A Love Letter to Eduardo Lalo’s Simone
Eduardo Lalo is a Puerto Rican novelist and visual artist. His latest novel, Simone, was released in 2012 (Corregidor), and is his first to be translated into English by David Frye in 2015 (University of Chicago Press).
Reading. I’ve done a lot of it, but never have I written to a fictional person before, and neither have I followed one around an unknown city. I justified my trip to San Juan by alleging that I was going alone, but a couple of days before boarding my plane, I remembered some travel advice that I once read from Tiphanie Yanique: read local authors.
My decision to spend the last week of December, including New Year’s Eve, in Puerto Rico baffled my family. “It’s very European of you,” my cousin told me. “Are you sure you’re not secretly meeting another man?” my boyfriend asked. I laughed, thinking of that Eddie Murphy skit — what’s a beautiful girl like you doing by herself on the island of love? I started feeling guilty, as if by purchasing my ticket to San Juan, I had already saddled up onto a lover’s mini-moto and driven off into the turquoise sun.
But there was no motorcycle — there was only a novel, spine down in the sand. Instead of any man: you.
*
I didn’t go to Puerto Rico to read. I went to write. I am a writer — like you. When I realize we share the same vocation, when I realize you have drawn a foot map of the city I am visiting for the very first time — bookstores, cafés, plazas, your favorite places to write — I can’t believe my luck. Even your voice endears me: I immediately relate with your discontentedness, your frustration with and anxiety around people, your sense of outsiderdom.
In San Juan, there are plenty of tourists, like me. And despite having no interaction with them, you are acutely aware that you live on alternate planes of reality. For example, you cannot fathom what the island looks like from the approaching mast of a cruise ship. You’ve never seen the “tourist’s sun,” nor do you attempt to do something so silly as rate it on a scale of stars.
All morning, I’ve been stuffed in a parched bikini, laid out on white sand. For you, the sun is “insufferable.” I realize I do not need TripAdvisor to understand that I, too, am bored by the beach.
*
You are a disenchanted, albeit brilliant novelist. Your writing career in Puerto Rico and elsewhere has been largely unknown. Unlike you, I’ve never attempted to write in such close proximity to the equator. It would seem easier with air conditioning. Are you from India? my Airbnb host asks, in English, over the sound of fan blades pushing out air.
I’m from New York, I tell her, but my parents are Latin American. I’m glad she doesn’t ask me to explain the realities of the Latinx diaspora, why my Spanish is choppy, why I speak only in English. She asks how my family is reacting to the fact that I’m spending Three Kings Day without them, and I tell her I don’t know what that is.
Her eyes grow wide and filmy, and my answer suddenly fills me with shame. She smiles. When I was growing up in San Juan, Santa didn’t even exist. Can you imagine that?
Admittedly, I can’t. I realize I don’t know if my grandmother could.
*
I follow your lead down Avenida Ponce de León towards the bus to Old San Juan. It is this line that motivates me to flee the scorching Airbnb:
“If the soles of my shoes were paint brushes, by this time my footsteps might have completely covered their surfaces… And so, with my foot-brushes, these shoe-markers, I express the autobiographical city, the city whose body my own body has covered.”
I walk to a café, reading, careful on the abundance of irregular alleys, sudden declines, uneven concrete. First, you ask if you exist on this island, noting that everyone finds your hobby peculiar, that writing has brought you no clout or fame. Then, you ask if you exist beyond the island, noting that Puerto Rico is only a concept as idyllic as its clichés. “Puerto Rico isn’t a cultural destination,” my brother said, when I first announced my trip. “Why don’t you go to Berlin?”
As a woman and first generation immigrant, I know what it means to exist beyond the world’s imagination, to try to redirect an invisible gaze. I could write dozens of manuals on it — instructions for how to see me. “I’m using these pages to log the passage of time,” you say, knowing that even the words that are read make very little difference.
*
You start receiving anonymous love notes. First in chalk at the university where you teach. Later, on your car windshield, tucked into pages. The notes fill you with teenage invigoration; they add cadence to otherwise motionless days. They lead you to the bookstores in Río Piedras. The journey from Sagrado Corazón isn’t long, and past the Plaza del Mercado with its hawkers and fruit peddlers and graffiti that breathes at your back like a person, there they are, the tiny stores where titles range from 2 to 30 dollars, where stacks of books are haphazardly stacked and disorganized, where it seems you could open a cover and find something alive.
“I came looking for you, but I don’t want you to find me,” your admirer writes, in one of her notes. “I want you to read me.”
*
Everywhere I go, I look out for you, to see if perhaps someone else is carrying you on their commute, is reading the same page as I am on the bus out of Santurce. Like you, I start people watching, jotting my thoughts down in notebooks. I take them with me to the center of the old city, to the exhibit Azules by Arnaldo Roche Rabell.
