by Eduardo Lalo
The tenor of the message gave no indication that she shared this reflection. Probably she imagined that I hadn’t bothered to come, or that I’d arrived late on purpose.
I waited a few minutes for the rain to abate, leafing through the new books. When I saw that the cloudburst showed no sign of diminishing, I decided to go ahead and soak myself to the bone. The owner was standing by the door. Alfredo Torres knew everyone who bought a book, so after saying hello to him I asked if he had seen a Chinese woman in the store.
— Chinese? he asked, unsure what it was I wanted to know.
— Yes, Chinese, a young woman.
— Oh, you mean Carmencita’s partner?
— Carmencita? I asked, not knowing who he was talking about.
— There was a Chinese woman here, Carmen Lindo’s partner.
— Right, that’s her, I replied, unsure whether it really was Li, jolted by this bit of information, which was news to me.
— She was around, Alfredo explained, but she must have left quite a while ago.
— You don’t know where she went?
Alfredo shook his head.
— Hey, when does Carmen get back from California? he asked, but he didn’t get my answer because I had run on.
The rain was intense. People were running around me under umbrellas or pieces of cardboard, laughing and shrieking when they stepped into puddles.
There was no point rushing since I was parked far away, so I soon slowed down and walked unhurriedly, almost content to feel the huge raindrops slamming into me, helping me not to think too much about what Li had decided I should not know.
I was practically alone in the flooded streets, and when I got to my car, I had to wade in soggy shoes through eight inches of water. The storm drains of Río Piedras were notoriously ineffective. After I sat down behind the wheel, I didn’t take the shortest route down Avenida Gándara; instead, I drove around those streets, touring past the bus station, the Plaza del Mercado, the Plaza de la Convalecencia, just to see what the city looked like in the rain. I didn’t want to go back home just yet. The night had been a letdown, except for meeting Máximo Noreña, to whom I had said a clumsy, rushed good-bye thanks to Li’s complications. In the end, the only clear outcomes were our failure to meet up and the disturbing information I’d learned from Alfredo.
I drove past the Cine Paradise, since the police had opened the street up to traffic again. Near La Tertulia, I saw Máximo Noreña hugging the buildings to try to keep from getting completely soaked, with one of his boys in his arms and, behind him, Isabel and the older boy. I wasn’t the only one for whom the night had turned out badly.
As I passed the gates of the university, I had an idea. Li had to have been returning on foot to the rooftop apartment above the restaurant, and she had likely been caught halfway home by the sudden downpour. She might still be walking back. I had to do all I could to find her. I needed to know why she hadn’t told me about Carmen Lindo and what that meant. I remembered she had written in the message, “I have more opportunities to save myself through inferno than through paradise.” I needed to know why.
I turned around as soon as I could and pointed the car toward Avenida Muñoz Rivera. I drove along it till I got to the sushi bar where she worked, but I didn’t find her on the sidewalks or taking shelter in any of the bus stops. I retraced the route at top speed and then went along Ponce de León, which runs parallel. The wet sidewalks sparkled under the streetlamps, and there wasn’t a soul to be seen. At the picnic tables outside the McDonald’s near Calle Betances, I could see the silhouettes of some people sheltering under the meager roof. When I stopped in front, I saw, swathed in plastic bags, the fat, bearded vagrant who had been wandering the area for years, and a couple of men who usually begged for alms by the next traffic signal. I was about to give up my search when I noticed that, a bit farther down, half-hidden in a corner of the place, was Li. I braked abruptly and opened the door. She got in and sat down, completely soaked, trembling. I saw her eyes. She had been crying.
At home, Li took a hot shower and got into bed. A little later I lay down beside her. We both watched the shadows on the ceiling of trees dancing wildly in the wind from the storm. After some time, Li shifted positions and sought the warmth of my side. She fell asleep in an instant, without either of us saying anything about what had happened that night, without my having dared ask her if she had been or was the lover of Carmen Lindo.
