These literary encounters, which took place on a number of occasions, were new to me. I had gotten used to writing for nobody because in my case the cliché of writing for your friends didn’t fit. My friends (with the partial exception of Diego because not even he had read everything) and my girlfriends weren’t particularly interested in my writing. So over the years, without getting metaphorical about it, I had resigned myself to writing for nobody, or rather, for my hand: writing gave me something to do with it, something to do with my life. Probably the reason I didn’t quit was that in my final years of high school, and later at the university, this was the identity I wanted to give myself because I revered book cover photos, not posters of actors or athletes; because in the end, despite the scale of the effort and the thankless indifference, what meant the most to me, even more than women, were books.
So it was natural for me to suppose that the mysterious message writer was inspired by an enthusiastic reading of my work. Something had to have motivated this person to seek me out because the notes I was given, or the phrases written in chalk or sent by e-mail, were, in addition to attempts at seduction, a proof of literary passion.
Julia phoned, and as we talked, it occurred to me she might be the one sending messages. We’d been partners. She knew my tastes, where I worked. Thinking it over, I lost track of the conversation. “Are you there? Still listening?” I could hear her annoyance. Her tone convinced me it couldn’t be her. She almost wanted me to listen to her by force, wanted me to love her. I was sure that under other circumstances we’d rather not be talking at all, or even to have ever met. Besides, she wasn’t patient or subtle enough for those messages. No, it couldn’t be Julia. Or rather, I thought, it shouldn’t be Julia.
I like writing on the backs of flyers that people hand me on the street. My notes go on advertising leaflets and also on receipts. Now, for example, I’m writing on the back of an ad for a company that does roof repair and similar services. I first read the message from the company, which, like so many others here, has a pompous English name under which it lists its services in everyday Spanish.
I write anywhere. Ink flows like magic across cheap paper.
“The Center for Academic Excellence invites you to our ‘Workshop on the Comma’ and our ‘Workshop on Pronouns and Adverbs; Prepositions and Conjunctions.’ These two workshops will be conducted by our resident professors of linguistic competence in the vernacular and are requirements for the Institute for Composition in the Vernacular.”
Is there anything to add, in the vernacular?
In what is now a familiarly disconcerting ritual, two days after the last note (on Saturday; today is Monday), I found an envelope in my home mailbox. From the San Juan Biennial of Latin American and Caribbean Printmaking, according to the return address, it was an invitation to take part in the Eleventh International Biennial Print and Drawing Exhibition in Taipei. A form letter photocopied to be distributed to a long list of addressees, no doubt. It was odd, in that I hadn’t been sent anything of the sort in quite a while; what was nearly incomprehensible was my discovery, in the flyer’s reflection in the glass living room table, of the now familiar calligraphy on its back, with its seemingly clumsy, thick block letters leaning toward the lower right corner of the paper. Unlike the letter, the message was handwritten, not photocopied. It seemed to consist of two quotations:
“I cannot stand good old boys. If it depended on them, literature would have already disappeared from the face of the earth.”
“I hate the vast majority of ‘normal’ human beings who day by day are destroying my world. I hate people who are very good-natured because no one has given them the opportunity to know what evil is and so to choose good freely; I have always thought that such good-natured people have an extraordinary malice in the making.”
To say that the arrival of these messages astonished me would at this point be an understatement. The truth is that whoever was writing to me had a special gift for getting under my skin. Both quotes would have interested me under any circumstances, in a book, in the press, or at a conference. I thought I could see clues in them both to the history of whoever was writing to me and to my own life. The note writer selected his (her?) texts (original or appropriated? I wasn’t sure), glimpsing that they would be the objects of a common passion (and perhaps a shared survival strategy, too?). Maybe it was too much for me to say that I found myself in them, but they undoubtedly hit close enough to the mark for the series to begin turning into a sort of fabulous chain whose magic lay precisely in its transcendence of the ordinary notion of writing and reading a text. I was committed to this “story,” which I couldn’t stop reading until I came across its last word, or, what was more disconcerting and in this case thrilling, until I discovered its author.
Who was my pursuer? How could he (or she) know where I live and be familiar with my habits, my identity, my consciousness, and even the things that lurked in my dreams? As daunting as these questions were, the richness of the messages and my desire for fresh submissions overcame my sense of alarm.
I see a man taking out a trumpet in the lobby of the Hospital del Maestro. I’m on the sidewalk across the avenue and am watching him through the plate glass window. Next to him is an old man. The cool light makes his instrument look extraordinarily golden. His instrument case is very battered, its corners broken and faded. What’s going on here? A trumpet in a hospital at night in San Juan? What story lies behind this vision?
D’Style. Brides and Grooms. The signs of businesses with their fabulous and so often pathetic messages. This lengthy urban text constitutes a sort of substitute for dialogue or description, a cartography of the words of so many anonymous people, set in plastic rectangles or turned into neon structures. Through them, desire speaks, but also tedium and lies. They are sentences in the novel of the city.
Yesterday, I went with Julia and her little boy Javier to the movies. (Julia, that unfinished story, set aside due to apathy and boredom. We separated three years ago, but from time to time, we still see each other and occasionally hop in the sack out of sheer loneliness and sheer self-delusion.) We went to one of the Río Hondo theaters to watch a children’s film. I knew what I was getting myself into from the moment I agreed to go and had nothing but the lowest expectations for what lay ahead that afternoon.
Just as the shorts ended, a couple with two children sat down right behind us, even though the whole auditorium was empty. I suppose there are a lot of people who model their behavior in movie theaters on the hours they spend every day in front of the TV, so they think it’s OK to talk out loud, to stand up, and to let their kids touch other people’s collars, kick the backs of their chairs, and run through the aisles. I almost asked Julia to move, but then thought it didn’t matter, in the long run there’s no escaping such people.
On the screen, a kangaroo was running away with a jacket and a wad of cash belonging to a cartoon gangster (this was the exquisite confection that we had paid money to subject ourselves to). The appalling plot struck me as both unreal and predictable, but for our back-row neighbors, the film had become a thriller. It would take some patience to explain to them that they weren’t watching a documentary; that the kangaroo hadn’t been trained, as they thought; and that everything they were watching had been created on a computer, so there was no need to wonder how the kangaroo could jump so high.