Leaving the Atocha Station Read Free Page B

absorb me; its articles and conjunctions and prepositions failed to dissolve into a feeling and a speed; you could fall into the spaces between words as you tried to link them up; and yet by refusing to absorb me the poem held out the possibility of a higher form of absorption of which I was unworthy, a profound experience unavailable from within the damaged life, and so the poem became a figure for its outside. It was much easier for me to read a poem in Spanish than Spanish prose because all the unknowing and hesitation and failure involved in the attempt to experience the poem was familiar, it was what invested any poem with a negative power, its failure to move me moved me, at least a little; my inability to grasp or be grasped by the poem in Spanish so resembled my inability to grasp or be grasped by the poem in English that I felt, in this respect, like a native speaker. So after I’d dismissed the Quixote, eaten, jacked off, read some Tolstoy, I carried what was left of the wine and an anthology of contemporary Spanish poetry onto the roof and read a few poems by what was left of the light.
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    As night fell La Plaza Santa Ana began to fill with tourists, and one could also see some Madrileños meeting up, kisses on both cheeks, although the locals weren’t out in force until much later. You could hear several languages, American or Australian English to me the most grating, chairs scraping the pavement and cutlery scraping plates, glasses being collected from the metal tables or placed there, and usually a violinist, inoffensively unskilled. In the distance airliners made their way to Barajas, lights flashing slowly on the wing, the contrails vaguely pink until it was completely dark. I imagined the passengers could see me, imagined I was a passenger that could see me looking up at myself looking down.
    In the first phase of my research, I knew no one except Jorge and his friends and they never invited me to do anything on weeknights; I’m not sure how they would have invited me, since I saw Jorge only on Fridays at the language school. I didn’t have a phone, and they didn’t know exactly where I lived. Since I had failed to attend any of the social events the foundation arranged, there was no one whose company I could join if I wanted to do the things one was supposed to do while in Madrid: progressing from one bar to another while getting progressively fucked up, then arriving at a multistory discoteca and dancing, if that’s even the word, to horrible techno, making out for hours, hours, then having chocolate con churros and stumbling home near dawn. This was apparently routine for a remarkable range of ages; certainly people of several generations were out very late; kids were still playing in the plaza at midnight; the late middle-aged drank into the early morning. I was unaccustomed to such hours or so much public space. While I thought of myself as superior to all the carousal I was in fact desperate for some form of participation both because I was terribly bored at night and because I was undeniably attracted to the air’s vulgar libidinal charge. Of course I could not sit in the plaza alone, although I saw men do that, guidebooks beside their beers, and I could not approach one of the innumerable roving bands and just ask to join their company, but I came to realize that I could leave my apartment and enter the flow of the night unashamed so long as I walked purposefully, pretending I had somewhere to be.
    I would roll one or two spliffs and put them in a pack of cigarettes, drink a glass of water, brush my teeth, walk down the stairs and out of the apartment into the plaza. I felt as I crossed the plaza that I was observing myself from the roof of my apartment; from there I could see that I was walking too fast and I’d stop, light a spliff or cigarette, then resume walking at a less frantic pace toward Puerta del Sol, the literal center of the city, which I could reach in a