Progressively my enthusiasm grew greater. I had seen little art in recent years that aroused my enthusiasm. It would be easy to think I was blinded by love and all the associated clichés, but in the case of her drawings, quite apart from the desire that your beloved should be extraordinary, there was the brute fact of a body of work being created with equal discipline in all sorts of places and circumstances. Li carried her notebooks and rolls of paper with her and, indifferent to her surroundings, she got down to work. She only stopped when her stiff, cramped hand could not keep going.
Once, I told her she was a Penelope who, instead of undoing the shroud nightly, was constructing one so vast and dense it could never be completed. My comment was meant to be light, and I couldn’t have imagined the enigma contained in her reply. “Whether I wish it or not, I am waiting too,” she said, and kept on drawing, protecting herself with a silence I didn’t have the courage to break.
My interest in art was reborn, and we glimpsed the possibility of doing projects together. Little by little our relationship turned into a working one. The process of my hunting, the pursuit Li had carried out through her messages, already constituted a sort of conceptualism, with the added merit of having erased the border between art and life, which after all had been the desire of so many vanguard artists.
An enigmatic and unprecedented Chinese — Puerto Rican was creating, without pretensions of any kind, almost spontaneously, using the commonplace materials she had at her disposal (markers, ballpoint pens, and drawing paper purchased in the stationery section of any drugstore), an exemplary body of art.
She didn’t sign her pieces, asserting that her authorship was in the execution itself. It was natural, then, for us to consider creating an anonymous art whose presence would emerge as a fait accompli, no attribution possible, in the most public and culturally dead spaces in San Juan. The pieces, which would take countless patient hours to complete, were pasted up in a bus station or in office building restrooms; there they stayed as a riddle or a minimal revitalization of the space where we placed them. Why did we undertake this effort, which would bring us no benefits or be taken into account by those who wrote the history of these things? Suffice it to say that it was a form of love and of fury.
Our efforts grew in scale, and I became completely wrapped up in them. I dusted off my cameras and with Li’s cooperation took close-ups of the cooks’ faces in several Chinese restaurants. Some fifteen faces that rarely saw the sunlight, with pustules, spots, and bloodshot eyes, were replicated on hundreds of copies. Li and I spent early mornings pasting them up by concert posters and flyers for political rallies. No messages went with them. One morning this line of faces greeted the surprised gazes of pedestrians and drivers. On the radio some said they must be unknown candidates in the elections. Nobody, except for a couple of writers, imagined it might be a work of art. We loved the fact that, as the weeks went by, the images continued to be respected. Nobody ventured to draw mustaches on them or peel them off the walls.
On another occasion, Li sacrificed some thirty of her drawings of blotches, made with infinite patience, and pasted them on each of the doors to the apartments in a condominium on Avenida Baldorioty de Castro, which we entered by carrying the drawings and the paste hidden in a pizza box.
That was the only intervention at which Li allowed me to photograph her. In another half dozen images, you can see her organizing drawings, pasting them up, smiling beside an intervened door.
We also honored the way in which we had met when Li inscribed a series of phrases in her crude block letters, which leaned farther and farther as the line went on. Written in public places, on walls, on the sidewalk, the words became surreal. I remember several that must have revealed the skepticism of the citizens in different spots in the metropolitan area:
“Is a people that elects as its president an icon that has never read a book all that far away from burning books itself?”
“If there is not a single place where you have not suffered, what other motive can you invoke to justify living a life of wandering?”
I remember that Li particularly liked this one: “Men cannot clearly translate what it is I do, even if they are watching.” That was the clearest possible definition of what we were trying to accomplish.
I have often wondered why we chose to remain anonymous. We probably expected near total incomprehension and indifference. Besides, I let myself get carried away by the wishes of Li, who found something voluptuous in disappearing. She’d used the same method in the messages she had sent me, and it had been in this way, by fading away, that she had managed to live her passions among the Chinese. Perhaps there was also, on her part, an intention of nearly absolute control. There was no greater personal authority than that of vanishing without a trace, as if none of the things that had been done with so much dedication and hard work ever existed.
The life of Li had been determined by events and commitments that bound her indefinitely. Immigration, poverty, family debts had meant a sort of servitude. What she was undertaking was voluntarily shrouded in mystery. She was putting together a play of mirrors in which, over the long run, there was no telling who was the person reflected, or even if there was anyone reflected. This way she could do whatever she wished, with no need for the understanding or approval of the rest. Her greatest efforts also required her to give up the most, but by doing so, she could be free.
One Saturday that Li had off and that we were going to spend together, I found a note when I went to the rooftop apartment to pick her up. She’d had to leave before our agreed-upon time to put in an order for materials for the restaurant, and she would be taking advantage of the trip to the Asian products store to visit with some relatives. She told me the hour when I should go get her at the distributor’s store, which was across from the Isla Grande base.
It was the first message Li had written me in a long time. She had used ordinary, everyday handwriting, which made me miss the block lettering of the old notes.
It would be a while before I met her, so I took my time driving down Avenida Ponce de León to Miramar. I liked that route through town, especially when there wasn’t any traffic. Coming up to the oldest part of Santurce, which had been built on a hill, I felt vibrations in the air and thought the light looked different than anywhere else in the city, probably because I was so near the ocean. Over the years, I had made this trip a great many times, especially on days I had free, to fend off boredom in a city that seemed dead. On this day, however, I had a purpose.
After parking, I went to a coffee shop to get breakfast. As I sat down next to the window, I realized that I’d been there a few months before, also on a Saturday, when I didn’t know who the author of the messages might be. Things were fundamentally changed now. This realization made me smile, but it came with an uncomfortable premonition suggesting that all conditions and relationships are unstable. A few more months and I might be back in this same shop, listening to the incredibly childish voice of one of its waitresses yet quite far from the current order of things. This was a clichéd reflection, but behind its banality lay the brute fact that it was true. To that moment, I wasn’t entirely clear what I meant to Li. We were living day by fleeting day, having made no plans for the future. We even did our art projects in the absolute present, no notes on the calendar required. I found this trend disquieting, as it embodied uncertainty. I had fallen in love with Li, I enjoyed every moment I spent in her company, and she didn’t seem willing to discuss any sort of bond, not even one like a commitment to prolong our present situation. At times, I found this just as incomprehensible as the Chinese people she had lived with her whole life.