by Eduardo Lalo
— So many times, rape probably isn’t the word for it any more. We shared the same room, with other cousins. He would come to my bed when they were sleeping, and at first, I didn’t know or didn’t want to know what he was doing. Of course it didn’t take me long to figure it out and realize it was something terrible, but how could I confess it, to whom. Not to my mother, who was still alive, I couldn’t. Also, I filled myself with ideas, I was a silly teenager, and I guessed it must have something to do with love, with the things that happened and were always resolved in Hong Kong movies, when the characters didn’t beat each other to death. It was also something to dream about, to forget the waste of a life I was living, waiting for him to climb into my bed. Bai was irresponsible and egotistic, but I had a secret bond with him, something that tied us together at night, when the rest were sleeping like the beasts of burden they were.
“They discovered us when I got pregnant, right after I turned fifteen. The boss’s wife had them send her some roots from Hong Kong. She boiled them for hours to make a tea for me to drink on an empty stomach, ten days in a row. They locked me in a room on the rooftop, with nausea and pains, and I went half crazy. Finally the spasms came, and I got the worst fever I’ve ever had in my life. They took me to the Centro Médico right on time, because I was hemorrhaging. In the end the treatment was effective because I lost the baby.”
I sat up to push the water closer to her. Li drank it and looked outside before going on.
— It marked me. You can imagine what petit bourgeois morality is like in such cases, but you have no idea what it, or rather the caricature of it, can be among a pack of ignorant Chinese. Bai was sent away for years to work in a restaurant in San Germán, in what you might call the end of the world. I didn’t see him again until I was an adult. Fortunately, I did pretty well in school, and I found a refuge there, until I fussed and fought to get them to let me go to the university. But nobody was as close to me as before, and nobody thought of me as a victim. I was always surrounded by an aura of dirtiness and scandal. It was easier for them; they even got a kick out of it, and that way, they didn’t have to come up with consciences of their own. My mother died feeling I had disgraced her, convinced I’d always be worthless.
“At the university I realized that something had changed, that many of my hopes and dreams were gone, and that now men were blocked off by a wall of terror and shame. I also found out, this is how serious my case was, that this was a possibility, that it happened to many other women, and that it was called lesbianism. I had a few flings with women at the university, but they didn’t last long since in the end I was still the Chinese girl who worked six days a week and slept in a room on the rooftop. I must not have been much fun, and they really weren’t for me, either.
“I hate the Chinese, it’s terrible to say it, but it’s the truth. I hate Bai and therefore all the Chinese who looked the other way as if none of this had anything to do with them. He destroyed a whole part of my life, a part I can never recuperate, that nobody, not even you, could give back to me. That’s why I was leaving, in spite of what happened last night. That was my good-bye. I wanted you to know that I was ready to go where I never thought I could and also, though I’d rather not admit it, that I cherished some hope. I wondered what I would feel, whether Bai’s body would interfere with yours, if I would get better or find the thing I don’t know how to name and that I lost forever. I tried to talk to you about it so many times; I know you expected that of me, you offered me the opportunity, but the words wouldn’t come. Today we did it, but it’s as if my body had no reality. That body was there—I’m not nuts, believe me—it acts, it feels pleasure, but in the end it’s a mirage. Something that isn’t altogether there, or is like a tragedy for which no one is responsible.
“If anyone doesn’t deserve my problems, it’s you. It all started as a game, a very serious game, because your books bedazzled me, and when I learned who you were, I found you attractive. You don’t know how I enjoyed fantasizing about a man again. I didn’t think we were going to meet. Even when we did, I thought it wasn’t happening. I was all alone then and didn’t know what to do, and our getting together grew too quickly. Before, I had only fallen in love with women, and I was hoping that through you something different might happen. It’s dumb, but a person has those dreams, those fantasies of being like everyone else again, as if it were possible or worth it.
