Simone

by Eduardo Lalo

  At first it bothered me. I felt this was no time to cite literature, though I had to admit his choice of a quotation was almost as good as Simone’s. I mulled over my dissatisfaction for half the morning before concluding that Diego, in his own way, was playing the same game. This ability not to take ourselves seriously was what had drawn us together from the time we met, and now, it served to put things in perspective for me. In the end I was grateful to him. Maybe I had shown the messages too much respect. More than likely, I was taking the whole thing too seriously.

  Even so, half an hour later, I was back at Grandma’s Attic. When I went up to her desk, I could tell that the owner was watching me with concern.

  — She hasn’t come, she said before I could ask anything.

  — That doesn’t matter. But when she does come in, give her this.

  — Should I say anything else?

  — No hace falta. Just give her the envelope.

  — Are you guys in love?

  — Sí, mucho, I answered.

  Even before I turned thirty, I knew that what I most wanted was to put my life into a book. I suffered so I could write my suffering. That way life had direction; that way alone it was worth squeezing life to the last drop, here or anywhere else. This set me apart from almost everyone. But I didn’t mind because I was discovering and rediscovering who I was, and I asked for nothing else. The shadow that had crisscrossed the city for years and years wasn’t a man passing through a transitory bad phase he’d get over someday. No, not even close, though I had always assumed this was true. I had been waiting for a change, a trip, a new job, or even exile. Without realizing it, I had already found my place. This was what I should be, this man I so despised was the person I wanted to resemble.

  More than two weeks went by without any news, but this silence was different. The search had taken on a different tone since I had given the envelope to the owner of Grandma’s Attic and since I had announced with breathtaking certainty that I loved a woman I didn’t know. It was obviously a huge risk to take, but I knew that avoiding risks and being sensible is sometimes the craziest thing you can do.

  Inside the envelope I’d copied the phrase that Rodrigo de Figueroa wrote on the map of San Juan Islet, drawn on his orders in 1509 when they were considering transferring the capital from Caparra, “Here shall the city be,” repeating the phrase below with a short addition: “If you wish, here shall the city be, without question.” Later on, doubts and questions would assail me, but at the time, it was the most honest declaration of love I had ever made. The messages I had received deserved an answer. One of the most apt images of a love story is the streets of the city that gave birth to and in time may witness the death of that love.

  The Chinese restaurant on Avenida Muñoz Rivera had a sign posted next to the cash register: “Try our delicious flan! We have ice cream!” The sign didn’t look any more Chinese than the Dominican woman who almost always took the orders. A little after the regular dinnertime, I would sit, once or twice a week, at one of the tables in the nearly empty dining room, and if I didn’t open my notebook to jot something down, I would sit looking through the service window into the kitchen, watching the hustle and bustle of the cooks, in their case authentically Chinese. Sometimes women were back there, or maybe a little girl learning to count in Spanish (“¡Uno, dos, tres, cinco!”), members of what was probably an extended family that lived somewhere in the building.

  Only rarely did anyone enter the place at that hour, maybe a couple of policemen or a friend of the Dominican woman, who would while away the time by standing at the long mirrored wall and popping her pimples. The food was awful and more than once I spotted insects crawling on the counter. Even so, I kept coming back. When I was there, out of the house, far from everything, even from myself, I was at peace, and feeling at home in such a dreary atmosphere was also a way of transcending it.

  One night, after eating a plate of fried rice, I opened the Simone Weil biography I had bought in Grandma’s Attic. I sat reading it for nearly an hour, and the Chinese cooks started giving me distrusting looks. It was unusual for someone to stay there that long.

  The restaurant was connected to a sushi bar that I had never gone into. Both must have had the same owner, who was thus able to offer menus for every pocketbook. A waitress came in through the door connecting the two places and asked the Dominican woman to make change. I realized that they were looking at me, that the waitress was staring at my things: the notes, the book. Soon afterward she came back in, but then they called her from the other restaurant. Later she entered for a third time, and this time she went straight to my table. I knew she was approaching me, but I waited until her black-stockinged legs stood planted in front of me before I lifted my eyes from the book.

  — Do you like Simone Weil? she asked.

  Coming from an unknown waitress in that restaurant, this felt like one of the most disconcerting questions I’d ever heard.

  — I’m starting to, I said.

  — Here. I study at the university and I’ve seen you there. Maybe we can talk about Simone Weil someday. I work next door, but now I have to go.

  — Thanks, I said, taking the small brown paper bag she handed me. Before she turned her back on me to go, for a brief instant, we looked eye to eye. We had spoken without saying a word. Then I watched her until she disappeared behind the door that divided the two restaurants. She must have been about twenty-five, though it was hard to tell for sure.

