by Dennis Bock
I stayed on the coast for a few days in a villa owned by the parents of one of the girls studying there that week. I didn’t bother anyone during the day, just wandered around the village, tried to read and looked at the sea. Everything I saw brought Holly to mind. I hadn’t spoken to her since I left, though I’d finally posted a card telling her I was fine. I didn’t tell her where I was or what my plans were. I didn’t have any. A small library of books had been left behind by various people who’d rented the villa over the years. Most were in German, but there was also a shelf of English novels and poetry and translations. From eight in the morning to three in the afternoon the place was deathly quiet. I sat in a lounge chair overlooking the Catalan hills and discovered Herman Hesse, whose writing reminded me of the torment of my own soul. He understood. I could practically feel his hand reaching up through the page. If someone else could know and write so well about what I was feeling, I wasn’t losing my mind after all. Suffering from the widest, deepest heartache I’d ever known, I almost turned around and headed back to her. But I knew what I carried in my heart for Holly was the very thing that was destroying her.
After a few nights at the villa I hitched west across the northern coast of Spain and landed in a small city called Santander. I rented a room in a drafty flat in the centre of town, a fifteen-minute walk from the ocean. The flat’s owner, the Señora, was a nurse. When she wasn’t at the hospital working the night shift, she sat in the darkness of her small kitchen smoking and turning over cards in a perpetual game of solitaire. She was raising a son on her own, a boy named Baldomero, and while fully employed still had to take in the occasional renter to help get her through to the end of the month. She was an attractive woman, and in her early thirties, I guessed, but a sense of greyness and gloom hung over her. Her floors smelled of bleach. Her younger sister, an equally distracted woman, lived on the same floor at the end of the hall, and she prepared her nephew’s evening meal and made sure he got to bed on time.
I’d told the Señora that I was studying at one of the city’s language academies, but I wasn’t a student anywhere anymore. I’d given that up in Montreal. Now I spent my days walking the streets and looking for cheap places to eat and wondering if leaving Holly had been the right thing to do. Could I be sure I’d been the cause of the melancholy that drew her down into those depths?
Baldomero, who was twelve years old, occupied the room next to mine. I didn’t know who had previously occupied my room or, for that matter, where the boy’s father was. Sometimes in the early morning I heard the Señora come in from her shift and make herself a cup of tea and then the creaking of her son’s bedsprings when she lay down beside him to wake him for school.
Instead of a wintery Berlin view, my window looked over the city’s main boulevard, a long pedestrian walkway lined with palm trees and booths and tables sheltered from the weather by makeshift coverings of blue tarp or clear plastic. Sometimes I watched for Holly from that window, as if she’d come to tell me that the pain she felt was worth it, that she could endure anything as long as she was with me. Wasn’t this the price of love? In a moment of weakness I sent a postcard telling her where I was, with no mention of when I might return.
It rained almost every day. But whenever it softened to a drizzle or stopped altogether, the vendors suddenly appeared with their cages of rabbits and canaries or pails of carnations, and the crowds streamed down the avenue, and the town seemed alive and bright with springtime. I left the flat early most mornings and explored the city. I found the port straight off and followed the coast for three or four hours, then doubled back. The next day I went down to the train station and watched the African men selling transistor radios and pirated cassette tapes and small wooden giraffes and elephants. Their skin as black as ink under those cloudy Atlantic skies, they seemed to vanish into thin air when the municipal police showed up. And then they reappeared only minutes later, unloaded their wares and once again turned to selling.
I found a decent library with a good English-language selection and read Aldous Huxley, Arthur Koestler and a hardcover copy of For Whom the Bell Tolls. I’d read it before but I took it down off the shelf and again was thrilled to imagine the pine forests in the sierra north of Madrid. It had seemed romantic and dangerous, and I realized it had been part of the reason I’d crossed the border into Spain. I wasn’t allowed to sign these books out without a library card, which wasn’t available without proper Spanish documentation, but the library was warm and dry, and the window I sat beside had a clear view of a park and a hill covered in trees that was sometimes shrouded in a foggy Atlantic mist.
A few weeks after my arrival I met a girl named Carmen in the student ghetto. She was standing with another girl at the bar in El Mago, a place I’d been going to over the last few days. On the brick wall behind them were large posters featuring a bullfight, the Stones and a black-and-white shot of Miles Davis cradling his trumpet. I liked the music playing in the bar that night. I can’t recall what it was, but it was loud, and everyone was talking and arguing and stubbing out cigarettes on the stone floor. I was alone most of the day and going crazy to meet people. I’d never been so lonely and had prowled up and down this street night after night hoping to meet someone I could talk to. I was looking at that beautiful Miles Davis portrait, almost waiting for him to look up and smile, when Carmen and Arantxa noticed me. I screwed up my courage and walked over and introduced myself.
“You like jazz?” Carmen asked in Spanish.
For half a second I was flattered. Maybe that meant I looked the part. “Not really,” I told her in English. “I just like the look of that photograph.”
