by Eduardo Lalo
“Derridito didn’t want to give me an incomplete.” I was irritated by Rosa’s habit of not including me in the conversation, refusing to acknowledge my presence, as if she needed to be hostile.
“What were you going to write about?” I asked to force her to look at me.
“The contemporary short story in the Caribbean. Or rather women short-story writers in Cuba and Puerto Rico, but this was too inclusive, so I ended up limiting it to Puerto Rico.”
I imagined the content of her paper. The women writers would be Marta Gómez Centeno and two or three of her contemporaries, whom Rosa probably knew personally. It was a legitimate topic, but at the same time a testimony to the limitations of her knowledge and curiosity. Derridito probably realized this and refused to validate her laziness and narrow perspective.
The evening progressed with difficulty. It was one more in a long chain of attempts to create bonds among people who supposedly had a lot to say to each other. Throughout the years I met many like Alejandro and Rosa. Folks who remained stuck, fixated on their defenses, too sick to be able to engage in a conversation in which they weren’t mouthpieces of some cause or, what was almost the same thing, of some retaliation. We Puerto Ricans were eloquent and friendly when we needed to unburden ourselves. When we couldn’t stand it any longer, we’d ask people to listen to us speak empty words, without pointing out the causes of our own misery, for which we didn’t want to be responsible. We loved monologues, and yet our loneliness terrified us.
As we said good-bye, I realized that Alejandro hadn’t wanted the night to go that way. His gesture was almost imperceptible, but firm and eloquent. Perhaps he just couldn’t do any better. But it was not my job to save him. Bidding him good night, I knew that he would return to being just another student. I would teach him in class, correct his exams, but his life would remain distant from mine.
I spoke to him only once more before the end of the semester. I ran into him across from the humanities building and asked him for a cigarette. “Buy your own” was his terse reply.
2
I had no news of him for years. I was able, with friends, and later with a couple of girlfriends, to take a few trips. I returned to Paris on several occasions and only bothered to visit the Pétrements and Simone and her father. I took a photo of myself under the street sign of the Astrolabe cul-de-sac and entered the building where I had lived. Beside the entrance door I paused, attentive and silently, musing on how everything, basically, vanished without leaving a trace. I traveled to other countries and on my last trip I didn’t even consider going to France. My life was in San Juan, and I knew that Europe was a chapter to which I would not return. There, in a few years, I had lived with an intensity that was hard to match in the life that would follow. I would accept the deficiencies that surrounded me: even though I didn’t want to admit it, I no longer experienced my commitments and passions in the same way. I would write, paint, or sculpt, knowing that nobody was awaiting my creations, that it would be difficult for me to publish or exhibit my work, and even harder for anyone to read, see, or appreciate what I offered. I knew these difficulties were not exclusive to my country, and that even in great cities, though probably for other reasons, they were the norm. But those places elsewhere, even though they didn’t shower success on some, were more enjoyable. I’d look at art magazines or the latest book reviews and couldn’t help recognizing that the world didn’t offer everyone equal opportunities.
I acquired, in those years outside Puerto Rico, the habit and the pleasure of walking. Even in San Juan, where uncontrollable growth limited the intimate joy of strolling, I went everywhere on foot. Hundreds of times I walked along treeless avenues, where the thirst for profit and makeshift expansion had destroyed all beauty. Frequently I imagined being far away, walking along different streets than these. Thus, in my fantasy life, I crossed deserts, continents, and cities on foot: the eastern Mediterranean, Egypt, the plateaus of Tibet, Patagonia. The voyage would begin in books and unfailingly run into the dirty sidewalks of San Juan, the only place in the world where I could dream of distant lands and cities. Without intending to, I became part of the landscape, and there were many people who would recognize me because they had seen me during the hours of my walk.
One Sunday morning during Christmas vacation, I was taking a walk in the direction of Old San Juan with the woman who would become my wife. She pointed out a car that had stopped and someone who was calling to me. Approaching, I saw a fat woman and a girl in the passenger seat. I didn’t know either of them, but I heard a familiar voice. I bent down to discover that the driver was none other than Alejandro Espinal. He had turned into a husky man and he smiled to greet me. While the traffic avoided his car, which was blocking the road, he told me he was visiting and would like to see me. After the woman who I presumed was his sister wrote down my telephone number, they immediately took off. As Alejandro had vanished from my memory so completely, I felt surprised by his interest.
In the following days he called me several times. I was about to move once again, and on two or three occasions I had to postpone our date. Each time he answered the phone he told me something about his life. Thus I learned, before seeing him, that he was studying for a PhD in French in a North American university, that he had spent a year in France on an exchange program, and that, even though ultimately he had not been able to throw himself entirely into his work, he was a poet. The news, the tone of the conversation, and his desire to tell me who he had become, augured healthy changes. I assumed it would be possible to have a conversation. I left the early hours of an afternoon open so that he could come get me to go for lunch.
