Leaving the Atocha Station

by Ben Lerner

  Arturo had said in Rafa’s presence that if I stayed in Spain I could have a room at Rafa’s house for as long as I liked, and Rafa had nodded his assent; the prospect of being a writer in residence in a modern palace frequented by the beautiful was not without its allure, however exhausting it would be for my face. Or, with my Ivy League degree, I could certainly find a job teaching English for corporations or rich kids; most Americans in Madrid made a living thus; they paid you under the table in cash so you didn’t need a visa, and being in Spain illegally for a white American was no problem whatsoever. I didn’t need to worry about health insurance, it might also have occurred to me, especially with the Socialists in power. The people I loved could come and visit. But in certain moments, I was convinced I should go home, no matter the mansion, that this life wasn’t real, wasn’t my own, that nearly a year of being a tourist, which is what I indubitably was, was enough, and that I needed to return to the U.S., be present for my family, and begin an earnest search for a mate, career, etc. Prolonging my stay was postponing the inevitable; I would never live away from my family and language permanently, even if I could work out the logistics, and since I knew that to be the case, I should depart at the conclusion of my fellowship, quit smoking, and renew contact with the reality of my life; that would be best for me and my poetry.

  In other moments, however, the discourse of the real would seem to fall on the side of Spain; this, I would say to myself, referring to the hemic taste of chorizo or the aromatic spliff or both of those things on Teresa’s breath, this is experience, not because things in Iberia were inherently more immediate, but because the landscape and my relation to it had not been entirely standardized. There would of course come a point when I would be familiar enough with the language and terrain that it would lose its unfamiliar aspect, a point at which I would no longer see a stone in Spain and think of it as, in some essential sense, stonier than the sedimentary rocks of Kansas, and what applied to stones applied to bodies, light, weather, whatever. But that moment of familiarization had not yet arrived; why not stay until it was imminent? Maybe if I remained I would pursue the project described so many months ago in my application, composing a long and research-driven poem, whatever that might mean, about the literary response to the Civil War, exploring what such a moment could teach us about “literature now.” My Spanish would rapidly improve; I would not read Ashbery or Garnett or anything else in English, but hurl myself headlong at the Spanish canon; I would become the poet I pretended to be and realize my project. I would buy a phone and consummate my relationship with Teresa.

  I was amazed to find myself protective of my poetry, comparing my options’ conduciveness to writing as though obliged to do so by my genius, a genius I knew I didn’t have; no duende here, I would think to myself, checking my body for sensation, no deep song. But my research had taught me that the tissue of contradictions that was my personality was itself, at best, a poem, where “poem” is understood as referring to a failure of language to be equal to the possibilities it figures; only then could my fraudulence be a project and not merely a pathology; only then could my distance from myself be redescribed as critical, aesthetic, as opposed to a side effect of what experts might call my substance problem, felicitous phrase, the origins of which lay not in my desire to evade reality, but in my desire to have a chemical excuse for reality’s unavailability. But wasn’t my relationship with substance also fake? I never injected anything; if I started pissing blood, I’d go to a doctor, not a bar; I planned to quit everything except social drinking, the appropriate dosage of my pills, and an occasional, whimsical smoke; I was destined to reproduce the bourgeois family, no matter how much I dreaded the prospect or wanted it postponed. Or was that the lie, the claim that my excessive self-medication was simulated; was the lie that I was in fact bound for health and respectability and so should enjoy getting fucked up while I could; had I stepped into the identity I projected, the identity of an addict; had the effort to prolong my adolescent experimentation indefinitely shaded imperceptibly into fearsome if mundane dependence, had mythomania become methomania? I less thought than felt these things on my skin as I wandered the city.

  I was surprised one afternoon when I returned from El Retiro to see mail sticking out of the mailbox I almost never checked; it was a flyer for the panel. My nervousness was compounded by how serious it looked, including photos of the foundation’s guests: Javier Torres, a novelist and book critic for El País, whose headshot made him look like a presidential candidate; Elena López Portillo, professor of literature at UCM, who looked distinguished, gray headed in front of her bookcases; Teresa Solano, translator, poet, visual artist, and curator, who was pictured squinting and smoking and engaged in conversation; and Francesc Balda, a thirty-something Catalan novelist and political journalist, handsome, also smoking, facing the camera, shaved head. Two fellows working in relevant fields would join the panel, the flyer said. I stood there looking at Teresa’s picture for a long time, letting it sink in. I had not mentioned the panel to her because I was afraid she would insist on attending, but that didn’t explain why she hadn’t mentioned it to me; I saw her almost every day. I felt her inclusion was an act of aggression, an attack on me from María José, who wanted to humiliate me in front of Teresa; Teresa wanted to humiliate me in front of the foundation. I was furious and felt betrayed, but I was also disconcerted to discover, to be discovering so late, that Teresa had a reputation that could justify her presence in such company; according to the internet, Balda and Torres were famous, López Portillo was the world’s leading authority on several Spanish poets, and then there was Teresa; why hadn’t I ever Googled her before? She wasn’t famous, but she had a forthcoming book of poems, her translations from Catalan and French had appeared in the major periodicals, and she had won various prizes for emerging writers. Visual artist? I knew she had published translations, but I didn’t know about the forthcoming book; we had never exchanged a word about her poetry, and it somehow never occurred to me to be curious about her standing in the literary circles, whatever they were.

