by Rob Spillman
“Excuse me,” the man said in English. “I do believe you are drinking my beer.”
I looked at the half-empty glass, then at the man. With his taut muscles and weathered face, I had a gut feeling that he was the kind of guy who knew how to cause maximum damage with one punch. At the thought, I imagined my ribs cracking. I’d never been in a fight, so hadn’t experienced what it was like to be hit, and as much as I sought out extreme sensations, I had no desire to get punched by anyone, much less this big Basque dude who was in his bar during his holy festival. Still, I was pretty damn sure I was drinking my own beer.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I believe this is my beer.” I felt Elissa’s protective, or warning, hand on my forearm. “However,” I quickly added, “just in case I am mistaken, let me buy you a beer.” I called the bartender over and ordered two more. The Basque solemnly clinked glasses with me, his expression unchanged, then drank down his entire beer. I followed suit, and as I was draining the last few drops, the man grabbed the brass bar rail with both of his huge hands and swung himself over the bar, then refilled our glasses as the old bartender looked on with a bemused smile. The man jumped back over and clinked glasses with me once more. No wonder Hemingway liked the Basques so much. Beers finished, he gave me a very serious look and said, “May I have the honor of dancing with your wife?”
Elissa’s nails dug into my forearm and I couldn’t help but think of the scene in Animal House—“Do you mind if we dance with your dates?” I saw no graceful escape. “That would be an honor,” I said, wondering what choice we had as Elissa’s nails went deeper. But I was ripped free, dragged onto the dance floor by his wife, a perfectly postured black-haired woman with eyes so dark I wondered if it was possible to have black irises. I spun and whirled to the fast, brassy music, clueless as to what I was supposed to be doing, but trying to follow the blue, spinning skirt of my elegant partner. “Spin, spin, spin, just give in,” I thought. Elissa was dancing a few yards away, shooting me a look of “How did you get us into this?”
I couldn’t gauge how long the song would last and hoped that I could maintain and wouldn’t vomit, but then the song built to a crescendo and crashed to a halt. I focused on my partner, who bowed. I looked for Elissa and spotted her a few yards away. She glanced at me and then back at the Basque, then signaled to the center of the dance floor like she wanted to keep going, the man smiling awkwardly. I looked to his wife, who frowned and led us over to them, where she clamped onto her husband’s arm.
Off the dance floor the man said, “I am Carlos. This is my wife, Margarita.”
I introduced us with as much grace as I could muster and Carlos said, “It has been an honor to meet you.”
“I am honored to meet you, and to be here at your festival,” I said, the music starting up. Carlos bowed again and Margarita spun him away.
“Don’t sell me out like that,” Elissa hissed.
“Wait. I thought you liked—”
“I would have liked to have choice.”
“But we didn’t have one,” I said.
“Bullshit. I went from thinking he might deck you and I would rip his eyes out, to all of sudden you’re giving me away and he’s whirling me around the dance floor.”
I stared at my wife, wondering how I had miscalculated the situation.
“You could’ve asked me,” Elissa said, taking my hand.
“Right. Sorry,” I said, squeezing her hand, willing us to be at our best as a couple, to go with the flow. But I was blindsided by self-consciousness. I had been part of the crowd, had given myself over to the collective celebration, and then, in an instant, I felt like a coward and a fraud, exposed as the play-actor I was. The heat, the sangria, the beer, the lack of sleep—none of that explained why I was feeling flat, two-dimensional in a three-dimensional world. I had seen our whole adventure in Portugal and Pamplona as if everyone we encountered were on a large stage set, performing for us. But I was the fake. I was putting on a show. Carlos and Margarita were real people, and the festival meant something to them. Their city, their friends, their family, their faith, their heritage, their present existence were all meaningful to them.
Was there any meaning to me being in Pamplona? Other than being with Elissa? Approximating Hemingway? And what was taking me so long to get to Berlin, my home?
19
“I decided as a kid I wanted to be a baseball player. Then I wanted to paint pictures and from there I decided I wanted to sing.”