Carmen was the pretty one, though she was self-conscious about how receded her teeth were. She tried to cover this up by quickly drawing her upper lip down over her teeth when she smiled or laughed, which she did enough that you could tell she was a kind and happy person who liked to have a good time. But it was precisely her mouth that made her attractive to me. They asked me lots of questions that night—what it was like where I came from, what I liked about Spain, where I was going next. It was the first conversation I’d had in weeks.
By then I’d very nearly gone through the money I’d earned at the record company. I only ate one meal a day, usually at Casa Mariano, the cheapest dive I could find. It had wooden beams and sawdust on the floor and included a half liter of wine with every dish, though I never touched it. Given that Holly was always on my mind, I didn’t need the gloominess of spirit that came with drinking wine in the middle of the day.
After lunch I would walk down to the harbor to where the car ferry docked, the biggest ship I’d ever seen. I was happy to sit there for hours, thinking about Holly or the pretty girl I’d met at El Mago, and listen to the English passengers as they came off the ship.
In the late afternoons, back in the flat, I heard the Señora and her sister talking in the kitchen. Neither of them looked up when I came in, and I did my best to disappear into my room. On the one or two occasions I’d sat in the living room with the landlady and her son, I looked at the photograph in an antique silver frame of a young man holding a child in his arms—Baldomero and his father, I thought. I didn’t know if he’d died or run off, and it wasn’t my place to ask. But I remember him as ordinary looking, a little dull and heavy, with sullen eyes. He had dark eyebrows and the solid round face I grew accustomed to later in the north of Spain, and the tired expression about his eyes you can see everywhere else.
Carmen, Arantxa and I began to meet regularly, usually at night, and I looked forward to these evenings all day. When I saw their familiar shapes walking toward me in the evening’s misting rain, the promise of some small connection with this place appeared along with them, and the girls would wave and I’d rehearse my greetings and wonder what it would be like to kiss this shy and beautiful girl.
They both liked to talk about Spanish boys. According to Carmen, they were selfish and arrogant and thought a girl owed them everything. Arantxa said
they were raised by their mothers to be utterly dependent on women. Neither of these girls wanted anything to do with them. Carmen was studying French and German at university, and Arantxa was in her last months of secretarial college. I remember thinking that their lives were far better thought out and organized than mine. Carmen was usually nervous and giddy, speaking quickly and always punctuating her questions with a negative, as if preparing herself for some inevitable reversal. You had a good day, no? People from your country are very serious, no? She had straight brown hair, pale skin and a strong, perfect nose. She was always smiling, unlike her friend, who talked about moving to Germany after she graduated.
Late one afternoon I saw Arantxa buying a canary from a birdman on the Paseo Menéndez Pelayo, just a block or so down from my flat. The air was heavy with mist that day, and I was heading home after struggling at the library for most of the day to write a letter—the only one I ever sent to Holly. I’d finally gathered the courage to explain why I’d left her. Meanwhile, she’d sent four or five by then, in each of which she mentioned coming to see me and asked how things were and if Spain was as wonderful as she imagined. Could I write soon? Is everything okay? She wrote her letters by hand in blue ink in the perfect script I knew well. These were beautiful physical artifacts, long and detailed and written at different points in her day or night. About to head into class now, more later … And she’d start up again, Just released from a Kafka lecture … She ended each letter with a line or two from whatever she was reading at the time. I couldn’t help remembering that Pound poem on the wall in Montreal.
I was thinking about the letter I’d just posted, rewriting parts of it or tearing it up completely in my head, when I saw a grey-haired man reach his arm out and hand Arantxa the bird, its small yellow head sticking out from between his fingers. I stopped walking and watched her, waiting for the moment when she’d set the creature free. What else could she do with it? She’d never shown an interest in birds or anything else, for that matter, other than escaping this rainy port town. But I saw her turn away, and she disappeared into the crowds on the boulevard.
I walked over to the student ghetto and stayed till after midnight. I was feeling miserable. All I could see now in my mind’s eye was Holly ripping open that envelope and reading the letter I’d sent. Now I didn’t know if I’d done the right thing.
When I got home hours later, I found the Señora watching TV in the living room.
“Hola,” I said. “Good night.”
“Good night. Wait.”
“Yes?”
“Look at me. What do you see?”
“I don’t understand,” I said.
“A nurse of fourteen years. That’s what you see. They’ve thrown me to the street. That’s how this country is now.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “That’s terrible.” I stood there for a moment longer, not knowing what else to say. “But you’ll find something, right? Sure you will. People always need nurses.”
“What this country needs is another Franco,” she said. “We need a strong man. People like me are thrown into the street. It’s the cowards who ruin everything. Cowards who do what they’re told and not what’s right.”
A knock on my door brought me up out of a shallow sleep sometime later that night. Without moving I looked at my watch sitting on the night table. The knob turned slightly and the door pushed open and a sliver of light reached across my bed. A deep silence filled the room. My heart was crashing in my chest. Then the door was closed, and a moment later I heard the sofa springs creak in the living room, and all was quiet.