Li’s bag once more sat almost every day on the floor by the bed. Superficially, our lives went back to the way they had been before. We were each tied to our work and devoted our free time to each other. As might be expected, the recent events, together with our inability to clear up what they meant, created shades of gray and left us feeling somehow burned out. We weren’t as fresh or as full of desire, and the silences began to weigh. Even so, I can’t deny that I was happy to have her near.
Soon Li fell ill with a bad flu. Her aches and fevers made it impossible for her to work, and she spent days in bed. She would sit up to drink some broth or tea, we’d talk for a few minutes, and she would cover herself back up with the blankets. For endless hours, I could only see strands of her hair on the pillows. I started thinking she was pretending it was serious, or was willfully putting off her recovery, so as to have an alibi for a kind of domestic disappearance that would delay bringing up the subject.
For nearly a week, she didn’t read or draw, and I was a shadow for her, coming in to ask her how she felt.
I took up her convalescence with an impossible combination of patience and restless anxiety. I wanted to imagine that life would give us a chance to start over. The days went by in a sort of dream state, and I convinced myself that waiting was the same thing as acting.
Between classes at the university, while driving, or when I woke up early in the morning for no apparent reason, I felt certain I was wrong. Deep down, I was frightened and acutely aware of our fragility. The small daily joys, the amorous trances, might last almost indefinitely, but there was room to doubt we had that elemental chemistry that truly unites two people. This question mark, which probably occurred to both of us, was a secret from which we irrationally wished to protect ourselves, as if the doubt were an affront and a betrayal.
We waited, simply waited, not knowing for what, not even having an inkling whether it would do us any good.
With the idea of freeing us from the gloomy atmosphere that had filled our spirits, on one of Li’s free days, after she had recovered her health, I suggested to her that we should take a trip outside San Juan. I was surprised when she agreed, given her scant interest in that sort of activity.
After taking her to buy a bathing suit, we took Route 3 toward Fajardo. I wanted us to spend a few hours on the beach and then eat in some village around there. On the way to the beach, Li seemed cheerful, her face bright. She continually changed the radio station and listened with the same pleasant attitude to a symphony, a silly love song, or a preacher’s sermonizing. I was finally seeing her as she used to be.
I was worried that Li might get bored or feel self-conscious on the beach, but as soon as we got to the swimming area, I saw her exhibit the extreme pallor of her body with an unusual lack of inhibition. She lay down to catch the sun, splashed around in the shallow water, made sand castles, and went into the ocean with me until the water was over her head without getting alarmed.
At moments like these, she possessed an almost childlike charm. She was light and flexible, but at the same time she revealed a certain vulnerability, of which she probably was partly unaware, caused by her being out in the open. Her life had transpired in close quarters, restaurants, and rooftop bedrooms among a narrow group of isolated immigrants in a country that was very foreign to them. Though this contact with sea, sun, and sky—pivotal factors on an island—nourished her, she seemed to be missing her points of support and only momentarily inhabiting a place that would never be entirely hers.
Stretched out on the sand, I was watch
ing her dig the moat for one of her complicated castles, and I realized how close I wanted to be to this body that simultaneously surrendered and withheld itself. I didn’t say a word, but I fought insistently to find the form in which I could make my emotion evident. You know you love someone when you are afraid to make her suffer. There, by her side, blinded by the midday sun, I was anguished by a pain that was not my own, one that I could do almost nothing to stop. At this moment, Li was much more than a body I desired, or a Chinese person, or even a woman. Completely engrossed in her sand castles, she was then a human being whose secret pain I had glimpsed. Her circumstances, what she did or didn’t do, what she knew or didn’t know about herself, ceased to be relevant. She was plainly and categorically a living being with the ability to overwhelm me because I knew just how deeply she had been wounded. She was similar to me, without a doubt, but I desired more than anything, more than even my own happiness, that she not suffer, that she might be forever so: playing in the sand, as free from cares as the childhood that history had robbed her of. Love was, I realized on this beach, the impossible and failed attempt to protect someone from her own life story.
