Uselessness

by Eduardo Lalo

  “It’s as if the sea that surrounded us didn’t exist.”

  “Yes, that’s it,” I said. “And yet, there is nothing more present than the sea that always circles us.”

  “Like a noose.”

  “Yes,” I said, “like the noose around a hanged man’s throat.”

  I called to the ice-cream vendor and asked for two cups of coconut. While we ate them I spoke again.

  “I’m grateful to you for introducing me to Esteves.”

  “A good guy.”

  “He was, but he became something more than that for me. I saw his papers last night. It was enough to make one cry. I don’t understand a thing, he must have pieces there from thirty or forty years back that he worked on and reworked without being able to produce a finished text.”

  “Enrique lost hope.”

  “One can see. Like many.”

  I watched him leave his ice cream unfinished and light a cigarette.

  “I’ve thought a lot since his death,” I said.

  “What’s there to think about? That’s what awaits us. There’s nothing more.”

  “Why do things have to be this way? I returned to Puerto Rico convinced that I would be able to do something. Esteves’s death has made me see that my commitment has been basically half-assed. I’ve preferred to create a bunker: work, family, a routine, an exhibit here and there, a few books no one reads. But in reality I have never been happy and am afraid to face the bigger void that surrounds my little hole. So as not to see it, so as not to feel it, I’ve been willing, like Esteves, to drown myself, to leave behind a box of messy and useless papers. I am, after all, like many others: a career of frustration and isolation, a numbing habit of living from day to day. I have known how to hide it from myself for many years. I probably wouldn’t have been able to stand this lucidity.”

  It was one of the few times, and the first in a long time, that Alejandro listened to me talking about myself. This wasn’t totally his fault. I had preferred to let him express himself. I had complacently observed his madness because I was using it to protect myself, to feel out of danger. But I now realized there was no escape. The sea surrounded us. That was the most basic, ancient, and unwanted metaphor. I had to, I should, accept this fate. Nothing mattered as much as this. Not even being understood by Alejandro.

  “Well, I don’t know,” said Alejandro. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “I’m talking about the sea,” I said, convinced that I would never reach him and that this dialogue of deaf men was precisely my legacy, what we all have inherited, since the beginning of time. “No matter,” I added, “it’s logical that no one gets it: this is precisely the problem, fate, reality.”

  “I only know that Enrique died, that I’d like to move from my parents’ house and get work at school; that I’m hungry; that there’s no point; that I don’t at all like such intellectualizing about suffering. That I want to get out of here.”

  He was such a son of a bitch. He’d always been—and would be until the day I decided it was not worth the trouble to ever see him again.

  It was only on one of the many holidays in July that I once again had contact with him.

  I had worked a lot, and as I had no expenses, I had saved the money with the intention of buying a car. Recently I had been presented with the opportunity of buying a Nissan Pathfinder in good condition despite its one hundred twenty thousand miles. As at home we were always short of cash, I thought of selling Alejandro the old Volkswagen Fox that we barely used now. The idea interested him and we agreed that he would come by to try it out. A few days later, we went out in the Fox with him at the steering wheel.

  I had forgotten his driving: too fast, changing gears while trying to light a cigarette with a box of matches and the window opened. He’d turn suddenly at any corner, accelerate or stop short without any apparent logic. We took a long drive and, upon returning, the deal was done. A few days later I went to his house to make the transfer of the vehicle with a neighbor who was a lawyer. The living room was filled with dishes decorated with Spanish scenes, the center table and the shelves crammed with kitschy ceramics and figurines in terrible taste. Further inside, in the dark patio, one could imagine a profusion of hanging plants. It was a black hole of bad taste, like all that surrounded us in Puerto Rico to the point of tedium and disgust.

  We went to the house of the lawyer who knew Alejandro since he was child. He treated him with a condescension that is often confused with responsibility and decency among adults. He asked me questions about the state of the car implying that he suspected deceit or cheating. Alejandro was getting more and more agitated until he devoted several minutes to a monologue in which he’d return endlessly to the same issues, trying, without any success, to reach a conclusion. The lawyer watched him with idiotic pity.

  When we finished, I insisted that he take me home right away. I had no desire to be with him, even though I knew he wanted me to keep him company. I knew I was disappointing him but was not willing to watch him get lost in his labyrinths. Nor did I want him to force me to talk about his poems while he smoked and drank in a restaurant. It was useless to be with him.

  Perhaps my refusal to linger that night displeased him, because weeks passed without his trying to contact me. Besides, the car probably made it possible for him to be more independent. Our relationship was always tenuous and I am sure that had anyone else been in his life, he would have preferred him.

  During this period I saw him on the street several times and tried, without success, to attract his attention. He was driving or walking, distracted and alone. I even thought that he was pretending not to see me. I discovered him in the rearview mirror when I was driving around El Condado. I saw my former car and stuck my hand out the window, but almost immediately he changed lanes and passed me. On another occasion, he was walking along Roosevelt Avenue. He was probably leaving a pastry shop. The traffic was heavy that day and I didn’t have time to signal to him. Another time I saw him on a side street in Ocean Park. His face and arms were red and he had a hard expression in his face. I pitied him, knowing that he was killing time. I knew the flavor of that solitude. I had lived it for so much longer than I had ever wanted.

  One day, returning home from work, I found several messages from him on the answering machine. He wanted to see me as soon as possible, and that same night he came to pick me up. We went to the Middle Eastern restaurant where we had eaten many times. I listened to a hodgepodge impossible to follow, full of moments of uncertainty. He couldn’t stand silence or the voice of anyone else. He didn’t eat. He had ordered a beer, a coffee, and a package of cigarettes. In the end, I was left apprehensive.

