by Glen Duncan
She slept on her left side and he slid in behind her as if thirty-two years hadn’t passed. They drifted in and out of consciousness, in Augustus’s case because he was afraid he’d wake up to find it had been a dream. It made him probe the ether for his mother’s ghost for the first time in years, evoked her voice saying: Well, I hope you’re happy now, kiddo. Yes, Mom, I’m happy. Suddenly he realized how lucky he’d been in Juliet, what a force of nature she’d been. Cardillo had said to him once: Women like your mother, Gus, there’s a tiny—I mean tiny handful in every generation. You got one you don’t need heaven. Heaven can go to hell. You got one, I know. Selina’s an elegant firework. Augustus had felt his heart open to the restaurateur when he said that, could’ve hugged him. Lying in bed with Selina now he wished he’d been kinder to the man who had been, albeit briefly, the closest thing to a father he’d ever had.
“I suppose we should go out,” Selina said.
They’d ordered breakfast in the room. Augustus in boxers and bathrobe stood at the open windows drinking a cup of coffee and looking out. Another hot day of milky blue sky and the streets’ baked odors. He was torn between fear and angelic well-being. Now he had all this joy and patience and appetite and gentleness he wanted to use it.
“Well,” he said, “that does offer the prospect of sunlight on your arms and legs.”
“Not what they used to be, the preservative powers of barrenness notwithstanding. I think if we are going out I should paint my nails.”
But for a long time they lay together on the bed. “I read an article about Calley recently,” Selina said. “You remember him, the My Lai guy?”
“Yeah. He got life, right? Must be out by now.”
“He was out after three and a half years, and most of that was house arrest with booze and his girlfriend. Being the only soldier convicted must have seemed shit luck at the time but it bought him a huge amount of sympathy. Nixon started angling to get him out practically as soon as the sentence was read. Anyway he married into a wealthy jeweler’s family in Georgia and by all accounts had a pretty pleasant life. He looks like Colonel Sanders now. It made me think of you. Porphyria’s Lover and God not saying a word.”
“Whereas the things that remind me of you are: tulips, affectionate horses, French toast, silver birch, the smell of snow…”
“Are we really to be given this?” she said. “So late in the day?”
“Yes. God’s got a romantic streak it turns out.”
“If this is his doing I might consider giving the old bastard another chance. How do you feel about ordering up a couple of Long Island Iced Teas, by the way?”
“Fine, but I think you might be an alcoholic.”
“I thought everyone was. Aren’t you?”
“Well if you put it like that.”
The maid knocked and Selina said, “Por favor vuelve más tarde,” and there in her voice in the foreign language were the thirty-two years, every one of them his enemy. It made him want to fuck her but they were both too sore. At last, sometime after noon, they got up, dressed and went out.
They were too tired to go sightseeing.
“What we do is, I do a little light shopping and you suggest places we can interrupt that for a consumable treat.”
“You try things on and I come in and mess about with you in the changing room.”
“Okay, but remember, I want nail polish and a bag. One of those great leather satchels I keep seeing everywhere.”
They were moving into a phase of realism. When he’d first turned and seen her standing there he’d entered a dream state. You found yourself living through what you believed impossible, perhaps the way hypnotized people observed themselves behaving out of character. That phase had required very little of them, as if they were being gently choreographed by invisible forces—otherwise how was it they’d moved from the Ramblas bar to his hotel with such quiescence? Then immediately after the intimacy he’d dropped into a state of self-protecting pessimism: invisible forces loved cruel pranks; they were waiting for him to start believing a life with her was possible—that they were really to be given this after all these years—to maximize the pleasure of whisking it away from him at the last minute. Gotcha! She’d felt it too, he could tell, the suspicion that they’d met like this only because some power had decided they hadn’t suffered enough the first time around. They’d have been less skeptical had one or both of them been encumbered with a spouse or children; at least then there’d be pains and losses before the reward. As it was the absence of obstacles presented a deal too good to be true. But yesterday had passed, a day and a night. He’d fallen asleep with her in his arms (his happiness on the edge of anger because he’d been forced to live thirty-two years without it) and woken up with her beside him, golden warm living Selina whose spirit for him renewed and revivified the world, and now here they were in a second day and God had not yet said a word.
