Despite being drunk, I immediately realized the story only contained a few absurd coincidences with that of Moy. He looked at me with his eyes wide, and still teary, but I don’t know if he was listening to me.
“The stubborn couple planned everything in secret. They pretended they were going to obey the sensible wishes of their parents and travel with their butler to Paris, where they had a hotel booked for two months. Once there, in Paris, they bribed the butler to send a postcard everyday to each of their families, and then they went straight on to Southampton, where a luxury ocean liner everyone was talking about was going to set sail for New York. On the tenth of April, 1912, they boarded the Titanic, delighted to have managed to outwit the moldy prejudices of their social class. Four days later, the ship sank and they died. The butler, in a state of panic over his disloyalty in betraying his real employers, continued sending postcards to the families throughout the two months the couple was supposed to be staying in Paris. He didn’t want to lose his job. Or didn’t want to feel the shame of his deceit. Perhaps he came to believe there could’ve been a miracle and the young lovers would come back from the dead. In the postcards, he wrote about luxurious balls, monuments, parties beside the Seine, and trips to Versailles. The couple’s parents continued imagining their children were happy for those two months.”
I stopped speaking and got up to get two more beers. When I returned to the table, Moy was still motionless, staring straight ahead at the body of air occupying the place where I had been.
“What happened then?” he asked when I had sat down again.
I took a sip of beer and shrugged my shoulders. I wasn’t sure what it was that Moy wanted to know.
“The butler went to live in New York,” I improvised. “And perhaps from there he kept sending the odd postcard.”
That day, when he told me his story, Brandon Moy had already begun his moral collapse. He had been living in Madrid for about six months, and for weeks the only thing that was binding him to Alicia was the erotic savagery he continued feeling when he saw her naked. He couldn’t bear her inconsistency, like that of a spoilt child, or her unpredictable outbursts of rage. He was planning to leave her, rent an apartment, and live alone, but his finances wouldn’t allow it, and at his age (he had just turned forty-eight), he didn’t feel up to looking for a new job. He had started drinking too much and living a completely chaotic life. It was during this time when the versions he gave of his past, paradoxical and sometimes incoherent, changed from one day to the next. One night he claimed that when leaving New York he had been happy and had found the intensity and passion he had been pursuing, and the following night, either more drunk or more sober, he would start to cry wretchedly and admit that in all those years, he had never stopped thinking about Adriana and missing the streets of Manhattan.
On one of those days of nostalgia, it occurred to Moy to step up to the brink of the abyss—he turned on Alicia’s computer to go into Adriana’s email account and read her messages. Moy remembered perfectly the email address his wife had used for years for her personal correspondence. There was a chance she might have closed the account after he left New York, but if not, Moy could log onto it and spy on her, find out if she had a lover or even if she had remarried, whether she was still in touch with the same friends, if Brent had grown up unscathed. His hands trembling with fear, he typed in the email address and a random password. The system responded that the password was incorrect and asked him if he had forgotten it. Moy clicked Yes, and the ever-agile system offered him three options for recovering the forgotten password: receive a link in another of Adriana’s email accounts (the one she used for work) to restore it; receive a verification code on the cell phone associated with the account, which also belonged to Adriana; or reply to a security question. Moy clicked on the last option, the only one that could pry open the gate, and waited for a few more seconds before clicking again. When he did so, the system showed the security question he had to answer, the question that Adriana had entered at some point to guarantee her secrets were safe—“What part of my body is blue?”
Brandon Moy began to weep profusely for a long while. Then, breathless, his sight still completely blurred with tears, he typed in the response. In New York it was early morning, so Adriana would be asleep. Moy went through all the steps and finally got into the email account. He felt a kind of swelling at the top of his throat, choking him—the horror of discovering something dreadful, on the one hand, and the vicious act of violating that which should be secret. There were more than three hundred messages that had been sent or received by Adriana in the last eight months. Moy spent several hours opening them one by one. In all of them, he found the insignificance he was hoping for, the banality of unimportant affairs—a dental appointment, a dinner invitation from Marion and Frank, a notice for a college counseling meeting for Brent, a reminder of household chores, notes on recipes exchanged with friends, insubstantial, light-hearted, vague messages.
He turned off the computer with an almost religious sense of sin, of guilt without redemption, although not because of having infringed Adriana’s privacy, rather for having taken his own life to the limits of devastation and wreckage. Perhaps, that day, he began to think that the land he had left behind was not altogether parched, that it might still contain some fertile soil. He recalled once again the men who had thrown themselves from the towers of the World Trade Center, fleeing from the flames, and asked himself whether they had been capable, during the seconds it took to fall, of thinking that something could save them before they smashed into the ground. Whether they had been capable of believing that their lives could begin again.
