Reading the works of Roberto Bolaño is a bit like hitchhiking in some godforsaken frontier territory. You stick out your thumb and wait. A semi zooms by, air-horn blasting, abandoning you to the dusty whirlwind of its wake and a brief glimpse of its NRA sticker and the inevitable Semper Fi crookedly plastered to the bumper. One minivan, two SUVs, an RV, a camper—they all pass you by. It’s rough country out here; you could be anyone. You could be Dick and Perry, looking for some middle-aged traveling salesman with a wallet full of fives and a tank full of gas and feeling in need of a little friendly chitchat in the middle of Kansas. Someone gives you the finger as you’re left behind to face darkness and uncertainty. The sky’s grown dark; the owls have come out to haunt. Headlights round the distant bend. Then an old pickup, unworthy of safety inspection, creaks to a halt. A model you haven’t seen in years. The driver turns his gaptoothed grin on you, a smile reeking of cheap brandy, his skin bleeding meth. He lights a Camel and starts to talk, or rather continues to talk, because he’d been talking when you opened the door, and even when you expressed your gratitude for his stopping, as if he were telling a story he’d begun days or weeks or even months earlier, but you’re in the midst of it, he’s telling about this guy he’d met at a bar, and this woman he knew, and some weird things were happening, man, there was a knife and an armadillo, and you don’t know if you’ll ever reach your destination or be murdered by this man who won’t shut up, who is telling four stories at once, and nothing’s making much sense.

I was recently engaged in a conversation that ended with the phrase, “The difference between us, Doug, is that I am a man of faith and you have no faith.” It was delivered with shrugged shoulders, a slightly tilted head and the nervous hint of a smile. It was not mean-spirited, just a declaration, yet it seemed to carry the impress of righteousness. I found it a curious thing, this conversation-stopping declaration. But I am getting ahead of myself.

There is a pizzeria in Pokhara, Nepal, called unimaginatively, Pizzeria and Jazz Club. It sports long wooden tables and outdoor dining and is a great place to watch people. It is a refuge for the traveler, a place where acceptable pizza is served and pints of ice-cold Everest beer can be consumed with complete abandon. A handful of fellow travelers and I, hungry for something other than the Nepalese cuisine we dubbed Goat Knuckle Curry, were settling down to serious eating, American style, when the conversation turned, first to history, then writers of history, then Josephus specifically, the first century historian of the Roman empire. In that context, my friend Neal brought up the Gospels.“You are aware that Josephus mentioned Jesus twice?” I said, looking over my beer at Neal. “Once in reference to his brother and the second time to his career as King of the Jews, though the second reference is probably not authentic.”

“James. His brother was James,” he replied. He peered back at me. Neal was a religious man. It was not an overt attribute. He was not doctrinaire, but having known him for several years, I’d observed his faith on occasion as it was released into the atmosphere. He was, as he would later in the evening declare, A Follower of Jesus. I, on the other hand, was not a follower of anything so much as my own mercurial whim, but he did not know this definitively, though I think he had a hunch.

It has been my experience that a conversation such as this progresses in one of two fashions. It either falls into stark partisanship: You are going to hell and I am not. Or, it becomes a tactful dance through a mine field. One either suits up for war or puts on dancing shoes. There is not much middle ground.
“Neal,” I said. “I learned Hellenistic Greek as an undergrad in order to read the Gospels in the original.” Although this sounds like stark braggadocio, that was not my motive. Rather, I offered it up as a warning to a friend: We have a decision to make before we go further. Do we war? Or do we dance? I am prepared for either. This is what one does with friends. We reveal. I left it up to him, which is my usual course in such matters.

“Wow, cool. Greek–that’s really something,” he said. We were going to dance. Let the orchestra tune up, I recall thinking.

We consumed vast quantities of Everest beer and pizza. The evening was warm and the company good–though an abundance of flies spent the evening repelling down the neck of my beer bottle. Despite the name, “Pizzeria and Jazz Club,” there was no jazz club, unless you count the CD player trumpeting elevator music from the kitchen nook. For some, travel is one of life’s basic pleasures. Eating can be another. Warm evenings with friends and good conversation yet another–preferably, for me, conversation with weight and laden with ideas. Ideas can be as tangible and enjoyable as mozzarella melted in sweet tomato sauce, and they last longer. It is something altogether different–enlightenment-like, even–when it all converges, when the universe is queued up to deliver a semblance of harmony and order, when food and friends and energy and spirit combine. Before you are aware of it you are brushing star dust off your shoulders. It’s the sort of experience that takes my edge off and puts me at ease. Such moments set me to thinking that I can be a reasonable and perhaps even decent human being. I am, though, usually disabused of the notion soon enough.