He didn’t get out to come greet my partner or to see our son. He honked the horn until I came down to the street. Immediately I realized something wasn’t right. His frantic way of smoking and driving and his convoluted ways of expressing himself portended an ill-fated encounter. He didn’t have the courtesy to take into account my preferences, but rather, after driving around, revealing how little he knew the city, he stopped in front of a Puerto Rican restaurant in ramshackle Villa Palmeras. It was the place least likely to please me because I hadn’t eaten meat for years. I had to settle for plantain fritters and a glass of water. We sat at the only free table, beside a cage of hens and near another filled with rabbits. Alejandro ordered a beer and some dish he wouldn’t be able to find in the restaurants around his university. He ate, drank, and smoked all at once. Annoyed, I was forced to listen to his story.
It had taken him more time than it should have to graduate college. Despite setbacks, he had been a good student, and the French department at the University of Chicago had given him a fellowship. He had been there for a year and then spent the following year in France. The French university required of the foreign students that they teach a few hours of classes in their own language. As Alejandro was studying in an American university, they had taken for granted that he spoke English. His English was acceptable, but he didn’t feel comfortable enough to teach it. I already knew that Alejandro was difficult, tending to get entangled in impossible situations. He had put the department chair, his students, and himself through an infernal semester, repeating tirelessly that he was willing to teach everything they wanted in Spanish but not English. The situation contributed to the fact that many students avoided him. He felt abandoned, barred from being able to make new friends. The longed-for city, which he had finally reached, turned into a stage upon which he meandered with his loneliness. For a while he’d spend the whole day reading in parks or going to movie theaters and bookstores, taking refuge every two or three hours in some café.
One Sunday night—Paris would make it harder to be alone on Sundays—he pulled up to a bar. His neighbor offered him a cigarette. This was an unexpected event in a society where strangers didn’t speak to each other. The brand of cigarette and the man’s accent were British. This began the story of a fleeting and ultimately one-sided love affair Alejandro related to me, in fragments. Thus I l
earned that he was homosexual. Now what I knew about him was much more understandable.
He fell in love with Kenneth Phillpott, an art history student whose father was English and mother was Swiss. The main point in this story seemed to be how attracted he was to his beauty, but also in equal or larger measure to the seductive power of his wealth. The relationship distanced him from the classrooms and dormitory in the university district. With his lover he got to know the Paris of the French, infinitely more appealing than the hangouts of his classmates. His contact with real citizens filled him with pride and he was willing to sacrifice his fellowship year. Before he met the Englishman, his relationships had been tussles with classmates and a secret union with a priest at the high school where he had studied. This had been the reason for his transfer to a public school as the scandal had forced him to leave.
For Phillpott, Alejandro didn’t seem to be much more than a seasonal conquest. His sense of privilege made him careless and unpredictable. He could live, if he wished, in three or four countries where he had friends and owned houses. He could spend the summer in Capri just as he could in Rhodes or on the Costa Brava. He didn’t suffer the personal, social, and monetary constraints of his lover. For Alejandro, Kenneth was the passport to his desires. With him he could stay in Europe and gain access to the life of his dreams.
The relationship had its setbacks. Kenneth left him in Paris, which, in the long run, had certain advantages, since Alejandro returned to the university and survived the final exams. But Kenneth’s trip to London lasted longer than he had promised, and Paris was not the same without the Englishman’s presence. He had to leave his room at the Cité Universitaire and take a room at a hotel on Rue Mabillon. Kenneth had not offered him his apartment. He waited for him for a month. Their time together was emotional and brief, because at the end of August Phillpott left for the Balearics and Alejandro had to return to his university in the United States. There had been no further invitation on the part of the Englishman, but instead Alejandro became aware of Kenneth’s long daily conversations with some unknown man, out of reach of Alejandro’s hearing.
The day they said good-bye, Alejandro took a walk along the poplar groves of the Tuileries and responded to an Arab who called him over. He made love without exchanging a word, like a voiceless body. The next day he returned but didn’t find the Arab. He offered himself to another who went off with his wallet. Forty-eight hours later he flew to Illinois without a cent and with a venereal disease.
From the first days of the semester, he knew he wouldn’t be able to make it to the end. He couldn’t progress with the readings because he’d become obsessed with some detail and read over and over again endlessly. In the end, he was called into the director’s office and had to transfer to another university. In January, he entered the new program as an interim student and remained there, for better or for worse, almost three years. He needed one more course to finish. I asked what he thought he’d do the thesis on, and after a lot of talk, I still didn’t have a clear idea of what his focus would be. He talked in circles, losing the thread, leaving any idea or plan half-baked, always as if with an urgent need to change direction.
The waiter took away our plates. On his, the food was mixed together and picked at, as if a child had been playing with it to amuse himself. He ordered two desserts and two coffees one after the other. He lit a cigarette without noticing that one was smoking in the ashtray.
Lunch had lasted too long. I kept him from ordering a third coffee, using the excuse that I had to take care of a problem with the move. Fighting with the traffic in a useless expense of energy, he drove me home. He would be leaving in two or three days and I didn’t ask for his address or press him to come see me again. I shook his hand without knowing what to say.
