Before I started getting to know her, Alicia had no significant friends in Barcelona. She could have met some had she wanted to, but it felt natural, even enjoyable, to be alone, walking the streets on her days off work, letting her sadness and anger swirl out into the foreignness of the city. She put aside at least half an hour every day to study Spanish, aided by a book and the accompanying CDs which she had loaded on to her phone. On a few occasions, she went for late-night drinks with her colleagues after they had closed up the restaurant. She danced and laughed with them, and they liked her, but whenever they suggested meeting up again soon, she made tactful excuses. On one of these nights out, when Alicia had been waitressing for a month or so, she went home with a slender Moroccan named Salim who worked in the kitchen. Before they made love, Salim stripped his bed of its covers, rolled them up and laid them in front of the window. Alicia did not know why he did this. In the morning, she awoke to find Salim kissing her neck. She drew him in around her, enfolded by him on the uncovered bed. Afterwards, Salim unsheathed the condom and tied it with the tip of his finger in a manner that struck Alicia as delicate and touching. Salim wanted to take her out for breakfast, but Alicia kissed him on the lips and said she would see him in work on Monday night. After that, she and Salim remained friendly, but they didn’t sleep together again.
Alicia found a bar that she loved on the Carrer de Paris, one Metro stop away from her home. Sometimes she would go there to write in the notebook she had bought at the Saturday market, or to read, or just to sip coffee, wine or brandy, and watch the locals float in, have their conversations, drift away again. She developed a passion for Chekhov, reading first all his short stories, then all his plays (or as many as she could find in English translation). She also read Kundera, until it came to seem to Alicia that he was engaged in a conversation which excluded her, as if he were unaware she was even in the room. After that, she read Djuna Barnes, Gogol and Jane Bowles. The bar was called Angelino’s and it was never full, never empty, and always played appealing music at just the right volume. Once, a couple walked into the bar holding hands. The woman was older, perhaps in her early forties, and wore a red leather skirt and a red top, not unlike some of the prostitutes Alicia encountered at the restaurant. The man was handsomely dishevelled, a decade or so younger than the woman. They sat at the bar and giggled, grinning at one another even as they ordered their drinks, oblivious to the rest of the bar and the world outside. Alicia had been writing about St Stephen’s Green, but now she began writing about the couple in Angelino’s, imagining the relationships they had both fled to be with each other, the affair they would live out over the coming months — passionately sexual, yet bound on a course for agony and destruction. She wrote about the woman in red standing on a windswept coast, alone, looking out to sea but expecting nothing.
Another evening, Alicia was again writing in the bar. It was already autumn, the sun sinking on the street outside. She did not have to work till the following night. Absorbed in her writing, she was startled when the empty chair by her table shifted. She looked up and saw that it had been moved by a man, who was asking by gesture if he might sit with her. Momentarily Alicia was annoyed that her writing had been interrupted. But the man’s eyes were kind. He sat down with her. He wanted to buy her another coffee but she said she shouldn’t drink more caffeine. A few minutes later, she let him buy her a glass of Prosecco. He was a big man, with thick arms, strong shoulders and dark, Mediterranean skin. His balding head was shaved and he had a neat, black beard. He laughed softly as he spoke, and listened attentively when Alicia did, nodding faintly. Halid was his name. Around midnight they took a taxi back to Alicia’s apartment. They made love till dawn began to show over the rooftops outside the window. Later they stood on the roof terrace in the light of early morning, a sheet wrapped around the two of them to maintain their modesty before any passing seagulls. Alicia later told me they were like two Greek philosophers, and they both giggled like children.
Alicia and Halid met up usually once a week, always on Alicia’s terms. When Halid realised that this was to be an exclusively sexual affair, he amiably accepted the situation. They would meet in bars, have one or two drinks, and then go to either Alicia’s or Halid’s place. If they slept at Alicia’s, she would always gently let Halid know, soon after they woke up, that she wanted him to leave. When they were at his tiny apartment in the Barceloneta district, she always left early. Then she got on with her day, smiling spontan-eously as she bought vegetables at the market, or took orders from customers, or sat on the roof terrace and listened to the sounds rising up from the street.
It was while Alicia was seeing Halid that I got to know her. I used to take walks around that quarter of Barcelona at night. It was because of Alicia that I often wandered into the restaurant, drinking coffee as the prostitutes and drunken tourists filed in and out. I liked the look of her. Sometimes I would have a book with me and I suppose she saw me as a sort of kindred spirit. Once we had a staccato conversation about Ortega y Gasset while she was between orders. Alicia said she didn’t read much philosophy, nor feel the need to, because things were quite simple after all. One night I came in late and lingered while Alicia and Salim were closing up the restaurant. Then she and I went for a drink in a nearby bar.
We drank martinis and Alicia spoke openly to me about her past, the circumstances that had led to her leaving Ireland. She had been in Barcelona six months now, she said. I told her about my art and photography projects, my time spent living in New York and Tangier, and the residency I’d been granted in Barcelona for the next three years.
‘What are you working on now?’ she asked.
I told her about my project, which was inspired by Molly Bloom in Ulysses, and was divided in two parts. First,I said, I took photographs of my subjects as they slept, and made audio recordings of them. I explained that my sound equipment was highly sensitive, able to pick up even the most furtive and intimate noises the subjects made as they slept, including the gurglings and rumblings of their tummies.
‘You’re a creepy guy,’ she said, laughing, then sipping her martini. She had already eaten the two olives on the plastic stick. ‘Are they women and men as well?’ she said.
‘No. Only women.’
‘That’s even creepier.’
I shook my head. ‘I’ve always been relaxed around women in that way. It’s easy for me to be with them, even to stay in the same bedroom as a woman without there being anything sexual to it. I slept in the same bed as my sister till we were eleven or twelve.’
She nodded. ‘And so what’s the second part of the project?’
‘That’s when the subject and I exchange beds. So, she spends a few nights in my place, and I sleep in her bed. I record myself as I sleep. I have cameras poised around the bed to take photos of me at intervals throughout the night. Later, I digitally merge the sounds of myself and the woman, the subject. Then I merge the photos. The faces blend together. So do the bodies. Finally I sequence the sounds with the photos. When people are stripped down to that level of intimacy, there isn’t much difference between men and women.’
‘Do you see yourself as a woman?’ Alicia said.
‘You mean in life?’
She laughed. ‘No, in the pictures.’