by Colm Toibin
I am in Barcelona now. I sleep late in the mornings. If I want to sleep in the afternoon I will take some wine at lunch and I will descend into a heavy sleep with vivid dreams which mix up where I am with where I have come from, the stream at Newtownbarry with the fountain in Plaza San Felipe Neri with the Market Square in Enniscorthy. I wake after an hour, maybe two hours, and I feel numbed by the sleep. I sit and brood. I sit and imagine until the light starts to go and then I make my way down the corridor and I shower in cold water. I go and eat and I come back here. Through the walls I have the opera man and his operas in the next room.
I wrote to my mother and gave the address of the pensión; this was where money was to be sent. I need more money soon. I did not explain why I am here, what I am doing here, how long I am going to stay, I told my mother nothing. Her reply, when it came, was as brief as her original letter. The money would come through a local bank. Your husband is frantic, he has no idea what you are doing. All my love. There was no mention of Richard; she knew that I had put him out of my mind.
A few weeks ago I tried to take a different route to the Hotel Colón where I was going to have my dinner. I was not in a hurry so when I saw a restaurant and heard a loud murmur of voices inside I stopped and looked. The place looked dingy, perhaps even dirty, but it was full of people drinking at the bar and waiters trying to get by them to the restaurant which was at the back. I ventured in. I suppose I was attracted by the people. I indicated to the waiter and he took it that I wanted a table for one. We both looked around and there seemed to be no free table so I was just going to leave and come back later, or maybe come back some other night, when a couple stood up having paid the bill and the waiter took me to their table. The menu was written in chalk on a blackboard and it was unclear. I had a phrase book which listed items on a menu. I was checking through the book to see if I could find any words on the blackboard when I spotted him.
He was with a number of people at a long table opposite mine; most of them were men but there were also a few young women. He was wearing a light grey suit and an open-necked white shirt. He had his back to me, but at intervals he glanced around. His companions were young, though some were not young enough to be students; they were young enough to laugh at most of what was said. I looked for the woman who had been selling jewellery in the square but she was not there.
At first, I remember, Tom was afraid to let me see him naked. He undressed by sitting on the bed and slipping on his pyjamas. When he turned out the light he would lean away from me in the bed and we made love only when the heat of each other in the same bed brought us together. But even then he was nervous when I touched him. He wanted to lie beside me for a long time holding me with his head buried in my shoulder and neck. He would lie still. Sometimes I thought that he was asleep and I would reach down and touch his penis and it would be hard and waiting. He would gasp for a moment and move his hands along my body. Almost as soon as he was inside me he would ejaculate, crying to himself, whining almost and then he would want to turn and sleep.
It is October in Barcelona. I continue to explore and find new places; days fill up. I change habits. I now have breakfast in Calle Petritxol which winds out of Plaza del Pino. There are several little cafés that specialise in coffee, chocolate, little sandwiches and pastries. I go to the same one every day at the same time; they know me now and smile at me when I come in.
At first I did not know if they were open on Sundays. As I walked down to find out I passed through Plaza del Pino and found once more the paintings on sale in the middle of the square. I was thinking of him. The crowds were coming out of mass in the church of Santa María del Pino as I walked by. The café was open but all the places near the door were taken so I had to go and sit at the back. As the waiter led me down to a vacant table, I saw him fix his eyes on me. I had not expected to see him here. He was paler than I remembered, but his eyes were the same and his lips. He looked at me as though I were coming to join them at the table. When I sat down he did not look away. His companion was older, more sallow than he, almost unhealthy looking. His face was thin. He was wearing a bow-tie. They continued talking and when they stood up to leave they both smiled at me. He did not look behind as he left.
I went out onto the Ramblas and walked up to Plaza Cataluña and then back down towards the cathedral. I stopped and tried to think for a moment. I tried to work out what I was doing as I walked back towards the paintings in Plaza del Pino. The small woman was there again and he was standing behind her. I walked around looking at the paintings until I came to them. I stopped and the woman spoke to me.
“English? American?” she said.
“English,” I said. He was watching me.
“Tourist?” she asked. I smiled and shrugged.
“You like Barcelona?”
I nodded. The man spoke to her for a while and then they both turned and looked at me.
“You live here in the Barrio Gótico?” she asked.
“I live in Calle del Pino,” I replied.
“You live in pensión?”
“Yes.”
“You have family here?”
“No.”
“Work?”
“No.”
“What is your name?”
“Katherine.”
“I am Rosa. Do you like paintings?”
“Yes,” I hesitated, “yes, sometimes.”
They spoke among themselves and I wondered if I should leave. I wondered if I should walk away.
“He want to paint you, this man,” she said.
I smiled and shook my head.
“No, I don’t want to.” She translated for him. “Is he your husband?” I asked her.
“No.” He looked at me and made a sign as though he had a brush in his hand and painted at his face. He began to nod in assent. I shook my head.
