So many years on the same streets. It occurs to me that it is here where I have thought through the great questions of life, on afternoons that always seem like summer, intolerably hot and boring, at the intersection of Avenida Ponce de León and Domenech, in front of the Asociación de Empleados del ELA, or crossing Andalucía street where the low, claustrophobic buildings of Caparra Terrace offer no shade. Such questions always arise in unlikely places. Nevertheless, there are things I should never have inquired about under this sun or while crossing this cement desert. These questions have made me feel San Juan as I feel no other city on earth, as I perhaps had to, to gain knowledge and a sense of disgust.
I run into a group of young people coming from the beach.
— You had a stiffy, says the girl, aged twelve or thirteen.
— Me? Answers the boy.
— Not now! A while ago. You had a stiffy.
— Me?
The repetition of the answer is weak and shows that the girl was right.
— I don’t care. I call it like I see it. I’m saying you had a stiffy.
— Hello.
I looked up from the notebook where I had been writing. It was an Asian girl who held out her hand and told me her name too fast for me to catch.
— Glad to meet you, I said, putting down my pen and hastening to shake her hand.
— I like what you do.
— Thanks. Would you like to sit.
— I can’t. Good-bye.
She offered me her hand again. Her black, straight hair fell across her face, obscuring it. I watched her back as she walked away from the Starbucks next to the bookstore in San Patricio Plaza. Not bad looking.
A new message has arrived in the most banal way possible, by mail. I have to confess I had been waiting impatiently, expecting one to come by less conventional methods. There are two parts to it. First there is the name of an author I don’t know, followed, as in a bibliography, by texts he has written. The titles are ridiculous, yet sadly plausible. It is all written on a typewriter or in a computer font that imitates typewriting, and most likely, it’s a fragment torn from a document and then photocopied. Then, at the bottom, in the usual block letters, comes a phrase that also seems to be a quotation.
“Vicente Molina Ruiz, ‘Seven Columns on Education’
, ‘Foundations of Freedom’
, ‘The ABCs of Critical Thinking’
, ‘Great Puerto Ricans for History’
He knew that only permutation secures us the truth.”
The light, the morning impressions that San Juan leaves when you’ve had to be in an office building long enough to become familiar with the dynamics of people entering and leaving, the route of the coffee cart, or the temperature changes sparked by the air conditioning. The sensation (very subjective, but perhaps shared) of feeling so close, physically and conceptually, to a stand crammed with magazines in Spanish that thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, of people will read in the Caribbean, Central America, and the rest of Latin America. Monthlies that I don’t buy or read, but that make me feel that I belong to this world. The sensation starts with the yellow light, with the sunbeams creating columns of dust pointed skyward and slicing through the morning, in the middle of a traffic jam, amid noxious gas and honking horns on this morning, which has been the same as far back as I can remember.
How many years crossing Río Piedras, from the Plaza del Mercado to the bookstores? Today I pay attention to Calle Monseñor Torres, which starts at the entrance to the Plaza, just beyond the lottery men and street sellers setting out their wares every morning, in the human-scale anthill (its rawness, its extraordinary freight of reality) that is Río Piedras. On the short Calle Monseñor Torres, beggars hail one another from corner to corner and a record store blasts the street with a song by La India. It would seem, despite the chaos, that everything was in its place: the crowd of men missing legs in their wheelchairs, the “Miss Millennium Model” ads, the neopsychedelic decoration in Cafetería Los Amigos, the row of timbales in the shop window of Casa Isern, the clock on the Tren Urbano station, the apartment buildings looking out on the Plaza de la Convalecencia where, if Río Piedras had been different, I would have liked to live.
I head in the direction of El Amal pharmacy. I smell cigar smoke, the kind with a hint of vanilla that they sell at a kiosk in the Plaza del Mercado. It takes me a few seconds to realize that the smoker is the old man walking ahead of me. He’s shouting something I can’t understand. He carries two shopping bags, calling out to the people on foot and in their cars. He tirelessly repeats the word or phrase that I can’t make out. “¡Cheneychequer!” Incongruently, I think of the vice-president of the United States, but a second later I notice that the bags he’s carrying hold boxes of damas chinas—that is, Chinese checkers. I leave him behind and another older man comes to mind who a few minutes ago had been drinking his coffee next to me in the coffee shop in the plaza. He poured an enormous amount of sugar into his cup. The stream of sugar flowed for seconds. It was astonishing how much he could drink, in three or four gulps. So many things have always seemed unbelievable to me, as if the world were endlessly foreign to me, as if this were the measure of the distance between me and the men I share it with.
What are these streets but my own life? Time circulating like water or wind, a body that will keep growing smaller and more fragile, alongside the gutters that flow always in the same direction, along the road that also is mine. Cities matter more to those who go in the same direction as their gutters, those who travel at their level. No master of this city — none of its mayors — care about this city as I’ve cared about it because I know that I have no way out, that I’ll never be able to leave. Not even exile would free me of San Juan. I’d simply suffer doubly: for belonging to the city and for being far from it.
The new message was almost erased by the afternoon showers. The black ink of the block letters was running like mascara smeared by tears. The mystery man or woman is running out of strategies for getting them to me because they are starting to repeat. The message, however, has some new elements: it is in English, it is a question (possibly addressed to me), and it contains the name of a French street.
“Remember me at rue Falguière?”
That street, Falguière, wasn’t far from where I lived in Paris. However, I rarely went there, since my usual destinations lay in other directions. But why the question? And most of all, who could know that I had lived in that neighborhood?
I could barely call up an image of that road. My memories of Paris were so faded that I was surprised to recall it had once been the center of my world. Maybe that was precisely why, having once thought it indispensable, I now found it one of the farthest removed corners of the planet.
It was hard, therefore, to recall a person, when I could barely recall the place of our hypothetical encounter. Whoever was writing to me was doing it by chapters. I was sure that more clues were on the way.
I’m sitting on the floor writing in this notebook, next to a crib where a month-old baby sleeps. I’ve come looking for some documents in the house that once belonged to my aunt and uncle, where my cousin lives now with her husband and children. She’s asked me to watch her sleeping newborn so she can run out to buy milk and diapers. In this room, which her son has only just begun to recognize, I spent many of my childhood days. No doubt that is why I’ve sat down here, specifically in this corner of the room, where I used to play hide-and-seek with the cousin I’m now waiting for, though I have no intention of ever seeing her again, at least not so long as her husband continues to be the great distributor of wheeled utility shelving units.