by Eduardo Lalo
Li was returning to her old ways. I wondered, were we embarking on a more satisfying phase or regressing to the period before we lived together?
The Cine Paradise was in Río Piedras, and if my memory served, it was in ruins. As a teenager and young man, I had watched countless double features and a bit of theater there as the place turned over from one management to another, as its owners took a chance for a while on art movies and experimental film, or second-run Hollywood movies, or opted for the easy alternative of Italian films with steamy intimate scenes. In the end, the building that had housed so much fantasy had been abandoned to the incursions of bums and drug addicts until the owners or the municipal government walled up the entrances.
That night, I’d find out whether I was wrong and something new was at the Paradise. What was unmistakable was that this message lacked the magic of her old notes. Since I already knew who the sender was, it seemed unnecessarily roundabout. She could have phoned or dropped by my house—which was her house too, if she wished it—and saved me the effort of heading out and searching. Even so, I intended to go to Río Piedras that night, and my feeling of anticipation bordered on happiness.
I was ready early, but I delayed leaving because I wanted to straighten up the living room and bedroom a little. The days with no news of Li had produced their share of slovenliness. I dusted, swept, loaded a pile of laundry into the washing machine. I wandered through the house, waiting aimlessly for the dark of night to settle. It was after seven when I got into the car and drove to Río Piedras.
Avenida Muñoz Rivera was, once again, impassable. I had long since given up on understanding the logic of San Juan traffic. By this time, the bottlenecks caused by people leaving work should have cleared and the lanes should be flowing. I knew, however, that it took only one accident kilometers away or, inexplicably, an overcast sky, as was the case then, to bring traffic to a standstill. I crawled slowly past useless traffic signals, which, in the face of this onslaught of cars, had ceased to control their movements.
Turning onto Avenida Universidad, I found a similar situation. Río Piedras was awash with cars and pedestrians. People were milling about in front of bars, cafeterias, and grocery stores, overflowing the sidewalks, and I had no idea why there was so much activity. I took a side street and ran into another roadblock. I armed myself with patience, took lots of turns, and finally was able to park far away, on a street near the bus station, when it was already past eight.
I didn’t know what was behind this influx of people into a part of the city that was normally uncrowded on a Thursday night. As I drew closer to the street with all the bookstores, which was also where the Cine Paradise was located, the throng grew thicker. I heard the sound of a woman’s voice giving a speech and saw banners hanging from the streetlight poles announcing the first of a series of “Bookstore Nights.” I understood why Li had called me there. She wanted us to meet in the crowd that would be heading to the celebration. It was one of the few times and places when books seemed to count in the city.
I came through Avenida Gándara to get to the stretch of Ponce de León where the bookstores are, for no apparent reason since it wasn’t the shortest route I could take. This section of the thoroughfare, lying as it does within the urban core of Río Piedras, never struck me as belonging to the avenue that traverses the city all the way to old San Juan. This humble fragment where the main bookstores in Río Piedras stood really deserved to have its own name. It had so little to do with the rest of the avenue.
La Tertulia was crowded, both inside and out—lots of familiar faces I preferred not to stop and greet just then. There would be one or more book presentations there that night, with more of the same at Librería Mágica and perhaps other bookstores on the block too. The music was coming from farther ahead. There stood the Cine Paradise and the plaza by one of the Tren Urbano exits. The street was closed to traffic, and it was hard to walk along it due to the number of people. I was wondering how to get inside and meet Li through this crowd when I sensed I was being called. It was a young man who had read my books, a writer. Whenever I ran into him, he was nice enough to mention my writings. I talked with him for a few minutes before I could recall his name. Luis Rosario. He had a peculiar way of pronouncing the final syllables of words, his humble origins seeming to merge with a sort of pedantry. He was a tireless promoter of literary magazines whose few issues were published in towns in the interior and rarely reached bookstores in San Juan. He was taking advantage of our meeting to propose an interview with me that he would like to publish in one of them. It surprised me how large the meager reputations of writers from the capital loomed in the interior of the country. The opposite happened in the literary world of San Juan; here, you never lost an opportunity not to read or not to talk with a colleague. I exchanged e-mail addresses and telephone numbers with Luis and we said good-bye with a hug.
A few meters on, zigzagging through the crowd, I ran straight into a publisher who had no choice but to say hello. He had long stopped answering my calls, and the manuscript I had given him months earlier must have been lying in some corner of his office where he had paid it no attention whatsoever. He greeted me loudly, calling me “Poet,” and embarked on a machine-gun fire of conversation, impossible to interrupt, in which he complained about losses in the business, announced new titles, greeted and introduced me to people walking around us, and finally said good-bye, insisting that I call him right away because we couldn’t let so much time slip by this time without getting together.
I had to stop a few more times, for in the space of a hundred meters, there were countless colleagues from work, former students, people I had met over the years at exhibits, talks, and book presentations. On that night, the cultural world of San Juan, usually barely perceptible, was occupying the street.
