I.
Alejandro Maria Alvarez had been to heaven once in his life.
He was nineteen years old, a prizefighter, and in the ring with Pedro Ruiz,
“El Asesino,” who was both feared and respected by the aficionados.
Many members of the crowd recall with great expression the sprays
of sweat and blood, the arcing flight of Alejandro’s teeth, cricket-soaring
across the mat canvass field, and the young woman, in the front row,
fainting from the spectacle. Alejandro remembers only the cool mat,
the referee’s cry of “FUERA! FUERA! CUIDADO CON LA CABEZA!”
and the buzzing hum of the generator located six and a half inches
beneath his fallen head.
Then there was a darkness, where Alejandro saw his lover
(whose name he has always forgotten)
sitting naked on a pile of sheets next to their bed
eating peanuts.
Her round folded skin gave her the appearance of being an angel,
and she was talking about a job she found in Madrid, in a factory,
working for a family friend of her father’s.
Alejandro remembers being sad in heaven.
Later that night, the warehouse is abandoned. A pair of teeth lay
in a puddle of beer on the pink cement floor. A street performer
plays accordion for the tourist on Las Ramblas.
II.
The hospital in San Pau is a modern marvel, done in
Catalan Modern Style, the product of an aggregation
of six local hospitals. The women of the hospital are, and have always been,
Catholic Nuns, and these are the people they have seen die.
1. Antony Gaudi, who was run over by a tram.
2. Picasso’s blue woman, who spent too much time in bed.
The hospital has a guest registry, and each patient has a private registry,
and there is a name written on top of one of the pages,
and that name is Alejandro Maria Alvarez,
and below that name there are no other names,
just straight waves of lines, crawling like a still ocean
through a black silent night, unlike the Mediterranean, which is never still,
but sweeps against the Catalan coast and drags sand into its belly.
Alejandro hears the ocean first thing when he wakes up, alone.
Immediately, he considers an apartment in South Barcelona, one that
by all rights should be inhabited by another person who may well be waiting
for him,
(but he knows that it will be empty tonight, and that only he and his
two shaking hands will ever be able to fill it, and that he will find empty
bags of peanuts stuffed behind the radio tuned to the sports channel,
and that he has never eaten peanuts, and that by now the peanut trade
in Madrid will be blossoming and that he will have to find himself
another job and another woman),
Alejandro, who made love to this woman in the afternoons,
across a blanket, sweating like an animal.
