by Dennis Bock
We walked for half a block without saying anything. I didn’t know what had gotten into her, but I felt good about that kiss. It had sent a warmth flooding into me, I won’t deny it. Still, some suspicion was mixed in there, too. I was considering asking how things were going with Pablo when she said, “I was never in love with him. You understand that, right?”
This comment took me by surprise. “Actually, there isn’t much about last year that I do understand,” I said. “But no, I didn’t know that. It’s something I’ve been meaning—” I wasn’t able to finish the thought.
She dropped my hand, and before I knew what was happening she was striding across the street toward a taxi double-parked on the opposite side. The driver’s door was thrown open, with a pair of legs sticking out. Two oversize sneakers, as garishly fluorescent as two flaming birthday candles, pulsated in the slashing glow of headlights.
Isabel reached in and grabbed hold of whoever was inside and yanked him out and upright. A junkie, most likely, he had a car radio and a carton of cigarettes pressed against his chest. More than that, he had fear in his eyes. He stood there for half a second, then dropped everything and disappeared up the street.
“Look at these people,” Isabel said when I caught up with her. “Everyone just standing around watching like it’s some sort of circus!”
She was right. A crowd had gathered, and no one was moving a finger.
“Let’s just get out of here,” I said.
I picked up the radio and the screwdriver the kid had used to jimmy the lock, and Isabel reached across and put the cigarettes on the passenger seat. I passed her the radio, and she tried to slip it back into the empty slot in the dashboard. “Come on,” I said. “Let’s get out of here. Don’t worry about it.”
The group of people pausing on their midnight stroll to check out what all the fuss was about split in two when a man suddenly pushed through them, walking fast and wearing an unpleasant scowl on his face. The owner of the taxi, obviously. No one else around here had half as good a reason to look as angry as he did at that moment. Heavyset with all his weight in his shoulders, he crossed the street like a man who knows someone’s ripping him off and is going to do whatever it takes to stop that from happening.
When I raised my hand to slow him down, I saw this was the same cabdriver who’d driven me into the city the night before. Thinking it might help matters that barely twenty-four hours earlier I’d actually been a paying customer, I reached out to shake his hand. I don’t know whether the coincidence failed to impress him, or he simply hadn’t registered it, but he shoved past me and hauled Isabel out of the cab by the scruff of the neck. I put my arm around his head and pulled him off her, then he turned and hit me square in the face. It felt like I’d sprinted headfirst into a brick wall, everything in my sight line seeming to elongate and slant violently to the right when, for no reason I could tell, he slumped forward and dropped to one knee. Isabel, the car radio in her right hand, was standing behind him. She’d cracked him over the head with it. I saw that stub of a finger when he put his hand up against his skull, then sat back against the front wheel of his taxi and slowly closed his eyes.
Thirteen
Three weeks after I stole that silver picture frame up in Santander, I walked into a bicycle shop in Madrid and met Isabel for the first time. I remember the outline of her face before she turned and looked at me, the surprised smile, how she pushed up from leaning against the counter, her arms crossed over her chest.
José’s shop in those days was small and cramped, filled with mopeds and racing bikes and smelling of grease and rubber from the tires and inner tubes hanging on the walls. Isabel was wearing jeans and sneakers and a green Clash Sandinista! T-shirt, one of my favorite records of all time.
“Hola,” she said.
The expression on her face was shy but welcoming enough to make me think she worked there, maybe selling bikes on her way through university. She looked the part, anyway, and held a book whose cover showed an illustration of a human head divided into mathematical sections. “Son muy buenos,” I said, gesturing to her shirt.
That I was a foreigner was apparent to her well before I opened my mouth, I’m sure, but I suppose my terrible accent would have only driven the point home. When I ventured that opinion, she flew off into some further observations I couldn’t make heads or tails of. I think I might have caught some reference to Joe Strummer, but that was it. She looked at me expectantly when she finished speaking, like it was my turn now, which it was, then I said in my pidgin Spanish that I couldn’t agree more and I was looking for a used bicycle, something very cheap. She listened patiently, a sympathetic smile forming in the corners of her mouth, and then called out to someone in the back room.
