Leaving the Atocha Station - Ben Lerner [56]
I meant to pour myself gin, but when I tried it, I discovered it was silver tequila. At seventeen I had made myself violently ill drinking tequila and had never had it again, except to taste it every couple of years to see if it still disgusted me, which it always did. I thought back to that night in Topeka, vomiting for an hour near a bonfire and then sleeping in the bed of a pickup in the middle of the winter. I could smell the campfire and felt cold and a little dizzy. Then I thought of Cyrus trying to wash the taste out of his mouth. Teresa took the drink from me and handed me a fresh one, a vodka tonic, which smelled clean. You don’t want tequila, she said, as though she knew what I was remembering, as though we had known each other for many years. I was becoming almost frightened of her grace and gifts of anticipation; I worried that I would not be able to lie to her, and I worried, not for the first time, that whenever I’d thought I’d successfully lied to her, she had in fact easily seen through me. If I were forced to rely on only the literal truth, she would soon grow tired of me. I thought I would attempt to preempt or slow this situation by naming it, and as we walked out back with our drinks, I said to her in English, “You are the most graceful and protean person I know. The way you handed me the coffee right when I awoke or the way just now you took the tequila from me or,” I paused to think of an example not involving drinks, “the way you can move without apparent transition from your stylish apartment to a protest.”
“The proper names of leaders are distractions from concrete economic modes.”
“Why do you keep speaking to me in English?” she asked, with something like concern.
I ignored the question and went on, “But I’m worried you’re too cool for me, that you’ll realize I’m in fact a fraud. An inelegant fraud. I won’t be able to fool you and you’ll get bored.” As I said this, I thought it would be impossible to hide my pills from her. I had a sudden, involuntary memory of the Ritz.
“All you’re describing,” she said in Spanish, “is the personality of a translator. From apartment to protest, from English to Spanish.” If she had spoken in English, I would have found it a little grand; in Spanish I experienced it as profound. I wondered if she’d weighed the sentence in both languages before selecting the one that would produce the desired effect.
Teresa started to remove her clothes and for a second I thought she had lost her mind. But she had a swimsuit on underneath, and she left her clothes in a little pile and slipped noiselessly into the heated, lighted pool, as if to punctuate the ease with which she could move between media. There were a few other people in the pool, all of them women, all of whom appeared to know Teresa. I found a nearby patio chair and lit a cigarette, reiterating to myself my promise that I would never smoke another cigarette once I left Madrid, but that until then I gave myself permission to smoke without guilt. This little psychological mechanism, as crucial to my smoking as lighter or match, reminded me of Arturo’s comment about staying in Spain. I saw Teresa dive underwater and thought, why wouldn’t I stay? I could make enough money teaching English to keep the same apartment. Maybe Arturo would pay me to work at the gallery in some capacity. Maybe my parents would send me money. Or maybe Teresa would support me. I would write and she would translate and