Uselessness

by Eduardo Lalo

  The next day I got up late and, amazingly, my resolution was still firm. Daylight, the streets, the people had a unique lightness or lack that was a liberating release from some great weight. I called San Juan. My family agreed to send money for the flight and for the trunk that I would send by ship. I didn’t want to visualize what awaited me. I had made a decision I could not undo. In the following two weeks I sold what I could and went to meet with my thesis director, who tried to convince me that when I found myself back in San Juan, I would realize the magnitude of my error. Before a few final chores, since there were still a few days remaining before my trip, I went to Marie’s apartment and left off a letter in which I asked her to return my studio key to the landlord, thus terminating the rental. At the end there was a good-bye without any explanation. I spent several days free of all tasks and obligations, living in a room with only a mattress and a pile of clothing and a few random things.

  I called Simone and we made a date to meet at a café. I spoke for quite a while before giving her the news. She was sensible enough not to try and poke her nose into my life, but she invited me to her house one more time, presumably because her father wanted to say good-bye.

  I came with two bottles of strong wine from Algeria. We all prepared the food together, as we always had, and consumed it at a leisurely pace, engrossed in a conversation mixed with joy, nostalgia, and heartbreak. There was a momentous toast by Simone’s father, in which he expressed all his feelings, from the sadness that my departure inspired to a drunken and disillusioned climax about not having me as a son-in-law. When it was late, and we had no hope of catching the last train, Georges fell asleep in his chair and Simone took me to her room, where we made love and talked until it began to get light outside the windows. I got dressed, as I wanted to leave before breakfast. After those hours with her, she was playing at unraveling my plan to leave. I realized how much I loved her, but I knew that she would not fill the void compelling me to leave the city. I should not hold onto anyone.

  Wrapped in a sweater, Simone accompanied me to the staircase landing. Our embrace left us looking at each other with teary eyes. I heard her voice cracking when I reached the front door to the building. “Bon chance!” She was wishing me good luck as if I were going to an exam.

  Sometime later I would find out, in one of her letters, that at that time she was going out with a man who would abandon her when she became pregnant.

  I purposely left the visit to the Pétrements for one of the last days before my departure. I knew that if anyone could change my mind, that person would be Didier. Conscious of this, I told him of my decision in front of Son. I thought that her presence would soften his reaction. Didier stood up and turned his back to me.

  “You’ve gone completely crazy.” It was the first time he addressed me as tu in the familiar form. “A man doesn’t put himself through such things for women.”

  “Didier,” Son interceded, “please, don’t be so rude.”

  “So, can you tell me why this fool is going?”

  “Because he has to go. That’s all. The French don’t understand this.”

  “There’s nothing to understand. Why do you come here today to present us with a done deed? Why didn’t you come before, to consult me?”

  “Because he knew that you were going to give him this speech,” said Son. “That you were going to turn into some sort of horrible father.”

  Didier made an irritated gesture while he lit his pipe. He walked around his office avoiding the piles of books and papers until he stood facing the window.

  “It’s what always happens,” he said. “Nothing lasts. You, after all, must be master of your own mistakes, your own stupidities. Forgive me for saying it like that. Tell me if there is something we can do to change your mind.”

  “There’s nothing to be done, Didier,” I said. “I must go.”

  The light coming in the window gave the smoke surrounding his shoulders a bluish density. We remained in silence for a long time; then we watched him go over to a cabinet, take out a bottle and three glasses.

  “Perhaps you’re right. Perhaps you’re both right, even though you’re the biggest fool I’ve known in my life. But it doesn’t matter anymore. Go home knowing that Son and I are your friends.”

  Son came over to kiss me and Didier gave me a hug that made my spine creak.

  In the little time I had left in the city I saw them twice. We dined, had lunch, walked, and let the hours pass chatting about any old thing at a café table.

