Then I saw Isabel pass by. I had often thought I’d seen Isabel over the last month or two. This time I felt sure, despite the improbability, and I put down various large coins without finishing my coffee and set off after her. It wasn’t until I was in pursuit that I wondered why I wanted to catch her; I had nothing to say, though I had the indeterminate sense I owed her an apology. She crossed a busy street and by the time I got there the traffic was flowing and I had to wait. It took forever for the light to change and I wasn’t sure it was still her I was trailing but I pursued a woman with something in her hair; she ultimately disappeared around a curve. I stopped again and asked a woman selling cut flowers how to get to El Barrio Gótico and she gave me Metro directions. I thanked her and flagged a cab. When we arrived at the neighborhood’s edge, I went again in search of coffee. I found a café, bought two espressos to go, and walked deeper into the neighborhood, turning onto a street I thought I recognized. I did not know the name of the hotel. Soon I noticed the coffee was cold and I drank mine quickly and threw both cups away. I felt irritated and stupid and sat down on a bench to let my head clear. A blind man was selling lottery tickets nearby, shouting something about fate. I felt like a character in The Passenger, a movie I had never seen.
When I resumed my search I gradually realized I no longer remembered what the façade of the nameless hotel looked like exactly; I could have passed it many times already. I didn’t have Teresa’s phone number. I estimated an hour and a half had elapsed since I left. Hungry, I entered yet another café and ordered yet another coffee and also a piece of tortilla, which I hated before it arrived. I told the waiter I was looking for a hotel whose name I didn’t know on a street whose name I didn’t know and could he help me; we both laughed and he said: Aren’t we all. When I finished eating I tried again, feeling like an actor whose wanderings were being used as an excuse to shoot the scenery. After I don’t know how long, surely more than an hour, I found myself in a small plaza and sat down, defeated. My irritation turned to worry; it simply would not be believable to me if I were Teresa that I had left the hotel to get us coffee and had gotten lost for however many hours would have passed by the time I found her. And even if it were somehow believable, I didn’t like what such a story would do to her image of me, an image about which I was actively, maybe increasingly, concerned. I would fare better in her eyes, I thought, to disappear mysteriously for several days than to show up like a lost child, dirty and exhausted, as night fell. With something like desperation, I resumed my wanderings. I started to feel a little crazy, space curling around the edges, which reminded me to take my white pill. I found another bench and sat down, stomping to scatter the pigeons. Without texture, time passed.
I arose and walked until I emerged onto Las Ramblas, where there were crowds around various men who were covered in body paint and pretending to be statues. They moved suddenly, scaring the children, when you gave them coins. I continued down Las Ramblas and onto the pier. There was a small outdoor bar on the little stretch of beach and I sat under the red plastic awning and ordered patatas bravas and a beer. I drank the beer quickly and ordered another. A funicular descended from the hills to a point near the beach. There were many teenagers in bathing suits although the water must have been cold. A small wave of sexual desire broke over me. When I finished the second beer I walked back to Las Ramblas, drifted for a while, then flagged down a cab and went to the Picasso Museum. Teresa had mentioned wanting to show it to me; maybe she would be there.
I stood, I made myself stand, in front of the early portrait of his mother. It yielded nothing. The woman, in profile, is half-asleep; her head is leaning slightly forward and her eyes are closed. Pastel on paper. 1896. He was what, fifteen? A freak of nature. I could convince myself I saw space curling around the figure or areas where space flattened suddenly, but I did not see this. Maybe I did see, however, the self-assurance of a painter who assumed his juvenilia would one day be scoured for the seeds of genius, embarrassing phrase. If the work felt uncanny, it was because it was mortgaged; it was borrowing from future accomplishment as much as pointing to it. It had started to rain a little; I could hear it falling on the skylight.
I wondered how my project would have differed if I’d come to Barcelona instead of Madrid. I thought of this in order to avoid thinking about Teresa, wherever she was. That I was contingent, interchangeable, I took as a given. Slightly more impetuous brushstrokes in the self-portrait, also 1896. A shameless celebration of his own lips. The left eye, however, blackened by shadow, looked like it was blackened by a fist. I tried to imagine myself at fifteen. I remembered my brother teaching me to drive in the parking lot of the V.A.
Only the juvenilia interested me. I walked indifferently through the rose rooms and blue rooms and nodded to the guards; I brought them greetings from the museum guards of Madrid. If Teresa were there, I would have asked her: what painting would you most like to stand in front of hour after hour, day after day? It wasn’t the same question as what is your favorite painting. Or what period would you most like to dwell in and protect. Would you prefer to have to see, month after month, the figurative or the abstract? I remembered learning to drive and bonfires at Lake Clinton and what they called “experimenting” with alcohol and drugs. A tentative procedure; an act or operation for the purpose of discovering something unknown or of testing a principle or supposition. Now I was an experimental writer.
My mom, whenever we went to a museum, told me that painting seemed to have developed in reverse; that if an alien were to arrive at a museum, the alien would think the abstract canvases came first, hundreds if not thousands of years before the Renaissance. Unless the alien happened to look like a yellow triangle abutting a plane of blue. I always dismissed this theory in my mother’s presence, but if Teresa were with me, I would have offered it as my own. You could say it about Picasso’s particular development and it would sound intelligent, right or wrong. In the gallery devoted to Picasso’s relation to African art, there were two young kids, six or seven. I didn’t see the rest of the family. One walked up quickly to a large canvas and pawed it, clearly on a dare. Both kids ran out of the gallery, presumably back to their parents. There was no guard around. I approached the canvas the child had touched, a miniature precursor of, or study for, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. I double-checked no one was around and, since the world was ending, touched the painting myself.
While I was attempting to hail a cab back to El Barrio Gótico, the rain intensified. I tried to reenter the museum, but couldn’t find my ticket, and the guard refused to let me pass. I crossed the street and ducked into a video-game arcade that had a few of the electronic gambling machines old men were always playing; such arcades were everywhere in Spain, but I’d never been inside one. I walked to the end of the arcade, past various flashing lights and blaring soundtracks and one or two kids, until I arrived at a car-shaped game in which I could sit down. I was dripping. I leaned my head against the wheel and felt the full force of my shame. I wasn’t capable of fetching coffee in this country, let alone understanding its civil war. I hadn’t even seen the Alhambra. I was a violent, bipolar, compulsive liar. I was a real American. I was never going to flatten space or shatter it. I hadn’t seen The Passenger, a movie in which I starred. I was a pothead, maybe an alcoholic. When history came alive, I was sleeping in the Ritz. A blonde woman, if that’s the word, with exaggerated breasts and exaggerated eyes, was waving a checkered flag on the screen before me. I dare you to play again, she said in English.