—You are undercover all right, but I can’t tell if you are infiltrating the underworld or City Hall.
* * *
I hid from each of my lives in a fragment from another. There was rarely a connection between my actions, desires, and dreams. I had accepted becoming a father the same way I had accepted becoming a husband, or taking an administrative position with the city government, without much thought, without a clear sense of consequences. Perhaps that is why I only found myself at home in literature and cinema, worlds where anything could happen and at the same time never have happened, worlds where the mind-numbing rules of the day-to-day did not apply, where shots did not kill, where misfortunes unleashed tears but not real pain, where stories had a clear beginning and end, leaving no residues, like cigarettes that leave no cancer, bad breath, or even ashes, just threads of smoke rising from the mouth of a beautiful fictional woman, preferably in black and white. I sought refuge in films and books, freedom from my mediocre reality, my self-delusion, my cowardice. Literature and film fed a solitude without introspection, like an adolescence. I only paid attention to myself and even so I could not see who I really was. Once, in an argument with my girlfriend, or maybe she was already my wife at that point, she said: “All that sensibility for characters in books and films, yet you’re completely oblivious to those who are actually here with you.”
* * *
I was a father and a husband, and also a foolish adolescent, an apprentice in the art of the novel, and a bureaucrat; I was undercover all right, but was I infiltrating the underworld or City Hall? If I liked a woman, I would look at her as if on a screen. My desires led to paralysis instead of courage. I was distressed by insecurities about my sexuality that were more appropriate for a fifteen- or sixteen-year-old, and the depressive mood of a child who was overweight and never got over the humiliations he experienced in gym class. I held on to that delirious belief, so characteristic of aspiring writers from small towns, that real life was elsewhere, that imagination is richer and more powerful than reality, and desire more important than its realization, that giants are more memorable than mills, fiction more perfect than the dull repetition of reality, that sickness and drunkenness are more romantic than health, sobriety, and calm, that the things that matter are always fleeting, because only the mediocre lasts, and forbidden and secret passions, and marriage-boredom, chaotic creativity, mind-numbing work, and delirium-lucidity, and reason, tasteless and cold, the night subversion and the morning submission.
* * *
It almost took me by surprise when it dawned on me that we were about to have another child. My wife had gone on maternity leave a month before the birth of our second child and had come to live with me in Granada. It was now more difficult to hide and abandon myself to the controlled mess that was my life without her. I worked and came home to a domestic life, as if it had always been that way: the child waiting for me, a clean house, dinner on the table. I would put my son to bed, read him a story, and wait for him to fall asleep. Then I would lock myself in my room and work on my novel. I became convinced that I had to travel to Lisbon if I had any hope of finishing the story the way I wanted.
* * *
I did not go to Lisbon to find the settings for a plot that was already in my head. I needed to find the drama there, fill certain gaps and key moments in the narrative. Or maybe I just wanted to escape for a few days and literature was my excuse. I remember the exact dates. I took a train from the Linares-Baeza station on the first day of the year. It was a cold, bright morning, and I was one of few travelers. The next day, my son Arturo, the newborn, would turn one month old. On the afternoon of December 2, 1986, I had been listening to a record of Gerry Mulligan and Chet Baker when my wife went into labor. I listened to music every evening until five or six, and then started to write. We lived in a small apartment provided by the city. It was on the outskirts of Granada, heading toward the Sierra, on the banks of the Genil River. That past returns to me in waves. In the mornings, I worked in a building in Los Campos Square, close to Mariana Pineda Square. It only took me twenty minutes to walk there. When the snow from the Sierra melted at the end of spring, or after a heavy rainfall, you could hear the river roar all night from my apartment. I was three months into writing the novel when my son was born. I had tried to start long before, again and again, but I would always get stuck or bored. Every page felt like punishment. Perhaps the story did not flow because it was trying too hard to trace or mask reality. Having emerged so literally from the familiar, it had nothing to do with Lisbon.
I had never been to Lisbon. The novel had been set in Granada because certain things I wanted to incorporate in the story had taken place or could have taken place there, and I did not know how or did not dare to tell them without the cover of a police plot. Literature is built with things that exist and things that do not. But I did not know how to create fiction from the world I saw around me, or invent characters with lives similar to mine. Back then, I thought fiction had to do with the imaginary, with the stuff of dreams and unattainable desires. Granada was a city without glory, but the characters of my novel transformed her into a different place. They were romantic projections of myself, of a woman I fell in love with the way sixteen- or seventeen-year-olds do, of the man, her husband, she was cheating on. To portray myself and her and him, as we really were, was as difficult as writing about the places where it all happened, about my everyday life, without the filter of literature.
Granada, as I closed my eyes and got ready to write, became a seaside town during winter; I was a jazz pianist, she was an actress, he was a villain. I imagined that my defunct love story, with its provincial sorrow and petty adultery, had the intensity and passion of a bolero, interrupted by police chases and revolvers in a city where the Alhambra and Albaicín faced the ocean instead of the Vega.
