by Eduardo Lalo
He would go to the showers, which were separated by cubicles, and would nearly reach the point of fainting from the big clouds of steam in his long baths. He would hang out there hoping that the man would show up with his cleaning cart. Finally he succeeded. His skin was all wrinkled by the dampness, when he heard the door open. He stepped out of the cubicle and presented himself to the janitor. With unexpected boldness, he opened his pants. They entered one of the showers, and Alejandro experienced a happiness he thought he had lost.
The next day he met with Miguel again, and they established a routine. He’d wait for him in his room, would suck him off or let him fuck him. His neighbors suspected the comings and goings, but for Alejandro the gossip was exciting. He had a man, a real man now, and he wanted to throw himself into his new identity, into the role he was playing in this drama. Melancholy had vanished. He barely went to class and read whatever he felt like reading: Camus, Montaigne, Boris Vian.
Sometimes he invited Miguel to lunch. Nights, though, did not belong to him. The janitor made it clear that he had a wife and children, and Alejandro agreed to keep their relationship secret.
One Saturday, Miguel came to his room with a boy he said was his cousin and they all went out for some beers. As night fell, they came back drunk to his room, and Miguel pressed him to suck both their penises. They both possessed him and Alejandro discovered the charms of being treated with indifference.
There were other meetings and Miguel asked him to shave his whole body. Alejandro was fucked in bathrooms and on car seats and more than once, almost publicly, at the entrance of the basement where the brooms, pails, and detergent were kept. One day, Miguel took him to a smoke-filled apartment, in which four men were arguing around a table full of bottles. In the next room, he was possessed by each one of them. At the end, he thought he didn’t have to accept his share of the money.
He gave into Miguel. He put up with his whims, his increasingly bad treatment, and the men he brought him. He assumed his condition as prostitute, with some glimmers of sanity such as a big box of condoms on his night table. Towards the end of the semester, he dropped out of all his courses except one and invented an excuse not to come to San Juan to spend his vacation. He convinced himself that everything was going well, but something told him that he shouldn’t see his parents. He stayed during New Year’s week in the deserted dormitory. He had to concede that Miguel owed it to his family to spend the holiday with them. Perhaps the fruit of his exploitation had bought the toys or the Christmas dinner.
He’d spend time indefinitely in the showers. Loneliness, which had not abandoned him, was pernicious. He wrote poems, most of which he would give to me that night, in which I would discover his strange and clearly hermetic voice, which seemed not to have any relationship with his life, except for the spaces between words. He expressed a hard, dry, breathless, skinless eroticism full of references to a world that couldn’t be transmitted but which remained in some form in his verse. He spoke without speaking and his texts were the image of an open mouth that forgot, on the very threshold of enunciation, how to scream.
He spent New Year’s Eve on the street. On the days before it had snowed and with the low temperatures the poplar trees were covered with ice. He sat on a frozen bench and awaited the twelve strokes of the bell. He listened to the noisemakers and to the toasts. He knew, in that moment, that he was one of the most miserable beings on earth.
He didn’t see Miguel again until the semester began. He noticed that Miguel kept him at a distance but he felt that, with patience, things would work out. He awaited him in the showers, looked for him in the hallways.
One day some man came to his room. He needed money. But Alejandro barely had any. He received the man’s blow with resignation, as if he had always been waiting for it. He gave him a couple of bills and couldn’t refuse to go with him. Beside the telephone booth, they waited for some guys to come get them. In the front seat were two of the men he already knew. They went to where the other two were. On this occasion they didn’t retire to a room, but rather on the couch or on the rug, they took turns fucking him while they watched a football game. Finally, urged on by his clients, Miguel possessed him. He moved over him with cruelty, pulling him by the hair, insulting him. Finally, humiliated, he remained on the floor, shivering. He listened to the men’s voices and clinking glasses. He felt a hand on his chest and opened his eyes. He thought it was Miguel getting close to him, repentant. Several arms held him down. Miguel ordered him to keep quiet. He felt then the incredibly hot stream of urine, the insults, and belly laughs.