So to this latest phase, terrifying in a different way. Now when they looked at each other it was with a tense mutual concession that pessimism was starting to give way to hope. He put his hand on the nape of her neck under her hot hair and she gently touched his hip and these gestures were tentative claims on the future. However unlikely, the facts remained: they were free and still in love.
“How come you never tried to contact me?” he asked her. They were having espressos and whiskey at a café in the Barrio Gótico, again with outside tables. She’d bought nail polish the color of dried blood and was applying a coat to her fingernails. He loved the older version of her skin, the way the veins showed on the backs of her hands. In the hotel he’d crossed her wrists above her head and kissed her underarms and felt the skin there looser than it used to be. The perceptible aging turned him on, gave a rousing strangeness to her familiar mouth, cunt, nipples, anus. He imagined her other lovers, hunted and absorbed with every inch of himself her body’s troubled enrichment—but also its prosaic history of coughs and sneezes, all the times she’d brushed her teeth or eaten ice cream or menstruated or taken a shit, even the abortion and the vague darkness of the manageable hell. He wanted it all. Her flesh testified, wearily but with resolve and hunger and every time he thought of this he wanted to go inside her or go deeper, break her spine with fucking because the thirty-two years of all this were a source of desire and rage.
“I was scared,” she said. “I would’ve been an affliction to anyone. I was an affliction. Selfish enough to fuck up other people’s lives but not yours. I thought you’d be with someone anyway. Plus you tell yourself the world’s just not like that. You don’t just pick up the phone after ten years.”
He thought about this for a moment. After the surreality of their rapid divorce, he’d never tried to contact her either. And yet not a single day in thirty-two years had passed without his thinking of her, even if only for a moment.
“You know how it is for me, don’t you?” he said. In lieu of saying: You know I’m still in love with you, don’t you? He could see from her face she understood. Using the word “love” was a risk neither of them wanted to take. But she kept her blue eyes steadily on his and said:
“It’s the same for me.”
“Really?”
“You felt it.”
“You look like your mother.”
“I know. If you want to see what I’ll look like at seventy-eight I can arrange it.”
“Would I still have sex with your mother?”
“Probably. But probably not if she wasn’t my mother. Your mother’ll be turning in her grave by now.”
“I discussed it with her when you were asleep. She said she hoped I was happy now.”
“I can imagine. The way you say that to a kid who’s finally broken the toy.”
They had to keep veering away from it. After the café they wandered without a map, zigzagged loosely around Las Ramblas, found themselves outside the Picasso museum, didn’t go in. The as yet unpurchased leather satchel was becoming mythic. Augustus had been here for a week in the roving numbness that h
ad been his state for twenty years and the city had said nothing to him. If he’d noticed anything it was the presence of global brands, the McDonald’s, the Starbucks, the Subways, the same relentless high-resolution inanity of television and advertising, the universal logos—Coca-Cola, Nike, Nokia, Microsoft, Motorola—that no matter where you were had found a purchase, a place from which to add their portion to the world hymn of corporate homogeneity. But now with Selina suddenly he was in Spain. History glimmered, Moors, Visigoths, Columbus, Torquemada, Isabella, Pizarro, Goya’s witches, Franco’s fascists, bulls’ blood in the dust and all the primped matadors with their womanish behinds still at it in the twenty-first century with pics and swords. This was her doing; she was what she’d always been: his license to belong, to take an interest, to make a claim for a share in the world.
“I’m struggling to not say things,” he said to her. They were in a little empty church just off the Carrer de Pi. She’d said: Come on it’ll be nice and cold in here. Just for a few minutes. In the vestibule they’d dipped their fingers in the font and crossed themselves with an unexpected sadness for the child selves they’d betrayed.
