The driver hits a pothole; something clanks. Blades of streetlight slip into the van, like swords thrust into a magician’s box—but the trick’s gone wrong. The driver doesn’t know I’m here. I want to shout, bang on the floor, but I’m too weak; getting weaker fast.
Hours ago, on the Puerta del Sol, I was considering dinner, guidebook in hand, when a woman with a wild frizz of hair made a conjuror’s flourish—and set a basket full of scarves aflame. The fabric shriveled quickly, giving off ugly smoke. An enraged vendor chased her through the crowd, and I heard, behind me, a stranger call my name.
A woman, smiling slightly, all in blue. Hair cut quite short. Hadn’t we met on the bus to Matadero Madrid? No, the museum: in front of that big Velázquez of women weaving.
She’d just eaten an apple, and still tasted of it when we kissed: fresh and crisp, with a slight flavor of salt. (Jalilla? Was that her name?) We walked on, talking; paused near a high black gate, its padlock carelessly painted red, and kissed again, more slowly. I liked her smell, the feel of her short, soft hair, the crepe of her shirt. The buckle of her belt pressed into my stomach, printing unseen designs into my skin.
Should we stop for a bite? A plate of custard and pork? Some hot polenta?
We wandered, paused, wandered some more. All around us, strangers went their ways.
“I’m really up for anything,” she said.
The night romance of the city made little differences sparkle. I kept encountering things I didn’t quite know how to see: suet studded with cloves? A row of shuttered windows painted crimson. A toy store lit only with candles, crowded with grown-ups moving and talking among dolls and dinosaurs, stickers and blocks, potholder looms and simplified puzzle maps. I thought I saw reflected water flickering: the bay so close you hear it slap the boat ramp. For a moment I stood near dripping stacks of traps, an overlooked crab still struggling in one.
Shivering, cold, I lie where they dumped me, in the back of a service van. Lights slide along the roof and down the walls, flare and go dim.
Her smile had a sour quality I liked: a steady look of detached curiosity as she waited to see what I or she would do next. One of us ordered wine in confident Spanish. A tapas place she knew. She was Czech, she told me, but had shared for two years an apartment in Cádiz with three male math students. Her táta lived on a boat on the Adriatic. “Seacoast of Bohemia, as far as he’s concerned.”
“On a houseboat?”
“Yes! Like the hero of a dreadful violet novel.”
I knew that book. I’d read it on a rain-blown porch the summer I turned 15. So absorbed in the story that I’d missed the storm, I’d looked up from the end past sunlit drips, at a rainbow crowning the beaten, bruise-black bay.
Jarmila said she was good with languages. For money she translated business documents into German and Russian and Czech, and for no pay ran a website about a kind of experimental music that wasn’t, she said, so easy to categorize “or to write little diary pages about, though that’s pretty much what I do. Just a few of us are interested right now, so someone has to.”
It was time. We emptied our glasses, traded numbers, kissed cheeks, and parted—she’d be in touch. She was off to hear a band.
Such a beautiful night: people strolling, pausing to talk, little kids up late . . . I wanted to find a certain plaza again, stop at a chocolatería, but got turned around; went left at one corner, right at another. At every turn I expected a familiar view to align itself with the random choice I’d made, but no, no, no. I turned again and got punched hard in the stomach. Staggered; bent.
My attacker (I never saw his face) just kept on walking. Something fluttered down: my train ticket. I felt the wall, let myself slide to the bricks. Not hit: stabbed.
I went clammy and cold. Faded out for a bit.
“¡Mira este tío . . . está borrachíssimo!”
“Pero, ¿has dejado algo en el bar?”
A circle of strangers leaned over me in the dark. They were laughing.
“¡Tiene una borrachera que te cagas!”
“Eh, ¿y si lo echamos en la furgo?”
They pulled me up as if to help me walk, laid me down in the back of a van—its doors stood open—and went off laughing. Surely someone would come back, bring help. Hadn’t they seen how badly I was hurt?
“That’s weird,” Jarmila said: the vaulted ceiling, the area at the back . . . the restaurant might as well have been the workshop in the Velázquez painting. “Maybe it dates to the same time?” We dipped warm rolls in mayonnaise, sampled delicious items from clay plates. I listened to her lovely English, so careful that its very precision was like an accent, as we feasted on tender bacalao (salt cod), zamburiñas (scallops), delicious dátiles con bacón y almendras (my favorite), and a plate of hollow-looking half-silvered sardines. She suggested the leche frita for dessert.
