Jolts
Page 8
‘I don’t have a single doubt,’ I say. ‘Your tea must be amazing.’
CECI N’EST PAS UN MÉMOIRE
‘During the next hour, everything you’ll hear from us is really true and based on solid facts.’
Orson Welles, F for Fake
A quick montage of family farewell, security checks, extortionate duty-free shops, boarding queues, the Overhead Compartment Wars, a safety announcement delivered by zombified attendants, eyes that reach for the nearest emergency exit, seat belts fastening, brain relocating to the stomach while the plane shoots away from the tarmac, pills gulped during a bout of turbulence over Uruguay, nodding off before the continent becomes a memory, and then — thousands of kilometres and several delirious dreams later — a stopover in Milan Malpensa.
Here, in a smoking area that I reach by inertia, I get rid of the cigarettes and the Argentine coins, in an overcooked attempt to reset, to start from scratch, to shed some existential kilos, to offload the detritus of a past self into an ashtray, sitting next to a broken man with yellow fingertips. So first a fast succession of events and then this flow slowing down — time recovering its habitual shape during the past months: a time of waiting. Seven hours now. Then there will be an Aer Lingus flight to Dublin.
After which there will be one more of these places that look like shopping malls, with people pulling suitcases around, pushing trolleys, scrambling for the nearest exit, stinking of armpit sweat, bad breath, booze, the stench of airplane travel. There, stinking as well and still a bit zoned-out, I will wait for Fred, who’s no longer Federico, and who’s been living this side of the Atlantic since 1998. He will be late and I will have time to ponder over the meaning of the linoleum floors, the crushed cigarette butts, the luggage belts puttering in their oblong journeys a few metres past the gates to my left, the signage in English and Irish, the voices announcing things on the PA, and the change in accent in these voices — the first clues as to what these departures and arrivals entail. And Fred and I finally will be hugging each other after several years apart. Everything will be business as usual. Even with his paler complexion, his yellower teeth, his receding hair. And whatever he sees in me as a marker of the time we’ve lost.
But all this I don’t know yet.
Now there’s just the cigarettes and the coins in an ashtray in Milan Malpensa. The broken man and his yellow fingertips. The waiting. The future as the inconceivable mass that follows the waiting.
_________
Smoke will get in my eyes in a parking lot, after Fred offers me one of his Marlboro Lights.
After a short ride on the airport shuttle, and after dropping my stuff in his room somewhere in the north of Dublin, we will stroll down O’Connell’s Street. I won’t pay much attention to anything in particular, trying to take everything in as a whole, barely registering Fred’s glossolalic hum, failing to imprint memories beyond those coordinates provided by the nouns that will be resonating in my head: Ireland, Dublin, Fred, O’Connell’s Street.
Everything will be a blur until we walk into an internet café and into different phone booths. Across the fake wooden wall full of Sharpie gibberish and telephone numbers scribbled next to pictures of hearts and names and ejaculating dicks, I will overhear Fred having a conversation in English. Yes, yes. No, no. Tomorrow, OK, sure, text me first thing in the morning if… yes, sure no problem… sure… of course… thanks… Then Fred will go quiet and I will be left on my own in my booth; I will try to call home. But I will forget to add the international code and will get nothing, followed by an angry tone. I will hang up, lift the receiver once more. I will key in 0054, repeating the numbers in my head to guide my fingers on the keypad, and finally I will hear the usual minimalist melody when a telephone rings in an empty room on the other end of the line. Until a person in the no longer empty room will lift the receiver. And then there will be a conversation with my mother that I won’t retain very well. Yet all conversations with mothers are more or less the same, so we can infer how the exchange will go: the interrogation regarding the quality of the flight; the excited comment about our apparent aural proximity; the curiosity over where I am, what part of the city; the invitation to look after myself. And a variation of the Conversation with a Mother theme: an unnecessarily dramatic and motherly ‘I miss you’ — Argentine telenovela words that I am not yet trained to reciprocate. And then, when the silence starts to feel too uncomfortable, my promise to call again soon.