  I opened the bag with trembling hands, amazed, but already confident. It held a sheet of paper, folded as usual, and a fortune cookie. I set them on the table and looked around. The Dominican woman was on the phone, but she seemed to be waiting to see what I’d do. The Chinese cooks were bustling around the kitchen, indifferent. I unfolded the paper. Just above the center, in a miniscule and near-perfect hand, was a quotation. This time I could be sure because for the first time the author’s name was provided:

  “Freedom is not a human right conferred by Heaven. Nor does the freedom to dream come at birth: it is a capacity and an awareness that needs to be defended. Moreover, even dreams can be assailed by nightmares.—Gao Xinjian, One Man’s Bible”

  I picked up the fortune cookie and broke it in half. There was the usual strip of paper inside, but this time the printed message had been crossed out. On the back was written, in the same handwriting as the quotation, “Page 46.” I knew it referred to the book I had there on the table, the book that had brought us to this same part of the city.

  On that page was an underlined passage, with an arrow pointing to it from the margin:

  “Beyond all schemes, she lives in what will be more and more a contact between souls. She is unaware of the carnal character of daily life as she is of the conventions and rites of social classes; thus, even on the social plane, Simone Weil will be perceived as inhuman.”

  I gathered my things and went outside. I walked by the darkened windows of the sushi bar. Inside the light was dim, but I thought I could see a silhouette following me with her eyes. I stopped and put my hand on my chest, over my heart. I felt I could see her do the same.

  The following day I found this message on my answering machine:

  “Hello, I’m Li Chao, alias Simone Weil. I think it’s time I introduced myself. I hope you’ll forgive my little game (I suppose I can speak informally now). As you must have noticed, I take it very seriously, though I know it could cause trouble. I may not be able to see you, sir, umm, I mean, I can’t see you till Thursday, my day off. I suggest we meet at the Starbucks on San Patricio. I’m not as mysterious as you must suppose. I said hello to you there a long time ago, but you didn’t realize I was the woman leaving the messages. And there’s no reason why you should have. We can meet at the same time as before—that is, at 7:49 p.m. You don’t have to show up, of course. Ciao from Li Chao.”

  I left the message on the machine and listened to it many more times over the following days. I had felt in control of my life, though at ti
mes it seemed utterly worthless. Li Chao had demolished what was, I discovered, an ineffective defense mechanism. Life was an uncontrollable torrent. I had long observed it comfortably, from the banks; now, I was captive to its unpredictability.

  The citadel had fallen. I wondered if, after Thursday night, I’d be a different person. I could never have anticipated someone using these texts or this strategy to get close to me. I was so limited. Li Chao was coming from another direction.

  I counted the days and hours and at the same time wished Thursday night would never come. I had fallen in love with the tactical brilliance of an approach that had turned into something like a work of art. I wasn’t stupid or naïve enough to think that what I now imagined was desirable or even possible. But at the same time, I was convinced there was a crack in my defenses: Li Chao’s messages were a kind of secret tunnel I had just uncovered. There was a way past the walls I had always raised around myself.

  The Starbucks server took my order and handed me a folded note. It was handwritten in the second style, the maniacally precise one. “It was an ancient beauty, like an old photograph set afire.” There was an asterisk sending me to another phrase at the bottom of the page. “I wait for you where you have gone so often.” I was going to ask the girl serving me where the woman who’d given her the note was, when I suddenly got an idea.

  — Be right back, I said while paying, and I ran over to Castle Books, literally a step away.

  I went to the literature section, but no one was there. I entered the next aisle, with four bookshelves of Puerto Rican books. I had noticed a few days earlier that they had put one of mine on the top shelf. But now the transparent plastic stand where Three-in-One had been was empty.

  Unsuccessful, very nervous, I searched the whole bookstore. Then I went out into the mall. Li wasn’t in the restaurant area or standing by the movie theater. I returned and again walked through each aisle in the bookstore.

  Only the children’s section, which was separated by a wall from the rest of the store, remained to be searched. When I entered, Li Chao was reading my book, sitting on a chair in the shape of an elephant.

  — You know how to get where you’re going, she said, barely raising her eyes. You do it well, she added.

  It wasn’t clear whether she was talking about my finding her or about my book.

  — You too, I said. Too well.

  — I hope you’ll forgive me for the complications.

  — For you, picking up a phone and dialing is too old-fashioned.

  — If I’d done that, you wouldn’t have come.

  For the first time, we saw each other face to face, without the screen of messages between us. It was so easy; it seemed unreal to me. I got the feeling that something was missing, that some basic piece was absent, yet her body was in front of me.

  — Come on, let’s get a coffee, I said.

  — You’ll have to buy. Starbucks is too expensive.

  I observed her, walking through the mall. For the first time, I could look at her by my side. Before, for many weeks, I was the one who had been examined at will. I was now finding out about the body of this woman, medium in height, dressed in a T-shirt and a pair of wide pants that she hardly filled. She had a shoulder bag, probably woven somewhere in Central America, and almost hidden under the large bells of the pant legs, a pair of plastic sandals.

  After so much excitement, this body was almost a disappointment. However, I was sure that if it had been any other I would have thought the same. From the messages, I had constructed a phenomenon in my head that blew reality out of proportion. No beauty could have compared, at least not at first blush, with that fantasy.

  Before we sat down, Li picked up a chess set and brought it to our table.

  — I’ll be white, she said, and I realized that behind the grammatical perfection of her words lay an unusual intonation, a peculiar way to attack certain sounds.