“I don’t know if I’ve used you. I don’t know if the love I feel for you might be a way of using you. It probably is, and that’s also why I was leaving. I admit it was a very bad way to do it. A while back, I was on the verge of a panic attack and at the same time completely numb. I’m not asking you to understand it or to forgive me. But I’m sorry I can’t stay because if I stay, everything will be worse.”
— And Carmencita? I asked, knowing she was only telling me part of the story.
— What?
— Carmen Lindo, the sociologist. Li and Lindo, sounds like a joke.
— She’s met you.
— I know. We were at a conference. I didn’t understand a word she said. Though she’s a big fan of Derrida, or “Dérida,” as she says.
— You shouldn’t make fun.
— I thought you’d like other women.
— In any case, they wouldn’t be the ones who appeal to you.
— Well, you have very bad taste.
— I don’t care what you think. She was my professor, and she did a lot for me. Later we had a relationship. She went to teach in the United States. Now she’s back.
— That’s why you’re leaving me. Because she came back.
— No.
— You mean, you’re going to tell me it’s a coincidence?
— Not that, either. Don’t dismiss what I told you. I can accept your not understanding but not your taking me for an idiot or a liar. If your pride makes you see phantoms everywhere, that’s your problem. Besides, this doesn’t have anything to do with pride. I’m not who you wish I were. I told you from the very beginning: I’m lesbian. OK, a pretty liberal lesbian, and for that very reason a person with lots of problems. Carmencita and I have a history, just like you and I have one. I understand that you find this threatening and infuriating, but so does she, at least as much as you do. And now that you know my story, put yourself in my shoes.
— I haven’t heard it all, and what I do know you told me very late.
— I did it when I could, and I don’t think you would have preferred for me not to go to our first date in Castle Books. Besides, this isn’t a matter of substituting one of you for the other. That’s not it.
— So why were you running away after what happened last night, then?
— Precisely because it did happen, because it puts me in a situation that I don’t know if I can be in.
— Why not?
— I already told you: because Bai raped me and I didn’t protest, didn’t raise the alarm, out of fear, out of shame; because I fell in love with a dog who only thought about what he had between his legs; because afterward I couldn’t be with another man, and like any girl, I found them attractive, and I desired them; because I’m a woman who was never anything but the Chinese girl, in the neighborhood, the restaurant, the school, the comparative literature department; because I got close to women and fell in love with lots of them and they left me shattered; because of what’s broken inside me and what I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to fix.
Dawn was breaking, and I went to the kitchen to make coffee. I watched the woman who had sent me the messages, and I realized I didn’t know who she was. The woman I had imagined, the one who fit into my life, perhaps did not exist. The one who was talking before me now was a bundle of things I couldn’t understand, who existed in a place beyond my reach, on the other side of a border that would probably always be there. This woman was a step away, sitting in the same place she had occupied on the sofa since I had discovered her about to leave, with her bag at her feet, and she was the absurd absence
of a body I loved.
Some time later, I learned from the cooks that Li had gone up to the rooftop that same morning and knocked on Bai’s door. As was often the case, he had gone to bed drunk on the eve of his day off. An intense argument had broken out, and the neighbors had been forced to intervene when Li began hitting him. The fracas ended when several hands pulled her away from her cousin. Then Li picked up her bag and ran off. She didn’t show up at work that afternoon and only returned two days later, to her boss’s great displeasure.
Afterward, nobody would tell me anything, even though I visited the restaurant several times over the following days. I gathered from the employees that Li wasn’t there or was hiding because she didn’t want to see me. I imagined that the foretold end was arriving in the cruelest way. As I drove around the city, I saw the now aged posters of the cooks’ faces and couldn’t imagine their having anything to do with me. I was turning into one more passerby, one more driver who didn’t have the remotest idea what they represented.
I didn’t even feel up to seeing Diego when he spent a few days in our country on vacation. The very idea of recounting the story of my relationship with Li—at the time, I wouldn’t have been able to talk about anything else—filled me with a mixture of fatigue and feeling ridiculous. I had gotten carried away, such was the measure of my helplessness, by a charade of anonymous messages and had ended up getting burned by someone else’s grotesque history. I made so many excuses each time we talked over the telephone that in the end I felt as ashamed as if I had told him every last detail of the affair.
