San Juan received me as a stranger. I had spent over nine years outside the country, only visiting for brief periods. Since I’d left college, my life had been organized around foreign countries. I wanted to make the most of my time abroad and, whenever I had breaks or vacations, had tried not to spend them in San Juan. Besides—and I didn’t admit this for a long time—I was afraid of this city. I knew too well the limits it imposed on the sort of life I had sought far away. The truth was that, while I’d been defending my home culture with convoluted arguments and mythmaking, trying to fend off the feeling of being a whole continent away, in reality, I hated too many things about life here. San Juan was my city, the place where I belonged more than any other. I didn’t doubt it, but this belonging could feel like a cruel bond, a chain forged by an accident of birth, or bad luck.
Aside from my family, I knew only a few friends from my college years, and (except for short trips to foreign countries) they had always lived in Puerto Rico. They held modest jobs. They were schoolteachers, bureaucrats, technicians. Some were studying endlessly for a PhD. What we had in common and what led me back to them was that they were all readers. As they had nothing to do with business and didn’t practice any high-paying profession, they were pleasantly marginal.
The country was suffocating. This was not news: I could tell from the very moment I arrived. The porter at the airport spoke to me in English and tried to cheat me. Through a crack in the paper they’d pasted on the terminal windows, making them a blind wall, I searched for my parents. I found them looking lost in a noisy, sweaty crowd who dressed, pushed, and shouted in a way that suddenly turned the scene, for me, into a nightmare memory. To the world I had just left behind, we were a caricature, a joke. We lived amid small ideas and trivial work, in an insular world of fantasy. I would quickly discover that my interests were met with nasty, belittling expressions of contempt, like, “So what?” or “Who cares?” This was why I had left, tired of a society that sentenced me to eccentricity and isolation. Politically, we were the same old disaster, aggravated at that time by the vulgarity and violence of the Romero government, which seemed to speak its own dialect, barely comprehensible to others. Its rhetoric was plagued with unexpected pauses, interjections, whole sections of orations that devolved into some sort of raving, which most people, totally uninterested, listened to with the routine resignation of watching the rain.
I remember my first days, my hopeful reencounter with the city, which in spite of everything, I still missed. I took a walk around the old town, stopping by its arts and crafts shops, its art galleries, and its bars. I remember my perhaps excessive enthusiasm on discovering the carnival masks of Ponce, the wooden saints, coffee cups made with coconut shells, or finding, in the corner of the inner patio of a gallery, abstract textiles from a tribe in the Sahara and wicker bowls from Zimbabwe.
In my last days in Paris, I had struggled with a deep-seated loneliness, a feeling of bereft orphanhood, of lost origins. Being abandoned by Marie had intensified this underlying homesickness. So in returning to Puerto Rico, I wasn’t just running away. Hope and youth convinced me I could begin again, and that I could make use, here, of what I had learned abroad.
Soon these aspirations clashed with reality. Their provincialism made it impossible for people to understand my situation. I was one of thousands of students who left to study abroad, but for most Puerto Ricans, the world beyond the island was almost exclusively the United States. Going to France was interesting in principle, but once they considered what I had had to live through, only to return without either a degree or fortune, the experience seemed an incomprehensible waste. I got tired of being constantly asked where I was from. Annoyed, I’d always reply, “From here,” only to encounter the tribal disbelief of my interrogator. Talking to anybody about the things I devoted myself to in France meant sounding unintelligible. What could Amazonian culture, Tibetan art, or modern art and narrative mean here? What unimaginable assumptions would they make about me, listening to my way of speaking, now that I had lost the tics of the local accent in those years away?
I’d spend the days in my family home, discussing the news of the day with my mother, reading, rediscovering the taste and aroma of a coffee that was so unlike the disgusting brews I had sipped for years. Almost everyday, in the afternoons, I’d go out for a walk in a city where people no longer walked. I’d walk along awful avenues that were hostile to pedestrians, like Roosevelt or Central, without anything to enjoy looking at except signs, cars, posts, cracks in the cement. Sometimes I’d end up in a pastry shop, which was the closest thing to a Parisian café in San Juan, and spend hours watching and smoking, as if I couldn’t fully believe the reality before my eyes.
At night my father would lend me his car and I’d go to see my friends. I’d hang out in the small living rooms of their apartments or, if it was Thursday, Friday or Saturday, in some bar or restaurant. Sometimes we’d go to the movies; sometimes there was absolutely nothing to see, and we’d sit there bored in front of our beers until our yawns forced me to say good night.
When I felt like it, I’d take a ride around the city. I’d go around the barrios with their deserted sidewalks: Santurce, Miramar, El Condado, Ocean Park, Puntas las Marías, Isla Verde. My mind would travel, too. I saw myself inhabiting some of the balconies that still had lights on in the early hours of the morning, and I imagined the cool, refreshing sea breeze, the joy I’d feel from cloudbursts, from reading in the low light with the balcony doors opened, from the arrival of old and new friends. I would live here, and perhaps the years spent far away would serve some purpose. It was a pleasant fantasy and a way of accepting the decision I had made. It had the grace of a certain peace, of some sort of relief. On other occasions I imagined myself, after many years, living on the top floor of a rundown old building in Santurce. There, isolated and forgotten, I would write the novel about this city, which would justify my existence. I didn’t know then that for years and years I would stick to this course of action and fantasy, ultimately inseparable (in my mind) from the city itself.