The next morning he applied for a sabbatical leave with the pretext of illness in the family and a few days later was in his sister’s apartment in New York City. Perhaps he had wished for this outcome, because running away had unexpectedly emptied him of purpose. The reasons for it, however, were kept a secret. He told his sister and the family another story.
Almost right away he was lucky. An acquaintance that worked in the Education Department gave Alejandro a job, midsemester, as a substitute teacher. He traveled every day to a school in the Bronx to deal with kids who gladly received the news that their teachers were absent. I found this difficult to believe, as I couldn’t imagine him working with students at an elementary level, but apparently he worked responsibly and with enthusiasm, even with success. With the first checks, he could afford a tiny room on Eighth Avenue. He’d spend his free time in the city, browsing in bookstores, reading and writing in the cafés of the Village. He came to feel that he had a satisfactory, even a rich life.
One day, in the Librairie de France in Rockefeller Center, he met a Frenchman. They went to have dinner, to a movie, and to a gay bar. That night he slept in his apartment. They got to know each other well, and Alejandro went on to form part of an international social group attracted by the aura of New York City. Swedes and Hungarians, Maghrebis and Brits, a Japanese lesbian, a German athlete who dyed his hair and was over sixty, formed part of this sophisticated, frivolous, and diffuse conclave.
Serge and his friends offered him what in former times Kenneth Phillpott had given him a glimpse of: an amusing and decadent world in which books and artists, love affairs, and scandals were common currency. There was always something to do: a party, a movie, excellent marijuana. They had fun going to exotic restaurants (How was the Mongolian food? When should we have a Paul Bowles night?); in bars, cafes, and discotheques, they savored the lustful eye candy of an endless flow of pectorals, crotches, and butts. Most of the group came from rich white societies, and perhaps because of that, they were attracted to the most extreme forms of otherness. Latinos, Blacks, and Asians, especially those who came from very poor and violent conditions, were the objects of desire they fought over and manipulated. Alejandro could suspect that his origins had something to do with Serge’s interest and the friendship of his circle, but he soon realized that they coveted neither his body nor his personality. They were seeking a noble savage to play at being barbarians.
Alejandro didn’t earn enough to keep up with this lifestyle. Serge grew tired of him and didn’t hide that he was after a Haitian whose genitals were legendary. The distancing between them gradually closed him off from the group. Only Peter, the older German guy skilled in physical culture, continued to call and ask him out to dinner. In this relationship the roles of father and lover were mixed together. Together they went to doctors’ appointments, gyms, and concerts. He had a key to Peter’s apartment and for the first time in his life he didn’t have to worry about the cost of things. He should have noticed, however, that his only peaceful relationship had been with an impotent man.
After some months, Peter traveled to Germany to attend the reading of a will. The separation, which was supposed to last just a few days, was inexplicably prolonged. Alejandro received calls, letters, and gifts, and finally, an envelope with a stranger’s handwriting. One of Peter’s sisters was writing to inform him that he had been found dead. It turns out that Peter had cancer, and
so, it had probably been just as well that his heart stopped. The German hadn’t told him anything about his health problems. That silence, which perhaps would have been temporary, was more devastating than his death.
He did the best he could to live normally. He went to work but he felt absent. One day he didn’t get up to take the train. He spent days in his apartment without getting out of bed, playing with the idea of dying. His sister took him to the psychiatric hospital, after getting worried about his staying home and finding out, when she went to visit him, that he had torn his books to shreds and destroyed the bathroom mirror.
He spent the first days sleeping. He sensed that men were coming over to him and asking questions. Later, therapy began and life with the other patients. He’d see the psychiatrist in the mornings and spend the rest of the day smoking and reading detective novels. He was a model patient, calm and cooperative; soon the doctors released him, giving his place to a doubtlessly more colorful patient. He shared an apartment with his sister and gradually returned to his routine of streets, parks, and cafeterias. Wherever he sat he composed new texts. This work made him think of returning to Puerto Rico. I asked him why and he said something that was both obvious and terrible: he was looking for someone who could read what he wrote.
