Uselessness

by Eduardo Lalo

  Everything seemed to be going wonderfully. Around that time, Marie’s mother traveled to the city and was favorably impressed with her daughter’s progress. For once, finally, she was pleasant and even showed some affection for me. Nevertheless, despite all the displays of happiness and peace of mind, something in me still held back from trusting Marie. I had no reason to, apparently. It seemed to be an irrational fear, disconnected from actual events, but the truth was that I couldn’t shake this insidious feeling. I was affectionate with Marie; I needed her complicit presence, her companionship; I enjoyed what we did and dreamed, but I remained alert, uneasy about a future I couldn’t envision.

  My research interests were taking shape as a dissertation project. I worked with discipline and enthusiasm. I imagined returning to register at the university to earn another degree. Perhaps ethnology? Continuing to study was the way not to return to my country, a way to gain time to see if, in some way, I could remain in France. The city was, then, my world, and I wouldn’t have been surprised or displeased if anyone predicted that I would stay there.

  One day, crossing Place Monge, I ran into Simone. Her hair was longer, and I realized, upon hugging her, that I had practically never seen her dressed in warm clothing. Somewhat self-consciously, we began a conversation in the square, which we then moved across to one of the cafés. We talked about the university where she was taking some course, about her father and cousins; I reminded her, knowing she would never come to get them, that, hidden in a bag in the bottom of the closet at my place, she had left some pieces of clothing and a few books. We quickly recovered our natural way of being together, laughing at each other over things that had happened to us or that we had done.

  When we were served our second coffee and Simone was going for her fourth cigarette, I said: “You know, I have fond memories of you. I’m not sure I’m making myself clear. I remember you without any bitterness, without bad feelings.” My intention had been, compelled by the joy of seeing her, to communicate my feelings about the time that had been ours, but upon articulating it, I realized I was saying something else. In my words there was something more than my appreciation for the memories. I was declaring my love and, unbeknownst to Simone, comparing and contrasting her with Marie and, for the first time, finally figuring out what was bothering me. No word was innocent, of course, but, unlike other times, neither was there any ill intent in what I said.

  “We had a good time,” she said, grabbing my hand. “My father always asks after you. He liked you. He always goes around saying that you were a great guy and always reminds me that you were my only boyfriend who was worth the trouble.”

  “And what do you think?” My smile suggested playfulness and at the same time veiled my feelings.

  “In spite of your many defects and a few of mine, I think that Monsieur Georges is right.”

  I let myself look away toward any point in the square while I felt the light movements of her hand in mine. More than any other gesture, our hands touching expressed our connection.

  After a few seconds she asked: “You’re with Marie, right?”

  “Yes,” I said, stifling my doubt and pain.

  “That’s how it had to be.”

  “You think so?”

  “It was obvious. Ça va bien?”

  I let go of her hand and readjusted myself in the chair. I didn’t want to lie.

  “On the surface, everything is going very well. Psychologically, she’s much better. We’re not living together, but, for all practical purposes, we might as well be.”

  “So what’s the matter?”

  “I don’t know. Now that I see you, I realize so many things.”

  “Don’t say that.”

  “Don’t get me wrong. That’s not what I’m saying, even though I know I’m saying it. I accept, I understand, what happened between us. I’m not asking you if we can get back together again. I admit that I miss you, and that, seeing you now, the distance between us hurts and I feel a knot in my throat. What I mean is that being with Marie always feels like carrying a dead weight, and she doesn’t realize it, or doesn’t want to. It’s the weight of past frustrations and everything that happened between us. Besides, it’s as if I know her so well that there is no space for discovery, for a hopeful new life.”

  “You’re getting bored.”

  “No, it’s not that. We get along well. There are many things I like, including how we are in bed. But I know her: I’m afraid this is not going to last, that what I have now is going to fall apart sooner or later, and I don’t want to be here then.”

  “You’re afraid of losing her?”

  “No, I’m afraid of finding her. Never, except now, here with you, have I been able to say it, but Marie broke something in me. I don’t trust her; I know she’s going to do it again and, despite the fact that everything seems to be going so well, I don’t want to be here with her again, and at the same time I can’t leave.”

  We soon had to say good-bye.

  “Can I call you sometime?” I asked. I was seeking an ally for when the disaster occurred.

  “Of course.”

  In front of the café, we hugged good-bye. My hands brushed over places I knew as a path to pleasure and Simone pushed me away, laughing.

  The upsetting content of this conversation and the need to live each day with normality made me repress what I admitted to Simone. Marie was continuing to do well, meditating, regularly going to appointments with the psychiatrist, and telling me her dreams. She tried not to upset me more than was strictly necessary, and enjoyed our walks, talks, and lovemaking. Months passed. In June I finished the dissertation seminar and applied myself to advancing my research as much as possible during vacation. Didier was pleased with the work I did and was counting on me for other projects. I’d accompany him on his visits to museum directors and I know that he loved to enter those strongholds flanked with me as his “secretary.” Sometimes, when there was nothing much to do, we’d let the hours fly by, poking around bookstores or galleries of primitive and Oriental art. More than once, we ended up at the Jardin des Plantes, sitting on a bench under an immense plantain tree, near the entrance of the zoo, telling each other our life stories. Thus I found out that Son had fragments of machine-gun bullets in her legs and left hip, and that she slept badly. A son she had had with her first husband had died during a bombing and her spouse had not returned from the front. Pétrement, who had been a steadfast bachelor, had become interested in Son, who, fleeing the tragedy, had made it to Saigon and, as she knew some French, obtained work at the administrative offices of the Alliance. One thing led to the next, and Didier ended up marrying her and bringing her to France. Still, there were times when Son would sit before the altar, light the incense, and sing in a low voice to her little boy.

