Leaving the Atocha Station Read Free Page A

Madrid slept during the siesta, and I drifted off imagining I was joining the rest of the slumbering capital, although later I learned that, of all the people I knew in Madrid, I was the only person who actually used this time to sleep. Whether my translation had gone well in El Retiro or whether I had sucked the grayness into my chest, I almost always felt the same after the siesta, that is, I felt nothing, although I would sleep for an extra hour if I had taken the tranqs, and if I’d been particularly upset, there was something like a faint chemical sting in the back of my mouth. I had known this chemical sting since I was a child and had assumed everyone knew it, that it was at least as universal as the coppery taste of blood, and somehow related, although later I learned that nobody I knew was familiar with this taste, at least not as I described it, not as the particular aftertaste of panic. I had never napped at home and the siesta had a dramatic effect on my sense of time, either seeming to double the day, so that remembering the morning was like remembering something on the other side of night, or supplanting the first half of the day entirely.
    When I had dried myself off and dressed, I lit the spliff, poured the rest of the espresso and, if I’d finished a translation in the park, typed it up on my laptop and e–mailed it to Cyrus. Although I had internet access in my apartment, I claimed in my e–mails to be writing from an internet café and that my time was very limited. I tried my best not to respond to most of the e–mails I received as I thought this would create the impression I was offline, busy accumulating experience, while in fact I spent a good amount of time online, especially in the late afternoon and early evening, looking at videos of terrible things. After writing Cyrus, I would attempt to read the Quixote in a bilingual edition, eat something, usually chorizo, hard cheese, olives, and white asparagus from a jar, open a bottle of wine, abandon the Quixote and read Tolstoy in English; his major novels had been remaindered at Casa del Libro.
    My plan had been to teach myself Spanish by reading masterworks of Spanish literature and I had fantasized about the nature and effect of a Spanish thus learned, how its archaic flavor and formally heightened rhetoric would collide with the mundanities of daily life, giving the impression less of someone from a foreign country than someone from a foreign time; I imagined using a beautiful and rarefied turn of phrase around the campfire after Jorge had broken out 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