One morning he got on a plane. He brought with him only one suitcase with clothes, papers, and a few books. He had the conviction that he should move back to Puerto Rico. At first he would live with his parents. Amazingly, he still had my phone number and Enrique Esteves’s. He called both of us right away. The night we talked took place two weeks after he had arrived. As the hours passed he told me this story, first in the restaurant and then sitting on the deserted steps of the monument to Baldorioty, facing the El Condado lagoon. He had already seen Esteves several times by then.
I was moved by his tale. I didn’t know how to help him, although I thought of a few friends who might be willing to mobilize their influence. At the very least, I could offer him some company. It would do him good to go out from time to time.
Later that night, when I dropped him off at his house, he asked me to wait a minute. He came out immediately with a large envelope. In it was a group of poems. He said he would call me to see what I thought. I shook his hand looking at him straight in the eye, as if trying to transmit the certainty that I had listened to and heard him.
Before I took off he detained me. “I would like to introduce you to Enrique Esteves.”
“I’ve seen him around. He teaches at the university.”
“He was my professor and he lived in Paris in the early sixties, when almost nobody was doing that.”
“That’s more or less how he has always been.”
“It’s true. Anyway I think you both would be interested in knowing each other.”
“Make a date, and let me know.”
“Okay, good-bye.”
“Don’t let things get you down, now.”
He knew that my words were a mere gesture.
“Please, read the poems.”
I didn’t take into account his insistence. I was given unpublished texts to read all the time. I knew there would be further unpleasant surprises and meetings, after which the friendship probably would not survive. As Alejandro was tremendously vulnerable, I’d read the material not as quickly as was desired, and, if possible, give the most positive critique I could. I would do this when I had some spare time and felt like it.
The next day he called for the first time. Fortunately I wasn’t the one who answered and I didn’t have to deal with the matter. But when in the following days he left perhaps a dozen messages on the answering machine, I decided to go to my workshop and open the envelope.
Many of the poems were more than a page long. They were difficult, had no narrative, and, as I’ve said, suggested rather than expressed an unfulfilled love relationship, without any resolution. The poet—and without any doubt Alejandro was a poet—masked himself with references to a vast literary tradition. When I read him I had the impression I was going to a strange place where I would never arrive. But the voyage was without a doubt worth the trouble.
In a pizzeria in El Condado I expressed my enthusiasm. Surprisingly, Alejandro received it with indifference, obsessing over secondary aspects that my comments didn’t deal with and about which he wanted feedback. The doggedness was on the point of driving me bats. I didn’t know what he wanted. I didn’t know what more to say to him. I didn’t understand the purpose of his cryptic questions. I realized that for him the poems had turned into something more than literary texts. It was as if they were a body that had to be acknowledged with undivided attention. He was a child who was demanding all the love in the world.
He had left a piece of pizza half finished; he was playing with the drops of humidity that had accumulated on the bottle of beer, and gazing away at some indeterminate point, he was looking for something I hadn’t said. My reading had turned out to be a failure. It wasn’t enough for him, because nothing could fill the need to hear something he couldn’t even define or identify. That black hole swallowed everything for him.
That night I brought him a signed copy of my last book. I never knew if he read it or simply glanced through a few pages. It contained a short novel and several stories that were about the European experience. I assumed he would be interested and have something to tell me. When I saw him again, he made only a vague comment and asked me if I knew Steven Armstrong. I had come across the name in bookstores but had never read him. According to him, Armstrong he had followed a trajectory similar to mine and we both shared a deliberate simplicity. He offered to loan me the only book he had of his, a compilation of reviews and miscellaneous texts. A couple of days later, I found it in the mailbox of my house. The title was extraordinary: The Usefulness of Blindness.
