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

gave us the sense of having been awoken by something, a noise external or internal to our dreams, and we listened, facing each other, blinking, for the noise to recur, which it didn’t, although I never mentioned this idea about the noise to her, so she might not have had the experience I ascribed her. She would get out of bed and wrap herself in the towel that was always draped across the chair, then shower while I put on the coffee. When the coffee was ready I would say so loudly enough that she could hear me over the water and she would turn off the water and rewrap herself in the towel and we’d take our coffee on the couch and smoke, moving the little butane heater close to us. Then I showered and did the things I didn’t do in front of her: shit, take pills, and when I came out of the bathroom she would be dressed, putting up her hair.
    She was always wrapping or unwrapping her hair or body in some sort of cloth, winding or unwinding a shawl or scarf, and whenever I imagined her, I imagined her engaged in one of these activities; I couldn’t picture her standing still, fully dressed or undressed, but only in the process of gracefully entangling or disentangling herself from fabric. I tried to tell her this, as I thought it would sound poetic, but I didn’t have any of the relevant verbs, so I said something about not having the words to describe how she was always moving, how I couldn’t imagine her still, and I made a series of gestures that communicated this was a pale version of what I had intended to communicate, and left her to unfold my meaning.
    Except for our most basic exchanges, pass me this or pass me that, what time is it, and so on, our conversation largely consisted of my gesturing toward something I was powerless to express, then guessing at whatever referent she guessed at, and gesturing in response to that. In this, my project’s second phase, Isabel assigned profound meaning, assigned a plurality of possible profound meanings, to my fragmentary speech, intuiting from those fragments depths of insight and latent eloquence, and because she projected what she thought she discovered, she experienced, I liked to think, an intense affinity for the workings of my mind.
    As we walked through the Reina Sofía I would offer up unconjugated sentences or sentence fragments in response to paintings that she then expanded and concatenated into penetrating observations about line and color, art and institutions, old world and new, or at least I imagined those expansions; To photograph a painting—, I said with derisive mystery as we watched the tourists in front of Guernica, and then I observed her face as this phrase spread out into a meditation on art in the age of technological reproducibility. I would say, Blue is an idea about distance, or Literature ends in that particular blue, or Here are several subjunctive blues; I would say, To write with sculpture—,To think the vertical—, To refute a century of shadow—, etc., and watch her mouth the phrase to herself, investing it with all possible resonances, then reapplying it to canvas. Of course we engaged in our share of incidental talk, but our most intense and ostensibly intimate interactions were the effect of her imbuing my silences, the gaps out of which my Spanish was primarily composed, with tremendous intellectual and aesthetic force. And I believe she imbued my body thus, finding every touch enhanced by ambiguity of intention, as if it too required translation, and so each touch branched out, became a variety of touches. Her experience of my body, I thought, was more her experience of her experience of her body, of its symphonic receptivity, ridiculous phrase, and my experience of my body was her experience once removed, which meant my body was dissolved, and that’s all I’d ever really wanted from my body, such as it was.
    Isabel did not own a car but there were apparently several cars to which she had access; weekends during the winter of