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By Root 345 0

of her father when she was a little girl, or how the death of her father turns her back into a little girl whenever she thinks of it; he had been young when he died but seemed old to her now, or he had been old when he died but in her memories grew younger. She began to quote the clichés people had offered her about what time would do, how he was in a better place, or maybe she was just offering these clichés to me without irony; then she began to talk about how Arturo had taken it, so I guessed he was her brother, about describing heaven to Arturo, how daddy was in heaven, so I guessed that he was younger. The father had been either a famous painter or collector of paintings and she had either become a painter to impress him or quit painting because she couldn’t deal with the pressure of his example or because he was such an asshole, although here I was basically guessing; all I knew was painting was mentioned with some bitterness or regret. Then without a transition or with a transition I missed she was talking about her travels in Europe and then I heard her say New York and college and she paused and as she paused my breath caught because I realized what was coming.

In fluent English she described how one night she went alone to a movie somewhere in the Village, a boring movie, she couldn’t even remember which, but when she left the movie and was debating whether to take a train or a cab back uptown the full reality of her father’s death, it had been around a year, was suddenly and for the first time upon her, and she began to cry and found a pay phone and called her mother and cried and cried and eventually her calling card ran out and she went and bought another from a kiosk and returned to the phone and called her mother and cried into the phone until the second calling card ran out. She said she often wondered if that pay phone was still there, now that everyone uses cell phones, and then faced me smiling and said that when I was back home in New York I could look for it and if it was still there I could buy a calling card and call her and we could cry together for my mom.

2

I THOUGHT I HAD MADE IT CLEAR TO ARTURO OVER THE COURSE OF several conversations that I would not read, that I would be happy to come to the reading, but only to listen, not that I’d understand much of what I was hearing, and while I was very flattered that he wanted to attempt translations of my poetry, I was too shy and ambivalent about my “work” in its current state to read with his accompaniment at the gallery. I was embarrassed I’d given in to his repeated requests to see my writing in the first place, writing that I’d photocopied for him out of my notebook, and which I assumed he read with Teresa’s help, as his English was terrible, just a smattering of phrases. But when he picked me up and saw me empty-handed, he told me to hurry and get my poems, that we were already late, and he was so insistent that I found myself running back up the stairs, thinking maybe he just needed to make another copy, and I grabbed my notebook and bag, and then reiterated as we drove toward the gallery that I wasn’t going to read; claro, he kept saying, which means sure.

It was getting cold; I had somehow never thought Madrid would have a winter, but I was sweating, no doubt visibly, as Arturo greeted and introduced me to the shivering smokers milling around the gallery’s glass doors. I was too nervous to catch the names of the people with whom I exchanged handshakes, but I was aware that my kissing was particularly awkward, that I had kissed one of the women on the corner of her mouth, more on her lips than on her cheek. This was a common occurrence; with a handful of clumsy exceptions when I had met particularly cosmopolitan New Yorkers one kiss on the right cheek, and various relatives when I was a child, I had almost never, prior to my project, kissed a woman with whom I was not romantically involved. I wasn’t exactly sure what would have happened if I’d tried to greet a woman by kissing her in Topeka; certainly her boyfriend would kick in my