As we leave I will tell Fred that I couldn’t recall the international code. Fred will say weird isn’t it and I will agree. And here there will be the realisation, the awareness of the change, of the cut. Like when someone dies or someone is born —realising that things are no longer the same, that they can’t be the same.
Minutes later, after another brief walk during which I won’t register anything trying to take in all at once, I will be sitting by the window in Fitzsimmon’s, a hopelessly obvious pub in the hopelessly obvious Temple Bar, drinking Jameson’s and Guinness, already quite dizzy and surrounded by Fred and some other nameless Argentines, watching tourists stroll down the road. By this point the feeling of self-strangeness triggered by the international code incident will a familiar acquaintance. This sensation that I’m always watching myself from somewhere else, or as if I was someone else.
Unable to yet do anything with this I will think OK, this is where I am now. This is where I am now, I will think, trying to find a solid point from which to start living this part of my life. This is where I am now, I will repeat mantra-like, as people in fluorescent windbreakers and trainers walk past, contorted by the weight of massive and unnecessary SLR cameras. And this is where I am now, I will think and repeat uncountable times since then, the this and the now jumping back and forth. Ungraspable thises and nows.
_________
Then there will a smelly pub called the Welcome Inn. The nameless Argentines will have been left behind — most live south of the river, Fred will explain at some point in the night, connoting something I will miss. So there will be just Fred and I in this unremarkable hole, mixing what’s left of my sleeping pills with pints of beer, battered by first-and second-hand smoking, surrounded by bloated fuchsia drunks.
Later there will be zigzagging all the way to Fred’s house. There will be puking in a small waste bin in his room, sleeping with clothes on after collapsing on a thin mattress. And soon the light of day will barely pierce through the blinds but will still wake me up — my first night in Dublin followed by my first morning, the passage from one to the other impossible to discern, a terrible headache acquired in between.
This is Dublin, tomorrow. My tomorrow now but also Fred’s tomorrow, the one he will have uttered in that internet café, in the yesterday of this first morning in Dublin. And his tomorrow will mean a sentence to full-time employment. More precisely a kitchen porter job in a canteen in an office building south of the river, where Fred has been working for a year and a half. It will take a few minutes for him to convey that he isn’t joking, that in the Dublin of the Celtic Tiger a job can be found with just a phone call, and that he has found me one, and that we will need to walk thirty minutes, because apparently no one uses the bus here. No, no time for breakfast, not even for a cup of coffee, no time for a cigarette, just brush your teeth, man, mask that breath a bit, and off we go, you should be happy, working the day after you arrived. And soon we will be out in the drizzle.
There will be walking, Fred several metres ahead of me. There will be houses that all look the same and several novel shades of grey every way I look. The closed shop shutters will be different. The traffic signs will be different. There will be no electricity cables above. Even dereliction will be different. And soon there will be a bridge and a malnourished river — a sad stream of dark green water coming from who knows where, flowing towards the sea, meeting the sea in some place I won’t be able to imagine. And there will be the need to compare size with that other river I have left behind, that I cursed for twenty-fiv
e years but that on this bridge will feel exuberant, majestic, an ocean of a river. And I will declare my disappointment at the way this city looks in the morning, so different from the sheep-blessed idyl in that Thomas Cook guide I picked up in a bookshop back home, that more or less decided the rest of my life. And Fred will say that I won’t be happy anywhere and he might be right. Maybe I have always been unsettled, dissolved, the perfect sequel to people who lived and died looking back home. A mythical place that they would have hated, should planes have been invented fifty years earlier, had they been able to return, to let time and habit kill their homesick ideation. But they didn’t return, so the nostalgia caught like a disease, became part of the family’s DNA. Maybe I’m tracing those journeys in the negative, I will fantasise; maybe I’m going back to the start, to some kind of origin, in search of some kind of reparation. Because it will take some more immigration officers until I shake off the illusion that I belong this side of the ocean.
All this mental dialogue with dangerous existential overtones will be done crossing the Liffey in slow motion, while I get used to a present that entails crossing bridges on foot. While I stop for a second to spit and watch my spit reach the water after dancing briefly in the wind, and then stare at a shopping trolley, the soon-to-be-forgotten supermarket name still visible under the water. There will be a bicycle underwater too, more indiscernible trash that the river has failed to wash all the way down to the sea. And in my head there will be ruminations over the things people throw into rivers in different parts of the world, a moment of toying with Heraclitus. But there is nothing to be gained from these attempts at philosophy because it will be too early in the morning.