A few weeks after my arrival, I got a part-time job at a language academy. I would give private lessons in Spanish to North Americans sent by their companies to work on the island. A bit later, I was able to complement these earnings with a class at the Alliance Française. My work was unbearably humdrum. Nothing in my education prepared me for teaching languages, and the incessant repetition and correction of absurdly simple sentences bored me to death. I began trying to connect with new acquaintances here and soon realized that the assumptions I would bring to conversations did not work at all. I couldn’t presume that these people knew anything about anything, that they knew an author, a historical event, the geographical setting of a country, or that they even had the slightest curiosity to find out about these things. Nonetheless, they were mostly good people, satisfied with the certainties that were sufficient for living here. However, it was hard for me to feel at ease. I had the impression that I was almost always concealing large parts of myself and that little by little I was constructing an identity based on suppression. For years I had practiced in my mind foreign phrases before uttering them, and now, continually, I was choosing to translate what I wanted to express into what I assumed they were ready to hear. In both cases much was lost. In both cases, I felt an insidious loneliness.
At the Alliance I taught a handful of French people who had come to San Juan mostly because they were married to Puerto Ricans. The interest and liberalism toward other cultures that one finds in Paris, at least intellectually, had eroded in them once they had lived in Puerto Rico. I witnessed a lot of grandiloquent posturing, punctuated by prejudice and lack of understanding, which made of their lives—except for time on the beaches and their annual trip to their cities in France—a kind of prison sentence on Devil’s Island. I could understand what they were experiencing, but their colonialist airs set me against them. At the beginning, they’d invite me to their parties and get-togethers, which, after the wine and delicious hors d’oeuvres, would turn into assemblies of a white fraternity. Here people would speak of what was missed by living far from France, and one would end up attending heated discussions in which they ranted against almost everything about this country. A horrible complicity reigned among the French and their spouses and most of the Puerto Rican fauna swarming in these Europeanizing venues, in which one accepted with a dignity at once shy and awkward the devastating critique of those judgmental stares. Far from this country, I had always defended my belonging here. I always thought we had a history, a culture upon which to stand firm, with which to validate our existence. I suddenly found myself alone, or in a minority, defending positions of which most of my compatriots weren’t even aware. I saw them bow their heads and agree with the French. I think that, around that time, I first heard the current usage of the term puertorriqueñidad, or “Puerto Ricanness.” The term arose, in part, in response to the belief that it was culturally glamorous to imagine not being Puerto Rican.
Most of the students of the Alliance were middle-aged sanjuaneros who went to French class as others went to play golf on Saturdays. They had an idyllic vision of France, which most of the time didn’t go beyond a grand tour of monuments with wine and cheese tastings. I was teaching an advanced conversation class in which I had to prepare exercises like sample conversations between a waiter in a café and a tourist. One day I decided we would base a conversation on literature, on something we had read. The group hated this so much that they went to complain to the director. I was called into his office, decorated with posters of tourist sites and big exhibits at the Louvre or the Grand Palais, and after being offered a cigarette by one of the few smokers of Gitanes in the country, I had to listen to a lecture on how our students had to be entertained by learning about a universal language and culture. This wasn’t a university, he said, and we have to limit ourselves to teaching them proper pronunciation.
His argument placed me in a difficult situation. He was the headmaster of the Alliance and as such I had to submit to his rules, like them or not. But on the other hand, I felt attacked by his paternalism. The conversation quickly turned into an argument and the next semester there were no courses for me.
The result of this contretemps would have been hard for me to imagine back in Paris. From then on I lived without practically any connection to French culture or to the French people. In Puerto Rico there were barely any books to be had, and little by little, I went through the two or three hundred titles I had brought with me. The same thing happened with music or other areas of culture. I didn’t have, and wouldn’t for a long time, a penny to my name, and interest in all things French here was about money, not culture, and implied a certain social position. All this had very little to do with the Paris I had known. The French and Francophile types who gathered in this part of the world ceased to interest me. France faded slowly into the horizon. I stopped speaking the language altogether (I didn’t have anyone to speak it with). There are people who have known me here for years and who haven’t the slightest notion that I speak French.
After living with my parents for some time, I looked for my own place. I’d walk around old San Juan to see if there were For Rent signs on the balconies. After visiting several that I couldn’t afford, I ended up putting down a deposit on an apartment that was very small but had, like many houses in this area, very high ceilings, underneath which they had built a wooden loft space which served as a bedroom. The place was hot and slightly claustrophobic, and on the weekends it didn’t keep out the racket from the street, but for the time being, it worked for me. I brought my belongings from my parents’ house and acquired something I’d never managed to possess in the countless rooms I’d lived in: a telephone.
