Leaving the Atocha Station - Ben Lerner [63]
While I was attempting to hail a cab back to El Barrio Gótico, the rain intensified. I tried to reenter the museum, but couldn’t find my ticket, and the guard refused to let me pass. I crossed the street and ducked into a video-game arcade that had a few of the electronic gambling machines old men were always playing; such arcades were everywhere in Spain, but I’d never been inside one. I walked to the end of the arcade, past various flashing lights and blaring soundtracks and one or two kids, until I arrived at a car-shaped game in which I could sit down. I was dripping. I leaned my head against the wheel and felt the full force of my shame. I wasn’t capable of fetching coffee in this country, let alone understanding its civil war. I hadn’t even seen the Alhambra. I was a violent, bipolar, compulsive liar. I was a real American. I was never going to flatten space or shatter it. I hadn’t seen The Passenger, a movie in which I starred. I was a pothead, maybe an alcoholic. When history came alive, I was sleeping in the Ritz. A blonde woman, if that’s the word, with exaggerated breasts and exaggerated eyes, was waving a checkered flag on the screen before me. I dare you to play again, she said in English.
I left the arcade. It had stopped raining. I hailed a cab to El Barrio Gótico. When the cabdriver attempted to make small talk, I said in Spanish that I didn’t speak Spanish. He said one or two things to me in English and, when I didn’t respond, French. When we arrived at the neighborhood’s edge, I overpaid him and resumed my search. After a few minutes, I thought I saw the first café, the one I’d entered upon leaving Teresa. I went down every street radiating out from the café but could not locate the hotel. It had been how many hours? I was beginning to find it a little difficult to breathe, the prodrome of panic. I asked an elderly man what time it was; it was six or seven something, alarmingly late. I entered what might have been the same café where I’d eaten the tortilla, all the cafés were by this point interchangeable, ordered sparkling water and tried to relax. I felt like the right thing to do should have been obvious. I felt another Isabel-related pang. I longed for the Alhambra and cursed the spidery Sagrada Familia. I ordered a real drink and considered calling my parents, asking their advice, and felt embarrassed; I considered getting a hotel room, going to sleep, figuring everything out tomorrow. By the third drink, I was considering leaving not only Barcelona, but Spain altogether, and never seeing Teresa again. Were the links that tenuous?
When night was imminent the panic was upon me, a thin layer of cold foil under my skin. I took a tranquilizer. I left the café and began to walk the neighborhood again. Within three minutes of leaving the café I found myself before what was unmistakably our hotel. Only when illuminated by streetlights did I recognize the façade. My first reaction was fury, not relief; fury that it had been here all along. My fury dissipated into worry about what I would tell Teresa. The panic, at least, was gone, replaced with an almost painful sobriety. I wondered if Teresa was still there and entered the hotel to find out. The woman behind the desk looked at me significantly and picked up the phone. I ran up the stairs and knocked on the door and Teresa opened it. She turned immediately back into the room and I followed her. Her little bag was packed and on the bed.
“I have been lost all day,” I said. It sounded like a lie.
“Why didn’t you call me?” she asked. She was disconcertingly calm.
“I don’t have your phone number,” I said.
“I have given you my number many times,” she said, which was true.
“I don’t have it. I’m sorry. I have spent twelve hours walking around this neighborhood,” I said, feeling the exhaustion.
“You walked around the neighborhood all day,” she asked, as if she knew everywhere I’d been.
“And I walked down Las Ramblas to the water and I went to the Picasso museum. I thought that