Eduardo Lalo
Simone
to Grisell
... il n’est pas de désir plus grand que celui du blessé pour une autre blessure.
... No greater desire exists than a wounded person’s need for another wound.
Habla con su propia palabra sólo la herida.
Only the wound speaks its own word.
Writing. What other choice do I have in this world, where so many things are forever beyond my reach? But I’m still here, alive and irrepressible, and it doesn’t matter if I’ve been condemned to corners, to cupboards, to nothingness.
Thoughts emerging from out of nowhere, from the “nothing’s happening,” from the here and now. I say this with the joy you feel when you’ve lost all hope yet still persist, still survive. Writing with no exit, from anywhere. In this opaque city, for instance, where I know my neighbors can’t understand why I’m writing and, in any case, they won’t ever see these pages. Writing from a dead end that will always remain a dead end that may have never been anything else. So many men and women have believed in the possibility of changing history, yet all they ever did was suffer it. Or maybe I should say: all they did was put up with their neighbors, their family, their wives, themselves. I’ve taken the blows and I’m still standing. That’s about all I’ve accomplished. That is what writing or reading is good for, and I’ve devoted nearly my whole life to it. Now and then, I’ve known something akin to grace.
Another Sunday morning. The quiet street, a few kids shouting, a brief gust of wind swirling leaves down the sidewalk. The restless day of rest. Blessed are the birds that sing today like any other day — that is, without hope.
Most of what’s called depression consists of store-bought feelings. I call them that for good reason: I’m speaking from experience. Our emotions pop off the assembly line, you can pick them up anywhere. There’s a mass distribution network. Like so many other things we buy and sell, they’re cheap knockoffs. They exist because we adopt specific ways of being and feeling to face specific events. That’s about all.
But sometimes your depression stirs up no feelings, so it hardly deserves the name. It’s just what’s left when time’s up and so many things have been lost or will never be gained, and you know there’s nothing to hope for in the end but this: this Sunday morning.
That may sound stark, but I find it comforting to think this way.
A journal. This notebook, the umpteenth in my lifetime, bought at a nondescript bookstore in an equally nondescript shopping center (leaving a bookstore with only a tome of blank pages is a metaphor, but also a form of grief and boredom). Its paper is surprisingly good, though the notebook itself turns out to be a little thick for resting my hand on while writing this. I’m using these pages to log the passage of time. I want the notebook to be a tool for living as best I can, for making it through the day, through the year, while preserving some scrap of sanity and pleasure. Before, in my older journals — now tucked away in corners and bookshelves at home — I used to think I was struggling against the society I was forced to live in. Against this city. Against the unbearable succession of classrooms where I’d made my living until I landed a steady job (though my contract could be revoked at the end of any semester) at the university. (And I felt ashamed of that struggle, as if there were something disgracefully dirty and paltry about it.) But now I know that struggling and writing are the same thing, whether there’s anything to write or struggle against. I’m not expecting anything major, no truce, no triumph. This is my place in the world, that’s all.
Diego told me it was only after he was able to move far from San Juan that he came to know beauty. He didn’t mean beautiful landscapes or beautiful bodies. He was already a young man by the time he managed to leave our country, Puerto Rico. Only then did he fully grasp how much misery he’d lived through. He remembered years spent in the schoolyard, surrounded by screeching schoolmates, under the midday sun, in the thick, dry clouds of dust they raised as they ran about. He obsessively recalled his teachers’ fruitless goodwill, the mounting pressure during class time, and the curriculum that made him despise for years the things he was forced to learn. And then, as if in a never-ending story, came the bell freeing him for the rest of the day, the stampede of kids shoving toward the water fountain, the games that kept getting more and more vicious, the interminable wait for the bus. Then arriving one hour later, dirty and exhausted, at his house in a city that has no prospects, nothing for a teenage boy to do but roam aimlessly and throw rocks at lamp posts, at neighbors’ houses, at lizards, at the kids on the next block. Diego used to say, with all his fury still smoldering in his words, that it took him more than twenty years to realize that such a thing as beauty existed, that it could be found in a shrug, in a glance, in a leap, in a book. Though he’d had the good luck of discovering it, a gift in itself, he had never managed to free himself from that schoolyard, those teachers, those schoolmates and rivals. He was stuck with them for good, and he discovered, as a full-grown man, that he was a loser. That’s all the good discovering beauty did him.
In my afternoon snooze, I had the dream again. I’m underground in an open space from which, after a whole series of apparently unconnected scenes, I am struggling to extract myself. This time, I had to climb a vast incline inside what looked like a metro station or the old lobby of the boarding lounge at the San Juan airport. But I couldn’t do it, it was too hard, and my feet seemed glued to the floor. I kept looking back (as I always do in this dream), trying to communicate with another person (almost always a woman), but I couldn’t find her, or my voice wouldn’t reach her.
It’s odd, this underground trap I can never leave. Apparently, there’s some country that I find myself unable to depart from; travel and connections with other human beings are impossible. The fact that it takes place underground — in a tomb or a trap — makes the point so obvious that it borders on the redundant. The space is lit exactly like a shopping mall. It is, then, a cave made from the most ignoble of materials. Isn’t the impossibility of escaping this space an image of me in this city?
It took such a short stretch of time, watching the news on Televisión Española, to encapsulate what had taken me a long time to live. The news program ended with their announcement of an upcoming concert by a singer celebrating sixteen years of performing solo. I watched his skeletal figure for thirty seconds, until the credits rolled. He wore a jacket (but not the sort an executive or a salesman would wear) and moved his head away from the microphone to take a deep breath before each verse. Years and excesses had taken their toll in equally brutal measure.
If I’d stayed in Madrid, I would have recognized him. All the same, I was convinced as I heard him sing that, even if I had remained there, I could never have made that world my own or become a part of the generation I’d been born into. I was too intensely discontented back then. There was no place — and no concert — where I would have belonged. This distance from everything around me, nearly the same as I’d later feel in San Juan, already stood between the person I was and the world. Geography and travel were infinitely less real than my feeling alone.
I don’t buy newspapers. Lately I’ve started to get them again on occasion; the wealth of absurdities in them amuses me. Yesterday I ripped half a page from Primera Hora and stuck it in my back pocket. Today I found it. In a column listing the opinions of people that the reporter interviewed on the street, six citizens were asked whether they thought the war in Iraq, which seems to be right around the corner, will go on for very long.