by Eduardo Lalo
Something occurred to me that, at least for the moment, has invigorated me: I should be sending my own messages. Whoever keeps pestering me is familiar with my routines and particulars. All I have to do is leave him or her an envelope or a note taped to my office or any other place where they know I go. I thought I might write down what I remembered about the Cuban novelist. I have nothing to lose by complicating the game, by making it mine as well. I should write the text. When I’ve got it, I’ll see if I do it.
Today, I found this written in colored chalk on the asphalt in front of my car in the university parking lot: “Today I am defeated, as if I had learned the truth.” My pursuer must be dedicated and have some free time and guts because it must have gone through his mind that I might discover him. I went to the guard’s booth and asked if he had seen anyone writing something on the ground. I had to repeat the question and explain it until it gave me a sensation of being ridiculous. And no one enjoys being taken for an imbecile or a crazy person.
Going back to my car, I found a piece of yellow paper caught under the windshield wiper. Just a couple of minute earlier, when I read the message on the ground, there hadn’t been anything on the windshield. I pretended to be uninterested in the folded note and didn’t look up because I didn’t want to encounter the eyes of my message writer. I wasn’t ready just then. I was stuck between fury and fright.
I left the parking lot as quickly as I could. I didn’t know whether my seeming lack of interest would deceive my pursuer. It was to be expected that he had been spying on me, and knowing that he was so nearby was intolerable for me. I thought some signal from me was expected and that I’d squandered my chance to send it. The messages, their delivery, and the skill with which it was all done were starting to feel like a seduction, and I didn’t know what to do with that.
I took a roundabout way home. Stupidly, with a mixture of pleasure and terror, I imagined that I was being followed. For what? Why? It was impossible to know.
When I came in and closed the door, I realized I hadn’t opened the sheet of yellow paper. There was the usual calligraphy, the coarsely yet carefully drawn print letters, angling down toward the right margin. “Walter Benjamin said that in our time the only work truly endowed with meaning—critical meaning, as well—would have to be a collage of quotations, excerpts, echoes of other works.”
I wandered between the kitchen and the other rooms, in the dark, not making any noise, trying my best to give no sign that might give away my presence. Several times, I went to the corner of the window, where I could hide behind the curtains and peer out. The street was the same as ever, the same neighbors I barely exchanged greetings with, the usual barking dogs, the symmetrically arranged cones of streetlight.
Today, on a street in Río Piedras, a man in a T-shirt walked by me. When he was near, I saw the date printed on the cloth: September 23, 1977. The T-shirt was announcing an event that took place a quarter of a century ago. I recalled an anecdote I once heard Diego tell. He knew a member of the Socialist Party who, after an event where few people had shown up, took a box of T-shirts that they wouldn’t be selling again home with him. He used them for years with complete indifference, with demented frugality.
I had just met that man, who was no longer young, who had probably been walking around the city’s streets for years bearing on his chest the vestiges of a vanished world.
I was invited to take part in a conference titled “The Right to Raise a Stink.” I’ve always been surprised by the simulated populism of the way organizers name so many intellectual activities, as if they were making a commitment or, worse, they felt embarrassed that the great majority of people find this sort of work unnecessary and incomprehensible. I suppose they’re trying to show that, despite appearances, the participants are just like anybody else. Nevertheless, the people who go to these events are hardly average folks, and I’ve never run into anyone from my own street at one of them.
I find it hard to attend these events. I’d rather read a text than have to listen to it, and besides, I rarely come across a talk that I find truly illuminating. This time I got there for the opening keynote and stayed for hours, waiting for my turn, witnessing a series of funeral dirges.
There was a bit of everything, from the reading of some fairly worthwhile texts to the recitations of others that became unbearable because of their authors’ efforts to cite without restraint a half dozen international luminaries, whose appearance in these writings was disturbingly predictable. I imagined how astonished those major figures would be if they found fragments of their works used by scholars from all five continents to support the most unlikely topics and conclusions.
