by Eduardo Lalo
I dreamed of Tomás and his wife. I should have seen him yesterday but I didn’t go to work. I like talking to him, but sometimes we have a hard time in spite of all our shared interests, including books. In the dream, his image returned over and over again. We spoke briefly and unintelligibly, and we kept having to separate and then talk again, as if the whole thing were a long, drawn-out, missed connection.
I saw him looking at me, and it took me a few seconds to recognize him. I almost got to the point where my reaction would have been too late. Two or three years ago, or maybe a little more, he worked with me for a brief period. A young man, quiet, superficially coarse. I later learned that he had been on death’s doorstep. When I went up to him, I couldn’t remember his name, but I did remember his condition and that’s what we talked about. His situation has improved, but as he told me about it, I could tell he was deeply exhausted. I gave him the banal support that a stranger might offer. When he said good-bye, I noticed that he shaved his forearms, the way bodybuilders do, and I was simultaneously impressed by how lightly he shook my hand. As if he doubted my presence.
I discover the name of a woman who works in an art supply store: Arles Pages. Arles, like the city that van Gogh made famous and the well-known brand of pricey watercolor drawing paper. Pages, as in pieces of paper in English or French. Her name is like one of the products she sells. She hadn’t noticed. She didn’t care to know.
I’m watching a red-tailed hawk, a guaraguao, from the café at the Borders bookstore in Plaza Escorial in Carolina. It glides skillfully above the housing development behind the shopping center, where a wooded hill still survives. I remember the stories I sometimes told my friends’ children, in which these birds were the protagonists; how they felt a longing for their lost world, a nostalgia that could degenerate into sentimentalism.
Next to me a Chinese man is thumbing through a volume in a series of popular novels titled Predator. His daughter, sitting across from him, is no more than three, but he’s given her his coffee to taste. They had spoken in Chinese earlier, but when she puts her lips to the coffee cup, the little girl wrinkles her nose and says “Fo!” like any Puerto Rican. There must be thousands of Chinese people in the country (just count everyone working in restaurants), but they’re invisible. I’ve sometimes wonder what their lives must be like, how they’ve ended up here, how they feel.
Is anyone counting us, the people living on this island? Do we exist for anyone, on this secretive afternoon, as we try to detach from the noise, the heat, the dust? Who hears our life stories? Are we known anywhere by anything other than clichés about us or vague, simplistic accounts of us that deny us our humanity?
A man is pushing his coconut and pineapple ice-cream cart along the sidewalk of Avenida Ponce de León, near the university. He’s wearing a pair of very cheap, worn-out sneakers, laces untied, like the ones they sell at a shoe store in the Plaza del Mercado in Río Piedras. He’s walking very slowly, hawking his wares unenthusiastically, as if by this time in the afternoon he doesn’t really care.
“The guilty feelings of those who write are well known, and they partly explain our obsession with putting the pen at the service of ‘worthy causes’ in order to feel less useless.” Gabriel Zaid, So Many Books.
I’m reading Zaid in a coffee shop. Near me, three Cubans are shouting more than talking to each other. The youngest, with a fantastically carved walking cane resting between his legs, says he didn’t see a cow until he was seventeen years old.
The improbable conversation distracts me. Zaid analyzes the act of reading, from learning how to spell out words to the comprehension of a book as a whole. “People who feel this way don’t read books. They never really learned to read books. Reading never appealed to them. They never acquired a taste for reading, and so they will never enjoy it.” I’m thinking about these men with their booming voices, meant to raise the value of what they’re saying, about the coffee shop workers, about the other people eating here. I’m the only one in the whole place with a book. At this hour, already well into the morning, nobody even has a newspaper. When I sat down and pulled the book out of my backpack, I felt a slight, distant sense of shame. As if I were making a fool of myself in the schoolyard.
I note with relief that the Cubans have stood up and are going to pay. An old Puerto Rican, who stands by the cash register in hopes of getting a coffee, has heard them and interrupts the one with the cane:
— And when you saw the cow, did you think it was a kangaroo?
The Cuban is sickly thin and wears false teeth. He doesn’t like it when others butt into his business, and in answer, he makes an unclear gesture meant to settle the matter. But the old man, who has just gotten his coffee, keeps up the joke:
— Where were you living? In New York?
In the geographic and conceptual choices behind his questions lies a lot of history and a whole limited view of the world. Apparently the Cuban feels that he has to establish a distinction.
— No, he answers. In a city where there weren’t any cows.
He says it with arrogant pride. His answer, I know, is imbued with a mythic concept of Havana as progress and modernity held back by history.
I reach the last page of a chapter in So Many Books: “Reading is not the act of spelling out words, or the effort of dragging oneself across the surface of a mural that will never be viewed in its entirety. Beyond the alphabet, the paragraph, and the short article which may still be taken in all at once, there are functional illiteracies of the book. The great barrier to the free circulation of books is the mass of privileged citizens who have college degrees but never learned to read properly . . .”
The Cubans finally leave and the door is about to close when the old man exclaims:
— Guess what, I lived next to a slaughterhouse! Didn’t I see cows!
