Read Online Leaving the Atocha Station by Ben Lerner - Free Book Online Page A

spliff and imagined what was happening inside, my first projections borrowed almost entirely from Spanish cinema: Rufina and Isabel were lovers, Rufina maybe a transvestite, and Isabel had brought me to get back at Rufina for the latter’s recent infidelity, but had underestimated Rufina; soon Rufina would return to the porch with a knife wet with Isabel’s blood, stab me, then stab herself. Or Rufina, unspeakably wronged by unspeakable men, all of whom resembled Franco in some sense, had sworn that no man would ever cross the threshold of her home again, and Isabel had violated this rule, hoping, for whatever reason, to reintroduce Rufina to the opposite sex; soon Rufina would return with a knife wet with Isabel’s blood, etc. As the hash had its effect, I took pleasure in picturing the flash of the knife reflected in Rufina’s eyes, having to wrestle her into submission or die. I was relieved and disappointed, then, when a light came on and Rufina and Isabel returned to the porch, Rufina now wearing a gray oversized Hard Rock Café Houston sweatshirt and holding our refreshed drinks, Isabel relaxed and smiling.
    “You smoked without us, Adán,” Rufina exclaimed. She must have asked Isabel my name.
    “I can make more,” I said. “I can roll another,” I corrected.
    “So you’re a poet, Adán,” she ignored me. I just smiled. She repeated my name as if it were a one-word joke at my expense.
    “He just read at a gallery in Salamanca,” Isabel said to spite me.
    “Salamanca—elegant!” It was clear Rufina was going to ask me what kind of poetry I wrote. “What kind of poetry do you write?.”
    “What kinds of poetry are there?” I was pleased with this response and made a mental note to use it from then on.
    “Bad and worse,” Rufina said with mock derision. Isabel laughed a little. Maybe it relaxed them further to be allied against me, to taunt the new boyfriend after clearing the air of the old.
    “I, too, dislike it,” I said in English.
    “You must come from money,” Rufina said, ignoring me again. Then she said something idiomatic involving hands and clouds, which I assumed was a colorful way of saying the same thing. “Do you have to work at all?”
    I wasn’t sure how to respond to this. I had encountered this association of poetry and money before in Spain, compounded, in my case, by the assumption that all Americans, I mean Americans abroad, were rich; compared to Isabel and Rufina, my family probably was. I had no clear sense of Isabel’s class position, let alone Rufina’s; I knew Isabel had graduated from college. had long worked at the language school, and now had a nice enough apartment, but she also had two roommates. I paid for almost all of our meals and drinks, but thought very little of it, even though it was a significant portion of my total funds, because euros always seemed fake to me. I had no idea, for instance, if the house we were in was of significant value, if land near Toledo was worthless or in high demand, if Rufina’s manner of dress or address indicated the working or middle or some other class, or if those were the relevant terms for Spain.
    “I won’t have to work for several months, it’s true,” I said in a way that implied I would then have to work in a coal mine. “Unless you think writing is work.”
    “What will you do when you go back to the United States?” Rufina asked. Perhaps the most important unspoken rule that Isabel and I had developed in our short relationship, our most important kind of silence, was never to refer to the time after my fellowship. I looked at Isabel. It had been a while since I’d thought what I would, in fact, do upon my return.
    “I don’t know that I will go back,” I lied. Isabel remained quiet, but there was a change in the intensity of her silence. I lit a cigarette to distance myself from this statement.
    “And your parents will send you money,” Rufina laughed, and then said something that involved the word