Pangyrus is delighted to feature a book excerpt from Josh Barkan’s Wonder Travels: A Memoir (Roundabout Press), which publishes this month. Can we ever really know another person? When, after fifteen years of marriage, his wife has an affair with a man she meets on the beach in Morocco, writer Josh Barkan grapples with this question. In this fearless, breathtakingly candid memoir, he maps a painful odyssey from New York to El Paso to the Apache Kid Wilderness to Mexico City, where he falls in love with a painter who begins to heal him. But two years after his wife’s affair, questions still haunt him. Why did she betray him, and with whom? With no more than a cell phone number, Barkan travels to Morocco to find his wife’s lover and confront his own past.
If there’s one thing we don’t want to do it’s disappoint mothers. They’re the ones who raise us, and even a mother-in-law is kind of the same. I never wanted to disappoint my mother-in-law. I always wanted her to think I was taking care of her daughter, far away in the United States. I wanted her to know her daughter was safe and sound, well cared for, and that in the absence of her mother, in the US, I would be both husband and mother, the family that couldn’t be with Luciana in the country she’d immigrated to. To go see my mother-in-law took all the courage I could muster. If we were divorced, then somehow I must have failed her daughter. I must have let things go awry.
I hadn’t spoken to my mother-in-law for two years, since the awkward last conversation when in tears I asked her if her daughter had come back from Morocco — or “Ibiza” — to Spain. At that time, all I’d wanted was to convince my wife she should come home to talk about her affair. I knew only vague details of what had happened. I knew only that she’d lied about going to Ibiza and that she’d gone to Morocco instead to be with a guy she’d met on her trip around the world. Everything was crumbling, and I just wanted to have it work out okay. I just wanted Luciana not to be afraid, to know she could come home and that we’d talk before whatever happened next, to let her know I wasn’t going to explode. I had no idea if Luciana was even going to come back from where she’d run away to; so that’s why I’d called my mother-in-law — to try to see if my wife was even on her way back to the States, when she said she’d come. It was the most awkward conversation you can have with a mother-in-law — gently saying, but also insisting because you know it’s true, that her daughter has lied to me, and even to her mother, saying she’s gone to Ibiza when she’s gone to have an affair with another man in Morocco. My mother-in-law didn’t believe me at first when we talked. She said it wasn’t possible — surely Luciana was in Ibiza, as she’d said. I had to be a bit firmer and tell her I had strong reason to believe she was in Morocco instead, and with another man. I didn’t tell her about the other man to compromise Luciana’s privacy; I told her because my mother-in-law had to understand the nature of the situation if she was going to give the kind of help I was asking for. I was asking her to help me find my wife. I was asking her to help me guide Luciana home, so we could talk, even after I knew she’d had her affair. Marisol was agitated on the phone. She repeated she didn’t think it was possible. But she’d had enough shit happen in her life — the death of her husband at a young age, the death of a baby of hers in a car accident, a coma, the death of another son from Hepatitis C after drug use, and on and on — to know this shit was real and this is how shitty things happen. They come as phone calls out of the blue.
I’d always admired, in that moment of talking to her when I told her what had happened and when I told her I hoped we would stay in contact, that she’d said of course we would, that the relationships between husbands and wives were independent of the relationship with her. This was untrue, of course. You can’t separate one from the other. But in that moment it was comforting to believe, even as I cut off whatever there was with my wife, my whole relationship with another family, whom I’d visited nearly every year for fifteen years in Spain, wasn’t going to be gone, too. It’s not that I felt so close to Luciana’s entire family, all the time. Since they barely communicated one with another — and especially with my wife when she was across the deep blue sea in America — there wasn’t the kind of daily, weekly, or monthly communication that would make them family. But they were what I had — part of the structure of my life — and suddenly, just as my wife was disappearing, it seemed they were going to go poof into the dust of vaporization, too.
