without the slightest affective fluctuation. Although I still did not leave my apartment because I was waiting for Isabel and/or Teresa to ring my bell and run up the stairs and confess her love for me, begging me to remain in Spain or to take her with me to the States, I waited now without feeling. And if one of them were to appear and make the most dramatic spectacle of her affection, I began to doubt I’d be moved significantly. At the same time, however, I felt a kind of euphoria at my sudden inability to feel, an exaggerated second order of feeling that did not alter the first order numbness. This euphoria, if that’s what it was, was very far from my body, and therefore compatible with my anhedonia; it was as if I were suspended in a warm bath outside of myself. I felt something like a rush of power, the power to experience the world as though under glass, and this detachment, coupled with my reduced need or capacity for sleep, gave me a kind of vampiric energy, although I was my own prey. I could read and write for hours on end with what felt like total concentration, barely noticing nightfall, and in the early hours of the morning, I would wander around Madrid, passing Isabel’s apartment or Teresa’s gallery just to show myself I could do so without a spike in agony. I would often watch the dawn from the colonnade in El Retiro or one of the benches on El Paseo del Prado or take the Metro to a stop I didn’t know and watch the sunrise there, return home, sleep for a few hours, wake and take white pills, hash, coffee, and with an uncanny energy resume my adventures in insensitivity. I was vaguely afraid, of what I couldn’t say; maybe that I would throw myself in front of a bus without knowing what I was doing or break into Isabel’s apartment and tear apart her brother’s notebook or put a trash can through the gallery window or otherwise act out, powerless to stop myself from such a distance. But I also felt, for the first time, like a writer, as if all the real living were on the page, and I had to purchase a stack of ruled notebooks from Casa del Libro to contain my poems and notes. I told myself I was going to write new poems of such beauty and significance that when Teresa translated and printed them and I gave a copy to Isabel, both women would realize that they had been in the presence of a poet who alone was able to array the fallen materials of the real into a song that transcended it.
Finally, Isabel came. It was late afternoon and I was reading “The Waste Land” online, stealing phrases. She said something about my apartment being dirty and arranged a few things and it was clear to me that all she felt for me was pity, convinced, no doubt, that she had broken my heart. After saying something about her work that I didn’t try to understand, she told me she was going to Barcelona, probably in the next few days, and would stay with Oscar until they both returned. I experienced the shape of pain but no pain, and said that while it was a shame I wouldn’t see her more, that I was going to miss her terribly, I wished her and Oscar all the best; indeed, if I stayed in Madrid beyond my fellowship, maybe we could all have a drink together at some point, although I understood if that would be difficult for him. My Spanish had never sounded so fluent. I heard myself saying that before she left I’d at least like to take her to dinner, drinks. She had probably planned not to see me again after this visit to my apartment, had imagined a difficult scene, but now that I was showing myself more or less indifferent to her departure, and capable of almost alarming lightness, she said yes, sure, that would be great. I told her for some reason that I was busy that night but that if she came by the next evening around nine we would have our good–bye celebration. She kissed me on the cheek, said how sweet I was, and left. After a momentary flash of anger, I felt nothing.
A few hours after Isabel’s visit I walked to the gallery, a half–hour walk, smoking and reciting some of my poems to myself, barely feeling the ground beneath me. It