“I have never been to Barcelona,” I said. The notion of Carlos “organizing,” I hoped she understood, was too preposterous to acknowledge.
“We can get there in a few hours on AVE,” she said, which was the high-speed train. I had thought it took much longer.
“Why, do you want to see Carlos?” I asked.
“We can go back to my apartment and get some clothes and go tonight, if you want,” she ignored me.
“O.K.,” I said, and we walked more quickly to the apartment, packed a few things, including, I saw, the notebooks of my poems and her translations, and then took a cab to Atocha to catch the next train. She bought the tickets because she bought everything and we walked past some red candles and boarded the train and after an initial jerk that I thought was an explosion we were speeding north, images from Cocteau’s Orpheus still flashing in my head. Three hours later we were in Barcelona. We walked from the station into El Barrio Gótico, labyrinthine, medieval streets largely closed to cars, and arrived at what looked like a fancy private residence but was in fact a small hotel. Teresa greeted a woman behind the tall desk and said something, to my surprise, in fluent Catalan. She gave her a credit card and we were provided an antiquated key. We ascended two flights of iron stairs and found our room. It had a giant wooden door, high ceilings, and the walls were white, so it recalled Teresa’s apartment. Teresa removed more clothes from her small bag than I would have thought possible and hung them in the closet. Why weren’t they wrinkled? We walked onto the balcony overlooking the street; it was only now dark.
She asked me what I would like to do and I said I was hungry; there was a restaurant she liked near the Sagrada Familia. We left the hotel, walked for a while, and emerged onto Las Ramblas. We took a cab to the Sagrada Familia, which was illuminated; it was the ugliest building I had ever seen. A few blocks away was the restaurant, Alkimia, full of fashionable people, and although it was crowded and we had no reservation we were immediately seated. I ordered a drink in Spanish and the waiter clarified my order in English, something that never happened in Madrid. Teresa ordered various small plates and they came quickly: tuna belly cut in the manner of Iberian ham and served over some kind of broad bean; white bread rubbed in oil and covered with tomato paste; a dish involving truffles and tiny pieces of sausage that might have been duck; it was all delicious. They brought us a bottle of white wine I hadn’t heard Teresa order and by dessert I felt pleasantly drunk. Dessert was a wonderful and unfamiliar ice cream and I asked the waiter what was in it and he said “Eucalyptus.” I was slow to recognize the gorgeous word as English.
After dinner we sat on a bench in a little park full of people and beneath a branching cast-iron street lamp a small wave of euphoria broke over me. Teresa let herself be kissed for a while and then we took a cab back to the outskirts of El Barrio Gótico and walked to our hotel and I thought we might make love. Instead we smoked another spliff on the balcony and I asked her how she learned Catalan. She said she had lived in Barcelona at various points, said it as if she were very old; Arturo had told me she was twenty-seven; she looked older and younger than her age in shifts. I said I would like to have a drink and we left again and after ten minutes or so we descended a few stairs into a bar that felt like a cave, cool and dark. We seated ourselves in green leather chairs in a corner around a little table that seemed to be made of petrified wood. A woman with an array of facial piercings appeared at our table and we ordered our drinks. Teresa asked me if I had seen the Antonioni movie partially set in Barcelona, The Passenger, and, lying, I said of course. She said I had his eyebrows, Jack Nicholson, that I called on my eyebrows to do important work, that if she were deaf she would read my eyebrows, not my lips. I said she was simply describing the personality of the translator, but I said it in my head. She said Arturo always claimed she looked like Maria Schneider, whom I knew from Last Tango in Paris, which I hated, and I could see what Arturo meant. I wondered what Maria Schneider’s relationship to Jack Nicholson was in The Passenger, what kind of statement Teresa was making about our relationship, and based on the Antonioni films I knew, I guessed it was unflattering.
“How do you understand their relationship?” I asked, trying to sound as though I’d pondered it for years.
“I don’t understand it,” she said, making it clear that was the point. Then she said things I could barely follow about the penultimate shot in the film, a continuous shot taken at “magic hour,” a phrase she said in English. I couldn’t understand what the shot looked like, but I understood that Antonioni had built, in order to achieve it, a special camera enclosed in a plastic sphere and fitted with various gyroscopes, whatever those were.
We ordered fresh drinks and Teresa talked about films, almost none of which I knew; maybe because we’d seen Orpheus, a movie about fluid boundaries, earlier that day, or because we were suddenly and impulsively arrived in a new city, or maybe because the bar was like a cave, I projected images to accompany her speech. Teresa appeared in those images, entered the films she was describing, and soon the films collapsed into one film, and it was her life I was imagining. She didn’t so much recount plots as shots and sequences as though they were plots. I pictured her at various ages and at the center of each scene, as if she had organized it around herself, and this struck me as a higher form of biography than the mere detailing of events. The more she talked the less aware of my presence she seemed; after several rounds, she asked for the check without consulting me and paid.
We left the bar and wound through the narrow streets and soon were back at our hotel. I rolled a spliff and asked her if she wanted any and she said no and I lay in bed smoking while she sat at the little table in the corner and worked on the translations, opening my notebook and hers. I asked her if she wanted to read me some and she again said no. I didn’t understand her method. She had no dictionary and asked no questions and I wondered if she was translating at all. After a while she came to bed and shut her eyes and I tried in my clumsy way to initiate some contact but she was totally if somehow gently unresponsive and soon she was asleep. For a long time, I watched her breathe.
When I woke she was reading Ashbery beside me. I wondered if she’d seen the pills in my bag. She smiled to indicate whatever distance had established itself between us the previous night had closed. Her breath smelled terrible and I told myself to commit that fact to memory, to remember it the next time I was intimidated by her unwavering grace. I told her I was going out for coffee. I got dressed, took my bag, and stumbled downstairs and out onto the street and walked until I found a café. Right as I was about to order, I realized I had no money; I left the café to find an ATM. Eventually the stone street widened into a modern avenue and I found a Deutsche Bank, where I withdrew the unreal currency. Still half-asleep, I put the cash in my wallet, and began to walk in what I thought was the direction I had come from, but after a few blocks I realized I was wrong. I retraced my steps and passed the bank but my confusion deepened; maybe I’d been right before. I asked a man, probably Roma, who was sitting in a doorway, where El Barrio Gótico was. He pointed and, although I headed in that direction for many minutes, I couldn’t find the ancient streets. I decided to have some coffee and entered the next café and ordered an espresso, asking the man who served me for directions. He drew me a confusing map on a napkin and I thanked him, deciding to take a cab.