Simone

by Eduardo Lalo

  Here I am, waiting for the next message, already aware that I find something in them that I don’t have in myself and that I desire. What is it? Who am I, what do I represent to that other person? What are they looking for, to go to such lengths?

  Yesterday, at the stoplight where Avenida Ponce de León meets Roosevelt, the addict I see every day and to whom I haven’t given a penny in months knocked on the car window and showed me an envelope with my name written in block letters. I opened the window. “It’s for you, mister. How are you today?” “OK, you?” It’s conventional to treat the poor brusquely, so it would have been a mockery to return his formality. “As you find me, mister,” he replied. “See you,” I said when the traffic started up again, convinced that in the future he would start to form part of my small circle of relations.

  I managed to open the envelope, which was heavily sealed with tape, while shifting gears and changing lanes, but even so, I didn’t manage to keep my fellow drivers from honking their horns at me. I turned onto a street in Hato Rey and looked for a place to park in the working-class neighborhood that’s still there, a block from the pomp of the banking district. In front of an auto shop, I found a driveway where I could pull off of the street, and I unfolded the paper. “When I asked if he remembered saying good-bye to his parents in the airport, he replied, after a long hesitation, that when he thought back to that May morning at Oberwiesenfeld he could not see his parents. He no longer knew what the last thing his mother or father had said to him was, or he to them, or whether his parents had embraced or not.”

  The message was as heartbreaking as the crudely handwritten phrase that the shop owner, no doubt a former drug addict converted to Evangelical Christianity, had posted over the entrance: “Drugs kill.” Now I saw him eyeing me from inside the shop, perturbed by my indecisively parked car, standing in a shop entrance papered with two or three months’ worth of centerfolds of women in bikinis from copies of Primera Hora. Curious combination of Christ Jesus and the finest tits the country has to offer.

  I backed up and drove back to the avenue. Tried not to think. It was preferable, for now, to savor both the pleasure and the uncertainty.

  It had been a couple of years since a publisher brought my first three books back into print in a volume called Three-in-One. I loved the play on words. “Three-in-One” was a brand of oil I used as a child to lubricate my bicycle. My books, which had suffered from neglect and editorial ineptitude, had returned to the land of the living (or of the reading) with relative success. They were circulating by dribs and drabs, but I knew that normally things were much worse. I had been impressed when the woman at an ice cream parlor in El Condado, instead of taking my order, asked me about the plot of a novel and scooped the vanilla ice cream while enthusiastically describing how she read it or when a secretary in a doctor’s office who read my name on a form asked me if I was the writer of the same name and proceeded to interrogate me until the coughs of waiting patients forced her to end her impromptu interview.

  These literary encounters, which took place on a number of occasions, were new to me. I had gotten used to writing for nobody because in my case the cliché of writing for your friends didn’t fit. My friends (with the partial exception of Diego because not even he had read everything) and my girlfriends weren’t particularly interested in my writing. So over the years, without getting metaphorical about it, I had resigned myself to writing for nobody, or rather, for my hand: writing gave me something to do with it, something to do with my life. Probably the reason I didn’t quit was that in my final years of high school, and later at the university, this was the identity I wanted to give myself because I revered book cover photos, not posters of actors or athletes; because in the end, despite the scale of the effort and the thankless indifference, what meant the most to me, even more than women, were books.

  So it was natural for me to suppose that the mysterious message writer was inspired by an enthusiastic reading of my work. Something had to have motivated this person to seek me out because the notes I was given, or the phrases written in chalk or sent by e-mail, were, in addition to attempts at seduction, a proof of literary passion.

  Julia phoned, and as we talked, it occurred to me she might be the one sending messages. We’d been partners. She knew my tastes, where I worked. Thinking it over, I lost track of the conversation. “Are you there? Still listening?” I could hear her annoyance. Her tone convinced me it couldn’t be her. She almost wanted me to listen to her by force, wanted me to love her. I was sure that under other circumstances we’d rather not be talking at all, or even to have ever met. Besides, she wasn’t patient or subtle enough for those messages. No, it couldn’t be Julia. Or rather, I thought, it shouldn’t be Julia.

  I like writing on the backs of flyers that people hand me on the street. My notes go on advertising leaflets and also on receipts. Now, for example, I’m writing on the back of an ad for a company that does roof repair and similar services. I first read the message from the company, which, like so many others here, has a pompous English name under which it lists its services in everyday Spanish.

  I write anywhere. Ink flows like magic across cheap paper.

  “The Center for Academic Excellence invites you to our ‘Workshop on the Comma’ and our ‘Workshop on Pronouns and Adverbs; Prepositions and Conjunctions.’ These two workshops will be conducted by our resident professors of linguistic competence in the vernacular and are requirements for the Institute for Composition in the Vernacular.”

  Is there anything to add, in the vernacular?