It is amazing what happens without anything happening. Here I am, sitting in front of a cup of coffee, reading a book, writing in a notebook.
“The human race publishes a book every thirty seconds.” Gabriel Zaid, So Many Books.
Diego, who’s been living abroad for longer and longer periods since he started working at the bank, has begun to neglect me, like so many other aspects of his past. I’ve seen this happen to plenty of people but never thought I’d see it with him. He must think his chance to leave the country came too late in life, and the years of stultifying frustration are now manifesting as disdain. Just like me, he was too eager, but I left at a much younger age and the moment came when I knew I had to return, even if I didn’t really know what I was coming back to. I don’t judge him, but this is the first time anything’s come between us since we’ve known each other. This break between us is a kind of violence. Nobody deserves it. A reminder that this society hardly even counts for him anymore, yet he can’t get away from it.
A young, attractive woman, walking with her two children. She’s dressed simply (jeans, blouse) and wearing heavy makeup. She buys snacks for the three of them but ends up eating everything herself, except for a couple of bites her older son nibbles. She talks to the clerk at the coffee shop and to someone on her cell phone with a naturalness that seems affected and puts me off. You could say she seems like a foreigner; here that would be taken as a compliment. She allows the boys to run around, doesn’t shout at them, does everything at a slow pace, so comfortable at it that it’s almost insulting. She doesn’t mind being watched. We all know she’s rich and couldn’t care less what we think.
When she leaves, the memory of her still bothers me. I can’t help this feeling of oppression, which comes from way back. A whole history of humiliations I’ve never been able to pin down.
“It pained me that on the streets of the city where I had lived most of my life nothing should be happening. It was like any other place in the world, people were born, grew up, suffered, fell in love, survived, died, the whole comedy and the whole tragedy, but at the same time and over the long run, here nothing ever happened. Nothing that I or people lik
e me could do would create more than passing waves in a pond. Our place in history, our efforts to live and leave a mark, a narrative, were not permitted to exist. We claimed to be a country, but in reality even many of those who were convinced of that fact acted as if we were nothing but a stop on an empire’s bus route. We barely had words, only gestures, maybe a few ways of destroying ourselves. A shopkeeper could be at peace any place. Money worked just as it did anywhere else. But all I had were words that would never be heard or read; terms from an unknown city that was scarcely real even to its own inhabitants.”
This is a paragraph by Máximo Noreña. I’ve read it so many times I’ve practically learned it by heart. It expresses the agony of generations of people and reading it gives me, ironically, a sense of peace. A desperate peace, to be sure, but ultimately peace, as if I suspected that something had happened in the city because someone had been capable of writing this paragraph.
“To what degree can we build a society based on lies and forgetting?”
At the exit to the university building, this was written in chalk on the sidewalk. I didn’t think it could have anything to do with me. It sounded like a slogan, a protest aimed at everyone and at no one. The next messages quickly made me change my mind.
I’d never seen a public statement written like that, in chalk, so willingly ephemeral. Political declarations tended to go for the aggressive hostility of paint. The block letters were almost childish and leaned to the right. At that moment I read it without suspecting it might have something to do with me.
A few days later I found a small, wrinkled piece of paper (barely a quarter of a sheet of notebook paper) that someone had slipped under the door to my office.
MONDAY, 8:1?.
I am Lina, the blond, pale-skinned, short-haired, blue-eyed girl who wrote on the street, ‘To what degree can we build a society based on lies and forgetting?’ I came looking for you, but I don’t want to find you. I want you to read me. I’ll be back on Wednesday at around 12:XX. I hope to be able to see you without our needing to talk. I prefer for you to read me and for me to read you. Thank you for your attention and sincerity.
Seriously,
Simone
I remember the early eighties, when I lived in old San Juan. At night I’d see how the ships (cruise ships, freighters, yachts) entered the bay wrapped in an unreal silence. It was new to me and completely magical. Never before had I lived near a port, neither here nor abroad. The traffic of great ships intensified the flavor of city living and taught me something obvious yet oddly difficult to believe: San Juan could be a destination, a point of arrival for sailors and vessels that I imagined coming from countries all over the world.
The sirens wailing at the mouth of the bay were the most comforting sound that, up to then, I had ever heard.
The day I wrote this, an unsealed white envelope appeared in my mail box at the university. It contained two sheets of paper covered with large and irregular block letters, spelling out what looked like an unidentified quotation:
As expected, I have remained in Manchester to this day, Ferber continued. It is now twenty-two years since I arrived, he said, and with every year that passes a change of place seems less conceivable. Manchester has taken possession of me for good. I cannot leave, I do not want to leave, I must not. Even the visits I have to make to London once or twice a year oppress and upset me. Waiting at the stations, the announcements over the public address, sitting on the train, the countryside passing by (which is still quite unknown to me), the looks of the fellow passengers—all of it is torture to me. That is why I have rarely been anywhere in my life, except of course Manchester; and even here I often don’t leave the house or workshop for weeks on end.
In Río Piedras two women are talking on the street:
— I want to be blonder.
— But you, your hair is so nice and fine, and it’s so easy to dye.
I know what they are saying, but in reality, what are they saying? How are words possible for something I do not wish to understand?
