Blitz

by David Trueba

  I surfed the Web in search of plane tickets at bargain prices. The cheapest flight departed in two days, Munich–Madrid. The repeated letter M reminded me of Marta. I went through all the preliminaries to buy a ticket on the cheap flight, but the payment page rejected my credit card three times. It was a biblical moment in my banking history, and very humiliating. My funds had dwindled to such a point. I looked at my brand-new cell phone, my last luxury for a long time. I looked for cheap hotels in Munich, but I got bored with the reviews of guests eager to share their experiences. I noted down a few addresses, and through the telepathy of online advertising, every webpage I opened had ads offering me flights between Munich and Madrid. I felt spied on and thought I’d best log off. I saw that my phone had gathered enough strength to last at least until after lunch. The call center was unlovely — lots of cheap wood — and its smell was starting to get to me.

  But I couldn’t resist looking up the Uruguayan singer on the Internet. The latest news, a recent interview. His webpage offered samples from his new record. His face was on the cover, and the title of the album devastated me: Spring Returns. In the depths of my winter, I couldn’t help feeling I’d been expelled from spring, and spring was Marta. What was a return for him was a loss for me. Each song got thirty seconds of play time, during which I couldn’t stop jumping around. Love lost and regained, past mistakes, soulful lamentations, romantic celebrations. There was a ballad titled “You Never Went Away.” I was able to hear only the first verse, but I found the whole song on YouTube, because it was the promotional video for the album. I listened to the thing in its entirety four times, convinced that it had to be dedicated to Marta. There were too many significant coincidences. This was an absurd idea, because the song had surely been written months previously, before their relationship had started up again. But sorrow generates irrational paranoia. Although I had the earbuds plugged into my ears, I realized that I was speaking and shouting over the song. A bastard, that’s what you are, a son of a bitch, a third-rate, cheating fraud. The guy in charge of the call center tapped on my cubicle door and asked me to lower my voice. I was no doubt bothering a mother who was talking to her far-off daughter, or a young man reassuring a relative he hadn’t seen in years. Was my minor problem serious enough to justify such an uproar?

  I decided to get out of there. In the street, I started to cry, and the tears froze on my face. All of a sudden I felt that I had no one. No love, no family, no friends, nothing that really existed in me anymore. Nothing and no one, because no matter how much you’re surrounded by people, no one can get inside you. A piercing wind came from the river and blew on my tear ducts. The hand I was carrying my suitcase with froze solid, and I was overcome by a stubborn, transcendental pity. Like a nail, thrust painfully into the inmost part of me. For the first time, I thought about dying. Not a bad solution. The end of all problems. And I’d save myself the return flight, not to mention the night without a hotel. Dying, once and for all, offered only advantages. Any objections?

  But I didn’t jump off a bridge into the river, nor did I throw myself under the wheels of a streetcar; instead I let the force of inertia tow me down the avenue. My movements were limited by the suitcase, which though not heavy was certainly cumbersome, and I didn’t want to set it down and pull it because its little wheels made an outrageous noise on the pavement. A noise that would attract pained looks to the sorry spectacle I presented. I switched the suitcase to my other hand and kept moving. I sat down and caught my breath for a while in a park situated between blocks of buildings at the intersection of Dienerstraße and Schrammerstraße. I stared at the street signs so long I learned to spell the names. The aluminum chairs were bound to one another by a steel cable, probably so that no Spaniard would steal them. I took a picture of the suitcase on the grass. Then I took another shot, a view of the building façades as seen from the park. Saving the photos was like making a map in which I wouldn’t feel so lost.

  I like gardens, and I like calling them gardens and not green spaces, and I like them because they’re an invention of man in alliance with nature. A pact between the territory and its settler, an armistice in the war of domination each conducts against the other. Gardens offer a clear view into man’s other dimension. The passion for the useless, for the aesthetic. My thesis director used to maintain that God was the first landscaper in history, and that gardens are our way of trying to recover the lost memory of the Garden of Eden. With every flowerpot, we’re aspiring to get back our lost utopia, the dream ruined by so original a punishment.

