Ever since the international coalition led by the United States through NATO killed Fadhil Ahmad al-Hayali, Islamic State’s second-in-command, the strategy of bombing targeted areas grew, with remarkable results, and so the warplanes with their enormous firepower blew up factories and arms depots, strategic roads, bridges, as well as “safe houses” or the offices of important leaders—sometimes with lodgers, colleagues, and family—which kept the Islamists of Mosul on their toes, changing shelter daily, since so many hits, with such specific targeting of what were supposedly secret locations, could only mean that someone on the inside was betraying them, a thought that plays on the nerves of any organization.
The response was a whole series of Islamist attacks on various European cities. A rifle attack on a gas station on a highway in Germany, which left two dead. A car bomb in a parking lot in Antwerp and three more explosions in Holland. According to reports, the intelligence efforts of the French police had managed to prevent nineteen attacks in just three months. The tragic events at the Bataclan in Paris were a declaration of war on the West and, incidentally, turned ISIS into the best ally of the European Far Right. But because this Madrid attack involved an embassy, it promised to be the most ambitious. That was the general view of the pundits who succeeded one another at a vertiginous rhythm on the current affairs shows on TVE, sometimes refuting, sometimes contradicting each other. They came from all over Europe and throughout the world. It was as if an army of experts, graduates of Harvard and Oxford, specialists in war, had been waiting for this crisis, which for most of them was more than predictable.
I switched off the TV and tried to read, but it was impossible. The wait was proving to be unbearable. Then I heard knocking at the door and my heart skipped a beat. Could it be her? I went slowly to the door and looked through the peephole. I saw a chambermaid, standing by a cart filled with bags of clothes, holding a hook in her hand.
“Yes?” I said.
“Laundry service, señor, your shirt is ready.”
I opened the door, what shirt? The woman checked her slip and said, oh, I’m sorry. It’s for 721.
Again, night was falling, and the noise of the city had increased.
Cities, like jungles, echo when night falls. It’s the moment when the animals come out of their caves and go on the prowl. They look for food and mates, which, collectively, produces a great din. That’s what Madrid was like when I decided to leave the hotel, louder, noisier. People walking along yelling into their phones, fixing dates, announcing visits. I watched that hullaballoo without feeling part of it, but eventually a certain nostalgia for my life in Spain prevailed. I thought I might go to the Cervecería Alemana on Plaza de Santa Ana.
As I headed in that direction, what I’d been dreading happened: every corner from Carrera de San Jerónimo all the way to Puerta del Sol, and then Calle Espoz y Mina, which thirty years ago was a sinister place, brought with it a whole series of images, of distant memories. On Plaza del Ángel I saw the Café Central and felt a stab in the pit of my stomach. I had been living in Delhi when I read the news of the death of Antonio Vega, the singer from the group Nacha Pop, which I’d heard so many times in that Café Central, although not strictly speaking in the bar itself, but from the balcony of the building opposite, where I spent a season. A slate board on the sidewalk would announce: “Today—Nacha Pop,” written in white chalk.
Then I reached Plaza de Santa Ana by the corner of the Hotel Reina Victoria, which I never entered and whose windows I was in the habit of looking at, three decades ago, when I would go with my Argentinian friends to sell leather masks on that same square. In those days, selling on the streets wasn’t prohibited. I would look at the windows of the Reina Victoria and imagine scenes of sophisticated, seductive women, with long legs, in front of their mirrors, washing themselves, or stepping out of the shower wrapped in fluffy white towels and getting dressed very slowly before going out to dinner in some exclusive spot in Madrid.
Despite the crisis and the embassy siege, there were streams of people on the streets, an incredible hustle and bustle. Hadn’t the pundits said that people were nervous? The Spanish tend to overdo things, and when all is said and done, Madrid is one big bar. It’s many other things, of course: a huge bookstore, an enormous boxing ring. A call center, too. Everyone was carrying a cell phone glued to their ear, shouting away.
“You’ve got a lot of nerve, you bitch!”
“Where are you? I don’t see you!!”
“ . . . no, but listen, now she comes and tells me that I have to tell Lucía, and why the hell should I tell Lucía? and then she goes and dumps me . . . ”
Yelling into that sacrosanct piece of equipment seemed to be the great national pastime, maybe to keep silence at bay at all costs; as if falling silent endangered their lives and was seen as a kind of surrender; as if forcing your foolish chatter on other people was a new human right. Was silence outdated, démodé?
Suddenly, from high up, a powerful spotlight swept quickly over the square. It was the helicopter again. The problem hadn’t gone away! But the people around me seemed absorbed in other dilemmas, in the demanding effort to have a good time and forget what didn’t matter.