We danced, Neal and I. The Q document? Yes, he knew the theory. No, I was not familiar with C.S. Lewis’s writings beyond Narnia, nor did I care. For me original texts matter, not metaphysics. Yes, he acknowledged knowledge of the absence of a virgin birth and resurrection in the original texts. And yes, I acknowledged the attributes of the righteous. And so on. As the evening worn on, undoubtedly more chips were stacking on my side of the table. If we had been playing poker, he was losing. And it was all so polite.  Occasionally, his wife leaned into the conversation with an odd and wrong-headed comment, something typically dismissive about evolution or some far-fetched eschatology crazy talk. But she seemed tentative and uneasy on our turf and backed off soon enough. As the evening wound down, so did we.

There are two things about that conversation I found particularly interesting. I mentioned one, the conversation stopper: the line of faith and those on one side of it and those on the other. The second is the implication of faith and what it means to what I call the infinity of ideas.

The meal completed, our entourage walked into the night. The mountains were silhouetted over our shoulder. Neal and I shuffled along as we finished up, each of us attempting to put a nice tight bow on our argument. Our friends trailed behind in various states of inebriation. Finally, he turned to me. “I sense, Doug, that you are a seeker,” he said. “I believe you will eventually find what you are seeking.” I have heard this before. I find that people who think they can discern a thing as subtile as the intent of my motivation irritating. I frankly can’t do that myself most of the time.  It was the only annoying thing he’d said all night and it squarely pissed me off. He delivered his pronouncement as if he had secret knowledge; that in spite of everything I had said, in spite of loosing the argument of the table, he was informed that I would eventually find my way onto his turf.

“No, Neal. I am not a seeker,” I said, suppressing my umbrage. “I am a curious man. They are not the same thing. The curious believe in the infinity of ideas. Conversely, the seeker longs for the end of ideas.” I don’t know where it came from, but it resonated of truth, so I continued. “The man of faith is a seeker who has set aside his curiosity, assuming he ever had it. He believes in the end of ideas, that ideas stop and something else picks up, faith. He seeks this end, and when that happens everything is different. It all changes once faith is discovered. That is you.” I can’t recall any particular profound ideas I’ve had in the past. My mind too often is shallow and barren, this one exception not withstanding. I pondered what I had declared: That ideas are infinite and that faith renders them otherwise. The thought was intriguing. “I will not accept the end of curiosity,” I declared, “even if faith were compelling, which it is not. That is me.”

Neal looked at me. It was dark and I couldn’t see his features well. I thought I had  offended him. He is an intelligent and well-read man, an experienced traveler. I had accused him of lacking curiosity and perhaps being devoid of ideas. He didn’t respond. I don’t know if I upset and offended him or if I had spoken a profound truth that he could not dismiss. Perhaps both. That was when he delivered the demarcation, despite my pronouncement: he had faith, I did not. And that settles it. Of course he was right, that is, correct in his assessment. We departed into the night. All was fine the next morning. We breakfasted in the shadow of Annapurna, though the mountain, ironically, soon grew shrouded in mist.

I should point out that I, to Descartes’ observation, do not have an “adequate idea” of the meaning of the infinite. Nor am I trained to figure it out. I’m not a philosopher, not a physicist, nor a mathematician, nor an astronomer. Nor am I a theologian who can knowledgeably discuss faith, though at one time I fancied myself a pilgrim on that path. I am just a simple man who struggles to plum the shallows of my being. I fall back on analogy and metaphor rather than critical thinking for that which I most seek: clarity. But I am a cynic. For instance, I look at my dog and see faith in her eyes, though that is a banality. I peer into the night sky and discern infinity, though I know that to be a simple romantic notion. So what am I (avoiding the loaded question, Who am I?) and what’s one to make of the notion that faith is at odds with curiosity? If ideas are infinite, can faith, and its implied limitations, be defended in the universe of ideas? I don’t know, but again I find the question intriguing–and that alone is worth something to me. Something important.

