Up on the Roof

[Note to readers: This story has the title Up on the Roof, but there is no roof in the story itself. However, there is an old song by the same title. It was put out by The Drifters around 1962, and you really ought to go listen to it. Just a suggestion. It kind of sets the mood here, or something. Better than that, it tells you who ‘she’ is.]

There she was. Packed city, lonely as blue blazes, blasting orange heat from all of its pores into every last one of her pores. It was kind of cruel, that heat was. Swarmed all over a person, forming an armor of sweat even though it was desert-bone-dry and sweating wasn’t easy. She had too much heat around her to want any human, any human heat. That was the first thing. It was too hot to get close to anything or anybody. Hiding from it all, but trapped in the midst. So alone. So empty inside. Vacuous world. So much of it, too.

Madrid. That’s where she was. She had a reason, but wasn’t always sure it was a good one. She shared an apartment, just for the summer. Maybe there were five, or maybe even six, in the small place. She never saw any of the other bedrooms. The apartment was painted white in all its originality, but it had green tiles, in the kitchen. Nobody who was normal would find comfort next to that green. It was an icy algae shade with lichen tinges. If only there really were algae and lichens in the apartment. That would have made it a little less lonely. More importantly, it would have given the illusion of water, water everywhere. Not so. All the boards did shrink. From dehydration.

Five, perhaps six young women resided in the cubicle that was miraculously called an apartment. Nobody knew anybody. Nobody had a world except the one of heat, which was immense. Stay away, don’t touch me. I have too much heat and words melt. Besides, we are strangers sharing this apartment and I don’t know why.

She shared a bedroom in the shared apartment in the blazing, isolatingly hot city. Hot it was, that bedroom with a view onto an inner, soot-edged interior patio. A patio that was merely a shaft of shadowy air but was not able to accept breeze. Nothing to see, nothing to feel. Everything to sweat, to humidify the parchment of the air. Mostly a failure.

The bedroom tomb was very still. That was aided by the fact that the young woman with whom she shared the bedroom was allergic to the open window. She said, because her mother had said, that night air coming in through an open window, even one with a screen, could do serious damage to the kidneys. Temperatures of eighty degrees were irrelevant.

She could not breathe that way, all locked away, and offered to sleep in the bed closest to the window. No, that was impossible for the roommate. The window had to remain closed, shut out the world, keep the heat. So she had no memories of the hot apartment place except for the cold tiled shower, the dull tiled kitchen, and the oven bedroom, took to the balcony with her mattress. After that she rarely coincided with her roommate and rarely spoke with the other two who slept on the balcony at night, because they only coincided at night. To sleep. It was only partial relief to flee to the balcony, because she had horrible vertigo. It made her violently ill to approach the sides of the open space whose breezes surely must be destroying her kidneys. She wanted to throw herself over to the street below. 

The street below was the infernal Calle de Jaén. The city of Jaén itself, further south, was an oven. A street by that name in Madrid was doubly oven-like. The little mattress was just foam, what they called espuma, and belonged to nobody. At least it was easy to transport nightly to the balcony. When she left, it must have floated on to somebody else.

She hoped nobody still lived in that tower of fire on an oven street in an infernal city. The temperature was so high every day that she could barely focus her eyes, which threatened to melt if forced to work too hard. That was why she didn’t try very hard after a while to look at things in her new (but temporary) home: because she wanted to protect her vision. She wore the darkest sunglasses and looked away from up (it was far too bright) as she moved along sidewalks and traveled on public transportation.

There were cherries in the grocery stores and fruterías and then there were cherries in the living room by the balcony. Cherries are a happy fruit, like round hearts or flat red roses. In Madrid, on Jaén , they were not quite happy. She had nobody to share them with, not in the store and not at home. Madrid had about five million residents, but it was empty of conversation.

Young people selling books were merely a fragment of contact. The street’s vehicles jealously competed with those attempted conversations with the vendors on corners, under awnings, so the words they said to one another never amounted to much. She loved books, loved to talk about them, but she was still alone. Smack in the center of the country, kilómetro cero, it all begins here. 

No, it didn’t. Nothing began there. Not for her.

She had gotten a job for two months with a summer abroad program run by a university from her home state of New York. She had been hired to answer the phone and answer questions she didn’t know how to answer, run an errand or two, then clock out and head to Jaén if she couldn’t stand the heat in the Puerta del Sol. That heat came from what should have been an illegal number of humans jammed into that one spot. It was famous, but she didn’t care. Three steps, jab. Two steps, push. Ten steps, tripped by a cane. An obstacle course. Not people. Not conversations. Obstacles. 

Museums, there were many. That was the single best thing about Madrid. Nothing else could come close. Well, there were in fact a few good places to eat, but it really cost more than she could afford. Bars were smoky, sweaty, wine-y, and most of all, loud. Words? Worthless. Too hard to talk. She was still alone. Not quite so alone in the Museo del Prado, close to El Bosco, Velázquez, Goya. There were so many of them. The Prado was climate-controlled, too. It had to be, given what it held between its walls. Cars were not deafening inside, but once again inside wasn’t a place for conversation. That meant she ended up feeling lonely after all, despite the big-name artists who accompanied her. Not that she could actually reach out and touch any of them. You could never touch the famous paintings. That would set off a blaring alarm and the visit would be over.