  — Of course, you always like to keep one step ahead.

  After a few moves, I’d lost three pieces, and when I hesitated for a long time over whether to move a bishop, I heard her say,

  — Every four seconds a child dies of hunger somewhere on the planet.

  She must have seen that I didn’t understand because she added impatiently,

  — At least two hundred have died by now.

  That was Li. She seemed to know all the statistics in the world, the illuminating ones and the trivial ones alike. She knew the per capita income of Togo, the inflation rate in Peru, how many more years the tropical forests of the world had left at the current rate of clear-cutting, the number of automobiles in Puerto Rico, and as a point of comparison, the number in Sudan; she knew how many pints of blood the human body contained and the weight of dolphins’ brains, how many spermatozoa there were in an ejaculation, and how many kilos of salmon a bear ate during an Alaskan spring.

  When she referenced a set of numbers at inappropriate times, it was like she was parodying the way we cite facts, questioning through exaggeration the numerical reality of the world. I observed her strong hands; the slight plumpness of her body that she tried to hide with loose clothes; her round face with full, pale cheeks; her black, listless hair parted in the middle and frequently tied back in pigtails. Taken all together, I realized, she would lead me to surprises. Li, a Chinese woman living on a Caribbean island who approached the works of novelists, thinkers, and artists as if they were musical scores to be interpreted, took every aspect of life like a young girl who’d seen it all.

  I watched as she drank two café con leches, ate three different kinds of pastry, let me win our very quick, second chess game.

  I remembered the passages she had underlined in the Simone Weil biography. Almost all of them established the distance at which the thinker had lived from her contemporaries, even if she had been so committed to those in need that she had attempted to repair that separation. More than one heartache lay behind her dedication. I’d seen enough of Li, though we’d never met in person before this night, that I could imagine her reasons for choosing her pseudonym.

  — Why Simone Weil? I asked.

  — I like that name. She used to study on her knees.

  — On her knees?

  — Yes, she studied on her knees, spent hours reading on her knees. She was a philosopher who had been humbled. She was half crazy but totally lucid. What I respect most about her work is that she understood that you don’t stop being humbled after you learn that’s who you are. She never claimed to escape that reality.

  — Why me? I asked. Where did you see me, how did you find out about me, why all this effort, this game that you took so seriously?

  — I met you through your books, and then I saw you at the university. I’m the only Chinese woman in comparative literature.

  — You know you’re not answering the question.

  — Of course.

  — So?

  — It’s impossible, or rather it would be complicated, to give you an answer tonight. The important thing is that we’ve gotten this far, and I really thank you for coming. Aside from that, you can use this opportunity to improve your chess game.

  Starbucks was closing, and Li went to the bathroom. A short time later the server brought me a note. “They’re coming to pick me up. If you’d like, you can stop by the restaurant. I get off at 10:30. Don’t obsess about the whys. Over the long run, I know that nothing can stay hidden. Ciao. Li”

  As the weeks went by, I would realize the extent to which Li lived in a practically closed world, still untouched by the consumer society or basic liberties, where high status meant having a tiny room of your own to sleep in, with space in a corner for storing your clothes and, in Li’s case, for keeping a few piles of books and papers.

  She worked six days a week in the restaurant and had done so from the age of eleven. She was a distant relative of the family that owned a half dozen Chinese food places in San Juan and in a few towns on the island. She had been born in 1969 in a small village on the o
utskirts of Beijing that was, according to Li, an unhealthy flatland, cold and damp, full during that era of officials forced by the Cultural Revolution to be “reeducated” through agricultural labor. She held onto few memories: the muddy pools that filled the streets, the endless rice fields, the taste of boiled potatoes, her grandmother’s lap, a couple of songs. Her family had to split up because her father, a math teacher, was accused of coming from a family of “intellectuals.” Given the abject human relationships imposed by the Cultural Revolution, this meant that Li’s mother could not maintain any ties to her husband, and she was forced to denounce him and repudiate him formally and publicly. Her father was sent to villages farther and farther away from the capital until he must have succumbed to the cold, the hunger, the sentence he had been given for knowing how to read and write, for owning Soviet geometry textbooks and an old prerevolutionary translation of Madame Bovary, for having a bourgeois taste for jazz. After countless close calls, her mother managed to reach Hong Kong with Li, and from there, of all the places in the world, they traveled to Puerto Rico thanks to the efforts of some distant family members. She was six when she arrived.

  Early on she didn’t even live in San Juan; she shared an apartment with other family members on the second story built with unfinished concrete blocks above the Gran Muralla restaurant in Arecibo. From there, she’d moved to one on Avenida Fernández Juncos in Santurce. At school and on the street, she was always la china. For years, hardly anyone outside the restaurant called her by her name. Nobody was interested or could understand her history. The distance, size, and complexity of China made it unfathomably abstract.

  She lived with cousins, aunts, uncles, and “relatives” of unknown kinship, in grotesque overcrowding. She was the only one who learned how to speak and read Spanish well, and this was probably why they let her graduate from a public school in Santurce. There she was one of the few students who got to the last pages of books and the only one who spent all her free time in the modest library.