Of Luciana’s family, I was closest to my mother-in-law. We’d met the first time, alone. I’d gone to Spain before Luciana, when we were still just boyfriend and girlfriend, because I had more vacation time than her. So I met her mom without her. I stayed in an apartment her mother had rented for us for a month. I still remember the soap Marisol bought for us, a brand that would always remind me by its smell of her and her family. There were new bars of the soap in the apartment. For four days, she left me alone when I arrived. No contact. That was the way they were in her house: a bit odd, hyper-independent, leaving gaps in normal decorum. But after four days, we drank some coffee at a cafe and ate some breakfast and, all of a sudden, Marisol invited me to a very small cabin they had, on a windy pass, in what had once been a town of shepherds a couple of hours outside of Madrid. There was something charming about that cabin. It got very cold, and you had to burn hard dry old oak branches to stay warm. For a few days, Marisol and I fixed up the house and took hikes in the surrounding hills, covered with cow patties from the animals that roamed the rolling hillsides, and we made fires and drank some wine, and I cooked — which surprised my mother-in-law, because most men don’t cook in Spain. There was affection, a chance to talk a lot. She liked to read books. Her husband had been a scientist. There was a lot to discuss, and I was eager to hear about the rise and fall of her family — she’d come from a family of aristocrats in the north, until their coal mines were taken away. And then, like everything else that I could see over time in that family, everything had gone south. Her husband had left unexpectedly for a year. She’d had to raise her large family of eleven kids by herself, while he disappeared. My wife, at the age of eight, was left with just two brothers, who were barely in their teens, in the north for over a year, alone, while my mother-in-law went to Madrid to try to earn some money fast. Then, years later, her husband died of sudden cancer while he was still young — possibly the victim of a murder in a nuclear reactor, because he wouldn’t allow the importation of dangerous reactors from the US, and that pissed off some special interests. Stories, survival, and chaos surrounded my mother-in-law. But the stories were always colorful, until they seemed over the years to be more and more tragic, such as the time when her son stole her business from her, and then my wife and I became one of those colorful stories that wasn’t so interesting or colorful anymore.
I could have come to Spain and not called my mother-in-law. I could have passed through and pretended the past was just in a box and that I didn’t need to go there anymore. But I did need to go there one last time, because — by the sudden splitting with my wife — she’d left this gaping hole to my former family. She may not have felt it was important to close these gaps, but I did. I knew there’s a right way and a wrong way to end what once had been mutual families. I wanted to say goodbye person-to-person: not over the phone in the last awkward phone call we’d had, and not via email, but in the flesh, face-to-face, showing I’d once respected my mother-in- law and that I hoped she was well. Yes, I was pissed, and very hurt she’d just simplified me and said I was a Jew. Yes, that hurt so deep it felt like another blow. But I’d heard those things secondhand. I knew they were true, but I didn’t want that kind of anti-Semitic comment to be the last word between us. Marisol was much more complicated than someone who had some anti-Semitic tendencies. She was no more anti-Semitic than the majority of Europeans, who simply had little contact with Jews and who were full of stereotypes and ignorance about that facet of religion. I wanted to see the person who I’d loved over the years, one last time, to say goodbye. I was doing it for myself, as Monica liked to say. I was doing it not for anyone else but because I thought it fit my idea of what was right . . .
In the morning, the mother in the house where I’m staying says she’ll drive me the hour out of town to see my former mother-in-law. I thank her for her invitation, but I tell her I need to go via train myself, alone. I need time alone to prepare for this encounter mentally. She tries to insist on taking me. She likes to drive to that part on the edge of Madrid, she says. But I have to be firm. I can’t go on a pleasure ride. This isn’t pleasurable. I can’t chitchat before we get there, pop out of the car to confront my past. I need to ease my way into the past and into the house where I was with Luciana the last time, before she came back to the US changed.
I take the subway forty-five minutes to the Atocha train station. I ask for the next local train to the small town of Alpedrete. The next train is before the one I told my mother-in-law I’d take, but I don’t want to be late for our encounter. I’ve said I’ll be there at 5 o’clock. I’ve chosen the time carefully, so it’s before dinner. People in Spain eat late at 9 p.m. I’ve talked to Marisol briefly on the phone, once I arrived in Spain, to ask if she wants to get together, and she immediately accepted. She sounded surprised and a bit nervous but gave the impression she wants to talk, too. We say no more. There’s too much to say, so we leave it for when we get together face-to-face. I want to be able to just talk. Talking about emotional things, while eating a meal, will just be too difficult. Food gets in the way. So I suggest a time when we can just talk.