A few days later our group stumbled into a village ceremony which included animal sacrifice. A guide told me that, though outlawed, in some parts of Nepal and India even child sacrifice is still practiced. I obviously have no idea if this is true. He showed me a small tattoo, more like a blemish, on his leg. This, he declared, “is the tattoo my parents gave me at birth to avoid me being kidnapped for sacrifice. Only perfect babies are sacrificed.” In this village a goat and a chicken had already been killed. Their headless carcasses where pushed up against the wall. A wild-eyed black calf was being led to the bloody stone before the alter and a lamb was waiting in the offing. The lamb was calm and quiet in its ignorance. Neal’s wife, as if still attempting to make her point, said to me, “If only they knew the lamb of God made all this unnecessary.”  I had to turn away before the calf was slaughtered. I cannot stand to see animals in pain.

Henry James said of the novel that its only obligation was to be interesting. It is the interesting that sustains the life flame, though our tendency is to settle for and accept the uninteresting, as if it were inevitable–an idea I firmly resist. We put down the difficult novel. We switch channels and grow easily bored. We tragically disengage from the vapid life. Curiosity evaporates and can even disappear from memory. In Buddhist philosophy Effort is the fourth paramita, after Generosity, Self-discipline and Patience. In this context effort is a virtue. (The late novelist Roberto Bolaño wrote that virtue lives in a dark cave, “amid cave dwellers, some dangerous indeed.”)  I like to think that the effort to maintain curiosity is its own reward. It fulfills the obligation of the life-novel project to be interesting. (I am making the assumption of a life-novel and not a life-short story, essay or poem.) As you see, no critical path for me. I easily slip into the stream of analogy, not generating a ripple. It is at once a weakness and a strength I simultaneously possess.

So is that it? Is anything settled? Or rather have I simply cooked up a stew of curiosity, faith, ideas and infinity, a meditation without the requisite singled-minded concentration, a melody without resolution? I am comfortable with the unsettled nature of things. And that is the lesson for me, teased out amongst all this rambling–calmness amongst the unsettled. I think that is more akin to what life is in truth–maybe even Truth. In tonal music there is a need, in theory, to resolve from dissonance. The ear longs to move from dissonance to consonance. As moderns our ears have evolved to accept something other than harmonic resolution. The debut of Stravinsky’s Le Sacre du Printemps famously broke out in riot at its 1913 premier, it was so foreign and discordant. (Does the unsettled nature of music resolve to violence? Does dissonance somehow explain why we war?) Today we find nothing unusual in a listening to Stravinsky, so conditioned we have become to that which was previously cacophonous. Yet, for some, the longing for resolution is deeply ingrained. I put faith in this context–faith as a longing for resolution. This is not to be mistaken for wishful thinking. Resolution solves something. It makes us feel better for starters, putting an end to that which was disturbing. But wishful thinking can only hope–it is transitive at best. Regardless, longing for resolution does not make finding it, if it is to be found, truth or Truth or even a convenient necessity. Nor does it make it wrong. Nietzsche said that “Every true faith is infallible, it accomplishes what the person holding the faith hopes to find in it.”

I have a friend who many years ago lost a child. She asked me if I believe in an afterlife. Compassion dictated that she hear I believe and that is how I answered her. But a gentle agnosticism is what allowed me to answer her as she needed. An idea that will not be extinguished, no matter how contested and to what length, should perhaps not be dismissed out of hand. Long-standing ideas, even possibly wrong-headed ones, deserve at minimum a curious respect, if not honest inquiry. Curiosity gives ground. Almost everything else, in my experience, takes it. (That is not so iconoclastic of me, I notice.) The metaphysical is the playground of fast and loose thought and one might occasionally want to speed down the slide in that playground, enjoying the rush. But it is not a place to spend purposeful time. Life and death more often warrant a spirit of playfulness than I think we can understand, but finally the devices of the playground cease to resolve an honest inquiry. The imperative for elegance is found in nature and it is, ironically, a brutal simplicity–further it can only be discovered from an origin placed in curiosity. Auden said “To ask the hard question is simple.” The balance of nature finds life at the fulcrum. In the frenetic quest for stability faith moves the fulcrum. That will ultimately, I think, disorient. Curiosity puts it again, square and center.

The message read Feliz Navidad Guapisimo!

Spaniards toss around the word guapo/a as if it were a definite article, but the extra oomph given to any noun with -isimo/a is not to be taken lightly and should be considered serious flirtation.

The number had no name attached to it, but I assumed it was from a girl, as most men don’t call other men guapisimo unless they’re gay or being facetious.

I had just gotten through customs at Madrid’s Barajas airport on New Year’s Eve and turned on my phone.

Without even considering who it could be, I replied Feliz Año Nuevo Guapisima! in spite of my disdain for exclamation points.

