by Dennis Bock
In the evening people from this bar spilled out onto the narrow street with their litres of beer and finished the night by breaking the bottles on the road. The sound of shattering glass frightened her that first night alone in her apartment. She thought the bottles were meant for her. She thought that she’d offended someone at the bar. But after she saw broken glass on the road in other neighbourhoods she realized this was nothing but a student ritual to be suffered by the whole town. It wasn’t long before she learned to tread over the broken glass in her doorway like an experienced and indifferent firewalker.
The first day of class, a tall good-looking man in his early twenties sat next to Suzanne. Reeves, from Louisiana, he said. He’d been studying art history at NYU before he decided to come to Spain. He told her he wanted to learn the language because he was planning to do graduate work in Madrid. At first Suzanne wasn’t interested, she said. She didn’t like his accent. She thought he was obvious.
After that first class some people from the group stayed and talked about their reasons for coming. Their foreigners’ voices echoed through the empty marble hallways. There was a man from Southport, England, named Simon. He wasn’t yet out of his teens. “My father made me come here,” he said with a grin on his face. “He practically put me on the plane and told me not to come home till I could count from zero to a hundred backwards in Spic. Bloody jolly, he is. Christ!”
The others who stayed behind—two French women in their early twenties, a German, and a Belgian, all speaking English—said they needed Spanish for their work. The two French girls were secretaries, the other two were studying international law.
“And what brings you all the way from Toronto?” Reeves said.
“That’s easy,” Suzanne said, brightening. “I’m not leaving Spain till I’ve read Don Quixote in the original, front to back.”
That afternoon they all went to a bar called La Rayuela (one of the first words Suzanne learned, which means Hopscotch) and drank beer from one-litre bottles and talked about what they’d done so far in Spain. Reeves had been there the longest. He had lots of advice. “You’ve got to go down into the basement of the market,” he told them. “It’s wild. You can find anything you want down there. They even sell bulls’ balls. At home we call ’em prairie oysters.”
The next day the class met under the clock in the town square. Their professor, a man named Severo Ortega, said they’d be going on a walking tour of the city. He planned to show them its practical side—where to get cheap food, some good bars (when he showed them La Rayuela, Reeves elbowed Suzanne and winked, proud that he already knew the bar), the post office, the telephone centre where you could make long-distance calls for a bit cheaper than the normal phone booths. He also showed them the historical side of the town. “The true Spain,” Suzanne wrote in a letter to a friend. This is when he told them about the names on the walls written in bulls’ blood. Suzanne took a roll of photographs that day, in some of which she appears standing beneath the names of great figures in Spanish history with her arms draped around her classmates, smiling.
We met in Kensington because it would have been too dangerous to meet in our neighbourhood. Tempting fate, Suzanne agreed. But not because she had anything to lose, she said once. She was only thinking of the scene she’d have to endure if Anna found out. They’d met once at one of those fundraisers. She said she’d just as soon avoid her altogether.
That summer I’d usually leave the apartment a bit after Anna took off for summer school. I’d hang around, waiting for her to leave. Then I’d get ready. I’d shower and have a bit to eat. Everything I did after she left for work was geared towards those afternoons with Suzanne. I’d check myself in the mirror, maybe slap some blood back into my face after a late night out. Then lock the door and head down to the market. Sometimes I’d run into someone from the centre walking west on Bloor, a family I’d been working with in those days or someone who’d since moved on. Usually I remembered names and countries, what someone’s particular problem was, professional training, if any. I’d speak with them in my clear unaccented university Spanish. Someone might ask me out for a coffee and I’d always decline, citing a previous engagement, something I couldn’t get out of. I’d say I’d call them—we kept numbers on file—and usually did. On the streetcar I’d look around at the faces and imagine their stories in the same way Anna wondered about the dark silent houses in our neighbourhood. Where the tracks merged beneath the wheels the streetcar would shift and clatter and I’d wonder if this was what my mother remembered from her trip east up to the Baltic Sea after the war.
We’d met at the fundraiser for a Nicaragua relief package we were sending down later that month. Suzanne was there with a friend, a woman from Bolivia—the friend whose apartment we used in those days—named Ingrid. I asked Suzanne if she wanted to go for a drink later that week. But sitting across from Anna the next morning I decided this wasn’t the direction I wanted to take my life. I’d go to where we planned to meet but leave quickly if things got out of control. We’d have a drink, exchange stories. I wanted to hear more about Spain, where she’d told me she’d lived for two years.
After a few beers we’d go upstairs to Ingrid’s apartment. I never asked where Ingrid was or how we’d come to commandeer her place for our afternoon meetings. I really wasn’t interested where Ingrid was or our claim over her apartment. As long as she didn’t suddenly come running through the door. But the possibility of problems arising out of the connection with Ingrid had crossed my mind more than once, being as closely related to the Latin community as I was. Ingrid would have friends, I thought. Things might get back to me at the office, where everyone knew Anna.