I was lucky to find one of the few outside tables of the Cervecería Alemana free, and I sat down and continued looking at the Hotel Reina Victoria with its purple lights. I ordered a beer, a portion of calamari, and another of tortilla. Then another beer, and a third. The food in Madrid is delicious and the body puts on a special effort to make room for it. Ah, the flavors! The adolescent who had lived here three decades ago asked, through me, for a shot of whiskey and another beer. The waiter, sweating, repeated the order:
“A beer, a shot of JB, and another portion of calamari.”
Spain, Spain.
“And one of croquettes!”
This last cry seemed to come from a long time ago, from the days of the Café Comercial on Glorieta de Bilbao. Although the bar I most frequented in my youth was the Blanca Doble, on Calle Santísima Trinidad, in the Chamberí district. It was opposite that bar, at number 9 of that street, that I lived for five years, all the time I was at the university. I shared an apartment with the young poet—now dead by his own hand—Miguel Ángel Velasco.
The JB and the beer arrived. And with them, more memories. Some happy, some sad. Others simply very sad, with that strange sadness that’s a mixture of nostalgia and an awareness that you can never go back. Thinking about my neighbor—and, in those years, also brother—the poet Miguel Ángel Velasco, my mind made another leap: now I was in Barcelona, in September 2011.
More than just remembering, I saw what happened that day as if on a Moviola:
I’m strolling amid the shelves of the Central Bookstore, I stop, read the spine of one book, open another, check the alphabetical order. I’m looking for two things: the complete poems of José María Panero, and Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Pirsig. I’m doing this, skimming over titles, when something on the table where the new books are draws my attention: La muerte una vez más, by Miguel Ángel Velasco. I open it to look at the photograph on the flap, that face of his that was always so theatrical. Then the biographical information, but as I read it I feel dizzy and the bookshop starts to spin around me. The text begins by saying:
“The untimely death of Miguel Ángel Velasco on October 1, 2010, at the age of 47, moved both the world of poetry and . . . ”
“Another beer with a shot of JB,” I tell the waiter.
“Something else to eat?”
“No, just the drinks.”
“Coming right up.”
I was moved to tears again, and made a leap to another date: now it’s September 18, 1985, when I landed for the first time in Madrid. I was nineteen. More than anything else in the world, I longed to write novels, and the only thing that would keep me close to them, or so I thought, was to study something like Hispanic Philology. Looking for a place to live, I came across an ad in the newspaper Segunda Mano that said: “Double room in shared apartment for rent.” It was at 9, Calle Santísima Trinidad and I set off to look at it. It was a furnished apartment on the fourth floor, with two adjoining rooms and a balcony overlooking the street. No telephone. The price was good and the location was perfect, so I decided to take it. The owner, an old lady from La Rioja named Visitación Isazi, told me: “The other young man who lives here is a poet from Palma de Mallorca, you’ll get along well.”
That same night I met him.
He swept in like a hurricane, knocked at my door, introduced himself, and asked if I had heard his telephone ringing (he had one). I told him I had, several times. Being a native of the very provincial city of Bogotá (“a young man pure of heart, recently arrived from the provinces”), I had never seen anybody like him: long curly hair, riding boots, a pink pirate shirt open to the chest, necklaces, rings, bracelets. He entered his part of the apartment (also two adjoining rooms, larger and more comfortable than mine, with decor that looked like something from a film by Alex de la Iglesias) and immediately, through a sealed door between our respective sitting rooms, I heard him say on the telephone:
“In that case, I’m going to celebrate!”
Then, in a state of euphoria, he called various people:
“I won the Ciudad de Melilla Prize! A million pesetas!”
Later, friends started to arrive and again he knocked at my door:
“Come celebrate with us,” he said, “I’ve just been given a prize.”
I didn’t dare ask him what the prize was for, but I could imagine.
From that day on, Miguel was my constant companion. He got me to read Spanish poetry. I met his entourage, above all Agustín García Calvo and the poet Isabel Escudero (I still remember a line of hers: “Death, come take away the thought of death”). I read Rilke, whom he worshipped, and Borges, whom he could recite like nobody else. With him, I confirmed my taste for Rimbaud, Baudelaire, Heine, the sonnets of Shakespeare.
Although Miguel didn’t read novels, I lent him One Hundred Years of Solitude and he read it in a single night. The following day he said:
“It’s one long poem.”