I wait for the train on the platform of Atocha and trains come and go, unclear which one is for me. I’m reminded I used to come to this station with my wife and what it was like the last few times we were here together, commuting from her mother’s house into Madrid to spend the day, strolling around the city, seeing her brothers and sisters, doing a little shopping, seeing some museums. That’s all over now — two and a half years in the past. I get on a train, and the train rolls through the city of Madrid. It passes four new office towers — the only skyscrapers of the city. Madrid is moving forward. Time is passing. It has a life of its own, independent of my former life with my wife. I’m getting older. The whole experience of divorce has aged me, sidetracked me, taken time from my present to recover. It’s taken so much time to recover. But there’s also the nice feeling the city is all still here. It exists, whether I’m with Luciana or not. It will continue to exist, and I can come back to it. The train goes into the dry countryside — the old hunting grounds with olive trees — between Madrid and the suburbia where I’m headed. These are the same trees I saw on the train I took with my mother-in-law that first trip out of Madrid to the cabin in the hills near Avila. Seventeen years have gone by now, since then. The fifteen with my wife, the two in this time of recovery. My life has been rooted here, even during short visits only once a year. There’s so much time destroyed in a divorce. What to do with all that time? The sun still flashes, light and then shadow, through the olive trees and into the train car as it has during all that time, but my body is older now. I’m not the young man I was when I first came, full of promise and hope and love. I’m weathered. I look out the window and smile as the olive trees go past. This is the thing I love about Spain. The dry dustiness on the pale olive leaves. The toughness and hardiness of the landscape, where plants grow out of the rock. I like that toughness. I like that survivability.
I’ve almost forgotten the way; so much time has passed. I’m not sure what stop comes after the next. But I know I’m on the right train. Some names at stops are familiar. Others not. I know I’m headed closer to where I used to go to be with the whole family, where we’d sleep when we came to Spain, and where the family would sometimes come on weekends for long lunches. Where siblings would drink too much, and get into arguments, and fill up the house with smoke. Where they would get together like a family, but then hide secrets.
The train pulls into the small station of Alpedrete, and I get off. It’s brutally hot. The sun is unrelenting. I have to pee, but the station is so small there’s no one working it and the bathroom is closed. The town looks deserted. No one walks on the streets in this heat. I hike from the train station up a hill, past rows of suburban houses in a small town that’s supposed to be a pleasant area for retirees and visitors on the weekend. I shuffle past a small restaurant where diners are hidden behind a gate and a granite wall, laughing. It’s a normal summer weekend for them in mid-July and an abnormal day for me. I need to pee. I can’t just go into this restaurant unless I’m a customer. I continue down another hill. There is the center of the small town. I used to walk here alone or with my wife sometimes to get out of the house. The stores are closed. I peek into the bakery, where I used to go get bread and croissants and especially cream Neapolitans, with my wife. It’s not open. Shut up. It looks like a wax museum of our past, the town a whole perfectly-constructed town, exactly the same as in the past except we’re not together anymore. By the one ATM in the center of town, I find a lone cheap restaurant, which also sells snacks, with its door open without any customers, and I enter and buy a bottle of water so I can take a pee. The pressure is temporarily relieved. I’m waiting for five o’clock. I don’t want to be early to see my mother-in-law. I don’t want to surprise her. I’m sure she’s preparing for this moment, too, and I want to give her the time to do so. I continue ambulating through the streets of the small town. The butcher store is still there, cold slaughtered meat waving in the windows, hanging from the ceiling. I try to find the old city hall. It’s one of the older buildings in town, made of stone with a beautiful clock, and I’d like to see it. This is the last time I’ll be in this little town. This is the last time I’ll see my mother-in-law, I’m sure.