  He’d go to the Ocean Park beach at night to meet up with an Argentine man whom he knew almost nothing about except his name. He had asked him to bring a friend and the night before, when he was waiting for him by the sea, the man had appeared with two North American guys. They had hid among the sea grape that grew against the wall in front of the condominiums. He spoke of himself with a terrifying distance. I knew he wasn’t lying.

  The second piece of news was also peculiar. He had left his job at the translation agency. They had told him at the high school that they were probably firing a teacher and that they would use him to replace her. Alejandro took for certain this possibility and didn’t want to have any commitments when they called him. He didn’t realize he was playing with fire.

  When he still hadn’t finished dessert, he gave me an envelope with poems and insisted that I read them right then and there. I told him I couldn’t, that a hasty reading would not do justice to his work. He got angry and drove me home. When he said good night, he informed me that he would call me the next day. It was a threat, a madman’s call for help.

  Around that time, I went out to take care of some chores and was still out when night fell. I didn’t have to return immediately, so that I took a long ride around the city. I drove on without direction until I found myself on Kenne
dy Avenue going toward San Juan. I had Alejandro on my mind and remembered that I had always wanted to show him the lights on Constitution Bridge. Halfway down the avenue, there were only some faraway points of light, but as they advanced, the lines of poles rose until they created, for a few seconds, on each side of the road, immense question marks. It was one of the secret experiences of the city. I had showed it to a few friends, only to those who would understand its mystery and magic.

  When I got home, I looked for the envelope he had given me and read his poems. They were the worst he had ever written: merely words placed aimlessly on the paper. I considered it useless to tell him this. He was sinking, and I could do nothing to help him. From the very beginning, our relationship had been stagnant and Alejandro had never had any warmth. I was one of the few players in his life. Nothing more. His part in my life, in turn, had been a way to build up my own. With my patience—if that’s what it was—with him, I had tried to include in my hope that what I had lived in other cities had really existed. San Juan was something else. It was this. We were gossip and bad faith, good-natured contempt, rivals for jobs that didn’t matter and that sometimes didn’t even exist. I wasn’t his friend, and didn’t even get to be someone he respected. It was awful to see him, but for the first time in years, perhaps in my whole life, I didn’t expect anything more. I was one step ahead. Free.

  Some weeks later, he called. The position at the high school had not come through and this news, which he was shocked to receive, left him crushed. He didn’t have the energy to look for another job. The only survival strategy he could come up with was to return to the university to audit a couple of courses. He’d spend the day at the seminar on Hispanic studies or in the library. Thus he amused himself and held onto a simulacrum of life.

  One day he called, sounding so bad that I imagined how serious might his condition be when on the telephone, which had always been his most coherent form of communication, he could barely make himself understood. After lots of hemming and hawing, he asked me for a loan. I didn’t object, but I couldn’t see him just then and asked him to call me back in a few hours.

  He did, two or three days later. Before repeating his request, he spoke at length. The sentences galloped along without order or transitions and I hadn’t the slightest idea what he was saying or where he was heading with all this. At a given moment, he spoke to me of the poems he was working on and described to me a typography that formed visual images on the page. Just to say something, I mentioned Apollinaire. I was remembering an earlier conversation I had with him when he was still my student. Disconcerted, he repeated the poet’s name and said that he didn’t know him: that he knew of Rimbaud, Lautréamont, Breton, but that he had never heard of Apollinaire.

  I thought he was pulling my leg. I reminded him of cubism and the surrealists; I alluded to our past conversation and I eventually realized that there was no humor or irony in his words. Something unfathomable was happening. Emotion took me by the throat. Alejandro was one more shipwreck, another of an endless series, collapsing within the boundaries of silence on this island. I had known many; I had come very close to being one of them.

  Confused, I listened to how he proposed to sell me the car. He wanted to know if I was interested in buying it back for a third of the price he had paid me for it. He had crashed into a pole (on Kennedy Avenue no less) and the car couldn’t run now. He said I could use it for parts or try to fix it. I promised to let him know if I knew of anyone who was interested. In the end, he asked again for some money. I made a date with him the following day at the university.

  Very early I saw him peeking inside the door to my office. I invited him to come in and sit for a while, but he refused because he was smoking. Smoking was prohibited in that area of small offices without windows. I suggested that he put out the cigarette, but he preferred to remain in the doorway, only half his body visible while he kept his hand as far away as possible and, from time to time, took quick puffs. I knew how he felt, what it’s like to give up the chance of a crucial conversation for a few inches of tobacco. His priorities were clear. It was also the only pleasure he had left.

  In answer to my question, he said that things were bad, that he wanted to sell the car to return to New York and look for work. I realized that he was too anxious to want to talk. I asked him to keep me posted, that before doing anything, he should call or come see me. I knew he wouldn’t. Without looking at me, he asked if I could give him ten more pesos to buy a book. I took out the money and gave it to him in the doorway. He put the butt in his mouth and shook my hand as if I were a stranger.

  Maybe telling his story is as useless as trying to forget it. But it doesn’t matter anymore because I have these pages. I’m still here, continuing to write the ending that was always there from the beginning, finding in Alejandro the path that was also mine. It would have been enough to write: “Here his story ends. Here silence begins.” But this is not true because Alejandro must be somewhere, and if he reads this someday, perhaps it won’t be bad for him to discover the efforts, the pain, and the failure of generations.

  The sea stretches like a desert around the city and the island; the sea is there to drown in. I can say that I am almost happy to come to this realization. Finally this land is mine.

  San Juan, 2001–2003