Leaving the Atocha Station Read Online Free PDF

asshole, although here I was basically guessing; all I knew was painting was mentioned with some bitterness or regret. Then without a transition or with a transition I missed she was talking about her travels in Europe and then I heard her say New York and college and she paused and as she paused my breath caught because I realized what was coming.
    In fluent English she described how one night she went alone to a movie somewhere in the Village, a boring movie, she couldn’t even remember which, but when she left the movie and was debating whether to take a train or a cab back uptown the full reality of her father’s death, it had been around a year, was suddenly and for the first time upon her, and she began to cry and found a pay phone and called her mother and cried and cried and eventually her calling card ran out and she went and bought another from a kiosk and returned to the phone and called her mother and cried into the phone until the second calling card ran out. She said she often wondered if that pay phone was still there, now that everyone uses cell phones, and then faced me smiling and said that when I was back home in New York I could look for it and if it was still there I could buy a calling card and call her and we could cry together for my mom.

I THOUGHT I HAD MADE IT CLEAR TO ARTURO OVER THE COURSE OF several conversations that I would not read, that I would be happy to come to the reading, but only to listen, not that I’d understand much of what I was hearing, and while I was very flattered that he wanted to attempt translations of my poetry, I was too shy and ambivalent about my “work” in its current state to read with his accompaniment at the gallery. I was embarrassed I’d given in to his repeated requests to see my writing in the first place, writing that I’d photocopied for him out of my notebook, and which I assumed he read with Teresa’s help, as his English was terrible, just a smattering of phrases. But when he picked me up and saw me empty-handed, he told me to hurry and get my poems, that we were already late, and he was so insistent that I found myself running back up the stairs, thinking maybe he just needed to make another copy, and I grabbed my notebook and bag, and then reiterated as we drove toward the gallery that I wasn’t going to read; claro, he kept saying, which means sure.
    It was getting cold; I had somehow never thought Madrid would have a winter, but I was sweating, no doubt visibly, as Arturo greeted and introduced me to the shivering smokers milling around the gallery’s glass doors. I was too nervous to catch the names of the people with whom I exchanged handshakes, but I was aware that my kissing was particularly awkward, that I had kissed one of the women on the corner of her mouth, more on her lips than on her cheek. This was a common occurrence; with a handful of clumsy exceptions when I had met particularly cosmopolitan New Yorkers one kiss on the right cheek, and various relatives when I was a child, I had almost never, prior to my project, kissed a woman with whom I was not romantically involved. I wasn’t exactly sure what would have happened if I’d tried to greet a woman by kissing her in Topeka; certainly her boyfriend would kick in my teeth if she had one, or I would be at risk of becoming her boyfriend if she didn’t. It often occurred to me that my upbringing would have been changed beyond all recognition if kissing had been common; such a dispersion of the erotic into general social circulation would have had unpredictable effects. In Providence I could have gotten away with it, but not without an air of affectation and effeminacy; regardless, I had never thought to try. But in Spain I was guilty of abusing the kissing thing, or of at least investing it with a libidinal charge it wasn’t supposed to contain, and when you were drunk or high and foreign, you could reasonably slip up and catch the corner of the mouth.
    We entered the gallery and I