Then I realized something. Like in those dreams where two places merge seamlessly, in the sketch of my novel, Granada was also San Sebastián. I had lived in San Sebastián for a year in 1980 for military service. The imagination creates its own rules. The story did not yet possess an autonomous form, but it had begun to emancipate itself from my lived experiences and found its own stage and atmosphere. The narrow streets around the cathedral in Granada had become those of the old town in San Sebastián, emptied after the bars closed. A man and a woman agreed to meet under the arcades of Constitution Square on a rainy night. The shadows were borrowed from my memories but also from detective films in black and white, films with chases and mysteries, low lights and cigarette smoke, sensual women with guns, love affairs that were traps. At thirty, I thought youth was already behind me and I was suffering an intoxicating adolescence of literature.
* * *
Lisbon was in the title of the novel long before it was in the plot. A good title is not a tag that goes at the end but an open flame that sits far away illuminating an unknown material, a faint moonlight, a flashlight handled by something unknown indicating a possible path. Back then, I used a typewriter. At home, I had the same machine I had been using since I was fourteen or fifteen. At work, I had gotten used to an electronic Canon that accelerated the writing, as if awaking it with the padding of the keys. The Canon justified the margins automatically. The sheet came out clean, the type was sharp and neat, as if technology alone had refined the style.
* * *
But Lisbon had also been slow in coming to the title, which had been without a story for a while, like the cover of a book filled with blank pages. I remembered its origin when years later I found something written in an old notebook, one of those notes to self that are completely forgotten.
I had written: The Winter in Florence. There was nothing else in the notebook. Florence had been in my imagination before Lisbon and it had vanished like a vivid dream that disappears without trace upon waking. A sound technician who used to tour with jazz musicians came to my office one morning. I had not seen him in a long time. He was a friendly man but tormented by an internal strug
gle, pressure from work and nonstop traveling, the constant hustle to get paid on time and the stress of not having enough to cover the monthly payments on the expensive equipment he needed for his job. I liked listening to his anecdotes. Some years prior, he had mixed the sound for two consecutive performances by Bill Evans in a small club or theater in Barcelona. Evans was only scheduled to play one show, which was sold out. But the next day he missed his plane, even though his bassist and drummer managed to board. So the organizers improvised a solo concert for Evans that second night. With little time to promote the show, Evans played for an almost empty room. The sound technician said it was one of the most memorable concerts he had ever seen. Bill Evans—fatigued, sick, exhausted from touring, his old suit still elegant, with a sunken face and the mouth of a junkie—he played without pause for over an hour, barely breathing, absent, his head down, as if there was no one else in the room.
The sound technician also shared stories about the time he accompanied Chet Baker in Florence. After breaking down the equipment with a stagehand, he stepped out to the vestibule, and there was Baker in a short coat facing the glass entrance, waiting with his trumpet case in hand. Rain was pouring down. The technician had his van parked close to the theater. He offered Baker a ride to the hotel. The stagehand offered him the front seat, but Baker preferred the back. The technician told me that as he drove in the rain through the dark and unfamiliar streets, he would glance at Baker in the rearview mirror every now and then. His face was small, gaunt, and deeply wrinkled. His hair was dirty, the toupee like a relic, an air of decrepit youth. He sat motionless, upright, staring into space, oblivious to the city on the other side of the glass, gusts of monumental buildings beyond the curtain of rain. Depending on the streetlights, the face became visible or stayed with the shadows. The technician noticed how bright his eyes were. He swore he saw a tear. Chet Baker was dead a few months later. He had leaped or fallen from the window of a hotel in Amsterdam.
The plan was to go back to Spain the day after the Baker concert. But there was nothing really urgent for him to attend, or anything his assistants could not take care of, and he was tired after the long tour. Suddenly he did not feel like being back in Granada. It was winter and Florence was cold and rainy. There were barely any tourists in the streets or the museums. He realized with some amazement that it had been years since he had taken a break from work, always on the run from one city to the next, from one country to another, theaters and concert halls and hotels where he spent one or two nights at most, assembling and disassembling equipment, suffering the whims and eccentricities of the musicians, the hours in airports, the days and nights on the road and at the wheel. Perhaps he was also tired from raising a family and burdened by guilt from spending so much time away.
He decided to stay a few days in Florence, taking advantage of the cheap hotel rooms during the low season. He basically did nothing. When it stopped raining he went for a walk with no destination in mind, bundling up against the piercing cold that hit along the Arno at dusk. The sun barely reached the halls of the Uffizi and the guards rubbed their hands together over small electric heaters. On clear days the sun tapped the ridges of the carved stones, and after a few hours of walking outside not even gloves and coat pockets could keep one’s hands from freezing.