—Jonathan Richman
Soundtrack: Jonathan Richman and the Modern Lovers, “Modern World,” 1976
THE REST OF JULY until the very end of August was my first extended experience of freedom. My father freed me from camp and Chautauqua became my own gated playground. The festival provided us with a cabin, the former servants’ quarters to a grander house next door, where the head of the opera program, Mr. Treach, lived with his wife. I loved the little three-room cabin, only a half block from the lake, with a cedar smell and an ancient claw-foot bathtub that was so long and deep I could almost do laps in it. Once a week, Australian bats—big, brown, and fuzzy—flew into our cabin, and we had to guide them out the open doors and windows with tennis rackets and brooms. The lake had once had a mosquito problem, and legend had it that around the turn of the century someone had the brilliant idea of importing a mosquito predator—the Australian bat. Now the lake was overrun with nonindigenous bats.
After breakfast at the music festival canteen, my father went to rehearsals and I’d head back to our place to see if the cats had caught anything. Most mornings a half of a mole or mouse or sometimes a bat would be waiting for me on the threshold, Lucy’s work, no doubt, Linus being too lazy to chase anything down. I would then grab my bike and spin by the rock beach and the dock by the clock tower, where I sometimes fished with slimy worms, catching small sunfish, sometimes bass, and once a fierce-looking pike. Under the docks there were crayfish to collect, and along the creek leading into the lake there were salamanders and tadpoles. I rode past the docks and clock tower, past the hundred-foot-long scale replica of the Holy Land, with each hill town and topological feature marked—Jericho, Jerusalem, the Red Sea. I cruised round and round the grounds, grabbed a quick lunch at the sub shop, and pedaled up to the great Norton Hall, where, as at Eastman, I tried to find all of its secret spaces.
One day toward the end of the summer, I dropped in on the barnlike shop house adjacent to the opera house, where carpenters were painting a scrim to look like the skyline of early nineteenth-century Rome. The schedule for the set builders was crazy—full sets for nine operas in nine weeks. But Vince, the lead builder, with his golden hoop earrings and red, watery eyes, appeared unflappable and never minded having me around, putting me to work doing nondetailed painting and carting away wood scraps. Vince and his crew were a lot more down-to-earth than most of the singers. They didn’t baby-talk me, and with each other they talked about nonopera things like cars and sports and Saigon. I liked that the carpenters were making actual things; there was a finished product to their labor. With singers, after dozens of hours of rehearsals, then a two- or three-hour performance, it was over. The sets could be used again and again.
That afternoon I became so consumed painting a sky-blue scrim, I looked up and it was almost five o’clock, the time the day’s last rehearsal was due to finish. I had to race across the street from the compound to an old garage that was now used for blocking rehearsals, but not before I stopped near the gate to pick wildflowers and cottontails. When I arrived, the rehearsal had just ended and I was able to catch a few of the chorus girls, whom I gave my bouquets to, and one of them, a student of my father’s at Eastman, mussed up my hair. I joined her and the other singers heading for the Main Gate.
“Wait, Robby,” my father said as he gathered up his scores from the piano. “Let’s take the East Gate. We need to talk.”
I wondered why he looked so serious. I hadn’t
done anything. At least not that I knew of. “What’s wrong, Dad?”
“Nothing’s wrong,” he said while getting out his ID to show the security guard, who talked to my father about the unusually rainy summer we’d had. We walked on and I waited for whatever bad news was coming, worry escalating with each step across the soggy lawn by the small practice cabins. Finally he said, “Your mother and I think it’s time that you lived with her for a while.”
I tried to keep pace, my body numb.
“Why?” I managed to say. “What did I do?”
“You haven’t done anything wrong,” my father said, staring straight ahead, marching forward. “We feel that you need both of your parents. You’ve had a chance to live with me, so now you’ll get a chance to live with your mom.” My father spoke as if he were delivering a speech against his will. The practice cabins were mostly deserted, though a stray oboe was working a scale up and down, up and down. It took me three strides to match his two.