For days at a time, my mind replayed the last hours I spent with Li. The morning on the beach, the meal in the port of Naguabo, the night, her body on mine, opening up all hopes. And then what had seemed incomprehensible and cruel, what had in reality been a desperate effort to give an explanation. I was wounded, stunned, victim to an unabating rage, but I also knew she had pieced that day together just at deliberately as she used to compose her messages. The day had been both a betrayal and a declaration of love. Realizing this was no consolation—nothing could appease me just then—but I recognized what she had done, her attempt to reach me by taking a step that would never be repeated. It was a gift. Something that shone in the midst of my squalor. But the trophy was horrendous.
Couples refuse to see it, but every love story has an ending. The unions that last an entire lifetime are survivors, stubborn fighters against collapse. And one of the rare glories of life is how they strive not to succumb. But the fact remained: love is a story, and stories always have their denouements. In the end there is death, physical or otherwise.
Like so many others, as long as I was in contact with the woman I loved, I remained stubbornly blind. It should have been obvious that we wouldn’t be able to overcome our differences. Our sexual preferences were not some mere detail, nor was the emotional upheaval of living in the capital of our pain. This city, which overlay the city surrounding us, remained within us, occupying us with a hurt that was reborn with every new day. Besides, what did we want from each other? Had Li picked me because she imagined I could understand the tatters of her life? But indeed, could we share the same road? What did I know about her, when her courtship had been a disquisition on concealment?
I was tied to that woman, happy for the first time in years, but almost daily, before daylight broke or the alarm went off, a wave of anxiety would awaken me. I’d lie in bed, eyes open, without speaking, aware of the turbulent movements of my nerves, as if witnessing an undecipherable spectacle. In the twilit dawn of the happiest days of my life, I rehearsed the sinking feeling that had belonged to us since her first message.
I couldn’t stay home, where the thought that I should be waiting around for Li tortured me. So I spent hours on foot and in the car, wandering the city, refusing any contact, my heart scabbed over. In this partial asphyxiation, I sought to dispense with other people, absenting myself from relationships, yet still inflicting my morbid disposition and baleful glares on everyone I met along the way. I knew that my actions were sterile, that the nastiness I aimed at the city’s residents would meet with their indifference no matter how I insisted on scorning them. Nevertheless, I could not stop, and as I walked or drove, my mind reiterated the same ideas to the point of exhaustion. A motor thrown off balance by fury.
I ended up walking to such distant points that it took me hours to get back at night, sometimes in the rain and feeling wiped out. I went all the way to Carolina, to the center of Bayamón; as the sun set one afternoon, I found myself across the bay in the ferry terminal at Cataño. The San Juan metropolitan area was always a desert inhabited by imbeciles, and I knew that the worst of them all was me: that I was once again nothing but a mound of muscles and organs that, despite it all, continued obstinately carrying out their functions though I could provide them no meaning or repose.
One night, after roaming for hours, hungry, I parked the car in front of a Chinese restaurant on Avenida Esmeralda. There were other food places in the neighborhood, but I couldn’t stand sitting alone at a table, reading the menu, and waiting for the guy to take my order.
Chinese restaurants provided the local version of fast, lonely food. The one on Avenida Esmeralda was like any other: Formica-top tables, false ceilings, neon signs, the small plastic altar behind the counter with a fake incense stick crowned by a tiny red bulb pretending to make a perpetual offering.