  In what is now a familiarly disconcerting ritual, two days after the last note (on Saturday; today is Monday), I found an envelope in my home mailbox. From the San Juan Biennial of Latin American and Caribbean Printmaking, according to the return address, it was an invitation to take part in the Eleventh International Biennial Print and Drawing Exhibition in Taipei. A form letter photocopied to be distributed to a long list of addressees, no doubt. It was odd, in that I hadn’t been sent anything of the sort in quite a while; what was nearly incomprehensible was my discovery, in the flyer’s reflection in the glass living room table, of the now familiar calligraphy on its back, with its seemingly clumsy, thick block letters leaning toward the lower right corner of the paper. Unlike the letter, the message was handwritten, not photocopied. It seemed to consist of two quotations:

  “I cannot stand good old boys. If it depended on them, literature would have already disappeared from the face of the earth.”

  “I hate the vast majority of ‘normal’ human beings who day by day are destroying my world. I hate people who are very good-natured because no one has given them the opportunity to know what evil is and so to choose good freely; I have always thought that such good-natured people have an extraordinary malice in the making.”

  To say that the arrival of these messages astonished me would at this point be an understatement. The truth is that whoever was writing to me had a special gift for getting under my skin. Both quotes would have interested me under any circumstances, in a book, in the press, or at a conference. I thought I could see clues in them both to the history of whoever was writing to me and to my own life. The note writer selected his (her?) texts (original or appropriated? I wasn’t sure), glimpsing that they would be the objects of a common passion (and perhaps a shared survival strategy, too?). Maybe it was too much for me to say that I found myself in them, but they undoubtedly hit close enough to the mark for the series to begin turning into a sort of fabulous chain whose magic lay precisely in its transcendence of the ordinary notion of writing and reading a text. I was committed to this “story,” which I couldn’t stop reading until I came across its last word, or, what was more disconcerting and in this case thrilling, until I discovered its author.

  Who was my pursuer? How could he (or she) know where I live and be familiar with my habits, my identity, my consciousness, and even the things that lurked in my dreams? As daunting as these questions were, the richness of t
he messages and my desire for fresh submissions overcame my sense of alarm.

  I see a man taking out a trumpet in the lobby of the Hospital del Maestro. I’m on the sidewalk across the avenue and am watching him through the plate glass window. Next to him is an old man. The cool light makes his instrument look extraordinarily golden. His instrument case is very battered, its corners broken and faded. What’s going on here? A trumpet in a hospital at night in San Juan? What story lies behind this vision?

  D’Style. Brides and Grooms. The signs of businesses with their fabulous and so often pathetic messages. This lengthy urban text constitutes a sort of substitute for dialogue or description, a cartography of the words of so many anonymous people, set in plastic rectangles or turned into neon structures. Through them, desire speaks, but also tedium and lies. They are sentences in the novel of the city.

  Yesterday, I went with Julia and her little boy Javier to the movies. (Julia, that unfinished story, set aside due to apathy and boredom. We separated three years ago, but from time to time, we still see each other and occasionally hop in the sack out of sheer loneliness and sheer self-delusion.) We went to one of the Río Hondo theaters to watch a children’s film. I knew what I was getting myself into from the moment I agreed to go and had nothing but the lowest expectations for what lay ahead that afternoon.

  Just as the shorts ended, a couple with two children sat down right behind us, even though the whole auditorium was empty. I suppose there are a lot of people who model their behavior in movie theaters on the hours they spend every day in front of the TV, so they think it’s OK to talk out loud, to stand up, and to let their kids touch other people’s collars, kick the backs of their chairs, and run through the aisles. I almost asked Julia to move, but then thought it didn’t matter, in the long run there’s no escaping such people.

  On the screen, a kangaroo was running away with a jacket and a wad of cash belonging to a cartoon gangster (this was the exquisite confection that we had paid money to subject ourselves to). The appalling plot struck me as both unreal and predictable, but for our back-row neighbors, the film had become a thriller. It would take some patience to explain to them that they weren’t watching a documentary; that the kangaroo hadn’t been trained, as they thought; and that everything they were watching had been created on a computer, so there was no need to wonder how the kangaroo could jump so high.

  It was ridiculous, a half-baked idea, but I became convinced that their stupidity was negatively affecting my life. It was aggressive, in a way. I know such people exist in every society, but in this society, practically everything seems to cater to them, to keep them from realizing how childish, inept, and miserable they are. The purpose of our government is to let them go through all the stages of their lives without facing their shortcomings. Shopkeepers design sales with them in mind. That’s why hardly anyone makes demands, why a handful of ideas are lauded everywhere: family, the illusion of democracy, consumer appeal. I am excluded because these people exist.

  I couldn’t help noticing the names of the boys who never stopped tormenting Javier. The elder was called Ostec or Usbec—anyway, something extraterrestrial-sounding, like parsec. The other had been christened with a name that most likely was taken straight from a soap opera. He was Jonathan Louis.

  I knew I really did care about them, when I got down to it. All I had to do was imagine what it meant to be born and to grow up in a suburb in Bayamón, have names like those, spend whole years going from the Canton Mall to the Plaza Río Hondo, belong to the political party that allows for the highest level of self-hatred disguised as progress and hope, peddle products that promise bulging muscles or gleaming auto finishes, and every Sunday attend the church that has all the answers and the greatest music. I was definitely as much a person of this place as they were. They were, despite appearances, my compatriots.

