Leaving the Atocha Station - Ben Lerner [47]
When I woke I read about the emerging link to Al Qaeda, although the government still claimed it was ETA, and I watched a terrible video online of Atocha’s security camera footage, or was that many months later: an orange fireball bursting from a train, engulfing commuters with smoke, leaving the platform littered with bodies and stained with blood. There was to be a giant public demonstration against terrorism of all kinds that night across Spain. Even the king was going to march. I had lots of e–mails from friends and family and the foundation, none of which I read. I showered and left the apartment and walked toward Sol. There were trucks set up where you could give blood. I stood in line for a while at one of the trucks. When it was my turn, the woman asked me various questions about drugs, when I had eaten last, and other things I couldn’t understand; I told her I felt sick and she impatiently waved me away and asked for the next person in line. I said to myself that, by that point, they didn’t need blood for the injured anyway; they were probably still there only so people could feel like they were contributing; hadn’t they done that in New York?
As I walked toward El Retiro I thought about how blood from my body might have been put into the body of someone injured by History. It was cloudy and cold. I didn’t see anyone, not even the hash dealers. I sat for a while and then walked to the gallery, where Arturo and Rafa were. Later I learned that, while I was in the park, the entire city had emptied into the streets for a moment of silence without me. I was glad to see Arturo and Rafa and I told them so. We hugged each other and Arturo unloosed a torrent of language, saying he knew people who knew people who died, and speculating on what all this meant for the election, which was Sunday. If ETA were responsible, the Socialists, who were seen as weak on the separatists, would get destroyed. If it were Al Qaeda or other Islamic terrorists, the right-wing Aznar and his handpicked successor, Rajoy, were doomed; they had supported Bush’s war, the fucking fascists. I asked them if ETA did it and they said they didn’t believe it and something about tapes the police had found and it being the eleventh. While we were talking, Teresa arrived. She kissed me on both cheeks and scolded me for not having been around or writing her but she didn’t seem angry. The conversation about the bombings and their political repercussions resumed and I was quiet. Then Arturo took a phone call and Rafa went to the back of the gallery for something, leaving Teresa and me alone. She said I looked tired and I said I had passed several long nights and she asked me, smiling, if I had passed them with this Isabel woman. Without emotion, I said I was never going to see Isabel again. Teresa squinted and said not to make any decisions on her account, but, smiling again, admitted she’d been a little jealous: very little. I waited to feel a thrill, however distant.
We went outside to smoke and I remembered the argument after my reading. I considered telling Teresa I had lied about my family but it no longer seemed significant. We decided to walk to a nearby restaurant for lunch. I tried to buy El País but the kiosks were out of them. “Collector items,” Teresa said in English.
Neither of us ate much. We walked back to the gallery and I asked Arturo if they were still having the opening. He looked at me like I was crazy and said no. I must have looked ashamed, because he added, a little apologetically: but the paintings would still be on display and maybe people would gather in the gallery after the demonstration. I heard myself saying that he should cover one of the larger paintings with a black cloth as a memorial, a visual moment of silence. He thought