By the time I reached her building, I was hot and thirsty and indignant. Some kind of courier, cardboard tube tucked under his arm, was leaving the building when I arrived, so I didn’t ring the bell. The elevator did not require the key and when the doors opened, I did not see her. Then I heard the shower. I drank a glass of water, poured myself a real drink, and sat down on her couch. I was glad she would be shocked to see me, maybe scream; I was shocked to see her on the flyer. Fuck you, I said to the cat, who was blinking its knowing blink.
She wasn’t shocked. She emerged wrapped in a towel, saw me, approached and kissed me, then walked to her closet to select her clothes.
“We’re on the panel together,” I said flatly, watching the action of her shoulders as she searched through her wardrobe.
“Yes,” she said.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” I asked, attempting to betray no anger.
“I thought you knew. María José told me you were on the panel and I assumed you were the one who asked her to invite me.” I was reluctant to admit it was reasonable.
“I’m not going to do it,” I said.
“Why?” she asked, but didn’t seem particularly to care.
“Because I have nothing to say. Because I don’t speak good Spanish. Because literature isn’t politics.” My intensity was misplaced.
She pulled on jeans and a white tank top, which made her skin appear darker. She sat down beside me. “I have known you for six or seven months,” she said, almost sadly. “We only speak Spanish. When are you going to admit that you can live in this language?” she asked.
I was touched by this, mainly because I thought she was inviting me to live in Spanish with her, to stay beyond the fellowship. My anger dissipated. “I can live in this language with you, but not with María José and the foundation. Besides, I have nothing to say about ‘literature now,’” I said.
Again there was something like sadness: “Adam, you are a wonderful poet, a serious poet. If I weren’t sure about that, why would I be translating you? When are you going to stop pretending that you’re only pretending to be a poet?” She said only my name in English.
“You project what you pretend to discover in my poetry,” I said in English.
She took my cigarette from me and I lit another. “No,” she said simply, whether in English or Spanish I couldn’t tell.
We sat in silence and I wondered if Teresa was right; was I in fact a conversationally fluent Spanish speaker and a real poet, whatever that meant? It was true that when I spoke to her in Spanish I was not translating, I was not thinking my thoughts in English first, but I was nevertheless outside the language I was speaking, building simple sentences with the blocks I’d memorized, not communicating through a fluid medium. But why didn’t I just suck it up, attend the panel, and share my thoughts in my second language without irony? They wanted the input of a young American poet writing and reading abroad and wasn’t that what I was, not just what I was pretending to be? Maybe only my fraudulence was fraudulent. Regardless, Teresa’s presence would protect me, not humiliate me; that she had selected my work to translate would lend it prestige, underwrite it, so to speak, and she would intervene if I talked myself into a corner at any point. I would be nervous and maybe it would be awkward but it would not be disastrous; María José would be placated, and my relation to Teresa would be publicized, helping to establish us in our own minds as a couple. I could send a copy of the fancy flyer to my mother. I leaned over and kissed her; she smelled like smoke and, because of the soap, lavender.
“I’m not going back to the United States,” I heard myself say.
Her eyes widened and I thought her smile diminished. “Really?”
“I mean I’m not going back in June,” I said. “I will probably go back eventually,” I said. I was waiting for her to be excited.
“Good,” she said, but my stomach sank at her lack of emotion. Or was it my heart.
“I’ll write and teach English and travel,” I said to say something.
“Good,” she repeated, with more, but insufficient, emotion, as the smile returned fully to her face. “You can come with me to Córdoba in June and meet my family,” she said. I was reassured; she was thinking long term. She did not, however, seem to be thinking of the long term with excitement.
“I would like to,” I said, careful not to sound excited myself. “And I would like to spend more time in Barcelona,” I said, inviting her with my eyebrows to consider whether Isabel or another woman might be awaiting me there. “And to go back to Granada,” I added, to make sure Isabel was evoked. “I never saw the Alhambra.”
“You went to Granada but didn’t see the Alhambra,” she confirmed, squinting.
“Yes,” I said. I hoped she thought I was too busy making passionate love to Isabel to see the sights. “Arturo and Rafa said I could stay at Rafa’s,” I said, and stared at her hard, gauging her response.
“Yes, I know,” she said, implying they had discussed it, but not revealing which side of the discussion she was on.
“But I’ll probably just keep my apartment,” I said.
“Yes, stay in the city,” she said. Then, “Stay here, where I am.” Now she sounded excited. She kissed me with unusual intensity and boundless, if blurry, prospects opened up.
Only an hour or two later, when we were leaving the apartment to get dinner, did the fact that I did not in reality know if I was staying in Madrid begin to bother me, and the fact that it took so long for it to bother me also began to bother me. What would Teresa say if I told her I had changed my mind, that I had decided, after all, to return to the States? As we walked back into Chueca, the plaza bustling now in late spring weather, and stood in line for a table at the restaurant, Bazaar, I decided I didn’t care what she’d think; all of this, all of Spain, would cease to be real if I went back; it would be my year abroad, a year cast out of the line of years, a last or nearly last hurrah of juvenility, but it would not, in any serious sense, form part of my life. I would not stay in touch with Teresa or Arturo, not to mention Isabel; I would compose a one- or two-sentence summary of my time in Spain for those who queried me about my experience abroad, but I would otherwise recall a blur of hash and sun and maybe that kid with blood streaming down his face; everything else would be excised. If this didn’t strike me as a ruthless or stupid way to think, that was because I could not believe Teresa would ultimately mind; we would have the chapbook as a memento and she would begin her next project, thinking of me no more and probably less than she thought of Carlos, Abel, whoever that guy was at Rafa’s party, et al. Eventually we were seated, ate things draped in various oils, drank two or three bottles of dry cava, and discussed Gaudí, Topeka, Lorca, New York, Córdoba, Orson Welles. I believed I contributed intelligent things, speaking and understanding effortlessly. We were drunk by the time we finished dinner and as we wound our way back to her apartment I thought to myself, this is wonderful, the life I lead here, no matter if it’s mine.