. I was wearing my suit. I’d received an e–mail María José sent out to all the fellows informing them about the event. Come celebrate a wonderful accomplishment, etc. For whatever reason, I wasn’t nervous. Maybe Elena López Portillo would attend and write an essay on my work. Maybe Isabel would bring Oscar, whom I imagined as Carlos. Teresa said her publisher was considering asking me for a book. Under the water / the words go on. I would have liked to kiss Rufina. Over the course of my research, I’d lost considerable weight. Other than that, I didn’t think I’d undergone much change.

  It would cost a hundred euros to change an international ticket, less than a meal at Zalacaín. The museum guard, the bathroom attendant, the economic mode. I walked to the colonnade and listened to the drummers. The sun was just beginning to set, and the light had softened, but there would be some light until nearly ten. I sat and smoked and, for whatever reason, thought: Teresa should read the originals; I’ll read the translations. My accent, when I read, was good, much better, I didn’t know why, than when I spoke. I sat on the colonnade and read a poem or two aloud in Spanish; I didn’t hear an American accent.

  I eventually made my way to the gallery, which I was pleased to see was overflowing. If I was nervous, it was only about the fact that I wasn’t nervous, which might mean something was wrong with me. I was greeted by various people: María José was surprisingly warm; we kissed each other without irony. One of the swimmers I had smoked with caught the corner of my mouth. I found Teresa, who looked stunning, and we kissed each other on the lips. She was wearing a dress that was probably satin, silver, very simple, but unmistakably expensive. We didn’t know many working people. I told her about my idea, that we’d swap parts in the reading, and although there were trace amounts of sadness in her smile, she agreed.

  There was a bar and, to my surprise, a bartender. I asked him for white wine. While he was pouring my wine, Jorge approached me; he must have been in my inbox. We embraced each other warmly. He said something about how far my Spanish had come, about the fancy people I’d fallen in with, how he’d tell people in the future all about the famous poet he tutored and sold drugs to. I asked him if he could name a famous living poet. He couldn’t.

  “Is Isabel back in Madrid?” I asked him.

  “What do you mean?” he said.

  “Is she back from Barcelona?” I asked.

  “When did she go to Barcelona?” he asked, puzzled.

  “Is she working at the
language school again?” I asked.

  “She never stopped working at the language school,” he said.

  “Oh,” I said. I waited for an emotional reaction to this news, to be thrilled or angry or at least suspicious. Had she made up the Oscar story? Had she changed her mind? Had he come early? I waited, but only felt a little curious; I was otherwise unmoved. I wondered if she was in the crowd. I wondered again if there were something wrong with me.

  There was a table with stacks of the chapbook for sale; it was strange to see so many copies of my name. They cost ten euros, which seemed like a lot. Arturo came up to me and hugged me and I thanked him for everything. You can make it up to me, he said, by sweeping the floors of the gallery in the coming months. He said we were about to begin and that I should sit in the front with Teresa, which I did. People stopped talking and those that couldn’t find seats sat on the floor or stood in the back. I was a little nervous now, but not unpleasantly so; I thought about my tranquilizers in my suit jacket pocket only because I was surprised not to want one. Arturo appeared at the podium and began to speak. Night-blooming flowers refused to open near the stadium lights. Freedom was on the march. Aircraft noise was having strange effects on finches. Some species synchronized their flashes, sometimes across thousands of insects, exacerbating contradictions. Why was I born between mirrors?

  Teresa would read the originals and I would read the translations and the translations would become the originals as we read. Then I planned to live forever in a skylit room surrounded by my friends.

  CREDITS

  Page 11: Detail of The Descent from the Cross, by Rogier van der Weyden (ca. 1435).

  Page 52: Photo of the bombing of Guernica, 1937. Reprinted from the German Federal Archives (Deutsches Bundesarchiv).