It isn’t my house, but I’ve been coming here for years. The construction work has made it less familiar, but the place is still part of my past. Nevertheless, in the silence tonight, in this abandoned, dusty house, I feel anxious. There’s something disturbing and secretive about being here. Coming to this residence, which the construction has transformed into ruins, writing under this single light bulb, listening to the noise of the wind, the distant murmurs of the neighbors, I get nervous and jumpy, and I know this feeling has nothing to do with my doing Diego a favor. I’ve come here so I won’t have to be home or in a shop where everyone can see me. Nobody could imagine me here. I’m hidden. Here no messages will arrive.
I’ve gone into the bathroom and found Virginia Woolf’s diary in a pile of books. It can’t belong to Diego. It must be some of the stuff one of his women left behind. I’ve opened it at random and read the first line of a paragraph. I’ve copied it in the notebook, imitating as best I could the block letters that have been pursuing me for weeks.
“I must note the symptoms of the disease, so as to know it next time.”
In a while I’ll leave. I’ll tear the sheet from the notebook, fold it in half, and when I get home I’ll stick it in the brown envelope I got a few days ago and place it under the windshield wiper, where I always park my car.
In my notebook, the sentence no longer means what it did in Woolf’s diary, and it will signify something even more different when it’s in the envelope waiting for the mystery hand.
A few words extracted from a diary, now turned into the beginnings of a dialogue. The irony is not lost on me.
Now gripping a walker, the elderly man takes his place in line at a diner in old San Juan. Twenty years ago he spent his nights at the Burger King on Calle San Francisco, next to a guy from the United States with a shaved head who would sit at the same table and read the Bible. How many years in this city have I watched how these people’s stories serve to knit my own together?
I’ve placed the Woolf quotation in the last envelope they sent me and stuck it on the windshield. I can’t help feeling distressed and a bit ridiculous. The bait is set. I’m aware that, with this act, I’m taking on a new position in the game; that by doing this, I’m recognizing what’s been happening; and that doing this may mean that everything will change.
Writing fragments, writing notes in a notebook as the days fly by, is the closest I can come to creating a text that doesn’t know it’s lying. Later, when I rework it, I’ll introduce subterfuges and establish ways of not saying things, or of not saying everything. But here, in this black notebook, I still don’t know what I shouldn’t let myself confess. It doesn’t matter if what I say is true. I don’t need to know. I don’t know what will happen tomorrow. I don’t know what I’ll write after that. I’ve got all my writing ahead of me.
My message elicited no response. I’ve been dreaming. I thought they’d see it right away. Perhaps it is the case that they’re following me, but nobody can shadow me twenty-four hours a day. I finally took the envelope from the windshield, and in an ultimate act of inanity, I fixed it to the lid of the mail box. There the afternoon showers destroyed it.
I went to meet a colleague at the Universidad del Sagrado Corazón. While I was walking along a corridor past the classrooms, I saw a large sign taped to a blackboard: “Be brief. I want to share.” Given its location, it was a call to a supposedly democratic superficiality and the militant slogan of those who are incapable of listening and understanding but who demand participation. Nevertheless, because of what I had been going through, the sign seemed aimed at me. All around me, I found messages, even if I wasn’t supposed to be the addressee. Wasn’t this absurd suggestion from a university classroom what I wanted to communicate to my pursuer? Hadn’t I been trying to hobble them, to put a limit on them, to shut them up, to replace their voice (which was beginning to appear excessive to me) with my own? Wasn’t that what I’d been trying to do when I put an envelope on my car’s windshield?
— Talk to me, pops!
— A coffee and toast, I say.
— Two coffees, but make ’em real Yaucono, ordered the man standing next to me, using the brand name as if it were a commercial. His name was Frank, and he was flirting with the waitress: a frankly horrific, middle-aged woman.
I see a couple leaving the coffee shop.
— I got something to do, the guy said distractedly. He was about twenty and obviously dying to get out of there.
— ¡Dame un fucking beso! says the girl, grabbing him in a forced embrace.
Later, in another coffee shop, I discover that the waitress, a fake-blond Puerto Rican, is named Amadora. I have to wait to give her my order because she and a client are trying to resolve the mystery of why his cortadito tastes bad.
— It’s ’cause I whipped the milk, says Amadora, clarifying nothing. Even so, I risk another café con leche.
A few minutes later the older man, probably a retiree, who had been talking with Amadora and who I can now see through the window, opens his car door and vomits. Just two spurts, a thin puke that lies on the sidewalk like a puddle of water.
The next day, in the afternoon, at Cafetería Mallorca in old San Juan, I order a cup of café con leche, which they make in their antique coffee machine. I watch the waitress while she makes it. She pours the milk from a dented metal jug with the brand written on a small black labeclass="underline" “Colony Economy.”
My life has passed me by in this “Colony Economy,” rehearsing the coffee ritual as if it were some kind of barrier against a torrent of history that overwhelms and defines me. What is left of the men and women of this country? What remains but the coffee and the centuries, ground down and percolated, flowing through steel tubes, pouring from plastic spigots?
In a bookstore, I find an anthology of pieces about the problems that come from feeling too small. I’ve met its author — a scrounger, a survivor of multiple financial catastrophes — and I’m aware of the extremes to which he’d go. The text is such a travesty that I’m tempted to buy it. Instead, I go for copying a few lines from San Sebastián de las Vegas del Pepino: The Basis of Pepinian Ethnicity: Brief Reflective Essays. (Are there essays of the unreflective variety?) The note on the back cover tells us a little about the book and its author: “Juan Valcárcel del Pino is a Pepinian writer who proposes a new terminology of his own, drawing on research from the field of ideas, sociology, and the popular apperception of culture to prove that Pepinianity exists as a psycho-spiritual phenomenon that takes concrete form as a philosophical principal. This book gives Pepinianity a physical, social, and, at the same time, a transcendent status. It invites all Pepinians to transcend in their appreciation and support for the physical, social, cultural, and spiritual heritage of San Sebastián del Pepino.”
Farther on, the reader is informed that the book is “an analysis of how Pepinians should gain transcendent perception in light of the processes and values that gave rise to and sustain the Pepino Collective.”
Also deserving honorable mention are the titles of a couple of chapters: “I. Original Status of the Pepino Future” and “X. Pepinianism: Pepinophilia and the Pepinophile.”
I guess the government of this small town in the western part of the country must have paid to have it published. I also guess it is understood that this is how cultural works get done here. It is also clear that the book was written to be read by no one, merely to exist.