I was living in an apartment in Barcelona at the time, right at the very top of a building on a side street. It was really an alley, but they all persisted in treating it as though it was a main thoroughfare. The apartment wasn’t mine and I wasn’t even paying rent on it, I was only loaning it from a girl I had come to know over the past summer. I was teaching English to very young children in a small town in the west of Spain and, after my assignment ended, I knocked shyly on her door to ask if she had been serious when she had offered me the place earlier on in the summer. She was also teaching English, but to older men who wanted to use it to make money. It was hard for her, and very stressful, and she was unhappy about this because she had planned to teach English overseas as a way of recovering from two heavy years of medical school in the States. The men she taught seemed to think that after every class they were prepared to sail to North America and move into a big house with an actress wife and every afternoon when they went home to their widening wives in their regular beds they were made to see the impossibility of their desires and it made them dislike her. As they began to be certain that there was no chance of any of them sleeping with her, they disliked her even more.
        She was an American girl named Rebecca and she had long bluntly cut brown hair that hung to the middle of her waist. Even on the hottest days she did not put it up. We knew each other in the casually intimate way one knows one’s presumed countrymen in foreign places. We went to a lot of the same bars. She was frequently accompanied by different Spanish young men whereas I was more often alone with a book. We would talk once in a while if we ran into each other at the market or on the street, and it was on one of these occasions that I expressed my desire to stop in Barcelona for a week or so before I flew home.
        “I have a place there,” she told me.
        “You do?”
        “Sort of,” she said. She explained that it had been her great-uncle’s, who had died only a few years ago. Her family had kept it and rented it for some time and when she came to Spain she had lived there for a number of weeks before taking this job and leaving it in the care of some friends as a summer sub-let. Now she was deciding whether she wanted to go back to it or if once again her family should rent it out. They had an agent who took care of matters like finding the potential renters. Despite the trouble she was having with her job she didn’t think she wanted to leave yet and so the apartment remained empty until she found out her immediate plans.
        “You could stay there.”
        “Is anyone living there now?” I asked.
        “No. They shouldn’t be. It’s mine from the first of the month.”
        The first of the month was the very next day and it was three weeks until my job ended. In that moment I decided very surely that I would ask her to use her place when I left.

The children I taught were all between the ages of three and five. They were teaching me far more Spanish than I was teaching them English and I was pleased to have acquired such a mutually beneficial post. We spent most of our time pretending to be adults, shopping in an invisible grocery store so that they would learn the names of foods, or decorating a house to go over domestic words. Once in a while, when I felt restless, we would go to the imaginary travel agency and discuss foreign lands in terms I found wonderfully relaxing and optimistic.
        “Greenland is cold. The people wear many coats.”
        “Italy is long. There is much good food there.”
        “Australia has kangaroos. They carry their babies inside a pocket on the front of their bodies and their Christmases never have snow.”
From their chatter I picked up enough Spanish to be able to live happily alone and I thought I would never have a job so lovely again.
        On my last day they brought me presents which made me nervous and happy and embarrassed and I longed to touch them all and stroke their smooth silky heads and kiss their fat and well-fed cheeks. It was a small place where I lived, where there wasn’t much to do as a baby child but run around and get sun and eat food so fresh it sighed when you bit into it. For a few days after it ended I stayed in bed late and then ate something, very slowly, before walking around the market and drinking a coffee in the early afternoons. This was a nice schedule but one I couldn’t keep up, so before a week had passed I went to her door and knocked on it, biting my lips with apprehension.

