Leaving the Atocha Station - Ben Lerner [32]
As a result of these interpretations and projections, Teresa, during our conversations, was often at a loss as to what to do with her face, or at least her facial machinations were delayed; the widening and squinting of her eyes was more in response to her own internal ruminations, to what she imagined I would have said, than it was to my actual speech. I was therefore able to raise an eyebrow and communicate that I was watching Teresa attempt to translate whatever I had said, or rather, failed to say, and thus my face reclaimed from her face the powers of metacommentary. And yet as we spent more and more time together, I found myself avoiding her eyes, because when I looked at or into them, I believed I saw she saw right through me. Or I saw her see herself reflected in my eyes, saw that she knew, or was coming to know, that what interest I held for her, all of it, was virtual, that my appeal for her had little to do with my actual writing or speech, and while she was happy to let me believe she believed in my profundity, on some level she was aware that she was merely encountering herself. This anxiety was characteristic of my project’s fourth phase.
One afternoon Teresa and I saw Citizen Kane, which was playing at El Circulo Bellas Artes, then had some chalky white wine at an adjacent sidewalk café. After making various ambiguous pronouncements about cinema, but experiencing Teresa as unusually distracted, I decided to make my confession.
“I told you before,” I said slowly, “that my mother was dead. This isn’t true.”
“What?” she asked, suddenly interested, but not sure she’d understood.
“I told you my mom was dead, but my mom is alive,” I said.
“Oh. I had assumed,” she said, smiling, “that you were just drunk and high and homesick and wanted some attention.” Then she leaned over and started twirling my hair and said in English, “You have a poetic license.”
I blinked at her, first surprised not to feel relief, then surprised to feel an intense anger rising, as though my mother were in fact deceased and now she was calling me a liar. “I didn’t want attention. I didn’t have homesick,” I said, my gravity cancelled by my grammar. She opened her eyes wide as I pulled away from her but said nothing, awaiting my explanation. As one part of me insisted to some other part of me that this was wonderful, a reprieve, that I could let go of my guilt and laugh about it with Teresa, I heard myself proclaim, “My mom is sick. And because—” I pretended it was difficult to go on. The smile drained quickly from her face. “I am scared … I was trying to imagine …” Her eyes grew a little wider. “I thought if I said it, I would have less fear.”
“What is she sick with?” Teresa asked, which I experienced as insensitive, maybe because, while she had stopped smiling, her voice wasn’t any more tender than usual, or maybe because she was interrupting my presentation. I signaled for the check, although our drinks were far from finished, then regretted signaling.
Not wanting to name a particular disease for fear of somehow condemning my mother to suffer it, I ignored the question. I reached out and touched her arm, a gesture out of character for me. “I have felt horrible about the lie. I’m sorry.” Withdrawing my hand, but leaving it on the table nearly touching hers, I explained, “I came here 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.” I downed my warming wine. “And I was glad to be away from my father.”
While I believed the speech was working in the sense of convincing Teresa my mom was ill, or at least entreating her to suspend her disbelief, I also sensed a lack of translation, that Teresa was experiencing me as merely inarticulate. I barely resisted the temptation to wax eloquent in English, but realized my actual English was nothing compared to her image of it.
“My father,” I said, “is basically a fascist.”
“What do you mean by ‘fascist