— You know something, Li? I asked, watching her through half-closed eyes.
— What?
— You’re very beautiful.
She remained kneeling on the sand, biting a lip. I had never seen her blush before.
Later that afternoon, we went to one of the restaurants in Naguabo. We were ravenously hungry, and we waited impatiently for our snappers. I remembered I had last been there with Julia and Javier, more than six months earlier. After I discovered the author of the messages, I avoided them, and I finally had to explain the last time Julia called. Had I ever felt something like this about Julia’s suffering? I guessed I had. The proof was this moment, when I was remembering her and wishing things had worked out differently. Had the women in my life shared this feeling? I couldn’t be certain, but I suspected I hadn’t always enjoyed that benefit, and this contaminated the memory. We live our love unconsciously, as pleasure, and what we miss upon its end is living bereft of memories, the life this small-format, manageable eternity created.
Li luxuriated in her meal, picking the fish’s backbone, the salad plate, and the dish of tostones absolutely clean. Then she ordered a flan and nearly ordered a second. The sun had done her well, toasting her cheeks and shoulders, making her healthy and flush.
We returned to San Juan at dusk, when Route 3 was a pit of suburban melancholy. Li took the hand that rested on the gear shift and pressed her body close to mine. She was exactly repeating the gesture that had begun our relationship. I felt her very close to me, as if we were witnessing a new beginning.
After we bathed and settled in to spend the night at home, I noted something odd about Li. She was moving incessantly around the living room, rummaging through her bag, bringing a glass of milk and cookies from the kitchen, taking off clothes, changing clothes. She was choreographing a dance, and I was her only audience.
She finally settled on a pair of shorts and a sleeveless top, and she lay on the sofa in them. She stretched out her legs, waiting, lying in wait. This time she hadn’t taken a book or the drawing implements from her bag, which she had left in the bedroom by the bed. I saw her smiling. I saw her make faces at me. I laughed when I saw her pantomimed boredom: fixing her eyes on the ceiling, she twiddled her thumbs, fingers interlaced, hands on her belly. With rare talent, accompanied in her case by a parody of common gestures, Li had a unique power of seduction. The messages she had used to kick-start our relationship weren’t the only example of her abilities.
I fell upon her on the sofa and in a single movement we were joined, hands running under clothes that sloughed off our skin like paper wrappings. I took her breasts and sank my face, my chest, my groin in them. Our bodies moved like a sphere rolling from the sofa to the living room rug and then past it, onto the cold, naked floor. We didn’t utter a word. We understood each other from our bellies, the muscles of our legs, from the insides of our mouths.
Holding tight, almost dragging ourselves, as if escaping a fire, we got into bed. Only our blind, fixed gazes through half-closed lids assured that this was not a fight, for we each moved the other’s limbs with a force that, while striking no blows, respected nothing: no separation, no modesty, no limits.
Li sat down on me. I grabbed her hips, but she stopped me with a smack. My proud member slid over the sweat-drenched skin of her belly, from the top of her pubis to her navel. Then her arms immobilized mine. Her hair fell across and almost covered her reddened face, engrossed in what she was doing. Her lips were full and shone wet with her saliva. Alerted by the elation of pleasure, I realized we were on the edge of something unstoppable. Li was crossing a threshold and overflowing with an energy that would be impossible to subdue.
She took my member and brought it to her mouth. It was hers, it was something she massaged with her tongue, with its surface of wet and tenderly rough tissue; it was a piece of vibrant flesh for which she was the master builder. And then, in a movement that took one second but on which she staked her whole life, from the muddy rice fields on the outskirts of Beijing to the filth of the Chinese kitchens in San Juan, the rooftop bedrooms above the restaurants, the control asserted by her relatives and the loneliness, the pain, and the hope, she sat down once more on me, with one hand tight on the thing she would now not let go, using it to stroke the entrance to her sex.