The apartment was always messy, dishes in the sink, beer bottles on the kitchen table. Dirty laundry strewn over the couch. On the wall there was a poster of Che Guevara with a circle and a line drawn through his face in red spray paint. I thought Ingrid’s family must have been part of the wave of Banzer supporters that came from Bolivia in the early eighties after the fall of the right-wing government there. Ingrid’s cat used to jump on us in the middle of things, suddenly moved to call attention to his empty dish or his overflowing litter box. His name was Gato, in order to keep things simple, she said.
There was usually beer in Ingrid’s fridge. We’d leave a twenty-dollar bill on the kitchen table with a little note if we remembered. Something like, Thanks for the cold ones. See you next week. But I could never be sure there would be a next week. The idea would flash across my mind as I held the pen. I’d tell myself that I’d bring flowers next time, something more than I was.
“I guess it was around November we started seeing each other,” Suzanne said, slipping out of her bra. The cat jumped up onto the chair in the corner and spun a lazy circle, pawing, and sat down.
After Spanish class they’d go off together under the darkening autumn sky to the old cafés they used to frequent. Newspaper cones on the street corners filled with roasted chestnuts, warming their hands over the burning coals. Later, around midnight, they’d make the rounds to the dance clubs. They slept in at Suzanne’s until one, just before the market closed. Then back to her apartment after picking up groceries. They’d fix a big lunch and afterwards smoke cigarettes until it was time for class.
They tried to work themselves into the fabric there, Suzanne said. When they went out with the Spanish students they’d met, they tried not to speak English together, even at the beginning when they could barely order their own drinks.
To everyone who knew them it was obvious that Reeves and Suzanne had something from the start. It wasn’t as clearly written on Suzanne’s face as it was on Reeves’s. He positively mooned. “He’s almost pathetic,” she wrote home to a friend. “He’s almost pathetic but he’s so good looking I think I can live with it.” She sent along a photograph of her and Reeves standing together, still apparently only friends, beside the cathedral with the famous names behind them
.
Reeves bought flowers and made Suzanne special dinners. He pampered her. It wasn’t long before he started talking about bringing Suzanne back to the States. He talked about vacations up north, by which she supposed he meant Canada. She didn’t think it was up to her to burst his bubble. But there was more to their relationship than romantic dinners and dreams of northern vacations. It was firm and rooted in the flesh. They were sleeping together by now (and very often at that, Suzanne added). Once Reeves brought her to the point of orgasm by touching her under the table in a crowded restaurant. This is what Suzanne liked about him, his boldness when it came to sex. During the rare nights they didn’t sleep together, she made herself shiver by thinking about him. She would wake up in the middle of the night and imagine him lying on top of her and hear the exhausted breathing that always followed their orgasms, marvelling at how the smell of his skin would change just as he was about to come, and feel his curly hair brush against the side of her face.
“But he didn’t have the distance I did,” she said. I was on my back listening, staring up at the ceiling.
It was a cold night in February, she recalled. Reeves was carrying a wine bottle, already opened but recorked. They’d picked it up at his place on their way back to Suzanne’s apartment. They stopped off to get the bottle. Suzanne said not to bother, she already had wine back at her place. But Reeves said he had something special for her. He needed to show her something.
But it wasn’t wine in the bottle. It was the blood that Reeves used to write on the cathedral wall. Where in God’s name did he get so much blood from? Suzanne asked herself. This is the kind of thing Reeves did. Extreme gestures.
Come on, he said. Watch this. I want to do something for you. She remembered the bone-piercing cold as he stood on the narrow ledge ten feet above her, bracing against the wind that came whistling through the open square. When he finished he climbed down and stood in front of her, breathing heavily like a man who has just committed a murder, wiping the blood on his hands into his blue jeans.
“So what did he write?” I said. I rolled over onto an elbow and faced her. That was the end of her story. “I mean, what did he think was so important that he had to share it with the whole town? Painting it like that.”
I think we both heard it in my voice. I knew she knew I was jealous. I tried to stop myself but I couldn’t. I knew it was the last thing in the world I should have said.
“I didn’t know what he was going to do until the last minute. Until he took out the paintbrush,” she said, stifling a laugh. I saw the freshness of the image come back to her, the playfulness. “But you don’t have to tell me it was a stupid thing to do,” she said.
“I didn’t say it was a stupid thing to do.”
She rolled out from her side of the bed and started getting her clothes together. I waited for a minute, watching her, wondering what to do. Then I said, “Sounds like Romeo’s got a career ahead designing greeting cards.”
Her tone changed after that. It was the I-couldn’t-care-less tone. She wasn’t even going to be bothered.
“Fine,” she said. She shrugged and smiled. “You want to know what he wrote?” She was standing naked in the middle of the room now. Her bra and underpants hanging from her right hand. “He poured that blood onto his paintbrush and drew me a heart with an arrow through it. It’s probably still there. Blood red.”