Finally, I was able to reach the Cine Paradise. In the plaza by the Tren Urbano station, they had set up a platform and several food stands. A reggae band was playing a long, saccharine song, and everywhere you looked there were people eating snacks and drinking beer. The movie theater was just as I remembered it: a wall of unplastered cement bricks, partly painted over with a mural, completely blocked off the entrance. I stood there, listening to the music, standing on tiptoes to see whether I could make out if Li was anywhere to be seen.
Then, I sensed someone coming my way. Turning around, I found it was Máximo Noreña. Next to him were the children I’d seen him with a few months earlier at a shopping center and a woman who must be his wife. He asked me how he could get into the Cine Paradise.
— Is it possible to get in? I replied, not giving him an answer.
— It’ll have to be possible, Noreña asserted, I have to screen a movie there tonight.
Having him there in front of me, I could see the mixture of ill humor and timidity in Noreña that characterizes so many writers. He had survived his demons and the lack of interest that long plagued his works, bound and determined to make books that recreated his most heartrending experiences. A fundamental malaise lurked in everything he wrote, but if anything validated his work, it was that he didn’t run away from that pain; he was dedicated to nothing but exploring that colorless landscape, which he turned into literature. Finally, after years of work, he had achieved a relative success that had allowed him to imagine he was at least working for some sort of audience. He knew, however, that many readers and writers would have preferred it if Noreña had never come to formulate a literary universe in which the topics of the Tropics weren’t enough to justify traveling there, unless you wanted to watch your pipe dreams fade away.
In recent years, he had made a few short films. Apparently one of them was going to be screened that night in the ruins of the theater that we didn’t know how to get into.
— A friend also asked to meet me in there, I said. I was surprised because it’s been closed for years.
— Well, tonight they’re going to open it somewhere because they’re thinking of restoring it, which is why t
hey’ve organized this Bookstore Night. I’m Máximo Noreña. Nice to meet you. My wife, Isabel. My children. I’ve read a couple of your books. I recognized you from your book jacket photo.
— I’ve read almost all of yours. It’s a pleasure.
— We have something in common, said Noreña. We’ve both at least made a gesture to these streets.
While we were talking, Isabel had asked how to get in.
— They say it’s around back, she explained.
— Let’s go together, if that’s all right, Noreña suggested.
We went into the blind alley behind the theater. They had strung up colored lights in the back and people were milling around. The wind picked up and felt chilly for the season.
— I don’t know the name of this street, I mean the one down there, said Noreña as we walked, but I remember that years ago, when I was still a teenager, there was a bookstore there. La Contemporánea, it was called. It wasn’t very good, but the owner was a Spaniard who had lived in Cuba till the revolution. They called him “the Red.” He had some sort of relationship with the woman who owned the Thekes because he used to be seen over there, too. Some of my friends were bold thieves. I’d go with them, but I never dared to steal one of his books. I always paid, and not because I had too much money. I felt that I had to protect the Red. I didn’t want him to get upset, close the store, and leave us unarmed.
The anecdote throbbed with the tenor of Máximo Noreña’s literary world. In it, bookstores, authors, and books lived side-by-side with the city streets and seemed to carry as much weight as characters and plot. Using other writers’ texts, rereading them, altering them, he had created his own, in a society that had little fondness for books. He was a proud man and unquestionably had the arrogance of a person who had persisted in following his vision to the point of depletion and the pointlessness of a Pyrrhic victory. He had accepted, with a resignation that at times seemed like a display of ecstasy, the artist’s marginality. In his books, San Juan was always the result of a writer’s gaze. Somebody had once reproached him for that, to which Noreña had responded that others might found, build, and rule cities, but writers are the ones who invent them.
We entered through a side ramp and discovered a large space, like a small plaza. The theater seats had disappeared, leaving a large, empty expanse of cement flanked by tall, windowless walls.
— Look, there’s no roof, said Isabel.
We looked up. All that was left were the steel beams, overgrown with creeping vines, through which the few stars in the cloudy sky could be seen.
— They should leave it the way it is, said the writer. Imagine this rude space as a stage to perform theater or dance, or simply to come and talk. A genuine ruin wouldn’t be bad in a city that always turns its back on its past, that’s happy to slap up a couple of condominiums and erase what had been. Any mayor would be capable of perpetrating a parking lot here.
More than a hundred people were strolling through the open space. Many of them were old enough to remember the hours they had spent there when the theater was still active. Máximo went up to the table where the organizers sat, the DVD of his film in his hand. His children were scampering around the open space and Isabel was saying hello to a couple. I walked through the theater looking for Li. I pulled the drawing out of my pocket and read it again: “Go to the Cine Paradise tonight and look for me at the image generator.” I didn’t have the slightest idea what the message might mean.
— Can you believe it? asked Noreña when he returned to where I was standing. They brought a projector but they forgot the sound system. They were planning to project my film as a silent movie. I refused, and they promised to find some speakers. We’ll have to wait, but who knows how many people there’ll be by the time they get them. Besides, it’s going to rain.
— Let’s hope not, I said, looking at the sky.