I couldn’t imagine what finding this book would mean for me, or, likewise, the magnitude of Alejandro’s intuition in recommending that I read it. I gathered most of the texts Armstrong had published in literary magazines before his success, during a black period of need and struggle. They were mostly book reviews, which the brilliance of his writing had turned into real essays. Amazingly, he reviewed a few years before I discovered them many of the authors and books that had influenced me. He had lived in France and, upon returning to New York, had thrown himself into writing about his French affinities and influences.
He dedicated two works to Neptune, one to his great novel and another, written on the occasion of his death, to the significance of his literary life. I could have written them. However, what left me thunderstruck was the story of his discovery of Pierre Plon, who at that time was almost unknown. He had found, on the table of a bookstore in Saint-Germain-des-Prés, the chronicle of his expeditions to the jungle. Armstrong had nothing to do with this world. He was not an anthropologist, archeologist, historian, or Latin Americanist, and yet some mysterious impulse made him acquire the book and read it from beginning to end in two and a half days. He was fascinated by the perspective of the man who became the raconteur of a millennial culture at the very moment of its annihilation. Without any logic whatsoever, since he didn’t have a publisher, nor was this his line of work, he decided immediately to translate it. The task took him over two years. During that time he exchanged several letters with the author and took a trip to Paris expressly to get to know him. When he arrived, he met with the news that Plon had just died, run over on the Boulevard Raspail. Toward the end of his text, the writer dedicated a few paragraphs to a melancholy conversation with a friend of Plon’s, in a Parisian apartment filled with books and Asian objects. In the last lines he provided his name. It was Didier Pétrement.
Aside from these pieces, Armstrong had written others on Antonin Artaud, César Vallejo, Knut Hamsen, Paul Celan, Kafka, the early Milan Kundera, on the Lisbon of Pessoa and the Paris of Walter Benjamin. These, together with introductions to French poets and a note on Roberto Juarroz, took me back again to the part of me that had tried to put time into wor
ds. I realized writing was not dead for me, but rather, under a surface of detachment and pretended indifference, I still had the urge.
Armstrong’s book reconnected me with the endeavor of writing, eventually influencing my way of living. It took me over a year to return to making a text, but during that period The Usefulness of Blindness was there reminding me that reading and writing were useless yet unavoidable, that it was the same in Paris or in San Juan: this was my way of occupying time and space.
3
I would see Alejandro often. Every week he’d call me several times and it would seem to me that on the telephone was where his thinking was most coherent, as if direct human presence stimulated him too much or pulled him, simultaneously, in two or more different directions. He always wanted to get together, to bring me new poems or consult me on some, often slight, matter regarding his search for work. It was obvious that he was still in bad shape and could not solve his problems on his own. More than once I urged him to seek help, but my advice didn’t help much, since, in any event, he couldn’t pay for therapy.
We’d go out to eat and afterwards take a stroll. It wasn’t always pleasant to be with him, to witness the unstoppable wheel of his hang-ups. With our walks I sought to lighten the topics of our conversations and to find a way, at the very least, to enjoy myself. I was showing him a city he had never seen. Alejandro was, like so many citizens of San Juan, a stranger to the space in which he lived. He had always gone around the city by car, blinded by speed.
On the walls of the old city I knew where there was a staircase that went down to the breakwater. There, along a narrow path, one could go around the Morro fortress and gaze at the wide expanse of the bay. One could see the city and on the other shore Cataño, and far away, on the hills, the faint vibration of the lights which must be in Guaynabo or in Bayamón. We’d go around the edges of the fort until we reached the walls of the cemetery, where we’d climb up to a little pile of stones among which lay the broken pieces of marble from ancient gravestones. There we’d sit to watch the sea, which had a mysterious beauty especially on moonless nights. The dark water felt then, more than other times, like the desert that separated us from the world.
