Simone

by Eduardo Lalo

  How many years crossing Río Piedras, from the Plaza del Mercado to the bookstores? Today I pay attention to Calle Monseñor Torres, which starts at the entrance to the Plaza, just beyond the lottery men and street sellers setting out their wares every morning, in the human-scale anthill (its rawness, its extraordinary freight of reality) that is Río Piedras. On the short Calle Monseñor Torres, beggars hail one another from corner to corner and a record store blasts the street with a song by La India. It would seem, despite the chaos, that everything was in its place: the crowd of men missing legs in their wheelchairs, the “Miss Millennium Model” ads, the neopsychedelic decoration in Cafetería Los Amigos, the row of timbales in the shop window of Casa Isern, the clock on the Tren Urbano station, the apartment buildings looking out on the Plaza de la Convalecencia where, if Río Piedras had been different, I would have liked to live.

  I head in the direction of El Amal pharmacy. I smell cigar smoke, the kind with a hint of vanilla that they sell at a kiosk in the Plaza del Mercado. It takes me a few seconds to realize that the smoker is the old man walking ahead of me. He’s shouting something I can’t understand. He carries two shopping bags, calling out to the people on foot and in their cars. He tirelessly repeats the word or phrase that I can’t make out. “¡Cheneychequer!” Incongruently, I think of the vice-president of the United States, but a second later I notice that the bags he’s carrying hold boxes of damas chinas—that is, Chinese checkers. I leave him behind and another older man comes to mind who a few minutes ago had been drinking his coffee next to me in the coffee shop in the plaza. He poured an enormous amount of sugar into his cup. The stream of sugar flowed for seconds. It was astonishing how much he could drink, in three or four gulps. So many things have always seemed unbelievable to me, as if the world were endlessly foreign to me, as if this were the measure of the distance between me and the men I share it with.

  What are these streets but my own life? Time circulating like water or wind, a body that will keep growing smaller and more fragile, alongside the gutters that flow always in the same direction, along the road that also is mine. Cities matter more to those who go in the same direction as their gutters, those who travel at their level. No master of this city—none of its mayors—care about this city as I’ve cared about it because I know that I have no way out, that I’ll never be able to leave. Not even exile would free me of San Juan. I’d simply suffer doubly: for belonging to the city and for being far from it.

  The new message was almost erased by the afternoon showers. The black ink of the block letters was running like mascara smeared by tears. The mystery man or woman is running out of strategies for getting them to me because they are starting to repeat. The message, however, has some new elements: it is in English, it is a question (possibly addressed to me), and it contains the name of a French street.

  “Remember me at rue Falguière?”

  That street, Falguière, wasn’t far from where I lived in Paris. However, I rarely went there, since my usual destinations lay in other directions. But why the question? And most of all, who could know that I had lived in that neighborhood?

  I could barely call up an image of that road. My memories of Paris were so faded that I was surprised to recall it had once been the center of my world. Maybe that was precisely why, having once thought it indispensable, I now found it one of the farthest removed corners of the planet.

  It was hard, therefore, to recall a person, when I could barely recall the place of our hypothetical encounter. Whoever was writing to me was doing it by chapters. I was sure that more clues were on the way.

  I’m sitting on the floor writing in this notebook, next to a crib where a month-old baby sleeps. I’ve come looking for some documents in the house that once belonged to my aunt and uncle, where my cousin lives now with her husband and children. She’s asked me to watch her sleeping newborn so she can run out to buy milk and diapers. In this room, which her son has only just begun to recognize, I spent many of my childhood days. No doubt that is why I’ve sat down here, specifically in this corner of the room, where I used to play hide-and-seek with the cousin I’m now waiting for, though I have no intention of ever seeing her again, at least not so long as her husband continues to be the great distributor of wheeled utility shelving units.

  I never imagined I’d have the opportunity to be back on the same terrazzo tiles that my feet trod as a boy, in this corner, my back leaning against the wall that I threw balls at for hours, fighting off weariness, dreaming of the glories of baseball and basketball players. My unexpected return to this place helps me measure the weight of my burdens. Once, I was that boy, and once, my cousin was one of the people I loved most in the world.

  The mobile-shelf magnate hands me the newspaper, probably figuring he should fill the five minutes of conversation time he’s set aside for me by mocking some protesters:

  “A group of sympathizers encouraged them not to come down from the tree, at least two exchanges of words arising with the superintendent of police. A third protester opted to climb to the highest point of the tree, and two rescue squad members were sent up in the basket to make him come down. The ambulances, which had been late in arriving, were in place, and nearby, the mayor of San Juan even made an appearance, and farther away, three statehood sympathizers shouted terrorists and potheads at the protesters.”

  I meet the smile of my cousin’s husband when I lift my eyes from the page. Apart from the inept prose, what we have here is the usual vacuity. The undeveloped drama that won’t get past the first act and will end in the customary outcome: the ancient tree felled by unknown hands in the predawn hours some Mother’s Day or Good Friday; a superintendent and a mayor representing the interests of those who have always won, steamrolling sensitivity, intelligence, and courage, convinced simultaneously that they embody morality and that this will get them the funds for retiring in a US city where they might even feel solidarity with the people who protect the trees. But not here, here it isn’t worth it, here we deserve this atrocity.

