by Eduardo Lalo
I defended my thesis during a strike at the university. My director and I entered the Sorbonne through a side door that the students hadn’t barricaded. I presented my work without the attendance of a defense committee, when the building was completely deserted and the shouting of the protesters could be heard in the background. At the end, the director left his approval letter signed on the desk of an absent departmental chair. It would take me a long time to get hold of the diploma that officially documented my PhD. Afterwards, we left by the same door we’d entered, and in front of the metro station, I received the embrace that sealed the completion of my studies.
I walked a while around the neighborhood of the Place de la Contrescarpe and Rue Descartes feeling that the whole thing was a joke in poor taste. The end of my odyssey was strikingly banal: the signing of a piece of paper while sitting in an empty office.
Melancholy and the cold evening air eventually drove me to enter the metro and return to the Pétrements, who awaited me to go and celebrate in a restaurant.
Shortly after this, I left on a train for Alicante. Santiago and Isabel had invited me to spend a few days with them. Autumn had transformed the Spanish landscape, and the city was deserted and a bit gloomy. The color of the sea, once impeccably blue, had now turned gray, and a wind coming from the east chilled us to the bone. Amid dinners and excursions, I considered the possibility of staying there. My life in San Juan was lonely and unrewarding. Here I had the warmth of friendship and a world that offered some novelty. With a little persistence, I could find work as a translator or as an English teacher. But one evening Santiago made me see the light. I had no papers and I had never worked in Spain. Nor was I really attracted to the prospect of spending my life translating business documents or teaching the rudiments of a language. In San Juan, things might change once I had the doctorate in hand. After two weeks I hugged my friends good-bye at the railroad station. I spent a night in Madrid and took the midnight flight to San Juan.
I arrived on the morning of December 24. Weeks of absence had left an impressive layer of dust and salt residue on all the surfaces of the apartment. I spent the days of that Christmas break reading the books by Neptune I had bought in Paris. I’d had a hard time finding some of them. They were the first and only editions of an unclassifiable literature, the kind that didn’t fit in any genre. The covers and pages had already begun to turn yellow. It was instructive to consider this fact. Even in a literary city, a writer like Neptune could be obscure and his books practically unattainable. What could one expect in Puerto Rico, where much of the best literature died after one printing and in small editions?
The new calendar year brought me few things to celebrate. I had to move to a cheaper apartment that was in the southern part of Miramar. It was a small rectangle divided in half with a windowless bathroom. One entered through the side door of a building three or four stories high. Originally, the space had been part of the parking lot. Sometimes, especially at night when it was windy, bad smells blew in from the garbage dump. It was, without any doubt, the worst place I had ever lived.
I didn’t have a steady job and could get up whenever I wanted. I had persuaded a library to mount an exhibit of my paintings, so I worked there every afternoon until after midnight. I’d spend time with some friends who lived as I did. At night we’d hang out in the city. Once, chasing a rumor, we explored the streets of Río Piedras until we found a Middle Eastern restaurant near the mosque. There I ate dinner alone on countless nights, at a place that, at that hour, had very few customers, sitting next to Egyptian, Lebanese, and Palestinian import merchants, watching lengthy musical shows, in which, almost always, a woman sang and danced in front of an impressive band. It was my way of retaining the taste of the world in my mouth. It was, also, a way of grieving.
Only on rare occasions would I get out of San Juan, because neither my car nor my friends’ cars were in any shape to handle major expeditions. I became familiar with a poverty that was both human and material, similar to the one I had endured for years in foreign countries. But this poverty felt crueler for being in my own country. Here it was not embellished by exoticism, adventure or literature.
I was surrounded by a misery that people here always denied was comparable to the neighboring societies in the Caribbean and Latin America. My countrymen thus constructed a fortress with the mortar of our power lines, highways, shopping centers, colonialism, and the dollar. Our reasoning was false and limiting, confined to a belief that among us there were no barefoot children, that, like some species offensive to our eyes and good consciences, they had vanished when the country was opened to transnational companies and to an orgy of cement. We couldn’t or shouldn’t ask for more, which would seem senseless and ungrateful. But, despite appearances, air conditioners, refrigerators, the first personal computers, the country remained in the place it had occupied for hundreds of years. It preserved intact its handicaps, its persistent vocation as a disposable island, its beggarly gloating. Culture, aside from claustrophobic and belligerent ghettos, was always elsewhere. We kept repeating ourselves for almost five hundred years. We knew only how to admire or to scorn other countries that, basically, we didn’t even know. We always preferred to see, not the truth, but an image we had created of them and of ourselves. It was a dreadful vicious circle.
I worked for short periods on community projects in towns adjacent to San Juan. I translated instruction manuals for cement mixers, lawn mowers, and electronic toys. I sought work as a journalist, in government offices, and in a greeting-card factory. I never stopped reading and thinking and thus produced my first books and art shows. One day, unexpectedly, I got a call from the university.