  When I finished reading about Teresa, I set out immediately for her apartment, a thirty- or forty-minute walk from Huertas. When I had returned from Barcelona, I had feared the worst, that Teresa was through with me, and for the first couple of days I could not find her at her apartment or the gallery. Finally she came by my apartment with new drafts of her translations; she betrayed no anger or irritation or newly established distance. Now that it was heating up, she was wearing a tank top and I could see her dark shoulders and the back I’d wept down. I apologized again for getting lost and told her how embarrassing the whole thing was. She said she had been worried and irritated but insisted, largely with her smile, that it was no big deal. When she asked me what poet I met up with, I gave her a name I had found on the internet and was relieved when she said she’d never heard of him. I said it was an awkward, boring conversation, and that I wished I’d returned with her. In fact I had awoken early and taken the first train back to Madrid. From that time on I saw Teresa almost every afternoon and often spent the night at her apartment; while we continued to kiss and fool around, we did not make love. This struck me as strange, but not worrisome; maybe I liked protecting the idea of our making love from clumsy attempts at its actualization. I told myself that we were taking it slow, that our connection to one another was so ardent, it had to be managed with extreme care; maybe Teresa was waiting to hear that I would stay in Spain before giving herself more fully to our relationship. That she made out with or maybe fucked Carlos and various other pretty boys, while filling me with jealous rage, only supported my theory of our exceptionality; if she didn’t find me attractive, she would have long since stopped seeing me; and if she did find me attractive, why would such a physically uninhibited person decline to sleep with me? Only, I reasoned, because she was shielding herself from the intensity of her own emotions. But now the panel somehow cast all this in doubt. As I cut through Chueca and passed nea
r the site of our first meeting, I began to suspect she was merely toying with me, that for whatever reason, maybe because she thought I had seen Isabel in Barcelona, she was going to reveal to the foundation and her distinguished peers that I was, at best, a charlatan.

  By the time I reached her building, I was hot and thirsty and indignant. Some kind of courier, cardboard tube tucked under his arm, was leaving the building when I arrived, so I didn’t ring the bell. The elevator did not require the key and when the doors opened, I did not see her. Then I heard the shower. I drank a glass of water, poured myself a real drink, and sat down on her couch. I was glad she would be shocked to see me, maybe scream; I was shocked to see her on the flyer. Fuck you, I said to the cat, who was blinking its knowing blink.

  She wasn’t shocked. She emerged wrapped in a towel, saw me, approached and kissed me, then walked to her closet to select her clothes.

  “We’re on the panel together,” I said flatly, watching the action of her shoulders as she searched through her wardrobe.

  “Yes,” she said.

  “Why didn’t you tell me?” I asked, attempting to betray no anger.

  “I thought you knew. María José told me you were on the panel and I assumed you were the one who asked her to invite me.” I was reluctant to admit it was reasonable.

  “I’m not going to do it,” I said.

  “Why?” she asked, but didn’t seem particularly to care.

  “Because I have nothing to say. Because I don’t speak good Spanish. Because literature isn’t politics.” My intensity was misplaced.

  She pulled on jeans and a white tank top, which made her skin appear darker. She sat down beside me. “I have known you for six or seven months,” she said, almost sadly. “We only speak Spanish. When are you going to admit that you can live in this language?” she asked.

  I was touched by this, mainly because I thought she was inviting me to live in Spanish with her, to stay beyond the fellowship. My anger dissipated. “I can live in this language with you, but not with María José and the foundation. Besides, I have nothing to say about ‘literature now,’” I said.

  Again there was something like sadness: “Adam, you are a wonderful poet, a serious poet. If I weren’t sure about that, why would I be translating you? When are you going to stop pretending that you’re only pretending to be a poet?” She said only my name in English.

  “You project what you pretend to discover in my poetry,” I said in English.

  She took my cigarette from me and I lit another. “No,” she said simply, whether in English or Spanish I couldn’t tell.