“Why not?” the woman asked. I didn’t reply. I pointed to a painting of boats on a beach on the easel beside us.
“Is that his?”
“No,” she said. When she told him what I had asked he laughed.
“He is good painter,” she said and he nodded in agreement.
“I must go,” I said.
In the week that followed I thought I saw him several times on the street. Yet when I did see the painter one day as I was walking towards the market I was startled. He was coming out of a doorway on Puertaferrisa. His lip curled up as though he were amused to meet me by accident in such a way.
“Bonjour,” he said.
“Good morning.”
He said something I did not understand. He laughed for a moment and then he pointed at my face and waved an imaginary brush in the air. He kept saying “si” and nodding his head. He held my hand for a second in the street.
“I must go. Je dois aller,” I said.
“Non, non,” he said.
He was insistent, and I wanted to get away. He wanted to know where I lived. I pointed to the pensión on the corner. If he called there or disturbed me I could move. There was a pensión on every corner.
Yet I became worried that he would call and create a fuss and was relieved when he did not. He simply arrived one day with Rosa and they asked me to come and see their studio. They were eager and friendly. The landlady’s face darkened when Rosa spoke in English. I said I would go with them some other day.
“Tomorrow?” she said.
“Yes, that’s fine.”
They come again the next day and I went with them around the corner to Calle Puertaferissa. It sounds funny but I did not feel nervous about going up the stairs of a house I had never been in before, the same house from which I had seen him coming the other day. After a few flights of stairs he pushed open a door and we went into a huge long room with large windows at either end and a glass roof. There were easels and paints everywhere. A few people, mostly young women, were sitting on stools, painting from a photograph of a street. The man I had noticed in the café on Sunday was standing behind the easels demonstrating somethin
g to one of the students. He looked at us for a minute and then continued what he was doing. The other man looked at me and pointed to himself.
“Yo, Miguel,” he said. “Miguel,” he repeated it.
“Y tú?” he asked, pointing at me.
“Katherine,” I said.
“Katherine,” he tried to repeat it.
“Me Tarzan,” I said and he wanted me to say it again but I did not feel able to explain.
“Is this a school?” I asked Rosa.
“Yes, it is a college for painters.”
“I paint,” I said. “Can I join the college?”
“You must ask Ramon,” she said. She pointed at the sallow man who had been in the café.
“You ask him for me,” I said.
I watched her walk up to where he was standing. The man who had introduced himself as Miguel approached me and when the sallow man glanced down again he could see us both standing together. Eventually, Rosa came over to me.
“Can you come back in a week? He will talk to you then.”
“Will he take me then?” I asked. “Tell him I can draw.”
“I am not sure,” she said. “He does not know. You must return next week.”
The cathedral has just rung midnight and there are no more shutters to be pulled down. The day is over. Tomorrow I will go back to the grammar book I bought. Tomorrow I will learn more verbs. But tonight there is no place for me in this city except here in this dingy bedroom in this small hotel. Until the morning no grammar will be of any use to me. Sleep my husband, sleep easy. I will not be back. My son is asleep in Ireland and I will not be back. I will settle into bed. I will sleep. I will not be back. I will think about the future until I fall asleep.
BARCELONA
She had forgotten about them now, they came in dreams sometimes and melted into other dreams. She was away. She opened the small window in the bedroom and looked down on Berga. A cold spring morning in the foothills of the Pyrenees. Dead silence. She lit a cigarette and rested her elbows on the window ledge. Mist was still clinging over the town and there was a faint hint of ice in the air.
She was naked and she was aware that if he woke he would see her. She looked around at him, his face angelic in sleep, all malice and amusement gone, all the life taken out of him.
The town had been alive all night. The crowds had come from the villages around; people had come too from Barcelona, from Lérida, from Gerona. Miguel had insisted on taking an early bus from Barcelona and staking his claim on this bed in the back room of his friend’s flat. He was given a key to the room, which he locked before they went down into Berga for lunch. He told her to eat as much as she could because there would be no time to eat later. The rest of the day would be spent drinking and shouting, he said, and he looked both words up in her pocket Spanish-English dictionary to make sure she understood. Drinking and shouting.
Miguel met several friends for lunch and they spoke intensely throughout. Katherine tried to follow what they were saying with little success. They spoke in Catalan; for months she had been learning Spanish. Occasionally one of them spoke to her in Spanish but in general they were too involved in their conversation to pay her any attention.
This was Corpus Christi—the opening day of the Patum de Berga. At ten o’clock in the main square the drums would roll and the fireworks would bang in the sky and then the huge giants would walk the streets and the people would try to get as close to them as they could.
Now in the morning the mist was clearing and she could see the few tents pitched on the meadow beside the small river to the north of the town. She stubbed the cigarette out on the window sill and closed the window against the cold morning.
The bed was a mattress on the floor. As she pulled the blankets up and edged her way back into bed, Miguel opened his eyes, closed them again and smiled. He kissed her on the mouth. When he stood up and stretched she lay back and watched him: his straight, thin white back and the rough hair on his legs.
