Leaving the Atocha Station - Ben Lerner [21]
I was also silent for a while, then stopped and turned to her and put my hands on her shoulders, which I never did, and looked her in the eyes, which sounds ridiculous, and said, tenderly, “Poems aren’t about anything.”
“Poems aren’t about anything,” she repeated, largely to herself, perhaps with a hint of incredulity or bemusement or scorn, and it wasn’t clear to me whether its significance was spreading out. I kissed her in case that helped the resonance expand.
By the time we reached the car I felt the balance of our relationship had been restored; I believed Isabel felt it too, and in a rush of optimism, she decided we should, in fact, visit Rufina. It was dark now as we drove across the ramparts and after fifteen minutes or so of confusing, curving roads, we pulled off into a gravel driveway. During the drive Isabel started and abandoned various descriptions of her aunt, attempting to avoid disparaging her in any way, which suggested affinity and respect, while also trying to warn me, it was unclear regarding what. Finally she managed, haltingly, to say something about a fight over Isabel’s ex-boyfriend, a fight arising, I thought she said, from Rufina’s protectiveness of Isabel, her sense that Isabel had been treated poorly, but a bad fight nonetheless.
Rufina’s house was small, white, boxy, two stories, but set on a large expanse of land, which I assumed, during the day, offered prospects of the distant hills, or were those mountains. Dogs appeared as we approached the house, recognizing Isabel, who greeted them in the dark by name. We rang the bell and I could hear the radio inside. The door opened and Rufina appeared; I was stunned by her youth, she looked thirty, shapely, and was made up as if about to go out for the evening—eye shadow and lipstick, clothes that seemed selected carefully—despite the fact that she was in the country, alone. I thought she might have missed a beat between seeing us and greeting Isabel warmly, but the greeting was, when it came, very warm; as she held Isabel’s face and wiped off her lipstick with her thumbs, I thought one or both of them might cry; Rufina was pressing hard. She released Isabel, kissed me quickly on both cheeks, and told us to come in, shutting out the dogs. We followed her into the kitchen where, without asking us what we wanted, she took out three tall glasses, gin from the freezer, and a bottle of tonic from the fridge. She put ice in the glasses and poured the cocktails in the Spanish manner, filling each glass almost entirely with gin, barely cutting it with tonic, then led us with our drinks to an enclosed and heated porch where we sat down in low cane chairs and near-dark.
I squinted at Rufina, waiting for my eyes to adjust. She and Isabel were obligatorily catching up, the Spanish so fast and full of slang I didn’t even try to comprehend it; after a minute or two, the rush of small talk tapered into silence. Rufina took a long match from a box somewhere within her reach and lit a cigarette and I thought she looked mean and attractive in its light, her appeal perhaps amplified by the fact that I’d spent the day imagining a visit to an elderly aunt. Isabel looked nervous, adjusting her hair; it was clear this was the first time they’d seen each other since the aforementioned fight. Rufina held the match toward me, shook it out. Why Isabel had brought me I found baffling, she certainly made no effort to introduce me into the conversation; I could only suspect my presence was a restraint, that Isabel wanted to work out whatever was between them, and hoped Rufina would rein in her behavior and talk in the company of a stranger, especially talk about a previous boyfriend. The silence was evidently oppressive to Isabel, who knew I wouldn’t break it, and finally she rose and said she had to go to the bathroom, leaving me with Rufina. I was in fact very interested in Rufina, in how she made a living, where she was from, how long she had lived outside Toledo and why, not