I got around by bus until I accepted my father’s generosity and bought a used Datsun. My friends would come to visit me Friday nights. We’d talk about books, politics, or whatever the hours and the rum would bring. Their presence was very pleasant but did not hide the fact that I was still alone. Many things hadn’t gelled in my life, and it was impossible for me, then, to do away with the expectations surrounding my return. I was living here, but this here was not what I had imagined from a distance and expected to discover upon landing in the city. The disappointment was painful and incomprehensible. I was too young to understand this misery.
I’ve thought that the story of a person like myself could be expressed by chronicling the books and music that memory preserves from each era of one’s life. It strikes me that upon picking up a volume or listening to a melody, one reproduces in miniature the famous Proustian scene. Those first years in San Juan could be Salvador Elizondo’s El grafógrafo, or Emilio Díaz Valcárcel’s Schemes in the Month of March or the anthologies of stories from the seventies generation or Juan José Saer’s The Witness or a rereading of Juan Carlos Onetti’s The Brief Life or a newly arrived copy of José Donoso’s Curfew. In those days I read Manuel Ramos Otero, and José Luis Gonzalez was still alive. I didn’t even have to read those books from beginning to end; the mere intention to read them already said the whole story. How often did I go to the bookstores, like the little one on San José street, opened even on Sundays, to stop at the table of new books; how often did I spend Saturday afternoons in Río Piedras between the basement of La Tertulia and the labyrinth of the Hispanoamericana? In these memories my emotions still stir, from the pleasurable expectation of seeing a new title to the sadness that inspires so much reading. I can say the same for the sounds of Roy Brown and Aires Bucaneros, Silvio Rodríguez and Pablo Milanés, of some record still on vinyl of Andrés Jiménez, Rubén Blades, Willy Colón, and from the political and cultural airs coming from Cuba, Nicaragua, and the rest of Latin America. There still remained some hope, some freshness in my life and one could still sip a bit of it at the bars and café nightclubs. The world could still change with a bottle of rum and the right tune.
It was around that time, a few months after I’d returned, the first letters arrived from Paris. The Pétrements and Simone wrote several pages filled with nostalgia and good wishes, but one day I found in my mailbox the letter that I know sooner or later would reach me. Just by feeling its weight and seeing Marie’s nervous, minuscule script—somehow she had gotten my new address—I knew it would be long and difficult to read.
At the beginning her tone was dry and bitter. She wrote out of indignation and guilt, and this irreconcilable mixture made her proceed in fits and starts. She said that even taking into consideration her role in the drama, she felt my reaction was absurd. She had never imagined that, on her return, she would find not only my terse letter but also that I had gone. There was no excuse, she said, for this hostility. It was ridiculous to throw overboard so much effort, to destroy without a second thought the future I was forging in Paris. In any case, the consequences of my actions were ultimately my problem; however, my departure also had an effect on her. According to Marie, nothing of what she had done had justified such a breakup. It was true she hadn’t written to me until now, which wasn’t right either. She admitted that. As I had doubtlessly presumed, she had gotten involved in a meaningless relationship with some man, but she felt I had reacted with a ferocity that the situation didn’t merit. We had survived such things before, and we would have been able to survive this too. She had fallen into a period of confusion that, unfortunately, had hurt me. For this she was responsible, but for the rest she could not forgive me. And besides, if things didn’t work between us, I always could have stayed in Paris and continued with my life. She was worried about what hardships I might be experiencing. She had visited Didier and Son, and they had spent a whole evening talking about me. Didier did not stop repeating, as he served more than half a bottle of cognac, that sooner or later I would feel suffocated in Puerto Rico. She encouraged me to reconsider my actions and to consider returning. I didn’t have to see her if I didn’t want to, although she wished that I would, but in no way should I be doing this damage to myself. “You must know that I’ve loved you and that I love you more than anybody, and this has nothing to do with our being together. I hope that you’ll forgive me and that I can forgive you, and am sending my love to you, all my love.”
I was already filled with doubts about having returned to Puerto Rico, and the letter made them worse. Perhaps I had acted out of an impulsiveness that was not typical of me and had been excessive, but at the time I had felt certain. And I was still sure of my decision. I didn’t know why (most probably I couldn’t explain it in a convincing way), but this was my reality. I had had to return, even if it was to suffer in this society in which I barely knew myself but which was the only one that could be mine.
I couldn’t answer her right away. Many times did I reread those pages with their lines scrunched together, and for a whole week I drafted and revised my answer. When I finally sat down to write, I put on paper only a fraction of what I had composed in my mind. I was capable only of addressing whatever was most anecdotal. The brief time spent in San Juan had diminished my sadness and I was no longer in any mood for arguments. I ended by reiterating my affection and the hope that someday we would meet again on good terms. But for the time being, I was staying put. I needed to be here, and besides, I had nowhere else to go.