So, with such absolute concentration that Li seemed lost beyond recuperation, breathing irregularly, about to weep, she let me, millimeter by millimeter, enter her, moving her hips just so, settling in, as if my member were a lost piece or the flavor of a fruit from another continent. When half was in, a single movement made me enter her and her body fell atop my chest. Then there was one second, an almost imperceptible pause, when we were both aware of what was happening and we knew there was nothing to be done. It was a magical moment, without a word, without a glance, without coming into the most absolute contact, a space that we were both discovering simultaneously and where we offered each other the freedom to lose ourselves in a pleasure that was almost self-absorbed. An instant later, back from the world we had glimpsed beyond time and identity, our hips were moving in a quickening rhythm that fought against pain and separation and became fused in our minds with ecstasy and perhaps also with love.
Her head was pressing against my neck, against my face, against my breastbone. Force drained from within through conduits swollen with pleasure in a wave of fury and jubilation that led to momentary spasmodic death in which life flowed out and, at the same time, was reborn.
And afterward, I learned that an indefinite time had passed when I felt her moving atop me once more, panting in a rhythm that sounded like weeping, while I rubbed her sweat-soaked back. “At last, at last,” I repeated in my mind, as if that were the clearest statement of happiness. Then she lifted her head and found my lips and resumed the movement of her hips, rubbing my still-erect member against the semen-coated walls of her sex. And once more it was a body that was action and surrender, and I knew I was witnessing something whose forcefulness I would never be able to forget: this body, striving to breathe, bearing down on me and bathing me in its sweat, ready to burst, to come undone, to fall to pieces, with enormous hips that were focused on surrender and on sacrifice.
A noise must have awoken me. I opened my eyes and through the window I saw a patch of very dark sky indicating dawn was near. On the ceiling, the shadows of the trees were still on a morning without wind. Shifting my position, I discovered that Li wasn’t there. I stood up, heavy with sleep. The light in the bathroom was off. Walking around the bed, I saw that her bag wasn’t on the floor.
I left the room without a sound and walked down the hallway to the living room. There was a shadow in front of the door. In my mind, I immediately understood that something was breaking. I thought of all sorts of ways I could react, but opted for simply turning on the light. As if a lightning bolt h
ad passed right over her head, Li wheeled around in fright.
— Where are you going? I asked. I stood naked by the dining table, before a woman who bore all her belongings on her shoulder.
— I was going to the restaurant.
— I don’t think they’re open yet.
— I mean, I was going to the rooftop room.
Li set her bag down and dropped onto the sofa.
— You think that’s enough of a good-bye?
— No.
She shook her head with a whisper that contained the last word she was able to utter before bursting into tears.
I did not move closer. I let her choke on a wail that she tried to stifle with a faltering movement of her hands, which rose toward her face and did not reach it. I went to get dressed. On the way back, I stopped in the kitchen and poured two glasses of water. I put one in front of Li and sat on a chair. I knew the moment had arrived when all the questions would be asked, the ones I had avoided so many times and the ones I hadn’t even seen coming until now.
I had no intention of consoling her. Her attempt to escape forestalled compassion. Nothing took its place. I felt a tremendous, almost inhuman pain, a hemorrhaging I had to ignore or else I’d fall apart.
For an instant, Li lowered the hands covering her face and looked at me. I waited a second before asking the question whose answer I hadn’t stopped imagining.
— What did Bai do to you?
The muted voice came from a body doubled over, rocking back and forth.
— Raped me.
— When?
— When I was thirteen. Fourteen. Fifteen . . .
The words were cut short by her falling to pieces. She wept uncontrollably and seemed to be trying to hide in the very middle of the room as if my presence were hateful. But even so, she seemed willing to talk.
