Via Dolorosa(25)

“Tell him to go to the site when he’s ready. I’ll wait there.”

“He knows the site?”

“Just tell him to go,” Isabella said, and walked away while the hardfaced Hispanic continued to stare at her. He seemed content, though, to watch her walk away. Then he turned to Nick. “You press?”

“Press?”

“Press,” the man said again, tone unchanged.

“I’m with her,” he said quickly, nodding to the place against the wall where Isabella had been standing just a moment ago.

The man laughed. Or coughed or growled or something: it was an action yet to be catalogued by the human condition. Nick could smell his breath, too, and it smelled like the stuffing in an old recliner. “Yeah, crumb,” the man said. “Shit, yeah. Ever’body with her.”

Isabella had relocated to the bar. She ordered a gin and tonic as Nick approached, and did not look at him. She had her elbows resting on the bar and her arms crossed over one another. With some intensity, she watched the bartender fix her drink.

“I was working in Pamplona two years ago,” she said from nowhere. “I was at a fairly famous café that doubles as an even more famous nightclub and occasional discotheque at night and on the weekends. It was an after-hours shoot. It was me, the band, the club’s—what is the word?—the club’s bouncer, and the man tending bar and cleaning up the bar counter. I remember watching him pull stacks of money from under the counter and run his fat, brown fingers through the stacks, then push the stacks into his pants. I remember wishing I’d taken a picture of him stuffing the money in his pants like that because it just looked so honest. We all continued drinking very late into the night. The bartender, or someone else, maybe, put something into my drink, Nicholas, and I don’t remember much after that. I woke up in the rectory of a Catholic church at the far end of town, half-undressed, with the inside of my mouth tasting like artichokes and cigarette ash and the lower half of my body feeling as if it had been laid out on smoldering coals while I slept. Luckily, my equipment hadn’t been stolen—someone had stashed it under a pew. I do not know why they left it, but they did. And for a while I had no inkling as to what had happened to me while I was unconscious. And for a brief time, I was thankful I could not remember. Then I developed the film in my camera, and it was all right there and there could be no mistaking any of it.”

The bartender set her drink down in front of her.

“Pamplona is a wonderful place,” she said, and downed half her drink in a single gulp. “I suppose in my own way I have run with my share of the bulls.”

“Where’s the site?” he asked.

“What site?”

“The site of the shoot. Where are you shooting tonight?”

“You do not even like jazz, Nicholas,” she said.

“No,” he said, “I like it fine. Really. I said I didn’t know it, but now that I know it, I like it a lot.”

“Ahhh,” Isabella said. “Now that you know it.”

“Well, I could learn it.”

“Oh,” she said, smiling, “yes. Oh, yes. I can see that.”

“I even have some Glenn Miller albums at home.”

She laughed at him.

“What?” Her smile forced a smile on him, too.

“What, what?” she said, mocking him. “Como?” Then: “Nothing. Just—nothing. Nada. It is only that you are just like a man.”

“How’s that?”

“Trying so hard,” she said.

“Trying?”

“Trying so hard, just like a man.”

“What I meant was—”

“Shouldn’t you be sleeping with your wife right now?”

He watched her and felt himself turn away from her and look out across the club. He said, “I don’t want to go back.”

“Ever?” she said.

“I don’t know about ever,” he said. “I just know about now, right now. And I don’t want to go back right now.” He looked at her. Said, “I can’t.”

Isabella said, “Tell me about the war.”





—Chapter VII—





There was a steep hill behind the Club Potemkin that climbed to the black sky brilliant with stars and overlooked, precipitously, the endless band of ocean. Nick walked, Isabella’s camera case around one shoulder and an accompaniment of battery-powered lights strapped together over his other shoulder. Along with the lighting equipment, Isabella had packed a portable CD player. Now, the volume turned low, the body of the CD player thumping discretely against Nick’s left thigh with every other step he took, they listened to Claxton’s latest album, Mephistopheles, as they walked. Beside him, Isabella moved quietly through the wet grass in her bare feet, carrying nothing except a small black purse and the hem of her dress.

He said, “Iraq was desolate and like an abortion. Which was good, I guess. It’s easier to fight on ground that isn’t alive. You don’t feel as responsible.”

“For what?”

“For everything,” he said. “For anything.” He found her questions to be nearly childlike, but also something of an insincere nature, as if she were really only playing with him, prodding him, seeing which way he would go. And this was something that had registered with him in the first few minutes of their initial encounter that day at the hotel café.