My mother-in-law has told Luciana I’m coming. I know this because Luciana has sent me an email out of the blue. Recently, we’ve communicated about nothing personal. Our only communication for months has been about how to finish the divorce in Spain. But suddenly she wants to tell me her mother is vulnerable, that she had an accident a year ago, that she doesn’t want me to upset her mother. She tells me she thinks it’s weird I want to see her mother, but she says okay, as if giving me permission. She says I shouldn’t tell her mother anything personal about her. I write back and tell her I just want to see her mother to say goodbye, that I think it’s appropriate after all this time to say goodbye properly, since things ended so abruptly and there was never the chance to do so before, because we lived in different countries. I tell her I know her mother had her accident and that’s why I want to see her. I tell her I don’t know what she’s told her mother about her personal life or not and that I have no intention of revealing anything about her. What I think is that the only weird thing is that she can’t see why someone would want to say goodbye to their mother-in-law. What I think is she’s so secretive. She tells her mother nothing about her real life. The only thing I ever told her mother, of a personal nature, was that her daughter had an affair. And I didn’t say this out of anger but just to help her coax her daughter back to see me in the US and, also, to let her mother know the reason we were about to break up — the reason everything was about to go haywire wasn’t because I’d mistreated her daughter, wasn’t because I’d somehow failed in my duty as a husband to take care of her daughter — but because her daughter had decided she wanted to be with someone else and that she didn’t love me anymore. Luciana was angry I’d told her mother of the affair. She would have liked it if we’d just pretended there was no reason for why we broke up. But I wasn’t willing to go along with that kind of lie, or with her mother thinking I’d failed her daughter.
I find the city hall. It’s half-covered in scaffolding. Cloth drips down the front, obscuring the view. A big sign in the middle of the scaffolding says the town hall is under repair. I see the building, and it seems like a clear metaphor. Things are broken. My relationship to my past is broken. Things need to be fixed.
I’ve ironed my clothes. They’re simply the clothes in my backpack — the few I have as I go to Morocco and to Alpedrete to confront the past and to close holes. I walk back to the main road from the center of town. I walk down the main road and then into the labyrinth of houses, constructed one after another in developments. It’s a little confusing for a moment which road to take. The past is a bit unclear. But I find my way through to the right roads again. I’m a little early. I try to delay some more. I’m sweating. I want to appear neat and clean. I wipe the sweat off my sunglasses. It’s too bright to take them off yet, but I want to take them off when I’m near so she has a clear view of me when I appear. I want nothing hidden. I want to be approachable, warm. There’s still a little too much time. I pace to the end of her street, which dead-ends nearby, and contemplate wandering into the olive trees, but I can’t delay this meeting anymore. It’s time. I take deep breaths. I tell myself I can do it, that I can make this meeting, that I have the strength to have it. “You can do it, you can do it,” I tell myself. I reach the gate to the street. It’s a bit rusty. It waits, silently frozen. To open it takes will and resolution. I open the gate and march up the front steps. I look at the door and wonder if I can ring the bell. This is the house where the nieces and nephews used to play in the yard. This is the front porch where family members would go out to take a smoke. There’s a photo of her from the last time I was in Spain, with Luciana wrapped in a colorful handmade blanket, smiling, with her face pretty the way it was when it was animated, standing between three or four of her brothers and sisters on this porch. She’s smiling and she wanted me to have that picture. She sent it to me. And then, only a couple of months later, she was with another man.
I ring the bell. We size each other up. She looks much the same as she did. We say nothing at first. I lean forward and give Marisol a hug. She goes into the kitchen to make some coffee. There’s a sense in which nothing has changed and everything has changed as we go to the kitchen. She’s taking her time, and I’m taking mine. There will be time to talk about the monumental change in our relationship that has come over us the last two and a half years, in our absence.
She stands in the kitchen as small and as sprightly as ever. She tells me she had an accident. She tells me how it happened. I express my sympathy and tell her she looks good, that she looks fully recovered, and she does. Her ability to bounce back amazes me. She opens the coffee maker and coffee grinds fly to the floor. She’s flustered. She gives me an explanation for why the old grinds are in the coffee pot. She likes neat explanations. She likes to think she’s scientific like her husband was, that things have a clear reason for why they happen, and that she has things figured out, even as things go flying out around her. She wears a white linen shirt with beautiful embroidery and white pants. She’s ironed her clothes neatly. She’s dressed up for me.