Although we saw each other fairly regularly, Moy and I did not have a fixed routine or see each other on a weekly basis, so when some time passed without hearing from him, I wasn’t surprised. When I called him at home and Alicia, to whom I preferred not to speak, answered, I would hang up without saying anything. One day, I unexpectedly received a postcard he had sent me from Italy. It bore a picture of the Pantheon in Rome. It didn’t include a return address or any precise information about his journey, and it didn’t offer any justification for his departure. He had only scrawled one phrase, in thick letters, in English. “It’s always the same city, but sometimes the roads are more beautiful.” It was signed Brandon Moy, which was a forewarning (that I was not able to grasp) of what was to come.
In Italy he was living with Laureen, first in Rome in the diplomat’s house, and then in Orvieto, Florence, Bologna, Milan, and Venice, where she, having secured her elderly husband’s acquiescence to her maintaining a discreetly licentious life, accompanied him. As in Boston, she was his Pygmalion. She showed him cathedrals and paintings, she unveiled the secrets of Buonarroti to him and taught him about the turbulent history of the Medici and Visconti families. She made him sample Italian wines and took him to see the famous landscapes of the Tuscan countryside. It was a long holiday during which Moy, as though it were his swan song, a recapitulation of everything, finally found himself. He sent me other postcards, which I still have, but in none of them after that first one from Rome were there any signs of his intentions. In Pisa, he told me of the beauty of the Arno river; in Florence, of Dante’s Inferno and the ugliness of Petrarca; in Venice, of Igor Stravinski, buried in the San Michele cemetery; and in Turin, of the Italian women, whom, because of Laureen, he had not been able to get to know in any depth.
One day, when I was leaving the office, he was waiting for me outside. We hadn’t seen each other for about four or five months, and he hadn’t informed me of his arrival. He was wearing a new, black wool coat that caught my attention because it gave him such an elegant look. I had never seen such refinement from him. Also, his face seemed to have changed; he was neatly shaved and had a haircut that highlighted his features and made him look younger. His expression was serene, confident. He was smiling, and as soon as he saw me step outside, he came to embrace me.
That day, Brandon Moy had come to a decision and he wanted to tell me about it. He had returned to Madrid three days earlier and was staying in a modest hotel with the money Laureen had lent him.
“I could have married Laureen,” he told me, laughing as we walked toward one of the bars where we usually got together. “The ambassador doesn’t have many years left in him, and she needs to keep doing crazy things with someone.”
He asked me to call my house to check that no one was expecting me for dinner and started to explain, between touristic descriptions of Italy and anecdotes about the journey, what his plan was. He had arrived in Spain more than a year ago, and almost three years had passed since he’d had his accident in Hermosillo. During all that time that he’d been fettered firstly by the shadows of death and then by the charms of Alicia’s or Laureen’s love, Moy had slowly realized that nothing that had happened in Boston, Bogotá, Mexico, or Madrid had made him happy. All those dreams he had fulfilled as though they had been part of a ceremony—the peyote deliria, the promiscuity, the hot air balloon trips, the diving feats—had never ended up satiating him, because in reality he had neither felt any particular fascination for them nor taken any pleasure in them; on the contrary, he had experienced displeasure. He’d pursued them because he’d always believed that through these things, he would get to know the essence of the world. Since childhood he had heard it said that the real core of life was to be found in danger, in excess, in a pushing of limits, or indulgence. In a constant state of flux. Those who sedately went to the office everyday, were faithful to their spouses, watched television at night, and always went to the same places each year on vacation were obscure, nonexistent beings. Specters that leave no prints on anything they touch. That was the law, the commandment—one had to seek out recklessness, since order and calm lead only to death.
Brandon Moy did not call that law into question, but he was beginning to realize that it had not been decreed for him. He remembered dispassionately all the times he had gone astray during the last few years, and he understood that he was one of those obscure beings who are only soothed by insubstantiality, one of those men with a leaden, gray spirit. He missed his wife, and some days, when making love to Alicia or Laureen, he had to think about her to become sexually aroused. Perhaps he would never be happy in Manhattan, living in a sunny house, doing an exhausting, thankless job, and disappointedly watching his son grow up, but now he was certain he would be unhappy anywhere else.
“Royuela told me Cavafy’s story, which he himself had written at some point,” he said as he drank. “He was born in Alexandria, and on his father’s death, when he was still a child, he moved with his family to England, where he was raised and learned English, which was the first language in which he tried to write poetry. Then he lived in Constantinople and spent periods of time in London, France, and Athens. But he wanted to return to Alexandria and live there working at a dull job in a government office reporting to the Department of Public Works.”
“The city,” I said.
“The city,” he nodded, and then, after clearing his throat, he began to recite. “ ‘You will walk the same streets, grow old in the same neighborhoods, will turn gray in these same houses.’ ”
I remained quiet for a few seconds. Moy was about to cry.
“Are you going to go back?”
He didn’t say anything. He drained the glass of the wine he was drinking, and with very slow movements, as though he wanted to give himself one last chance to change his mind, he searched in one of his pants pockets and took out a coin, which he placed on the table, directly in front of me. It was fifty cents.
“Once, a few days after leaving, I was about to call Adriana to tell her I was alive and I was going to go back to New York. I didn’t do it, because something happened, but I kept the coin not knowing why. Now I know.”