Sometimes this repeated appeal to authority was suspicious, sometimes merely a nervous tic. One anthropologist with an authentic Cuban accent and questionable hair color demonstrated an oddly open interpretation of Lacan’s seminar on psychoses in the longwinded and disquieting conclusion to her commentary on the hundredth anniversary of the Universidad de Puerto Rico. Then there was the frightening sociologist Carmen Lindo, who, instead of pronouncing Derrida in the French way, with the accent on the last syllable, alluded to the philosopher three or four dozen times over the space of fifteen dense and impenetrable pages with the accent on the first syllable and a trilled r: “Dérida.” To top it off, she cited “Dérida” in an English translation, which for the public’s benefit she followed with a spontaneous version in Spanish that suffered a bit too much from trial and error.
There was also a lawyer-historian who, after saying he didn’t want to presume to predict the future, ran half an hour out of time and out of sense in giving us a detailed description of the coming century, which he was certain would be an age of solidarity. Also noteworthy was the second talk by professor Lindo, who, each time (and there were many times) she quoted her sources and found that they had written “man” to refer to humanity, would offer her generous aid by chiming in with “and I would add woman,” thus creating spontaneous, unauthorized collaborative texts, which, while contributing little, at least showed her taking some risks and presenting her own words, predictable and obsessive as they may have been.
That’s how I spent my day, dreaming of coffee breaks, incredulous to find someone capable of citing Deleuze and Gabriela Mistral in the same sentence just like that, without forewarning or footnotes, yoked together by a conjunction that both linked and disfigured their meaning. I skipped the farewells and left before the end, having heard the prodigious citer of “Dérida” preface her commentary on the final panel by warning us that she had “only nine little points to make.” In the end, a day of ordeals that will have to be filed under the heading “Conferences Attended,” in the hopes that it will prove of some use in the fateful hour when contracts are renewed at the university.
Diego is off on another trip. He dropped by to give me the keys to his house. He has a crew of workers remodeling the kitchen and bedrooms, and he wants me to stay on top of them. He spends less and less time in San Juan, lately no more than three or four days at a stretch, and it’s very likely that the bank he works for will send him for an extended time to some large South American city. I don’t know why he’s investing money in a house he won’t be living in. I miss my friend, who I feel is growing more and more distant, who I see disassociating himself from the world that was ours for so many years.
It’s Saturday and night has fallen. I’ve gone to his house to check on the how the work is going. I doubt the workers have done anything this afternoon; there’s no sign they’ve been here. Everything’s covered in a layer of cement dust and the electricity is shut off to part of the house. I’m sitting on the kitchen floor, near the lamp that used to be in the living room and that has now been tossed in some corner here, next to a cushion leaning incongruently against the fridge.
It isn’t my house, but I’ve been coming here for years. The construction work has made it less familiar, but the place is still part of my past. Nevertheless, in the silence tonight, in
this abandoned, dusty house, I feel anxious. There’s something disturbing and secretive about being here. Coming to this residence, which the construction has transformed into ruins, writing under this single light bulb, listening to the noise of the wind, the distant murmurs of the neighbors, I get nervous and jumpy, and I know this feeling has nothing to do with my doing Diego a favor. I’ve come here so I won’t have to be home or in a shop where everyone can see me. Nobody could imagine me here. I’m hidden. Here no messages will arrive.
I’ve gone into the bathroom and found Virginia Woolf’s diary in a pile of books. It can’t belong to Diego. It must be some of the stuff one of his women left behind. I’ve opened it at random and read the first line of a paragraph. I’ve copied it in the notebook, imitating as best I could the block letters that have been pursuing me for weeks.
“I must note the symptoms of the disease, so as to know it next time.”
In a while I’ll leave. I’ll tear the sheet from the notebook, fold it in half, and when I get home I’ll stick it in the brown envelope I got a few days ago and place it under the windshield wiper, where I always park my car.
In my notebook, the sentence no longer means what it did in Woolf’s diary, and it will signify something even more different when it’s in the envelope waiting for the mystery hand.