  Once I dragged Marta to the botanical garden in Madrid and showed her the bench where I often used to sit and draw. I enjoyed sketching flowers and other plants in their natural state. But in spite of having been born in Madrid, Marta had never seen the garden. It was the place where I wanted to kiss her for the first time, and so I did. Later, in spite of the entrance fee the city council charged, we sometimes went back there and walked around, and I’d make her laugh with my theory about people, namely that we’re nothing but plants that have invented the fantasy of travel in order to believe ourselves free, whereas in reality we’re anchored to the earth by a stalk and some invisible roots. Sad flowers bend down and bow their heads, just as I was doing that morning.

  The night before, I had barely been able to explain my work to Helga. She told me she’d been with the landscaping conference for several years, and she volunteered for the film and opera festivals too. You know talented people, Helga said, justifying herself. I like to be around them. In her preretirement working life, she explained, she’d been only an administrative assistant in a food import company, and the rare moments of excitement in her husband’s line of work hadn’t done much for her either. Her frustration had been renewed with her children, who had humdrum jobs with international firms. I’ve always liked useless jobs, said I. Jobs that offer society something it doesn’t even see. Would this attitude make a mime out of me yet? When the financial crisis blew up in Spain, I explained, town and city councils and other governmental authorities cut every one of our proposals out of their budgets, in a perfect demonstration of our uselessness, of our lack of essentialness. The existing gardens had to be maintained, an unnecessary expenditure the councils couldn’t avoid, but they reduced the number of caretakers and cut back on the available resources. The lack of basic necessities was something different. And although from time to time a tree fell or a broken branch crashed down on a man walking in El Retiro park, killing him instantly before the eyes of his small daughters, these events provoked little but rhetorical indignation, which had no echo and nothing to do with landscaping.

  I still had my conference credentials in a pocket of my overcoat, and I remembered that there was an area in the convention center where the conference provided free drinks and snack items to its visitors. The center wasn’t very far away, and I arrived there resolved to haul my suitcase over its carpets. There were many projects, and now I’d have time to study them. A conference hostess offered to store my suitcase, and as I watched her carry it through a door I felt light and liberated. While nibbling on nuts and fried potatoes and holding a beer in one hand, I sent a message to one of my sisters to let her know that I was staying in Munich a few days longer. It’s possible I undervalued my family’s capacity for taking me in, for saving me, for serving me as a refuge. But I preferred to postpone the moment when I would open up to my sisters concerning the news about Marta and they would look at me like disapproving tutrixes. Just as everything you have without having won it seems dispensable to you, so too family love, which opens for you like a parachute, never enters into even your most desperate self-rescue plans, though it has the strength of a steel girder and can stop your collapse.

  It was the last day of the conference, and posters announced the closing lecture, which was to take place in the main auditorium. When we planned the trip, my only regret was that our limited sojourn in Munich would be too brief for me to attend this talk, which was to be given by th
e great Japanese landscaper Tetsuo Nashimira. I looked at 3-D models and paged through catalogs, waiting for the time when the talk was scheduled to begin. It didn’t take me much effort to understand that I’d been born in the wrong country, a place where landscapers are ignored because the best elements of our discipline have composed themselves; the beauty of our landscape is a gift no one’s had to fight for. Often in my conversations with others — Marta, Carlos, friends, collaborators — we’d spoken inconsiderately of Spain. We have to leave, we have to go away, someone said, how are we going to survive here, in the bricklayers’ paradise? And yet it turned out that the climate, the customs, a certain level of anarchy, the mutual contempt between the governing and the governed, had caused addiction. No, no, we wouldn’t move from there, and the stalk anchoring us to the ground probably wouldn’t allow us to anyway. We were additions to the long list of those who were Spaniards in spite of Spain. Perhaps at some point we’d be won over definitively by familiarity, by force of habit, by the sun’s punctuality, by the commotion in the streets.

