Leaving the Atocha Station - Ben Lerner [33]
“He is a man of right–wing politics,” I said, meaninglessly. “He only respects violence.” As I said this, I thought of my dad patiently trying to get a spider to crawl from the carpet onto a piece of paper so he could escort it safely from house to yard.
“But your mom is a feminist,” she said in a voice suspiciously free of all suspicion. I’d no memory of discussing my mother’s politics with Teresa.
“Yes, and publicly so is he,” I said, implying everybody knew that fascists marry feminists in order to evade detection. “And what do you mean by ‘feminist’?” I threw in. She just smiled ambiguously.
The check arrived. I overpaid with large euro coins, which always struck me as particularly fake, and we stood to leave; it was rare for me to pay for anything with Teresa. We walked in the direction of El Retiro. The nicotine and white wine mixed nicely with the light and still–tentative warmth and I felt confident as we walked that Teresa would give me, if nothing else, the benefit of the doubt, and I remembered, in order to buttress this belief, the time I had been stern with her at the reading and she had seemed genuinely hurt. Young women were testing their new dresses, teenagers were skateboarding in the plazas, failing again and again to land their kickflips, and we saw ourselves reflected vaguely in the silver of passing buses. I was surprised to find myself taking Teresa’s hand, although I did so with the faintest trace of irony, implied, at least potentially, in the childish way I slightly swung our arms; if the intimacy were unwelcome, she would dismiss it as frivolity. At the same time I was careful to communicate, mainly with my pace, that if I was acting unburdened and optimistic it was to cover the great sadness arising from the situation with my family. I was probably aided in this representation of concealed suffering by the guilt that was beginning to spread through me, displacing nicotine and wine; it was not yet causing pain, but it was positioning itself everywhere in my body, lying in wait till evening.
We entered El Retiro through the main iron gates. It was the beginning of a long dusk and, as it was one of the first true spring evenings, people were out in force. There were young couples displaying their mutual absorption on nearly every bench, kids racing tricycles or playing tag or football, and the men who would soon be selling shaved ice were selling chipped potatoes. The voices and laughter and birds and wind and traffic combined and separated gently. As we made our way toward El Estanque, which would be full of pedal boaters, I felt that I could, in fact, imagine remaining in Spain indefinitely; I would live with and off of Teresa, my lover and translator, I would assemble a body of work, I would walk every evening through the park, I would master Spanish; a little wave of euphoria broke over me. But why was I imagining this with Teresa, not Isabel, given that I was in fact the lover of the latter, and had had no real romantic contact with the former? I had, however, so often kissed Teresa hello or good–bye, deliberately catching the corner of her mouth, or lingering near her face a second longer than necessary, that I felt we had a physical relationship, that we had been, if nothing else, in a stage of protracted courtship. But as we walked around El Estanque toward the colonnade, I was struck by the fear that this was only in my mind; Teresa must have noticed that I was catching her mouth, flirting, but surely that was not to be taken very seriously; after all, Teresa hadn’t taken it seriously when I told her about the death of my mother and wept down her elegant back. I had never attempted to initiate anything with Teresa, but this was in part because I always assumed I could, that she was, if not exactly waiting for my advances, open to them, and that keeping such a possibility alive was for both of us, at least for the moment, more exciting than any consummation.