When she opened the door, she was wearing shorts and a very tiny tank top because of the heat, but most shockingly, her hair was twisted up on the top of her head. It made her look about five feet taller and for a second I couldn’t catch my breath, I was so surprised.
        “Hi,” she said, neither pleasantly nor unpleasantly. I managed to whisper something in reply and then cleared my throat.
        “I’m leaving tomorrow,” I told her, which was neither a truth nor a lie since I would leave as soon as she said I could have the place and I had no train ticket yet.
        “Do you want the key?” she asked me. I was confused that it could be this simple.
        “Is it ok? Do you mind?”
        She shrugged her shoulders and walked into her apartment, leaving me holding the door. I stayed still, fully prepared to deal with this kind of brusqueness if it meant a place to stay. After a minute I heard her call out to me that I should come inside and I realized I had been expected to follow her. Her apartment was dim because of the heat, and with the blinds down it was nice and cool. In the middle of the living room she had a fold-out couch that was a mess of sheets and pillows. There was a man asleep in them, his naked brown shoulders as contoured and relaxed as the mounds of cotton. Most of his face was covered by a pillow so he could have been awake and simply not moving. I counted slowly by threes to keep myself from blushing.
        Rebecca came out of the kitchen with the key in one hand and a piece of paper in the other. She tore the paper in half.
        “This is the address of the place,” she said, indicating one half, “and this is where you can mail the key to me when you’re done.”
        “Ok. Should I……pay you….anything?” I asked her. She looked at me without seeming to see my face.
        “No,” she said. “Don’t be silly.” And then even though she must have known we would never see each other again, she turned her back to me and stripped off her top and began to climb into the folded out couch bed.
        “Thank you,” I mumbled, and ran out.
        The next morning I bought a train ticket and I rode into Barcelona lonesome and sad at the same time.

It was the end of summer, where the days were fetid with heat but the nights provided some relief. It was still insupportable to wear any sleeves or long pants outdoors in the day, but in the middle of the nights there was the promise of coming coolness that kept people going.
        Her apartment was lovely and big. It was close to the most densely populated tourist strip in the city and the noise made from the people bent on selling junk to other people that didn’t know better got maddening between eleven and one in the morning. The apartment was at the top of six flights of stairs and my thighs were burning even though there was very little extra weight on my body. The rooms were dusky and secret even though I knew there had been people living here as recently as a month ago. When I put my things down I smelled the sheets and they seemed so inviting that I didn’t change them even though I had no idea what had gone on in them before I got there. My favorite thing about the whole place was outside the apartment’s front door. There was only one other apartment on this top floor and we were all alone. On the ceiling, right above the center of the open staircase, was a huge pulley made of heavy black metal. I liked to watch it while I climbed the stairs, staring up above my head and imagining thick whipping ropes that were inched up slowly to lift an antique dresser or a piano, voices calling out in Spanish to watch the walls as a bed floated upwards towards its new home.

The first night I got there I had been traveling for a few hours with a heavy pack in the insane heat but as soon as I took a shower and put on a new shirt I felt like I had just woken up ten minutes ago. So I locked the door with a sense of property and I walked down the six flights of stairs while I listened to my footsteps speaking to each other. I could feel the luring heat and noise of hundreds of tourists a few streets away, so I started walking in the opposite direction, patting my hair with my hands to make sure it didn’t dry too frizzed out. I ended up walking for over an hour, not because I couldn’t find anywhere to stop, but because it was so nice to move without carrying, to walk without arriving, to watch without concluding. It was a bit after eleven and just getting pleasant out when I walked into a bar because I felt like drinking a few glasses of beer. The walls were deep reddish orange and it was streaming hot in there. Everyone was talking softly with what sounded like unspoken motives and smiling at each other meaningfully. The air was thick with a very distinct but unnamable odour. I got the hilarious and shocking sense of being inside an enormous vagina. I had to push my hands over my mouth to make sure I didn’t honk out laughing.
        I had brought my book and I took it out to read once I was on the second glass but after a few pages I felt like everyone was looking at me with some sort of pity and interest, like an animal in the zoo playing with some garbage thrown in by visitors. So I put the book away smoothly and only pretended that I was waiting for someone, attractively bored.
        Often when you are waiting for someone they will come along even after you stop expecting it. Markus walked in and sat down at my table with hardly any hesitation, which appalled me, but also made my illusion true and so I said nothing. He smiled in a way someone must have once told him looked confident. When I was silent for nearly a minute, he stood up and went to the bar to buy a glass of beer, leaving his bag on the chair opposite mine so that I wouldn’t get any silly ideas about running away.

