I came through Avenida Gándara to get to the stretch of Ponce de León where the bookstores are, for no apparent reason since it wasn’t the shortest route I could take. This section of the thoroughfare, lying as it does within the urban core of Río Piedras, never struck me as belonging to the avenue that traverses the city all the way to old San Juan. This humble fragment where the main bookstores in Río Piedras stood really deserved to have its own name. It had so little to do with the rest of the avenue.
La Tertulia was crowded, both inside and out — lots of familiar faces I preferred not to stop and greet just then. There would be one or more book presentations there that night, with more of the same at Librería Mágica and perhaps other bookstores on the block too. The music was coming from farther ahead. There stood the Cine Paradise and the plaza by one of the Tren Urbano exits. The street was closed to traffic, and it was hard to walk along it due to the number of people. I was wondering how to get inside and meet Li through this crowd when I sensed I was being called. It was a young man who had read my books, a writer. Whenever I ran into him, he was nice enough to mention my writings. I talked with him for a few minutes before I could recall his name. Luis Rosario. He had a peculiar way of pronouncing the final syllables of words, his humble origins seeming to merge with a sort of pedantry. He was a tireless promoter of literary magazines whose few issues were published in towns in the interior and rarely reached bookstores in San Juan. He was taking advantage of our meeting to propose an interview with me that he would like to publish in one of them. It surprised me how large the meager reputations of writers from the capital loomed in the interior of the country. The opposite happened in the literary world of San Juan; here, you never lost an opportunity not to read or not to talk with a colleague. I exchanged e-mail addresses and telephone numbers with Luis and we said good-bye with a hug.
A few meters on, zigzagging through the crowd, I ran straight into a publisher who had no choice but to say hello. He had long stopped answering my calls, and the manuscript I had given him months earlier must have been lying in some corner of his office where he had paid it no attention whatsoever. He greeted me loudly, calling me “Poet,” and embarked on a machine-gun fire of conversation, impossible to interrupt, in which he complained about losses in the business, announced new titles, greeted and introduced me to people walking around us, and finally said good-bye, insisting that I call him right away because we couldn’t let so much time slip by this time without getting together.
I had to stop a few more times, for in the space of a hundred meters, there were countless colleagues from work, former students, people I had met over the years at exhibits, talks, and book presentations. On that night, the cultural world of San Juan, usually barely perceptible, was occupying the street.
Finally, I was able to reach the Cine Paradise. In the plaza by the Tren Urbano station, they had set up a platform and several food stands. A reggae band was playing a long, saccharine song, and everywhere you looked there were people eating snacks and drinking beer. The movie theater was just as I remembered it: a wall of unplastered cement bricks, partly painted over with a mural, completely blocked off the entrance. I stood there, listening to the music, standing on tiptoes to see whether I could make out if Li was anywhere to be seen.
Then, I sensed someone coming my way. Turning around, I found it was Máximo Noreña. Next to him were the children I’d seen him with a few months earlier at a shopping center and a woman who must be his wife. He asked me how he could get into the Cine Paradise.
— Is it possible to get in? I replied, not giving him an answer.
— It’ll have to be possible, Noreña asserted, I have to screen a movie there tonight.
Having him there in front of me, I could see the mixture of ill humor and timidity in Noreña that characterizes so many writers. He had survived his demons and the lack of interest that long plagued his works, bound and determined to make books that recreated his most heartrending experiences. A fundamental malaise lurked in everything he wrote, but if anything validated his work, it was that he didn’t run away from that pain; he was dedicated to nothing but exploring that colorless landscape, which he turned into literature. Finally, after years of work, he had achieved a relative success that had allowed him to imagine he was at least working for some sort of audience. He knew, however, that many readers and writers would have preferred it if Noreña had never come to formulate a literary universe in which the topics of the Tropics weren’t enough to justify traveling there, unless you wanted to watch your pipe dreams fade away.
In recent years, he had made a few short films. Apparently one of them was going to be screened that night in the ruins of the theater that we didn’t know how to get into.
— A friend also asked to meet me in there, I said. I was surprised because it’s been closed for years.
— Well, tonight they’re going to open it somewhere because they’re thinking of restoring it, which is why they’ve organized this Bookstore Night. I’m Máximo Noreña. Nice to meet you. My wife, Isabel. My children. I’ve read a couple of your books. I recognized you from your book jacket photo.
— I’ve read almost all of yours. It’s a pleasure.
— We have something in common, said Noreña. We’ve both at least made a gesture to these streets.
While we were talking, Isabel had asked how to get in.
— They say it’s around back, she explained.
— Let’s go together, if that’s all right, Noreña suggested.
We went into the blind alley behind the theater. They had strung up colored lights in the back and people were milling around. The wind picked up and felt chilly for the season.
— I don’t know the name of this street, I mean the one down there, said Noreña as we walked, but I remember that years ago, when I was still a teenager, there was a bookstore there. La Contemporánea, it was called. It wasn’t very good, but the owner was a Spaniard who had lived in Cuba till the revolution. They called him “the Red.” He had some sort of relationship with the woman who owned the Thekes because he used to be seen over there, too. Some of my friends were bold thieves. I’d go with them, but I never dared to steal one of his books. I always paid, and not because I had too much money. I felt that I had to protect the Red. I didn’t want him to get upset, close the store, and leave us unarmed.
The anecdote throbbed with the tenor of Máximo Noreña’s literary world. In it, bookstores, authors, and books lived side-by-side with the city streets and seemed to carry as much weight as characters and plot. Using other writers’ texts, rereading them, altering them, he had created his own, in a society that had little fondness for books. He was a proud man and unquestionably had the arrogance of a person who had persisted in following his vision to the point of depletion and the pointlessness of a Pyrrhic victory. He had accepted, with a resignation that at times seemed like a display of ecstasy, the artist’s marginality. In his books, San Juan was always the result of a writer’s gaze. Somebody had once reproached him for that, to which Noreña had responded that others might found, build, and rule cities, but writers are the ones who invent them.
We entered through a side ramp and discovered a large space, like a small plaza. The theater seats had disappeared, leaving a large, empty expanse of cement flanked by tall, windowless walls.
— Look, there’s no roof, said Isabel.
We looked up. All that was left were the steel beams, overgrown with creeping vines, through which the few stars in the cloudy sky could be seen.