A few words extracted from a diary, now turned into the beginnings of a dialogue. The irony is not lost on me.
Now gripping a walker, the elderly man takes his place in line at a diner in old San Juan. Twenty years ago he spent his nights at the Burger King on Calle San Francisco, next to a guy from the United States with a shaved head who would sit at the same table and read the Bible. How many years in this city have I watched how these people’s stories serve to knit my own together?
I’ve placed the Woolf quotation in the last envelope they sent me and stuck it on the windshield. I can’t help feeling distressed and a bit ridiculous. The bait is set. I’m aware that, with this act, I’m taking on a new position in the game; that by doing this, I’m recognizing what’s been happening; and that doing this may mean that everything will change.
Writing fragments, writing notes in a notebook as the days fly by, is the closest I can come to creating a text that doesn’t know it’s lying. Later, when I rework it, I’ll introduce subterfuges and establish ways of not saying things, or of not saying everything. But here, in this black notebook, I still don’t know what I shouldn’t let myself confess. It doesn’t matter if what I say is true. I don’t need to know. I don’t know what will happen tomorrow. I don’t know what I’ll write after that. I’ve got all my writing ahead of me.
My message elicited no response. I’ve been dreaming. I thought they’d see it right away. Perhaps it is the case that they’re following me, but nobody can shadow me twenty-four hours a day. I finally took the envelope from the windshield, and in an ultimate act of inanity, I fixed it to the lid of the mail box. There the afternoon showers destroyed it.
I went to meet a colleague at the Universidad del Sagrado Corazón. While I was walking along a corridor past the classrooms, I saw a large sign taped to a blackboard: “Be brief. I want to share.” Given its location, it was a call to a supposedly democratic superficiality and the militant slogan of those who are incapable of listening and understanding but who demand participation. Nevertheless, because of what I had been going through, the sign seemed aimed at me. All around me, I found messages, even if I wasn’t supposed to be the addressee. Wasn’t this absurd suggestion from a university classroom what I wanted to communicate to my pursuer? Hadn’t I been trying to hobble them, to put a limit on them, to shut them up, to replace their voice (which was beginning to appear excessive to me) with my own? Wasn’t that what I’d been trying to do when I put an envelope on my car’s windshield?
— Talk to me, pops!
— A coffee and toast, I say.
— Two coffees, but make ’em real Yaucono, ordered the man standing next to me, using the brand name as if it were a commercial. His name was Frank, and he was flirting with the waitress: a frankly horrific, middle-aged woman.
I see a couple leaving the coffee shop.
— I got something to do, the guy said distractedly. He was about twenty and obviously dying to get out of there.
— ¡Dame un fucking beso! says the girl, grabbing him in a forced embrace.
Later, in another coffee shop, I discover that the waitress, a fake-blond Puerto Rican, is named Amadora. I have to wait to give her my order because she and a client are trying to resolve the mystery of why his cortadito tastes bad.
— It’s ’cause I whipped the milk, says Amadora, clarifying nothing. Even so, I risk another café con leche.
A few minutes later the older man, probably a retiree, who had been talking with Amadora and who I can now see through the window, opens his car door and vomits. Just two spurts, a thin puke that lies on the sidewalk like a puddle of water.
The next day, in the afternoon, at Cafetería Mallorca in old San Juan, I order a cup of café con leche, which they make in their antique coffee machine. I watch the waitress while she makes it. She pours the milk from a dented metal jug with the brand written on a small black label: “Colony Economy.”
My life has passed me by in this “Colony Economy,” rehearsing the coffee ritual as if it were some kind of barrier against a torrent of history that overwhelms and defines me. What is left of the men and women of this country? What remains but the coffee and the centuries, ground down and percolated, flowing through steel tubes, pouring from plastic spigots?
