She wouldn’t come to see me, or she would come too late to tell me what she already knew. There would be no good-bye, and I knew that she wouldn’t think it wrong. Someday, I’d hear about her, when we no longer counted for each other.
I went back to the living room, got a sheet of paper, and in one go wrote down a poem that had been brewing for weeks:
Take refuge in the multiplied unknown
Always this voice this voice whose voice?
which writes when there is no one here
when to be is not a verb
Stay here in this nook this nothing site
forget the forgetting of remembrance
write on this page indifferent to you
write with no desire to write that is not really
with this absurd absence of your body
Then, a little later, came sleep, my exhaustion a narcotic. I slept for many hours, and opening my eyes when day had already come, a tremendous weight still kept me glued onto the sheets.
At last I got up, thirsty and needing the bathroom. The silence on that morning was different. It was spongy and slowed my movements down. There was something familiar about it. It was what I had lived before Li. I found out then that hope would now produce only shame.
Máximo called around midday.
— I have two pieces of news for you, he said. Both bad.
— I guess it doesn’t matter much which you tell me first.
— García Pardo just won a major award in Madrid. The Grand Asshole of Letters or some such.
— We’re screwed.
— Seriously.
— What’s the second?
— Carmen Lindo leaves tomorrow. I suppose Li goes too.
— Thanks for the report.
— Did you care for her?
— Why the past tense? Who, Li?
— Yes.
— I thought, though it makes me look like the biggest idiot in the world, that it might work out. But we all delude ourselves.
— That’s the way it is, said Noreña. Look at the panel of judges in Madrid.
— But I don’t gain anything by being deluded.
— Neither does García Pardo.
I had to guess what the sound was because even though I’d been home since early in the morning I had kept all the windows closed. It sounded like someone knocking on the locked front gate. Seconds later, a car honked. Stealthily I went to peer from behind the curtain in the living room. Li was looking toward the house, toward the window behind which I was hiding, striving to find some sign of my presence. Behind her, Glenda honked the car horn again. Probably the same car she had borrowed from her cousin the day we first met.
I waited, holding my breath. There was the woman I loved, but I would not open the door. I waited until she looked at Glenda without saying a word. Glenda honked the horn again and Li shouted my name, once, twice, three times. I watched her face flush with emotion and closed my eyes. When I opened them, I saw her get into the car and return with a notebook. She looked for a page, tore it out, and put it in the mailbox. She looked at the house one last time, shouted my name louder than all the times before, and Glenda leaned on the horn. Then, burying her face in her hands, the same gesture as when she had cried for such a long time in my living room, she got into the car, and her friend stepped on the accelerator.
When the sound of the engine had disappeared into the distance, I unplugged the telephone. Hours later, when it was already night, I opened the door stealthily and found the sheet of paper. It was the first time Li had written me more than a couple of lines:
“All my life I have suffered from bending to authority. I have spent my life on the lookout for someone whom I do not know but who always says no. I have preferred solitude — I have learned everything I know by myself, even at the university, where I had no advisers or genuine teachers (Carmen, in reality, was not one) — in a fruitless attempt to escape from a power that was all too real for me.
“I have only had this barren space. Hence my readiness to make do with scarcity and privation.
“I have not been in the habit of living among equals. My lesbianism is in a way an ironic statement. It is very likely I have never known this situation, that of being on the same level as another person. I have inhabited the margins without being free.
“You will never read this, but this is my attempt to apologize.”
On reaching the last line, I finally knew why Li had chosen me. I was her match, one half of an impossible couple, half of two bodies that had never met their mates in any other. Something, at the outset of our lives, had conveyed to us the great no.
I folded the torn sheet in four and sat in the dark living room, in the same place where I had spent so many nights with her, and I recognized, finally, what my life entailed, why it was like this, why it could not have been otherwise. I was unable to move a muscle or speak a word. An enormous unremitting wave racked my body from head to foot. It was the accumulated weight of all the years I had lived. Once more, I would not undertake any action. No phone call, no stormy visit to Calle Canals. I would stay here. My cry for help was silence and stillness.
That night I went outside and in thick wax crayon wrote “This absurd absence of your body” over walls and sidewalks. For hours and hours, I scrawled the conclusion — a kind of mourning for an unending loss. What was left was the city, the turf where I still belonged, despite it all. I inscribed its surfaces with my naked grief, tormented, one moment on the verge of tears, the next seething with anger. I’d never be able to leave this city, after walking its streets like this, without shame, turning them into a page for me to write on. My agony bound me to them forever. My naked feelings told me, these streets were my fate.