Leaving the Atocha Station Read Free

I called translation. I opened the Lorca more or less at random, transcribed the English recto onto a page of my first notebook, and began to make changes, replacing a word with whatever word I first associated with it and/or scrambling the order of the lines, and then I made whatever changes these changes suggested to me. Or I looked up the Spanish word for the English word I wanted to replace, and then replaced that word with an English word that approximated its sound (“Under the arc of the sky” became “Under the arc of the cielo,” which became “Under the arc of the cello”). I then braided fragments of the prose I kept in my second notebook with the translations I had thus produced (“Under the arc of the cello / I open the Lorca at random,” and so on).
    But if there were no sun and the proportioning was off, if there were either too many people around or if the park was empty, an abyss opened up inside me as I smoked. Now the afternoon was boundless in a terrifying way; it would never be tonight or the next day in room 58; silver and green drained from the landscape. I couldn’t bring myself to open the book. It was worse than having a sinking feeling; I was a sinking feeling, an unplayable adagio for strings; internal distances expanded and collapsed when I breathed. It was like failing to have awoken at the right point in a nightmare; now you had to live in it, make yourself at home. He, if I can put it that way, had felt this as a child when they sent him to camp; his heart seemed at once to race and stop. Then his breath caught, flattened, shattered; as though a window had broken at thirty thousand feet, there was a sudden vacuum. Some of the gray was sucked inside him, and he was at a loss; he became a symptom of himself. He summoned the strength to reach into his bag, open the childproof bottle, touch the yellow pill to his tongue, crush it between his index finger and his thumb, and return its moist remains to the floor of his mouth. Then he waited and waited and finally the edge of something dulled. He became aware that he was warm; no, aware he had been cold. He touched his hands to his face and found both alien; the former were still freezing, the latter getting hot. He thought of the pay phones beside El Estanque; he could use his calling card; he could have someone at home talk him down. But it was seven or eight hours earlier there, everyone was sleeping. And what kind of grown man, if that’s what he was, calls home in a panic for no definable reason, as he had called home from camp as a child, sobbing, please come pick me up. He became aware of a strange taste in his mouth; his saliva belonged to someone else; it made him sick to swallow. This, he said to himself with authority, is a sign of schizophrenia; this is the beginning of the rapid fragmentation of your so-called personality; you will have to be hospitalized. He could feel the paper gown against his skin. He crushed a second tranquilizer and stood up, legs barely his, and began walking toward the main gates. The other pedestrians on El Paseo del Prado regarded him strangely; he had the distinct sense that each person stopped as he passed and turned to watch; it was difficult not to run; his apartment receded at his approach; laughter issued from each passing car. Knowing none of it was real only made it that much worse.
    He would rush up the six flights of stairs, find the key, drop the bag, and throw himself on the bed. He would cover himself entirely with the blanket. He would take my siesta then.
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    Most days when I awoke from my siesta, I put on the stovetop espresso machine, rolling a spliff while I waited for the coffee. When it was ready I turned on the shower and when the water was hot I stepped into the shower and took my coffee there, letting the water dilute the espresso as I drank it, letting the steam and caffeine slowly clear my head.
    During the first phase of my research, I thought all