The Prologue
Creating shelter
While also being sheltered
Gathered around a table
Those seated form a unit.
Friday
The Day After
Looking at her reading quietly and seated on the yellow couch across from him
he read out loud from the book
with emphasis and out of context
“…hot and dry as your mouth; and it blew heavily; hot and dirtily; and it rose and died away with the fortunes of the day.”
Putting the book down
Getting up from his chair
Feeling smug and full of himself
As if he was the author.
She looked up at him briefly
Then continued reading without reaction.
He decided then that, like in Madrid,
he would dress ‘scholarly’ on their trip to the bookstore.
Like in Madrid, no one will know who he is. Hidden from within the disguise.
He decided to read For Whom the Bell Tolls in advance of their trip to Spain. He hoped to finish it before they left. He had not. He then planned to finish the book during the transatlantic flight. He had not. He would finish it in Madrid, he thought. Then, in Madrid, at the Matador, they sat at the bar watching the bartender slice Iberico Ham from the black-hoofed leg, which was stationed centrally on the bar. This was after they were at the Key West Bar, with pictures of Hemingway doing masculine things like holding a shotgun bare-chested. At the Matador, they struck up a conversation with two Australians, a father and son, who had been traveling in Spain for the last six weeks. When the Key West Bar was mentioned, one of the Australians, not sure which, stated, “In Spain, they will hang a plaque anywhere that Hemingway took a shit.” That is when he decided to put the book aside until he was back home, and the phrase “False Professor” came to mind.
The Hotel Room
The Month Before
Four thirty in the morning.
The complete darkness in the hotel room
was diluted by the city lights seen from ten stories above
And from the bathroom, the door left slightly open
The glow from a nightlight built into the bathroom switch.
Closing the curtains completely, anticipating the morning
hoping to sleep in, an odd feeling felt, the feeling of mourning.
Box of Rain, Real House
“175 Pounds of Candy”
Finished number
two nails
In two three. Hold for one.
Out two three four five six seven.
Back flat breathing.
A last effort to sleep.
Plastic cup with reusable straw and legal pad
left behind to save space and time.
The restaurant appeared, panning, zooming, rotating,
but was not, left of the hotel.
Seven in the morning.
Trying not to wake the remaining sleepers in the room, he used the bathroom glow to lead him to water. He brewed the coffee in near dark. Sugar from a paper packet and into a paper cup. He placed a chair, outside of the dark room, between the curtains and the floor-to-ceiling windows. Seated within, he drinks his coffee, reads the book, and thinks of caves.
There is a man at a hotel across the street, a few stories down, smoking outside on the balcony next to a room with curtains closed tight.
With a hide hung high at the entrance, in the book, inside the cave, the Ingles describes a sip of absinthe. A full paragraph of warm nostalgia. A full paragraph outside the war, describing all the things he loved about his life before, that the drink replaces.
He is reminded of that same warmth, of coming home, to the rhythms, to the small moments, to the little details, to the shelter of food and family and love.
Wednesday
The Day Before
He left work early to pick up provisions for the long weekend
Oysters for shucking
and roasting with snail butter and eating
Pints of ice cream. Two of one kind.
Two of another, and one of another.
Poetry
from the late Nineteen Seventies.
Albarino y La Cuesta.
Spanish wine and vermouth.
Back at the house, everything is put away. Separately, standing in front of the refrigerator, he first ate slices of cheese. Then slices of ham. Then, he ate toasted slices of bread and butter while sitting at the kitchen table watching his daughter make a pie crust from scratch. Later, he gathered up the book, the poetry collection, and magazines and placed them on the coffee table in front of the couch. He laid down and, without picking up anything to read, closed his eyes. His son and daughter were in the same room, playing games separately on their laptops in silence, knowing nothing of the “False Professor.” He drifted off to sleep blanketed inside their presence. After dinner, after some pints were eaten, he leaves the family in the family room, listening to music from their collective past. In the kitchen he cannot think of a better way to spend an evening, preparing tomorrow’s dishes to be shared with those who are here and thinking of those from a far.