I’m glad to find I can speak easily and calmly to her. It’s almost like old times — us chatting in the kitchen. I’m glad, once I’m in the heat of the moment, I don’t feel overwhelmed by the past. I feel in control. She asks me whether I want hot or cold milk with my coffee. I tell her either one is good. It doesn’t matter to me. The trivial things don’t matter. What matters is that I can come back into this house and not feel overwhelmed. It’s a place of the past. Not of the present. There is the staircase, by the kitchen, which leads up to the bedroom where Luciana and I used to sleep together. There is the living room and dining room, joined into one big room, where her family used to get together. We move to the living room. I sit on the couch. She sits in a big chair the size of a La-Z-Boy, facing me. She goes for some cookies and places the hot coffee in front of us. I serve her and then myself. I put the coffee pot aside.
For two hours we talk. The shades are down and the room is dark, but there is the quiet dark feeling of a cocoon. Here we can meet like two in-laws who knew each other for years and talk without interference. She asks what I’ve been up to and what I’m doing in Spain. I tell her I was passing through for the first time since the divorce and that I had two choices: either not to call her or to call. I tell her I felt I wanted to call. I don’t say my plan is to say goodbye—that seems too abrupt, too final — but she knows why I’m here. I tell her I’ve been living in Mexico with a female painter and that I’ve been writing a book. I tell her I’ll be going to Italy for a while. I don’t tell her I’ll be going to Morocco. But other than that, I’m honest and open. I want her to see I’ve moved on, that I’m not stuck. She nods at the information I’m with someone else. She takes this as natural. I tell her Luciana and I aren’t in communication about anything personal. She seems to know this, potentially, but she says Luciana knows I’m in Mexico.
“You know, I never had anything against you,” she says. What she seems to be saying is that these are things between a husband and wife and that she’s just been an observer to the whole breakup.
I don’t respond defensively. I tell her calmly that I hope she can see now that I’m not the one responsible for her daughter leaving Spain and coming to the US. I tell her that at times it felt when we were married they believed I’d almost kidnapped her daughter and taken her away to the US.
No, she’d realized that all along, she says. Luciana had long wanted to go, she says.
“The reason we broke up had to do with personal things,” I say. “It didn’t have to do with coming from different countries.” I pause and then add, “Or because of being from different religions.” I’ve said it, without having to take her to task directly. I’m not going to talk about her anti-Semitic comment directly. There’s no need for that. I’ve made it clear the reason we separated wasn’t somehow because I am Jewish.
She volunteers something equally indirect in response. “You know, sometimes we say things in the heat of the moment we shouldn’t say. We say things that express at the time some feelings we have, but it isn’t what we think. I’ve always had trouble saying things, too much,” she says. It’s her way of indirectly apologizing, and it’s enough for me. I’m not married to her daughter anymore. She’s not my mother-in-law anymore. I don’t need for her to be perfect. What I need is for her to be respectful of me, and as we sit in the living room sharing updates on her children and grandchildren and my parents and my sister and my sister’s new baby, there’s the mutual respect of two who were once family.
She tells me about everyone. One daughter-in-law has cancer of the lymphoma. Her eldest daughter, who once drank heavily, has had a heart attack. Her son, Javier, is now living with her. He’s in his mid-forties. He’s lived for close to twenty years with another woman, but now he lives with his mother and visits his “girlfriend” (the one he’s been with for twenty years) on the weekend. “It seems strange to me,” my former mother-in-law says. But so it goes, she implies. Chaos runs rampant throughout the family. Children have affairs, they leave their spouses, and their children — her grandchildren — die in automobile accidents with drunk drivers. Another daughter-in-law won’t talk to her anymore, she says. Of the eleven children, six are divorced or separated, one has run away from the family, another has died in his forties from complications of former drug use. She tells me about the better things happening to her grandchildren, too — about fellowships to go study in other countries.
I give my sympathy. “It sounds like things have been tough,” I say.
