Diego, who’s been living abroad for longer and longer periods since he started working at the bank, has begun to neglect me, like so many other aspects of his past. I’ve seen this happen to plenty of people but never thought I’d see it with him. He must think his chance to leave the country came too late in life, and the years of stultifying frustration are now manifesting as disdain. Just like me, he was too eager, but I left at a much younger age and the moment came when I knew I had to return, even if I didn’t really know what I was coming back to. I don’t judge him, but this is the first time anything’s come between us since we’ve known each other. This break between us is a kind of violence. Nobody deserves it. A reminder that this society hardly even counts for him anymore, yet he can’t get away from it.
A young, attractive woman, walking with her two children. She’s dressed simply (jeans, blouse) and wearing heavy makeup. She buys snacks for the three of them but ends up eating everything herself, except for a couple of bites her older son nibbles. She talks to the clerk at the coffee shop and to someone on her cell phone with a naturalness that seems affected and puts me off. You could say she seems like a foreigner; here that would be taken as a compliment. She allows the boys to run around, doesn’t shout at them, does everything at a slow pace, so comfortable at it that it’s almost insulting. She doesn’t mind being watched. We all know she’s rich and couldn’t care less what we think.
When she leaves, the memory of her still bothers me. I can’t help this feeling of oppression, which comes from way back. A whole history of humiliations I’ve never been able to pin down.
“It pained me that on the streets of the city where I had lived most of my life nothing should be happening. It was like any other place in the world, people were born, grew up, suffered, fell in love, survived, died, the whole comedy and the whole tragedy, but at the same time and over the long run, here nothing ever happened. Nothing that I or people like me could do would create more than passing waves in a pond. Our place in history, our efforts to live and leave a mark, a narrative, were not permitted to exist. We claimed to be a country, but in reality even many of those who were convinced of that fact acted as if we were nothing but a stop on an empire’s bus route. We barely had words, only gestures, maybe a few ways of destroying ourselves. A shopkeeper could be at peace any place. Money worked just as it did anywhere else. But all I had were words that would never be heard or read; terms from an unknown city that was scarcely real even to its own inhabitants.”
This is a paragraph by Máximo Noreña. I’ve read it so many times I’ve practically learned it by heart. It expresses the agony of generations of people and reading it gives me, ironically, a sense of peace. A desperate peace, to be sure, but ultimately peace, as if I suspected that something had happened in the city because someone had been capable of writing this paragraph.
“To what degree can we build a society based on lies and forgetting?”
At the exit to the university building, this was written in chalk on the sidewalk. I didn’t think it could have anything to do with me. It sounded like a slogan, a protest aimed at everyone and at no one. The next messages quickly made me change my mind.
I’d never seen a public statement written like that, in chalk, so willingly ephemeral. Political declarations tended to go for the aggressive hostility of paint. The block letters were almost childish and leaned to the right. At that moment I read it without suspecting it might have something to do with me.
A few days later I found a small, wrinkled piece of paper (barely a quarter of a sheet of notebook paper) that someone had slipped under the door to my office.
MONDAY, 8:1?.
I am Lina, the blond, pale-skinned, short-haired, blue-eyed girl who wrote on the street, ‘To what degree can we build a society based on lies and forgetting?’ I came looking for you, but I don’t want to find you. I want you to read me. I’ll be back on Wednesday at around 12:XX. I hope to be able to see you without our needing to talk. I prefer for you to read me and for me to read you. Thank you for your attention and sincerity.
Seriously,
Simone
I remember the early eighties, when I lived in old San Juan. At night I’d see how the ships (cruise ships, freighters, yachts) entered the bay wrapped in an unreal silence. It was new to me and completely magical. Never before had I lived near a port, neither here nor abroad. The traffic of great ships intensified the flavor of city living and taught me something obvious yet oddly difficult to believe: San Juan could be a destination, a point of arrival for sailors and vessels that I imagined coming from countries all over the world.
The sirens wailing at the mouth of the bay were the most comforting sound that, up to then, I had ever heard.
The day I wrote this, an unsealed white envelope appeared in my mail box at the university. It contained two sheets of paper covered with large and irregular block letters, spelling out what looked like an unidentified quotation:
As expected, I have remained in Manchester to this day, Ferber continued. It is now twenty-two years since I arrived, he said, and with every year that passes a change of place seems less conceivable. Manchester has taken possession of me for good. I cannot leave, I do not want to leave, I must not. Even the visits I have to make to London once or twice a year oppress and upset me. Waiting at the stations, the announcements over the public address, sitting on the train, the countryside passing by (which is still quite unknown to me), the looks of the fellow passengers — all of it is torture to me. That is why I have rarely been anywhere in my life, except of course Manchester; and even here I often don’t leave the house or workshop for weeks on end.
In Río Piedras two women are talking on the street:
— I want to be blonder.
— But you, your hair is so nice and fine, and it’s so easy to dye.
I know what they are saying, but in reality, what are they saying? How are words possible for something I do not wish to understand?
I dreamed of an area in the center of the island that doesn’t exist. Very mountainous (with peaks much higher than the ones in the Cordillera Central) and tall cliffs of sheer rock with no vegetation. In one place there’s a waterfall, and then a photo. In the photo, I’m very thin and have long hair, parted the way I wore it when I started at the university. Behind me is my partner during that moment beyond time. A thin, foreign woman (probably North American) who smiles at me with a great deal of affection. Something suggests that we met and fell in love while working together on whatever it was that brought her to the country. However, she will be leaving soon, and in the dream, there’s a sense of a couple of letters. Distance will not allow this romance to continue. What’s left is this photo, suggesting nostalgia for the impossible, for these cliffs and mountains that are somehow associated with us. The cruel certainty of dreams, telling me that this woman whom I am losing forever has been a part of my life story.
I think of the women I’ve been involved with, each relationship ending in disappointment. In the end, it always devolved into tallying losses, into tiresome negotiations to create a barely livable situation: company, sex, conversations, a soft and capricious tenderness. I put up with what almost always struck me as their narrow-mindedness: the ridiculous obsessions, the dreams of weddings and progeny, the search for an apartment we couldn’t afford in El Condado. We were always victims of the long, slow dissolution of what was never fully there.