by Eduardo Lalo
Li would emerge from the shower without looking at me, combing her fingers through her well-drenched hair with overly studied slowness. She would climb into bed and run her fingers through lock after lock, repeating the same gesture over and over without a break. When she felt my hand, she would seek my eyes. Invariably, after we had made love, in her eyes I saw fear.
A few minutes later, when after getting up and showering I was getting dressed in the bedroom, I would watch her sitting with her knees raised and her back against the headboard, lost in thought, still combing her hair. Then I’d ask her if she felt well, watch her tilt her head and nod, while her hair, falling like a curtain across her face, prevented me from knowing whether it were true.
I tried to spend as much time with her as possible. I went to the restaurant when her shift ended and often joined the employees for dinner there. As time went on, the boss, the entrepreneurial patriarch of the family for whom Li, bound by some shady debt, was forced to work, came to accept my nearly daily presence. He took the initiative to consult with me about some matter in the hopes that my belonging to San Juan society would open up some commercial opportunity for him or provide profitable relationships. In the long run, he realized that I wouldn’t be able to help him, and he took me for one more of his “niece’s” eccentricities.
In this way, I joined in many late suppers at the table in the back of the restaurant where the employees ate after a long day’s work. Li’s relatives and fellow workers, free at last, stopped and sat down, shouted their conversations, disregarding all decorum and respect, in a relaxed revelry where exhaustion briefly intermingled with euphoria. Those suppers, without tact or affection, were the result of years during which they had put up with each other practically every hour of every day, in the narrow quarters of kitchens, dining rooms, and sleeping rooms that had turned them into not a family so much as a community stranded in a strange land. Being with them brought to mind the people who ate at fixed times on the benches of a boarding school or a barracks.
I realized that they were sometimes talking about us at the table, being brazenly insolent toward Li, who understood what they were saying. I didn’t know whether they envied her for having gotten her hands on a partner from outside their circle, or whether they did it simply as an expression of boredom or cruelty. According to Li, not eating with them would have been worse. She had to see their faces every day, and she couldn’t quit her job. Being independent of it all was for the moment impossible. These people, the father of the current owner of the restaurant, had put up the money to bring her and her mother from China. They had given her food and shelter. This had established an obligation, and not a merely financial one, that she couldn’t just wash her hands of.
After several weeks, as the strength of our bond grew evident, Li’s “family” ceased to care whether she spent the night with me. She seemed to feel comfortable in my house, making herself at home, taking whatever she wanted, books, this piece of clothing or that, bustling about the kitchen as much as she pleased, but it occurs to me now that she never asked for anything: neither a drawer for her things nor a desk to draw at. Nor did she indicate any preferences: one side of the bed, one type of food, one product brand. That likely had to do with her habit of practically living on borrowed things, sharing everything with others, and owning nothing but a few objects, but perhaps it was also a way of being prepared for an eventuality that she knew was, despite it all, always lying in wait. From the time she left her village on the outskirts of Beijing, she’d had nothing to hold onto but the community of Chinese with whom she worked. She lived as lightly as possible. The only thing tying her down was a debt and the impossibility of leaving this country. In both cases, it was a question of chains.
One thing, however, was always clear: I couldn’t force or impose anything on her. Persistent questions would always put her in a dark and taciturn mood. I’d have to suggest a topic or a concern and get a strictly factual explanation hours or even days later. This was clearly an overreaction, a defensive move, but she was incapable of dealing with some areas of her life in any other way. Sometimes I felt Li lived on a narrow ridge of land beside a deep gorge. There was very little room to maneuver.
Those were the conditions; I could take them or leave them. She never told me so openly, but it was always obvious. Her situation and sexual preferences had not been a mystery. In fact, I had suspected them, and she made matters clear from the beginning. Nevertheless, she alone set the limits. So long as we were together, she enjoyed a freedom that I never had.
These uncertainties and shades of gray, contrary to what might be supposed, increased our desire to be together. It was as if we imagined the end was already living with us and that we had to struggle to delay it. Our desire grew when we realized it was mortally wounded, and in bed, we would dive into a tidal wave where we hardly sensed our own silhouettes. Even so, our fears were never far away.
From the depths of that ocean, we would surface to talk about books and authors, about performance art, about Duchamp, John Cage, and Diogenes of Sinope, creating an island of shared passions on the other island that was a daily affront to who we were. When we went outside some people stopped to stare. We were hardly a circus act, but I’m sure that they sensed our strangeness. In this way we negotiated, at times with indifference and at times with pride, the rapids of a society where we had always felt unwanted. Even so, life was better, indubitably better, since Li was there.
