Leaving the Atocha Station - Ben Lerner [25]
“I want to go,” she said.
“Sit down, my love,” Rufina said with an authority that returned Isabel to her chair. Then to me: “Continue.”
“I came here,” I began, “and nobody knows me. So I thought: You can be whatever you want to people. You can say you are rich or poor. You can say you are from anywhere, that you do anything. At first I felt very free, as if my life at home wasn’t real anymore.” Isabel was trying to make herself believe I’d confessed my lie to Rufina. “And I was glad to be away from my father,” I threw in for color, implying my dad, gentlest of men, was some kind of tyrant. “But then the reality returns. And I have constant terror. I call her all the time. She says she is fine, but I don’t know for sure. I didn’t want to leave her, but she said I had to come here and do my work. That I had a responsibility to my writing. She insisted. I can’t imagine life if something happens to her. And then when I meet someone important,” I said, looking directly at Isabel, “I lied. To see. If I could say even the words.” Isabel appeared to understand. “I am crazy, I know,” I said, placing my head in my hands. Then I said, looking up at Isabel again, “I am sorry. I am sorry to her. I am sorry to you.” I contemplated crying.
Isabel came to me and pulled my head against her and said something to comfort me that included the word “poet.” Rufina was rubbing my leg. I saw myself as if from the yard, amazed.
__________________________
That winter my research fell, my research was falling, into two equally unrepresentable categories. All December, there was rain, record amounts apparently; the city was strangely empty, emptied; even if it were merely drizzling, the Spaniards seemed to suspend all nonessential activity. Besides young men delivering the orange canisters of butane, or elderly women protected by plastic slickers hurrying between grocers, I saw next to no one on the streets. That December, if someone rang my buzzer, and that someone could only be Isabel, Teresa, or Arturo, their cars illegally parked in La Plaza Santa Ana, I wouldn’t answer, and because it was raining, they wouldn’t linger.
These periods of rain or periods between rains in which I was smoking and reading Tolstoy would be, I knew, impossible to narrate, and that impossibility entered the experience: the particular texture of my loneliness derived in part from my sense that I could only share it, could only describe it, as pure transition, a slow dissolve between scenes, as boredom, my project’s uneventful third phase, possessed of no intrinsic content. But this account ascribed the period a sense of directionality, however slight or slow, made it a vector between events, when in fact the period was dilated, detached, strangely self-sufficient, but that’s not really right.
During this period all like periods of my life were called forth to form a continuum, or at least a constellation, and so, far from forming the bland connective tissue between more eventful times, those times themselves became mere ligaments. Not the little lyric miracles and luminous branching injuries, but the other thing, whatever it was, was life, and was falsified by any way of talking or writing or thinking that emphasized sharply localized occurrences in time. But this was true only for the duration of one of these seemingly durationless periods; figure and ground could be reversed, and when one was in the midst of some new intensity, kiss or concussion, one was suddenly composed exclusively of such moments, burning always with this hard, gemlike flame. But such moments were equally impossible to represent precisely because they were ready-made literature, because the ease with which they could be represented entered and cancelled the experience: where life was supposed to be its most immediate, when the present managed to differentiate itself with violence, life was at its most generic, following the rules of Aristotle, and one did not make contact with the real, but performed such contact for an imagined audience.