Sometimes he would wake me early in the morning to read me something he had just written, or we would read aloud Edgar Allan Poe stories by candlelight, drinking vodka with coconut liqueur that his grandmother’s boyfriend gave him. When I read Sophie’s Choice by William Styron, it seemed familiar to me: the relationship between the young southerner recently arrived in Brooklyn and the lovable madman named Nathan.
Like me, Miguel was living far from his family, so we spent Christmas and New Year together, in bars, drinking and reciting. Thanks to his aristocratic manners and his long hair, he was incredibly successful with women. We conceived a thousand crazy projects, like one to learn Latin so that we’d gain more respect in bars. We drank, we read, we visited brothels, we listened to classical music on his portable record player, we got all excited over Butragueño’s goals for Real Madrid (him) and Baltazar’s goals for Atlético de Madrid (me), we exhausted the city by night, the whole of it, thousands of times.
Overcoming my shyness, I read him my first stories, and much to my surprise he approved of them. And in those years I was the first to read everything he wrote. I’ve never again known anybody so convinced of his own genius.
Sometimes he would say:
“Listen to this, you have good taste, you’ll appreciate it,” and he would read me his latest poem.
A modest publication of his called Pericoloso sporgersi dates from those years, but I was particularly enthusiastic about his early books, especially Las berlinas del sueño, for which he was awarded the Adonais Prize at the age of eighteen. He was twenty-three now, and death was his great theme, his lover, his obsession.
We shared the old apartment for five years, until Visichu’s grandchildren threw us out in order to refurbish it and get a higher rent. Then I went to Paris and we lost touch with each other, as people did in those days, before e-mail and social networks.
We met a few times by chance, here and there, but never with the same intensity as in our crazy youth. That was only natural. He died while I was living in India and I didn’t even know. Then the poet Luis García Montero confirmed to me that he had committed suicide.
“He got out of the way,” Luis said.
“Excuse me, another shot of JB, please.”
“And another beer?”
“No, thanks. Just the whiskey.”
In spite of everything, I told myself, Miguel achieved his goal: to leave an oeuvre behind him and to melt into death, as in that poem by Emerson that he loved and we so often repeated together:
When me they fly, I am the wings;
I am the doubter and the doubt,
And I the hymn the Brahmin sings.
Suddenly a group of quite angry young people passed by. One of them said:
“Fuck it, they cut someone else’s throat!”
“Seriously? Someone else?”
“Yes, man, have a look . . . ”
They walked up toward the Teatro Español. One of them was showing the others something on his smartphone, but then they laughed.
Over there on Paseo de la Castellana the siege was following its course, but the JB was having its effect and starting to take me to other places, distant in time, like a submarine that closes its hatches and dives down into the waters. But the dive stopped abruptly when at the table next to mine a woman yelled at the man who was with her:
“How can you say that, you son of a bitch?”
Reality had imposed itself again: the shouting, the brazenness of the communicating masses. It struck me that the best thing I could do was get out of here, go back to the hotel, and stay there until Juana showed up.
The man was older than the woman: maybe about forty-five, although well-preserved and athletic. I could only see him from the back. He was wearing one of those tweed jackets that lend a vaguely intellectual air, but his narcissism was evident in the kerchief around his neck. Maybe he was a bit older, fiftysomething. Seeing them together, I got the impression they were lovers.
“After all the fucking lies you’ve told me!”
I could see her from the front. Her beautiful dark eyes were spitting fire, and I sensed that she might start crying at any moment. I would have sworn she was Colombian. Her muscles tightened and she continued saying things to him, but in a low voice now, as if she’d suddenly realized she wasn’t in her own home. But then she raised her voice again:
“You pig! You disgust me!”
The man was American, with a red neck and fair hair that was already graying a little. In his right hand he was holding a glass of something yellow that I assumed was whiskey. He was looking nervously around him, fearful of the other customers’ reactions, but without losing his composure. Even from behind, I was aware of his efforts to remain calm, and I calculated that he wouldn’t be able to do so for much longer.
“I thought you were a good man, not a fucking pig!”
I imagined them a little while later, making violent love in some hotel or in the backseat of his car.
There are couples for whom arguing is the only valid way to get to a certain kind of brutal, satisfying sex. Later, he would go back to his wife, and she would sleep alone and hopeful.
“You’re not even ashamed of yourself . . . ”
Her anger was starting to weaken. I imagined that the first night, when he seduced her at some business party and penetrated her standing up, in some empty office or in a third-floor bathroom with a view of the parking lot, he had told her he was separated, but then, a few days later, he’d had to explain that he was still living with his wife for the sake of the children.