After a few hours at the library the next day I carried a sandwich up to the zoo and ate it sitting on a bench under a plane tree. It was the first sunny afternoon in a week. Without thinking too deeply about my landlady’s situation, I finished my sandwich and sat back and felt the sun on my face, then walked around the zoo and looked at the animals. When I came to the polar bears, I leaned against the safety support and looked down and watched them. There were just two of them. Their pen was comprised mostly of natural rock, built right into the cliff. They had access to a small strip of sand, and the water that rushed in and out of the space they patrolled came directly from the ocean.
I met Carmen later that evening and walked the length of the harbor with her five or six times. The water was calm, the air still, and the doleful sound of a Spanish guitar came from an unseen radio. We went to a bar we knew nearby and had a drink. It started to rain as I walked her back to her apartment, and she stopped and looked at me.
“Me gustas,” she said. “I like you. You’re very different from the Spanish boys.”
“I guess I always will be.”
“Maybe that’s the reason you left where you’re from in the first place, no?”
I told her she was probably right.
“So you will stay for a little while?”
“Sure, I will,” I said. “It rains too much here but otherwise I like it. The ocean is beautiful.”
We were holding hands now, and I kissed her and said I’d like to see Santander in the summertime when the beach was full of happy splashing families and girls in bikinis. She pinched me and smiled, just like Holly had done six or seven weeks earlier, and told me maybe I wasn’t so different from all the Spanish boys after all.
“I guess you’ll just have to wait and see,” I said.
Baldomero was already in bed when I got home. I’d walked Carmen back to her front step, and now I found the Señora flipping through a magazine at the kitchen table. She didn’t say hello or even look up. I went into my room and shut the door behind me and undressed and got into bed and thought about Carmen and what Santander would look like in a few months’ time. And then I thought about Holly and that excitement vanished, leaving me as blue as I’d ever felt. I listened to the rain begin and calculated in my head how much money I had spent that day. At least this might keep me from thinking about girls.
Still distracted, I got up and sat down at the writing desk that looked out over the rainy boulevard and opened the top drawer where I kept my traveler’s checks pressed between the pages of a Spanish-English dictionary. The book was there, but the checks were not. I walked out to the kitchen and told the Señora that someone had taken money from my room.
“That is not possible,” she said. “No one goes in there.” She flipped a page of her magazine.
I told her I needed my money back.
“I am no thief,” she said. “In the streets there are thieves. Not in this house.”
“All my money was in that desk.”
“You will pay what you owe and then you will leave.”
I went into my room and wondered if it was possible I’d made some mistake. Had I moved the checks without remembering? But there could be no doubt. The money had been stolen. I waited, wondering what to do, then just before dawn I packed my bag in the dark and quietly walked through the apartment. The Señora’s door was shut tight. I pressed an ear against the door and listened, then took the photograph of the boy and his father from the mantel and slipped it into my backpack. I found her wallet in her purse hanging on a hook by the front door. It didn’t contain much, but I took it all.
The rain had stopped falling now, and the air was cold and damp, and the streets were still empty. I walked to Carmen’s apartment and stood on the street watching the windows on the third floor. I didn’t know which window was hers, but they were all dark.
At the train station I found the group of Africans waiting beside the kiosk. I removed the picture and dropped it in the trash bin and showed them the frame.
They passed it among themselves, shaking their heads as if this was the poorest imitation of silver they’d ever seen. “No, hombre, no,” one of them said, shrugging. Finally the guy selling pirated tapes offered me my pick of ten cassettes as a fair trade. I told them I needed pesetas. They conferred again, passing the frame around, and in the end I sold it for one thousand pesetas, barely ten dollars. Though it was wor
th much more, they pretended they were doing me a kindness. I bought a ticket on the first train out of there.
Seven
On a windy October afternoon in 2005 I asked Hilary if she’d like a tour of the new academy. Hilary was the woman I’d interrupted at the coffee shop after speaking with the Sikh business owner earlier that fall. She was sitting under the Picasso print in the Starbucks on Yonge Street, sipping a latte. “You’ve been listening to that racket for weeks,” I said. “What do you say?” The hammering and banging had been going on a lot longer than that, in fact, and things had warmed up between us considerably since our first meeting.
“It sounds like a war zone up there,” she said, drawing a strand of hair behind her ear.
I walked her through the maze of sawhorses and vats of plaster and extension cords. The classrooms were framed in at that point, and the drywall was going up. You now could get a good sense of what the whole place would look like in a few weeks.
“It’s a helluva project,” she said.
I showed her my office and the view looking down over College Street.
“Boss gets the best sight lines, I see,” she said.
“Wouldn’t have it any other way.”
I toured her through the rest of the place, then locked up, and we strolled down to the Elephant & Castle for a drink and a basket of nachos. She was a Guinness drinker, she said—had been ever since a trip to Dublin a few years back.
“Fabulous place. I’m there twice a year, for a while now.”
“I suppose you have an academy there, too?”
I tilted my head and shrugged.
“Well, well. Mr. Big Shot,” she said. “What other plans for conquering the world should I know about?”