MR. L.H. VALDEZ, the celebrated author, the pole star around which the rest of the faculty rotated, who had already willed his desk to the national museum, whose portrait—wearing a snow-white Panama hat of distinctive style—appeared in the windows of no fewer than fourteen bookshops in the capital, was due to lecture on Shakespeare. The Sonnets. That morning he would explain, not poetry, of which he knew almost nothing, but obsessive love, of which he knew even less outside the pages of his novels. That mattered little. Like all teachers, he need be only one lesson ahead of his pupils and he was smug behind a carapace of reputation.
The lecture bored him. He had delivered it so many times before that he knew it by heart, spotted the signposts that indicated this wise observation, that witty insight or pointed the way to a long avenue of brilliant wordsmithing and on to his heart-breakingly beautiful conclusion.
He recited without incident and stood before the students like a confident tennis pro, facing the children of the beginners’ class, forcing them to squint into the sun and effortlessly batting away expected, predictable questions. And nothing that he said, nothing that he quoted, nothing that he read aloud was half so important as those two words, scrawled down with a blunt, gray pencil on a scrap of damp paper.
He could feel that tiny sentence burning its way through the leather of his wallet, through his shirt, through his flesh until it burrowed between his bones and into his heart.
I write.
“I write,” he thought. “I write too.” But that was not quite true. “I wrote.” That would be more accurate. “I wrote this and this and this and I will write. I will write again.”
While he stood, regurgitating the old lie that Shakespeare was by no means unnatural in his appetites, that the experience of intense male friendship can be found everywhere in literature from the Iliad to The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, Mr. L.H. Valdez decided to turn his critical eye fully on Caterina’s note.
“I write.”
Not the shortest sentence it was possible to create but pretty near. Impersonal, in spite of the aggressive personal pronoun, something René Magritte might have inscribed on the side of a pencil: “I write” or “This is not a writer,” either would do. A bald statement of fact, then?
No, not that. The author of this piece did not intend to convey simply that she makes marks on a page. One could not infer “shopping lists” as the next phrase in the sentence. No, a confession of that magnitude could be followed only by a word of great moment: “stories” or “poetry.”
And yet—he wanted to stop wasting his words on Shakespeare and direct the class instead to study the epic that was glowing inside his wallet—she had chosen not to say more.
In the lecture inside his head, the lecture not given, Mr. Valdez pointed out that the sensitive critic can reveal as much from what is not said as from what is. In this case the author had said: “I write.” She had not said: “too.”
This was a message addressed to the foremost author of his generation. How could she have written “too”? That would be to put herself on a level with him. Impossible. Unthinkable. But it was still a message semaphored from the foothills to the mountaintops, a flag waved, a rocket sent up to say: “See me. Notice me, please.”
She was so far below as to be almost out of sight and she had no idea that, up on the summit, he had already begun to slide down the far side, clutching at rocks as he fell, tearing his hands open, kicking up pebbles, scrabbling.
I write. She meant it as a plea for attention. For a man clinging on over an empty chasm, it sounded like a promise of rescue.