20
“A man lives not only his personal life, as an individual, but also, consciously or unconsciously, the life of his epoch and his contemporaries.”
—Thomas Mann
Soundtrack: Kraftwerk, “Autobahn,” 1974
SUNSHINE LEAKED THROUGH the bar windows, driving the Basques outside, and we followed them to a corridor already full of white-shirted men, the sides five or six deep with spectators. Elissa tugged on the tail of my T-shirt and pulled me back from pushing through, then pointed to a drainpipe that led up to a window caged in black iron bars. “Seriously?” I said, doubting her inebriated logic and climbing abilities. We’d have to dangle off the ledge, then shimmy up the drainpipe to get to the bars, where we would then have to hold on fifteen or twenty feet above the stampeding bulls.
But as the bells rung out, Elissa deftly scampered up. Damn her ex-gymnastic dexterity, I thought as I followed, not nearly as easily, but with enhanced motivation, as everyone was now whistling and yelling, the men below running with their pink newspapers. “Hang on,” Elissa yelled as the roar grew, and then the frantic black and brown bulls, their hooves sliding across the worn cobbles, careened below us, carrying with them a musky funk of rage as they ran through and over and around the sprinting Basques, who swatted them with their wands even as they were knocked to the unforgiving stones.
Fifty feet past us the bulls and men somehow funneled themselves around a narrow bend and out of sight, and a roar followed. Before I could exhale, another wave of bells and cries came from the other direction. I pulled up and hooked my arm through the bars, my feet fighting for traction on the granite wall. “Hold on,” Elissa yelled as the din grew louder. I twisted around in time to see a dozen calves galumphing into view. Bells tied to their tails, they were being chased by children, and the massive crowd cheered and whistled for the future bull-chasers. The children jangled below us and I heard Elissa say, “You okay?” as I skidded down the wall.
As we looked around for someplace to lie down, I wondered where I was on the drunk–hangover continuum. There was a strong probability that I was very drunk and very hungover at the same time, and I thought about lying down in a shady spot on a side street, but then I remembered the passed-out tourist we had seen on our way into the old city. Instead, we hiked back to Dusty, then drove away from town and along a dirt road, where we found a grove of what looked like cottonwoods and collapsed under them. We slept the sleep of the dead, awakening in the broiling mid-afternoon sun to red ants biting our legs and arms.
“Once more into the brink?” Elissa asked as she brushed ants off my back.
“Really?” I said, wondering how she could be so cherry when I felt like death.
“What’s the matter, Scarecrow, scared of a little fire?”
“If you want to,” I said. But as we drove toward the city, Elissa said, “We did it, didn’t we?”
“We did,” I said. “Papa would be proud.”
“I guess,” Elissa said.
Had we lived up to Hemingway? Certainly with the drinking. But had we engaged? Or were we just tourists? I kicked this around my tired brain, then turned to Elissa to ask her, but she was peacefully asleep against the passenger door. Instead, I grabbed the cassette of Daydream Nation, an intentionally brilliant album, its ambition announced in the title and with its cover art, Gerhard Richter’s painting Candle. I wanted to live like Hemingway, yes, but I also wanted to risk and create like Sonic Youth. I popped in the tape and listened for clues as I focused on the narrow road ahead, which wound through the hot hills and through the cooler, greener Portuguese valleys, and once more into the heat along the coast and sixteen hours later we were in Zambujeira.
There was no iconic postcard from Hank, so I guessed that he had simply left, which was a relief as I collapsed into my own bed. But in the morning, I was surprised and not surprised to see Hank at the Café Atlantico, a double espresso comically small in his big hand, his other a blur as he sketched the black café cat curling around his long legs.
Elissa unlatched her hand from mine and gave me a quick look that said, “You had better deal with this,” then turned around, all of the good vibes from Spain gone in an instant.
“Hank, man, I don’t get it,” I said, fighting the urge to flip his little iron table.
“I wanted to sketch the town some more,” he said. His half frown, half smirk contained contrition but also a challenge. Why the hell was he challenging me?
