I waited a few minutes for the rain to abate, leafing through the new books. When I saw that the cloudburst showed no sign of diminishing, I decided to go ahead and soak myself to the bone. The owner was standing by the door. Alfredo Torres knew everyone who bought a book, so after saying hello to him I asked if he had seen a Chinese woman in the store.
— Chinese? he asked, unsure what it was I wanted to know.
— Yes, Chinese, a young woman.
— Oh, you mean Carmencita’s partner?
— Carmencita? I asked, not knowing who he was talking about.
— There was a Chinese woman here, Carmen Lindo’s partner.
— Right, that’s her, I replied, unsure whether it really was Li, jolted by this bit of information, which was news to me.
— She was around, Alfredo explained, but she must have left quite a while ago.
— You don’t know where she went?
Alfredo shook his head.
— Hey, when does Carmen get back from California? he asked, but he didn’t get my answer because I had run on.
The rain was intense. People were running around me under umbrellas or pieces of cardboard, laughing and shrieking when they stepped into puddles.
There was no point rushing since I was parked far away, so I soon slowed down and walked unhurriedly, almost content to feel the huge raindrops slamming into me, helping me not to think too much about what Li had decided I should not know.
I was practically alone in the flooded streets, and when I got to my car, I had to wade in soggy shoes through eight inches of water. The storm drains of Río Piedras were notoriously ineffective. After I sat down behind the wheel, I didn’t take the shortest route down Avenida Gándara; instead, I drove around those streets, touring past the bus station, the Plaza del Mercado, the Plaza de la Convalecencia, just to see what the city looked like in the rain. I didn’t want to go back home just yet. The night had been a letdown, except for meeting Máximo Noreña, to whom I had said a clumsy, rushed good-bye thanks to Li’s complications. In the end, the only clear outcomes were our failure to meet up and the disturbing information I’d learned from Alfredo.
I drove past the Cine Paradise, since the police had opened the street up to traffic again. Near La Tertulia, I saw Máximo Noreña hugging the buildings to try to keep from getting completely soaked, with one of his boys in his arms and, behind him, Isabel and the older boy. I wasn’t the only one for whom the night had turned out badly.
As I passed the gates of the university, I had an idea. Li had to have been returning on foot to the rooftop apartment above the restaurant, and she had likely been caught halfway home by the sudden downpour. She might still be walking back. I had to do all I could to find her. I needed to know why she hadn’t told me about Carmen Lindo and what that meant. I remembered she had written in the message, “I have more opportunities to save myself through inferno than through paradise.” I needed to know why.
I turned around as soon as I could and pointed the car toward Avenida Muñoz Rivera. I drove along it till I got to the sushi bar where she worked, but I didn’t find her on the sidewalks or taking shelter in any of the bus stops. I retraced the route at top speed and then went along Ponce de León, which runs parallel. The wet sidewalks sparkled under the streetlamps, and there wasn’t a soul to be seen. At the picnic tables outside the McDonald’s near Calle Betances, I could see the silhouettes of some people sheltering under the meager roof. When I stopped in front, I saw, swathed in plastic bags, the fat, bearded vagrant who had been wandering the area for years, and a couple of men who usually begged for alms by the next traffic signal. I was about to give up my search when I noticed that, a bit farther down, half-hidden in a corner of the place, was Li. I braked abruptly and opened the door. She got in and sat down, completely soaked, trembling. I saw her eyes. She had been crying.
At home, Li took a hot shower and got into bed. A little later I lay down beside her. We both watched the shadows on the ceiling of trees dancing wildly in the wind from the storm. After some time, Li shifted positions and sought the warmth of my side. She fell asleep in an instant, without either of us saying anything about what had happened that night, without my having dared ask her if she had been or was the lover of Carmen Lindo.
Li’s bag once more sat almost every day on the floor by the bed. Superficially, our lives went back to the way they had been before. We were each tied to our work and devoted our free time to each other. As might be expected, the recent events, together with our inability to clear up what they meant, created shades of gray and left us feeling somehow burned out. We weren’t as fresh or as full of desire, and the silences began to weigh. Even so, I can’t deny that I was happy to have her near.
Soon Li fell ill with a bad flu. Her aches and fevers made it impossible for her to work, and she spent days in bed. She would sit up to drink some broth or tea, we’d talk for a few minutes, and she would cover herself back up with the blankets. For endless hours, I could only see strands of her hair on the pillows. I started thinking she was pretending it was serious, or was willfully putting off her recovery, so as to have an alibi for a kind of domestic disappearance that would delay bringing up the subject.
For nearly a week, she didn’t read or draw, and I was a shadow for her, coming in to ask her how she felt.
I took up her convalescence with an impossible combination of patience and restless anxiety. I wanted to imagine that life would give us a chance to start over. The days went by in a sort of dream state, and I convinced myself that waiting was the same thing as acting.
Between classes at the university, while driving, or when I woke up early in the morning for no apparent reason, I felt certain I was wrong. Deep down, I was frightened and acutely aware of our fragility. The small daily joys, the amorous trances, might last almost indefinitely, but there was room to doubt we had that elemental chemistry that truly unites two people. This question mark, which probably occurred to both of us, was a secret from which we irrationally wished to protect ourselves, as if the doubt were an affront and a betrayal.
We waited, simply waited, not knowing for what, not even having an inkling whether it would do us any good.
With the idea of freeing us from the gloomy atmosphere that had filled our spirits, on one of Li’s free days, after she had recovered her health, I suggested to her that we should take a trip outside San Juan. I was surprised when she agreed, given her scant interest in that sort of activity.
After taking her to buy a bathing suit, we took Route 3 toward Fajardo. I wanted us to spend a few hours on the beach and then eat in some village around there. On the way to the beach, Li seemed cheerful, her face bright. She continually changed the radio station and listened with the same pleasant attitude to a symphony, a silly love song, or a preacher’s sermonizing. I was finally seeing her as she used to be.
I was worried that Li might get bored or feel self-conscious on the beach, but as soon as we got to the swimming area, I saw her exhibit the extreme pallor of her body with an unusual lack of inhibition. She lay down to catch the sun, splashed around in the shallow water, made sand castles, and went into the ocean with me until the water was over her head without getting alarmed.
At moments like these, she possessed an almost childlike charm. She was light and flexible, but at the same time she revealed a certain vulnerability, of which she probably was partly unaware, caused by her being out in the open. Her life had transpired in close quarters, restaurants, and rooftop bedrooms among a narrow group of isolated immigrants in a country that was very foreign to them. Though this contact with sea, sun, and sky — pivotal factors on an island — nourished her, she seemed to be missing her points of support and only momentarily inhabiting a place that would never be entirely hers.