Followed by our haphazard, widely spaced encounters in the street, perfect for acting out, certain we could always retreat. My survival strategies: a stupid desire to live in any hole in the wall, a tremendous craving for a smoke, a yearning to lose myself in a solitude that was both a chrysalis and an offensive weapon, my useless disappearance, and my useless violence.
I’ve always been just as I’ve described myself here: surrounded by fragments, by bits of things with which to fill the hours.
I’ve learned to live amid the rubble, satisfied not to be satisfied, supposing these circumstances link me to a multitude of men and women whom I will make no effort to meet, but with whom I feel a sort of kinship much more powerful than I’ve had with most of the people I actually know. This is how I’ve lived, with no possibility of a reasonable excuse. I’ve become a creature of habit and run out of arguments. I try to explain why I still feel shreds of something like a childish sense of shame, but my shame too has lost ground. I explain without a reason now. Free.
My e-mail inbox received a message that seems to consist exclusively of one quote:
“As he watched the small towns and lonely mines go by, he ran into reminders of his past that transported him to the rest of the world…. For a dead man, the whole world was a giant funeral.”
The sender’s unlikely e-mail address belonged to a beauty academy.
The world of the future (the future?): people wandering through the streets, the plaza, the highways, the stages of life, without understanding any of it.
That time when, arriving at the airport in New York, I pretended to be a Paraguayan, and I told the woman who shared the taxi with me (a US citizen, over the age of fifty, married to a lawyer with a degree from Columbia University) that I had been on a trip with many layovers all across South America. It wasn’t that saying I was coming from Puerto Rico seemed like too little to me. My struggle was to keep her from attributing one of the few images she had at hand to me. My humanity didn’t fit them, and it rebelled. But why did I pretend to be a Paraguayan, which for her was even harder to place, less real? Why emphasize the distance, the length, complexity, and phantom nature of the trip? What was I telling her? Why was I in such a rush to impose a distance between us that put practically everything off limits?
Another message has appeared in my inbox: “Struggles have become all but incommunicable.” Could it be from Lina? Or from Simone? The sentence forms a solid column in which it is repeated at least fifty times. At the end, after a blank line, it says, “For you. Is it you?”
It was impossible to know how he, or she, got my address. Obviously the game was afoot. I was in the sights of a sharpshooter who wanted to toy with me.
I must admit that I like getting the messages. More than a week has gone by since the last one. Are they original texts or quotations? And I fantasize that the writer might be a woman.
On the street, I find myself watching my back. I’m not afraid of anything, but I think I can detect eyes spying on me.
I also consider the fact that these messages, which seem to arrive on sunbeams or on the wind, could surely only happen here, that they’re a form that life takes on in San Juan. Like this, like writing at this table with a tangle of feelings lashing out against the ocean that separates us from everything and everybody, even our friends, such as Diego. For some reason we’ve chosen to talk without looking at ourselves, without knowing for sure who we are, without any real contact. The routine of the city: solitude drives down the highways, making pit stops at twenty-four-hour gas stations.
I’m in the Iberia coffee shop on Avenida Ponce de León. It’s Saturday and the afternoon is beginning. There’s hardly anyone here. A waitress with dyed blond hair and an incredibly childish voice sweeps the floor. In the far corner, an old couple talks in low whispers. The man is from the United States and has ordered two café con leches in his heavy accent. A TV set mounted near the ceiling is blaring. No one watches it.
Through the storefront window, I see it’s drizzling, as it’s been for the past two days. The city of insufferable sun has its indoor days. A Saturday, traffic is light and flows easily. Across the street there used to be an appliance store where I’d go with my parents more than twenty years ago. I bought a refrigerator there myself, for one of my first apartments. I remember that in this coffee shop, more than a decade ago, I tried to buy a sandwich one wretched night when the whole city was celebrating, because they were setting off fireworks in honor of the Quincentennial.
Here I am, waiting for the next message, already aware that I find something in them that I don’t have in myself and that I desire. What is it? Who am I, what do I represent to that other person? What are they looking for, to go to such lengths?
Yesterday, at the stoplight where Avenida Ponce de León meets Roosevelt, the addict I see every day and to whom I haven’t given a penny in months knocked on the car window and showed me an envelope with my name written in block letters. I opened the window. “It’s for you, mister. How are you today?” “OK, you?” It’s conventional to treat the poor brusquely, so it would have been a mockery to return his formality. “As you find me, mister,” he replied. “See you,” I said when the traffic started up again, convinced that in the future he would start to form part of my small circle of relations.
I managed to open the envelope, which was heavily sealed with tape, while shifting gears and changing lanes, but even so, I didn’t manage to keep my fellow drivers from honking their horns at me. I turned onto a street in Hato Rey and looked for a place to park in the working-class neighborhood that’s still there, a block from the pomp of the banking district. In front of an auto shop, I found a driveway where I could pull off of the street, and I unfolded the paper. “When I asked if he remembered saying good-bye to his parents in the airport, he replied, after a long hesitation, that when he thought back to that May morning at Oberwiesenfeld he could not see his parents. He no longer knew what the last thing his mother or father had said to him was, or he to them, or whether his parents had embraced or not.”
The message was as heartbreaking as the crudely handwritten phrase that the shop owner, no doubt a former drug addict converted to Evangelical Christianity, had posted over the entrance: “Drugs kill.” Now I saw him eyeing me from inside the shop, perturbed by my indecisively parked car, standing in a shop entrance papered with two or three months’ worth of centerfolds of women in bikinis from copies of Primera Hora. Curious combination of Christ Jesus and the finest tits the country has to offer.
I backed up and drove back to the avenue. Tried not to think. It was preferable, for now, to savor both the pleasure and the uncertainty.
It had been a couple of years since a publisher brought my first three books back into print in a volume called Three-in-One. I loved the play on words. “Three-in-One” was a brand of oil I used as a child to lubricate my bicycle. My books, which had suffered from neglect and editorial ineptitude, had returned to the land of the living (or of the reading) with relative success. They were circulating by dribs and drabs, but I knew that normally things were much worse. I had been impressed when the woman at an ice cream parlor in El Condado, instead of taking my order, asked me about the plot of a novel and scooped the vanilla ice cream while enthusiastically describing how she read it or when a secretary in a doctor’s office who read my name on a form asked me if I was the writer of the same name and proceeded to interrogate me until the coughs of waiting patients forced her to end her impromptu interview.