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By Root 344 0

I heard only so many Spanish words, but nothing I could recognize as my own; after all, there was nothing particularly original about my original poems, comprised as they were of mistranslations intermixed with repurposed fragments from deleted e–mails. But as the poem went on I slowly began to recognize something like my voice, if that’s the word, a recognition made all the more strange in that I’d never recognized my voice before. Something in the arrangement of the lines, not the words themselves or what they denoted, indicated a ghostly presence behind the Spanish, and that presence was my own, or maybe it was my absence; it was like walking into a room where I was sure I’d never been, but seeing in the furniture or roaches in the ashtray or the coffee cup on the window ledge beside the shower signs that I had only recently left. Not that I’d ever owned that particular couch or cup, but that the specific disposition of those objects, the way they had been lived with, required or implied me; not that I was suffering from amnesia or déjà vu, but that I was both in that room and outside of it, maybe in the park, and not just in the park, but also in innumerable other possible rooms and parks at once. Any contingent object, couch or cup, “orange” or “naranja,” could form the constellation that I was, could form it without me, but that’s not really right; it was like seeing myself looking down at myself looking up.

When Arturo finished reading there was a long pause followed by what I experienced as unusually loud applause, and Arturo gestured toward me, redirecting that applause, and then said something about Tomás into the microphone, the applause thickening to include him before it gradually tapered off. People rose from their seats and either left to smoke, I guess smoking was bad for the art, or broke for the wine and tapas. Teresa approached and congratulated me and said I had done a wonderful job. Rafa embraced me, Rafa never really talked, and then I saw that María José was waiting to speak with me, American fellows in tow.

I introduced Teresa to María José and vice versa, and Teresa let fly a barrage of compliments about my writing and said something about how wonderful it was that the foundation had brought me to Madrid. While I couldn’t understand much of what she was saying, it was clear it was eloquent, that Teresa spoke not as a friend but as a self-appointed representative of Spanish Art, and that María José was impressed, if a little put off. To me María José said she had enjoyed the reading very much, she looked forward to talking with me about how my new poems related to my research about the Spanish Civil War, perhaps at one of the upcoming events where fellows would be presenting their work, and I blinked a few times and said claro. Then one of the fellows introduced herself and said she too was a poet, basically yelled it, and that she would love to have coffee sometime and talk Spanish poetry. I blinked at her as well, but, before I could say claro, Arturo was pulling me away from the group to introduce me to Tomás, who had the air of a man badly misunderstood.

We shook hands and I said I liked your reading and he thanked me but didn’t say anything back, I guess because he didn’t like my poetry and because Tomás couldn’t lie for the sake of politeness when it came to the most sacrosanct of arts. I was surprised how furious I became and how fast, but I didn’t say anything; I just smiled slightly in a way intended to communicate that my own compliment had been mere graciousness and that I in fact believed his writing constituted a new low for his or any language, his or any art.

When I felt my face had made its point, I left him without saying excuse me, walked out of the gallery, and stood a few feet apart from the other smokers and lit my own cigarette, impervious to the cold. I sensed that the other smokers were whispering about me in respectfully hushed tones, and while I knew this was less because of any particular response they’d had to my reading than because I had been presented to them as