Leaving the Atocha Station Read Online Free PDF Page A

Montessori, my dad gentle but insistent that I had to leave the car. Then Teresa was playing with my hair, as she’d been playing with Arturo’s, and I looked at her and felt an agitation I could not name. I stood quickly but quietly and left the group, walking farther away from the house and party and into the dark until I reached a wooden fence, the end of the property and the beginning of a downward slope, a few lights far below.
    I no longer felt much of anything as I smoked and looked back toward the group and saw that someone, probably Teresa, was approaching, the ember of her cigarette describing little circles as she walked, the ice audible in her glass as she drew nearer, and I realized with some anxiety that she would expect me to be upset, very moved, that I needed to be so in order to justify my abrupt departure from the others. I turned back toward the fence, licked the tips of my fingers, and rubbed the spit under my eyes to make it look like I’d been crying, repeating this until I felt there would be enough moisture to catch a little light or at least make my face damp to the touch. It was Teresa, humming the song as she approached. When she reached me she asked gently if I were O.K., what was bothering me. Fine, nothing, I said, but in a way I hoped confirmed incommunicable depths had opened up inside me. We stood side by side looking down the slope and because I felt she was waiting for me to say something, I said: This is a difficult time for me. It was a stupid thing to say, but it was the only sentence I could form sufficiently freighted with mystery. Why, she asked, which surprised me, and I tried to calibrate my silence to convey less that I wasn’t comfortable telling her than that the circumstance wasn’t tellable, save maybe by guitar, certainly exceeding my Spanish, if not language in general. Tell me, she said and started to do the thing with my hair again and I thought she could see the wetness on my cheeks and I said, I was shocked to hear myself say: My mother died.
    Poor boy, poor boy, Teresa said, embracing me, and I let my head rest on her shoulder, careful to touch her skin where my face was wet; her skin was warm, almost hot. At first I felt something like accomplishment at my performance and excitement at the contact with her body but this quickly gave way to a sinking feeling as I began to imagine my mom, how she would feel if she knew what I had done, my self-disgust giving way in turn to the fear that somehow this lie would have material effects, would kill her, or at least that, when something did in fact happen to my mother, as happen it must, I would always feel and be at least in part responsible, that whatever she suffered would be traceable in some important sense to this exact moment when I traded her life for the sympathy of an attractive stranger. I began to cry, both arms around Teresa now, real tears falling down her back as she hummed to comfort me, maybe believing me only then. When my tears subsided, we both sat down and looked out over the slope in silence. She lit a cigarette and passed it to me and began to speak.
    She described the death of her father when she was a little girl, or how the death of her father turns her back into a little girl whenever she thinks of it; he had been young when he died but seemed old to her now, or he had been old when he died but in her memories grew younger. She began to quote the clichés people had offered her about what time would do, how he was in a better place, or maybe she was just offering these clichés to me without irony; then she began to talk about how Arturo had taken it, so I guessed he was her brother, about describing heaven to Arturo, how daddy was in heaven, so I guessed that he was younger. The father had been either a famous painter or collector of paintings and she had either become a painter to impress him or quit painting because she couldn’t deal with the pressure of his example or because he was such an