“But the people doesn’t ride a bicycle in Madrid,” she said, turning back to me, her English just good enough to understand.
“Nobody?”
“Nobody. Is dangerous,” she said with a shy accent.
“But this is a bike shop, isn’t it?” I said.
“Yes. Vespas. Mopeds. Tour de France. That kind.”
She introduced me to José when he came up to the counter. He was tall and thin, my age, with short black hair and a stud in his ear, and almost two decades later he would give me some background on Pablo.
When she explained my dilemma, he raised a finger to let me know I should wait half a minute, disappeared and then returned with something that looked like it hadn’t been ridden in twenty-five years. He bounced it on the concrete floor with a jarring thump.
“Que tal esto?” he said. How’s this one?
I took it out for a test ride. The chain was rusted, and the handlebars and front wheel were crooked, pulling the steering to the left. It was the worst piece of junk I’d ever tried to ride. In ten minutes he straightened everything out and oiled the chain and made a few adjustments. I tried to give him some money, but he said the thing had been cluttering up his back room for years, and he was glad to finally get rid of it. Though I tried to insist, he wouldn’t take my money and suggested as a compromise that I buy him a beer.
He put a sign up on his shop door saying he’d be back in ten minutes, then the three of us went across the street to the Estrecho Bar. It was a nondescript neighborhood watering hole with crumbling plaster walls and a bright, shining bar top.
“So what are you doing in Spain, anyway?” Isabel said.
I attempted a short Spanish version of the story that had brought me here, having gotten used to talking in what essentially amounted to shorthand. I’ve since decided that there’s nothing like crawling among the fundamentals of a second language to focus the mind.
“And for how long?” she said, rescuing me in English.
“I don’t know,” I said.
“Long enough to want a bike, anyway,” José said.
On the other side of the street a man stopped in front of the shop, read the sign and looked at his watch, so José shook my hand and wished me good luck in not getting killed on that bike.
“Looks like it’s just me and you,” I said to this beautiful girl.
“I can practice my English. I need to practice my English.”
“Your English is great.”
“Oh, yeah,” she said.
“No, really. You’re my official translator. You helped me with that bike. Without you I’d be bikeless.”
“Bikeless?”
“Without a bike.”
“Okay. Am I hired?”
“You’re hired,” I said, raising my glass. “But you’ll have to help me with my Spanish, too.”
After Isabel and I said good-bye, I rode through the city and down to the Retiro Park warmed by the thought that I’d actually had a good conversation with a cute Spanish girl and a friendly shop owner in a neighborhood bar, much of it in their language. Afterward, as I cycled, enjoying the sites and the warm evening sun, I was able for a few hours to forget about Holly and all the sadness I felt after leaving her, and then Carmen,
and focus instead on that small, bright flame of hope. She’d laughed at a few of my jokes and stood there—sportingly, I thought—as I tried, in Spanish, to give her a sense of where I was from and my tastes in music and the books I liked to read and exactly what I was looking for when I came to Europe. It didn’t seem to bother her when I admitted that I really had no idea why I was here, other than a book I’d read that took place in the hills north of the city, and that I might stay for a month or a year. I didn’t mention Holly that afternoon, of course, or that I’d left Santander in the dark of night, and didn’t until we finally started dating a couple of months later.
• • •
Those first few days in Madrid I stayed at a pension in the centre of the city near the Puerta del Sol. Every morning I picked up a paper and scoured the classifieds for an apartment. My guidebook described one neighborhood in the north end as bereft of any notable history and therefore an area to avoid. Believing the rents might be more affordable up there, I strolled around it one afternoon. I had some addresses with me and managed to find a few of the buildings they belonged to. At the third or fourth place I buzzed from the street, an American answered the intercom, then invited me up to have a look around.