  The day of my departure, I took the baggage and suitcases downstairs and gave the mailbox one last look. There was nothing. I got into the taxi and we went along the boulevards before getting on the highway. I was leaving everything I had come to find. Maybe this was nothing, but it had a tremendous weight.

  After handing them my luggage at the airlines counter, I bought, with my last francs, a few packages of Gauloises and walked toward the gates. I sat on a bench and waited a little over a half hour watching the passengers move around. I wanted to savor the very last drop of France. When I saw that it was already time to board, I stood up, feeling my nerves tightening in my stomach.

  Then, unexpectedly, I ran into Didier and Son.

  “Tiens, mon vieux, c’est pour toi.”

  My companion of so many days had placed a package in my hands.

  “Don’t forget us,” said Son.

  After passing through security, I walked backwards, until I lost sight of them.

  I opened the package a few minutes after the plane took off. It contained the first slightly faded edition of Pierre Plon’s translations of myths and songs. On the first page there was a dedication. It said: “To Didier Pétrement with whom I lived the greatest years of my life.”

  San Juan

  1

  San Juan received me as a stranger. I had spent over nine years outside the country, only visiting for brief periods. Since I’d left college, my life had been organized around foreign countries. I wanted to make the most of my time abroad and, whenever I had breaks or vacations, had tried not to spend them in San Juan. Besides—and I didn’t admit this for a long time—I was afraid of this city. I knew too well the limits it imposed on the sort of life I had sought far away. The truth was that, while I’d been defending my home culture with convoluted arguments and mythmaking, trying to fend off the feeling of being a whole continent away, in reality, I hated too many things about life here. San Juan was my city, the place where I belonged more than any other. I didn’t doubt it, but this belonging could feel like a cruel bond, a chain forged by an accident of birth, or bad luck.

  Aside from my family, I knew only a few friends from my college years, and (except for short trips to foreign countries) they had always lived in Puerto Rico. They held modest jobs. They were schoolteachers, bureaucrats, technicians. Some were studying endlessly for a PhD. What we had in common and what led me back to them was that they were all readers. As they had nothing to do with business and didn’t practice any high-paying profession, they were pleasantly marginal.

  The country was suffocating. This was not news: I could tell from the very moment I arrived. The porter at the airport spoke to me in English and tried to cheat me. Through a crack in the paper they’d pasted on the terminal windows, making them a blind wall, I searched for my parents. I found them looking lost in a noisy, sweaty crowd who dressed, pushed, and shouted in a way that suddenly turned the scene, for me, into a nightmare memory. To the world I had just left behind, we were a caricature, a joke. We lived amid small ideas and trivial work, in an insular world of fantasy. I would quickly discover that my interests were met with nasty, belittling expressions of contempt, like, “So what?” or “Who cares?” This was why I had left, tired of a society that sentenced me to eccentricity and isolation. Politically, we were the same old disaster, aggravated at that time by the vulgarity and violence of the Romero government, which seemed to speak its own dialect, barely comprehensible to others. Its rhetoric was plague
d with unexpected pauses, interjections, whole sections of orations that devolved into some sort of raving, which most people, totally uninterested, listened to with the routine resignation of watching the rain.

  I remember my first days, my hopeful reencounter with the city, which in spite of everything, I still missed. I took a walk around the old town, stopping by its arts and crafts shops, its art galleries, and its bars. I remember my perhaps excessive enthusiasm on discovering the carnival masks of Ponce, the wooden saints, coffee cups made with coconut shells, or finding, in the corner of the inner patio of a gallery, abstract textiles from a tribe in the Sahara and wicker bowls from Zimbabwe.

  In my last days in Paris, I had struggled with a deep-seated loneliness, a feeling of bereft orphanhood, of lost origins. Being abandoned by Marie had intensified this underlying homesickness. So in returning to Puerto Rico, I wasn’t just running away. Hope and youth convinced me I could begin again, and that I could make use, here, of what I had learned abroad.