“Yes, but this is what happens when you have a lot of kids,” she says. And in that phrase is everything that’s wrong in the family. It’s as if these things just happen, as if none of these people have any responsibility for the chaos that’s happening around them and to them. There’s a claim of fatalism that this is just the way of life. Maybe. But sitting on the couch, as we drink coffee, I feel the relief I’m no longer in this chaotic family. These problems are no longer my problems. I don’t have to absorb them anymore. I can just hear the information, and while I care about these folks, while I used to eat with them, while I feel sadness so much is happening that is painful to so many of them, while I wish the fastest recovery health-wise to all, while it pains me especially to hear about health problems through no fault of their own, I’m glad this maelstrom is no longer something I have to take in anymore. All families have problems. What I wish is that I’d simply not married into a family so full of them, with so much pain the pain overflowed into my own life and took it over captive for a while.
We talk about my sister’s baby. I tell her my sister is going to have another. My ex mother-in-law tells me her youngest daughter, Vanessa, is going to have a second baby. She shows me a picture of Vanessa’s first baby, Isabel. This is the baby Luciana supposedly went back to Spain to see, when she then went on to “Ibiza.” There’s something shocking seeing this photo. The baby is a two-year-old. She’s growing up, getting big. For that whole time, I’ve been in recovery from Luciana. A lot of time has gone by in this recovery.
I ask my mother-in-law if she’s still volunteering and working with foreigners. She tells me she is. She tells me about the books she’s reading. She tells me about some Moroccan writers she’s been reading — women. She tells me I should read these books. These are the kinds of things we used to talk about and that I connected with her. She reads a lot. She’s smart. We talk about women and whether it’s hard, or not, to get ahead as a woman. I tell her she must have felt she had to exert herself specially when she was a law student decades ago in the early 1950s, when there were only three women in her entire class. She disagrees. She says modern women talk about how tough it was then but that she and her mother and grandmother and sisters all went to school and that school was common for people of her class then. What she says is interesting to me, a window onto the past, but it also shows her stubbornness and dismissiveness. Feminists are wrong, period. Things weren’t the way they said. This is the same stubbornness she passed on to her daughter, Luciana. A few days before, when I saw Marcelo, he told me, “The problem with them is that they think they know everything and that they have nothing to learn.”
My own wife actually felt very insecure about her knowledge. But that didn’t keep her from being absolutely certain about her opinions. She knew what she knew and that was the way it was. Period. Things were absolute. She’d loved me once a lot, and then she didn’t. Period. Time to move on. And no need to show any doubt about the way decisions were made. As my mother-in-law talks about the books she’s reading, that pride, that certainty comes out.
We’ve talked for a good while. It’s getting later. I tell my mother-in-law I have to go meet up with some others for dinner. It’s only partially true. I have an invitation to eat with the family I’m staying with, but I can go back any time. Yet there’s nothing more to say. I’ve caught up on the gossip. I’ve seen my former mother-in-law, and she looks healthy after her accident, and that makes me happy. I’ve been able to say whatever I wanted. I’ve expressed I’ve moved on. We’ve chatted one last time. I’ve told her it never felt right to end our communication just by email. I’ve told her I wanted to speak in a better way, and we have.
She gets up and takes me to the door. What to say next? “Yes, we’ll see each other, again,” she says. She means it. She’s inviting me to come again the next time I’m in the country.
“I’m glad to see you look good,” I tell her. “Full of energy and sprightly, as always.” And she does look good standing in the doorway, her hair silvery, combed carefully for our meeting, her white clothes pressed. Her eyes get misty. She knows this is the last time we’ll see each other. She knows, without me saying goodbye, this is why I came. I lean forward and give her a kiss on both cheeks and a hug. There’s a feeling of warmth transmitted, of people who were once family. “Yes, until the next time,” I say. I hug her again and leave.
The whistle of the train is blowing. The station is a bit away and the train is coming in. I run as fast as I can to reach the train. The train comes only once an hour. I get to the platform and the conductor has already waved the others on. I jump on the commuter line. I’ve just made it. It’s a sign. An omen. I’ve made it.
Images: Author photo is by Steven B. Smith. Cover of Wonder Travels: A Memoir courtesy of Roundabout Press.
- Wonder Travels: A Memoir Book Excerpt - September 5, 2023