by Eduardo Lalo
I’ve thought that the story of a person like myself could be expressed by chronicling the books and music that memory preserves from each era of one’s life. It strikes me that upon picking up a volume or listening to a melody, one reproduces in miniature the famous Proustian scene. Those first years in San Juan could be Salvador Elizondo’s El grafógrafo, or Emilio Díaz Valcárcel’s Schemes in the Month of March or the anthologies of stories from the seventies generation or Juan José Saer’s The Witness or a rereading of Juan Carlos Onetti’s The Brief Life or a newly arrived copy of José Donoso’s Curfew. In those days I read Manuel Ramos Otero, and José Luis Gonzalez was still alive. I didn’t even have to read those books from beginning to end; the mere intention to read them already said the whole story. How often did I go to the bookstores, like the little one on San José street, opened even on Sundays, to stop at the table of new books; how often did I spend Saturday afternoons in Río Piedras between the basement of La Tertulia and the labyrinth of the Hispanoamericana? In these memories my emotions still stir, from the pleasurable expectation of seeing a new title to the sadness that inspires so much reading. I can say the same for the sounds of Roy Brown and Aires Bucaneros, Silvio Rodríguez and Pablo Milanés, of some record still on vinyl of Andrés Jiménez, Rubén Blades, Willy Colón, and from the political and cultural airs coming from Cuba, Nicaragua, and the rest of Latin America. There still remained some hope, some freshness in my life and one could still sip a bit of it at the bars and café nightclubs. The world could still change with a bottle of rum and the right tune.
It was around that time, a few months after I’d returned, the first letters arrived from Paris. The Pétrements and Simone wrote several pages filled with nostalgia and good wishes, but one day I found in my mailbox the letter that I know sooner or later would reach me. Just by feeling its weight and seeing Marie’s nervous, minuscule script—somehow she had gotten my new address—I knew it would be long and difficult to read.
At the beginning her tone was dry and bitter. She wrote out of indignation and guilt, and this irreconcilable mixture made her proceed in fits and starts. She said that even taking into consideration her role in the drama, she felt my reaction was absurd. She had never imagined that, on her return, she would find not only my terse letter but also that I had gone. There was no excuse, she said, for this hostility. It was ridiculous to throw overboard so much effort, to destroy without a second thought the future I was forging in Paris. In any case, the consequences of my actions were ultimately my problem; however, my departure also had an effect on her. According to Marie, nothing of what she had done had justified such a breakup. It was true she hadn’t written to me until now, which wasn’t right either. She admitted that. As I had doubtlessly presumed, she had gotten involved in a meaningless relationship with some man, but she felt I had reacted with a ferocity that the situation didn’t merit. We had survived such things before, and we would have been able to survive this too. She had fallen into a period of confusion that, unfortunately, had hurt me. For this she was responsible, but for the rest she could not forgive me. And besides, if things didn’t work between us, I always could have stayed in Paris and continued with my life. She was worried about what hardships I might be experiencing. She had visited Didier and Son, and they had spent a whole evening talking about me. Didier did not stop repeating, as he served more than half a bottle of cognac, that sooner or later I would feel suffocated in Puerto Rico. She encouraged me to reconsider my actions and to consider returning. I didn’t have to see her if I didn’t want to, although she wished that I would, but in no way should I be doing this damage to myself. “You must know that I’ve loved you and that I love you more than anybody, and this has nothing to do with our being together. I hope that you’ll forgive me and that I can forgive you, and am sending my love to you, all my love.”
I was already filled with doubts about having returned to Puerto Rico, and the letter made them worse. Perhaps I had acted out of an impulsiveness that was not typical of me and had been excessive, but at the time I had felt certain. And I was still sure of my decision. I didn’t know why (most probably I couldn’t explain it in a convincing way), but this was my reality. I had had to return, even if it was to suffer in this society in which I barely knew myself but which was the only one that could be mine.
I couldn’t answer her right away. Many times did I reread those pages with their lines scrunched together, and for a whole week I drafted and revised my answer. When I finally sat down to write, I put on paper only a fraction of what I had composed in my mind. I was capable only of addressing whatever was most anecdotal. The brief time spent in San Juan had diminished my sadness and I was no longer in any mood for arguments. I ended by reiterating my affection and the hope that someday we would meet again on good terms. But for the time being, I was staying put. I needed to be here, and besides, I had nowhere else to go.
Time gradually blurred the past. I lived as best as I could. The reencounter with the country made me return to writing, and the atmosphere of Old San Juan with its galleries and museums, aside from the dead time of loneliness, got me to take up again paints and brushes. With the passing of the years I was becoming another man and got to be many things: artist, teacher, painter and decorator, mediocre carpenter. I lived in many rooms and houses, embarked on and weathered the shipwrecks of several love affairs, and over a decade later finally became a father and husband. I built a life in San Juan, which, if it hasn’t been the best, has at least been my destiny. I’ve had a somewhat gray existence, which perhaps has given me the freedom to abandon many illusions. I expect very little. My motivations and pleasures are simple; achieving them is often precarious. But I have assimilated to this place that is mine in the world.
