Leaving the Atocha Station - Ben Lerner [37]
“Of course,” she said, “I’m sorry.” I kissed her to assert my spirits were ultimately unaffected by our talk and resumed my increasingly fragmented and incoherent speech about time in ancient cities. She seemed interested now, although I suspected it was charity.
We left the restaurant and walked back down through the Albaicín into the center of the city. Isabel put her arm around me in gesture that expressed less affection than relief at having clarified things between us. As we walked and dusk began to fall and Isabel wrapped herself in a shawl, I thought back to the scene at the lake when Miguel hit me; that was probably around the time she’d broken up with Oscar. And who knew if Rufina’s suspicion of me was the issue of her disdain for Oscar or her affection for him. We sat on a bench in a little plaza and watched the goatsuckers spar. My mind was revising many months’ worth of assumptions; I felt something like a physical change as my recent past liquefied and reformed. What was left of the light burnished what it touched; Isabel was half shadow and half bronze, boundless and bounded. We got high.
When it was unmistakably night we walked down toward and then along the Darro; there was some sort of small festival and part of the river was illumined by torches. Little kids dressed in white, glowing softly, darted through the streets. It had been a while since either of us had spoken, and whereas for months I had imagined Isabel’s silences as devoted to me entirely, I was now unsure if I was even in her thoughts.
“When I am near a river,” I heard myself say, “I think of my time in Mexico.”
“When were you in Mexico?” she asked.
“I spent some time with my girlfriend in a town called Xalapa before I came to Spain.” I paused to suggest she might still be my girlfriend. “We went on a trip one weekend. We found a place to swim. There was a violent current, but we decided to swim anyway. There was another man. He wanted his girlfriend to swim. But she was afraid of the current. In the end she entered the river.” I paused again, lighting a cigarette. Why was my Spanish so halting? “She did not know how to swim. She had bad luck and the current carried her. We followed her. We found her body in the river. I gave her”— here I touched my mouth and then gestured toward Isabel’s—“to make her breathe. But it was too late. We took her body to a place with phones. We called the police. An old woman gave us limes.”
“Limes,” Isabel confirmed.
“She gave us limes for sucking because we suffered shock.”
“My God,” Isabel said, and took my hand. I wanted her to ask about my girlfriend, I was preparing a speech about Jane, but she didn’t. We sat down on the low stone wall that ran along the river and watched the reflections of the torches in the water and after a while Isabel began to talk. First she described a house or home or apartment, a description vaguely familiar from her first speech at the lake, but I was still unsure if her words attached to a household or the literal structure where she lived. I could understand more now than then; my Spanish had, despite myself, significantly improved, but this fact itself got in the way of understanding: I was measuring the time that had elapsed since the night at the lake by virtue of my increased comprehension, but this attention to the quality of my own attention crowded out Isabel’s meaning. Eventually I shook free of my self–absorption and came to grasp what she was saying, aided by how slowly she was speaking. That summer her brother died—she referred to his death as if we’d discussed it before—and she was looking through his stuff, records and books, deciding what to take with her when the family moved, she had found