Simone

On that page was an underlined passage, with an arrow pointing to it from the margin:

“Beyond all schemes, she lives in what will be more and more a contact between souls. She is unaware of the carnal character of daily life as she is of the conventions and rites of social classes; thus, even on the social plane, Simone Weil will be perceived as inhuman.”

I gathered my things and went outside. I walked by the darkened windows of the sushi bar. Inside the light was dim, but I thought I could see a silhouette following me with her eyes. I stopped and put my hand on my chest, over my heart. I felt I could see her do the same.

The following day I found this message on my answering machine:

“Hello, I’m Li Chao, alias Simone Weil. I think it’s time I introduced myself. I hope you’ll forgive my little game (I suppose I can speak informally now). As you must have noticed, I take it very seriously, though I know it could cause trouble. I may not be able to see you, sir, umm, I mean, I can’t see you till Thursday, my day off. I suggest we meet at the Starbucks on San Patricio. I’m not as mysterious as you must suppose. I said hello to you there a long time ago, but you didn’t realize I was the woman leaving the messages. And there’s no reason why you should have. We can meet at the same time as before — that is, at 7:49 p.m. You don’t have to show up, of course. Ciao from Li Chao.”

I left the message on the machine and listened to it many more times over the following days. I had felt in control of my life, though at times it seemed utterly worthless. Li Chao had demolished what was, I discovered, an ineffective defense mechanism. Life was an uncontrollable torrent. I had long observed it comfortably, from the banks; now, I was captive to its unpredictability.

The citadel had fallen. I wondered if, after Thursday night, I’d be a different person. I could never have anticipated someone using these texts or this strategy to get close to me. I was so limited. Li Chao was coming from another direction.

I counted the days and hours and at the same time wished Thursday night would never come. I had fallen in love with the tactical brilliance of an approach that had turned into something like a work of art. I wasn’t stupid or naïve enough to think that what I now imagined was desirable or even possible. But at the same time, I was convinced there was a crack in my defenses: Li Chao’s messages were a kind of secret tunnel I had just uncovered. There was a way past the walls I had always raised around myself.

The Starbucks server took my order and handed me a folded note. It was handwritten in the second style, the maniacally precise one. “It was an ancient beauty, like an old photograph set afire.” There was an asterisk sending me to another phrase at the bottom of the page. “I wait for you where you have gone so often.” I was going to ask the girl serving me where the woman who’d given her the note was, when I suddenly got an idea.

— Be right back, I said while paying, and I ran over to Castle Books, literally a step away.

I went to the literature section, but no one was there. I entered the next aisle, with four bookshelves of Puerto Rican books. I had noticed a few days earlier that they had put one of mine on the top shelf. But now the transparent plastic stand where Three-in-One had been was empty.

Unsuccessful, very nervous, I searched the whole bookstore. Then I went out into the mall. Li wasn’t in the restaurant area or standing by the movie theater. I returned and again walked through each aisle in the bookstore.

Only the children’s section, which was separated by a wall from the rest of the store, remained to be searched. When I entered, Li Chao was reading my book, sitting on a chair in the shape of an elephant.

— You know how to get where you’re going, she said, barely raising her eyes. You do it well, she added.

It wasn’t clear whether she was talking about my finding her or about my book.

— You too, I said. Too well.

— I hope you’ll forgive me for the complications.

— For you, picking up a phone and dialing is too old-fashioned.

— If I’d done that, you wouldn’t have come.

For the first time, we saw each other face to face, without the screen of messages between us. It was so easy; it seemed unreal to me. I got the feeling that something was missing, that some basic piece was absent, yet her body was in front of me.

— Come on, let’s get a coffee, I said.

— You’ll have to buy. Starbucks is too expensive.

I observed her, walking through the mall. For the first time, I could look at her by my side. Before, for many weeks, I was the one who had been examined at will. I was now finding out about the body of this woman, medium in height, dressed in a T-shirt and a pair of wide pants that she hardly filled. She had a shoulder bag, probably woven somewhere in Central America, and almost hidden under the large bells of the pant legs, a pair of plastic sandals.

After so much excitement, this body was almost a disappointment. However, I was sure that if it had been any other I would have thought the same. From the messages, I had constructed a phenomenon in my head that blew reality out of proportion. No beauty could have compared, at least not at first blush, with that fantasy.

Before we sat down, Li picked up a chess set and brought it to our table.

— I’ll be white, she said, and I realized that behind the grammatical perfection of her words lay an unusual intonation, a peculiar way to attack certain sounds.

— Of course, you always like to keep one step ahead.

After a few moves, I’d lost three pieces, and when I hesitated for a long time over whether to move a bishop, I heard her say,

— Every four seconds a child dies of hunger somewhere on the planet.

She must have seen that I didn’t understand because she added impatiently,

— At least two hundred have died by now.

That was Li. She seemed to know all the statistics in the world, the illuminating ones and the trivial ones alike. She knew the per capita income of Togo, the inflation rate in Peru, how many more years the tropical forests of the world had left at the current rate of clear-cutting, the number of automobiles in Puerto Rico, and as a point of comparison, the number in Sudan; she knew how many pints of blood the human body contained and the weight of dolphins’ brains, how many spermatozoa there were in an ejaculation, and how many kilos of salmon a bear ate during an Alaskan spring.

When she referenced a set of numbers at inappropriate times, it was like she was parodying the way we cite facts, questioning through exaggeration the numerical reality of the world. I observed her strong hands; the slight plumpness of her body that she tried to hide with loose clothes; her round face with full, pale cheeks; her black, listless hair parted in the middle and frequently tied back in pigtails. Taken all together, I realized, she would lead me to surprises. Li, a Chinese woman living on a Caribbean island who approached the works of novelists, thinkers, and artists as if they were musical scores to be interpreted, took every aspect of life like a young girl who’d seen it all.

I watched as she drank two café con leches, ate three different kinds of pastry, let me win our very quick, second chess game.

I remembered the passages she had underlined in the Simone Weil biography. Almost all of them established the distance at which the thinker had lived from her contemporaries, even if she had been so committed to those in need that she had attempted to repair that separation. More than one heartache lay behind her dedication. I’d seen enough of Li, though we’d never met in person before this night, that I could imagine her reasons for choosing her pseudonym.