“Really? Fried milk?”
A workman slid a toolbox into the van, slammed the doors, and all was quiet. I tried to call out. Smelled his cigarette. People passed in clusters, talking and laughing. The driver’s door opened and shut. The engine started, the radio went on, and the truck moved out.
Something about the painting bothers me: how much is tapestry at the back? How much is real? There’s no way in: you can’t get past the ladder, the woman, the wheel, the junk on the floor, the cat . . .
We’re going fast. A bend in the door shows a gray hairline of sky. My fourth day. Why here, among strangers whose words I don’t even understand?
My own language and I will be strangers soon. An hour, maybe two. I won’t be taking my side trip to Seville. Won’t eat the pistachios I left in my room. Won’t watch the sun thin down to a filament, won’t put on a clean white shirt or hear that sound as fine rain touches the sills. Won’t smell ozone blowing in through dusty screens, through other houses, out of distances I can taste. Won’t be. No one alive will have walked down Teackle Road to the Chesapeake and stood in the salt warmth, the silence, the brilliance reflecting far out on the bay, the sudden haze of mosquitos—and raced off slapping himself. No one will have claimed that dorm room at Mines with a duffel, two computer bags, a red wool blanket, and an old school chart of THE ELECTROMAGNETIC SPECTRUM. No one alive will have woken up next to Amit in a rented cottage on the Nova Scotia coast and gone stumbling down a beach of fist-size stones to a sea too frigid to swim in (it was August), in sun so bright that if you looked away and back, sea and sky reversed and only slowly faded back to accustomed tones. No one will have known the path she kissed along my neck and collarbone, the warmth her skin gave off, the slight rasp in her whisper, or the seething moodiness of her friend Jenny Sandbakken, who showed up on the second day, said a brusque hello, and walked straight into the woods for a three-hour solo hike—Jenny, who wore her reddish hair in a careless braid, stayed in touch after Amit and I broke up, kissed me one afternoon in a Brooklyn bar, whispered something in my ear I never caught, and slept beside me nearly every night for two years, until I found her packing up one Sunday, wearing a new engagement ring: she was off to Colorado Springs, where she would work at a state park, marry a contractor named Jimmy Jimenez, and produce three likable, strong-willed girls.
A cat relaxes at the woman’s feet, settles in, tucks its paws under its chest. Maybe the painter has fed it a sardine. Maybe all capital cities are alike: Madrid with its plazas and statues and heavily ornamented lampposts might have been Paris with Spanish signs—though not this museum. “That’s Arachne,” said the woman with short brown hair, “and that’s Athena—see her helmet?—in the back. Odd painting, right?”
“The more you look, the stranger it gets,” I said. “At least the cat looks comfortable.”
But how had she known to speak English? My map?
The van slows down. The radio plays on, la música yé-yé, chipper pop. Cuando estoy contigo . . . me olvido de lo que quiero . . . The woman singing must be 80 now.
I want water, a whole pitcher of swirling cubes, ice shadows that spin on the tabletop as I gulp, replenish my glass, and drink again. While the bay bleeds out and the sky goes inky black, let me lie out on this deck and take slow, long sips. Let me go home.
When we moved to the Eastern Shore from Baltimore, to a ranch house on a loamy, piney lot, my sisters and I were city kids. We became wild beach children overnight—racing along shell roads, booming down docks, breaching abandoned houses, collapsing on plowed fields near family graves. We lived on the bay side of the highway that runs down the peninsula like the vein in the back of a shrimp. We hardly saw the Atlantic—Mom said the road was too dangerous to cross—but went everywhere on our side of US 13.
My dad’s gone. My mother’s porch is cool. I’m dizzy, but she leans down over me, touches her wrist to my forehead. All around us are plants in pots of various sizes, wet leaves reaching out to reposition themselves in time. Something streaks off into the reddish dark. It trembles like a ribbon on edge, fluttering bright and dull, streaming far behind and whipping off into a deep unending spaciousness ahead; but the two directions are becoming the same.
Nothing to do with me. My thigh feels warm and wet but far away, as if it might belong to anyone. Tomorrow won’t be happening, though: too bad. I’m going to miss my train.
The van is parked. Its driver sits at a counter sipping chocolate that couldn’t be thicker or hotter—a place just off the Autovía de Toledo. At least the job site will be easy to find: Avenida de Barber, not far from the Hospital Virgen de la Salud, where his sister works. He takes a bite of a churro and checks the time. His watch is slow. The boy he met last summer in Toulouse—blondish, thin shoulders, sandy hair—owns a cheap watch that still keeps steady time, though some relative must have bought it long ago, before the Siege of Madrid. Its dial glows green in the dark from radium. Probably harmless enough, in small amounts like that?