Time gradually blurred the past. I lived as best as I could. The reencounter with the country made me return to writing, and the atmosphere of Old San Juan with its galleries and museums, aside from the dead time of loneliness, got me to take up again paints and brushes. With the passing of the years I was becoming another man and got to be many things: artist, teacher, painter and decorator, mediocre carpenter. I lived in many rooms and houses, embarked on and weathered the shipwrecks of several love affairs, and over a decade later finally became a father and husband. I built a life in San Juan, which, if it hasn’t been the best, has at least been my destiny. I’ve had a somewhat gray existence, which perhaps has given me the freedom to abandon many illusions. I expect very little. My motivations and pleasures are simple; achieving them is often precarious. But I have assimilated to this place that is mine in the world.
That is my story. I do not know how much of it is true, or how much I have rationalized my defects and weaknesses. But I do know that coming home to Puerto Rico was more important than all my travels. I don’t think it was merely a fleeing, an escape, but that no longer matters. Paris (or any other place) has ceased to be Paris. I have no more trips left to take.
San Juan came to be a corrosive acid that erased the past. Sometimes I have a hard time recognizing its faded traces. Memory, or rather the rational role I play in my memories, feels like a novel or movie read or seen years ago. Very little remains to tell, as if life in San Juan didn’t allow for having relationships with any other part of the world. After many letters and a surprise visit that resolved nothing and left me even more confused, my relationship with Marie dissolved. This was doubtlessly for the best. Her life kept going in circles around the same old problems. I didn’t want to have to deal with that anymore. When I saw her that last time, I did my best to bring her down to earth. To this end, I presented myself as weighed down by all my frustrations. I was a loner, poor and bitter, and didn’t pretend to be otherwise. I took her to the places I frequented, mediocre bars, restaurants, and parks that were often also dirty. She saw me get drunk every night while the electric fan, whose grate was covered with rust and dust, swiveled back and forth between us. Successively I tried to elicit her pity, sorrow, guilt, and repulsion, and to provoke the pain of both having lost me and seeing me lost in San Juan. Only bed with her could bring relief to those days. Only there could I breathe without hating her.
After an absence of several years in which we had no contact, I received from her, fairly recently, an absurd and nostalgic letter which I didn’t answer. I learned that Sandrine had married, divorced, and married the same man again—and, the last I heard, now lives with another man in Le Mans. Meanwhile, Simone has brought up her child alone, and every once in a great while I receive a postcard from her, almost always from some vacation spot, telling me she’s alive, more or less fine, and that she remembers me.
Didier Pétrement died a few months ago. Son sent me the news, and at the same time announced she was returning to Vietnam to live with her sister and nephews in Le Petit Vietnamien’s community there. Until the very end, Didier was loyal. We would write to each other regularly, and I always had news of his museum adventures and misadventures. He, in turn, knew about my problems and followed with interest the course of my projects. I would send him my books and catalogs of art shows, and he was sorry that his knowledge of languages didn’t include Spanish. Nevertheless, I am sure that he was the best reader I had. Then again, there haven’t been many, but rather a vast throng of readers who have never read me.
Since the time I left Paris, Didier and I were resigned to the fact that our relationship would not have the intensity it had before. Always, when I wrote to him, I translated my life; I would change things in these narratives so that he could understand and accept them without getting furious. We had a way of dealing with each other that we maintained until the end, unspoken. This was a way of making our affection for each other survive; it was a way to eliminate the penalty imposed by distance.
I felt reduced, impoverished by his death, but also freer. It became easier to live here, to be whoever I was on these streets, the person I might have never accepted otherwise. Sometimes I still light up incense sticks and think of him, remembering his dimly lit, encyclopedic workplace, seeing myself next to the hulk of his body, while he was showing me images and telling me things (myths, histories, archeological scandals) which were perhaps the most important stories I’ve heard in my life.
After an almost endless process (which I was on the verge of abandoning on numerous occasions) I finished my thesis. I spent a year and a half without a job, sometimes painting houses or cleaning pools, before attaining a contract at the University of Puerto Rico. I’ve been teaching there for over a decade, and I try to emulate some of the rigor and passion of my former teachers.
But, after leaving Paris and before becoming a university professor, I was a Spanish teacher at a private high school. That was my first job with a regular salary and the first time I had the opportunity to practice what I had studied. I labored there, like any novice anxious to prove himself, with exaggerated energy and enthusiasm. The willpower I put into my classes gradually tamed the students’ lack of discipline and awakened their interest. I was just a few years older than the seniors, and because I played basketball with them and went to their parties as well as teaching them, an atmosphere of camaraderie developed among us. During our Friday class, they’d ask me to talk about Paris. It was a way of relaxing the rigorous classroom atmosphere, but also a way to get to know each other. They were no doubt expecting the tale of my affairs with the women (whom they imagined excitingly liberal) but instead they got—and they began to listen more closely and seriously—the story of what my life had been there. When the hour was ending, promising more chapters, I discovered in them something akin to a kind of vague hope. Perhaps this was the first time they realized that, aside from following the business or professional paths of their fathers, there existed, for whoever wished to take them, other paths. It was in this way that Alejandro Espinal learned of me.
