The first man, whose impossible name was Hovitt Plancdeball, stated, “I don’t think it will last long. Because of all the technological advances, that won’t be necessary. They’ll drop a bomb and that’s it, it won’t even be like the Gulf War.”
A woman addressed the question: “Not long, I don’t think. With all that technology, they’ll definitely finish quick and start a dialogue because, otherwise, it could lead to worse consequences.” Curious, this notion that dialogue could only begin after bombardment (discussing, I imagine, various ways to surrender) and that the absence of such a dialogue could forebode something worse.
A man said, “Short. Our technology” (our?) “is much more advanced, and the American people would never agree to that.” (That? What is that?) “They’d start putting yellow signs” (shouldn’t it be yellow ribbons?) “up everywhere.”
There’s only one dissident voice: “Plenty, a lot longer than they think. I pray to God that it won’t cause too much devastation and that it will end as soon as possible.”
But my favorite opinion comes from an advertising agent from Carolina — young and attractive, to judge by her photo; an idiot, to judge by the rest: “Short. We aren’t living in the old days anymore.” (Apparently in the past everything was worse.) “We’re a little lighter on our feet now and people have to have more civilization and resolve things faster.” This way of looking at war is extraordinary, like love advice or an offer from a telemarketer.
— The new arrivals are on the table.
— Yeah, I saw.
— We just got García Márquez’s new novel.
— Not interested.
I see a bumper sticker. It says, “I am a citizen of Heaven.” Ironically, the phrase floats above twinned flags of Puerto Rico and the United States. Below it there’s a Bible quote and the names of a pastor and a church, but the lettering is too small for me to read.
Get up, see and hear the city. Think: I’ve wasted my life here and now it’s too late. Think: it would have been the same anywhere else, but it doesn’t matter, I would have preferred anywhere else.
Outside, the loudspeakers blaring from a politician’s campaign car promise fireworks and “surprises” in front of campaign headquarters tonight after five.
Today everything is too painful, and yet I am nearly at peace. It’s because pain has become a habit. I no longer notice the incessant hum.
I spend Sunday afternoon correcting exams. One student has written, “The Renaissance started when people realized it wasn’t the Middle Ages anymore.”
Diego, who has been frequenting the airport for some time now, told me about him. The man is retired. As a boy, he lived in New York, and after he returned to Puerto Rico, he left rarely and for short trips. It’s been years now since he’s boarded a plane. Every week he spends at least one night at the international airport. He strides along the wide concourses like just another passenger. He shows up at the food stands, reads the newspaper or a novel as if he were killing time on a long layover, sits at a bar near the boarding gates. He buys knickknacks, magazines, and countless best sellers in those all-night stores.
Sometimes, suffering from insomnia, he goes to the airport in the small hours of the morning, when it’s practically deserted and the workers are polishing the floors with machines. He walks through both levels, arrivals and departures, along the outdoor sidewalks that were crowded with people all day and half the night and where now you might see nothing passing by but a taxi or a service truck.
Out there, he feels the night breeze, stares at the black spots on the cement (old chewing gum stains), reads the signs at the post office or customs booth announcing hours, holidays, and obscure laws. He stops walking when he feels a vibration growing until it turns into a takeoff or landing. He attends the thundering din, much as others sip coffee or savor a dessert. Then, nodding off in a chair, greeting through his yawns the cleaning crews or airline workers he’s met, he waits for the shops to open. He has a couple of eggs for breakfast at a cafeteria, and before leaving, he buys the newspaper and sometimes a National Geographic. He goes home while hundreds of people are rushing along the highways in the other direction to catch their morning fights.
I’ve been very impressed by the adventures of this man who inhabits the borders of travel indefinitely, as if they would exhaust his desire to leave. Few people travel so often, so slowly, so close to home.
A curious phenomenon: if I don’t jot down a memory or an idea, it loses all its power, as if the substance of the thought had dried up, leaving it forever inert. It’s as if I could only discern life through ink.
I walk toward four young women and from a distance I perceive the aura of stupidity. As they pass me, I hear one saying, “Addy is famous among the world of the homosexuals.” The sentence doesn’t hold together, not only because of the misused preposition. She pronounces the last word clumsily, partly swallowing the sound of the m, as if it were too big for her mouth.
A student hands me a note, signed with only her first name: Cindidet. We both live in the same city. Nevertheless, this absurd, made-up name seems to open an unbridgeable distance between us.
I think about all the times I’ve read or written the concept, “Puerto Rico.” Thousands, perhaps tens of thousands of times, and yet those words are hardly ever written or read anywhere but here. What’s more, they are practically unknown, or they suggest very weak images having little to do with what they mean to me. This is something I think whenever I read, write, hear this name of a country that means so little beyond its borders (and perhaps within them, too). What sort of silence is this? That is to say, what sort of pain?
Somewhere in the city (I know I saw it with Diego years ago), there’s a coffee shop called “Our Daily Bread.” Unbelievable, such a pious tautology. Is it in Barrio Obrero, Villa Palmeras, or on a street around Avenida Fernández Juncos? I don’t know, and this incomplete memory is also a part of San Juan.
Late last night, I went to get takeout from a Chinese restaurant near Avenida Barbosa. I’d never gone in there, and I felt nervous stepping out of the car. The atmosphere was tense: a couple of drug addicts out begging, shady teenagers keeping an eye on everyone who approached, men drinking beer and shouting under the corner streetlight.
When they handed me my food, a man came in who said hello to the fellow behind me in line. Then the guard at the door, apparently an indispensable employee around there, went up to him:
“You left your engine running.”
“Yeah, if I turn it off I have to push-start it.”
When I left, carrying my order of fried rice in a bag, I spotted the old Yamaha. In terrible condition, its motor chugging. Not even worth stealing.
I’ve reread The Stranger after many years, focusing on Camus’s use of the sun. Meursault, the protagonist, authentically perceives things the way someone suffering from too much sun would, someone who’d even kill because of it. His is not the tourists’ sun; there’s no paradise here. His sun is simply what one has to endure day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year. It heightens poverty, despondency, the neighbors’ shouting.