University teaching allowed me to move from Miramar and to buy a stereo set, a television, and a DVD player. I could now look forward to the weekend, knowing that I could escape by watching some film on the foreign movie channel. With my first paychecks, I could acquire the appliances that were already in countless homes, but which, for me, constituted a kind of life preserver.
I spent very little. My only luxuries were books and art materials. I got used to living as an introvert. San Juan and the country could, at the slightest provocation, inspire frustration and anger, but I tried not to fall back on those props. When all was said and done I accepted the life I was leading, whether out of heroism or resignation I don’t know.
At the beginning of my second year as professor, I entered a classroom and discovered, at the back, sitting in the last seat in a row, someone I was sure I had met before. I looked at those paying attention to me from their desks and stopped at that face which I finally managed to place. He was the boy who, years earlier, had sought me out, shouting on a street in old San Juan. I remembered his first name but couldn’t recall his last name. He had filled out and no longer had the freshness of youth. When the hour was over, I greeted him warmly. Vanity led me to assume he had read my name on the list of professors and had leapt at the chance to take one of my courses. I soon discovered that this was not the case, and that the surprise of spotting each other in the lecture hall had been mutual. He had to take the course because it was required for graduation. Otherwise, it held no interest for him at all. He had been at the university for five years and was anxious to finish his degree in French. We took leave of each other with chilly civility and for several classes I watched him come in late and leave early. He sat at the same desk he occupied the first day, took very few notes, did not participate in class, and often did not even deign to look at me. One morning, before class, I found him smoking on the second-floor balcony. I had no reason to avoid him and so I came over to say hello.
“One doesn’t say en base de but rather a base de for ‘on the basis of,’” he said.
It took a few seconds for me to realize that he was correcting something I said in class.
“It’s an Anglicism,” he added.
“You’re right. Those are things one says without thinking,” I said justifying myself, confused by
the tone of our exchange.
“Do you like doing this?” he asked at the same time he made a sweeping gesture toward the corridors, the lecture rooms, the entire building.
I said yes, but I knew he wasn’t convinced.
“The classics,” I said, “were never what I thought I’d teach, but one can do a lot with them.”
“But here?”
“Of course. Where else? I have no other place.”
“You think they understand you, or care?”
“The students merely reflect the society. Perhaps the university can be an antidote for some of them.”
He didn’t speak any further and put out his cigarette. It was time to enter the classroom. The conversation had gone badly. I could understand him, however. I was sure that, if I were in his shoes, I would have a similar doom-and-gloom attitude. This explained his choice of seat in the room, his aggrieved silence and antipathy toward me. I knew that, in all probability, he was the best student I had, and I wanted to offer him the benefit of my goodwill.
As the weeks passed, we met several times before and after class. Our conversations lasted the time it took to smoke a cigarette. Thus I had news of his friend Guillermo, who had left to work in New York and was applying to graphic design institutes. I also found out that Alejandro had helped organize a poetry reading in a bar in San Juan and had smoked so much that night that he had spent the weekend with tachycardia. He didn’t offer to show me his poems. It wasn’t even clear to me that he had read them in public.
The first exam he took in the class was excellent, but in the next one he didn’t get the highest grade. When he got it back, after having missed several classes, he came to see me.
“I don’t care about the grade, but I’d like to know what’s going on here.”
I took the pages and explained each of the comments I had written in the margins. My status as professor created a barrier between us. I knew that my explanations didn’t satisfy him, not because they weren’t valid, but because this was not what bothered him. Alejandro couldn’t get close without being aggressive. He’d compare himself to others and always arrive at arrogant conclusions. He thought he belonged in my place. I grew tired of his attitude and left him to his world.
I’d see him now and then on campus. He liked to sit on the benches around the humanities building, under the immense trees, to read, smoke, and drink coffee. Sometimes I saw him accompanied by a thin girl wearing glasses who built around herself a kind of impenetrable wall. They resembled one another, both of them taking on the same world-weary misery as if they were wearing hair shirts. On one occasion when I saw them together, we exchanged glances, but I knew, without a doubt, that I should not approach. They didn’t seem to be a couple, but, on the other hand, they encompassed an exclusive and despotic territory.
I knew our country and could imagine the causes of their isolation. The hard, unfriendly façade that they flaunted was only a feeble, and, in the long run, ineffectual defense of their pride. Alejandro and his friend, and others like them, lived in a society that barely accommodated them. They’d meet in the hallways, plazas, and classrooms of the university, after spending years as pariahs. Some literature, language, or art professor would take them under his wing and raise the flimsy bastions of their vocations as writers or artists. Behind them remained the dark, conflictive past that had brought them this far, the history of an outcast’s failure to adapt, which would probably never be resolved.
And so, despite everything, I offered him my friendship. One day I invited him home, adding that if he wanted to, he could bring his friend. He looked surprised, as if the second part of my proposal had caught him off guard, but he ended up accepting, unable to completely hide his eagerness.
