A few minutes later, when after getting up and showering I was getting dressed in the bedroom, I would watch her sitting with her knees raised and her back against the headboard, lost in thought, still combing her hair. Then I’d ask her if she felt well, watch her tilt her head and nod, while her hair, falling like a curtain across her face, prevented me from knowing whether it were true.
I tried to spend as much time with her as possible. I went to the restaurant when her shift ended and often joined the employees for dinner there. As time went on, the boss, the entrepreneurial patriarch of the family for whom Li, bound by some shady debt, was forced to work, came to accept my nearly daily presence. He took the initiative to consult with me about some matter in the hopes that my belonging to San Juan society would open up some commercial opportunity for him or provide profitable relationships. In the long run, he realized that I wouldn’t be able to help him, and he took me for one more of his “niece’s” eccentricities.
In this way, I joined in many late suppers at the table in the back of the restaurant where the employees ate after a long day’s work. Li’s relatives and fellow workers, free at last, stopped and sat down, shouted their conversations, disregarding all decorum and respect, in a relaxed revelry where exhaustion briefly intermingled with euphoria. Those suppers, without tact or affection, were the result of years during which they had put up with each other practically every hour of every day, in the narrow quarters of kitchens, dining rooms, and sleeping rooms that had turned them into not a family so much as a community stranded in a strange land. Being with them brought to mind the people who ate at fixed times on the benches of a boarding school or a barracks.
I realized that they were sometimes talking about us at the table, being brazenly insolent toward Li, who understood what they were saying. I didn’t know whether they envied her for having gotten her hands on a partner from outside their circle, or whether they did it simply as an expression of boredom or cruelty. According to Li, not eating with them would have been worse. She had to see their faces every day, and she couldn’t quit her job. Being independent of it all was for the moment impossible. These people, the father of the current owner of the restaurant, had put up the money to bring her and her mother from China. They had given her food and shelter. This had established an obligation, and not a merely financial one, that she couldn’t just wash her hands of.
After several weeks, as the strength of our bond grew evident, Li’s “family” ceased to care whether she spent the night with me. She seemed to feel comfortable in my house, making herself at home, taking whatever she wanted, books, this piece of clothing or that, bustling about the kitchen as much as she pleased, but it occurs to me now that she never asked for anything: neither a drawer for her things nor a desk to draw at. Nor did she indicate any preferences: one side of the bed, one type of food, one product brand. That likely had to do with her habit of practically living on borrowed things, sharing everything with others, and owning nothing but a few objects, but perhaps it was also a way of being prepared for an eventuality that she knew was, despite it all, always lying in wait. From the time she left her village on the outskirts of Beijing, she’d had nothing to hold onto but the community of Chinese with whom she worked. She lived as lightly as possible. The only thing tying her down was a debt and the impossibility of leaving this country. In both cases, it was a question of chains.
One thing, however, was always clear: I couldn’t force or impose anything on her. Persistent questions would always put her in a dark and taciturn mood. I’d have to suggest a topic or a concern and get a strictly factual explanation hours or even days later. This was clearly an overreaction, a defensive move, but she was incapable of dealing with some areas of her life in any other way. Sometimes I felt Li lived on a narrow ridge of land beside a deep gorge. There was very little room to maneuver.
Those were the conditions; I could take them or leave them. She never told me so openly, but it was always obvious. Her situation and sexual preferences had not been a mystery. In fact, I had suspected them, and she made matters clear from the beginning. Nevertheless, she alone set the limits. So long as we were together, she enjoyed a freedom that I never had.
These uncertainties and shades of gray, contrary to what might be supposed, increased our desire to be together. It was as if we imagined the end was already living with us and that we had to struggle to delay it. Our desire grew when we realized it was mortally wounded, and in bed, we would dive into a tidal wave where we hardly sensed our own silhouettes. Even so, our fears were never far away.
From the depths of that ocean, we would surface to talk about books and authors, about performance art, about Duchamp, John Cage, and Diogenes of Sinope, creating an island of shared passions on the other island that was a daily affront to who we were. When we went outside some people stopped to stare. We were hardly a circus act, but I’m sure that they sensed our strangeness. In this way we negotiated, at times with indifference and at times with pride, the rapids of a society where we had always felt unwanted. Even so, life was better, indubitably better, since Li was there.
At the university, Li had enrolled as a comparative literature student, but she had also taken courses in many other departments. Her interests were extremely broad, and she could read Foucault or an FAO report with equal interest. She had, as her messages revealed, a vast and idiosyncratic command of literature, even more admirable when you learned that, unable to afford these books, she had read them all standing in bookstores over the course of many days. Taking her origins and circumstances into account, it was a miracle she had become the woman she now was. She worked as a waitress all day long, but at lunch and during her free time, she consumed an impressive number of pages. When she discussed them with me, she demonstrated a deep and original understanding. What fell into her hands seemed to reassemble itself, and someone else’s text ended up being, through her reading, a redefined text that shone brightly. She was always busy, usually reading and drawing; she only rested when she slept. In her waking life, there couldn’t be any empty space, a moment for fantasy or idleness. She struggled to make the best use of every hour, every minute, all day long.
On some occasions, we would sit to watch a movie, but after a short time I would see her taking out her notebook and drawing without looking up.
— You never rest, I would say.
— I’ve never been able to, she’d answer.
— You aren’t watching the movie.
— Of course I am, she would reply with a touch of pride. I’m drawing from the movie. If I weren’t watching it, I wouldn’t be drawing this.
As time passed by, the blotches of black ink from her drawings grew and multiplied. She dropped the small-format notebooks and used progressively larger sheets of paper, which she kept in a portfolio case that I gladly gave her as a present, for which she was as grateful as a child. Her works invaded her room in the rooftop apartment at the restaurant, my house, and even, with one sublime piece, the horrid wall of my university office.
It was an elegantly crafted work. Successive rows of ink plowed across the paper’s surface to create areas of deep intensity. If the strokes had been drawn in a straight line, Li’s hand would have covered countless meters, but here her effort was concentrated on a few square centimeters. The lines erased their passage until they became a solid, pulsing body that took a mammoth feat of tedious and hypnotic labor. In the end, there was seemingly nothing or nearly nothing on the paper: a more or less purely geometric form with slight glimmers of white, the minimal patches of paper not covered by the tip of the pen. The result was austere and bedazzling and also constituted a powerful conceptual design. Rather than an erased drawing, like the famous de Kooning that Rauschenberg had painstakingly “erased,” Li’s drawing disappeared under the excess that seemed to penetrate the paper and, at the same time, to float above it. It was a nearly infinite series of strokes, and it was impossible to tell where or when they ended. She wasn’t interested in finding out, it was enough for her that it remained alive, covering its tracks, turning the finest line into the densest shading, the most insurmountable wall.