At some point I realized I had been lost in these reveries, if that’s what they were, for longer than it took to make a drink or take a piss. I listened hard and could hear voices, voices I could tell were raised; Isabel and Rufina were arguing somewhere in the house, in a room whose door they’d shut. I became fascinated with this phenomenon of hearing loud voices at a distance, in trying to account for how I knew they were loud when I could barely hear them, something about their shape or shapeliness, or the way they filtered through the walls, and I reached for my notebook to write this down, although there wasn’t really light to write by, when suddenly I stopped and blushed, at least my face was hot. Why would I take notes when Isabel wasn’t around to see me take them? I’d never taken notes before; I carried around my bag because of my drugs, not because I intended to work on my “translations,” and the idea of actually being one of those poets who was constantly subject to fits of inspiration repelled me; I was unashamed to pretend to be inspired in front of Isabel, but that I had just believed myself inspired shamed me.
I took my notebook from the bag, but only to use it as a surface; I rubbed a cigarette between my thumb and forefinger to loosen the tobacco and emptied it onto the notebook cover. Then I took the little egg-shaped mass of hash out of my pocket, so shaped because it had been transported, wrapped in plastic, up someone’s ass, found my lighter, heated and flaked a quantity of hash into the tobacco, then blew carefully into the empty cigarette paper, inflating it a little, and shook the mixture back into the cigarette, twisting the end of the paper to keep it from spilling. Finally, I removed the cottony filter with my teeth. The voices were getting louder.
I lit the 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 “Bohemian.” “What,” she said, “do they do?”
I knew that no matter what I said my parents did, Rufina was going to find it hilarious, so I decided to tell the truth, although I knew it would be particularly funny: “They’re both psychologists.” I heard Isabel shift uncomfortably.
As expected, this cracked Rufina up. I assumed the flourish of talk that followed was about the preposterous image of a Bohemian poet supported by his psychologist parents. Isabel said something about not being too hard on me, but I smiled to indicate I was fine with being teased. “Isabel’s friends from the language school are always rich,” Rufina explained to me. “Friends” clearly meant “boyfriends.”
“What is your profession?” I asked, sounding intensely foreign.
“I lost my job,” she said, flatly. I blinked. “Maybe I’ll start writing poetry. Maybe,” she said, leaning forward and placing her hands on my thighs, “you’ll marry me and we can live off your family.” I thought I saw Isabel wince when Rufina touched me.
“O.K.,” I said.
“Do you think your parents would like me?” Rufina asked, sticking out her chest in a performance of her voluptuousness I didn’t quite understand, but enjoyed taking in.