For a few days he remained in my thoughts. His was one of those tragic lives attracted to literature. I had come close to madness myself and knew that I could have ended up like Alejandro. A crisis, an error, or one more hopeless illusion would have been enough to send me to where he was. There was something in his insanity that I shared. I didn’t know how to define it exactly, but a look in his eyes communicated a pain I had not seen elsewhere.
Around that time I distanced myself from books. For the first time in my life, I stopped reading novels and poetry. I would buy art books from catalogs—because they were practically impossible to obtain in Puerto Rico—and would devote my creative efforts to painting and sculpting. I even thought that the well of words had dried up. From time to time I’d pick out of my library some book I hadn’t read, which was almost always a novel. I’d read about a fourth and always leave them unfinished, indifferent to their denouements. I often went to bookstores without even pausing in front of the shelves of literature. I didn’t keep up with the new writers coming out and for the first time I had to ask others who was this or that author and what was important about them. I even reached the point of getting annoyed at the reputations of others, perhaps because I couldn’t admit to myself the suspicion that my energy and willpower had been, in the long run, insufficient.
I spent months working with wood, immersed in a rhythm of gouges, mallets, and axes, in which there was no place for words and adjectives. It was liberating. I worked with my hands, with the earthy and tangible. Little by little I was creating the world I would take to a museum in San Juan. I already had a date for the show and some money donated by a sponsor. I was enthralled with my tools, with their long tradition that enabled me to do without electrical machinery. I cut and polished by hand, awash in the poetry of sweat and muscle. My books remained in the past, buried in the warehouses of their incompetent publishers. I didn’t present myself to anyone as a writer and was annoyed by my wife’s habit to announce to people the lost existence of my books. I reached the point of preferring my body to my mind. The scars on my hands were a source of pride as were the conversations I carried on with carpenters and cabinetmakers in the lines buying wood from timber dealers.
A few days before the show opened, when I was already beginning to set it up, I answered the telephone. On the other end I heard a man’s voice. Alejandro Espinal had returned. While I listened to him, I realized that it wasn’t during vacation time but rather in the middle of the academic semester. I imagined that he might have finished his studies, but I realized that this was impossible. Since our last meeting, enough time hadn’t passed. As on other occasions, his conversation over the phone was coherent and even pleasant. I again had hopes that he might be doing better. In some way, the nature of which I didn’t understand, I was drawn to Alejandro’s life. Perhaps through him I was trying to confirm my own assumptions or to confront my doubts, to see up to what point I was similar or foreign to what he was. I couldn’t see him right away, but I invited him to come by the museum the night of the opening.
I was taken up with a long list of tasks during those days. The night of the opening arrived and before anyone could enter, I went around the rooms. There was the alphabet of my vertebrate forms, of my bones of wood. All that remained of my literary past were a few words written in block letters on some of the paintings that hung on the walls. I stood still for a second and breathed with satisfaction. The silence washed over me and vibrated on my skin.
I received the public and, as occurs in these situations, enjoyed with numerous people conversations that almost always revolved around congratulations. The work was received enthusiastically, but that night there were no buyers. At some point I went out to the entrance hall looking for catalogs and saw that Alejandro was studying the piece that, under an arch, opened the way to the exhibit. I went to greet him. He had already gone around the rooms and had liked the exhibit very much. He elaborated some ideas that didn’t seem relevant to me. Art wasn’t literature.
At least he looked pretty well. He had gained weight and looked older. He said he had written some comments in the guest book and wanted to know what I thought of them. He added that he was writing and wanted me to read his texts. So
meone came looking for me and I had to say good-bye.
Later I saw him smoking near the cocktail table in the beautiful patio inside the museum. When the night was over, I looked for him but he had gone.
The next day I left with my family for a beach house in the west. I relaxed a few days and didn’t think about anything. When we returned I found on the answering machine a couple of messages from journalists requiring an immediate response and six messages from Alejandro. In each he said the same thing: he wanted to see me, wanted to give me his poems. So much insistence eradicated my desire to call him. I didn’t have to, anyway, as the next day he called again and I was the one who answered the phone.
He came to get me soon after and we went to dinner at a Middle Eastern restaurant. It was no longer the one in Río Piedras, which had closed. Now there were several places like this in the city with food that was quite delicious and belly dancing on Fridays and Saturdays.
He asked me if I had read what he had written in the guest book. I hadn’t and promised that when I returned to the museum I would take the trouble to look at it. His persistence was exaggerated, but at that point I thought nothing of it. What caught my attention, however, was the difficulty he had in choosing what food to order. The waiter came back to the table several times and I was beginning to feel exasperated. Then he told me the story that astounded me.
Although he was still on leave, he had decided to abandon his studies. I was the first person to whom he was telling this. He only needed a couple of courses and the thesis to finish the PhD, but some months ago, when he was still an active student, he had thrown it all overboard. He had begun a relationship with a man, the son of Puerto Ricans, who worked as a janitor in the dormitories. At the beginning he hadn’t gone beyond spying on him, getting to know his name, starting conversations with him. But he couldn’t get him out of his head when he’d sit at a table in the library to read seventeenth-century French texts.