“I know,” she said. “But it seems absurd to say them.”
“Answer me one thing.”
“What?”
Augustus couldn’t remember the last time he’d been in a church—then could, of course: his mother’s funeral. Juliet had specified a full Catholic Mass.
“Do you want more of this?”
She looked at him. This. Us.
“Yes,” she said.
“A lot more?”
“Yes.”
He could see the sixth station of the Via Crucis over her shoulder, a sub-Giotto relief with blue sky and gold leaf halos. Verónica enjuaga la cara sagrada, Veronica wipes the sacred face. He tried to remember what the seventh station was. Couldn’t.
“Do you want more?” she said.
“What do you think?”
“A lot more?”
“Yes.”
“Okay. That’s good.”
“Now show me your knockers.”
Which was for the past, one of the things they used to do. She gave one quick glance to check the place was still empty then just in the way she’d always done with a look of bored impunity lifted her shirt. He bent and kissed her breasts through the lace of her bra, felt her breathing and was suddenly so full of tenderness for her there was no gesture he could make that would sufficiently honor it. This was the sweet panic. He straightened and she lowered her shirt, stared at him with the dead-eyed queenly self-containment that was part of the role.
“You’ll be returning the favor later,” she said. “In the restaurant. And I won’t want any argument. Waiter or no waiter the wang comes out.”
He sat in a pew at the back while she walked a slow circuit of the church. Thirty-two hours had passed since they met. Cosmologists had time doing all sorts of things you couldn’t believe when you heard it, but here was proof. Twenty years collapsed in on its own emptiness, became a finger snap. Thirty-two hours held times within time, private ages you consumed without the clock’s knowledge. What had they had? A day and a night and a day. Nothing.
It was just after eight when they left the church. The lamp-lit streets were warm and busy. (Until now Augustus had been Americanly baffled at how bad so many European cities smelled. In Barcelona as in Rome as in Marseille as in Athens there was a ubiquitous double act of blocked drains and ammoniacal cleaner that could hit you like a karate chop to the gullet. The sidewalks frequently stank of urine and dog shit. Now—how not?—the reek was honest and human, a celebration of messy life.) They walked up to the pedestrianized Avenida Portal de l’Angel, halfheartedly perusing restaurant menus along the way.
“Let’s go and see something dumb,” Selina said. They’d stopped outside a theater showing American movies.
“That’s not going to be hard. Look at the selection.”
“Oh wait. El Corte Inglés. I should go here.” Opposite the movie theater was a large department store.
“For the Satchel.”
“For the Satchel. I can feel it. You choose a movie and get tickets. I’ll meet you back here in ten minutes. Fifteen minutes. Pick the dumbest one.”
Yes. You let her go briefly for the pleasure of her coming toward you out of the crowd. Revenge on all those times you thought it was her but it wasn’t.
“Hey.”
She turned. “What?”
There was nothing he could say that wouldn’t have the sound of tempting fate. She saw it.
“Don’t go anywhere,” she said.
He watched her and she turned back several times to see him watching her. A few yards from the store, turning back from giving him another look, she walked straight into a litter bin, stumbled and almost fell over. It looked like a finely tuned bit of slapstick, but it was an accident. Immediately she turned again, laughing, waving him back. He was laughing too. It’s okay, she mouthed. I’m fine. I’m fine. There was an old guy selling flowers there next to her and he was laughing, one arm extended to her as if steadying her aura. Augustus watched her exchange a few words with him. The bin had left a smudge on her skirt. She brushed at it a couple of times, gave up, waved to him, grinning, then turned and went into the store.
“I have to execute you.”
Augustus, still holding the Styrofoam cup, feels how far he’s traveled from the wanting-to-die of the interrogations. That wasn’t a wish to die but a wish to stop suffering. It was just that he couldn’t imagine anything other than death with the power to grant it. Since they took his eye he’s worked hard (or so he’d thought) at not caring, letting the fragments of self swirl but not cohere. Now, when Harper steps into the latrine’s wedge of light with a gun in his right hand the fragments rush back together and there’s nothing he can do but yield to the fear that he really is going to die right now and the hope that somehow he isn’t.