It was a decent-enough place, two bedrooms, if modest by every standard you could imagine. It didn’t even have a real stove, just a hot plate set on top of the kitchen counter.
I told him a little bit about myself, nothing important, then he said, “Okay, when can you move in?”
“There’s just one hitch,” I said.
“What’s that?” he said.
So I explained that I’d been robbed up north.
“That’s not good,” he said.
“I guess I’m in a bit of a bind.”
He sat down at the living room table and pulled a chunk of hash from his breast pocket and began drying it out with a lighter flame. He crumbled it into his palm, mixed it up with a pinch of tobacco, then rolled and lit the spliff and passed it to me after taking a hit.
“How much do you have?” he said, breathing out a lungful of blue smoke.
The flat was small and dark, and its carpets smelled of mildew and stale cigarette smoke, but I guessed it cost more than I could afford.
“Not much,” I said.
I took a puff on the spliff and listened to the story of how this painter from Ann Arbor had showed up in Madrid three years ago without a peseta in his pocket. He’d been robbed on the night train coming in from Lisbon, he said, on Christmas Eve, no less, and forced to spend Christmas morning at the Chamartin Station hitting up travelers for handouts.
He was happy to have someone to talk to in his own language. I told him a little about myself and about Holly and life back in Montreal. I didn’t know where I would go next, I said, or when, but Madrid seemed to have more than enough to keep me busy.
“Oh yeah,” he said, smiling. “De Madrid al cielo.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Next stop, heaven,” he said.
I didn’t know at the time that this refrain was meant to describe the city’s lasting impression on those who visited. People came from the outermost regions of the country, the argument went, and once they arrived they no longer wanted to go back to where they came from, such were its wonders. You stayed there, and there you died. From the provinces to Madrid, from Madrid to heaven.
I dug into my pocket and pulled out a handful of coins. “This is it, after I pay where I’m staying.” It might have amounted to four hundred pesetas, three or four dollars.
When I placed the change on the table, one of the coins rolled off the edge and dropped to the floor. He picked it up and slipped it in his pocket. “This’ll do for now,” he said.
The next day I found the English-language bookshop highlighted by my guidebook as a hub of the ex-pat community and posted my name and services as an English teacher on the bulletin board.
I remember the beautiful light in the sky over Madrid in those early days. It seemed deeper and bluer, somehow. Everything to my mind seemed richer. The world thrummed with possibility. As the approach of early summer brought those beautiful colors down over the city, on its buildings and over the wild greens in the parks I visited almost every day, the small windows facing the interior courtyard of my new flat shimmered with heat in the late afternoon, exactly when I got home after a day of tutoring. By mid-June I had half a dozen private students, enough to cover rent and basics, but still had plenty of time to wander down a new street if something caught my interest. Back at the apartment, I’d read and prepare for the next day’s classes before going out again to explore the city by night, either alone or with my roommate. Between six and seven, for close to fifteen minutes, direct light entered the flat. I sat at the round black table where my roommate had gotten me stoned, and where I’d since taken to eating my solitary meals, and basked for a short while in this private sunlight. It was around this time I realized that I had lost the sound of Miles’s voice in my ear. I couldn’t remember what he sounded like. And even when I was thinking hard about him, or dreaming about him, he was a vague and partial presence, as impermanent as that sliver of light.
My roommate usually left the apartment early in the morning in order to claim his preferred location at the park where four or five years later I would find myself pushing a stroller and whispering desperate lullabies to my colicky daughter. He spent his mornings chalk-drawing Raphael and El Greco imitations on the sidewalk. In the afternoons he carried his supplies to the Plaza Mayor, where he sold caricatures of Ronald Reagan and John Belushi and Helmut Kohl. He made a pretty good living at this. It was the sort of hand-to-mouth existence that appealed to us then, and for a short time we mastered it.
I started dropping by José’s shop once or twice a week. It wasn’t too far from the flat, and I went back the first time to buy a combination lock and ask for a couple of minor adjustments on the bike. But the real reason for going in was Isabel, of course. I hoped I’d see her again.
