Leaving the Atocha Station - Ben Lerner [60]
After dinner we sat on a bench in a little park full of people and beneath a branching cast-iron street lamp a small wave of euphoria broke over me. Teresa let herself be kissed for a while and then we took a cab back to the outskirts of El Barrio Gótico and walked to our hotel and I thought we might make love. Instead we smoked another spliff on the balcony and I asked her how she learned Catalan. She said she had lived in Barcelona at various points, said it as if she were very old; Arturo had told me she was twenty-seven; she looked older and younger than her age in shifts. I said I would like to have a drink and we left again and after ten minutes or so we descended a few stairs into a bar that felt like a cave, cool and dark. We seated ourselves in green leather chairs in a corner around a little table that seemed to be made of petrified wood. A woman with an array of facial piercings appeared at our table and we ordered our drinks. Teresa asked me if I had seen the Antonioni movie partially set in Barcelona, The Passenger, and, lying, I said of course. She said I had his eyebrows, Jack Nicholson, that I called on my eyebrows to do important work, that if she were deaf she would read my eyebrows, not my lips. I said she was simply describing the personality of the translator, but I said it in my head. She said Arturo always claimed she looked like Maria Schneider, whom I knew from Last Tango in Paris, which I hated, and I could see what Arturo meant. I wondered what Maria Schneider’s relationship to Jack Nicholson was in The Passenger, what kind of statement Teresa was making about our relationship, and based on the Antonioni films I knew, I guessed it was unflattering.
“How do you understand their relationship?” I asked, trying to sound as though I’d pondered it for years.
“I don’t understand it,” she said, making it clear that was the point. Then she said things I could barely follow about the penultimate shot in the film, a continuous shot taken at “magic hour,” a phrase she said in English. I couldn’t understand what the shot looked like, but I understood that Antonioni had built, in order to achieve it, a special camera enclosed in a plastic sphere and fitted with various gyroscopes, whatever those were.
We ordered fresh drinks and Teresa talked about films, almost none of which I knew; maybe because we’d seen Orpheus, a movie about fluid boundaries, earlier that day, or because we were suddenly and impulsively arrived in a new city, or maybe because the bar was like a cave, I projected images to accompany her speech. Teresa appeared in those images, entered the films she was describing, and soon the films collapsed into one film, and it was her life I was imagining. She didn’t so much recount plots as shots and sequences as though they were plots. I pictured her at various ages and at the center of each scene, as if she had organized it around herself, and this struck me as a higher form of biography than the mere detailing of events. The more she talked the less aware of my presence she seemed; after several rounds, she asked for the check without consulting me and paid.
We left the bar and wound through the narrow streets and soon were back at our hotel. I rolled a spliff and asked her if she wanted any and she said no and I lay in bed smoking while she sat at the little table in the corner and worked on the translations, opening my notebook and hers. I asked her if she wanted to read me some and she again said no. I didn’t understand her method. She had no dictionary and asked no questions and I wondered if she was translating at all. After a while she came to bed and shut her eyes and I tried in my clumsy way to initiate some contact but she was totally if somehow gently unresponsive and soon she was asleep. For a long time, I watched her breathe.
When I woke she was reading Ashbery beside me. I wondered if she’d seen the pills in my bag. She smiled to indicate