And soon this episode of river-watching will be left behind. Even if from this airport in Milan it is still the future and leaving the future behind is beyond the realms of possibility. Now there is just this café where they serve a decent espresso that I pay mentally for in Argentine currency, making it the most expensive coffee I have ever had. Now I am just a recent non-smoker with a flight to catch in four hours. Now I am still oblivious to the fact that tomorrow, soon after crossing the Liffey, after being gifted a pair of gloves, an apron, a silly-looking white hat, and an induction of five minutes — mostly health-and-safety truisms and a couple of basics on how to use the industrial dishwasher — I will spend most of the day working a metallic scrubber on a pot.
_________
Some things — dishes, cutlery, glasses — will go in the dishwasher; the pans and pots must be tackled by hand. Two, three, a hundred times I will wash the same large pot before 10 a.m. and the pot will go two, three, a hundred times back to the chef, who will make it dirty again two, three, a hundred times, to then pass it back to me, and so on, in a culinary re-enactment of Sisyphus’s plight. The dishes, cutlery, glasses, pans, pots, everything, will start pilling up because the dishwasher is too slow and why wash the same pot over and over if he’ll make it dirty again?
A kitchen where you could use some help can be a lonely place and Fred will be at the carvery, getting everything ready for lunch, taking his time arranging the food in elaborate ways, not so much seized by an aesthetic impetus but to work as little as possible. Come on now, will ye clean up those fuckin dishes, we can’t have them eating off fuckin trays, can we. Or something like that, accented, grammatically disconcerting, in a tongue that sounds close to English but that is nowhere near what my teacher Miss Oitaven sold me as English back in the mid 1980s. Nothing like Sam on Radio 3, 2, 1, Sam on Channel 9, or Sam by Satellite, the textbooks of those days, so British, so BBC, received pronunciation, every English speaker either a lady or a gentleman. Go on, will ye clean them things and I’ll clean these other things and be done with it, fuck’s sake, Simon the chef will shout once more, fuckin grabbing the thing from my hand and fuckin pushing me away from the sink while he assaults the thing with a scrub. And like this it will go on for a while, him scrubbing, me washing dishes by hand. Until the dishwasher’s cycle ends and he goes back to the stove with his beloved pot.
Just a couple of days ago I was sitting in a bar, unhatted and unaproned, relaxed and carefree, I will think while I dry glasses with a long piece of blue kitchen roll. And to think that I fancied things would always be the same, wherever I went. True, the whole country was sinking in shit: everyone had left, was leaving, or was thinking of leaving, figuring out how to get their money out of the bank, if the bank still existed. True, everyone was talking about leaving or about those who had left, mostly to hide in Barcelona for a while, wait for the worst to pass, do the Grand Tour around the Old Continent, catch some imported STDs, gather nice memories. I wasn’t averse to talking about leaving too, in the company of some of my friends who were still there, who will remain there forever because that’s who they are and they can’t fathom dying a kilometre away from the place where they were released into the void. But I monologued, blasé. I indeed delivered a departure speech, but as with an actor delivering a well-rehearsed soliloquy there was a whiff of fabulation to my words. In my mind it was more like a game than a leap into the unknown — an extended holiday without a clear itinerary — an adventure — the opening lines of a Bildungsroman with a happy ending.
