— I see where you’re coming from, but I cannot agree. Spain has produced a century of great literature, before, during, and after Franco.
— It’s been an insular literature that doesn’t resonate beyond the peninsula.
— And where would you leave Unamuno, the Generation of ’27, and Lorca?
— I’ll give you the first one, Noreña said. Unamuno was one the last intellectuals to confront his own society, and that always has some force. The Generation of ’27, apart from Lorca, was a local phenomenon, and his influence extended only to Latin America and in a very temporary way. Postwar Spain clung to them and mythified them, making them much more than a literary phenomenon.
— It’s the same with you, said García Pardo.
— With who? asked Noreña.
— All you, the Latin Americans.
— To a certain degree you’re right. For a long time, Latin America was a poor copy of Spain. But this part of the world is where literature in Spanish was revived.
— That claim has to be approached with a critical eye, too, García Pardo responded. The Boom was invented by a Catalan publisher, and years ago, García Márquez ceased to be the towering figure he had become. Cortázar, it’s a shame to say it, but now he looks like a writer for little love-struck couples, and Borges is an Argentine show-off.
— Those are rather simplistic opinions, I said.
— Like yours, García Pardo replied.
— We were talking about Spain anyway, said Noreña.
Carmen had set a fresh glass of whiskey on the table for García Pardo, who took advantage of the pause to light a cigarette.
— I detect tremendous frustration in you fellows, said García Pardo. Puerto Rico is a small country and that perhaps has something to do with it. You gain nothing by taking it out on us. We aren’t your enemies. I’m not even sure if enemies exist.
— You’re wrong, said Noreña.
— Mind telling me why? said García Pardo, who was starting to look for a way to end the conversation.
— Literature can’t bear a sham. That is what I am talking about. Today, Spain doesn’t have a literature; it has a publishing industry, and good readers hate being sold a bill of goods. I don’t question the value of some authors, but they’re victims of the industry, too.
— Oh, God! That’s all we need!
— A literature, Noreña went on, is more than a pile of books. A literature, no matter how minor and limited it is, such as Puerto Rican literature or the literatures of other countries around Latin America and the world, cannot be confined to being an endless succession of books. It has to grapple with something. Now, I’m confronting you and the world you come from. Tomorrow, it will be something else. The best of Spanish literature was what came from the writers who were, so to speak, anti-Spanish, external and internal exiles who couldn’t be at peace with the brutalization of their society. Today, they’re nearly an extinct species.
— Máximo, said García Pardo, that won’t get you anywhere. Only to hatred. Excuse me.
García Pardo stood up and left the living room. The guests surrounding us opened up to let him leave, and we all remained silent.
— Enough already, said Carmen. Juan Rafael is in my house, and this isn’t the treatment he deserves.
— And what sort should he have been given? I asked.
Carmen looked at me for an instant, wheeled about turning her back on me, and walked off in search of the writer. Li, who had been present at the debate, approached me.
— I hope what you said had nothing to do with me, she said.
— You know it didn’t, though now that you mention it, I think it did, that it had a lot to do with you. Anyway, I wasn’t the lead singer.
— You were a duo.
— You look different. You even sound different.
— So do you.
— Is your friend going to let you see me?
— The situation is complicated. I lost my job and lots of things have happened since the last night. I’m sorry for getting you mixed up in my problems, but it couldn’t have been otherwise.
— You’re moving away? I asked. That’s what I heard.
— I don’t know yet, but probably.
— In other words, that’s your way out.
Li did not answer; she took my hand, and we embraced.
— I’ll call you and we’ll see each other. I promise you. You’d better go before they throw you out, she said, smiling.
We could hear voices from the other rooms. García Pardo, Carmen, and somebody else were talking very loudly. I went out the front door without saying good-bye to anyone. Noreña was waiting for me by the stairs.
— Cigarette? he offered.
It was back to smoking.
Rumors soon circulated about the scandal into which the debate with García Pardo had devolved. Carmen Lindo’s rage had been monumental. For the rest of the soirée and over the next few days, she had probably not talked about anything else. My having shown up uninvited, my having been Li’s partner and Noreña’s friend, together with our bitter debate with the Spaniard, gave Carmen an open invitation to slander me. When I went by La Tertulia one afternoon, I felt too many eyes staring at my back. A few of the people who worked there, being more informed than anyone else regarding tales great and small from the literary world, stopped me to ask about the affair. I learned through them that the prevailing version accused us, Noreña and me, of being arrogant and envious.
The controversy had served to air some old dissatisfactions. Noreña and I came out of it as a couple of minor hacks with outsized egos who had gone after the foreign writer with fever-crazed arguments. We were accused of being chauvinists, and countless professors of language and literature imputed a new mental illness to us: Hispanophobia. A novelist who, for other reasons, had earlier tried to tear us both to pieces saw the confrontation as the shameful proof of our Frenchification. Few sympathized with our position, and even fewer among them understood what had brought it about. In the end, Carmen made her move and, to mollify the great author, got the Department of Hispanic Studies to hold a discussion session with him in the university auditorium.
I called Máximo, who had given me his phone number when we said good-bye that night, and found that he already knew all about it. He told me to meet him the following day on the foot bridge connecting Muñoz Rivera Park and Escambrón Beach. I arrived early and strolled up and down the tree-lined walks. I liked feeling the gravel of that park beneath my feet, looking at the cement benches built to look like tree branches, some of them almost a century old. Not a soul was there, naturally enough, on a workday afternoon.
At the agreed-upon time, I found Noreña watching the traffic from the center of the bridge. We went and sat facing the sea on the stairs next to what was once the Naval Reserve Officers’ Club.
— You haven’t seen Li? he asked.
— Not yet, I replied.
— You may have to wait a while. García Pardo is leaving today.
— We’re really getting dumped on.
— By the same people as always. I’m used to it. Still, they’re right about one thing. I spoke, maybe so did you, with all the harshness of someone who no longer expects anything. Not even a gesture of friendship. It’s the voice of disillusionment and the open wound, a voice that leaves no room for anyone. I believe in what I said, I think it is regrettably true, but I didn’t allow García Pardo to see that perhaps he, too, is a victim.
— It seems to me, I said, that he wouldn’t have been willing to entertain the idea. He’s fully accepted his function as the writer on the autograph tour. From his point of view, he’s made it, and we don’t figure in the game. He was probably expecting us to ask him to sign a copy of his book and banter with him about banalities. He never imagined we’d start questioning the ground he stands on.