Markus was a German, but he was the kind of mongrel that irresponsibly globe-trotting parents create, so he spoke every language but Russian with a terrible accent. He had spent his school years in Moscow and he disliked it intensely. When he spoke to me in Spanish I understood about one fifth of what he said and yet I found myself nodding like a puppet, curious what it was I was agreeing with.
        “Ah. American English,” he said. I had actually been born while my mother was in Peru but there was no time or need for that story. So I just shrugged my shoulders.
        “The erotic desire is very great in this city, no?” he asked me.
        “Mine?” I asked stupidly.
        He grinned. “Mine,” he said, and it was impossible to tell if he was imitating me or giving the correct answer. He told me about his day, which had involved many grotesque positions on the ground of one of the many small squares, taking pictures for a book a friend was having published.
        “How will it be published if the photos are not taken already?” I asked him, genuinely interested.
        “Yes, a travel book. The photos, colour,” he answered.
        “But you can only publish something finished. Or almost finished.”
        “Yes. The friend.”
        I didn’t want to embarrass him or myself any more, so I just smiled again. He asked me where I was staying. I bit the insides of my cheeks hard to keep my face from turning bright red. Looking down into my empty beer glass I gave him the address of Rebecca’s apartment. He opened his mouth wide enough to yodel and actually got off his chair to bend before me on one knee. Some of the people in the bar looked up and then looked down at him. I thought I would start crying of shame and contemplated making a run for it. My drinks were paid for.
        “Is perfect!” he screeched.
        “What is? Please, stand up.”
        He reluctantly got back into his chair. The building was perfect, he said in his horrible English. He knew it well.
        “A lover, yes, I have a lover alive in there. Alive?” he asked. I said I hoped she was alive. “Or he,” I hurried to add and then clenched my toes in my shoes at how verbally clumsy I could possibly be. He laughed at me and said, “and now, she is…..Oregon! Ha!”
        He described the street perfectly and then he began to praise the pulley on the ceiling. I was smiling broadly and nodding. He picked up his bag and held out his hand.
        “One picture,” he begged.
        “What, now? No. Oh no.” I said, actually pressing myself down onto the chair in case my body got up to do his bidding.
        “No no no no no. In the house. The stairs. Yes?” He wanted to take pictures in the building and he wanted me to let him in presumably. I didn’t think Rebecca would approve of this. But then I thought about it again and realized she would maybe have suggested it herself. He wasn’t a big man, and if I got screaming mad, I thought my chances were pretty good that he would run. It had been quite some time since I had taken a stupid risk. He looked ready to get on his knees again, and I was concerned about this, so I stood up and tried to act stern.
        “You must be very quiet. People are sleeping,” I instructed, even though I had no idea who even lived there and hadn’t, of course, even slept there yet. He waved his arms like some sort of deranged child and started to unzip his bag, possibly to ease my mind. It was, in fact, filled with photographic equipment. I waved him away.
        “Ok, ok. One picture. That’s it,” I said, wondering what kind of a book this could possibly be, and deciding it was probably imaginary. He tried to leave money on the table for my drinks and I had to explain slowly that they were paid for. For one wild second he seemed about to give the money to me, but I put my hands quickly into the pockets of my jeans to prevent this.

We left the bar and right away he was walking much too close to me. We hadn’t even reached the end of the block before he kissed me deep into my mouth. The act was not surprising but the timing was and I almost choked into his mouth. This seemed to please him. While he held the back of my neck with one hand, dragged down by the weight of the camera bag, he gripped my ass so ferociously and suddenly with his other hand that I jumped into the air. I bit his tongue in a blindness of shock. This seemed to positively delight him and he released me and actually clapped his hands with glee.
        “The need!” he declared incomprehensibly. I saw he was as harmless as a child and I laughed a little bit which encouraged his joy. There was, yet, something lying at the bottom of his eyes which told me he was no fool. I saw an instant picture of myself in the very near future, so fast I thought it hadn’t happened, my cheek lying on the soft wornness of the bed sheets, his hands lifting my lower body high in the air, the breeze finally the perfect temperature against naked skin. The flash of image came with a sound effect, a sharply indrawn breath let out in a sigh, my own throat making the noises. I looked at Markus as he swung the camera bag and put two of his fingers into one of my belt loops and, for the second or third time in my life, recalled with some small level of understanding my father’s habit of saying that sometimes the world needs to be seen to be believed.