Today, I found this written in colored chalk on the asphalt in front of my car in the university parking lot: “Today I am defeated, as if I had learned the truth.” My pursuer must be dedicated and have some free time and guts because it must have gone through his mind that I might discover him. I went to the guard’s booth and asked if he had seen anyone writing something on the ground. I had to repeat the question and explain it until it gave me a sensation of being ridiculous. And no one enjoys being taken for an imbecile or a crazy person.
Going back to my car, I found a piece of yellow paper caught under the windshield wiper. Just a couple of minute earlier, when I read the message on the ground, there hadn’t been anything on the windshield. I pretended to be uninterested in the folded note and didn’t look up because I didn’t want to encounter the eyes of my message writer. I wasn’t ready just then. I was stuck between fury and fright.
I left the parking lot as quickly as I could. I didn’t know whether my seeming lack of interest would deceive my pursuer. It was to be expected that he had been spying on me, and knowing that he was so nearby was intolerable for me. I thought some signal from me was expected and that I’d squandered my chance to send it. The messages, their delivery, and the skill with which it was all done were starting to feel like a seduction, and I didn’t know what to do with that.
I took a roundabout way home. Stupidly, with a mixture of pleasure and terror, I imagined that I was being followed. For what? Why? It was impossible to know.
When I came in and closed the door, I realized I hadn’t opened the sheet of yellow paper. There was the usual calligraphy, the coarsely yet carefully drawn print letters, angling down toward the right margin. “Walter Benjamin said that in our time the only work truly endowed with meaning — critical meaning, as well — would have to be a collage of quotations, excerpts, echoes of other works.”
I wandered between the kitchen and the other rooms, in the dark, not making any noise, trying my best to give no sign that might give away my presence. Several times, I went to the corner of the window, where I could hide behind the curtains and peer out. The street was the same as ever, the same neighbors I barely exchanged greetings with, the usual barking dogs, the symmetrically arranged cones of streetlight.
Today, on a street in Río Piedras, a man in a T-shirt walked by me. When he was near, I saw the date printed on the cloth: September 23, 1977. The T-shirt was announcing an event that took place a quarter of a century ago. I recalled an anecdote I once heard Diego tell. He knew a member of the Socialist Party who, after an event where few people had shown up, took a box of T-shirts that they wouldn’t be selling again home with him. He used them for years with complete indifference, with demented frugality.
I had just met that man, who was no longer young, who had probably been walking around the city’s streets for years bearing on his chest the vestiges of a vanished world.
I was invited to take part in a conference titled “The Right to Raise a Stink.” I’ve always been surprised by the simulated populism of the way organizers name so many intellectual activities, as if they were making a commitment or, worse, they felt embarrassed that the great majority of people find this sort of work unnecessary and incomprehensible. I suppose they’re trying to show that, despite appearances, the participants are just like anybody else. Nevertheless, the people who go to these events are hardly average folks, and I’ve never run into anyone from my own street at one of them.
I find it hard to attend these events. I’d rather read a text than have to listen to it, and besides, I rarely come across a talk that I find truly illuminating. This time I got there for the opening keynote and stayed for hours, waiting for my turn, witnessing a series of funeral dirges.
There was a bit of everything, from the reading of some fairly worthwhile texts to the recitations of others that became unbearable because of their authors’ efforts to cite without restraint a half dozen international luminaries, whose appearance in these writings was disturbingly predictable. I imagined how astonished those major figures would be if they found fragments of their works used by scholars from all five continents to support the most unlikely topics and conclusions.
Sometimes this repeated appeal to authority was suspicious, sometimes merely a nervous tic. One anthropologist with an authentic Cuban accent and questionable hair color demonstrated an oddly open interpretation of Lacan’s seminar on psychoses in the longwinded and disquieting conclusion to her commentary on the hundredth anniversary of the Universidad de Puerto Rico. Then there was the frightening sociologist Carmen Lindo, who, instead of pronouncing Derrida in the French way, with the accent on the last syllable, alluded to the philosopher three or four dozen times over the space of fifteen dense and impenetrable pages with the accent on the first syllable and a trilled r: “Dérida.” To top it off, she cited “Dérida” in an English translation, which for the public’s benefit she followed with a spontaneous version in Spanish that suffered a bit too much from trial and error.
There was also a lawyer-historian who, after saying he didn’t want to presume to predict the future, ran half an hour out of time and out of sense in giving us a detailed description of the coming century, which he was certain would be an age of solidarity. Also noteworthy was the second talk by professor Lindo, who, each time (and there were many times) she quoted her sources and found that they had written “man” to refer to humanity, would offer her generous aid by chiming in with “and I would add woman,” thus creating spontaneous, unauthorized collaborative texts, which, while contributing little, at least showed her taking some risks and presenting her own words, predictable and obsessive as they may have been.
That’s how I spent my day, dreaming of coffee breaks, incredulous to find someone capable of citing Deleuze and Gabriela Mistral in the same sentence just like that, without forewarning or footnotes, yoked together by a conjunction that both linked and disfigured their meaning. I skipped the farewells and left before the end, having heard the prodigious citer of “Dérida” preface her commentary on the final panel by warning us that she had “only nine little points to make.” In the end, a day of ordeals that will have to be filed under the heading “Conferences Attended,” in the hopes that it will prove of some use in the fateful hour when contracts are renewed at the university.
Diego is off on another trip. He dropped by to give me the keys to his house. He has a crew of workers remodeling the kitchen and bedrooms, and he wants me to stay on top of them. He spends less and less time in San Juan, lately no more than three or four days at a stretch, and it’s very likely that the bank he works for will send him for an extended time to some large South American city. I don’t know why he’s investing money in a house he won’t be living in. I miss my friend, who I feel is growing more and more distant, who I see disassociating himself from the world that was ours for so many years.
It’s Saturday and night has fallen. I’ve gone to his house to check on the how the work is going. I doubt the workers have done anything this afternoon; there’s no sign they’ve been here. Everything’s covered in a layer of cement dust and the electricity is shut off to part of the house. I’m sitting on the kitchen floor, near the lamp that used to be in the living room and that has now been tossed in some corner here, next to a cushion leaning incongruently against the fridge.