The stars were out that night by the time I got my things together and left the apartment. I walked up Augusta, past leaning boxes of rotten fruit and vegetables stacked three high against telephone poles and lamp-posts. Small bats fluttered and dipped hungrily, snatching fruit flies and mosquitoes as they emerged from the warm garbage. People drinking in the dark up on second-floor verandas hushed their conversation when I passed below.
As I walked that night I thought about the morning I’d spent with Anna. It was the only time of day I’d feel hopeful, when I’d wake up glad that I wasn’t alone. Glad to be with someone I could share the day’s experience with. But by the time I’d come home from work I’d think people wanted too much from me. That’s what had led me to Suzanne, I thought, a pure selfishness that I’d hoped would remind me of a time less complicated than this. I remembered the week’s vacation we’d shared in Mexico four years before, the year after we met in Chicago. How it seemed impossible that I was the same person who’d led Anna around Veracruz because she was lost without me, because I was learning the language and she wasn’t. I’d taken care of her, getting things bought, food, tickets, clothes, joking with the old ladies at the market and in the shops where Anna wanted to find tourist collectibles. It didn’t bother me then that Anna depended on me. I hadn’t thought of it in that way.
Then I wondered where Suzanne was. If she’d left Ingrid’s by now. If she was coming up through that cloud of fruit flies behind me. Maybe she’d have something to say. Maybe she’d say she’d lost her temper, that’s all. Back to where we left off. I thought I’d go by her place tonight, later, after my walk through the neighbourhood with Anna. Her light would be on, glowing in the dark, inviting me upstairs.
But suddenly I felt the urge to go to the centre. I wanted to sit at a desk and be taught a lesson on the mysteries of life in a new country. I turned west on College and quickened my pace. I needed to turn the tables for once. I wanted to be the one to listen, to have things spelled out for me, for someone to give me the answers. The perils and the pitfalls.
It’s something you get used to, I used to tell people every day. The Nicaraguans, the Salvadorans, the Chileans. The war babies. People running from dictators, ruined economies, death squads.
Relax. Feel the place out. We’ll help you find work. Discover the secrets of the city and when there are no surprises left, you know you’ve made it your home.
I let myself into the centre with the key I always carried in case I forgot something at the office and had to return late at night after the janitors had locked up and gone home. It was quiet and dark, only the red emergency light over the doors was on. The route of escape. Like that it was a different world from the one I was used to. The day’s usual commotion, the sound of crying babies and ringing telephones, the smell of coffee and perspiration. Now there was only the thin sound of people walking by down below in the street.
I walked by the reception desk and past my office. Through my open door I saw the single white rose the old lady from Guatemala City had given me the day before. She was alone in Canada, knew nobody in Toronto, spoke no English. I’d set her up with a family that took in people who had no one else to fall back on. I walked across the floor to the other end of the room, where a chalkboard hung bolted to the wall. Every night it was wiped clean by one of the building’s janitors. I took a piece of white chalk from the ledge and held it a moment. I pressed the chalk to the board and began to draw. I drew the heart I’d imagined on the side of the Spanish cathedral. I ran an arrow through it, sharp-pointed. Then I stepped backwards towards the door, under the red light of the emergency exit, and I waited like that, rolling the chalk dust over the pads of my fingers, waiting for the heart to beat in the dark. For the first drop of blood to bead to the surface of the wound.
VII
A week after she was eliminated, Lottie and a friend rode the bus to Kiel to watch the young man she’d met the first day of the diving competition race in the eight-metre class. The lake was choppy that day. The wind lifted swaths of water like strips of dark cloth and brushed them against the sky. The weather was in their favour, the man beside them said. Our boys are used to this, he said. It was their lake, after all. From the shore Lottie watched the young men working their yacht, bringing it to the ready. From this distance she could not find the man she’d met among his crew mates. Their seven figures moving swiftly along a narrow strip of deck, thin as mizzen masts, calling out to one another. They were small and frantic looking. There were six yachts racing. She watched as they approached
the starting buoys. Wind filling the sails. The sails filled the sky with flags and colours from countries she’d never known. She heard voices carry over the water and the jump of the crowd around her when the boom of the starter’s cannon sent the yachts out farther into the lake, moving through clouds of rising white spray. She wondered about these countries as the boats pulled away, Great Britain, Sweden, their men working the oak and canvas and wind in a way they believed would deliver them fastest to the finish. She said the names of the countries over and over to herself until the last of the sails disappeared behind the rising black wall of water.
Madrid Waterworks
I don’t believe my parents were looking for miracles in the summer of 1992, when they got remarried out on the Atazar reservoir, floating above the abandoned town where Nuria and I scuba-dived for trinkets. They just wanted a simple ceremony, they said. No frills. But a miracle happened just the same that afternoon when San Judas Tadeo, Patron Saint of the Impossible, came glistening up out of the water mid-ceremony, his red-sandstone hair dripping and shining in the afternoon sun, to bear witness to a story that even he would have thought remarkable.