by Eduardo Lalo
I called Máximo, who had given me his phone number when we said good-bye that night, and found that he already knew all about it. He told me to meet him the following day on the foot bridge connecting Muñoz Rivera Park and Escambrón Beach. I arrived early and strolled up and down the tree-lined walks. I liked feeling the gravel of that park beneath my feet, looking at the cement benches built to look like tree branches, some of them almost a century old. Not a soul was there, naturally enough, on a workday afternoon.
At the agreed-upon time, I found Noreña watching the traffic from the center of the bridge. We went and sat facing the sea on the stairs next to what was once the Naval Reserve Officers’ Club.
— You haven’t seen Li? he asked.
— Not yet, I replied.
— You may have to wait a while. García Pardo is leaving today.
— We’re really getting dumped on.
— By the same people as always. I’m used to it. Still, they’re right about one thing. I spoke, maybe so did you, with all the harshness of someone who no longer expects anything. Not even a gesture of friendship. It’s the voice of disillusionment and the open wound, a voice that leaves no room for anyone. I believe in what I said, I think it is regrettably true, but I didn’t allow García Pardo to see that perhaps he, too, is a victim.
— It seems to me, I said, that he wouldn’t have been willing to entertain the idea. He’s fully accepted his function as the writer on the autograph tour. From his point of view, he’s made it, and we don’t figure in the game. He was probably expecting us to ask him to sign a copy of his book and banter with him about banalities. He never imagined we’d start questioning the ground he stands on.
— That ground, or so it seems to me, is what a writer must mistrust the most. That was what I was trying to express. There in Spain, they’ve lost their way. They have a literary scene that requires manuscripts, whole reams for each and every season. A novelist is nothing but a producer churning out stories, a professional narrative-maker. There’s nothing that rubs the wrong way because almost all books do one thing: endeavor to make time melt away in the reader’s hands. That is the impoverishment I was speaking of. At this extreme, literature as we understand it is dead, or it survives almost underground, pushed farther and farther each day from the new arrivals table. Here, as in other countries where the literary marketplace barely exists, there still endures a type of writer that has been slowly disappearing in societies where publishing has become almost exclusively a business. Frailty in the culture of letters is always the manifestation of a despicable time, a brutal and naïve era.
— The funny thing, I said, is that there are lots of publishers in Spain that only publish translations. Their doubts about, if not outright disdain for, their own nation’s writers is plain enough right there. What’s surprising is that writers only complain about it in private, they don’t write about the subject. It’s as if they were all hoping to sneak onto the list, dreaming of the day when they’ll get the chance to be the exception.
— The problem is that they are so alone, said Noreña. As alone as we are, but they don’t realize it because they move in circles where there are real reputations and, sometimes, lots of money. You have to be brave not to join the charade. The risks are high. There isn’t much that one writer can do against a publishing world that starts to perceive him as a content provider. The record industry killed music. The book industry is in the process of annihilating literature. We’re castaways; all we have left is the bitter future of those who’ve survived from a world that will never exist again. What we wanted to do in our lifetimes no longer exists.
Noreña fell silent and for a few seconds we watched the sea.
— But I can’t live without that mirage, he went on. That’s why I was so adamant with García Pardo. He’s an impostor. A little talent and a lot of favorable circumstances. His books are dead after six months. He’ll never become a tragic figure because he had opportunities and knew how to use them.
— We’re bound to the day when a book bedazzled us, I said.
— Very likely so. That’s why, in spite of it all, we turned into writers. A few days ago, I told a young man not to become a writer if he could help it. It takes years to be convinced that it’s practically a life sentence. Yes, the first book that bedazzled us. We want to recreate as closely as we can the force that shocked us on that day. To bring it back to life, but through our own efforts this time, using the stuff of our own lives. García Pardo probably experienced this, too, but he opted for eight hours a day in front of a keyboard, like any office drone.
We sat in silence, smoking the small cigars.
— We’re alone, so alone.
I watched as the smoke carried his words away.
— I sent you an e-mail, he said. Have you seen it?
