Gasoline. Quim Monzo

      Praise for Quim Monzó

      “A gifted writer, he draws well on the rich tradition of Spanish surrealism to put a deliberately paranoic sense of menace in the apparently mundane everyday and also to sustain the lyrical, visionary quality of his imagination.”

      —New York Times

      “Quim Monzó is today’s best known writer in Catalan. He is also, no exaggeration, one the world’s great short-story writers. This novel shows all his idiosyncrasy and originality. We have at last gained the opportunity to read (in English) one of the most original writers of our time.”

      —Independent (London)

      “To read this novel is to enter a fictional universe created by an author trapped between aversion to and astonishment at the world in which he has found himself. His almost manic humor is underpinned by a frighteningly bleak vision of daily life.”

      —Times Literary Supplement (London)

      Other Books by Quim Monzó

      in English Translation

      The Enormity of the Tragedy

      Guadalajara

      O’Clock

      Copyright

      Copyright © 1983, 2004 by Joaquim Monzó

      Copyright © 1983, 2004 by Quaderns Crema, S. A.

      Translation copyright © 2010 by Mary Ann Newman

      Published by arrangement with Quaderns Crema, S. A., 2008

      First published in Catalan as Benzina, by Quaderns Crema, S. A., 1983

      First edition, 2010

      All rights reserved

      Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data: Available.

      ISBN-13: 978-1-934824-62-7

      Translation of this novel was made possible thanks to the

      support of the Ramon Llull Institut.

      Printed on acid-free paper in the United States of America.

      Design by N. J. Furl

      Open Letter is the University of Rochester’s nonprofit,

      literary translation press:

      Lattimore Hall 411, Box 270082, Rochester, NY 14627

      www.openletterbooks.org

      For Mary Ann Newman

January

      “Blow me down.”

      “I can’t.”

      “In that case, let’s go.”

      —Francesc Trabal, L’any que ve

      Once again, he feels as if he were asleep and awake at the same time, yet if he concentrates he feels as if he were fast asleep. A fraction of a second later, it dawns on him that perhaps Hildegarda is already awake, up and about, and (out of boredom) dressed, as he wastes time wondering whether or not he’s awake. Then it all fades to gusts of wind, oranges, bicycles, a tin clown, a man jumping off a skyscraper, a tunnel, and a locomotive leaving a trail of smoke that, upon clearing, takes the shape of a street corner, a cafeteria with people inside. The dream is an exact reproduction of the scene in Nighthawks by Edward Hopper. He is thrilled to be able not only to identify the origin of the images in mid-dream, but also to be aware of doing it, and to remember that he had seen the painting as a little boy, many years before (impossible to calculate how many) at the Art Institute of Chicago. He also realizes that the painting is now appearing in this fantasy because the night before he had seen a reproduction of it in the window of a frame shop, along with two other reproductions of Hopper paintings. He remembers one of them: an office, and a secretary with a prominent ass (wearing a blue dress and glasses, he seems to recall) who is poring over a file cabinet, and a moth-eaten clerk sitting at his desk.

      The diner, on the corner of two dark and deserted streets, has picture windows, a sign that reads phillies, and a thin old waiter behind the counter, wearing a white soda jerk’s hat. One woman and two men with wide-brimmed hats are sitting at the bar, drinking, but this doesn’t last long because soon the diner is filling up with people: men identical (in face, hat, and suit) to the man or men already sitting there; and women identical (in face, hairdo, and dress) to the woman already at the counter (but wearing hats, fur stoles draped around their necks, and shiny handbags). Outside, in the street, there is a good layer of snow on the ground, and this is perfectly logical, because it’s New Year’s Eve, though in the painting he had seen as a child (and obviously in the reproduction he has seen the night before) there wasn’t a trace of snow.

      All at once, the people leave the bar and spill out onto the street, laughing. They leave by the dozens, by the hundreds. There are thousands of them, fleeing like insects. No matter how many leave, though, the diner is always full of people having vanilla, strawberry, raspberry, or chocolate milkshakes and crushed ice with a good squirt of blueberry, lemon, or mint syrup. It’s just like that old movie gag in which (by circling out beyond the camera’s range and circling back in again through an off-screen door) an endless stream of people gets out of a tiny car that could barely have seated four.

      Of all the crowd, aside from the waiter, two characters always stay behind: the redhead dressed in burgundy and the man eating vanilla ice cream with chocolate syrup drizzled over it—who is he, himself (and he finds it hard to believe he hadn’t recognized himself till now)—staring intently at the street where a car flashes by. Bit by bit the sky turns from black to dark blue, lights come on in a few windows; they go out when day breaks definitively, morning arrives implacably, and the diner ceases to be the silvery island it was during the night. The waiter sets up the counter with cups, teaspoons, knives, bread, jam, and butter. Not missing a beat, a stream of hungry office workers hurries into place, pushing and shoving, gulping down watery coffee, milk, toast, and croissants. As he has shifted his attention to the inside of the bar, the outside starts to go dark on him again. This is why, when he tries to light up the street again (at that point in mid-morning when all the office workers have left and the lonely people in the place are the man and the woman, or the woman and the two men, one of whom is he), the surroundings fade: everything goes white, stunningly resplendent, and turns into a beach. Oh, what a delightful sight, Hopper’s diner smack in the middle of a beach with plastic chairs and a string of desolate awnings, and, in the distance, a backdrop of immobile waves spotted with surfing teenagers. Finally he feels he’s dreaming freely: he resolves to let his imagination flow. The woman in the burgundy dress is wearing sunglasses, as is the waiter. The other man is and isn’t there, appearing and disappearing. When he takes off his hat (and the shadow that hides his face vanishes), Heribert recognizes himself unmistakably, sweating beyond endurance in his steaming woolen winter coat.

      The dream has been boring him for some time now. He tries to stop it, but he can’t. Now he sees them in bathing suits: himself in shiny black briefs and her in one of those backless skintight suits with two strips of cloth stretching up from the waist in front, covering the breasts and tying around the neck. They are rolling down a flight of stairs and he crashes into a glass door that softly gives. For a fraction of a second, Heribert (about to dive into the water) asks himself if the woman isn’t Helena. Now they are swimming, off on their own, surviving the gigantic waves that engulf them. They swim in silence, and when Heribert plunges deeper, he wishes he didn’t ever have to surface again. He seems to stay underwater for hours. When he does surface, she is already on the beach, walking slowly towards the diner. He rushes after her. When he reaches the sand, he steps on a small black cockroach. Hildegarda’s voice (was it Hildegarda, then, and not Helena?) tells him to hurry, to go faster, because she has to leave. Now he’s running, trying not to step on any of the thousands of roaches streaming out from under the sand. When he