If it was later in the evening, near closing time, José and I grabbed a beer at the Estrecho Bar. Sometimes Isabel happened to pass by when walking home from the school where she’d been doing her practice teaching. She was in the last year of a work-study program in early childhood education, with a focus on handicapped kids, at the University of Madrid. By then José had told me everything he could about her, principally, in my mind, that she was single and had been for more than two years. I liked the idea that she was in no hurry and was the sort of girl who didn’t need a boyfriend but was willing to wait till she found someone who truly interested her instead of just filling the empty space beside her.
Her father, Santiago, ran a hair salon three or four blocks from José’s shop. Orphaned during the Civil War, he had no schooling whatsoever but was a savvy businessman and an artist with a pair of scissors, according to José, who’d once brought his copy of My Aim Is True into the salon and asked if he could have a haircut like Elvis Costello’s, a sort of pompadour that was heavy in front and skinned down to the bristle up the back. The old women in the neighborhood lined up for Santiago’s latest stylings and for the flirtations that made their hearts flutter. He’d given his daughter not only his dark eyes but also the easy manner with people, a calm and reassuring nature, that I began to see and admire so much in her.
I’d visited the salon once or twice by then to pick her up for the language lessons we were using as our excuse to get together. At the salon her father had taken my hand and pressed hard and looked into my eyes with a smile and said that he was glad to meet someone like me because he loved his only child more than anything in the world and he could tell I was the type of boy who understood how a father would take any bad behavior against his daughter as bad behavior against himself personally, that he would gladly and without any hesitation run such a boy out of town if anything happened to his daughter and that it was a great comfort to him to know I was of the same mind on this issue and everything between us wa
s clear and up front. I agreed that everything was perfectly clear and up front, and he slapped me on the back and explained to his customers that I was from Canada and teaching his daughter English, and the ladies with their heads half consumed by the beehive hair dryers I’d seen only in episodes of I Love Lucy glanced up from their magazines and smiled politely and welcomed me to Madrid.
When Isabel walked by on the sidewalk while José and I were catching up at the bar across the street from his shop, I’d race out and haul her back in for a drink, and soon after that my friend would come up with an excuse to cut out, and the two of us would stay and talk for hours. Sometimes she’d take me around the neighborhood. The old men sitting in cafés or leaning on their canes against a storefront would greet her by name and warmly cock their heads and offer me a handshake, and for an hour I’d feel the privilege one gains when walking with a pretty girl in a foreign city, like suddenly everything is possible.
José and Isabel introduced me to their friends one night at the height of summer. Ten or twelve people were gathered around a couple tables in a square. The guys shook my hand and slapped my back like we were childhood buddies; the girls kissed me and smiled like they knew something I didn’t.
After we took a seat, Isabel leaned forward and whispered in my ear that I was a big hit with all her friends. I hardly believed this was true at the time, but what I distinctly remember now was the smell of her hair and her skin—summer heat and sweet perfume and the faint taste of tobacco and the hint of her father’s salon. This was the first time I’d gotten close enough to smell these things, and it was rapturous. In a moment, she turned away, but I hung there like a man suspended, wishing she would lean back into me with some new whispers.
We dipped into a dozen bars and taverns that night, never staying longer than one drink in any of them. I’d never seen people move so fast before. Her friends filled me in on the basics of drinking in Madrid. They called themselves “cats,” they said, always on the move. The whole city came alive at nightfall and didn’t stop until dawn. They were all incredibly patient with my Spanish, each taking plenty of time with me and asking simple questions to help me along. At one point Isabel and I found ourselves separated from the crowd in a neighborhood where the view opened north to where that novel was set that I’d read up in rainy Santander. In half the bars in the city there were pictures of Hemingway having a drink; you just couldn’t get away from him. For some reason I’d always felt a little embarrassed to see those photographs. But on that beautiful starry night as we stood side by side, I felt all the preconceived notions of Madrid dissolve, and suddenly the moment was ours.