  I asked a couple of hostesses for a set of headphones so I could follow the proceedings in English and left my identity card with them in exchange. The conference attendees were arriving in a slow but steady stream that accelerated in the final minutes. Fearful as I was of being expelled for bad behavior — recognized as the violent and rancorous landscaper of the previous evening — I chose a discreet area to sit in. Alex Ripollés entered, surrounded by two or three foreign colleagues, and sat in one of the front rows with his credentials stupidly hanging around his neck. I lowered my head and was delighted when he failed to see me. In a fair fight, he would have beaten me to a pulp. I’d taken advantage of the element of surprise, but now I even thought I could discern traces of gym activity under his shirt. I suspected that Helga was in the auditorium too when I felt the hot breath of guilt on the back of my neck. I didn’t want to look around for fear of meeting her, but during the tedious presentations I had a feeling she’d spotted me but was maintaining a defensive distance.

  Nashimira’s talk focused on a detailed exposition of his latest project, an interior garden inside a center for elderly people with Alzheimer’s disease in Osaka. How to make a garden for those who have forgotten all gardens and seem to be insensible to emotions? he wondered aloud. Do we find gardens moving because they bring back memories, feelings, former sensations? He spoke of Alzheimer’s disease as a mysterious illness that takes what you’ve invested in your life without taking your life itself. It reduces us, he said, to the empty vessel of ourselves. The garden he’d designed was a marvel where the four seasons converged. Its glass roof opened it to the sky, and it was a colorful place, filled with flowers and other plants; a little stream crossed by a diminutive bridge humidified the air.

  As I looked at the images projected onto the screen, I felt a great urge to go back to work, to do some sketches. This elderly designer was still inventing delights and modestly presenting them. I’d discovered his work during my university days, and in the end he and some other masters had inclined me to the choice of my specialty. I’d listened to some of his recorded lectures, but to hear him now, in person, was to experience something more expressive and more precise. Beauty comes down to appreciation, he concluded. The passage of time is the perfect expression of transience, and it’s precisely this fleeting quality that endows each vital stage with significance. The meaning of life is to live according to the meaning of life. I sighed with relief; the man was no disappointment.

  After the end of his talk, he generously responded to three or four questions from the audience. Someone asked him what were, in his opinion, the most beautiful gardens in the world, and he hesitated for a long moment. Then he said, the Great Barrier Reef, and added, with an enormous smile, I’d like very much to congratulate the landscape architect who designed it. The conference director initiated the general applause, and then asked for silence so he could read the list of the prizewinners in the various competitions. For a second, I succumbed to the ambition to win. After my behavior at the roundtable, it was more likely that my name had been proscribed.

  Not only didn’t I win or receive an honorable mention, but also the grand prize in the Future Prospects (Zukun​ftsper​spek​tiven) category was awarded to Alex Ripollés and his Chernobyl Park in Barcelona. I applauded with the rest and listened to his words of gratitude, expressed in perfect English. He ended with a pronouncement that struck me as bombastic: memory is our only resistance against the past. I noticed I was being watched. Maybe some people were fearful that the gardening hooligan I’d turned into would go into action again. After the prizes had all been awarded and the ceremony concluded, the winners gathered on the stage and had their pictures taken with Nashimira. Alex Ripollés put his arm around Nashimira’s shoulders, and they both smiled at the camera. I felt jealous. I turned in Helga’s direction and considered whether to approach her and say hello. She was surrounded by several women her age, all of whom looked elderly next to her. Well, your friend won in the end, she said. Yes, Alex Gilipollez, I answered. Thanks for breakfast, I added, but what I really wanted to thank her for was her tactfulness in making sure we didn’t wake up together. Mornings are always hard, she said. I smiled and nodded. What did you think about our speaker? she asked. I’d never heard of him, but they tell me he’s a genius. He is, I answered, he’s one of my idols. Actually, I’m pretty much dedicated to copying everything he does.