He had already told me that story—the desperation he had felt in Boston, the need to steal to afford a night’s sleep in a warm bed, the fear, the woman who’d crossed his path, the bills that were in the purse he’d snatched from her, the satisfaction of that danger.
“It’s fifty U. S. cents,” I said to him unthinkingly, as though creating an allegory. “You can’t call from a phone in Spain with that coin.”
Moy smiled and shrugged his shoulders, indifferent to symbolism.
“Swap me for a euro, will you. I’ll get the beers.”
“I’ll miss you,” I said, not really sure that it was true.
He looked at me gratefully and stretched out his hand on the table to squeeze mine, but he couldn’t reach between the glasses, and the action turned into a clumsy, hurried gesture.
“‘This city will always pursue you,’” he said.
That day, after getting drunk with me and confessing the sorrow that had wracked him since he left New York, Moy went to his hotel, staggering with drunkenness and remorse, and sat down to write a lengthy account of his wayward years, as he himself referred to them, in order to be sure that what he was going to do was, this time, without any doubt, the right thing. In this account, he told the absolute truth—that he was not called Albert Tracy, that he was a real estate lawyer who had a wife and child, that he had always lived in New York and had fled from there on the day when the al-Qaeda planes smashed into the World Trade Center. He mentioned Albert Fergus and the dreams they had shared when they were young. His literary ambitions, the countries he intended to visit some day, the women he had charmed with his vivid imaginings and boasting. He explained, quite unashamedly, as if it were an act of atonement, that he had never truly loved (although he had been convinced that he had) Angelita, Alicia, and all those women who had made his heart swell with fantasies, and that all the affairs he’d had over the last few years since he’d left New York had only caused him angst and fear. Lastly, he admitted that he wanted to go home and see his friends again. Spend weekends on Long Island, go swimming on 51st Street, and have meetings with construction companies at the top of skyscrapers, where the empty rooftops of his city could be seen. “This is my nature, and I cannot change it,” he wrote as dawn began to break. “When serpents shed their skin, there appears below another, which is just the same, with the same patterns and the same cold, clammy cuticle. It could not live, even if it wished to, in the skin of a deer or the feathers of an eagle.”
Then he took off his clothes and, twisting his neck, looked at his back in the closet mirror. He tried to touch it with the tips of his fingers. He thought he should remove the eagle wings from the serpent in his tattoo.
Moy devoted the following days to packing up his things. He prepared his luggage in a disciplined manner, bought a plane ticket to New York, and said goodbye to me and all his Spanish friends. He traveled to Chicago on Thursday, January 8, and went through customs with the fake Albert Tracy passport. From there, he called Adriana with the fifty-cent coin and told her a convoluted, unoriginal story that she, thrilled by his resurrection, nonetheless believed without hesitation. He told her that on the day of the attacks, he had lost consciousness and completely forgotten who he was, that he had walked aimlessly for weeks and traveled through strange towns and unfamiliar cities until he ended up in Chicago, where he’d been living ever since. Now, at last, with the help of a psychiatrist and the healing that always comes with time, he remembered everything. Many years had passed since that September day, and perhaps she, Adriana, had met another man and had fallen in love again, but if by any chance that was not so and she still had something of the love she had for him in the past, Moy could go to New York that very night and remain by her side forever. It took Adriana a while to answer, since her sobbing prevented her from being able to speak. When she calmed down, she assured him blatheringly that she had never stopped thinking about him and would never be able to love another man. They talked for over two hours. Then Moy caught the first flight for New York and was reunited with her.
I only saw Brandon Moy again o
ne more time, when I was in Manhattan in June 2010, but we’ve spoken on the phone several times and regularly send each other emails and even postcards, so I’m abreast of what’s happening in his life. They let him return to the company he worked at prior to the attacks, and a few months later, he was promoted. He went on vacation with Adriana to Italy and pretended to discover with her the beauty of the Sistine Chapel and the majesty of the Basilica of Saint Mary of the Flower. He took his son, who was now a teenager, camping in the Catskill Mountains. He was never able to have dinner at the Continental, which closed its doors shortly after he’d left, but he often goes out with Adriana to fashionable bars and is well acquainted with Manhattan high society, the art exhibitions, the clubs, and the literary festivals. His life is very similar to his old one, but now he views it with a different kind of discernment. “I’m not happy, but at least now I know that I can’t ever be,” he wrote in a letter he sent me at Christmas 2011. “There is no uncertainty, and that, in my opinion, is a form of happiness.”
The poet Albert Tracy, who had stirred up so much excitement among a number of critics in the United States, disappeared without a trace. He didn’t publish anymore books, attend any conferences or poetry gatherings, but it seems nobody missed him, perhaps because readers and literary scholars are used to transience and fickleness. At that time, I was the only person, along with the Australian girl in Boston and Alicia, who knew the truth about his disappearance, and I wrote an article, in a legendary tone, in which I reviewed his limited biography and his foolhardy, secret life, comparing him with some of the great poets who had achieved glory through seclusion and mystery.
The Same City Page 8
