by Eduardo Lalo
Turning his back on the dead, whose tombs we’d see from where we sat on top of the wall, Alejandro would seem calm, maybe, for a moment, feeling better. When we’d go back, I would lead him along the least-trafficked streets until we got to the windows—almost always opened—of a bookbinder’s shop. We’d peer into the dim interior piled with books, the tables covered with tools, presses, and sheets of paper. I’d take him to certain street corners and point so that he would look at the ground. Near his feet were small sewer drains, polished smooth by shoes and the elements, with dates from a century ago. Other times we’d visit the decayed beauty of Santurce or the side streets of Alto del Cabro, listening to the chickens and pigs that lived together in tiny lots with their owners. Río Piedras was a dark sector at night and, awaiting the garbage trucks, an olfactory adventure. In the Plaza de la Convalecencia, next to the church was an ice-cream parlor run by Chinese that remained open late. We’d have an ice cream or a milkshake, sitting on a bench under the stars of the tropics. We’d talk about Armstrong’s book: we thought a lot about it and wanted to write about him. Alejandro would ask me about my times in Paris but would get impatient with my stories, regretting that he had asked. He was incapable of listening. Dealing with him meant putting up with this tyranny. I believe there was never an occasion when he didn’t talk about his poems or repeat a part of his own history.
One day he took me to Esteves’s house. I had seen him go by almost invisibly along the hallways of the humanities building. He was small and delicate, perpetually silent. I knew very little about him. Nothing prepared me for meeting him.
We parked in Río Piedras and went to a three-story building. We climbed to the third floor by a narrow staircase; on the first landing was a strong smell of urine. We knocked and listened a moment after a successive unlocking of several locks. Under the doorframe Esteves appeared, and, behind him, we noticed an extraordinary disorder. After our hellos, we went into the living room that faced onto a small balcony upon which there were many pots with dead plants. Esteves moved books, piles of papers, and a couple of plates with the leftovers of food so that we could sit on a sofa with broken springs into which I sank. On the coffee table there was an overflowing ashtray. Esteves offered coffee and Soberano brandy. We let the hot liquid rest, putting the cups wherever we could. We watched as he poured, blinded by a cigarette between his lips, into the coffee a long stream of amber-colored liquor, whose resinous fragrance brought back distant memories.
At the beginning, he made an effort not to look at me, but, strangely, I did not feel ignored. I observed that on the walls were two collages by El Boquio Alberty. I stood up to look at them, turning my back on him. When I turned around, I found him looking at me.
“They’re Boquios?” I asked, knowing the answer.
“You know him.”
“Not personally, but I’ve seen whatever I’ve been able to, of his work.”
“He was my friend. You must have seen that they are dedicated.”
“They are good pieces.”
“Like many that he did. Like many that were lost who knows where. I don’t know if you know that he even sketched, for lack of materials, but also by design, with cigarette ash.”
“So I have heard,” I said taking the first sip of the strong and very bitter coffee, probably burnt.
“He’s an artist,” said Alejandro.
“Really? Please don’t be offended if I don’t know you. I’ve been out of it for many years. I am sure that, if you had the eye and the curiosity to identify Roberto Alberty’s, your work must have value. But I am no longer interested in painting. Besides, I don’t see well and it’s a big effort for me to go to galleries. I don’t drive.”
He drank from his cup and crushed the butt.
“Look, I want to show you something.”
He left us alone. I saw in a mirror that he was looking for something under the bed. On top of the mahogany chest of drawers, there was a bottle of eucalyptus rubbing alcohol and talcum powder. He returned with a wooden frame, dusting off the glass with his hand. When he handed it to me, I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. It was a small engraving by Matta. He was reelaborating his famous image of The Poet: a body with the head of an insect or bull, pointing a pistol—in whose barrel there’s a lock—at the spectator. The paper was stained with damp spots. On the lower left edge there was a dedication to Esteves by Matta.
I raised my eyes. Esteves lit a cigarette and explained: “He gave it to me in ’62. Around that time, in Paris, I once went by La Promenade de Venus café. This was where Breton, following the custom of heroic eras, gathered towards the end his few insignificant ‘soldiers’ who remained. I wanted to join his army of acolytes like the good provincial who enters history thirty years too late. Unfortunately I was rejected for being conservative, even if in that era, the ‘Pope’ was being abandoned by most and was willing to allow on his red carpet even the dumbest of the dumb. I didn’t meet Matta there. I hadn’t spoken to Breton for a long time. Benjamin Escarano, the Mexican poet, an excellent inventor of verbal machines, who died very young, introduced him to me in the café I went to regularly. We’d meet there often and spend a good hour talking. One day he came from his atelier with a roll of proofs of watercolors. He took one of the prints and asked for a pencil to sign it for me. But this was a long time ago. Anyway, I thought you’d be interested. I have other things that I’m sure you’d like to see, but I have to look for them. Come another day with more time if you wish and I’ll show them to you.”
