One night, after roaming for hours, hungry, I parked the car in front of a Chinese restaurant on Avenida Esmeralda. There were other food places in the neighborhood, but I couldn’t stand sitting alone at a table, reading the menu, and waiting for the guy to take my order.
Chinese restaurants provided the local version of fast, lonely food. The one on Avenida Esmeralda was like any other: Formica-top tables, false ceilings, neon signs, the small plastic altar behind the counter with a fake incense stick crowned by a tiny red bulb pretending to make a perpetual offering.
I ate with my eyes fixed on the paper plate, oblivious to the few people in the place at that already late hour of the night. As I dropped the fork onto the handful of rice I would not be eating, the memory surfaced. I had been here, in this very restaurant, many years before, just before I started at the university, one summer night, with Diego and some other friends. Here, at one of these tables, enjoying some ice cream, we had talked about books and politics. I hadn’t fallen in love yet, hadn’t slept with a woman. Behind the counter, two teenagers appeared while we were talking. I observed the Asian girl closely, feeling the sort of sudden tenderness you only get when you’ve never known pain or disillusionment. Now, in the same restaurant on Avenida Esmeralda, I felt the insistent, imperious, anarchic certainty that the girl I saw then had been Li, that we had crossed paths for the first time many years ago as we each traveled along the force lines forming the city. The idea wasn’t entirely harebrained. I knew she had regularly visited the restaurants controlled by her family clan when she was a teenager. The boy, deprived of features in my memory, could have been Bai. Perhaps I had seen them just before their catastrophe. Long after that time, I found myself here again, desiring the same body, filled with the same unanswered love.
Having no clear idea of what I meant to do, after I recalled or invented that first memory in the restaurant on Avenida Esmeralda, I began to retrace our steps. I returned to the Asian products store across from the Isla Grande base and asked the boss if I could see Wen Da. Seeing me by myself, he looked at me warily and told me to wait because the old man had stepped out. A few minutes later, the bell over the door rang and Wen walked in with a woman. Summer had begun and Li’s “granduncle” was wearing a sleeveless T-shirt and a pair of shorts that looked more like old-fashioned underpants from which sprouted a pair of legs that were nothing but bones and thick veins. The old man didn’t see me or didn’t recognize me, for he stood right next to me in front of the boss’s desk arguing about something. On his skeletal wrist, he wore an enormous old watch, its dial face stained entirely yellow. I’d never seen one like it, and I imagined it must be one of the few objects he still kept from China.
Finally, I decided to attract his attention, and I saw him focus his eyes, magnified by his glasses, on me. He immediately made a slight bow, shook my hand, and indicated that I should follow him. I picked up the bag of provisions that the boss had given him and followed him up the staircase to his room. That afternoon no one else seemed to be in any of the rooms opening onto the gallery.
We had no language in common. Wen knew no English or French and was barely familiar with a handful of words and expressions in Spanish, but I knew he might have me sit down and make me some tea all the same. I’d come to see him because of Li, but I had no idea whether this action would yield any results.
After we sipped the tea and I watched Wen rustle around the room looking for a roll of rice paper with his latest drawings, I became aware that we had never stopped talking. Each was interpreting what the other one said. Sometimes a phrase was complemented by a facial gesture or hands acted out a pantomime that might mean “I like that,” “hot,” or “many years ago in China.” Wen spoke at length in his thin, hoarse voice, while his hands might form a school, a book, a town, a machine gun, a flood, or a deep sleep that might perhaps be death. When his hands imitated the rocking of waves and bodies holding tight to one another, I knew that he was telling the story of his journey to Puerto Rico. I recognized the long voyage, with stopovers, heat, and the overcrowding in the holds of the cargo ships, how he was treated by the police in an undecipherable country, a plane ride, and then the endless and indefinite kitchen work in restaurants, the same gestures repeated over a wok until your face becomes a mask of disgust. In response, I found myself talking, explaining who my parents had been, when and how they had died, and, with emotion constricting my throat, I said I hadn’t gotten a chance to communicate to them my pardons and thanks, memories and longings, which their death had made pointless. When I finally stopped talking, the hand with the huge watch patted my hands. I lifted my head to see a man whispering words of comfort that I was, perhaps for the first time in my life, ready to receive.
We remained silent while he heated up more water. As he refilled the cups, he began to speak in a different tone. There was no mimicking now, no effort to overcome the language barrier, as if Wen had forgotten or no longer cared that I spoke no Chinese. Nevertheless, I knew what the topic was. In the words he spoke there was one that came up over and over and stood out clearly. It was his niece’s name. I heard worry but also disappointment and sternness. I didn’t know whether those judgments were also directed at me. I answered, I argued, I explained. Wen interrupted me when it was appropriate, when it was fitting to call me on something or register a doubt in the debate we were imagining. In the end, we sat in silence, looking each other in the eye.
Talking had done us both good. Something more real than languages, more elemental and powerful, had come about within these four walls of misery.
Then Wen stood up and pulled a portfolio full of drawings from under the bed.
— Li, he said, his only explanation.
I untied the cords binding the two cardboard sides of the portfolio warped by the humidity. There, in some disorder, were the drawings Li had done since childhood: typical school assignments, drawings of a flower or a house, mother’s day or father’s day presents, which in her case had been dedicated to Wen. Then the old man’s influence became apparent, the niece’s attempts to do landscapes of cliffs and mountains in the traditional Chinese style, and, after she had probably taken an art class, portraits of her mother, of cousins, and of restaurant coworkers, sketched in pencil on school notebook paper.
At the bottom of the pile were more recent drawings, done with better materials. Among them were her first attempts at abstraction: labyrinths of lines, compositions with solid shapes painted in tempera or watercolor, aggressive machines inspired by surrealism.
Separated from the rest by the wax paper in which they were wrapped were some twenty pieces, done recently, because I recognized the paper and knew we had bought it on one of our outings. They were a variation on the usual dense blotches, seemingly made with the same stubbornly insistent line, but in this case leaving more blank spaces. At first sight, they looked like netting or honeycombs, but on closer inspection I realized they were formed by superimposing written phrases. Something was there in them: a word, a sentence, or an entire paragraph that had been written systematically over and over again until it became unintelligible.
The last dozen drawings were nearly identical, and it was logical to assume they constituted a series. They were denser and blacker, as if Li had tried to solidify the words. I inspected them with growing interest, suspecting that there was a message in them that Li had determined would not be read. One corner where the lines of the word had been written and rewritten less intensively gave me the clue. There, unquestionably, was the form of a b and the dot of an i. I checked and saw the pattern repeated in other drawings, perhaps five or six of them. This was how I found out what Li had been secretly drawing all the months she’d lived with me. She had written Bai’s name countless times, trying to erase it, cross it out, crush it into a solid blotch. The result was a rectangle of black lines that looked like a tombstone, her attempt to destroy the past.