At the university, Li had enrolled as a comparative literature student, but she had also taken courses in many other departments. Her interests were extremely broad, and she could read Foucault or an FAO report with equal interest. She had, as her messages revealed, a vast and idiosyncratic command of literature, even more admirable when you learned that, unable to afford these books, she had read them all standing in bookstores over the course of many days. Taking her origins and circumstances into account, it was a miracle she had become the woman she now was. She worked as a waitress all day long, but at lunch and during her free time, she consumed an impressive number of pages. When she discussed them with me, she demonstrated a deep and original understanding. What fell into her hands seemed to reassemble itself, and someone else’s text ended up being, through her reading, a redefined text that shone brightly. She was always busy, usually reading and drawing; she only rested when she slept. In her waking life, there couldn’t be any empty space, a moment for fantasy or idleness. She struggled to make the best use of every hour, every minute, all day long.
On some occasions, we would sit to watch a movie, but after a short time I would see her taking out her notebook and drawing without looking up.
— You never rest, I would say.
— I’ve never been able to, she’d answer.
— You aren’t watching the movie.
— Of course I am, she would reply with a touch of pride. I’m drawing from the movie. If I weren’t watching it, I wouldn’t be drawing this.
As time passed by, the blotches of black ink from her drawings grew and multiplied. She dropped the small-format notebooks and used progressively larger sheets of paper, which she kept in a portfolio case that I gladly gave her as a present, for which she was as grateful as a child. Her works invaded her room in the rooftop apartment at the restaurant, my house, and even, with one sublime piece, the horrid wall of my university office.
It was an elegantly crafted work. Successive rows of ink plowed across the paper’s surface to create areas of deep intensity. If the strokes had been drawn in a straight line, Li’s hand would have covered countless meters, but here her effort was concentrated on a few square centimeters. The lines erased their passage until they became a solid, pulsing body that took a mammoth feat of tedious and hypnotic labor. In the end, there was seemingly nothing or nearly nothing on the paper: a more or less purely geometric form with slight glimmers of white, the minimal patches of paper not covered by the tip of the pen. The result was austere and bedazzling and also cons
tituted a powerful conceptual design. Rather than an erased drawing, like the famous de Kooning that Rauschenberg had painstakingly “erased,” Li’s drawing disappeared under the excess that seemed to penetrate the paper and, at the same time, to float above it. It was a nearly infinite series of strokes, and it was impossible to tell where or when they ended. She wasn’t interested in finding out, it was enough for her that it remained alive, covering its tracks, turning the finest line into the densest shading, the most insurmountable wall.
Progressively my enthusiasm grew greater. I had seen little art in recent years that aroused my enthusiasm. It would be easy to think I was blinded by love and all the associated clichés, but in the case of her drawings, quite apart from the desire that your beloved should be extraordinary, there was the brute fact of a body of work being created with equal discipline in all sorts of places and circumstances. Li carried her notebooks and rolls of paper with her and, indifferent to her surroundings, she got down to work. She only stopped when her stiff, cramped hand could not keep going.
Once, I told her she was a Penelope who, instead of undoing the shroud nightly, was constructing one so vast and dense it could never be completed. My comment was meant to be light, and I couldn’t have imagined the enigma contained in her reply. “Whether I wish it or not, I am waiting too,” she said, and kept on drawing, protecting herself with a silence I didn’t have the courage to break.
My interest in art was reborn, and we glimpsed the possibility of doing projects together. Little by little our relationship turned into a working one. The process of my hunting, the pursuit Li had carried out through her messages, already constituted a sort of conceptualism, with the added merit of having erased the border between art and life, which after all had been the desire of so many vanguard artists.
An enigmatic and unprecedented Chinese–Puerto Rican was creating, without pretensions of any kind, almost spontaneously, using the commonplace materials she had at her disposal (markers, ballpoint pens, and drawing paper purchased in the stationery section of any drugstore), an exemplary body of art.
She didn’t sign her pieces, asserting that her authorship was in the execution itself. It was natural, then, for us to consider creating an anonymous art whose presence would emerge as a fait accompli, no attribution possible, in the most public and culturally dead spaces in San Juan. The pieces, which would take countless patient hours to complete, were pasted up in a bus station or in office building restrooms; there they stayed as a riddle or a minimal revitalization of the space where we placed them. Why did we undertake this effort, which would bring us no benefits or be taken into account by those who wrote the history of these things? Suffice it to say that it was a form of love and of fury.
Our efforts grew in scale, and I became completely wrapped up in them. I dusted off my cameras and with Li’s cooperation took close-ups of the cooks’ faces in several Chinese restaurants. Some fifteen faces that rarely saw the sunlight, with pustules, spots, and bloodshot eyes, were replicated on hundreds of copies. Li and I spent early mornings pasting them up by concert posters and flyers for political rallies. No messages went with them. One morning this line of faces greeted the surprised gazes of pedestrians and drivers. On the radio some said they must be unknown candidates in the elections. Nobody, except for a couple of writers, imagined it might be a work of art. We loved the fact that, as the weeks went by, the images continued to be respected. Nobody ventured to draw mustaches on them or peel them off the walls.