One night, after eating with some friends, I parked in the high part of the city. I was still living in Old San Juan, but I had moved to an apartment on Calle Cruz. This fascinated my students since it was the neighborhood where they hung out, and they assumed that, living so close to the bars, my life would be a kind of endless party. At some point I had mentioned the street where I lived without going into details, as I didn’t want them visiting me at all hours of the day or night. I was walking down the deserted slope of the road when I noticed a couple further ahead. They were shouting something, looking up. This was a common scene in San Juan, as most of the buildings didn’t have doorbells, so visitors had to shout to announce their arrival. I didn’t pay any further attention to them until I got to the entrance and started to struggle with the lock. The couple was shouting my name. The boy was blondish, thin, and wore glasses; his companion was an attractive light-skinned black girl who was slightly plump. I waited; they saw I was looking at them and shouted again.
“Who are you looking for?” I asked.
They said my name, my occupation, and the place where I worked.
“That’s me,” I said, surprised.
They came over to me, laughing. They had been looking for me for three nights and had shouted my name time and again at all the buildings on Calle Cruz, and—pointlessly—on the adjacent street, Calle Justo. They had followed my classes from afar, because they had heard about them from a friend, and had decided to meet me. I had made my students read great writing such as Cortázar’s Hopscotch, Vallejo’s poetry, stories by Carpentier and Borges. I had playfully introduced them to the nivolas of Unamuno and had acquainted them with a group of new Puerto Rican writers—Rodríguez Juliá, Ramos Otero, Magali García Ramis, Ana Lydia Vega—in whom they discovered an intimate, lively world they had never seen or imagined could be conjured up so well in a book. The story of their search for me was incredible. Alejandro Espinal was a friend of Guillermo Fernández, one of my best students, the only one who said he wanted to be an artist, and who was constantly drawing, reading, and writing. Alejandro had left high school before beginning his senior year because, according to what he said that night, he couldn’t stand being in all-boy classes or the oppressive atmosphere of future technocrats. At this point he was finishing college in the public system and, as was natural, he was still hanging out with some of his old high school friends. Thus he knew about my stories of Paris and wanted to meet me because he too wanted to go to France. The girl was smiling and nodding as Alejandro spoke rapidly, the words tumbling out of his mouth, his manner shy and at the same time arrogant.
I was captivated by his determination to make my acquaintance, and so that our meeting wouldn’t be so brief, I invited them for a beer. We went up the hill toward the bar Hijos de Borinquen which was then on San José Street, on the corner of Luna. I liked its unpretentious atmosphere and its hybrid nature (it was a mixture of bar and grocery store), and because it sold natural juices and had a jukebox that played the best Puerto Rican and Caribbean music. We found a table and I ordered three Medalla beers from the skinny old waiter.
We spoke about school and his former classmates. Alejandro gave terse answers, as if he weren’t interested in the direction the conversation was taking. He smoked nervously and laughed with the girl about things I didn’t understand. He mentioned Paris, trying to get me to talk about the city. I didn’t feel like it. He was very young, and I knew that his dreams would soon vanish for the most ordinary reasons. Besides, I had returned, Paris felt far away, and the reasons I had left did not form part of my best memories. I didn’t get that Alejandro had sought me out for days because of the attractions that Paris held for him. It didn’t pique my vanity that someone wanted to follow in my footsteps. I knew from experience that following such dreams of travel could be a mistake.
After a while, I made an excuse about having to get up early. With nothing more to talk about, they accompanied me to the door of my house. I didn’t invite them in, or to come visit me sometime. I congratulated them for finding me and said good-bye assuming I would never see them again.
We cannot always know what certain encounters may bring into our lives. There are people who don’t know who they really are or their effect on others. This significance is beyond them and they become the bearers of a message they don’t even know they convey. Alejandro Espinal would bring to me the most destructive and most lucid silence. His life would become a territory through which my days would blindly pass. He was only a detail, a short chain of incidents, but in him, more than in many events of my biography, lingered the danger of San Juan. He forced me to see what I never wanted to see. The society I lived in had also avoided contact, for centuries, with this image of itself. Unconsciously, my time in San Juan became a battle with the fast-moving shadow of Alejandro’s history.
I didn’t last much longer at the prep school. My innovations in the curriculum sparked controversies, and the shadowy and manipulative moves by the priests provoked uneasiness among the professors who had now chosen me to represent them. One day the director called me to his office and showed me evaluations of my classes. This document was unusual, as nobody had come to observe them. I knew what this consultation meant: when the year ended, they would not renew my contract. I decided to hand in my resignation after Christmas. I thought it was better to focus on my thesis than to wait and be left without a job. My parents helped me out financially, and seven or eight months later, I sent the manuscript to my director. At the end of October, I traveled to Paris for my defense. I stayed at Didier and Son’s house. I didn’t have to resist the temptation to get in touch with Marie because she had returned to live with her parents in New York, but I had a brief encounter with Sandrine. Time had distanced us, and our dinner in a restaurant was excruciatingly dull.
I planned to leave Simone in peace with her new partner, but after a few days with the Pétrements, the temptation was too great, and I called her. We met at the Café de l’Arrivée, almost directly facing the train station at Montparnasse. She was the same as ever, and the joy of seeing each other led us to rent a room in a rather dubious hotel, which we didn’t leave except to buy merguez sausage sandwiches at an Arab stand. We spent the whole night without sleeping, just talking and making love. When I returned the next morning, Didier and Son, who had noticed my absence, asked where I had been and, before falling into a deep sleep, I told them about my long coffee date with Simone. Before I left Paris, she and I decided, on a couple of occasions, to spend the whole night again in those labyrinths in which down-and-out traveling salesmen would give free rein to their secret desires.