That evening, which soon turned into night, Esteves completely won me over. He listened to Alejandro’s poems with an openness and concentration that were commendable. What he said was pertinent and generous, without any pretention. We left late, and even had to go out to get another bottle of Soberano and something to eat. I observed his trembling hands, his discomfort in the armchair, his impressive tolerance for drink, and his indifference to his coughing attacks, which didn’t prevent him from continuing to smoke, and I thought that the old poet spoke to us from an inaccessible and fearful place. When I said good night, I knew that I would be back.
Thus began our friendship. It wouldn’t last long, just a few months. I soon learned that he was, predictably, very ill. Nevertheless, the cancer in his bones was a secret he didn’t reveal until the end. His doctor gave him his dire prognosis and Esteves didn’t visit him again, or any other doctor. He did nothing to vary his way of life. He still attended, while the pains didn’t paralyze him, his classes at the university. He smoked and drank until the day when he couldn’t light a cigarette or swallow a drink.
He studied at the university in the fifties and the Spanish poets Juan Ramón Jiménez and Pedro Salinas, who were his professors, expected everything of him. His first book of poems dates from that era, which appeared as a reprint from La Torre. It was the golden age of the university: a small and select student body, contentedly exiled professors from Europe or Latin America, the facility of teaching jobs just out of college and to study abroad, to return to the university with the honor of a degree. After a few years of lecturing on the basics, he managed to get sent to the Sorbonne. He wouldn’t go to the Universidad Complutense in Madrid or to the Ivy League. He would make his way in a city where few Puerto Ricans ever arrived. At that time nobody had heard anything yet of the boom. On the island, anachronistically, Paris still suggested the times of Darío. But Esteves knew what he had in hand. He knew Vallejo and knew that behind Neruda, Lorca, and Alberti there were other texts, palimpsests written in French.
He spent four years in Europe. He made friends there but left little in the way of writing. He never wrote his thesis. He returned home with poetry that was passé. The legacy of Mallarmé, Apollinaire, and the surrealists didn’t mix well with the poetry and battles of the socially conscious sixties. The university press published his only volume. He had few readers, and even they didn’t really comprehend his wordplays, references, and lyricism.
He let more t
han twenty years go by between the university and La Torre bar, in an impoverished and bitter bohemia. His bimonthly salary check paid for the meals and drinking revelries of painters, poets, and singers who didn’t have a penny to their name. There he became known to the next generation that practiced socially conscious poetry and defended other lyricisms. Among them he was obscure but not anonymous. There exist only two critical studies of his work, both by the most fanatical of the phonetic poets: this minimal attention attests to the failure of his literary life. His work was evaluated within a linguistic approach totally foreign to him.
Alejandro had been his student and, during his brief attempts to stop smoking, his supplier of cigarettes. As he did with me, Alejandro pestered him with his poems and with the desire to receive infinitely repeated applause.
I could think that Esteves’s life had been a mistake if it weren’t that he couldn’t have had any other life. Poetry served no purpose anywhere, but trying to produce work responding to the avant-garde in a society where ignorance and pettiness killed everything: he could only fail. He had been a terse poet, perhaps minor, but this didn’t matter. It was all the same, because here he couldn’t be anything other than what he was. For him there was no possibility of another life, or another death.
The thought didn’t escape me that all this was, in a way, a heavy-handed joke. Esteves was the living incarnation of characters I had invented in stories and a novel. I had imagined careers marked by excess and oblivion, sure that in some way they expressed the creator’s destiny in a society like Puerto Rico. Now fate, if it existed, was making me face the reality of my fictions. Here was the writer whose life was the very proof of uselessness. What remained were his countless obscure publications, a considerable and fragile talent wasted in bars and sleepless nights, endless solitude, useless bitterness, and his pose of indifference. For Esteves, as for many others, the opportunity to be discovered posthumously did not exist. The hole in which he lived had been too big and what fell into it got lost. The effort of one man, or of a whole generation, did not suffice. He had before him an impossible task.
Alejandro called one day to ask me for a letter of recommendation. He was thinking of applying for a teaching job at the high school he’d left shortly before I met him, where he had studied until his junior year. I didn’t think this was a good idea, especially not on my approval, but at his insistence I promised to do it.
There was still a lot of time before the start of the school year, and despite having gone through three interviews, they didn’t promise him a decision until well into the summer. He looked elsewhere and ended up with a part-time job at a translation agency. I didn’t hear from him for two or three weeks. I was sure that he must have been obsessively concentrating on his work. I knew that in his life any small matter or change was enough to capture his complete attention.
During that semester my first class was at seven in the morning. At around eight thirty, I’d usually end up in the faculty center to have a coffee and toast. Originally the center had been a kind of club for professors, but for many years it had deteriorated into a cafeteria serving the students. The piano, one room with armchairs and sofas, and the dining room reserved for the teachers, were all that were left of better times.
One morning I was surprised to run into Esteves. We went together to the counter. I ordered and saw that Esteves made a sign to the manager with his fingers. I was shocked to see them bring him a paper cup filled to the rim with a transparent liquid. “It’s vodka,” he explained. We went to sit at an empty table. At that hour there were very few people in the center. He drank and smoked with a repulsive resignation. We didn’t speak. His attention was centered on the cup. He said good-bye with a nod, as if it didn’t matter whether he did it or not, and I watched him walk toward the exit.