  We sat in silence and I wondered if Teresa was right; was I in fact a conversationally fluent Spanish speaker and a real poet, whatever that meant? It was true that when I spoke to her in Spanish I was not translating, I was not thinking my thoughts in English first, but I was nevertheless outside the language I was speaking, building simple sentences with the blocks I’d memorized, not communicating through a fluid medium. But why didn’t I just suck it up, attend the panel, and share my thoughts in my second language without irony? They wanted the input of a young American poet writing and reading abroad and wasn’t that what I was, not just what I was pretending to be? Maybe only my fraudulence was fraudulent. Regardless, Teresa’s presence would protect me, not humiliate me; that she had selected my work to translate would lend it prestige, underwrite it, so to speak, and she would intervene if I talked myself into a corner at any point. I would be nervous and maybe it would be awkward but it would not be disastrous; María José would be placated, and my relation to Teresa would be publicized, helping to establish us in our own minds as a couple. I could send a copy of the fancy flyer to my mother. I leaned over and kissed her; she smelled like smoke and, because of the soap, lavender.

  “I’m not going back to the United States,” I heard myself say.

  Her eyes widened and I thought her smile diminished. “Really?”

  “I mean I’m not going back in June,” I said. “I will probably go back eventually,” I said. I was waiting for her to be excited.

  “Good,” she said, but my stomach sank at her lack of emotion. Or was it my heart.

  “I’ll write and teach English and travel,” I said to say something.

  “Good,” she repeated, with more, but insufficient, emotion, as the smile returned fully to her face. “You can come with me to Córdoba in June and meet my family,” she said. I was reassured; she was thinking long term. She did not, however, seem to be thinking of the long term with excitement.

  “I would like to,” I said, careful not to sound excited myself. “And I would like to spend more time in Barcelona,” I said, inviting her with my eyebrows to consider whether Isabel or another woman might be awaiting me there. “And to go back to Granada,” I added, to make sure Isabel was evoked. “I never saw the Alhambra.”

  “You went to Granada but didn’t see the Alhambra,” she confirmed, squinting.

  “Yes,” I said. I hoped she thought I was too busy making passionate love to Isabel to see the sights. “Arturo and Rafa said I could stay at Rafa’s,” I said, and stared at her hard, gauging her response.

  “Yes, I know,” she said, implying they had discussed it, but not revealing which side of the discussion she was on.

  “But I’ll probably just keep my apartment,” I said.

  “Yes, stay in the city,” she said. Then, “Stay here, where I am.” Now she sounded excited. She kissed me with unusual intensity and boundless, if blurry, prospects opened up.

  Only an hour or two later, when we were leaving the apartment to get dinner, did the fact that I did not in reality know if I was staying in Madrid begin to bother me, and the fact that it took so long for it to bother me also began to bother me. What would Teresa say if I told her I had changed my mind, that I had decided, after all, to return to the States? As we walked back into Chueca, the plaza bustling now in late spring weather, and stood in line for a table at the restaurant, Bazaar, I decided I didn’t care what she’d think; all of this, all of Spain, would cease to be real if I went back; it would be my year abroad, a year cast out of the line of years, a last or nearly last hurrah of juvenility, but it would not, in any serious sense, form part of my life. I would not stay in touch with Teresa or Arturo, not to mention Isabel; I would compose a one- or two-sentence summary of my time in Spain for those who queried me about my experience abroad, but I would otherwise recall a blur of hash and sun and maybe that kid with blood streaming down his face; everything else would be excised. If this didn’t strike me as a ruthless or stupid way to think, that was because I could not believe Teresa would ultimately mind; we would have the chapbook as a memento and she would begin her next project, thinking of me no more and probably less than she thought of Carlos, Abel, whoever that guy was at Rafa’s party, et al. Eventually we were seated, ate things draped in various oils, drank two or three bottles of dry cava, and discussed Gaudí, Topeka, Lorca, New York, Córdoba, Orson Welles. I believed I contributed intelligent things, speaking and understanding effortlessly. We were drunk by the time we finished dinner and as we wound our way back to her apartment I thought to myself, this is wonderful, the life I lead here, no matter if it’s mine.

  The two days I spent before the panel, however, were not wonderful, were definitely my own; a low-level but constant panic had come upon me; I couldn’t stop grinding my teeth. Maybe I could just be silent, not say a single word, but use my face to modulate my silence and let that be my contribution; surely the more distinguished panelists would hold forth, hold court. I didn’t answer the buzzer and I didn’t leave the apartment. I wrote out a few sentences of wide applicability with the help of my dictionary and attempted to commit them to memory: “No writer is free to renounce his political moment, but literature reflects politics more than it affects it, an important distinction.” I searched the internet for short quotes from Ortega y Gasset, who I had at one time thought was two people, like Deleuze and Guattari, Calvin and Hobbes. I f
igured out how to say: “I’m hesitant to speak about the Spanish condition as if I were an expert; to do so would be to fulfill the stereotypes regarding American presumptuousness.” Each time I mangled a quote, I grew more nervous. I was less concerned about exposing my ignorance of Spanish poetry than I was about exposing my ignorance of Spanish period. I might be able to produce several grammatically perfect sentences on the cuff, or is it off, but I might not; better to mimic spontaneous if oblique pronouncements than to rely on real-time fluency.