He was cold when he came back from the toilet and they huddled against one another in bed, shuddering at the cold. She gasped when he put his cold hands on her back. For a moment she managed to rest the sole of one foot against his stomach and he cried out and pushed her away.
“Good morning,” he said, trying to mimic her English.
His breath tasted of garlic when he kissed her. He held his face against hers and stared at her, trying to outstare her. He lay on his back and pulled her on top of him with his face buried in her breasts.
He waited a long time before he came into her and when he finished he wanted, as always, to sleep for a while holding her in his arms, keeping her as close to him as he could. Sometimes he would sleep for just five or ten minutes; he would doze and wake again and want to talk to her; sometimes she would not let him know that she didn’t understand much of what he said. It was taking her a long time to learn the language.
Jordi owned the flat; Katherine had met him before. His studio was on the floor above with two windows looking down on Berga. She spent the first morning after the Patum watching Jordi paint. The canvases were about three feet in length and a foot across. He had finished six of them which he ranged against the wall for her. All of the canvases had been first painted a bright, almost luminous white. In two of them, this white covered most of the finished surface; in one of these, there was a half moon in black on the white and very thinly towards the bottom of the canvas a worked-over mass in red, blue and pink. She was impressed by the subtlety in the painting, although she still couldn’t understand what he was trying to do. She looked at another canvas: the white, faintly luminous background and on the right a number of black lines forming oblique cruciform shapes; nothing else.
The other four paintings were warmer, but still stark. Thick black lines divided squares of colour from one another. Sometimes the paint had been left so thin that it shimmered in the black surroundings. There was a painting of a mountain, brown, black, dark green with scalpel or knife marks incising the canvas and a flat blue sky behind. In the bottom corner were two people, about one inch high, painted like cut-out figures. They seemed to be embracing.
Jordi told her that the paintings had been commissioned by the monks in the abbey of Montserrat. They were the stations of the cross: the fourteen images which represent the closing scenes of the passion of Christ.
They stood looking at the work: the black and white painting, he told her, was the crucifixion; the painting with the half moon and the shapes at the bottom of the canvas was Christ’s descent from the cross, the deposition; the three paintings of shimmering colours and black lines were the three times Jesus fell on his way up the hill of Calvary, and the painting of the mountain with the cut-out figures was of his meeting with Mary.
She walked down into Berga to meet Miguel. He was sitting on his own at the bar with a full glass of beer. When they had moved into the restaurant and were looking at the menu Katherine explained to him what Jordi had told her about the paintings of the stations of the cross. He laughed. He put the palm of his hand towards her and rubbed his thumb against his fingers; his face took on a miserly expression. He laughed again. She told him she didn’t understand.
“Money,” he said, “Jordi does it for the money.” He went on to say that Jordi had more interest in the Patum de Berga than he had in the via dolorosa. He just needed the money and the monks were willing to pay. She told him she didn’t believe him.
They had pasta and a bottle of rich red wine. Opposite them was a thin man in his thirties whose hair was prematurely grey. His skin was almost yellow; he looked as though he was recovering from some disease. From time to time his eyes darted across the table at them and he paid great attention to the discussion on the stations of the cross. His wine had come in a porrón but he didn’t hold the spout in the air and let the wine jet into his mouth, as the others did. He poured the wine into his glass from the neck of the porrón. She noticed that his eyes were green.
Miguel wanted to ta
lk to her about the future. After his exhibition in Barcelona they would go away together and live in the mountains, north of here, higher up. By that time she would speak Spanish perfectly and could start to learn Catalan.
She was embarrassed by the loudness of his voice and by the vehemence of his tone. They had not discussed money. He did not know that her mother sent her money at intervals. She was unsure what he lived on. There were other things about him she was unsure of; she had no context in which to place him. It was easier to be with him from one day to the next without having to make a grand decision to go and live in the mountains with him.
They went to a bar further along the street and had coffee at a table outside. Miguel ordered a sweet purple drink he called paxaran. After two of these and two coffees she felt drunk and tired and she urged him to come back with her to the flat.
* * *
As soon as they went into the room she took off her clothes. She stood in the middle of the room while he made the bed and smoothed out the sheets. He took off his jacket and shirt and when he was naked he came over and put his arms around her and she could feel his heart beating fast. She could taste the alcohol and the coffee from his mouth as though it were an integral part of him like the pattern of black hairs on his chest. When they were in bed he lay on top of her and his hands held her head; all his energy came from his mouth and tongue. Sometimes he kept his mouth closed and kissed her on the lips. He had left the packet of condoms on the floor beside the mattress; he rolled the rubber down on his penis and she held it and guided it into her. As he moved it in and out she could feel the effortless throb of orgasm come on. He kept his two hands under her as she gasped and he tried to get his penis further and further in. He started to ejaculate and together they held it for as long as they could.