Leaving the Atocha Station - Ben Lerner [65]
Arturo had said in Rafa’s presence that if I stayed in Spain I could have a room at Rafa’s house for as long as I liked, and Rafa had nodded his assent; the prospect of being a writer in residence in a modern palace frequented by the beautiful was not without its allure, however exhausting it would be for my face. Or, with my Ivy League degree, I could certainly find a job teaching English for corporations or rich kids; most Americans in Madrid made a living thus; they paid you under the table in cash so you didn’t need a visa, and being in Spain illegally for a white American was no problem whatsoever. I didn’t need to worry about health insurance, it might also have occurred to me, especially with the Socialists in power. The people I loved could come and visit. But in certain moments, I was convinced I should go home, no matter the mansion, that this life wasn’t real, wasn’t my own, that nearly a year of being a tourist, which is what I indubitably was, was enough, and that I needed to return to the U.S., be present for my family, and begin an earnest search for a mate, career, etc. Prolonging my stay was postponing the inevitable; I would never live away from my family and language permanently, even if I could work out the logistics, and since I knew that to be the case, I should depart at the conclusion of my fellowship, quit smoking, and renew contact with the reality of my life; that would be best for me and my poetry.
In other moments, however, the discourse of the real would seem to fall on the side of Spain; this, I would say to myself, referring to the hemic taste of chorizo or the aromatic spliff or both of those things on Teresa’s breath, this is experience, not because things in Iberia were inherently more immediate, but because the landscape and my relation to it had not been entirely standardized. There would of course come a point when I would be familiar enough with the language and terrain that it would lose its unfamiliar aspect, a point at which I would no longer see a stone in Spain and think of it as, in some essential sense, stonier than the sedimentary rocks of Kansas, and what applied to stones applied to bodies, light, weather, whatever. But that moment of familiarization had not yet arrived; why not stay until it was imminent? Maybe if I remained I would pursue the project described so many months ago in my application, composing a long and research-driven poem, whatever that might mean, about the literary response to the Civil War, exploring what such a moment could teach us about “literature now.” My Spanish would rapidly improve; I would not read Ashbery or Garnett or anything else in English, but hurl myself headlong at the Spanish canon; I would become the poet I pretended to be and realize my project. I would buy a phone and consummate my relationship with Teresa.
I was amazed to find myself protective of my poetry, comparing my options’ conduciveness to writing as though obliged to do so by my genius, a genius I knew I didn’t have; no duende here, I would think to myself, checking my body for sensation, no deep song. But my research had taught me that the tissue of contradictions that was my personality was itself, at best, a poem, where “poem” is understood as referring to a failure of language to be equal to the possibilities it figures; only then could my fraudulence be a project and not merely a pathology; only then could my distance from myself be redescribed as critical, aesthetic, as opposed to a side effect of what experts might call my substance problem, felicitous phrase, the origins of which lay not in my desire to evade reality, but in my desire to have a chemical excuse for reality’s unavailability. But wasn’t my relationship with substance also fake? I never injected anything; if I started