— Make love completely, I explained.
— I don’t know.
— I love you, Li. It’s natural to desire it, and for me, it’s important.
— I guess so.
— So why not? We do everything else, and we enjoy it. I’m pretty sure you like it. Why not go that far?
— There are some things that are hard.
— Why don’t you try to explain them? You shield yourself too much. You saw how close you got to me with the messages. You could have stopped the game at any point.
— But I didn’t.
— I didn’t, either. You hardly ever talk about yourself. I’ve learned who you are through what you do, almost never through what you say.
— I’m not accustomed to talking about myself. They say it’s a Chinese thing.
— But now, you’re with me, and it could be different.
— I know.
— It doesn’t have to be today, think about it and trust me. What could happen?
— Everything.
We sat in silence. During the conversation, Li hadn’t looked at me. Her hair hid her profile. I couldn’t accept that she refused to clarify anything for me.
— Do you prefer women? Is that it?
— Sometimes I’d prefer a woman, but since I’ve gotten to know you, I’m not so sure.
— What is it that I don’t know about you?
— Lots of things.
— What? I asked.
— What I can’t tell you.
— And that is what? I asked bitterly, surprised by the emotion that overcame me.
— What I can’t tell you, repeated Li.
The next day she let me know she was sick. When the telephone rang, after eleven thirty, neither the illness nor the distrust came as a surprise. She said we’d see each other the following night, when she’d be feeling better, but I was sure she wouldn’t come then, either. Twenty-four hours later she didn’t even answer my calls.
I thought it was unfair. What I had brought up wasn’t a minor detail and couldn’t be ignored indefinitely. I could even, at least I guessed I could, accept her ban, but she would have to show me why. What I couldn’t take was a wall that constantly made me question myself. I had a pressing need to know why a woman who supposedly kept herself away from men had taken over my life.
Dark days followed when, as an ineffective antidote to her absence, I wandered the city aimlessly. At night, I would sit and write the story of how we met, as she had once made her drawings: it was the tale of an obsessive line flowing out into an illegible geometry.
It was difficult to accept my failure in this way, with no explanation, no contact. I could no longer go through life assuming that nothing would happen, that my years in this city would be nothing but what I already knew so well that I was sick of it. Just wandering around streets and avenues with nowhere to go, in the vague hope I’d someday find a way out, a way to imagine for an instant she’d moved away and I might have another life or be in a situation that would really seem like another world.
The hope was vain and fruitless, but it was drilled into my mind and the minds of so many others, as if history hadn’t allowed this society to come up with any other idea. This was one of the country’s identifying signs; it was our obsession with salvation and escape.
I often remembered that I had to live in uncertainty. Li was shielding herself, but she would come back. It was hard to put up with at that moment, but I preferred the emptiness I now felt in my breast to the worthless time I’d led before meeting her. I waited. I suffered, knowing I had to keep waiting. I spent nights writing, expecting at any moment for the phone to ring and stop me, to tell me enough already. But Li never called, and I started to prefer her absence, the certainty that, once again, I had lost someone. Knowing that nothing would remain, that, for who knew how long, my life would once more go back to being a whisper, a blotch of slovenliness and forgetting, was strangely enough a sort of consolation.
I knew that Li was surfacing from the depths when on coming home one afternoon I found a black rectangle in my mailbox. She had pasted one of her drawings to it. It seemed to be from a new series, since the pen’s fine line left many small blank spaces, and the impression that the blotch produced, a sort of cloud floating in space, had probably been created by writing and rewriting a phrase or a word. It was pretty good, and I was curious to see how this process would look in a larger format. On the back of the paper were the accustomed leaning block letters that hadn’t been addressed to me since I had discovered the author of the messages. There were five short lines: “I have more opportunities to save myself through inferno than through paradise. Go to the Cine Paradise tonight and look for me at the image generator.”
Li was returning to her old ways. I wondered, were we embarking on a more satisfying phase or regressing to the period before we lived together?
The Cine Paradise was in Río Piedras, and if my memory served, it was in ruins. As a teenager and young man, I had watched countless double features and a bit of theater there as the place turned over from one management to another, as its owners took a chance for a while on art movies and experimental film, or second-run Hollywood movies, or opted for the easy alternative of Italian films with steamy intimate scenes. In the end, the building that had housed so much fantasy had been abandoned to the incursions of bums and drug addicts until the owners or the municipal government walled up the entrances.
That night, I’d find out whether I was wrong and something new was at the Paradise. What was unmistakable was that this message lacked the magic of her old notes. Since I already knew who the sender was, it seemed unnecessarily roundabout. She could have phoned or dropped by my house — which was her house too, if she wished it — and saved me the effort of heading out and searching. Even so, I intended to go to Río Piedras that night, and my feeling of anticipation bordered on happiness.
I was ready early, but I delayed leaving because I wanted to straighten up the living room and bedroom a little. The days with no news of Li had produced their share of slovenliness. I dusted, swept, loaded a pile of laundry into the washing machine. I wandered through the house, waiting aimlessly for the dark of night to settle. It was after seven when I got into the car and drove to Río Piedras.
Avenida Muñoz Rivera was, once again, impassable. I had long since given up on understanding the logic of San Juan traffic. By this time, the bottlenecks caused by people leaving work should have cleared and the lanes should be flowing. I knew, however, that it took only one accident kilometers away or, inexplicably, an overcast sky, as was the case then, to bring traffic to a standstill. I crawled slowly past useless traffic signals, which, in the face of this onslaught of cars, had ceased to control their movements.
Turning onto Avenida Universidad, I found a similar situation. Río Piedras was awash with cars and pedestrians. People were milling about in front of bars, cafeterias, and grocery stores, overflowing the sidewalks, and I had no idea why there was so much activity. I took a side street and ran into another roadblock. I armed myself with patience, took lots of turns, and finally was able to park far away, on a street near the bus station, when it was already past eight.
I didn’t know what was behind this influx of people into a part of the city that was normally uncrowded on a Thursday night. As I drew closer to the street with all the bookstores, which was also where the Cine Paradise was located, the throng grew thicker. I heard the sound of a woman’s voice giving a speech and saw banners hanging from the streetlight poles announcing the first of a series of “Bookstore Nights.” I understood why Li had called me there. She wanted us to meet in the crowd that would be heading to the celebration. It was one of the few times and places when books seemed to count in the city.