When I got home, I went straight to the computer and read the message that for some mysterious reason Máximo decided to write and send just before we met.
“Carmen is leaving for California. García Pardo has come to visit. Two movements, very much alike in their own way to one who has decided to remain here. Carmen is going where she can breathe deeply from a different atmosphere, construct her personal happiness, and who knows whether she will ever want to return. García Pardo is traveling through ‘the provinces’ and will return to Madrid convinced that, despite it all, he is in the best of all possible places. What happens when you wish to honor these streets not because they deserve any special tribute but because almost your whole past took place here, because here is what made us yearn to set it to paper? None of these questions have answers. You can’t even assess these things or formulate an idea that’s close to correct. We’re left with a pain we cannot relieve, a pain we feel each time someone walks by without seeing us, blinded by his tinseled traditions. Peace is impossible and that is perhaps why we write, and since writing does not relieve that pain either, writing becomes an obsessive, pointless act. It’s just another sentence, another paragraph, another page, and we can never finish. Best case, someone reads something we write and finds it unforgettable. We’ve all had such experiences ourselves, and they have marked us, but there are already too many unforgettable texts in the world.
“What is taken for success in literature matters less and less to me each day, even if I can’t help seeking it. I know now that it won’t solve anything, that at most it will cool the pain and make me write less willingly, and I will more closely resemble García Pardo and so many like him. I know I can only live by repeating a gesture that separates me from most of humanity. And without really knowing why, I feel that it is very important for me to wear myself out doing it. Out of choice or out of necessity.
“When we live like this, let this attitude determine our lives, the choice between staying or emigrating no longer has any meaning. We’re always alone, irremediably alone, with our rage. The rage of the place and the life we were fated to have. And then, sitting before a blank page some day or some night, you realize that this, precisely, is the point, that you had to get to the end of the dead-end street to be able to set something down on paper that’s worth the trouble. Worth the pain. That’s when you know: this is writing. A writer is an athlete of defeat. All the rest is not literature. That is García Pardo’s problem (and his tragedy).”
Frailty. All the times I’ve been weak, the times I’ve collapsed. To remember those times in order to know what it really means to live here. Here, I am fragile as I am nowhere else. My fault lines and fissures are here.
Happiness is bound up with coming back home. I was hoping for Li. I was hoping for happiness. I was hoping for the impossible, and therefore I kept on hoping and waiting. I was tied to what I had lost, and over these days, the yearning I felt for her could only be compared to what I had gone through when I was getting her messages, when I feared, each moment, that I was about to lose someone I still hadn’t found. The situation now was similar, but there was a scent of decay. Who was it that had been here and had go
ne? Was it really the woman with whom I had shared days and nights, or was it, sadly, the absurd absence of a body in which I had believed with a faith that was blind?
I was immersed in thought, unaware of my surroundings. Seconds passed, maybe a minute or more. That was it: the drawing Li had left in the mailbox on the day she had asked me to meet at the Cine Paradise. I searched for it. I had put it away in a drawer with all the others. I didn’t need to look at it to know, but I felt an urge to check and be certain. It was half a sheet torn from a drawing notebook, with a rectangle in black ink. It had attracted my attention at first because it was less dense than the others, allowing minute patches of paper to show through. It was my name. It had been made by writing and crossing out my name hundreds of times within a restricted space. It was her attempt to say what she already knew. The rest had been fear, exhaustion, a horrible good-bye. Li had given herself to me knowing she could not stay, knowing that the moment she made love to me she would have to leave.
She wouldn’t come to see me, or she would come too late to tell me what she already knew. There would be no good-bye, and I knew that she wouldn’t think it wrong. Someday, I’d hear about her, when we no longer counted for each other.
I went back to the living room, got a sheet of paper, and in one go wrote down a poem that had been brewing for weeks:
Take refuge in the multiplied unknown
Always this voice this voice whose voice?
which writes when there is no one here
when to be is not a verb
Stay here in this nook this nothing site
forget the forgetting of remembrance
write on this page indifferent to you
write with no desire to write that is not really
with this absurd absence of your body
Then, a little later, came sleep, my exhaustion a narcotic. I slept for many hours, and opening my eyes when day had already come, a tremendous weight still kept me glued onto the sheets.