“What about Budapest, Prague, Dresden?”
“The light here’s just as good,” Hank said, and nodded over my shoulder. The light in the kitchen? I wondered, but then saw that he was nodding to Constança, the morning waitress, who was bringing me my espresso.
“Obrigado,” I said, and the teenager hesitated, as I was still standing, but I nodded and took the cup and saucer from her.
“But there’s no history here,” I said to Hank. “You said you wanted to be in conversation with the French and German greats.”
“So?”
“Berlin?”
“Still on the table,” Hank said, and I laughed. “Seriously. I’ve got enough for a round-trip train ticket.”
I downed my shot. “We’re out of here.”
“What do you mean?” Hank said. I wanted to slap his little smirk. He didn’t believe me.
“I have zero faith that you’ll be there, but I’ll look for you starting exactly one week from today at noon or eight at night, in Berlin, on the stairs of the Gedächtniskirche. Got it?”
Hank’s smirk slowly faded as he realized I had called his bluff. “Sure, Chief. I’ll be there. I promise.” Hank said it like he meant it, but I was betting he’d stay in Zambi until he had to take the Lisbon bus to his flight home.
“Seriously?” Elissa said when I relayed my plan.
“Just us,” I said.
“But I’m so fucking tired.”
“You’re the all-time transportation sleeper champion,” I said.
While Elissa repacked, I went to tell our landlords that we would be gone for two or three weeks, though I was hoping for longer.
As we pulled out of Zambi, dirt turning to pavement, I was hit with the realization that we were about to drive two thousand miles of European roads. What the hell is wrong with me? I thought. But then I looked over at Elissa, who gave me a tired smile. At least I’ve done one thing right. I vowed to slow down, to make this journey last, to be in it. And I was, as we car-camped outside of Biarritz, then meandered through the south of France, pissing away money on wine and cheese and cute hotels that looked out over lavender fields. And then to Rouen, resisting Paris’s pull (she would have taken all of our dollars), where we bathed in the warm light pouring through the walls of spectacular stained glass, and where I thought about Hank, missing the cathedrals where Proust met his gods.
At sunset, bobbing in the chilly waves off a rocky Norman beach, I though
t, There but for the grace of God go I. My uncle might well have landed on this very beach, only while I dog-paddled, he had stormed out of an amphibious assault vehicle as shells exploded around him. From Normandy he’d marched all the way to Berlin, and was decorated with a Medal of Valor for his bravery during the Battle of the Bulge. J. D. Salinger was in his unit, and they both went through the “meat grinder” of close infantry combat following D-day. Would Salinger have been the writer we know without having gone through slaughter? Is that what I needed—atrocity?
In Amsterdam, after eating “space cakes,” Elissa and I walked in circles along a looped canal, laughing at the endless, all-vowel Dutch street names. We would have kept walking till dawn if we weren’t pulled into a Mexican bar/restaurant by Dutch sailors who were scaring away customers. The squeaky-clean, if slightly drunk, sailors bought us dinner.
“This is the most perfect place in the world,” I told Elissa over burritos so bland and flavorless that I thought they were works of genius and perfection, and could never be duplicated in a million years.
“Hoogenboogenstrasse!” Elissa repeated, swatting away my stoner sentimentality.
The next morning, cotton-mouthed and fuzzy-eyed, I put on my prized Joy Division Unknown Pleasures T-shirt, suitable for the final push into Berlin.
“What if we don’t stop?” I asked as we crossed the German border.
“What do you mean?”
“Like in On the Road where Dean drives from Berkeley to New York to say hi to his friend, and does just that—walks up the stairs to his friend’s apartment, says hello—then drives right back to Berkeley. It’s the journey, not the destination. Keep moving, keep moving, keep moving.”
“It’s going to be okay,” Elissa said.
I wasn’t so sure. Hanover, Magdeburg, Potsdam—the signs sped by. German signs. Was I really doing this? And then, in the gloaming, signs for Zoo Berlin, Berliner Weisse, and Tiergarten blurred by.