Maybe deep inside I knew well I was fooling myself. But I didn’t want to think too much about it, so first I’m going to Dublin and I’ll get a good job, anything, I’m not fussy. Maybe as a tour guide, or in a museum, or as an interpreter, somewhere, anything along those lines — Fred can help me. Because they need people in the tourist industry, people who can speak English, yes, but also other languages, and no one asks many questions about your papers as long as you work hard. So just work, save money, and travel a bit around the country. Stay long enough to get my head around things abroad, get confident. Then move to London where you get a six-month tourist visa, use the work experience in Dublin to get an even better job, and when the visa expires join a cheap language college and stay longer, now as a student. And then just bide my time. Maybe even attend the course and get a Cambridge Proficiency certificate. Wait for the Italian papers to arrive; it’s only a matter of time, as the guy in the Italian consulate said. Then perhaps move to Madrid, go back to university, get a philology or a comparative literature degree, something clever-sounding; anything to compensate for the past six years studying classical music in a conservatory full of idiots. One of them, Ángel — older than us, a retired lawyer — was quiet, smoking, observing my performance. Until he couldn’t stay quiet any longer and said you should stay and brave the storm like we did; instead you’re running away to go and wait tables for the English. I laughed. I said that this boy wasn’t going to wait any table, no way. They need intelligent people over there; they need eager, resourceful people like me. And I was going to Ireland, maybe I would go to London too, but the only thing I knew for sure was that I was going to Ireland, that the story would start there and who knows where things would take me. I couldn’t stay in Argentina, couldn’t take it any more, just couldn’t keep looking for work in the paper every Monday morning, when everything available was selling mobile phones, commissions only, and you had to queue for four hours to end up working for peanuts. What kind of future can you build like this? If he had been twenty-five he would have done the same this time — if he was sincere he would agree. Because there was no epic quest in staying to sell mobile phones, and soon no one would give a fuck about mobile phones either. There was no great fight worth fighting for in 2001. No chance of playing Che Guevara like you and your delusional friends back in the ’70s. Maybe my mistake had been not listening to my grandmother when she said I would starve as a musician and I should study something else, management, business administration, accountancy, IT, something short and useful. Maybe my mistake was committing to things one hundred per cent, all or nothing, take no prisoners. The past six years it had been music. And the time had come to leave and I was committing one hundred per cent to that, I said, telling myself that this commitment was bullshit, like all my other com
mitments, but by this time also quite certain that whatever would happen wasn’t up to me to decide any more. But I didn’t say this. I just said that somehow things would make sense, they always do, sooner or later. I would find a way. I’d have a brilliant idea at some point and I’d be saved. It was my fate to be saved. I’m like a cat, right? Somehow I’ll fall on my feet. Ángel didn’t reply; he just smoked, in silence.
Just a couple of days later I will be scrubbing the pan once more, after having finished the dishes and the glasses. I will have lost count of the precise numbers of times this will have happened. And I will pass the pot back to Simon.
_________
And every day will blend into one. And the days will turn into weeks.
Up early in the morning with a terrible headache. Walk under the rain, Fred always a few metres ahead, taciturn, smoking. I will be following, trying to catch up, smoking too, cursing, still physically unprepared for all this bipedal moving across space. The grey houses. The closed shop shutters. The traffic signs. No electricity cables hanging above. Dereliction. And then the bridge, the trolley, the bike. Spitting at the Liffey with the rage of one who spits not at a river but at a country he can’t understand yet, but already resents, because of a stupid sense of superiority, that some things are below me, that some people just shouldn’t sell mobile phones let alone wash dishes for a living, even if they have to; all this paired with a very Argentine propensity for drama and tragedy, a tendency to think that things are the way they are and they can’t ever change, that everything you do is ultimately a prison, in some way, and that I will die in front of the industrial dishwasher fifty years from now, with Simon passing me back the pot or asking me to fuckin pass it back to him will ye. And occasionally the thought of foetuses aborted and disposed of in the river, and the wish they were more, that everyone outside of the kitchen, in this cold bog of a city, threw themselves into the Liffey and drowned with a turd in their mouth, because they don’t understand me — they can’t see my true potential for something I don’t yet know myself what it is but the potential is there; these bastards condemning me to the miserable life of a kitchen porter, instead of receiving me like a genius, just because I was born elsewhere and no one wants to wash dishes in their own country, not if they can do something else. Then calming down, walking a bit more, until we get to the building where we work. And one more cigarette before going in, sitting outside. And then the repetition of a relatively limited number of manoeuvres, executed over and over again, for eight hours, interrupted only for a twenty-minute lunch break, a couple of sneaky fags in the alley in the back, and the generally uneventful round to check the toilets.