That is my story. I do not know how much of it is true, or how much I have rationalized my defects and weaknesses. But I do know that coming home to Puerto Rico was more important than all my travels. I don’t think it was merely a fleeing, an escape, but that no longer matters. Paris (or any other place) has ceased to be Paris. I have no more trips left to take.
San Juan came to be a corrosive acid that erased the past. Sometimes I have a hard time recognizing its faded traces. Memory, or rather the rational role I play in my memories, feels like a novel or movie read or seen years ago. Very little remains to tell, as if life in San Juan didn’t allow for having relationships with any other part of the world. After many letters and a surprise visit that resolved nothing and left me even more confused, my relationship with Marie dissolved. This was doubtlessly for the best. Her life kept going in circles around the same old problems. I didn’t want to have to deal with that anymore. When I saw her that last time, I did my best to bring her down to earth. To this end, I presented myself as weighed down by all my frustrations. I was a loner, poor and bitter, and didn’t pretend to be otherwise. I took her to the places I frequented, mediocre bars, restaurants, and parks that were often also dirty. She saw me get drunk every night while the electric fan, whose grate was covered with rust and dust, swiveled back and forth between us. Successively I tried to elicit her pity, sorrow, guilt, and repulsion, and to provoke the pain of both having lost me and seeing me lost in San Juan. Only bed with her could bring relief to those days. Only there could I breathe without hating her.
After an absence of several years in which we had no contact, I received from her, fairly recently, an absurd and nostalgic letter which I didn’t answer. I learned that Sandrine had married, divorced, and married the same man again—and, the last I heard, now lives with another man in Le Mans. Meanwhile, Simone has brought up her child alone, and every once in a great while I receive a postcard from her, almost always from some vacation spot, telling me she’s alive, more or less fine, and that she remembers me.
Didier Pétrement died a few months ago. Son sent me the news, and at the same time announced she was returning to Vietnam to live with her sister and nephews in Le Petit Vietnamien’s community there. Until the very end,
Didier was loyal. We would write to each other regularly, and I always had news of his museum adventures and misadventures. He, in turn, knew about my problems and followed with interest the course of my projects. I would send him my books and catalogs of art shows, and he was sorry that his knowledge of languages didn’t include Spanish. Nevertheless, I am sure that he was the best reader I had. Then again, there haven’t been many, but rather a vast throng of readers who have never read me.
Since the time I left Paris, Didier and I were resigned to the fact that our relationship would not have the intensity it had before. Always, when I wrote to him, I translated my life; I would change things in these narratives so that he could understand and accept them without getting furious. We had a way of dealing with each other that we maintained until the end, unspoken. This was a way of making our affection for each other survive; it was a way to eliminate the penalty imposed by distance.
I felt reduced, impoverished by his death, but also freer. It became easier to live here, to be whoever I was on these streets, the person I might have never accepted otherwise. Sometimes I still light up incense sticks and think of him, remembering his dimly lit, encyclopedic workplace, seeing myself next to the hulk of his body, while he was showing me images and telling me things (myths, histories, archeological scandals) which were perhaps the most important stories I’ve heard in my life.
After an almost endless process (which I was on the verge of abandoning on numerous occasions) I finished my thesis. I spent a year and a half without a job, sometimes painting houses or cleaning pools, before attaining a contract at the University of Puerto Rico. I’ve been teaching there for over a decade, and I try to emulate some of the rigor and passion of my former teachers.
But, after leaving Paris and before becoming a university professor, I was a Spanish teacher at a private high school. That was my first job with a regular salary and the first time I had the opportunity to practice what I had studied. I labored there, like any novice anxious to prove himself, with exaggerated energy and enthusiasm. The willpower I put into my classes gradually tamed the students’ lack of discipline and awakened their interest. I was just a few years older than the seniors, and because I played basketball with them and went to their parties as well as teaching them, an atmosphere of camaraderie developed among us. During our Friday class, they’d ask me to talk about Paris. It was a way of relaxing the rigorous classroom atmosphere, but also a way to get to know each other. They were no doubt expecting the tale of my affairs with the women (whom they imagined excitingly liberal) but instead they got—and they began to listen more closely and seriously—the story of what my life had been there. When the hour was ending, promising more chapters, I discovered in them something akin to a kind of vague hope. Perhaps this was the first time they realized that, aside from following the business or professional paths of their fathers, there existed, for whoever wished to take them, other paths. It was in this way that Alejandro Espinal learned of me.
One night, after eating with some friends, I parked in the high part of the city. I was still living in Old San Juan, but I had moved to an apartment on Calle Cruz. This fascinated my students since it was the neighborhood where they hung out, and they assumed that, living so close to the bars, my life would be a kind of endless party. At some point I had mentioned the street where I lived without going into details, as I didn’t want them visiting me at all hours of the day or night. I was walking down the deserted slope of the road when I noticed a couple further ahead. They were shouting something, looking up. This was a common scene in San Juan, as most of the buildings didn’t have doorbells, so visitors had to shout to announce their arrival. I didn’t pay any further attention to them until I got to the entrance and started to struggle with the lock. The couple was shouting my name. The boy was blondish, thin, and wore glasses; his companion was an attractive light-skinned black girl who was slightly plump. I waited; they saw I was looking at them and shouted again.