  In a filthy bathroom, I see graffiti, scrawled in English, that says, “The Panty Sniffers.” It boasts the usual inanity of these toilet writings, supplemented on this occasion by the falsity of its expression of desire, for in the next line it adds in Spanish, “Not because I want to, I do it to please you.”

  I returned home while night was falling this rainy Friday night. As I walked in, my eye was immediately drawn to the blinking red light on the answering machine. Few people have my number, and still fewer call it. My pursuer took the trouble to record a female computer-generated voice (those generic, spectral voices with extravagant vibrations at the end of the syllables) with the following message: “FROM WHICH REMARKABLY ENOUGH NOTHING DEVELOPS.” I’ve written it in all caps because that’s how it sounded. At this point in the game, I hardly needed to worry about how my pursuer got my number.

  I grow befuddled every day in trying to discover a hint that might reveal the identity of the message writer, and I suspect it must be someone I know. But I hope it isn’t, hope that his hiding behind words and stratagems might finally be the good news that this society with no surprises is giving me.

  Nevertheless, lurking in this message is life’s abomination: nothing will come of this. The matter will remain incomplete, like a frustrated hope. Perhaps one day, as mysteriously as they appeared, the messages will disappear. I should expect nothing. That is what good sense and experience tell me, but I cannot bow down before my conclusions.

  This Sunday, I saw Máximo Noreña looking like the devil, on his way out of a crowded shopping center. He stood with two children who must be his sons, waiting, holding a bag from K-Mart, while they finished eating a pretzel. He seemed totally fed up. He is an author who matters to me, but none of the hundreds who surrounded him had the slightest idea of his work. I crossed the street slowly, feeling the asphalt yield under my footsteps, softened by the sun on this hateful summer afternoon. Looking at him, I could see myself a few years from no
w. He knows nothing of my admiration. We’ve never been introduced. Seeing him there, so miserable, I felt my appreciation and fascination grow. Seeing the banal and terrible despair of an afternoon like this, you can begin to understand the demons of this city and this country. He has not stopped writing about them, as if he had nothing else to hold onto if he wants to survive.

  Under my office door, I found a little flyer for a rock band called Los Pepiniyoz. Their symbol is a big question mark drawn in a thick stroke circled by a delicate line. The flyer contained the usual information: date, time, address of the concert venue. It sat on my desk all afternoon without my realizing there was a message on the back. It must be a quote; I’d like to assume that it’s a quote because it would be scary if my pursuer could read my mind so well.

  “You write because you like to, because you do not know how to do anything else, because you are unable to get your revenge by any other means. But in no way does this weakness for the text make you blind to the superfluity of your labors.”

  There is a diner in Río Piedras that already has the tables set at eleven in the morning, with red plastic tablecloths and paper napkins held down by the weight of the silverware. Entering, I find an extraordinarily large surface surrounded by chairs. I realize it is the pool table and that people also sit here to eat.

  Years ago I spent one summer afternoon gathering the mangos I found lying on the pavement in Luis Muñoz Marín Park. In the end, I filled two shopping bags that I found discarded there. I was with my girlfriend, a woman I had lived with for some time before our relationship fell apart. This was the last time we went out together. I remember the futility of that afternoon: running all over the park picking up overripe fruit. We filled our bags with mangos much as we might have filled them with paper smeared with bits of food or with empty cans. It was better than having to talk. It was our mute good-bye.

  A few days later, I would set out her last belongings (the ones my girlfriend didn’t want to take with her) for the garbage truck, along with the bags full of mangos, which had rotted. We hadn’t even bothered to taste them.

  I’ve been told that a group of friends (lawyers, accountants, shopkeepers with literary inclinations) get together in a coffee shop every Sunday to discuss the newspapers. I am told that they roar with laughter.

  I’ve totaled up all the places I’ve lived in. No doubt I missed a few, but there’s only so much you can ask from me. Nevertheless, I remember perfectly well the ritual I went through every time I time moved out. With each apartment, I assumed I’d be staying in place for a long time, but I never did. When I was all packed up to move, just before I shut the door and turned in the key, I’d go inside for a moment and say good-bye to the walls. Sometimes I thanked them; frequently I cursed them. In any case, it was always a farewell, as if the apartments had been witnesses.

  Julia invited me to her house. After lunch, she had to go out, and she asked me to babysit Javier for a while. We watched cartoons and then played hide-and-seek. I’m hiding behind the sofa when I come face-to-face with the child, who’s holding a photo of his mother in front of himself as if it were an icon. I ask him to show it to me. I don’t recognize it; it’s a photo from before we met. Julia is smiling into the camera, and her hair is very long. Javier takes me by the hand to the bedroom. He’s gone under the bed and taken out a shoebox full of photographs. I sit down to look at them with him. I recognize some of them because Julia had shown them to me when we were together, but apparently, there are many others she didn’t want me to see. She appears with people I’ve never met, sitting in apartments I knew nothing about, wearing haircuts and makeup that reveal a side of her I never glimpsed. In some of them she radiates an irrefutable beauty and looks straight at the camera, convinced of her power.