  I left the theater with the sensation I’ve had so often: the pain that never goes away, that I hardly even feel any more. But it’s always there. Julia and I tried to put it into words but we soon gave up. The family in the theater, the drive along Highway 2 a few minutes later—there was no break between them. It was all the same. This was another part of the desert. Nothing set them apart. It was just more sand.

  “Lookit, gimme two them big boxes.” “I’m a tell you, here’s her papers.” “Don’t you go changing.” “Our prayers are getting through because the war isn’t so bad.” “You’re gumming things up.” “The wallet’s the problem.” “Wait up, I’m turning.” “Dale una pizza con mushrooms.” “It isn’t cheap. It’s expensive. I brought him a bunch of biscotti.”

  These are the things I hear and write down on the streets. Behind the words, the enigma remains. But everything smacks of plastic, of sun, of double-A batteries for a machine made in China. The only way out is having enough money to go into seclusion or to travel, recover by seeing and hearing other things. That’s the only real privilege here. If you’re rich enough, you can pretend you don’t have anything to do with this.

  I kept circling the block because I didn’t want to stop listening to a program on Radio Universidad about a Cuban novelist, a schizophrenic, who went into exile in Miami and ended up committing suicide in the last decade of the twentieth century. His name (Wilson, William, I’m not sure) meant nothing to me. The critic they were interviewing recalled that he had destroyed almost everything he had written. A paragraph they read from a novel stuck with me. It told the story of the protagonist’s arrival at the Miami airport from Cuba and the reaction of his family when they saw him. It said that they were expecting a man in the prime of life, a businessman, a future husband, father, and upstanding member of the exile community, yet what they met with was a prematurely aged man, toothless, looking at everyone with apprehension, who had to be committed on the very day he arrived to a psychiatric hospital.

  When the reading ended, I felt overwhelmed. It was one of those texts that nails the Caribbean. It proved the power of the fragmentary, how much can be said without the fanfare. That afternoon, I was spontaneously discovering a text of the same caliber as the ones I was being sent. This was good enough for me to send to myself; if I were daring enough, I might even send it to my pursuer.

  I’ve often seen him in the small shopping center where the coffee shop is. Some of the richest housing developments in the metropolitan area are near there. He must still be living in one of those tracts, still with his parents, probably in his childhood bedroom. Despite his studies, or at least his attempts along those lines, he never managed to get a job or live independently. So he’s come to be a bald, pot-bellied forty-year-old. Today, he’s by himself, sharply dressed. Other times, he’s in shorts and sandals, displaying a slovenliness you don’t often see in his circles. He comes around here at the most ungodly hours, so he clearly has no job, no work to do; he’s a moocher, dead broke. I’ve seen how the coffee shop workers make fun of him, probably thinking there’s something deeply unfair about this waste of privilege. The man pretends not to notice their contempt, so thick you could cut it, and keeps on walking.

  I just saw someone parking a car the same color and model as mine. For a second, I thought I was watching myself arrive. The thought came so naturally, as if it were actually possible, as if there weren’t anything demented about that perception.

  I’m looking at the floodlights in the park where I played baseball as a boy. Back then I got to see them being built. This was more than thirty years ago. They’re the same towers I struck with the best hit of my career. The ball bounced off into a bit of swampy pasture, all that was left of what the whole area must have been until it was developed in the 1940s or 50s.

  The same towers, the same trees, the same bit of primordial habitat, the same consciousness. Eternity must be pretty much like this.

  When I recall visits to the Santa Rosa shopping center in Bayamón, it’s always the middle of summer and the sun is beating down on a merciless cement pavement, an image of desolation. Inside, the short passagewa
y with shops on either side is dark, dank, immune to air conditioning.

  When my father was dying, I went to buy myself a pair of shoes like the ones he wore. I’d just broken them in when he passed away. The leather soles were very slippery. That was how I walked for weeks following his death, wearing shoes that could have been his, constantly on the verge of toppling.

  The boy was sitting on a cement bench opposite the entrance to an office building. He must have come from school, as his schoolbook backpack was in front of him, and he must have been waiting for someone to come pick him up. Maybe eleven or twelve years old, a little small for his age, unkempt hair, wearing a silver bracelet on his right wrist, too big for him, too incongruent on a small boy. I was having a cup of coffee a few steps away, at the counter in a tiny coffee shop. He was staring fixedly at some point, both at the ground right in front of him and at something far away. I felt certain that I must have been like him, that this combination of fragility and cool was the face I once offered the world. I knew, then, what he would go through later, what his lost stare already suspected: the inability to understand the desires and the violence of everyone else; the riddle of finding so many people so sure of themselves, ready to accept the world, who later dissolve into drab adults with various degrees of remorse and ignorance. I knew that this was what awaited him. His stare seemed to have a presentiment of it that afternoon. I had an impulse to keep this boy from suffering, but all I did was finish my coffee and leave.