I walked around the place with Noreña. At the other end, where the lobby had been, we saw some stairs that had lost their handrail. It was dark. Máximo called his children over, and the four of us went upstairs, groping along the wall. At the top was the theater’s small balcony, which gave us a magnificent view of the plaza formed by the nave. It was clear why Li had asked me to come precisely to this place: it was an unexpected, almost magical space to which I would have access only on this night.
Behind us, at each far end, were steps leading to two entrances without doors. Máximo asked his children to wait for him before going down, and he and I went into the room, which still had a roof and was completely dark except for the bit of light filtering through its tiny windows. We saw the silhouettes of two iron hulks. Noreña approached them and discovered that they were projectors, their machinery encased in rust. He was inspecting the enormous reels when I went over there.
— Impressive, he said. I didn’t imagine they’d be so huge. To think, everything came through here: Italian neorealism, Fellini, Passolini, French New Wave, the soporific and vaguely pornographic comedies we killed so many evenings and nights watching. It’s incredible they left this here.
— Yes, I said, watching him play with the wheels and handles, as if the projector were a salvageable monument and he were thinking about bringing it home with him.
— It was a great image generator. Dreams reached Río Piedras through here.
I was astonished. Máximo Noreña had just uttered the phrase that Li had written in her message.
— You said the same words that a friend of mine wrote this afternoon.
— Ah, really. Which?
— Calling it an image generator.
— It’s logical enough. Almost an exact description.
— My friend asked me to come here, to the image generator, to meet her.
We were alone in the old projection booth. Outside, Noreña’s children were bouncing something off the wall. Fewer people must have been walking around the theater because the noise had died down.
— There’s nobody here, said Máximo.
— I know. It’s after nine. Maybe I got here too late.
— She didn’t say when? he asked.
— No.
— Well, your girlfriend’s making things hard for you, if you didn’t know the projectors were here.
— I didn’t.
— You can’t ask for miracles, Noreña concluded.
I hesitated to tell him the whole story. I thought that if anyone understood, it would be him. But I didn’t say anything.
Máximo had gone out to see what his children were doing. I ran my hand over the mounds of rust on the image generator and looked around. The floor was covered with trash and piles of dry leaves. With my foot I nudged a piece of metal that must have come from one of the machines. I stood on tiptoe to look through one of the tiny windows. A singer was moving her hips in front of the microphone, accompanied by a guitar player with a mop of Rastafarian dreads. The crowd was dispersing, opening their umbrellas. The sky was pale with the reflected city lights. It was starting to rain.
I was about to go down to the balcony through the other door to the projection booth, when I noticed something lying on the floor and bent over to pick it up. It was a small sheet from a drawing notebook. At the top was a piece of tape. Li’s block letters said, “La Tertulia. The third Three-in-One. Don’t be late.” The sheet had come unstuck, or someone had pulled it off.
When I emerged, Máximo Noreña had already gone downstairs with his children to the open space. I watched him talking with the organizers, who were rushing to pack up the projector before the rain became a downpour. The theater was emptying out, and the sound system hadn’t arrived.
— The show has gone off without a hitch, Noreña said when he saw me. I guess we’ll have to leave, he added, turning to Isabel.
— I have to meet my friend in La Tertulia. She left me a message.
— On the dream generator?
— I found it on the floor. It must have fallen.
— All right, then, see you later.
> He shook my hand, and I said good-bye to his wife. As I walked out into the alleyway, I realized I hadn’t asked for his phone number or suggested we meet again. I felt like a real imbecile.
When I reached the plaza where they had set up the stage, the drizzle turned almost without transition into a downpour. People ran for cover under balconies or in the train station lobby. The street, now empty of people, was a sea of trash and beer cups. The rain was cool, windy, laden with earthy smells. I couldn’t wait until it died down, so I resigned myself to getting soaked. I arrived at La Tertulia with my shirt plastered to my skin.
Around the tables in the bookstore were more people hiding from the rain than book buyers, and Li wasn’t in either of the two rooms. I took the message, which I had folded in four, out of my pants pocket and went to the Puerto Rican literature section. I looked through the shelves for the first letter of my last name. There was a small pile of Three-in-One copies there, placed so you could see the cover of the book. I picked up one and opened it, making its pages flip by quickly. Nothing in it. I turned back to the pile. There were five. The message mentioned the third one. I picked it up and riffled the pages. I saw a vertical smudge that wasn’t part of the book. I looked through it until I found the slip of paper. “You didn’t come. Simone.”
I had taken too long. It was the first time the Swiss clockworks of Li’s messages hadn’t worked, confirming that this was a time of missed connections.
The message found in the book was glacial. Its coldness was reaffirmed by the name she had used to sign it. It was as if the times had become confused, and it was no longer possible to tell which was really the present. One consequence stood out in this whole business: the elaborateness of her spider webs, in the context of our relationship at that time, bordered on stupidity. Li had vanished one day and weeks later had invited me to a place crowded with hundreds of people to leave me a message poorly taped in a hidden corner, which in turn sent me to another place. The process was pointlessly labyrinthine. Before, we hadn’t met yet, and the messages created an exciting game of hide and seek. Now they were nothing but an unnecessary complication that could have been avoided by a phone call or a visit.
