This book describes a year in the life of Adam Gordon, a young American poet living in Madrid on a fellowship, who is supposed to be “composing a long and research-driven poem … about the literary response to the [Spanish] Civil War.” We quickly discover that Adam is a thoroughly feckless fellow who spends his days smoking hash and then taking tranquilizers to cope with the resulting panic attacks. Early on, Adam’s Spanish isn’t very good, and so he relies on a kind of personal performance art based on guessing and acting to keep things moving along:
I wanted to know what she had been crying about and I managed to communicate that desire mainly by repeating the words for “fire” and “before.” She paused for a long moment and then began to speak; something about a home, but whether she meant a household or the literal structure, I couldn’t tell; I heard the names of streets and months; a list of things I thought were books or songs; hard times or hard weather, epoch, uncle, change, an analogy involving summer, something about buying and/or crashing a red car. I formed several possible stories out of her speech, formed them at once, so it was less like I failed to understand than that I understood in chords, understood in a plurality of worlds. … I kept quiet, modeling my face on the San Leocadio.
I suspect that anyone who is approaching a certain threshold in foreign language competence will do something similar—you can’t keep asking “What?” and you can’t just stare blankly. So you improvise.
Adam begins a relationship with Isabel, the woman who has unburdened her soul to him. As they begin an affair, he exploits and exaggerates his linguistic difficulties by speaking in vague, oracular platitudes and playing the part of a detached genius. This actually works for a while. To heighten the pathos, he tells her that his mother has died. At the same time, Adam takes up with Theresa, a poet and translator who is helping him make inroads into the Madrid literary world. Adam has a harder time reading Theresa, who may or may not be on to Adam’s game, but who at least seems to accept that there is some sort of game going on.
Adam visits Granada with Isabel, and Barcelona with Theresa. Spain, women, booze—this might almost be Hemingway territory—except that the hero is trying to muster his courage to do poetry readings, instead of blowing up fascist fortifications.
I guess it isn’t hard to make fun of Adam Gordon, and there certainly isn’t a great deal at stake here beyond his self-respect. The reader is expecting to see him ultimately exposed, shamed, chastized. But while there are dicey moments, he never quite tips over. His work begins to attract attention, as Theresa works furiously to translate his poetry into Spanish. Adam may think his success is just a result of luck and bluffing, but we begin to realize that Adam’s friends in the literary world are not being duped and are not acting out of pity—they see value in his work, even if Adam himself advances no such claim on his own behalf.
And we see it too, because it is Adam’s voice that we hear in Leaving the Atocha Station, a voice that is quick, funny, acute, and occasionally profound:
My research had taught me that the tissue of contradictions that was my personality was itself, at best, a poem, where “poem” is understood as referring to a failure of language to be equal to the possibilities it figures; only then could my fraudulence be a project and not merely a pathology; only then could my distance from myself be redescribed as critical, aesthetic, as opposed to a side effect of what experts might call my substance problem, felicitous phrase, the origins of which lay not in my desire to evade reality, but in my desire to have a chemical excuse for reality’s unavailability.
Never has existentialism been quite so much fun.