I defended my thesis during a strike at the university. My director and I entered the Sorbonne through a side door that the students hadn’t barricaded. I presented my work without the attendance of a defense committee, when the building was completely deserted and the shouting of the protesters could be heard in the background. At the end, the director left his approval letter signed on the desk of an absent departmental chair. It would take me a long time to get hold of the diploma that officially documented my PhD. Afterwards, we left by the same door we’d entered, and in front of the metro station, I received the embrace that sealed the completion of my studies.
I walked a while around the neighborhood of the Place de la Contrescarpe and Rue Descartes feeling that the whole thing was a joke in poor taste. The end of my odyssey was strikingly banal: the signing of a piece of paper while sitting in an empty office.
Melancholy and the cold evening air eventually drove me to enter the metro and return to the Pétrements, who awaited me to go and celebrate in a restaurant.
Shortly after this, I left on a train for Alicante. Santiago and Isabel had invited me to spend a few days with them. Autumn had transformed the Spanish landscape, and the city was deserted and a bit gloomy. The color of the sea, once impeccably blue, had now turned gray, and a wind coming from the east chilled us to the bone. Amid dinners and excursions, I considered the possibility of staying there. My life in San Juan was lonely and unrewarding. Here I had the warmth of friendship and a world that offered some novelty. With a little persistence, I could find work as a translator or as an English teacher. But one evening Santiago made me see the light. I had no papers and I had never worked in Spain. Nor was I really attracted to the prospect of spending my life translating business documents or teaching the rudiments of a language. In San Juan, things might change once I had the doctorate in hand. After two weeks I hugged my friends good-bye at the railroad station. I spent a night in Madrid and took the midnight flight to San Juan.
I arrived on the morning of December 24. Weeks of absence had left an impressive layer of dust and salt residue on all the surfaces of the apartment. I spent the days of that Christmas break reading the books by Neptune I had bought in Paris. I’d had a hard time finding some of them. They were the first and only editions of an unclassifiable literature, the kind that didn’t fit in any genre. The covers and pages had already begun to turn yellow. It was instructive to consider this fact. Even in a literary city, a writer like Neptune could be obscure and his books practically unattainable. What could one expect in Puerto Rico, where much of the best literature died after one printing and in small editions?
The new calendar year brought me few things to celebrate. I had to move to a cheaper apartment that was in the southern part of Miramar. It was a small rectangle divided in half with a windowless bathroom. One entered through the side door of a building three or four stories high. Originally, the space had been part of the parking lot. Sometimes, especially at night when it was windy, bad smells blew in from the garbage dump. It was, without any doubt, the worst place I had ever lived.
I didn’t have a steady job and could get up whenever I wanted. I had persuaded a library to mount an exhibit of my paintings, so I worked there every afternoon until after midnight. I’d spend time with some friends who lived as I did. At night we’d hang out in the city. Once, chasing a rumor, we explored the streets of Río Piedras until we found a Middle Eastern restaurant near the mosque. There I ate dinner alone on countless nights, at a place that, at that hour, had very few customers, sitting next to Egyptian, Lebanese, and Palestinian import merchants, watching lengthy musical shows, in which, almost always, a woman sang and danced in front of an impressive band. It was my way of retaining the taste of the world in my mouth. It was, also, a way of grieving.
Only on rare occasions would I get out of San Juan, because neither my car nor my friends’ cars were in any shape to handle major expeditions. I became familiar with a poverty that was both human and material, similar to the one I had endured for years in foreign countries. But this poverty felt crueler for being in my own country. Here it was not embellished by exoticism, adventure or literature.
I was surrounded by a misery that people here always denied was comparable to the neighboring societies in the Caribbean and Latin America. My countrymen thus constructed a fortress with the mortar of our power lines, highways, shopping centers, colonialism, and the dollar. Our reasoning was false and limiting, confined to a belief that among us there were no barefoot children, that, like some species offensive to our eyes and good consciences, they had vanished when the country was opened to transnational companies and to an orgy of cement. We couldn’t or shouldn’t ask for more, which would seem senseless and ungrateful. But, despite appearances, air conditioners, refrigerators, the first personal computers, the country remained in the place it had occupied for hundreds of years. It preserved intact its handicaps, its persistent vocation as a disposable island, its beggarly gloating. Culture, aside from claustrophobic and belligerent ghettos, was always elsewhere. We kept repeating ourselves for almost five hundred years. We knew only how to admire or to scorn other countries that, basically, we didn’t even know. We always preferred to see, not the truth, but an image we had created of them and of ourselves. It was a dreadful vicious circle.
I worked for short periods on community projects in towns adjacent to San Juan. I translated instruction manuals for cement mixers, lawn mowers, and electronic toys. I sought work as a journalist, in government offices, and in a greeting-card factory. I never stopped reading and thinking and thus produced my first books and art shows. One day, unexpectedly, I got a call from the university.
