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By Root 337 0

the powerful weed and watching the faces of the others as they realized their failure to understand me was not the issue of my ignorance or accent but their own remove from the zenith of their language. I imagined myself from their perspective once I’d obtained fluency in this elevated idiom: auratic, my example coming to stand for some dormant power within their own language, so that henceforth even my silences would seem well wrought, eloquent. But I couldn’t bring myself to work at prose in Spanish, in part because I had to look up so many words that I was never able to experience the motion of a sentence; it remained so many particles, never a wave; I didn’t have the patience to reread the same passage again and again until the words ceased to be mere points and formed a line. I came to realize that far more important to me than any plot or conventional sense was the sheer directionality I felt while reading prose, the texture of time as it passed, life’s white machine. Even in the most dramatic scenes, when Natasha is suddenly beside him or whatever, what moved me most was less the pathos of the reunion and his passing than the action of prepositions, conjunctions, etc.; the sweep of predication was more compelling than the predicated.

Reading poetry, if reading is even the word, was something else entirely. Poetry actively repelled my attention, it was opaque and thingly and refused to absorb me; its articles and conjunctions and prepositions failed to dissolve into a feeling and a speed; you could fall into the spaces between words as you tried to link them up; and yet by refusing to absorb me the poem held out the possibility of a higher form of absorption of which I was unworthy, a profound experience unavailable from within the damaged life, and so the poem became a figure for its outside. It was much easier for me to read a poem in Spanish than Spanish prose because all the unknowing and hesitation and failure involved in the attempt to experience the poem was familiar, it was what invested any poem with a negative power, its failure to move me moved me, at least a little; my inability to grasp or be grasped by the poem in Spanish so resembled my inability to grasp or be grasped by the poem in English that I felt, in this respect, like a native speaker. So after I’d dismissed the Quixote, eaten, jacked off, read some Tolstoy, I carried what was left of the wine and an anthology of contemporary Spanish poetry onto the roof and read a few poems by what was left of the light.

__________________________

As night fell La Plaza Santa Ana began to fill with tourists, and one could also see some Madrileños meeting up, kisses on both cheeks, although the locals weren’t out in force until much later. You could hear several languages, American or Australian English to me the most grating, chairs scraping the pavement and cutlery scraping plates, glasses being collected from the metal tables or placed there, and usually a violinist, inoffensively unskilled. In the distance airliners made their way to Barajas, lights flashing slowly on the wing, the contrails vaguely pink until it was completely dark. I imagined the passengers could see me, imagined I was a passenger that could see me looking up at myself looking down.

In the first phase of my research, I knew no one except Jorge and his friends and they never invited me to do anything on weeknights; I’m not sure how they would have invited me, since I saw Jorge only on Fridays at the language school. I didn’t have a phone, and they didn’t know exactly where I lived. Since I had failed to attend any of the social events the foundation arranged, there was no one whose company I could join if I wanted to do the things one was supposed to do while in Madrid: progressing from one bar to another while getting progressively fucked up, then arriving at a multistory discoteca and dancing, if that’s even the word, to horrible techno, making out for hours, hours, then having chocolate con churros and stumbling home near dawn. This was apparently routine for a remarkable range of