Leaving the Atocha Station - Ben Lerner [49]
A few hours later I left my apartment. There were still people everywhere, but the demonstration was over. I walked, maybe through rain, back to the gallery; it was packed. There was a huge pile of umbrellas in the corner, an interesting sculpture. I thought some people recognized me, but I wasn’t sure. The paintings were covered in what looked like black felt. I wondered if that would damage the paintings. The placards were uncovered. Toward the back of the gallery there was a bright light and I saw Arturo being interviewed by a reporter, presumably about the covered paintings. I was afraid that if he saw me he would credit me with the idea and would pull me in front of the camera, so I kept my distance. People were looking at the covered paintings as if they weren’t covered, looking long and thoughtfully at the black felt and then reading the placard. I wondered if any of them would sell.
“I wonder if any of them will sell,” Teresa said, suddenly beside me. Then she said, “Sorry we were separated.” Maybe she’d seen me standing still, watching her get swept away. She had changed her clothes.
“Where do you live?” I asked her, apropos of nothing. I knew she had an apartment in Madrid but she had never invited me there and I had never asked to see it. She seemed to stay, at least half the time, at Rafa’s.
She laughed at the question and said, “A fifteen-minute walk from here. You’ve walked me home before, remember?” I didn’t.
“Can we go there?” I said. “I don’t mean to fuck”—I couldn’t think of any subtler Spanish word—“or anything. I am tired and the crowds—” I switched to English: “I’m just really out of it.”
“I’ll need to come back to help Arturo,” she said in Spanish, “but we can go there for a while. You can stay there if you want. Arturo and Rafa will probably come back there later.”
Teresa went to tell Arturo she was leaving and we emerged from the gallery into the rain and walked in silence until we reached Calle Serrano; I remembered her narrow, fancy building when we got there. She was on the top floor and we took the elevator, which had mirrored paneling. She had to turn her key in the elevator in order to get it to take us to her floor and when the elevator doors opened we were in her apartment. Besides the bathroom, the apartment was just one giant room with a very high ceiling and a balcony that overlooked Serrano. What furniture there was, was low to the ground: a desk in one corner, a red couch with a cat on it near the center of the room, and against one of the walls a low, Japanese-looking bed that was probably Swedish. There was a long coffee table near the couch. Piles of books were everywhere, but the piles somehow looked considered, tastefully arranged. The walls were empty save for various expensively framed and carefully grouped series of black-and-white photographs. I walked to the nearest bank of photographs. They showed very elegantly dressed men and women smoking and smiling. They looked like they were taken in the fifties. “Is this your family?” I asked Teresa, who was fixing drinks. “Distant family,” she said. I wondered what it meant about your politics if you managed to be rich and fashionable in the Madrid of the fifties, but didn’t ask.
I walked to another group of photographs and saw that they were Abel’s idle machines, but much smaller than the photos in the gallery.
“You don’t like them,” she said, handing me a drink involving whiskey.
“They don’t do much for me,” I said in English. She squinted, maybe because of what I said, maybe because I’d once again used English.
“Make yourself