  Soon these aspirations clashed with reality. Their provincialism made it impossible for people to understand my situation. I was one of thousands of students who left to study abroad, but for most Puerto Ricans, the world beyond the island was almost exclusively the United States. Going to France was interesting in principle, but once they considered what I had had to live through, only to return without either a degree or fortune, the experience seemed an incomprehensible waste. I got tired of being constantly asked where I was from. Annoyed, I’d always reply, “From here,” only to encounter the tribal disbelief of my interrogator. Talking to anybody about the things I devoted myself to in France meant sounding unintelligible. What could Amazonian culture, Tibetan art, or modern art and narrative mean here? What unimaginable assumptions would they make about me, listening to my way of speaking, now that I had lost the tics of the local accent in those years away?

  I’d spend the days in my family home, discussing the news of the day with my mother, reading, rediscovering the taste and aroma of a coffee that was so unlike the disgusting brews I had sipped for years. Almost everyday, in the afternoons, I’d go out for a walk in a city where people no longer walked. I’d walk along awful avenues that were hostile to pedestrians, like Roosevelt or Central, without anything to enjoy looking at except signs, cars, posts, cracks in the cement. Sometimes I’d end up in a pastry shop, which was the closest thing to a Parisian café in San Juan, and spend hours watching and smoking, as if I couldn’t fully believe the reality before my eyes.

  At night my father would lend me his car and I’d go to see my friends. I’d hang out in the small living rooms of their apartments or, if it was Thursday, Friday or Saturday, in some bar or restaurant. Sometimes we’d go to the movies; sometimes there was absolutely nothing to see, and we’d sit there bored in front of our beers until our yawns forced me to say good night.

  When I felt like it, I’d take a ride around the city. I’d go around the barrios with their deserted sidewalks: Santurce, Miramar, El Condado, Ocean Park, Puntas las Marías, Isla Verde. My mind would travel, too. I saw myself inhabiting some of the balconies that still had lights on in the early hours of the morning, and I imagined the cool, refreshing sea breeze, the joy I’d feel from cloudbursts, from reading in the low light with the balcony doors opened, from the arrival of old and new friends. I would live here, and perhaps the years spent far away would serve some purpose. It was a pleasant fantasy and a way of accepting the decision I had made. It had the grace of a certain peace, of some sort of relief. On other occasions I imagined myself, after many years, living on the top floor of a rundown old building in Santurce. There, isolated and forgotten, I would write the novel about this city, which would justify my existence. I didn’t know then that for years and years I would stick to this course of action and fantasy, ultimately inseparable (in my mind) from the city itself.

  A few weeks after my arrival, I got a part-time job at a language academy. I would give private lessons in Spanish to North Americans sent by their companies to work on the island. A bit later, I was able to complement these earnings with a class at the Alliance Française. My work was unbearably humdrum. Nothing in my education prepared me for teaching languages, and the incessant repetition and correction of absurdly simple sentences bored me to death. I began trying to connect with new acquaintances here and soon realized that the assumptions I would bring to conversations did not work at all. I couldn’t presume that these people knew anything about anything, that they knew an author, a historical event, the geographical setting of a country, or that they even had the slightest curiosity to find out about these things. Nonetheless, they were mostly good people, satisfied with the certainties that were sufficient for living here. However, it was hard for me to feel at ease. I had the impression that I was almost always concealing large parts of myself and that little by little I was constructing an identity based on suppression. For years I had practiced in my mind foreign phrases before uttering them, and now, continually, I was choosing to translate what I wanted to express into what I assumed they were ready to hear. In both cases much was lost. In both cases, I felt an insidious loneliness.

