Leaving the Atocha Station - Ben Lerner [24]
“O.K.,” I said.
“Do you think your parents would like me?” Rufina asked, sticking out her chest in a performance of her voluptuousness I didn’t quite understand, but enjoyed taking in.
“I think my mom and dad would like you,” I said.
“I can cook and clean,” she said, sarcastically, crossing and uncrossing her legs.
“My mom is a well-known feminist,” I said, a statement that sounded as stupid as it was. Rufina laughed, Isabel asked what time it was, implying we should leave, but was ignored. I could see her staring at Rufina, mutely telling her to shut up; I didn’t understand the extremity of her concern. “You’d like my mom,” I said to get further away from the feminist thing, “but she’s not so rich.” I smiled again, in part to calm Isabel. “Neither she nor my father ever give me money,” I lied. Now Isabel was looking at me strangely. I had just finished saying maybe Rufina could meet my parents if and when they visited Spain, when I remembered I’d told Isabel that my mom was dead.
There were several ways I could have recovered from this mistake; I could have looked melancholy and later claimed that I simply refused to share such a loss with Rufina, or, if I’d kept my cool, I could have maintained to Isabel that she had misunderstood my terrible Spanish in the first place, that I’d never said or meant to say that my mom had passed away. But I could feel my face, which was burning, fully confess to Isabel that I had lied to her. I’d told Isabel the lie during one of our first nights together when, still guilty from having recently told it to Teresa, I had felt compelled to repeat it, maybe to deepen my guilt into a kind of penance; surely I’d been drunk. Instead of amplifying my guilt, however, repetition mitigated it. While she had responded tenderly, Isabel never asked me about my family, and I never returned to it; at first I’d been aware of needing to avoid talking about my mother, as I still was with Teresa, but with Isabel I avoided talking about almost everything, save for my cryptic aesthetic pronouncements.
Isabel said she had to piss again and left the porch. Rufina, confused about what had passed between us, didn’t resume her sarcastic inquiries, and in the ensuing silence, I tried to imagine how Isabel was going to react. My lie would be unforgivable in any context, but I felt it would be particularly unforgivable in Spain; had I told the lie about my father, that might have been O.K.; I could always say he was a fascist, whatever that meant, and that I’d merely engaged in wishful thinking. Almost every movie I had seen since arriving in Spain, maybe every Spanish movie made since 1975, was about killing, literally or symbolically, some pathologically strict, repressed, and violent father, or was at least about imagining a Spain without such men, a Spain defined by liberated women rediscovering their joie de vivre with the help of their colorful gay friends. But to have “killed” my mother, the “feminist,” for whatever reason, revealed me to be at heart a right-wing, jackbooted misogynist, and further called into question the legitimacy of my research.
“I told Isabel earlier,” I said slowly to Rufina, who, smoking again, appeared to have forgotten all about me, “that my mother was dead. This isn’t true.”
“What?” she asked, suddenly interested, but sure she’d misunderstood.
“I told her my mom was dead, but my mom is alive,” I paused. “Just now, I forgot I had lied.”
“My God,” Rufina said, and gasped. “Why did you do that, Adán?” She was more intrigued than disgusted. She was smiling, not unkindly.
“Because my mom is sick,” I said. “And because—” I pretended it was difficult to go on. The smile drained quickly from her face. Then it was difficult to go on: “I am scared … I was trying to imagine …” Rufina leaned forward, now all tenderness. “I thought if I said it, I would have less fear,” is how I must have sounded.
“Poor boy,” Rufina said, and looked like she wanted to embrace me. The thrill I felt at her gaze checked the