I dreamed of an area in the center of the island that doesn’t exist. Very mountainous (with peaks much higher than the ones in the Cordillera Central) and tall cliffs of sheer rock with no vegetation. In one place there’s a waterfall, and then a photo. In the photo, I’m very thin and have long hair, parted the way I wore it when I started at the university. Behind me is my partner during that moment beyond time. A thin, foreign woman (probably North American) who smiles at me with a great deal of affection. Something suggests that we met and fell in love while working together on whatever it was that brought her to the country. However, she will be leaving soon, and in the dream, there’s a sense of a couple of letters. Distance will not allow this romance to continue. What’s left is this photo, suggesting nostalgia for the impossible, for these cliffs and mountains that are somehow associated with us. The cruel certainty of dreams, telling me that this woman whom I am losing forever has been a part of my life story.
I think of the women I’ve been involved with, each relationship ending in disappointment. In the end, it always devolved into tallying losses, into tiresome negotiations to create a barely livable situation: company, sex, conversations, a soft and capricious tenderness. I put up with what almost always struck me as their narrow-mindedness: the ridiculous obsessions, the dreams of weddings and progeny, the search for an apartment we couldn’t afford in El Condado. We were always victims of the long, slow dissolution of what was never fully there.
Followed by our haphazard, widely spaced encounters in the street, perfect for acting out, certain we could always retreat. My survival strategies: a stupid desire to live in any hole in the wall, a tremendous craving for a smoke, a yearning to lose myself in a solitude that was both a chrysalis and an offensive weapon, my useless disappearance, and my useless violence.
I’ve always been just as I’ve described myself here: surrounded by fragments, by bits of things with which to fill the hours.
I’ve learned to live amid the rubble, satisfied not to be satisfied, supposing these circumstances link me to a multitude of men and women whom I will make no effort to meet, but with whom I feel a sort of kinship much more powerful than I’ve had with most of the people I actually know. This is how I’ve lived, with no possibility of a reasonable excuse. I’ve become a creature of habit and run out of arguments. I try to explain why I still feel shreds of something like a childish sense of shame, but my shame too has lost ground. I explain without a reason now. Free.
My e-mail inbox received a message that seems to consist exclusively of one quote:
“As he watched the small towns and lonely mines go by, he ran into reminders of his past that transported him to the rest of the world. . . . For a dead man, the whole world was a giant funeral.”
The sender’s unlikely e-mail address belonged to a beauty academy.
The world of the future (the future?): people wandering through the streets, the plaza, the highways, the stages of life, without understanding any of it.
That time when, arriving at the airport in New York, I pretended to be a Paraguayan, and I told the woman who shared the taxi with me (a US citizen, over the age of fifty, married to a lawyer with a degree from Columbia University) that I had been on a trip with many layovers all across South America. It wasn’t that saying I was coming from Puerto Rico seemed like too little to me. My struggle was to keep her from attributing one of the few images she had at hand to me. My humanity didn’t fit them, and it rebelled. But why did I pretend to be a Paraguayan, which for her was even harder to place, less real? Why emphasize the distance, the length, complexity, and phantom nature of the trip? What was I telling her? Why was I in such a rush to impose a distance between us that put practically everything off limits?
Another message has appeared in my inbox: “Struggles have become all but incommunicable.” Could it be from Lina? Or from Simone? The sentence forms a solid column in which it is repeated at least fifty times. At the end, after a blank
line, it says, “For you. Is it you?”
It was impossible to know how he, or she, got my address. Obviously the game was afoot. I was in the sights of a sharpshooter who wanted to toy with me.
I must admit that I like getting the messages. More than a week has gone by since the last one. Are they original texts or quotations? And I fantasize that the writer might be a woman.
On the street, I find myself watching my back. I’m not afraid of anything, but I think I can detect eyes spying on me.
I also consider the fact that these messages, which seem to arrive on sunbeams or on the wind, could surely only happen here, that they’re a form that life takes on in San Juan. Like this, like writing at this table with a tangle of feelings lashing out against the ocean that separates us from everything and everybody, even our friends, such as Diego. For some reason we’ve chosen to talk without looking at ourselves, without knowing for sure who we are, without any real contact. The routine of the city: solitude drives down the highways, making pit stops at twenty-four-hour gas stations.
I’m in the Iberia coffee shop on Avenida Ponce de León. It’s Saturday and the afternoon is beginning. There’s hardly anyone here. A waitress with dyed blond hair and an incredibly childish voice sweeps the floor. In the far corner, an old couple talks in low whispers. The man is from the United States and has ordered two café con leches in his heavy accent. A TV set mounted near the ceiling is blaring. No one watches it.
Through the storefront window, I see it’s drizzling, as it’s been for the past two days. The city of insufferable sun has its indoor days. A Saturday, traffic is light and flows easily. Across the street there used to be an appliance store where I’d go with my parents more than twenty years ago. I bought a refrigerator there myself, for one of my first apartments. I remember that in this coffee shop, more than a decade ago, I tried to buy a sandwich one wretched night when the whole city was celebrating, because they were setting off fireworks in honor of the Quincentennial.