The time he had initially given himself ran out and he decided to prolong it. He comforted his stomach with bean and pasta stews served in the small taverns tucked in high-walled alleys that the sun never reached. Architecture, frescoes—none of it did much for him. In the Uffizi he went to a dark gallery where a newly restored Birth of Venus hung under a light. At the museum, he mostly strolled on the marble floors of the wide galleries lined with classical busts and looked at the river that spanned beyond the big windows. He liked looking at the green eyes of the goddess and the delicate lines of her hands and feet, the wild, golden hair, ruffled by the same wind that rippled the small waves. One day he discovered The Sacrifice of Isaac by Caravaggio. The hint of brutality and fanaticism overwhelmed him in a way that no other painting had. He would leave the gallery and then be back shortly after, he said to me. He even became afraid of being alone with the painting during those overcast mornings when the museum was almost empty.
One afternoon he suddenly realized he could not remember how many days he had been in Florence. Time references had vanished from his mind. He could tell the time on his watch, but without a calendar in the hotel room he simply could not remember what date it was and thus had no idea how many days, or weeks, it had been since the last date he remembered, the concert with Chet Baker. He also could not remember his age. He knew the year he was born but not the current one and it filled him with terror to think just how old he could be. He feared that if he looked at himself in the bathroom mirror, he would find a stranger, maybe bald or with a head of white hair.
His only experience of temporality was winter, winter in its pure form, like a fog he could not exit, no matter how hard he tried. He inhabited that winter like Florence itself, like an island, like a spellbound kingdom floating above the past and future, in a present without succession or a beginning. Vertigo and a vast stillness combined into one. Acquaintances, loved ones, they all seemed so distant, as if he were remembering them from a time long past. He thought about calling the reception desk to ask the date, but felt too self-conscious. He thought about calling his wife, but the number blurred in his memory. He remembered the country code for Spain, the code for Granada, but as he tried to recall what came next the series disappeared and he had to start all over. He remembered Venus and Isaac, desire and fear, her naked body, the child’s face contorted with terror, his jaw pressed against the sacrificial stone by the strong, merciless hand of the old man. After so many days of only interacting with strangers who spoke a different language, days of barely uttering a word except to the occasional waiter in a restaurant, the figures in the paintings felt more real than the actual people around him.
He realized he was having a panic attack. He took two sleeping pills and noticed how his thoughts began to gradually dissolve into sleep. There was no trace of temporary amnesia the next morning. He told me he was relieved but also disappointed. Once again, the day and the month and the year and the hour and his name and his job and his past—all occupied precise locations, like elements in the periodic table, within the compartments of time. He decided it was time to return to Granada; he had already spent plenty of money and could not continue neglecting his family. Now, many months later, he missed the winter in Florence, that winter without dates when he had lived in another country. “And now, back to this,” he said, involuntarily throwing his hands in the air, looking at me across the table, where I probably had some pending invoice of his among the stacks of documents, looking at the office with sorrow and pity, even a hint of sarcasm, the office where I worked and relished any spare moment to write using the swift electric Canon, and sometimes by hand, in a notebook or on the back of some form, some piece of paper embossed with an official letterhead and coat of arms, possible titles, beautiful titles for short stories and novels that most of the time never materialized.
* * *
I heard about Lisbon from a friend, the painter Juan Vida, who had once traveled there for a few days. He told me about the grand square with the statue of a king on horseback and elephants at the center, and a public elevator like that of the Eiffel Tower connecting the lower streets with a neighborhood on top of a hill. The elevator had a polished wooden cabin that creaked as it ascended and golden brass knobs and handles. He told me that on clear days there was a white luminosity dimmed by the mist of the river, and that entering the city was a bit like traveling back in time because it reminded him of the Granada of his childhood, the one of small storefronts with textiles or groceries, and chattering crowds in the squares. As in Granada, there was a Moorish castle atop a hill, and a neighborhood of balconies, winding alleys, and stairways as labyrinthine as Albaicín. Lisbon had communal squares like those of
Bibrrambla, with grandparents soaking up the sun, shoe shiners, and groups of people hanging out in the corners. He drove out of the city and reached a resort town with houses painted in pastel colors, wooded hills overlooking the sea, and a chasm called Boca do Inferno, where it was terrifying to look down and see the swells of the Atlantic break against the reefs, forming towering surges of foam that could reach a bystander.
* * *
I had already written who knows how many pages but nothing had really happened in the novel. It was tiring. Like climbing a dune, every step sinking in the sand and never arriving. After pages and pages, the two lovers whose affair threaded the story had not even met. Every morning I came to the office and punched my time card, my arrival time printed in tiny numbers that were red if I was late. Every afternoon I sat to work in my room, too small to call it an office, next to a window that looked onto the upper floors and rooftops of the housing complex, and farther up, in the distance, a line of arid hills leading to the Alhambra, the red, sun-dried bricks and the cypresses of the cemetery.
I thought I would see this same landscape for many years to come. At dusk, as the blue sky paled, the reds of the rammed earth walls became more intense. The truth is I lacked vision. I was incapable of imagining the breadth of the future. I could not imagine my three-year-old son as an adult, or the children who played around the buildings and bought candies at Juan’s shop, at that time barely two years since it had opened in the new development that slowly filled up with people, young couples with small children, modest incomes, beneficiaries of government housing.
Like a Fading Shadow Page 4