Fortune and the year 2007 seemed certain.

Emerging from the metro near my home, a reply came back from the same unrecognized number. It read, Pasalo genial esta noche. Nos vemos en clase, which meant she was a student of mine and I would find out within the week who it was.

Her name turned out to be Itziar (pronounced eat-SEE-are). I love uncommon names, the rarer the better and this one topped the list of exotic names. To boot, she was easily the most physically fit and attractive one at a company of about 100 women where I taught her in class. I had even made the conscious decision at the beginning of the 2006 school year to continue teaching at that company merely to be around her.

The following Friday evening I texted her a question about salsa dancing and if she knew where classes were offered. After a few back-n-forth messages, she finally sent me this bomb: I know that in Tropical House they give classes, I don’t know which day exactly. I can offer myself as a partner but what I would really like is to know if you’re doing anything this evening because you seem like a very interesting person and I would like to get to know you better and, if we end up dancing, all the better…

My pupils widened and blood rushed to my genitals. I almost dropped the phone.

I immediately canceled my other plans that evening and was over at her house within 2 hours.

She opened the door; the dream began.

She was wearing tight-yet-comfortable sweatpants and a tank top that revealed about four inches of tight skin covering muscled indentations. Her face was uncomplicated by paint and highlights. Despite her Basque name, she grew up in the Andalusian town of Malaga and appeared somewhere outside the realm of the guide book Spanish woman. That is, her hair was light brown and not raven black; her eyes were bluish-green instead of brown and her skin leaned toward a paler shade of olive. Her twenty-eight year old face maintained a simple contentment, unwrinkled by fixed expressions. She spoke very softly.

She gave me the tour of her flat, explaining that her roommate was out of town for the weekend and she had the flat all to herself.

She looked at me smiled.

Blood rushed to my face, and my genitals. I smiled and looked away.

She cooked while we talked. I kept averting extended looks, wondering to myself what I was doing in her flat. I tried to act natural and not acknowledge the fact that she revealed a midriff that sparkled a belly button ring highlighting abs that she probably spent several hours a week on. Her breasts were magazine perfect.

I understood that she was my student and this was completely outside the professional boundaries that were established by my language academy. But damn, it felt oh-so-right to be there and notions of boundaries quickly vanished in the reflection of her ab ring.

We listened to Nina Simone and ate from a full spread of tortilla, salmon and brie, croquetas and a spinach salad, washed down with a Reserva Tinto from Rioja from 1996. Good year.

Quieres salir para bailar?

Sí, bueno, si quieres.

Me visto y nos vamos – vale?

Vale.

I offered to wash up the dishes while she got ready but she insisted there was no way I was doing her dishes, that I was her guest and I should just sit down on the sofa, relax and wait. I agreed.

In the living room I perused her copy of Los Detectives Salvajes. (The Savage Detectives)

I looked at the ceiling. A huge concave indentation, like a inverted golden saucer being sucked into the upper floor, decorated the room, gave it a retro-Roman dome feel.

I took out my camera and pushed a button.

I intended to snap a shot of her sometime that evening but opportunity and memory failed me.

She came out of her room wearing knee-high glossy boots, the same tank top and suspenders.

Women in boots always look definitely serious and unarguably sexual, but suspenders? Never had suspenders looked so alluring.

On the street, she suggested going to this club called 69 petalos. I agreed. In the club, every guy in the club looked at her, then at me. I felt somehow unworthy and worthy. The shy part felt like she was way out of my league and the arrogant part felt like, “Wait a sec…that’s right, I’m the man.” We danced to some 80s classics for about an hour and she suggested that we go. I agreed.

I agreed to everything she suggested that night: dinner, dancing, not washing her dishes and sharing her single bed overnight.

I awoke early and in the morning sunlight that layered her half-covered naked body, I saw an inch-long faint-but-noticeable scar on the lower part of her breast. As I dressed I could see a picture of her topless on a beach with breasts that weren’t nearly as round as the ones that were now attached so perfectly attached to her body.

One and one made two.

I realized I had left my scarf and, in an attempt to be poetic and romantic all at once, I sent a message to the effect of: I dreamed last night that a beautiful woman made me dinner, we went dancing and then had a wonderful night in the dark. When I awoke, I realized my scarf was missing.

She replied immediately saying that, yes, last night was something special and she would give me the scarf the next time we met, which she wanted to be that same night.