On another occasion, Li sacrificed some thirty of her drawings of blotches, made with infinite patience, and pasted them on each of the doors to the apartments in a condominium on Avenida Baldorioty de Castro, which we entered by carrying the drawings and the paste hidden in a pizza box.
That was the only intervention at which Li allowed me to photograph her. In another half dozen images, you can see her organizing drawings, pasting them up, smiling beside an intervened door.
We also honored the way in which we had met when Li inscribed a series of phrases in her crude block letters, which leaned farther and farther as the line went on. Written in public places, on walls, on the sidewalk, the words became surreal. I remember several that must have revealed the skepticism of the citizens in different spots in the metropolitan area:
“Is a people that elects as its president an icon that has never read a book all that far away from burning books itself?”
“If there is not a single place where you have not suffered, what other motive can you invoke to justify living a life of wandering?”
I remember that Li particularly liked this one: “Men cannot clearly translate what it is I do, even if they are watching.” That was the clearest possible definition of what we were trying to accomplish.
I have often wondered why we chose to remain anonymous. We probably expected near total incomprehension and indifference. Besides, I let myself get carried away by the wishes of Li, who found something voluptuous in disappearing. She’d used the same method in the messages she had sent me, and it had been in this way, by fading away, that she had managed to live her passions among the Chinese. Perhaps there was also, on her part, an intention of nearly absolute control. There was no greater personal authority than that of vanishing without a trace, as if none of the things that had been done with so much dedication and hard work ever existed.
The life of Li had been determined by events and commitments that bound her indefinitely. Immigration, poverty, family debts had meant a sort of servitude. What she was undertaking was voluntarily shrouded in mystery. She was putting together a play of mirrors in which, over the long run, there was no telling who was the person reflected, or even if there was anyone reflected. This way she could do whatever she wished, with no need for the understanding or approval of the rest. Her greatest efforts also required her to give up the most, but by doing so, she could be free.
One Saturday that Li had off and that we were going to spend together, I found a note when I went to the rooftop apartment to pick her up. She’d had to leave before our agreed-upon time to put in an order for materials for the restaurant, and she would be taking advantage of the trip to the Asian products store to visit with some relatives. She told me the hour when I should go get her at the distributor’s store, which was across from the Isla Grande base.
It was the first message Li had written me in a long time. She had used ordinary, everyday handwriting, which made me miss the block lettering of the old notes.
It would be a while before I met her, so I took my time driving down Avenida Ponce de León to Miramar. I liked that route through town, especially when there wasn’t any traffic. Coming up to the oldest part of Santurce, which had been built on a hill, I felt vibrations in the air and thought the light looked different than anywhere else in the city, probably because I was so near the ocean. Over the years, I had made this trip a great many times, especially on days I had free, to fend off boredom in a city that seemed dead. On this day, however, I had a purpose.
After parking, I went to a coffee shop to get breakfast. As I sat down next to the window, I realized that I’d been there a few months before, also on a Saturday, when I didn’t know who the author of the messages might be. Things were fundamentally changed now. This realization made me smile, but it came with an uncomfortable premonition suggesting that all conditions and relationships are unstable. A few more months and I might be back in this same shop, listening to the incredibly childish voice of one of its waitresses yet quite far from the current order of things. This was a clichéd reflection, but behind its banality lay the brute fact that it was true. To that moment, I wasn’t entirely clear what I meant to Li. We were living day by fleeting day, having made no plans for the future. We even did our art projects in the absolute present, no notes on the calendar required. I found this trend disquieting, as it embodied uncertainty. I had fallen in love with Li, I enjoyed every moment I spent in her company, and she didn’t seem willing to discuss any sort of bond, not e
ven one like a commitment to prolong our present situation. At times, I found this just as incomprehensible as the Chinese people she had lived with her whole life.
I walked to the Asian products store. I’d never been inside, but I had often seen the façade when driving down Avenida Fernández Juncos. On the same block there were a couple of topless bars and, a bit farther on, the empty lot where the city’s largest brothel had once stood. At this hour in the morning, the area was deserted.
When I walked into the poorly lit place stuffed with merchandise, my first impression was that I had traveled to another continent. Tall display shelves, crammed with products I’d never seen before, limited the walking space to a narrow passageway. In the back, there was an old desk and a man who reminded me of Li’s boss, but instead of his suits, this man was wearing a shirt covered in stains. Beyond where I could see, several people were having an animated discussion in Chinese.
I walked through the shelf-lined aisles, examining cans and bottles with labels inscribed in characters I found incomprehensible. I could identify their contents by the pictures but found it impossible to discern how they had been prepared. At the end of one of the aisles, I found a long, low table covered in newspapers and magazines, and above it a couple of small shelves with thin paperbacks. I took one. The cover showed some sort of mechanical superhero with a machine gun, and written on his metal breast in Latin characters, he bore the title of the adventure series: Predator. After the title page came the vertical paragraphs. Next to this tiny library were a good hundred videos, flanked by posters announcing martial art films from Hong Kong.