  Have you settled your plane ticket? When I said no, she insisted on accompanying me to the conference’s administrative offices, which were in a private area toward the back of the building. She knocked on the half-open door of an office and spoke to a young woman in German. The girl listened, shifted her eyes toward me, and gave me a compassionate smile. Then she appeared to consent to something and again looked at me, the passive protagonist of their conversation. Helga asked me to give her my full name. I felt a little ridiculous reciting my two surnames, as if I were responding to a teacher.

  Looks like you’re going to get a break, I’ll explain afterward. She waved good-bye. I went back to the main area, which was swarming with conference guests. There were people exchanging business cards, embraces, some handshakes. Young people with little water bottles and their credentials hanging around their necks, displayed like Olympic medals. If Alex Ripollés saw me, he did a very good job of pretending not to and ignoring me. I stopped for a second beside Professor Nashimira, who was examining some of the models in the central exhibit. I’m a great admirer of yours, I told him in English. You are a master. He responded with an almost reverential bow and then said, no master, I’m old. I’m just old. And he shook off all my admiration. Then some of his companions drew him away from me.

  I looked at the model’s title and specifications, and it was his interior garden project. While walking over to him, I’d seen him resituate a bit of grass carpet and adjust a few other details of the presentation. It was called “Garden of Solitude.” Garten der Einsamkeit. And when I tried to pronounce the name, the German words Helga had taught me the night before came back to me, came back and excited me a little. There you are, Helga whispered to me one instant later, appearing out of nowhere. She was holding a piece of adhesive notepaper, of a frightful color between lilac and orange. My flight information and flight locator number were written on the paper. Your flight is at ten o’clock tomorrow morning, she said. And, almost as a joke, she stuck the paper to the back of my hand. I looked at the writing impassively. Is your suitcase still at the hotel? No, I said, and I told her where I’d left it, near the building entrance. Then I glanced at the locator code, M4RTA, and after a moment I folded the sticky note in half and slid it into my rear pants pocket. We walked toward the entrance hurriedly, and maybe, like me, she felt embarrassed at our being together and afraid someone, including ourselves, would be able to look at us and tell what had gone on the previous night. She too had a right to be embarrassed, for reasons different from mine, but essentially i
dentical. She was wearing a skirt that came down to below her knees, a long sweater that covered most of her behind, her hair pulled back, and low-heeled shoes that helped her propel herself forward at a torrid pace. I stopped so that she wouldn’t feel obligated to accompany me any farther and showed her the place where I’d left my suitcase. I wanted to leave and not to think about what was waiting for me outside, the cold, first of all, and then another day to waste in the city, waiting for my flight tomorrow morning, which would land in Madrid, where I had neither house nor home, no roof, no shelter, where I would be as vulnerable as a man without a country.

  The information booth was deserted, no doubt because the girls were attending the final celebration. I waited. The hideous background music accomplished its objective of covering up the silence suspended between Helga and me. It filled the painful vacuum for a moment. Are you listening to this music? I asked her. It’s horrible, right? She agreed. It’s like what we were talking about yesterday, the smiles, the perfect faces, the molded bodies. Helga didn’t say anything, but she understood my reference to a certain conversation we’d had the previous night about all the special offers one received, kindly propositions conveyed with pleasant expressions, pleasant looks, pleasant families, pleasant settings, a free massage that stopped us from observing and recognizing ourselves amid so much perfection. Laminated, decorated places where everything glides along smoothly and the going is never rough and the air is vibrant with romantic, melodic music, as when an airliner’s about to land. Vacuums loaded with artificial proposals under skies eternally blue. Buried solitudes that present no danger of reflecting you as a mirror reflects what you are, what you lack, what goes away, what never arrives. Terrifying silences that someone takes it upon himself to fill for us, like a person who whistles to drive away thought. Reality reduced to the affordable, like a panther reduced to a domestic cat.