University teaching allowed me to move from Miramar and to buy a stereo set, a television, and a DVD player. I could now look forward to the weekend, knowing that I could escape by watching some film on the foreign movie channel. With my first paychecks, I could acquire the appliances that were already in countless homes, but which, for me, constituted a kind of life preserver.
I spent very little. My only luxuries were books and art materials. I got used to living as an introvert. San Juan and the country could, at the slightest provocation, inspire frustration and anger, but I tried not to fall back on those props. When all was said and done I accepted the life I was leading, whether out of heroism or resignation I don’t know.
At the beginning of my second year as professor, I entered a classroom and discovered, at the back, sitting in the last seat in a row, someone I was sure I had met before. I looked at those paying attention to me from their desks and stopped at that face which I finally managed to place. He was the boy who, years earlier, had sought me out, shouting on a street in old San Juan. I remembered his first name but couldn’t recall his last name. He had filled out and no longer had the freshness of youth. When the hour was over, I greeted him warmly. Vanity led me to assume he had read my name on the list of professors and had leapt at the chance to take one of my courses. I soon discovered that this was not the case, and that the surprise of spotting each other in the lecture hall had been mutual. He had to take the course because it was required for graduation. Otherwise, it held no interest for him at all. He had been at the university for five years and was anxious to finish his degree in French. We took leave of each other with chilly civility and for several classes I watched him come in late and leave early. He sat at the same desk he occupied the first day, took very few notes, did not participate in class, and often did not even deign to look at me. One morning, before class, I found him smoking on the second-floor balcony. I had no reason to avoid him and so I came over to say hello.
“One doesn’t say en base de but rather a base de for ‘on the basis of,’” he said.
It took a few seconds for me to realize that he was correcting something I said in class.
“It’s an Anglicism,” he added.
“You’re right. Those are things one says without thinking,” I said justifying myself, confused by the tone of our exchange.
“Do you like doing this?” he asked at the same time he made a sweeping gesture toward the corridors, the lecture rooms, the entire building.
I said yes, but I knew he wasn’t convinced.
“The classics,” I said, “were never what I thought I’d teach, but one can do a lot with them.”
“But here?”
“Of course. Where else? I have no other place.”
“You think they understand you, or care?”
“The students merely reflect the society. Perhaps the university can be an antidote for some of them.”
He didn’t speak any further and put out his cigarette. It was time to enter the classroom. The conversation had gone badly. I could understand him, however. I was sure that, if I were in his shoes, I would have a similar doom-and-gloom attitude. This explained his choice of seat in the room, his aggrieved silence and antipathy toward me. I knew that, in all probability, he was the best student I had, and I wanted to offer him the benefit of my goodwill.
As the weeks passed, we met several times before and after class. Our conversations lasted the time it took to smoke a cigarette. Thus I had news of his friend Guillermo, who had left to work in New York and was applying to graphic design institutes. I also found out that Alejandro had helped organize a poetry reading in a bar in San Juan and had smoked so much that night that he had spent the weekend with tachycardia. He didn’t offer to show me his poems. It wasn’t even clear to me that he had read them in public.
The first exam he took in the class was excellent, but in the next one he didn’t get the highest grade. When he got it back, after having missed several classes, he came to see me.
“I don’t care about the grade, but I’d like to know what’s going on here.”
I took the pages and explained each of the comments I had written in the margins. My status as professor created a barrier between us. I knew that my explanations didn’t satisfy him, not because they weren’t valid, but because this was not what bothered him. Alejandro couldn’t get close without being aggressive. He’d compare himself to others and always arrive at arrogant conclusions. He thought he belonged in my place. I grew tired of his attitude and left him to his world.
I’d see him now and then on campus. He liked to sit on the benches around the humanities building, under the immense trees, to read, smoke, and drink coffee. Sometimes I saw him accompanied by a thin girl wearing glasses who built around herself a kind of impenetrable wall. They resembled one another, both of them taking on the same world-weary misery as if they were wearing hair shirts. On one occasion when I saw them together, we exchanged glances, but I knew, without a doubt, that I should not approach. They didn’t seem to be a couple, but, on the other hand, they encompassed an exclusive and despotic territory.
I knew our country and could imagine the causes of their isolation. The hard, unfriendly façade that they flaunted was only a feeble, and, in the long run, ineffectual defense of their pride. Alejandro and his friend, and others like them, lived in a society that barely accommodated them. They’d meet in the hallways, plazas, and classrooms of the university, after spending years as pariahs. Some literature, language, or art professor would take them under his wing and raise the flimsy bastions of their vocations as writers or artists. Behind them remained the dark, conflictive past that had brought them this far, the history of an outcast’s failure to adapt, which would probably never be resolved.
And so, despite everything, I offered him my friendship. One day I invited him home, adding that if he wanted to, he could bring his friend. He looked surprised, as if the second part of my proposal had caught him off guard, but he ended up accepting, unable to completely hide his eagerness.
