Curiosity aroused, I found the only text I have about Camus. I opened it at random and started reading a paragraph: “Due to his health, he was forced to leave the Algerian summer. Camus obtained a safe-conduct pass to return, with his wife, to the mother country.” Was he another victim of the sun? Could the sun be a sort of illness that for centuries has been producing the sensation that life is unlivable?
I picture myself here, sitting alone at this table in a shopping center courtyard food court, with my coffee and notebook. At my feet, a backpack with books, another notebook, and two fountain pens. I’ve been here for hours and haven’t bought anything, not even a book. It’s incredibly odd, given everything around me, but I find no other image so haunting and disturbing.
“Even in our own day, nine-tenths of humanity is outside history, outside a system of interpretation and recording which was born with modern times and will disappear. History is a kind of luxury Western societies have afforded themselves. It’s ‘their’ history. The fact that it seems to be disappearing is unfortunate for us, but it allows destiny, which has always been the lot of other cultures, to take over. The other cultures have never lacked destiny, whereas we, in our Western societies, are bereft of it.” Jean Baudrillard, Le Paroxyste indifférent.
I dreamed of Tomás and his wife. I should have seen him yesterday but I didn’t go to work. I like talking to him, but sometimes we have a hard time in spite of all our shared interests, including books. In the dream, his image returned over and over again. We spoke briefly and unintelligibly, and we kept having to separate and then talk again, as if the whole thing were a long, drawn-out, missed connection.
I saw him looking at me, and it took me a few seconds to recognize him. I almost got to the point where my reaction would have been too late. Two or three years ago, or maybe a little more, he worked with me for a brief period. A young man, quiet, superficially coarse. I later learned that he had been on death’s doorstep. When I went up to him, I couldn’t remember his name, but I did remember his condition and that’s what we talked about. His situation has improved, but as he told me about it, I could tell he was deeply exhausted. I gave him the banal support that a stranger might offer. When he said good-bye, I noticed that he shaved his forearms, the way bodybuilders do, and I was simultaneously impressed by how lightly he shook my hand. As if he doubted my presence.
I discover the name of a woman who works in an art supply store: Arles Pages. Arles, like the city that van Gogh made famous and the well-known brand of pricey watercolor drawing paper. Pages, as in pieces of paper in English or French. Her name is like one of the products she sells. She hadn’t noticed. She didn’t care to know.
I’m watching a red-tailed hawk, a guaraguao, from the café at the Borders bookstore in Plaza Escorial in Carolina. It glides skillfully above the housing development behind the shopping center, where a wooded hill still survives. I remember the stories I sometimes told my friends’ children, in which these birds were the protagonists; how they felt a longing for their lost world, a nostalgia that could degenerate into sentimentalism.
Next to me a Chinese man is thumbing through a volume in a series of popular novels titled Predator. His daughter, sitting across from him, is no more than three, but he’s given her his coffee to taste. They had spoken in Chinese earlier, but when she puts her lips to the coffee cup, the little girl wrinkles her nose and says “Fo!” like any Puerto Rican. There must be thousands of Chinese people in the country (just count everyone working in restaurants), but they’re invisible. I’ve sometimes wonder what their lives must be like, how they’ve ended up here, how they feel.
Is anyone counting us, the people living on this island? Do we exist for anyone, on this secretive afternoon, as we try to detach from the noise, the heat, the dust? Who hears our life stories? Are we known anywhere by anything other than clichés about us or vague, simplistic accounts of us that deny us our humanity?
A man is pushing his coconut and pineapple ice-cream cart along the sidewalk of Avenida Ponce de León, near the university. He’s wearing a pair of very cheap, worn-out sneakers, laces untied, like the ones they sell at a shoe store in the Plaza del Mercado in Río Piedras. He’s walking very slowly, hawking his wares unenthusiastically, as if by this time in the afternoon he doesn’t really care.
“The guilty feelings of those who write are well known, and they partly explain our obsession with putting the pen at the service of ‘worthy causes’ in order to feel less useless.” Gabriel Zaid, So Many Books.
I’m reading Zaid in a coffee shop. Near me, three Cubans are shouting more than talking to each other. The youngest, with a fantastically carved walking cane resting between his legs, says he didn’t see a cow until he was seventeen years old.
The improbable conversation distracts me. Zaid analyzes the act of reading, from learning how to spell out words to the comprehension of a book as a whole. “People who feel this way don’t read books. They never really learned to read books. Reading never appealed to them. They never acquired a taste for reading, and so they will never enjoy it.” I’m thinking about these men with their booming voices, meant to raise the value of what they’re saying, about the coffee shop workers, about the other people eating here. I’m the only one in the whole place with a book. At this hour, already well into the morning, nobody even has a newspaper. When I sat down and pulled the book out of my backpack, I felt a slight, distant sense of shame. As if I were making a fool of myself in the schoolyard.
I note with relief that the Cubans have stood up and are going to pay. An old Puerto Rican, who stands by the cash register in hopes of getting a coffee, has heard them and interrupts the one with the cane:
— And when you saw the cow, did you think it was a kangaroo?
The Cuban is sickly thin and wears false teeth. He doesn’t like it when others butt into his business, and in answer, he makes an unclear gesture meant to settle the matter. But the old man, who has just gotten his coffee, keeps up the joke:
— Where were you living? In New York?
In the geographic and conceptual choices behind his questions lies a lot of history and a whole limited view of the world. Apparently the Cuban feels that he has to establish a distinction.
— No, he answers. In a city where there weren’t any cows.
He says it with arrogant pride. His answer, I know, is imbued with a mythic concept of Havana as progress and modernity held back by history.
I reach the last page of a chapter in So Many Books: “Reading is not the act of spelling out words, or the effort of dragging oneself across the surface of a mural that will never be viewed in its entirety. Beyond the alphabet, the paragraph, and the short article which may still be taken in all at once, there are functional illiteracies of the book. The great barrier to the free circulation of books is the mass of privileged citizens who have college degrees but never learned to read properly…”
The Cubans finally leave and the door is about to close when the old man exclaims:
— Guess what, I lived next to a slaughterhouse! Didn’t I see cows!
It is amazing what happens without anything happening. Here I am, sitting in front of a cup of coffee, reading a book, writing in a notebook.
“The human race publishes a book every thirty seconds.” Gabriel Zaid, So Many Books.