Instead of calming down, she took a deep breath and started shouting again.
“You fucking coward! You pig!”
The man was scratching something behind his ear. He asked her to moderate her tone. His reserves of calm seemed to have reached their limit. He spoke very good Spanish and I assumed she must be a student of his, of course. Young women often confuse love with admiration. Yes. She was a girl in love with her teacher. At any second, I thought she was going to burst into tears. Suddenly she looked for something in her bag, nervously; she took out a glasses case and a pack of Kleenex. Finally she found it: a little box from which she extracted a brooch that, at least from where I was sitting, looked quite glossy and expensive. Gold, maybe, with a jewel mounted in it.
“I’m giving you back this crap, I don’t want it!”
The brooch ricocheted and fell to the ground. He bent down to pick it up and put it back on the table, still without saying anything.
“You filthy fucking pig! Give it to your wife!”
His calm needle was already moving into the red. Then he put his glass of whiskey down on the coaster, flexed the fingers of his right hand several times, as if testing them, and gave the young woman a slap. She wasn’t able to dodge it in time, and the impact propelled her against the back of the chair and the window.
“You son of a bitch! You coward!”
Once she had recovered she grabbed a glass that contained the remains of what might have been a Cuba Libre, and flung it in his face. The man grabbed a napkin, wiped his forehead and cheeks; he even took advantage to wipe behind his ears. In a flash he hit her again, this time with his fist closed. Then he grabbed her by the neck, pulled her over the table, and landed her another punch.
“That’ll teach you to behave yourself!”
The man’s voice was strong, his breathing heavy. When the girl recovered and made to speak, the man’s fist again collided with her jaw. Twice, three times, until she started to bleed.
“I don’t want you to open that fucking mouth again, you want to go back to the jungle?”
He punched her a fifth time, on the eyebrow, and she started crying.
Nobody apart from me seemed to be following the fight. Now the man’s neck was redder than ever. He hadn’t finished. He loosened his tie completely, grabbed her by the dress, and resumed hitting her on her left eye, which was already starting to become inflamed.
I left my shot glass on the table and stood up. The man looked at me in surprise.
“That’s enough,” I said.
He looked at her and let out a laugh.
“And who’s this gallant knight, come to protect the damsel? Maybe you want to fuck her? Sure, that’s easy enough.”
“You son of a bitch!” she cried.
He stopped looking at me and gave her another punch in the face. I would have sworn he broke a tooth or her nose.
I put a hand on his arm and said:
“Listen, at least pick on someone your own size.”
He stood up like a shot, and seeing him on his feet I realized that he meant business.
He kicked me in the groin and when I doubled up in pain he landed me a punch to the jaw that made me fall backwards. When I was on the ground, he came and gave me more kicks. I tried to shield myself. At last I was able to stand, but when I turned more punches rained down on me. How many arms did he have? My nose started bleeding. I hadn’t been in a fight since I was a teenager. Why had nobody come to separate us? We were out on the street! Instead, people were just watching. Maybe there was an unwritten rule to avoid sticking your nose into other people’s business.
I launched a punch, but it fell short and I felt a yanking in my collarbone. Then I received another couple of blows that opened my left eyebrow. I also noticed that something didn’t feel right between my ribs and I thought, okay, that’s it, it’s time to stop this, but when I tried to move away the guy grabbed me by the neck and knocked my head against the wooden buffet that the waiters took the cutlery and napkins from.
Then came more blows to the face.
My nose made a sharp noise, but I didn’t have time to analyze it because more blows hit my eyebrows. My mouth filled with blood. My cheeks were bruised, my left eye practically closed, and the right wasn’t too good. The eyelid was broken.
I thought it was going to end there, but the man hadn’t finished. Far from it. Like a tiger, he leapt on me and tried with all his strength to choke me, as if determined to finish the job. I attempted to push him off, but he was strong and he was beside himself with anger. I was finding it difficult to breathe, since the blood was running into my broken septum. Desperately, I held out my arms. A reflex gesture, I suppose, caused by the asphyxia, until I touched and grabbed something solid: it was a big glass ashtray. I lifted it and, with my last strength, brought it down behind me, more or less blindly. Once, twice. Suddenly the pressure on my neck stopped and the man rolled to one side, lifeless. Falling to the ground, I was able to see him: he had a huge gash on his forehead and his eyes were blank. I heard screams. A siren.
I got up as best I could, gushing blood, and groped my way to my table. Before reaching it, a shadowy figure moved toward me. It was the girl who was with him. I didn’t even see that she had picked up a stool and was aiming it with all her strength at my head.