In a bookstore, I find an anthology of pieces about the problems that come from feeling too small. I’ve met its author—a scrounger, a survivor of multiple financial catastrophes—and I’m aware of the extremes to which he’d go. The text is such a travesty that I’m tempted to buy it. Instead, I go for copying a few lines from San Sebastián de las Vegas del Pepino: The Basis of Pepinian Ethnicity: Brief Reflective Essays. (Are there essays of the unreflective variety?) The note on the back cover tells us a little about the book and its author: “Juan Valcárcel del Pino is a Pepinian writer who proposes a new terminology of his own, drawing on research from the field of ideas, sociology, and the popular apperception of culture to prove that Pepinianity exists as a psycho-spiritual phenomenon that takes concrete form as a philosophical principal. This book gives Pepinianity a physical, social, and, at the same time, a transcendent status. It invites all Pepinians to transcend in their appreciation and support for the physical, social, cultural, and spiritual heritage of San Sebastián del Pepino.”
Farther on, the reader is informed that the book is “an analysis of how Pepinians should gain transcendent perception in light of the processes and values that gave rise to and sustain the Pepino Collective.”
Also deserving honorable mention are the titles of a couple of chapters: “I. Original Status of the Pepino Future” and “X. Pepinianism: Pepinophilia and the Pepinophile.”
I guess the government of this small town in the western part of the country must have paid to have it published. I also guess it is understood that this is how cultural works get done here. It is also clear that the book was written to be read by no one, merely to exist.
So many years on the same streets. It occurs to me that it is here where I have thought through the great questions of life, on afternoons that always seem like summer, intolerably hot and boring, at the intersection of Avenida Ponce de León and Domenech, in front of the Asociación de Empleados del ELA, or crossing Andalucía street where the low, claustrophobic buildings of Caparra Terrace offer no shade. Such questions always arise in unlikely places. Nevertheless, there are things I should never have inquired about under this sun or while crossing this cement desert. These questions have made me feel San Juan as I feel no other city on earth, as I perhaps had to, to gain knowledge and a sense of disgust.
I run into a group of young people coming from the beach.
— You had a stiffy, say
s the girl, aged twelve or thirteen.
— Me? Answers the boy.
— Not now! A while ago. You had a stiffy.
— Me?
The repetition of the answer is weak and shows that the girl was right.
— I don’t care. I call it like I see it. I’m saying you had a stiffy.
— Hello.
I looked up from the notebook where I had been writing. It was an Asian girl who held out her hand and told me her name too fast for me to catch.
— Glad to meet you, I said, putting down my pen and hastening to shake her hand.
— I like what you do.
— Thanks. Would you like to sit.
— I can’t. Good-bye.
She offered me her hand again. Her black, straight hair fell across her face, obscuring it. I watched her back as she walked away from the Starbucks next to the bookstore in San Patricio Plaza. Not bad looking.
A new message has arrived in the most banal way possible, by mail. I have to confess I had been waiting impatiently, expecting one to come by less conventional methods. There are two parts to it. First there is the name of an author I don’t know, followed, as in a bibliography, by texts he has written. The titles are ridiculous, yet sadly plausible. It is all written on a typewriter or in a computer font that imitates typewriting, and most likely, it’s a fragment torn from a document and then photocopied. Then, at the bottom, in the usual block letters, comes a phrase that also seems to be a quotation.
“Vicente Molina Ruiz, ‘Seven Columns on Education’
, ‘Foundations of Freedom’
, ‘The ABCs of Critical Thinking’
, ‘Great Puerto Ricans for History’
He knew that only permutation secures us the truth.”
The light, the morning impressions that San Juan leaves when you’ve had to be in an office building long enough to become familiar with the dynamics of people entering and leaving, the route of the coffee cart, or the temperature changes sparked by the air conditioning. The sensation (very subjective, but perhaps shared) of feeling so close, physically and conceptually, to a stand crammed with magazines in Spanish that thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, of people will read in the Caribbean, Central America, and the rest of Latin America. Monthlies that I don’t buy or read, but that make me feel that I belong to this world. The sensation starts with the yellow light, with the sunbeams creating columns of dust pointed skyward and slicing through the morning, in the middle of a traffic jam, amid noxious gas and honking horns on this morning, which has been the same as far back as I can remember.