  As the weather got warmer and the afternoons longer, I began to see the first disturbing changes in Marie. I’d listen to her talking on the telephone to her mother and I’d watch her become sugary sweet to the point of agreeing to a two-week vacation with her at a spa known for its medicinal waters. Marie had not consulted me. We had not figured out our plans, but I naturally expected that before making any decision, we’d discuss it first.

  Almost immediately, gifts began to arrive: articles of clothing, a Sony Walkman, money to buy more nineteenth-century church chairs in an antique store. I knew the logic of bribery and its seductive game of reciprocity. One could sense the mother’s tentacles through her generosity, manipulating the situation so that she could take control. Now, as in the past, I passively played along. I would watch Marie open the packages, show off new garments, turning around in front of the mirror and then carrying on long transatlantic conversations. I grew more and more annoyed but dreaded precipitating the end. Marie was heading toward a place where there was no space for me.

  The progression was slow but undeniable. Her mood changed. She’d spend the days without knowing what to do, selfishly using me or our friends to distract herself. I was becoming in
creasingly bitter over her whims and intolerance, the tiny and apparently arbitrary conflicts that always led to useless and endless talk at night, in which the major topics of envy, friction with others, or the meticulous analysis of some unappreciated detail of her body, revealed the steady progress of her anxiety. One morning we had an absurd argument about some dirty dishes; one Sunday, when I couldn’t go out because I had to prepare a written text for my thesis director, she said she didn’t want to spend the rest of her life with someone who lived only for books. Ironically, she was the one who, in her happiest moments, encouraged my pursuits and urged me (and I don’t doubt her sincerity) to devote myself to research and writing. Her eating habits became obsessive. She’d spend days devouring goat cheese and dry bread. Or she’d exorbitantly buy numerous cans of asparagus, open three at a time and, without putting them on a plate or accompanying them with some condiment, oblivious to everything around her, she’d keep munching and downing them as if they were French fries. Before, when she’d go to her therapy sessions, she’d talk about what she was discovering. Now she didn’t say a word.

  These changes couldn’t have happened at a worse time. I was writing the first pages of my thesis, plus the stories and reviews I was sending to Santiago’s journal in Spain, and I couldn’t even withdraw to work in peace. Marie would arrive with her monologue or a dense silence. She’d spend a while reading magazines and silly novels, and then I’d feel her eyes shooting darts at me. She’d interrupt, asking me to open cans or bottles, and she’d try to initiate conversations that were going nowhere, which disrupted my work. Everything would end in a fight, with her grabbing her bag and leaving abruptly. From the window, I’d watch her disappear in the direction of Rue de Vaugirard. I’d go to the stove and prepare coffee. Now unable to work, I’d drink it listening to the radio.

  She fled so as not to face what was really going on. On her wrist was the scar of the knife cut. It was almost a straight line that could have passed for the mark of any accident, if not for its location. This hard fact was always there, in view. Marie had gotten used to talking with her hands together, the palm of her right hand covering her left wrist. She would wear, besides, various silver and leather bracelets. Hiding it seemed worse to me than the scar itself, because her motive seemed to be not vanity but shame. Her mother had suggested that she take advantage of the already-planned trip to New York to see a plastic surgeon. It was none of my business, but the fact that she contemplated the idea of erasing the scar disturbed me. It was a kind of reverse scarring. Marie thus would inscribe her mother’s power and will upon her body.

  I kept quiet. I wouldn’t have explained myself well, and I wouldn’t have been heard. I got to the point of preferring that she’d just leave. That way I’d be able to work, without anxiety or distractions.

  At the beginning of July she announced the day she was leaving for New York. Afterwards she would go with her family to some vacation spot in Europe. I was faintly invited to the latter, but both of us knew I had to work on my thesis and with Pétrement and that I had no money for travel.

  I took her to the airport. A few days before leaving, she had doubts. She wondered if it wouldn’t be better, instead, for us to go on a spiritual retreat with Monsieur Nan. We were treating each other better, and the activities we were sharing somewhat recovered the tone of the good times. I even thought that the trip didn’t have to lead to catastrophe. All of us have a right to our ups and downs, to lose our way, to err. Perhaps Marie needed a reunion with her mother to reassert herself. We said good-bye in good spirits, promising to write often.

