Leaving the Atocha Station - Ben Lerner [59]
In post–March 11 Madrid, I kept thinking things were going to explode; I would watch the planes making their way to Barajas and the sun would catch them briefly and I would believe for a second, with less fear than excitement, that they were aflame. Or I would take the Metro and experience a sudden jerk in the carriage as the first detonation. I would imagine my friends from the U.S., their amazement and maybe envy at the death I had made for myself, how I’d been contacted by History. Why I thought, why everybody thought, that dying in a terrorist attack was more bound up with the inexorable logic of History than dying in a car crash or from lung cancer, I couldn’t really say. I told Teresa that it derived from our impoverished sense of the political, that we could not think of the car or cigarette as Titadine because that would force us to confront our economic mode; when she said I sounded like Carlos, my face burned. Where is Carlos anyway, I asked her one afternoon as we walked slowly toward her apartment from La Filmoteca. We had seen two movies by Cocteau, the subject of a retrospective. It was one of the first hot days and the entire city, save Teresa, appeared sluggish. She said Carlos was in Barcelona, working. In my mind Carlos and Oscar, near anagrams, merged, and I had a sudden pang of longing for Isabel. I asked her what kind of work he did and she said, in English for some reason, “Organizing.”
“I have never been to Barcelona,” I said. The notion of Carlos “organizing,” I hoped she understood, was too preposterous to acknowledge.
“We can get there in a few hours on AVE,” she said, which was the high-speed train. I had thought it took much longer.
“Why, do you want to see Carlos?” I asked.
“We can go back to my apartment and get some clothes and go tonight, if you want,” she ignored me.
“O.K.,” I said, and we walked more quickly to the apartment, packed a few things, including, I saw, the notebooks of my poems and her translations, and then took a cab to Atocha to catch the next train. She bought the tickets because she bought everything and we walked past some red candles and boarded the train and after an initial jerk that I thought was an explosion we were speeding north, images from Cocteau’s Orpheus still flashing in my head. Three hours later we were in Barcelona. We walked from the station into El Barrio Gótico, labyrinthine, medieval streets largely closed to cars, and arrived at what looked like a fancy private residence but was in fact a small hotel. Teresa greeted a woman behind the tall desk and said something, to my surprise, in fluent Catalan. She gave her a credit card and we were provided an antiquated key. We ascended two flights of iron stairs and found our room. It had a giant wooden door, high ceilings, and the walls were white, so it recalled Teresa’s apartment. Teresa removed more clothes from her small bag than I would have thought possible and hung them in the closet. Why weren’t they wrinkled? We walked onto the balcony overlooking the street; it was only now dark.
She asked me what I would like to do and I said I was hungry; there was a restaurant she liked near the Sagrada Familia. We left the hotel, walked for a while, and emerged onto Las Ramblas. We took a cab to the Sagrada Familia, which was illuminated; it was the ugliest building I had ever seen. A few blocks away was the restaurant, Alkimia, full of fashionable people, and although it was crowded and we had no reservation we were immediately seated. I ordered a drink in Spanish and the waiter clarified my order in English, something that never happened in Madrid. Teresa ordered various small plates and they came quickly: tuna belly cut in the manner of Iberian ham and served over some kind of broad bean; white bread rubbed in oil and covered with tomato paste; a dish involving truffles and tiny pieces of sausage that might have been duck; it was all delicious. They brought us a bottle of white wine I hadn’t heard Teresa order and by dessert I felt pleasantly drunk. Dessert was a wonderful