“Who are you looking for?” I asked.
They said my name, my occupation, and the place where I worked.
“That’s me,” I said, surprised.
They came over to me, laughing. They had been looking for me for three nights and had shouted my name time and again at all the buildings on Calle Cruz, and—pointlessly—on the adjacent street, Calle Justo. They had followed my classes from afar, because they had heard about them from a friend, and had decided to meet me. I had made my students read great writing such as Cortázar’s Hopscotch, Vallejo’s poetry, stories by Carpentier and Borges. I had playfully introduced them to the nivolas of Unamuno and had acquainted them with a group of new Puerto Rican writers—Rodríguez Juliá, Ramos Otero, Magali García Ramis, Ana Lydia Vega—in whom they discovered an intimate, lively world they had never seen or imagined could be conjured up so well in a book. The story of their search for me was incredible. Alejandro Espinal was a friend of Guillermo Fernández, one of my best students, the only one who said he wanted to be an artist, and who was constantly drawing, reading, and writing. Alejandro had left high school before beginning his senior year because, according to what he said that night, he couldn’t stand being in all-boy classes or the oppressive atmosphere of future technocrats. At this point he was finishing college in the public system and, as was natural, he was still hanging out with some of his old high school friends. Thus he knew about my stories of Paris and wanted to meet me because he too wanted to go to France. The girl was smiling and nodding as Alejandro spoke rapidly, the words tumbling out of his mouth, his manner shy and at the same time arrogant.
I was captivated by his determination to make my acquaintance, and so that our meeting wouldn’t be so brief, I invited them for a beer. We went up the hill toward the bar Hijos de Borinquen which was then on San José Street, on the corner of Luna. I liked its unpretentious atmosphere and its hybrid nature (it was a mixture of bar and grocery store), and because it sold natural juices and had a jukebox that played the best Puerto Rican and Caribbean music. We found a table and I ordered three Medalla beers from the skinny old waiter.
We spoke about school and his former classmates. Alejandro gave terse answers, as if he weren’t interested in the direction the conversation was taking. He smoked nervously and laughed with the girl about things I didn’t understand. He mentioned Paris, trying to get me to talk about the city. I didn’t feel like it. He was very young, and I knew that his dreams would soon vanish for the most ordinary reasons. Besides, I had returned, Paris felt far away, and the reasons I had left did not form part of my best memories. I didn’t get that Alejandro had sought me out for days because of the attractions that Paris held for him. It didn’t pique my vanity that someone wanted to follow in my footsteps. I knew from experience that following such dreams of travel could be a mistake.
After a while, I made an excuse about having to get up early. With nothing more to talk about, they accompanied me to the door of my house. I didn’t invite them in, or to come visit me sometime. I congratulated them for finding me and said good-bye assuming I would never see them again.
We cannot always know what certain encounters may bring into our lives. There are people who don’t know who they really are or their effect on others. This significance is beyond them and they become the bearers of a message they don’t even know they convey. Alejandro Espinal would bring to me the most destructive and most lucid silence. His life would become a territory through which my days would blindly pass. He was only a detail, a short chain of incidents, but in him, more than in many events of my biography, lingered the danger of San Juan. He forced me to see what I never wanted to see. The society I lived in had also avoided contact, for centuries, with this image of itself. Unconsciously, my time in San Juan became a battle with the fast-moving shadow of Alejandro’s history.
I didn’t last much longer at the prep school. My innovations in the curriculum sparked controversies, and the shadowy and manipulative moves by the priests provoked uneasiness among the pr
ofessors who had now chosen me to represent them. One day the director called me to his office and showed me evaluations of my classes. This document was unusual, as nobody had come to observe them. I knew what this consultation meant: when the year ended, they would not renew my contract. I decided to hand in my resignation after Christmas. I thought it was better to focus on my thesis than to wait and be left without a job. My parents helped me out financially, and seven or eight months later, I sent the manuscript to my director. At the end of October, I traveled to Paris for my defense. I stayed at Didier and Son’s house. I didn’t have to resist the temptation to get in touch with Marie because she had returned to live with her parents in New York, but I had a brief encounter with Sandrine. Time had distanced us, and our dinner in a restaurant was excruciatingly dull.
I planned to leave Simone in peace with her new partner, but after a few days with the Pétrements, the temptation was too great, and I called her. We met at the Café de l’Arrivée, almost directly facing the train station at Montparnasse. She was the same as ever, and the joy of seeing each other led us to rent a room in a rather dubious hotel, which we didn’t leave except to buy merguez sausage sandwiches at an Arab stand. We spent the whole night without sleeping, just talking and making love. When I returned the next morning, Didier and Son, who had noticed my absence, asked where I had been and, before falling into a deep sleep, I told them about my long coffee date with Simone. Before I left Paris, she and I decided, on a couple of occasions, to spend the whole night again in those labyrinths in which down-and-out traveling salesmen would give free rein to their secret desires.