The House of Lope de Vega, a very famous Golden Age (16th-17th century) Spanish playwright, was another good choice for an afternoon. History, literature, and rustic architecture, all rolled into the price of one ticket. There was so much to see and learn, despite the small size of the house. It was a miracle it had survived until now. Unfortunately for her, she mostly had to listen and learn. She was ushered through the small rooms at a pace that would not clog up the route of the visit for the next patrons. She had had so many questions, but there was nobody to ask and nobody to answer. Nobody knew her and she was so alone. She didn’t learn the whole history of the house until a lot later. Lope bought it in 1610 and died in 1635. That’s mostly what she recalled afterward. 

There was an infinite number of interesting, historical things to see. The Templo de Debod, the Palacio Nacional, the Palacio de Cristal, the Crypt of the Almudena… too bad she didn’t care so much for palaces. Those were for the rich and famous, on cooler days.

There was likewise a wide range of food if she really wanted to eat Italian dishes in the capital of Spain. Or Brazilian. French? Russian? German? She didn’t have much of an appetite.There would be nobody to talk to in any of those places. Plus, it was still cherry season. That was small comfort, but it mattered.

The Biblioteca Nacional de España - the national library - was another interesting place, with high ceilings and reasonably cool air, but you could make even less sound there, and it was like having a dungeon for company. The Metro was a melange of sticky sweat and the stench of mouths of black tobacco smokers. Definitely not good company, not good closeness. Not good and not fun. Bad for those with claustrophobia, also. She disliked buses, feared the Metro. 

Cement cement cement. Hard and hot, not the least bit friendly.

Dusty weeds, scrawny trees with spindly branches, straw-like stalks. That was what passed for vegetation. Dust floated everywhere and rain fell from nowhere. In Madrid it will not rain in the summer. It bakes for three solid months, maybe longer. Do not expect respite.

El Corte Inglés, big, cool-aired department store. Used book stores and new ones. Books were a wonderful world and she still liked talking about them with almost anybody. That was why it was funny - or sad - that she found the libreros in Madrid to be quite distant, rather dim, like the stores’ interiors. Maybe the bookstore owners just saw her as a foreigner who couldn’t possibly read books in Spanish. They didn’t know her. They never would.

Noise exhaust full of people cars taxis whistles braking buses bawling babies more noise from one side of a street to the other, ricocheting her to death. Metal bonds, steel syllables, but no words. Heat and exhaustion. Madrid was Dante’s model, or could have been. A hundred or more degrees of Inferno.

Nobody to talk to.

Nobody. And all the dusty, parched cement that had nothing to say. She didn’t think she wanted to bother trying any more.

Not even the sidewalks listened. Perhaps it was because the Metro rumbles unceasingly beneath them. That might be distracting. She was willing to cut it some slack, but it didn’t help her loneliness.

The stores had employees, of course, and when she went in to buy something or just look around, there would be humans with whom there were conversations to be had. You might wish to point out. Still and all, she felt that wasn’t really talking. Like has already been noted, nobody ever expected to see anybody again in that big metropolis. Most times they didn’t. What conversation did they need, then? Wasted words, in a city as large a Madrid. Just throw some sounds at the other person and move on.

Sleep on an open balcony if you can manage it. She could do that, at least. That, and answer the phone at work.

***

She wakes up, checks the time, and sees she can still sleep another three hours. It’s a very warm night, still around seventy degrees. Balmy, with a breeze like the caress of a kitten. Barely two nights like this a year here. She enjoys this special warmth in the moist world of Maine. In her town of about twenty-two thousand. In a house with only two bedrooms instead of the three in Madrid. Should she sleep or think? 

She drags a sleeping bag out onto the deck, on a whim. There may be some crickets. It would be nice to listen to their chirping. (In Madrid the closest thing to a cricket was a cucaracha.) Maybe it would be possible to hear grasshoppers jump if she sat completely still. On this side of the house the sound of a vehicle is tenuous; conversations can happen. 

There are no other people in the house or on the deck right now, but she is unconcerned. Grass, raccoons, night-flying birds approach. Maybe one is not a bird but a bat. That does not pose a problem, since bats remove mosquitoes from decks and bat yards. Squirrels, a few of them, perch off to one side. The woman knows why. She has often watched a raccoon swat an over-eager squirrel away from the grapes or seeds that are sometimes put out for them. She does hope there will be no fox tonight. The next town over, about eight thousand in population, has had a number of cases of rabid foxes.

She knows all this and knows who is living nearby, in the back yard, down the slope, beside the brook. They are nameless but are not strangers. The woman listens to all of those who surround her and knows what they are saying. Nobody is speaking of books, but that’s all right. The conversations may be merely thoughts in suspension, in the silence, but they hear one another and they know it. Perhaps it is the effect of the expansive deck, clearly superior to a balcony and its vertigo.

They know - she knows, the visitors know - that in the midst of five million you can never really meet and certainly not have as a friend, you are in hell. It is a hell worse than the one Dante wrote of, if you really thought about it. Hurrying brings you nothing except the satisfaction of showing others that you can move forward through space. Everybody hurrying to maintain their status of aloneness.

In comparison, she thought and is very serious about this, in the midst of twenty thousand, slow-talking, you will always find someone who can do more than hurry and throw words at you in passing. Some live inside houses and have jobs that are not just for a couple of months during the summer. Others you will meet and spend time with, liking the same things, slowly, live outside. 

Perhaps, on a rare warm night, perfect for the deck, you will gather and try to show how you know that words are meant to work. They let her know they understand how she must have felt when she had to spend two months in Madrid with only a balcony and some cherries to help her survive.