— She’s met you.
— I know. We were at a conference. I didn’t understand a word she said. Though she’s a big fan of Derrida, or “Dérida,” as she says.
— You shouldn’t make fun.
— I thought you’d like other women.
— In any case, they wouldn’t be the ones who appeal to you.
— Well, you have very bad taste.
— I don’t care what you think. She was my professor, and she did a lot for me. Later we had a relationship. She went to teach in the United States. Now she’s back.
— That’s why you’re leaving me. Because she came back.
— No.
— You mean, you’re going to tell me it’s a coincidence?
— Not that, either. Don’t dismiss what I told you. I can accept your not understanding but not your taking me for an idiot or a liar. If your pride makes you see phantoms everywhere, that’s your problem. Besides, this doesn’t have anything to do with pride. I’m not who you wish I were. I told you from the very beginning: I’m lesbian. OK, a pretty liberal lesbian, and for that very reason a person with lots of problems. Carmencita and I have a history, just like you and I have one. I understand that you find this threatening and infuriating, but so does she, at least as much as you do. And now that you know my story, put yourself in my shoes.
— I haven’t heard it all, and what I do know you told me very late.
— I did it when I could, and I don’t think you would have preferred for me not to go to our first date in Castle Books. Besides, this isn’t a matter of substituting one of you for the other. That’s not it.
— So why were you running away after what happened last night, then?
— Precisely because it did happen, because it puts me in a situation that I don’t know if I can be in.
— Why not?
— I already told you: because Bai raped me and I didn’t protest, didn’t raise the alarm, out of fear, out of shame; because I fell in love with a dog who only thought about what he had between his legs; because afterward I couldn’t be with another man, and like any girl, I found them attractive, and I desired them; because I’m a woman who was never anything but the Chinese girl, in the neighborhood, the restaurant, the school, the comparative literature department; because I got close to women and fell in love with lots of them and they left me shattered; because of what’s broken inside me and what I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to fix.
Dawn was breaking, and I went to the kitchen to make coffee. I watched the woman who had sent me the messages, and I realized I didn’t know who she was. The woman I had imagined, the one who fit into my life, perhaps did not exist. The one who was talking before me now was a bundle of things I couldn’t understand, who existed in a place beyond my reach, on the other side of a border that would probably always be there. This woman was a step away, sitting in the same place she had occupied on the sofa since I had discovered her about to leave, with her bag at her feet, and she was the absurd absence of a body I loved.
Some time later, I learned from the cooks that Li had gone up to the rooftop that same morning and knocked on Bai’s door. As was often the case, he had gone to bed drunk on the eve of his day off. An intense argument had broken out, and the neighbors had been forced to intervene when Li began hitting him. The fracas ended when several hands pulled her away from her cousin. Then Li picked up her bag and ran off. She didn’t show up at work that afternoon and only returned two days later, to her boss’s great displeasure.
Afterward, nobody would tell me anything, even though I visited the restaurant several times over the following days. I gathered from the employees that Li wasn’t there or was hiding because she didn’t want to see me. I imagined that the foretold end was arriving in the cruelest way. As I drove around the city, I saw the now aged posters of the cooks’ faces and couldn’t imagine their having anything to do with me. I was turning into one more passerby, one more driver who didn’t have the remotest idea what they represented.
I didn’t even feel up to seeing Diego when he spent a few days in our country on vacation. The very idea of recounting the story of my relationship with Li — at the time, I wouldn’t have been able to talk about anything else — filled me with a mixture of fatigue and feeling ridiculous. I had gotten carried away, such was the measure of my helplessness, by a charade of anonymous messages and had ended up getting burned by someone else’s grotesque history. I made so many excuses each time we talked over the telephone that in the end I felt as ashamed as if I had told him every last detail of the affair.
For days at a time, my mind replayed the last hours I spent with Li. The morning on the beach, the meal in the port of Naguabo, the night, her body on mine, opening up all hopes. And then what had seemed incomprehensible and cruel, what had in reality been a desperate effort to give an explanation. I was wounded, stunned, victim to an unabating rage, but I also knew she had pieced that day together just at deliberately as she used to compose her messages. The day had been both a betrayal and a declaration of love. Realizing this was no consolation — nothing could appease me just then — but I recognized what she had done, her attempt to reach me by taking a step that would never be repeated. It was a gift. Something that shone in the midst of my squalor. But the trophy was horrendous.
Couples refuse to see it, but every love story has an ending. The unions that last an entire lifetime are survivors, stubborn fighters against collapse. And one of the rare glories of life is how they strive not to succumb. But the fact remained: love is a story, and stories always have their denouements. In the end there is death, physical or otherwise.
Like so many others, as long as I was in contact with the woman I loved, I remained stubbornly blind. It should have been obvious that we wouldn’t be able to overcome our differences. Our sexual preferences were not some mere detail, nor was the emotional upheaval of living in the capital of our pain. This city, which overlay the city surrounding us, remained within us, occupying us with a hurt that was reborn with every new day. Besides, what did we want from each other? Had Li picked me because she imagined I could understand the tatters of her life? But indeed, could we share the same road? What did I know about her, when her courtship had been a disquisition on concealment?
I was tied to that woman, happy for the first time in years, but almost daily, before daylight broke or the alarm went off, a wave of anxiety would awaken me. I’d lie in bed, eyes open, without speaking, aware of the turbulent movements of my nerves, as if witnessing an undecipherable spectacle. In the twilit dawn of the happiest days of my life, I rehearsed the sinking feeling that had belonged to us since her first message.
I couldn’t stay home, where the thought that I should be waiting around for Li tortured me. So I spent hours on foot and in the car, wandering the city, refusing any contact, my heart scabbed over. In this partial asphyxiation, I sought to dispense with other people, absenting myself from relationships, yet still inflicting my morbid disposition and baleful glares on everyone I met along the way. I knew that my actions were sterile, that the nastiness I aimed at the city’s residents would meet with their indifference no matter how I insisted on scorning them. Nevertheless, I could not stop, and as I walked or drove, my mind reiterated the same ideas to the point of exhaustion. A motor thrown off balance by fury.
I ended up walking to such distant points that it took me hours to get back at night, sometimes in the rain and feeling wiped out. I went all the way to Carolina, to the center of Bayamón; as the sun set one afternoon, I found myself across the bay in the ferry terminal at Cataño. The San Juan metropolitan area was always a desert inhabited by imbeciles, and I knew that the worst of them all was me: that I was once again nothing but a mound of muscles and organs that, despite it all, continued obstinately carrying out their functions though I could provide them no meaning or repose.