I left my hideout ready to turn around and go home in defeat. That was when I saw a man walking from Avenida Ponce de León. When he was twenty steps away, face lit by the street lamp, I recognized him as Máximo Noreña. He must have seen me from farther back because, without shifting his posture or raising his eyes, he walked straight over and welcomed me.
— Good evening, professor, he said, shaking my hand.
— What are you doing here? I asked.
— You also look like you were forced to go to Carmencita’s thing.
— In a way, yes, I replied, not wishing to go into details.
— It could be dreadful, you know. It seems that the appearance of a visiting writer from Spain is the sort of event for which one must drop everything and come running. Carmen called me at home at least twenty times to make sure I’d be here. I guess she is supposed to provide the novelist with indigenous literary specimens. At least we know his name, and some of us have read his books, but he won’t have a fucking clue who any of us are. There’s nothing like that difference to foster literary understanding, especially since he’ll interpret his ignorance as proof of his superiority. If he hasn’t read us, he’ll think it must be for good reason. These situations put me in an exquisitely bad mood and I’m afraid the night will turn into Madrid versus the West Indies, a reprise of the Conquest, with a possibility, I hope, of rewriting history.
— Who’s coming? I asked.
— Don’t you know? Noreña was surprised. A real somebody: Juan Rafael García Pardo. I thought they must have reeled you in, too.
— The one who wrote Time for Good-bye.
— Yes, and You’ll Never Go North Again and other annual offerings, all equally irredeemable.
— He’s not very good.
— He’s Spanish.
— What more could you expect, I said, laughing.
— Naturally, but don’t tell him so, because he’s on an evangelical tour paid for by his country’s Ministry of Culture, and he might take us for envious pygmies. I’m sure the first time he gave a thought to Puerto Rico was when he got his ticket on Iberia.
— Probably.
— You want to grab something to drink? Noreña suggested. We’ll have to go upstairs after, and it’s better not to rush it.
— Of course. Where should we go?
— There’s a cafeteria on Ponce de León.
When we sat at a table near the bar in the outdoor café, I felt good to be away from that building. Máximo got us a couple of beers.
— For many years, I thought what I missed the most about Europe were the cafés, he said. But when I had a chance to go back there, after a ton of years, I found that even those no longer held up to my memories of them. Now I don’t miss anything — not because this is any better but because just about everything has the same feeling about it and makes you feel like you haven’t traveled anywhere. Europe, the Europe you have in your head, which is basically an invention of literature, may have once existed, but I’m definitely not interested in looking for it or in finding it, either.
— You’re exaggerating a little, I said.
— Of course; exaggeration is a literary genre, Noreña clarified. What I’m getting at is that over there they have no idea how close they are to becoming imitations of us. We’re used to being worthless and to the poverty of earthly joys, but they aren’t. Here we know, at least anyone with a bit of perspective does, how rare it is to find a situation favorable to life, creativity, or what have you. If you are a writer, this is painfully obvious. But they’re blind. They still put their faith in the prestige of their traditions and in the symbolic (and to be perfectly clear, little more than symbolic) position their societies grant them, even if that is more out of inertia or custom than for any other reason. García Pardo, who lives from his writing, though not from his books but from the brief articles he publishes in the press, will refuse to see himself in this light and will think that he’s several steps above our situation. We aren’t subsidized by anybody, and we can’t write for a press that is pure garbage, and our books hardly exist for anyone. We’re a geographic, political, and literary island. But there isn’t a huge difference between the situation of a writer from Spain or whatever and us, though they’ll never be able to see it. And I’m telling you the truth: I prefer the clarity of being on the margins, in this squalor.
— They’re professionalized over there. In countries like Puerto Rico, it’s very hard to attain anything like that.
— That’s true, but it’s a precarious professionalization, filled with concessions and renunciations that make it nearly pointless. That’s the problem, right there. García Pardo can’t complain because he runs to pick up the crumbs they drop for him from the table. He isn’t free. He isn’t a writer so much as a hack who makes a living from filling a given number of column inches in the papers with sentences, and that is precisely what they look for in the people they contract, to fill paper with the dead letter of common wisdom.
— It’s preferable to what we’ve got.
Máximo Noreña looked at me as if he were examining my intentions, fearing I didn’t understand him.
— Let’s be clear about this, he said. We’re a half-formed country — that is, a society that’s never been able to think of itself as anything but a province. Our institutions, when they exist, fit that trend line. They can’t see past it. When the statehooders are in control, they don’t even go that far, and we get four years of self-destruction. If instead of being Puerto Ricans, we were Galicians, Serbians, Nigerians, or Costa Ricans, there wouldn’t be any huge differences. They also get the small publishers, the small reading publics, the nationalism for idiots, the isolation, the myopic administrations. The thing is — let’s take the Spanish case — is that they have centers, Madrid and Barcelona, with real cultural industries. Those are the major leagues, the Division I, and everything within them conspires to make you think you’re writing for the whole world.
— That’s one way to understand the disappointment their literature produces, I said.
— But have you read Juan Rafael García Pardo, whose name is too long for his book covers? It could be him or plenty of others, doesn’t matter. He has a culture, let’s call it “world culture,” that has allowed him to produce a presentable, even fairly decent text. But I insist, it’s that “world culture,” the fruit of a more or less effective school system, that allows him to dream of a Europeanness that is more a brand image than a sign of genuine prestige. I suppose he can identify the parts of a Corinthian column or a Romanesque cathedral; he’ll play up the legacy of Cervantes and the Golden Age, then jump ahead a few centuries to the Generations of ’98 and ’27, and he’s convinced that this tradition lends more authority to him than to others. Apart from that, he probably has a schoolboy’s French, old summer trips included, an adolescent fascination with New York and US cinema, and at opportune moments for bulls and flamenco. So he can write about fine wine or about terrorist attacks, whichever, and he constructs his Civil War or his version of the North American novel, in that hereditary language that sounds like it was snatched from a lawyer’s office.
Máximo Noreña’s arguments were leading him to a dead end. I saw him struggling against something enormous over which he had no control or influence. Nevertheless, behind the harshness was the passion of a man who was staking his life on a text.
The writer had set a clear plastic bag of small cigars on the table.
— Mind if I have one? I asked, carried away by an impulse produced by the tenor of that night.