I ate with my eyes fixed on the paper plate, oblivious to the few people in the place at that already late hour of the night. As I dropped the fork onto the handful of rice I would not be eating, the memory surfaced. I had been here, in this very restaurant, many years before, just before I started at the university, one summer night, with Diego and some other friends. Here, at one of these tables, enjoying some ice cream, we had talked about books and politics. I hadn’t fallen in love yet, hadn’t slept with a woman. Behind the counter, two teenagers appeared while we were talking. I observed the Asian girl closely, feeling the sort of sudden tenderness you only get when you’ve never known pain or disillusionment. Now, in the same restaurant on Avenida Esmeralda, I felt the insistent, imperious, anarchic certainty that the girl I saw then had been Li, that we had crossed paths for the first time many years ago as we each traveled along the force lines forming the city. The idea wasn’t entirely harebrained. I knew she had regularly visited the restaurants controlled by her family clan when she was a teenager. The boy, deprived of features in my memory, could have been Bai. Perhaps I had seen them just before their catastrophe. Long after that time, I found myself here again, desiring the same body, filled with the same unanswered love.
Having no clear idea of what I meant to do, after I recalled or invented that first memory in the restaurant on Avenida Esmeralda, I began to retrace our steps. I returned to the Asian products store across from the Isla Grande base and asked the boss if I could see Wen Da. Seeing me by myself, he looked at me warily and told me to wait because the old man had stepped out. A few minutes later, the bell over the door rang and Wen walked in with a woman. Summer had begun and Li’s “granduncle” was wearing a sleeveless T-shirt and a pair of shorts that looked more like old-fashioned underpants from which sprouted a pair of legs that were nothing but bones and thick veins. The old man didn’t see me or didn’t recognize me, for he stood right next to me in front of the boss’s desk arguing about something. On his skeletal wrist, he wore an enormous old watch, its dial face stained entirely yellow. I’d never seen one like it, and I imagined it must be one of the few objects he still kept from China.
Finally, I decided to attract his attention, and I saw him focus his eyes, magnified by his glasses, on me. He immediately made a slight bow, shook my hand, and indicated that I should follow him. I picked up the bag of provisions that the boss had given him and followed him up the staircase to his room. That afternoon no one else seemed to be in any of the rooms opening onto the gallery.
We had no language in common. Wen knew no English or French and wa
s barely familiar with a handful of words and expressions in Spanish, but I knew he might have me sit down and make me some tea all the same. I’d come to see him because of Li, but I had no idea whether this action would yield any results.
After we sipped the tea and I watched Wen rustle around the room looking for a roll of rice paper with his latest drawings, I became aware that we had never stopped talking. Each was interpreting what the other one said. Sometimes a phrase was complemented by a facial gesture or hands acted out a pantomime that might mean “I like that,” “hot,” or “many years ago in China.” Wen spoke at length in his thin, hoarse voice, while his hands might form a school, a book, a town, a machine gun, a flood, or a deep sleep that might perhaps be death. When his hands imitated the rocking of waves and bodies holding tight to one another, I knew that he was telling the story of his journey to Puerto Rico. I recognized the long voyage, with stopovers, heat, and the overcrowding in the holds of the cargo ships, how he was treated by the police in an undecipherable country, a plane ride, and then the endless and indefinite kitchen work in restaurants, the same gestures repeated over a wok until your face becomes a mask of disgust. In response, I found myself talking, explaining who my parents had been, when and how they had died, and, with emotion constricting my throat, I said I hadn’t gotten a chance to communicate to them my pardons and thanks, memories and longings, which their death had made pointless. When I finally stopped talking, the hand with the huge watch patted my hands. I lifted my head to see a man whispering words of comfort that I was, perhaps for the first time in my life, ready to receive.
We remained silent while he heated up more water. As he refilled the cups, he began to speak in a different tone. There was no mimicking now, no effort to overcome the language barrier, as if Wen had forgotten or no longer cared that I spoke no Chinese. Nevertheless, I knew what the topic was. In the words he spoke there was one that came up over and over and stood out clearly. It was his niece’s name. I heard worry but also disappointment and sternness. I didn’t know whether those judgments were also directed at me. I answered, I argued, I explained. Wen interrupted me when it was appropriate, when it was fitting to call me on something or register a doubt in the debate we were imagining. In the end, we sat in silence, looking each other in the eye.