At last I got up, thirsty and needing the bathroom. The silence on that morning was different. It was spongy and slowed my movements down. There was something familiar about it. It was what I had lived before Li. I found out then that hope would now produce only shame.
Máximo called around midday.
— I have two pieces of news for you, he said. Both bad.
— I guess it doesn’t matter much which you tell me first.
— García Pardo just won a major award in Madrid. The Grand Asshole of Letters or some such.
— We’re screwed.
— Seriously.
— What’s the second?
— Carmen Lindo leaves tomorrow. I suppose Li goes too.
— Thanks for the report.
— Did you care for her?
— Why the past tense? Who, Li?
— Yes.
— I thought, though it makes me look like the biggest idiot in the world, that it might work out. But we all delude ourselves.
— That’s the way it is, said Noreña. Look at the panel of judges in Madrid.
— But I don’t gain anything by being deluded.
— Neither does García Pardo.
I had to guess what the sound was because even though I’d been home since early in the morning I had kept all the windows closed. It sounded like someone knocking on the locked front gate. Seconds later, a car honked. Stealthily I went to peer from behind the curtain in the living room. Li was looking toward the house, toward the window behind which I was hiding, striving to find some sign of my presence. Behind her, Glenda honked the car horn again. Probably the same car she had borrowed from her cousin the day we first met.
I waited, holding my breath. There was the woman I loved, but I would not open the door. I waited until she looked at Glenda without saying a word. Glenda honked the horn again and Li shouted my name, once, twice, three times. I watched her face flush with emotion and closed my eyes. When I opened them, I saw her get into the car and return with a notebook. She looked for a page, tore it out, and put it in the mailbox. She looked at the house one last time, shouted my name louder than all the times before, and Glenda leaned on the horn. Then, burying her face in her hands, the same gesture as when she had cried for such a long time in my living room, she got into the car, and her friend stepped on the accelerator.
When the sound of the engine had disappeared into the distance, I unplugged the telephone. Hours later, when it was already night, I opened the door stealthily and found the sheet of paper. It was the first time Li had written me more than a couple of lines:
“All my life I have suffered from bending to authority. I have spent my life on the lookout for someone whom I do not know but who always says no. I have preferred solitude—I have learned everything I know by myself, even at the university, where I had no advisers or genuine teachers (Carmen, in reality, was not one)—in a fruitless attempt to escape from a power that was all too real for me.
“I have only had this barren space. Hence my readiness to make do with scarcity and privation.
“I have not been in the habit of living among equals. My lesbianism is in a way an ironic statement. It is very likely I have never known this situation, that of being on the same level as another person. I have inhabited the margins without being free.
“You will never read this, but this is my attempt to apologize.”
On reaching the last line, I finally knew why Li had chosen me. I was her match, one half of an impossible couple, half of two bodies that had never met their mates in any other. Something, at the outset of our lives, had conveyed to us the great no.
I folded the torn sheet in four and sat in the dark living room, in the same place where I had spent so many nights with her, and I recognized, finally, what my life entailed, why it was like this, why it could not have been otherwise. I was unable to move a muscle or speak a word. An enormous unremitting wave racked my body from head to foot. It was the accumulated weight of all the years I had lived. Once more, I would not undertake any action. No phone call, no stormy visit to Calle Canals. I would stay here. My cry for help was silence and stillness.
That night I went outside and in thick wax crayon wrote “This absurd absence of your body” over walls and sidewalks. For hours and hours, I scrawled the conclusion—a kind of mourning for an unending loss. What was left was the city, the turf where I still belonged, despite it all. I inscribed its surfaces with my naked grief, tormented, one moment on the verge of tears, the next seething with anger. I’d never be able to leave this city, after walking its streets like this, without shame, turning them into a page for me to write on. My agony bound me to them forever. My naked feelings told me, these streets were my fate.