They arrived almost two hours late. Knowing our local bad habit of not writing down addresses I went out on my balcony several times to see if I could see them looking for the house. Giving a false excuse, Alejandro and the girl, whose name was Rosa, finally came up to the top floor where I had moved and sat down on the uncomfortable sofa that I had bought from the landlord and which was right next to my workshop. This space would attract the attention of visitors because of my paintings, either finished or in process, leaning on top of one another against the wall, and the little piles of metal and wood I’d bring in from the street to make assemblages. I presumed, as I took curiosity for granted, that at some moment they would show some interest in my work. There was not one mention, however, during the whole night: it was as if my work were invisible.
I measured the magnitude of our misery. We dug trenches and fired weapons, as having received so many blows it was impossible not to expect more of the same. Thus we had to suffer this idiotic chitchat and drink beers in order to access some simulacrum of friendly exchange.
On a table in front of the sofa stood a pile of poetry books. The girl picked up one and opened it at random, pausing barely a few seconds on some line or stanza.
“I wonder how they can find anyone to publish this,” she said, grimacing at Alejandro.
The discarded volume was by Paul Celan. I decided it was pointless to mention who he was.
Alejandro glanced through an anthology of French poetry.
“Can I borrow this?” he asked.
I went to get us something to drink, figuring this would be the last time I would see the book. I heard them whispering. My absence had made them talkative. I had been stupid to invite them. I put on a record to make the night bearable for myself.
“Who’s that?” Alejandro asked, after sipping from the can of beer.
“You don’t know Léo Ferré?”
“He’s a great singer. He put Rimbaud and Apollinaire to music, and his own lyrics are also very good. He died recently, last July 14. He was an anarchist. You should listen to his songs.”
“He really put Apollinaire to music?”
“Yes, and other poets. He has an album dedicated to Aragon.”
“Can I hear them?”
“What?”
“Apollinaire’s poems.”
“I don’t think I have them.”
Finally I saw him show some interest in something and come out of his shell a bit. I went to look in the pile of cassettes from my time in Paris, but I didn’t find the tape.
“So, you like Apollinaire.”
“Yes, a lot. The Calligrammes are marvelous. I took a class with Marta and they were the best thing we read. The rest, Breton, Desnos, Char, and the surrealists who came later all seemed too cerebral. But Apollinaire is something else.”
I didn’t tell him that Apollinaire wasn’t exactly a surrealist. Marta must have been Marta Gómez Centeno, a French professor, with a PhD from Paris, and many years at the university. I had heard that she was good at giving language classes. She also knew how to inspire her students, and from generation to generation, they created circles of admirers around her. She taught more than the mere rigors of grammar and would show foreign films and organize gatherings and the visits of intellectuals. People gossiped that at her house, some years ago, with the help of a male photographer friend of hers, she had led sessions in “liberating the body” and among her refreshing new approaches were such Francophone goings-on as ménages à trois.
Aside from the gossip, Marta had been a pioneer, an initiator bringing into the country such diverse currents as structuralism, anti-phallocentrism, the first movies by Almodóvar and erotic comics. For years she had had a major impact on the lives of many students. Independent of what one thought of her methods, or of her, this was no small achievement. I had never met her but I knew that, if I had stayed in the country like Alejandro and Rosa, I would have been a member of her group. Recently she had surprised everyone with the publication of some slim volumes of poetry and narrative. She had created a big stir with her use of language (which, from what I heard, reproduced the most exact nuances of colloquial speech) and with handling subjects rarely touched upon, so to speak, in the country. Speculating on the bisexuality of Muñoz Marín, with abundant psychoanalytical, semiotic, or postmodern references in accessible language, she was taking a risk but also, as far as I could see, an opportunistic path to fame. Someone had written unjustly, in bad faith, that she was a female version of the gay artist Antonio Martorell. Her work was suspiciously didactic, useful because of this very fact for consumption by young, impressionable readers. She was that kind of egocentric island artist, aspiring to gather crumbs of recognition in a society almost totally lacking in artistic criteria and culture. She was a kind of simplistic native translator of modernity and postmodernity, at those inevitable key moments in which the official culture (aside from its folkloric traditions) needed to look good. She and a few others were perfect for rousing speeches, posters, and the front rows of inaugurations and funerals. They had opted, in detriment to their talent, to be court jesters in a court that wasn’t even sure if it existed.
“Did you see Marta’s last article in Diálogo?”
“Rosa hates men,” Alejandro explained. I had read the article in the university newspaper. It was an ambiguous and ironic homage to the woman who had tried to kill Andy Warhol and in it, in a muddled way, she connected the woman’s will to kill with the generic use of the masculine gender in Spanish.
“She’s right,” said Rosa. “Why not say las hombres?”
“Don’t start with that again, you always end up saying dumb things.”
“They might sound dumb to you, but we have to start somewhere. Why not call you la hombre?”
“Marta was goofing around.”
“Well, I’m not. And Marta wasn’t goofing around either. She was very serious.”
The conversation was all about people I didn’t know. They talked about classmates and professors whom they’d nicknamed the title of a book or the name of an author.
“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.