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