Shortly after this, I learned from a woman friend that the Spanish Department was considering suspending him. Perhaps this was inevitable and even the right thing to do, but I wondered how it would resolve anything. He had been forgotten for many years and no one seemed concerned about his being ill. Every once in a while, when I’d visit him, I found him suffering, submerged in a dreadful aura. I’d busy myself looking at the drawings and engravings of his friends, which he kept between two pieces of cardboard.
I’d observe him in his corner, tense, putting up with a pain that now nobody could relieve.
I wanted him to go to a doctor. I asked Alejandro to help me convince him. One day I found a message at the university: Esteves was asking me to come see him. I had a brief moment of hope.
“I want you to listen to me without interrupting,” he said just as I arrived. “I know what you do and why you do it. It’s what I would have done for a friend. And I also want you to know this, that you are a friend and that I am sorry not to have time for your friendship. I am dying. I’ve known it for a year, since the doctor gave me three months to live. Now you can see how worthwhile prognoses are. I would have preferred to go quickly, because it’s taken too long. It’s hard when one knows one has nothing, not even time. Deep down, it’s the same as before, but knowing it with certainty, with a time limit, is worse.”
There was a pause; our eyes met.
“I don’t want you to do anything. I don’t want to go to the doctor or to the hospital. I simply want this to end. That’s all. When the time comes, come here with Alejandro and take what you both want. Throw the rest out or leave it to the landlord. In the bank (I need you to do this, to find out how to have access to my account) there is money to dispose of me. Please, no wake or funeral: just bury me. That’s all. I have no descendants, and I don’t think my cousins really care to find out about me. Everything: books, papers, works of art, it’s all yours. Take what you want. Throw the rest out.”
“And if the moment arrives when you can no longer be here?”
“Then take me to the hospital. But to die only: no more examinations or doctors or tubes. My life ended some time ago; it’s just that my body hasn’t found out yet.”
I left the apartment and went directly to look for Alejandro. As always he didn’t want us to talk in his parents’ house. We went to an awful pizzeria. I told him what I had talked about with Esteves. He thought it was impossible to follow his wishes to the letter. It was crazy to leave him alone in his apartment. Someone had to take charge. He had mentioned some family members. Perhaps we could contact them, or at least get someone to attend to him. I didn’t expect such a response from him.
The next day Alejandro moved into his apartment. He could translate right there and I committed to bringing him and delivering his work and everything else that he needed. Esteves did not return to the university. Alejandro, who knew the Spanish Department professors, took charge of transmitting to them the news. Between the two of us we tried to make dying less cruel for him.
As the weeks passed, Alejandro became indispensable. He took charge of him day and night, kept him clean, and made the humiliation of the end bearable. His patience and good disposition to deal with the most intolerable chore were admirable. I never saw him more centered or close to a person. Never had the convolutions of his life seemed simpler.
We had to call an ambulance when Esteves fell into the stupor from which he never emerged. He lived six more days in a room in the general ward. According to his wishes, he was treated as little as possible. He died a little past four in the morning, with his skeletal hand in Alejandro’s. I got to the hospital when the sun was coming up. I didn’t know how to console Alejandro, who was in the bathroom, crying.
Two days later we buried him in the municipal cemetery. Besides Alejandro, my family, and myself, a retired professor wearing an absurd toupee was there. He couldn’t resist the urge to smoke and to give a stuffy rhetorical speech about our national literature.
As we agreed, I took the boxes of books we didn’t want to the Econolibros bookstore, which provided the commendable service of buying the libraries of dead people. I sent Alejandro the total sum from the s
ale, as well as the little more than a thousand dollars left in the bank account. From the apartment, he took some furniture, thinking that it would be useful for him when he moved from his parents’ home. The rest—except for the works of art, in a very bad state of preservation, which we divided—remained in the apartment.
I stored in my workshop a cardboard box filled with hundreds of pages: Esteves’s unpublished work and notes. A few days after his death, I opened it. The texts were not in order, his handwriting was difficult, and even the typed pages were filled with corrections made at different times. I knew that I couldn’t edit them. The desolation in these pages was too much, that hopeless disorganized hoarding.
Early the next day, I called Alejandro and asked if we could meet at sunset at the Parque del Indio. In all the years we had known each other, I had almost never taken the initiative to get together with him. The death of Esteves had touched places I had not wanted to consider, and for the first time in a long time, I needed to talk, to try to tell someone what I was feeling. Life could end at any time, the demise of the poet made this clear, and it wasn’t enough to try not to see reality, to live halfheartedly, protecting myself.
I found him sitting next to the fountain, facing the sea. As I approached, I remembered the conversations we had, with our backs to the cemetery, facing the blue wall of the nocturnal ocean and sky.
“It’s a beautiful evening,” he said.
“Yes, it’s always lovely and those of us who live here barely realize it.”