  There are dozens: groups circled around family tables, moments immortalized on the streets of old San Juan with a bottle of beer in her hand, or on the beach in a baseball cap, a seed necklace and a yellow bikini. At the bottom of the box, probably placed there on purpose, is a group in which she appears naked in unmade beds and of close-ups of her face looking at the camera through tender, half-closed eyes. I understand that these are the photos she let other men take of her. I discover, while Javier plays with a robot next to me, that these images never could have been mine, or ours.

  “Simone Weil taught philosophy to the railway workers at a night school on rue Falguière.” So said the computerized female voice on my answering machine. Simone Weil? The French philosopher? I remembered nothing about her except that she had been a sort of saint for the left. Is this message a clue about the sex of its sender? For days, I’ve had the feeling that something is changing. I know I might be mistaken, but the vibes I get from this message seem to confirm this transformation. Simone, like the Simone of one of the first messages? Simone Weil? Is this a signature? Who are you? Why are you looking for me?

  I find this article tacked up in a bus station on Avenida Ponce de León. It shows the self-demeaning insanity that seems to be part and parcel of this society:

  “The separatists, from the most leftist derivatives of communists (there are no communists anymore but their ideas and theories are still around, especially the materialist method of analysis), the nationalists, the anti-American and the pro-American separatists have many differences, but they have one thing in common, they base their separatism on the idea that the Nation is the land, the utopian or ideological idea, and not its people.

  “Is it being a Patriot to plant bombs and kill innocent compatriots or the negative and destructive criticism that kills the spirits of people who work, the effect being nearly identical? Is it being a Patriot in the new modality of ecoterrorists with their extremist demands of ‘environmentalism’ without trying to find a balance of benefits or harm to the citizenry and the environment?

  “Thinking that Patriotism is just a walk in the park, or criticizing in a negative and destructive way, which are bombs that kill the positivism and creativity of the citizenry, is not being a Patriot, it is being a Patrioteer.”

  How could I not fantasize that the person sending me messages is a woman—a woman I could fall in love with—when I’m surrounded by people capable of producing texts such as this? How could I not find hope in this seduction by words? How not dream of an unknown body that is utterly unlike these voices assailing me, voices that have nothing to do with me and nothing to tell me, which will never understand me, until having to share my life with them feels like a form of dying, of having been dying day by day throughout my entire life?

  I didn’t notice until today that the article I picked up at the bus station includes a request at the bottom: “Print it Forward it to 20 to photocopy and they forward it to 20 more and they talk about it with 20 more.” How can I be sure that the person sending me the messages is writing exclusively to me? Couldn’t he or she be sending them, like the fanatic who goes around posting his allegations all over the city, to lots of people? Might I not be part of a network of victims, of a spectacle, of a work of art, or of a dirty joke?

  I borrowed a CD of Arvo Pärt from Diego and played it in the car on the way to work. After just a few minutes, I came close to turning it off and tuning into the news. The music frightened me. I didn’t know the name of the piece; the CD was a burned copy that only gave the composer’s name. It must have been a requiem because the powerful chorus brought up waves of emotion that had been buried since who knows when.

  Listening to it, I pictured my death on Avenida Central between San Patricio and Río Piedras—from the discovery of a cancer (in the pancreas or liver, one of the terrible, silent ones) to the last agony. I was listening to the music and experiencing my hopelessness, the malaise that would make existence intolerable and that would be expressed in my refusal to get treatment. That was the emotion that has been bottled up inside me for years, a swelling agitation that I didn’t know where to direct, which shook me to my core. Thus, between Avenida de Diego and Calle Andalucía, I confronted the
banality of my death. The purpose of the music’s beauty was to produce this. Its art was to console those who await defeat.

  I got to work still reeling from the impact of the music, and on entering my office I found a new message. The block letters were slanted rightward as usual and again precisely on target: “He knew that only permutation would secure him the truth.” This time the message came on the back of a bibliography; the phrase was written out and numbered one hundred times, as if it were some old school punishment.

  I burst into the department office and, under the astonished gazes of the secretaries, left as abruptly as I’d entered. I badgered the people in the neighboring offices and checked my floor of the building to see if I could find anyone suspicious. Nobody knew or had seen anything. I didn’t want to go into details because I didn’t want them asking me what was up. But with my emotions so stirred, I could no longer be passive; I needed clarity. Waiting wasn’t good enough. “He knew that only permutation would secure him the truth.” What did that signify? How could someone fire into the air and hit the bull’s-eye? What truth was I afraid of? Why were the permutations undergone by the messages beginning to alarm me? Who could know me so well as to predict the movements of my mind? I was already old enough and cynical enough to take cabals and mysteries seriously. But how could I have a message waiting for me that expressed what I had experienced when I was sitting in a car driving from one end of Avenida Central to the other while listening to a CD that belonged to someone in Caracas? These messages had never been a joking matter, and for some time now, they’d started to worry me, admit it or not. Nevertheless, fear and fascination live at the same address. I scrutinized the faces of the people I crossed paths more closely than ever. Any one of them might be the person stalking me.