It was ridiculous, a half-baked idea, but I became convinced that their stupidity was negatively affecting my life. It was aggressive, in a way. I know such people exist in every society, but in this society, practically everything seems to cater to them, to keep them from realizing how childish, inept, and miserable they are. The purpose of our government is to let them go through all the stages of their lives without facing their shortcomings. Shopkeepers design sales with them in mind. That’s why hardly anyone makes demands, why a handful of ideas are lauded everywhere: family, the illusion of democracy, consumer appeal. I am excluded because these people exist.
I couldn’t help noticing the names of the boys who never stopped tormenting Javier. The elder was called Ostec or Usbec — anyway, something extraterrestrial-sounding, like parsec. The other had been christened with a name that most likely was taken straight from a soap opera. He was Jonathan Louis.
I knew I really did care about them, when I got down to it. All I had to do was imagine what it meant to be born and to grow up in a suburb in Bayamón, have names like those, spend whole years going from the Canton Mall to the Plaza Río Hondo, belong to the political party that allows for the highest level of self-hatred disguised as progress and hope, peddle products that promise bulging muscles or gleaming auto finishes, and every Sunday attend the church that has all the answers and the greatest music. I was definitely as much a person of this place as they were. They were, despite appearances, my compatriots.
I left the theater with the sensation I’ve had so often: the pain that never goes away, that I hardly even feel any more. But it’s always there. Julia and I tried to put it into words but we soon gave up. The family in the theater, the drive along Highway 2 a few minutes later — there was no break between them. It was all the same. This was another part of the desert. Nothing set them apart. It was just more sand.
“Lookit, gimme two them big boxes.” “I’m a tell you, here’s her papers.” “Don’t you go changing.” “Our prayers are getting through because the war isn’t so bad.” “You’re gumming things up.” “The wallet’s the problem.” “Wait up, I’m turning.” “Dale una pizza con mushrooms.” “It isn’t cheap. It’s expensive. I brought him a bunch of biscotti.”
These are the things I hear and write down on the streets. Behind the words, the enigma remains. But everything smacks of plastic, of sun, of double-A batteries for a machine made in China. The only way out is having enough money to go into seclusion or to travel, recover by seeing and hearing other things. That’s the only real privilege here. If you’re rich enough, you can pretend you don’t have anything to do with this.
I kept circling the block because I didn’t want to stop listening to a program on Radio Universidad about a Cuban novelist, a schizophrenic, who went into exile in Miami and ended up committing suicide in the last decade of the twentieth century. His name (Wilson, William, I’m not sure) meant nothing to me. The critic they were interviewing recalled that he had destroyed almost everything he had written. A paragraph they read from a novel stuck with me. It told the story of the protagonist’s arrival at the Miami airport from Cuba and the reaction of his family when they saw him. It said that they were expecting a man in the prime of life, a businessman, a future husband, father, and upstanding member of the exile community, yet what they met with was a prematurely aged man, toothless, looking at everyone with apprehension, who had to be committed on the very day he arrived to a psychiatric hospital.
When the reading ended, I felt overwhelmed. It was one of those texts that nails the Caribbean. It proved the power of the fragmentary, how much can be said without the fanfare. That afternoon, I was spontaneously discovering a text of the same caliber as the ones I was being sent. This was good enough for me to send to myself; if I were daring enough, I might even send it to my pursuer.
I’ve often seen him in the small shopping center where the coffee shop is. Some of the richest housing developments in the metropolitan area are near there. He must still be living in one of those tracts, still with his parents, probably in his childhood bedroom. Despite his studies, or at least his attempts along those lines, he never managed to get a job or live independently. So he’s come to be a bald, pot-bellied forty-year-old. Today, he’s by himself, sharply dressed. Other times, he’s in shorts and sandals, displaying a slovenliness you don’t often see in his circles. He comes around here at the most ungodly hours, so he clearly has no job, no work to do; he’s a moocher, dead broke. I’ve seen how the coffee shop workers make fun of him, probably thinking there’s something deeply unfair about this waste of privilege. The man pretends not to notice their contempt, so thick you could cut it, and keeps on walking.
I just saw someone parking a car the same color and model as mine. For a second, I thought I was watching myself arrive. The thought came so naturally, as if it were actually possible, as if there weren’t anything demented about that perception.
I’m looking at the floodlights in the park where I played baseball as a boy. Back then I got to see them being built. This was more than thirty years ago. They’re the same towers I struck with the best hit of my career. The ball bounced off into a bit of swampy pasture, all that was left of what the whole area must have been until it was developed in the 1940s or 50s.
The same towers, the same trees, the same bit of primordial habitat, the same consciousness. Eternity must be pretty much like this.
When I recall visits to the Santa Rosa shopping center in Bayamón, it’s always the middle of summer and the sun is beating down on a merciless cement pavement, an image of desolation. Inside, the short passageway with shops on either side is dark, dank, immune to air conditioning.
When my father was dying, I went to buy myself a pair of shoes like the ones he wore. I’d just broken them in when he passed away. The leather soles were very slippery. That was how I walked for weeks following his death, wearing shoes that could have been his, constantly on the verge of toppling.
The boy was sitting on a cement bench opposite the entrance to an office building. He must have come from school, as his schoolbook backpack was in front of him, and he must have been waiting for someone to come pick him up. Maybe eleven or twelve years old, a little small for his age, unkempt hair, wearing a silver bracelet on his right wrist, too big for him, too incongruent on a small boy. I was having a cup of coffee a few steps away, at the counter in a tiny coffee shop. He was staring fixedly at some point, both at the ground right in front of him and at something far away. I felt certain that I must have been like him, that this combination of fragility and cool was the face I once offered the world. I knew, then, what he would go through later, what his lost stare already suspected: the inability to understand the desires and the violence of everyone else; the riddle of finding so many people so sure of themselves, ready to accept the world, who later dissolve into drab adults with various degrees of remorse and ignorance. I knew that this was what awaited him. His stare seemed to have a presentiment of it that afternoon. I had an impulse to keep this boy from suffering, but all I did was finish my coffee and leave.
Something occurred to me that, at least for the moment, has invigorated me: I should be sending my own messages. Whoever keeps pestering me is familiar with my routines and particulars. All I have to do is leave him or her an envelope or a note taped to my office or any other place where they know I go. I thought I might write down what I remembered about the Cuban novelist. I have nothing to lose by complicating the game, by making it mine as well. I should write the text. When I’ve got it, I’ll see if I do it.