  The first days were good. I recovered my space and worked easily and contentedly. Then the solitude began to weigh on me, and I had a hard time filling the hours, even with the lure of work. I exchanged long letters with Santiago and Isabel in which, among other things, we promised to meet up again, either in Alicante or in Paris. Almost a year had passed since we met each other in Spain and the pleasure of our contact was still fresh. But, after all, a reunion depended almost exclusively on my slim resources. Without family and without friends—the Pétrements were traveling and were going to spend some days with Le Petit Vietnamien—I found myself killing time in parts of the city far from my studio, half-exhausted by the heat, flipping through boxes of books on sale in small neighborhood bookstores or looking at the windows of stores that were selling puppets or enamel figurines. I visited many jewelry stores in search of a cheap watch, because the old mechanism in the one my father had given me years ago had stopped. I’d check out, while walking or sitting on park benches, the bustling of the tourists and the beauty of the women coming to the city from all over the globe. I surrendered, like Parisians who couldn’t travel, to the irritating noise of their happiness.

  I received brief, anecdotal letters from Marie, in which she told me about her theater and opera outings, about the weekends spent at the beach house, or a dinner in a luxurious Russian restaurant, in which her father got so drunk that he hired a band of Gypsy musicians. In my room I’d answer her, writing on the pinewood desk that was stained with ink, paint, wine, and coffee. It pleased me to leave these traces of my existence, which little by little were becoming a palimpsest. Paris was teaching me to discover minimal beauty, to honor these findings as a way of validating life.

  One evening, after the postman’s second visit, I found a letter from Marie that filled less than one page. It contained two pieces of news. She said that she couldn’t write anymore because she had a lot of pain from the surgery, and that in three days she was leaving with her parents for Portugal. She would write again when she had recovered and knew her new address. The brevity of this bulletin left me uneasy. I felt sure that she had gone too far and that everything was about to fall apart. It was useless to think that I was fantasizing all this.

  The days kept going by without further news of Marie. At some point, I could no longer chalk it up to the post office’s inefficiency. Marie, for some reason I didn’t know, but whose dark tone I could anticipate, did not want to write to me. I felt a whole range of emotions, ending up with disbelief, anger, and depression. I knew that, somewhere in Europe, Marie was betraying me. My mind fought to reach other conclusions, but my certainty grew stronger and more and more humiliating.

  I stopped working on my thesis. I had twenty-four hours of the day to myself, but I couldn’t work. I’d waste time on absurd activities, like washing the worn-out rug in the studio with my hands or throwing a ball made of socks in the air, again and again. I grew so desperate that I went to see Sandrine to ask her point-blank if she knew anything about her friend. When she showed me the postcard from Portugal written in a hotel in the Algarve, the news hit me like a punch in the face. As I walked out, I felt as if molten lead had been poured inside me. Once again, with my fear of loneliness, I had created my own personal form of hell.

  This time, I didn’t even feel like walking. I dragged my feet to an anonymous café in the Fifteenth arrondissement, where I had only been once before, soon after arriving in the city. At that time I spoke very bad French and I remembered, as I sat at one of the tables, how difficult it was to order anything when my accent was almost incomprehensible and I didn’t recognize most of the dishes. A long history separated me from those days. The city and its culture had shaped me, and I had found here a space for my life’s labors. It was difficult to imagine living somewhere else than this world of pedestrians inhabiting the city as if it were an extension of their apartments. But that afternoon, in that café, I suddenly thought of returning. Nothing, nobody, now was keeping me from returning home. I needed to decide where home was, though, since up until that moment, mine was in the Impasse de l’Astrolabe. Over there, far away, was the island I came from. I never denied it; it had always been my hallmark of identity. I had always defended Puerto Rico in a world that didn’t care to know us. But I knew it was a hole in the wall, and that very little of what was done in Paris could be reproduced in my native city. But I couldn’t take it anymor
e. I had no more strength to continue fighting, and even more significant, I didn’t feel strong enough to be near Marie. Being lonely and poor didn’t help, but Marie was, so to speak, the straw that broke the camel’s back. In that café, during the hour and half I spent there, the notion that my time in the city had come to an end, quietly took root in me. It was like an epiphany, produced by a contradictory rush of emotions: failure, hope, and willpower all rolled into one compelling impulse.

  Night and dawn found me on the streets and boulevards of the city, struggling with a decision I’d already made but couldn’t quite swallow. Between the bridges of the Seine and the stairs of Saint-Sulpice, I walked, rehearsing countless versions of a single thought. I suffered the pain and indignity of abandonment. The city had been mine, but its people had not. I came to realize this, walking along the dark gates of the Luxembourg Gardens or watching the crowds pour out of the movie theaters on Boulevard du Montparnasse. I couldn’t continue living as if I were reading a book. My world had been made of paper, and in it the humans, the French, had been held at a thoughtless distance. This was the flip side of the story of those years. It’s possible that at certain ages one comes to earth-shattering realizations. It is possible, because that night I recognized that I had no choice but to return.

  I couldn’t entirely justify, in words, my decision to leave Paris. It was something I will never be able to completely understand—perhaps associated with the lost and eternal world of childhood. The limitations of my life with Marie were also perhaps the sign of another point of no return. I will never be able to explain satisfactorily why I left the city. I left, in fact, because I couldn’t explain it.