  At the Alliance I taught a handful of French people who had come to San Juan mostly because they were married to Puerto Ricans. The interest and liberalism toward other cultures that one finds in Paris, at least intellectually, had eroded in them once they had lived in Puerto Rico. I witnessed a lot of grandiloquent posturing, punctuated by prejudice and lack of understanding, which made of their lives—except for time on the beaches and their annual trip to their cities in France—a kind of prison sentence on Devil’s Island. I could understand what they were experiencing, but their colonialist airs set me against them. At the beginning, they’d invite me to their parties and get-togethers, which, after the wine and delicious hors d’oeuvres, would turn into assemblies of a white fraternity. Here people would speak of what was missed by living far from France, and one would end up attending heated discussions in which they ranted against almost everything about this country. A horrible complicity reigned among the French and their spouses and most of the Puerto Rican fauna swarming in these Europeanizing venues, in which one accepted with a dignity at once shy and awkward the devastating critique of those judgmental stares. Far from this country, I had always defended my belonging here. I always thought we had a history, a culture upon which to stand firm, with which to validate our existence. I suddenly found myself alone, or in a minority, defending positions of which most of my compatriots weren’t even aware. I saw them bow their heads and agree with the French. I think that, around that time, I first heard the current usage of the term puertorriqueñidad, or “Puerto Ricanness.” The term arose, in part, in response to the belief that it was culturally glamorous to imagine not being Puerto Rican.

  Most of the students of the Alliance were middle-aged sanjuaneros who went to French class as others went to play golf on Saturdays. They had an idyllic vision of France, which most of the time didn’t go beyond a grand tour of monuments with wine and cheese tastings. I was teaching an advanced conversation class in which I had to prepare exercises like sample conversations between a waiter in a café and a tourist. One day I decided we would base a conversation on literature, on something we had read. The group hated this so much that they went to complain to the director. I was called into his office, decorated with posters of tourist sites and big exhibits at the Louvre or the Grand Palais, and after being offered a cigarette by one of the few smokers of Gitanes in the country, I had to listen to a lecture on how our students had to be entertained by learning about a universal language and culture. This wasn’t a university, he said, and we have to limit ourselves to teaching them proper pronunciation.

  His argument placed me in a difficult situation. He was the headmaster of the Alliance and as such I had to submit to his rules, like them or not. But on the other hand, I felt attacked by his paternalism. The conversation quickly turned into an argument and the next semester there were
no courses for me.

  The result of this contretemps would have been hard for me to imagine back in Paris. From then on I lived without practically any connection to French culture or to the French people. In Puerto Rico there were barely any books to be had, and little by little, I went through the two or three hundred titles I had brought with me. The same thing happened with music or other areas of culture. I didn’t have, and wouldn’t for a long time, a penny to my name, and interest in all things French here was about money, not culture, and implied a certain social position. All this had very little to do with the Paris I had known. The French and Francophile types who gathered in this part of the world ceased to interest me. France faded slowly into the horizon. I stopped speaking the language altogether (I didn’t have anyone to speak it with). There are people who have known me here for years and who haven’t the slightest notion that I speak French.

  After living with my parents for some time, I looked for my own place. I’d walk around old San Juan to see if there were For Rent signs on the balconies. After visiting several that I couldn’t afford, I ended up putting down a deposit on an apartment that was very small but had, like many houses in this area, very high ceilings, underneath which they had built a wooden loft space which served as a bedroom. The place was hot and slightly claustrophobic, and on the weekends it didn’t keep out the racket from the street, but for the time being, it worked for me. I brought my belongings from my parents’ house and acquired something I’d never managed to possess in the countless rooms I’d lived in: a telephone.

  I got around by bus until I accepted my father’s generosity and bought a used Datsun. My friends would come to visit me Friday nights. We’d talk about books, politics, or whatever the hours and the rum would bring. Their presence was very pleasant but did not hide the fact that I was still alone. Many things hadn’t gelled in my life, and it was impossible for me, then, to do away with the expectations surrounding my return. I was living here, but this here was not what I had imagined from a distance and expected to discover upon landing in the city. The disappointment was painful and incomprehensible. I was too young to understand this misery.