They arrived almost two hours late. Knowing our local bad habit of not writing down addresses I went out on my balcony several times to see if I could see them looking for the house. Giving a false excuse, Alejandro and the girl, whose name was Rosa, finally came up to the top floor where I had moved and sat down on the uncomfortable sofa that I had bought from the landlord and which was right next to my workshop. This space would attract the attention of visitors because of my paintings, either finished or in process, leaning on top of one another against the wall, and the little piles of metal and wood I’d bring in from the street to make assemblages. I presumed, as I took curiosity for granted, that at some moment they would show some interest in my work. There was not one mention, however, during the whole night: it was as if my work were invisible.
I measured the magnitude of our misery. We dug trenches and fired weapons, as having received so many blows it was impossible not to expect more of the same. Thus we had to suffer this idiotic chitchat and drink beers in order to access some simulacrum of friendly exchange.
On a table in front of the sofa stood a pile of poetry books. The girl picked up one and opened it at random, pausing barely a few seconds on some line or stanza.
“I wonder how they can find anyone to publish this,” she said, grimacing at Alejandro.
The discarded volume was by Paul Celan. I decided it was pointless to mention who he was.
Alejandro glanced through an anthology of French poetry.
“Can I borrow this?” he asked.
I went to get us something to drink, figuring this would be the last time I would see the book. I heard them whispering. My absence had made them talkative. I had been stupid to invite them. I put on a record to make the night bearable for myself.
“Who’s that?” Alejandro asked, after sipping from the can of beer.
“You don’t know Léo Ferré?”
“No.”
“He’s a great singer. He put Rimbaud and Apollinaire to music, and his own lyrics are also very good. He died recently, last July 14. He was an anarchist. You should listen to his songs.”
“He really put Apollinaire to music?”
“Yes, and other poets. He has an album dedicated to Aragon.”
“Can I hear them?”
“What?”
“Apollinaire’s poems.”
“I don’t think I have them.”
Finally I saw him show some interest in something and come out of his shell a bit. I went to look in the pile of cassettes from my time in Paris, but I didn’t find the tape.
“So, you like Apollinaire.”
“Yes, a lot. The Calligrammes are marvelous. I took a class with Marta and they were the best thing we read. The rest, Breton, Desnos, Char, and the surrealists who came later all seemed too cerebral. But Apollinaire is something else.”
I didn’t tell him that Apollinaire wasn’t exactly a surrealist. Marta must have been Marta Gómez Centeno, a French professor, with a PhD from Paris, and many years at the university. I had heard that she was good at giving language classes. She also knew how to inspire her students, and from generation to generation, they created circles of admirers around her. She taught more than the mere rigors of grammar and would show foreign films and organize gatherings and the visits of intellectuals. People gossiped that at her house, some years ago, with the help of a male photographer friend of hers, she had led sessions in “liberating the body” and among her refreshing new approaches were such Francophone goings-on as ménages à trois.
Aside from the gossip, Marta had been a pioneer, an initiator bringing into the country such diverse currents as structuralism, anti-phallocentrism, the first movies by Almodóvar and erotic comics. For years she had had a major impact on the lives of many students. Independent of what one thought of her methods, or of her, this was no small achievement. I had never met her but I knew that, if I had stayed in the country like Alejandro and Rosa, I would have been a member of her group. Recently she had surprised everyone with the publication of some slim volumes of poetry and narrative. She had created a big stir with her use of language (which, from what I heard, reproduced the most exact nuances of colloquial speech) and with handling subjects rarely touched upon, so to speak, in the country. Speculatin
g on the bisexuality of Muñoz Marín, with abundant psychoanalytical, semiotic, or postmodern references in accessible language, she was taking a risk but also, as far as I could see, an opportunistic path to fame. Someone had written unjustly, in bad faith, that she was a female version of the gay artist Antonio Martorell. Her work was suspiciously didactic, useful because of this very fact for consumption by young, impressionable readers. She was that kind of egocentric island artist, aspiring to gather crumbs of recognition in a society almost totally lacking in artistic criteria and culture. She was a kind of simplistic native translator of modernity and postmodernity, at those inevitable key moments in which the official culture (aside from its folkloric traditions) needed to look good. She and a few others were perfect for rousing speeches, posters, and the front rows of inaugurations and funerals. They had opted, in detriment to their talent, to be court jesters in a court that wasn’t even sure if it existed.
“Did you see Marta’s last article in Diálogo?”
“Rosa hates men,” Alejandro explained. I had read the article in the university newspaper. It was an ambiguous and ironic homage to the woman who had tried to kill Andy Warhol and in it, in a muddled way, she connected the woman’s will to kill with the generic use of the masculine gender in Spanish.
“She’s right,” said Rosa. “Why not say las hombres?”
“Don’t start with that again, you always end up saying dumb things.”
“They might sound dumb to you, but we have to start somewhere. Why not call you la hombre?”
“Marta was goofing around.”
“Well, I’m not. And Marta wasn’t goofing around either. She was very serious.”
The conversation was all about people I didn’t know. They talked about classmates and professors whom they’d nicknamed the title of a book or the name of an author.