The next week in class I was a nervous, stammering twat. The class was comprised of six women and the lights in the meeting/class room were piercing and relentless. After class via text, she asked me if I was okay giving her class, if I felt comfortable. I lied and told her yes; the truth was I had never experienced such a high heart rate and self-consciousness while giving classes.

Having a student as a lover, especially a secretive one, was exhilarating because it was partially wrong,  nerve-wracking because it was partially right and twat-inducing because of its secrecy.

Several weeks passed and this formula repeated: dinner, movie, sex and sleep. Conversation between us wasn’t exactly as electrifying as the sex, and thus it wasn’t explored or developed. What we did talk about didn’t move very far beyond our days (her pilates class or the progress of what I was writing), the movie we just watched, or our separate and joint plans for the weekend.

To negligibly greater or lesser degrees, this is probably the composite whole of too many relationships throughout the world.

After about four weeks, she came over and wrote on the whiteboard in my living room.

Te quiero mucho que la trucha al trucho!!

This Spanish saying doesn’t rhyme in English because we don’t have gendered nouns, but it basically says, “I love you very much like the female trout to the male trout.”

Several Spaniards told me this is something a mother would say to her baby, that it’s cute because mucho rhymes with trucho and that I shouldn’t put too much stock in it, i.e. she’s not declaring love, just being cute.

But just to see the words “Te quiero mucho…” forced me to evaluate her as more than just a lover, the potential one (or one of the ones) or even just a consistent girlfriend — part of the idyllic Spanish life I had wanted since arriving.

Other hints, notes and pet names appeared. “Mi amor…” , “Cielo” and more. She even once offered to marry me in order to get me papers. I doubted she was serious at the time, but it surely drew me further into her.

In some email early in March I mentioned that I had changed my mind about wanting to wait until the weekend to see her. I wrote …cambie de mente…which I thought was how you’d say I changed my mind.

She replied, slyly correcting me with Has cambiado de idea? Vale.

You learn the details of a language like this, with subtle corrections.

So on my ever growing stack of flashcards, I wrote down the proper translation of the expression, “to change one’s mind.”

In Spanish, to change one’s mind is to change one’s idea (literally).

It makes no intuitive sense and the more you think about it, neither does it in English. It just sounds natural to you because you’ve always said it that way. If I could have any real influence in how this should be said, I would propose that everyone says change one’s opinion, because this is precisely what happens.

You hold an opinion of someone or something and then it–not your mind–changes for reasons either external, internal or both.

One week later on Sunday evening I messaged her that I didn’t feel well and that we should get together later in the week.

She didn’t reply.

I called her.

She didn’t answer.

I called her an hour later.

Same result.

I messaged and called her the next day as well.

No reply.

She didn’t come to class on Tuesday.

I emailed her and after a full week, she replied.

In an email that consisted of five sentences, she told me she needed time to think and that she would call me the following day.

No call.

Two weeks later, after I had pleaded for some sort of explanation to the silence, she finally took the time out to write me a ten sentence email.

How generous.

She said that she had been a coward in facing me, that she was a very closed person and she had built up walls to protect herself, that she felt like she needed to be alone and that blah blah it’s-not-your-fault-it’s-mine blah.

A few times over the course of the next four months I saw her fleetingly in the company where I taught. Twice she walked by and our eyes met just before one of us disappeared into another room.

I once walked past her at the copier and felt nervous, resentful blood rushing all over.

The dream disappeared with her change of mind, shortly after she corrected me on how to say it properly.

If it weren’t for a picture of her ceiling, two of my friends that met her briefly and this damn flashcard…

I wouldn’t have any proof as to her existence.

I try not to see the irony in it, but it’s too obvious.

I wrote this particular saying down because of her correcting me and it precisely and concisely describes her final action regarding me.

What an unforgettable way to learn an idiomatic expression.

Now, a year later, I realize how lucky I am to have never liked fake breasts.

The subway train slows into the station and smoothes to a soft, comfortable stop.

It’s the fourth stop on my five-stop ride.

There are no seats available and I find myself standing directly opposite the set of entrance/exit doors.

Doors open, several people exit.

In the wake of their exit stands a rugged-looking hombre in his early 40s, holding a tall-boy of Mahoua Classica in one hand–the Madrileña king of beers–and a cigarette in the other. His dark green trenchcoat is bedraggled and frayed; his well-worn jeans end to reveal a pair of once-white tennis shoes that look like they were soaked for days in asparagus-alimented piss.

At his feet lies an old typewriter.