If your Puerto Rico is akin to a cage whose bars are oceans, someone else has noticed too. In enormous canvases that span entire walls, irregular pieces of wood and layers and layers of blue oil paint, Roche Rabell has created a prison of sea and sky. “I’ve learned to live among the rubble, satisfied not to be satisfied.” A labyrinth of unending blue.
*
Outside the exhibit, a crowd moves towards El Morro, the fort first constructed by the Spanish and later repurposed through four hundred years of colonial rule. I’ve taken a seat on the lawn, notebook open in my lap. Two little girls, one blonde, another brunette, skip a few paces ahead of me, yelling. Free! Freedom! They stop in front of me, throwing their heads back, and I am so close I can see their tiny teeth, both of their jigsawed smiles.
I remember your recounting of the man who drives to San Juan airport every night, who reads the newspaper at a table, enjoys a coffee at the terminal, only to return to his house in the morning as others board their planes. Sometimes, staying put isn’t about having money or even a passport. When I moved out of my parent’s house in Queens, I settled ten blocks away, afraid of leaving the borough and feeling guilty for even considering it. For many, freedom is the understanding that there are only so many places where home is possible.
*
Is blue always the color of longing, desire? When you finally track down your secret admirer, when you learn that she works at a restaurant you often eat at, you are shocked to find out that she is Chinese, and it is this identity, one of invisibility, of unrecognition, of navigating the island’s anti-chinismo, that you are enthralled by. You wonder, earnestly, what it feels like to be Chinese on the island. You realize you have never thought of this before, that perhaps your blue isn’t the only blue, or perhaps your blue is a kindred blue. Perhaps, in this prison, you aren’t alone.
*
I leave the house early to catch a bus. I’m not going back to Old San Juan, where the sea crumbles the walls in an effort to reclaim its place. Instead, I’m taking an aimless walk, the kind of walk you are accustomed to, my shoe-brushes leading the way. I walk through a long winding street in Santurce, and at the end of it, I arrive at a museum. Outside the entrance I see it: an enormous Fernando Botero statue.
*
Your secret admirer, whose face you now know, goes by Li. Soon, you are in love. You talk about how beautiful she is, how she lies out on the beach in Fajardo, the Eastern coast of the Caribbean shore, and this is your thought as her limbs unfurl: “love [is] the impossible and failed attempt to protect someone from her own life story.” You cannot erase her pain, her trauma. All you can do is watch her, and yearn.
*
When I was doing a Fulbright in Colombia, the country where my mother was born, I saw my first Botero statue. Similarly, it was outside a museum, but that time, in Medellin. When my mother came to visit me, it was the first time she’d been back to the country in decades. She fell in love with the Boteros as much as I did, and when we saw a cat-sized replica of the Reclining Woman early on in her visit, I convinced her not to buy it, positive that we’d come across another again.
We never found another miniature after that, and to this day, we still talk about it in regretful tones. Outside the Museo de Arte in Santurce, San Juan, here she is — without warning — our Reclining Woman. My eyes become warm and honeyed. When I recount the experience to my mother later, I feel compelled to tell her she was too large to move, too much to carry back on my own.
*
You and Li are drifting apart. When you are confronted by a renowned Spanish writer who is surprised that Puerto Rico imports so many books, who is astonished at the island’s literacy, you channel some of your heartbreak into rage. Rage fueled by “centuries of belittlement,” by what you, referring to the way in which writers are or aren’t elevated to fame, term “not a literature, but a publishing industry.” Rage fueled by a “whole history of humiliations,” the inability to define your humanity, to create nothing more than “passing waves in a pond.” Rage about living on an island that nobody cares for or counts. Rage from the fact that a woman who never asked to be found might be a woman you will be losing forever.
*
I am going back to New York after seven days in which I have not written any new parts of my novel. I realize one of my mistakes is that I often operate under the assumption that there is nothing as interesting as the way I interpret it.
When you’ve just finished reading a great book, there’s always a reluctance to part with it. Though my Airbnb host has a bookshelf for guests to donate and take books as they like, I decide to take you with me to New York. At home, I tell anyone who asks about how you kept me company — the bookstores and cafés and realizations I came to only because you led me directly to them. Back in the Northeast, the days become darker and colder, and I forget all about the San Juan sun.
One day, by the time I’ve made lots of progress on writing my novel, it’s warmer and I remember again. I rifle through my bag, the one I’ve left mostly unpacked in a dark corner of my apartment. Under fossilized towels, I find you. Like picking up a phone call from an old friend, there is a silence, then a crackle as the page turns, and suddenly, I hear you again. On a piece of paper I rip from a journal, I write in my neatest script, thank you. I press the note between your opening pages, knowing that words, even those that are read, make only the littlest difference.