It takes Jarmila a week to find me. By then I can sit with the bed tilted up and talk. Straight from a business meeting, so sharply dressed I don’t know her at first, she smiles with her lips turned down. “Ah. Well. I didn’t think you’d just disappear. Not unless you had a reason. A good one, like almost being killed.” She comes nearer, brushes the hair on my forehead with her fingertips. “I would have been here sooner. You were hard to trace.”
“Sorry,” I said. “Lost my phone.”
She leans in close. Her lips touch my cheek. She smells like the sun.
“If you want my advice, get better fast, then schedule a break. I’ll take you fishing near Manzanares el Real.”
I tell her about Nova Scotia, the seashore covered with stones, how I teetered and winced and knuckled along like a fool that afternoon; how my girlfriend at the time claimed the beach was prehistoric—that over the course of tens of thousands of years those tumbling stones would be worn down first to pebbles, then to ordinary sand.
Jarmila seems to think I’m making it up. I fall asleep—la morfina.
She leaves me a couple of English paperbacks and a stack of Spanish picture magazines. Her generosity’s casual, specific; easy to accept. It’s clear we’ve decided not to kiss again.
The driver saved me: pressed a credit card flat to the wound and called his sister, a nurse. I still had the ticket in my hand, like I was going somewhere. Maybe someday I really will make it to Seville.
Meanwhile I move into a shared apartment Jarmila helps me find. I heal so slowly. Panic sometimes at being out in the open, undefended; or go taut with rage, anger tangling my nerves the way scrap metal clings to a net. A stabbing seems so personal—though the man who opened me up with a carpet knife hadn’t known me at all.
From long hours of radio and TV, I learn a little Spanish. Mas vale algo que nada. I get a little stronger—strong enough to work. An off-the-books tech-support job brings in just enough to keep me in Madrid. And one wet winter evening, at a party I have to be talked into attending, in a bookstore lit with little metal lanterns, I meet Estafania. (We leave together, almost without a word.)
Stafa designs and sews dresses. She sells them in a long, narrow shop with her partner, Jane, who is tall and lean and aloof and practical, possibly even kind. Jane handles the business, chooses the fasteners, edits the inventory, keeps the shop most days. I can’t understand her, but I like her. Stafa I love.
I move into Stafa’s apartment near the Plaza de Lavapiés. I learn to cook what she likes—trout a la Navarra, oven-baked rice, some dish without a name. Though my Spanish improves—I now make confident mistakes that leave friends feeble with laughter—Stafa and I prefer looking and touching to speech. Bolts of fabric lean in our halls. Stafa sketches with vine charcoal, draws on fabric with soaplike slivers of tailor’s chalk; I find the dust on her fingertips and wrists. Her eyes are the green of sunlit seawater. She closes them when we kiss, but her mouth is soft, and when we stop she is smiling, eyes open again.
From time to time someone asks: “How’d you end up living in Spain?” and I want to say it’s luck to be living at all. That one day a Liberty Truck broke down on a Belgian road in the province of Hainaut; five soldiers set off on foot to “await repairs.” Really they hoped for beer. It was a chilly day with gusty, sweeping winds. The mud was thick, hopeless even on foot, but the war had ended two weeks back and they were alive. My young great-grandfather steadied himself on a farmer’s wall and lit his pipe. A spiderweb stuck to his sleeve. He smiled at a farm girl—lovely!—and addressed her in his rather pathetic French.
“Bonjour, mademoiselle. Comment faites-vous? Sera-ce la pluie ce soir?”
No, she did not think it would rain. But no sun either. She smiled back (delayed reaction). They spoke a little more, her great-aunt came out of the house, and my future relative turned and bowed at the neck. He was 26. The farm girl—who was to become many things in her long, long life, among them my great-grandmother—laughed at him.
If not for that moment—if not for a broken-down truck and a war that left more than 10 million people dead—I wouldn’t be pouring tea for my pregnant wife, who speaks no English and may never visit the Chesapeake. Who knows? She might become a great-grandmother too.
So I live in Madrid. I’ll die another time. I planned a trip, bought a ticket, booked a room; that future was stopped by a stranger with a knife. Another future took its place. Here, have a look: I keep the ticket in my wallet, the way you’d carry a snapshot of some elderly relative looking impossibly young—younger than you are now.