Your hands are free. The brain can’t help it. The brain’s compelled to throw in whatever might be useful. He has no strength, no weapons, nowhere to go. Harper moves out of the light then stops again. “I’m finding it difficult,” he says.
If you’re not in extreme pain you don’t want to die. You’re a disfigured prisoner who could be shot any time but you want life right up until the end. Light still comes and goes in the frosted glass. There’s still a cigarette, cold coffee, disgorged memories. There’s still speculation and the margin of anesthetic bliss just before sleep. The blanket still feels good around you. There remains your poor body asking if it’s still a deal between you.
“Children who don’t have rules and boundaries become hyperactive and irritable,” Harper says. “This is the current thinking. They want dos and don’ts, discipline, parameters. Without restraints their own potential’s like vertigo.”
For a surreal moment (although all these moments are surreal) Augustus thinks Harper’s about to start talking about his own childhood, with what would be laughable belatedness begin looking for explanations in his distant past. But no. It’s an analogy.
“I find myself irritable,” Harper says. “It’s the freedom. Like wealth or sex or cocaine. This is a basic wisdom I’m only just acquiring: too much of what you want leads to irritation, an impatience with yourself. I’m often late in my insights.”
Augustus is alert with every cell. All aspects of himself have pooled resources to make sure he doesn’t say or do anything that will nudge Harper from holding the trigger to pulling it. He’s rushing up an incline that will end in a sheer drop into the great empty answer, that there’s nothing beyond this life. The last moments’ urgent message is that they are the last moments, precious bright beautiful granules of time, but the last. You want time to sift them, to raise them up to the light, to enjoy them, but they’re all the time you have. In El Corte Inglés Selina was one of the people nearest the blast. Despite what had been done to her body her face was wholly recognizable. At the morgue Meredith had insisted on seeing
her daughter’s remains, though Augustus had offered to go in alone. There was Selina’s face, one large cut in an almost perfect diagonal from left to right but otherwise absolutely her. The little silver scar under her bottom lip testified, as if this was what it had come into her life for. He remembered the footage he’d imagined, her running, laughing with the glass jar of nickels and pennies across a green lawn in warm sunshine, the trip, the smash, the hot pain and shocking taste of her own blood. She’d told him it was the first time the world shifted for her, showed her it could open under her feet or block out the sun. She’d said, I was such a little monster, I was outraged that the world would suddenly turn on me like that. On me, its darling, its point. Augustus had stood next to Meredith and felt rather than seen the old woman taking in the wrongness of the shape under the white sheet, the declivities and gaps, a landscape of terrible absences. He’d thought of horror movie corpses, shark attack victims, afterward told himself it would have been better to see everything, to leave his imagination nothing to work with. Outside the building in Barcelona’s crisp morning sunlight Meredith had said: Your generation’s weighed down with all this idiotic chatter about what to do about these maniacs. This slew of tolerance, it’s like the sewers have ruptured and no one’s noticed they’re swimming in shit. Don’t you know wretched stupid ignorant evil when you see it? My daughter was a force of beauty in the world and now…She’d been unable to finish, fractured against the word “beauty.” Augustus had said nothing, watched her turn and get into the waiting car. After she’d gone he’d stood on the steps smoking a cigarette, remembering Juliet telling him that in heaven people who’d lost limbs would have them back again, the blind would be able to see, the crippled to walk, the deaf to hear. The wrongness of Selina’s shape under the death sheet was giant, an error he couldn’t imagine the universe—the mere continued existence of things—failing to put right. There must be a heaven because there couldn’t be only the hell of such subtraction. It wasn’t that he couldn’t bear never seeing her again, it was that he couldn’t bear her never being herself again.
