Nor did I, but that did not stop the FBI from messing with my phone. Suddenly, I’d pick it up and hear all these clicks and sonic hums, and switches — even voices in the incredible distance, ever so faint but audible, saying things like “Roger that” and “Roger out”—whistles too, sometimes so loudly that I’d have to pull my head away. (My brother and mother experienced the same disturbances.) This bugging happened to coincide with my Southern California romance. Calling me nightly, she loved to go recount the details of what we had once done, what she would do the next time she saw me, the places where she ached inside, how she was touching herself just thinking about me, and, along the way, moaning as she’d breathlessly bring herself around — in short, a bit of phone sex. What those agents made of it, I can’t say, but on a few occasions, I’d hear a click, and static and screeches, as someone (I think) listened, until the poor guy on the other end couldn’t take it anymore.
As for Eduardo, the poor soul, eventually apprehended and tried, was sent to jail, where he continues, I think unjustifiably, to linger to this day.
All in all, I really didn’t have much to complain about. As a Latino writer — no matter how I looked upon myself, that’s what I happened to be — I had already done quite well. My book had come out with a New York house, a very rare thing; I had been reviewed in the Times, an even rarer occurrence for a Latino writer; and, best of all, along the way, I found a place, however peripherally, with my own special community of writers. Not just the inner-city thing with friends like Julio Marzan and Ed Vega, but in a scene so erudite, yet social, that it was to become known as a hub of Latin American literature in New York City.
Situated in a McKim, Mead & White Georgian brownstone on Sixty-eighth Street and Park Avenue were the offices of the Americas Society, an organization dedicated to the promotion of cultural ties between the United States and our hemispheric partners: Canada, the Caribbean Islands, and Central and South America. Also known as the Center for Inter-American Relations, its ground floor boasted an art gallery, whose shows were mainly dedicated to exhibitions culled from the Latino diaspora to our south. On an upper floor, reached by a winding robber-baron staircase, were several ornately appointed salons in which all manner of programs, from music recitals to business lectures, along with a profusion of poetry and prose readings, literary panels, and such took place nearly every night of the week, each event followed by cocktails.
I’d first caught wind of that place while lugging my corrected manuscript of Our House around a book fair on the East Side. A friend had suggested that I introduce myself to a woman at one of the booths, a director of programs at the Americas Society, Rosario Santos, a transplanted Bolivian who couldn’t have been kinder when I shyly (terrified of the notion of having to speak Spanish with her) introduced myself and, eventually, left her that copy. In turn, she had passed it on to her deputy there, a vivacious, wildly attractive young Hispanist, a certain Lori Carlson. One of those rare creatures unable to resist helping others, she, upon reading Our House, later hosted me as the special guest speaker at a program of her design called Books and Breakfast. On that occasion, just after the novel had been published, I gave a reading from it and answered questions for a small gathering of mainly Latin American businessmen, all before the hour of nine in the morning, after which I went off to work, attending to my subway clocks. She also assigned a cubano, Enrique Fernandez, to write a critical — and as it would turn out, quite positive — piece on Our House for the literary journal she edited, Review, an honor, as far as I was concerned, given the incredible caliber of the authors whose work she championed in its pages.
Ms. Carlson, whose Grace Kelly looks and sweet temperament turned more than a few heads, also officiated over a number of literary evenings in which a nobody like me could not only attend charlas—lectures — by some of the most prominent writers of the Latin-American boom, but afterward find himself rubbing shoulders (bumping into literally, the rooms were so crowded) with the likes of Mario Vargas Llosa, José Donoso, Luisa Valenzuela, Carlos Fuentes, Elena Poniatowska, Octavio Paz, Ernesto Cardenal, and, among so many others, the towering, Lincolnesque Julio Cortázar. (Which is not to say that there weren’t any non-Latinos around. Two I can recall were the poet/memorist William Jay Smith and the novelist William Kennedy, fresh from winning a Pulitzer for Ironweed. He couldn’t have been more cordial and respectful of me, and took pains to pronounce my last name as accurately as he, married to a Puerto Rican, could. Both he and Smith were real gents.)
I also made the acquaintance of some Cubans there, among them Héberto Padilla the poet, as well as the greatest of Cuban novelists, Guillermo Cabrera Infante (a wonderful man), whom the center had first introduced to an American audience. Other Cubans turned up, sometimes from the island, like Pablo Armando Fernandez, but since one side always boycotted the other, you never saw the pro- and anti-Castro writers in the same room at any given time. (Somehow, after attending a reading by Fernandez, I met his father, who, at hearing my story of my Cuban/American conflicts — which is what I tended to talk about with some folks — he told me, “Well, being half-Cuban is better than not being Cuban at all.”) Another Cuban writer, who would become most famous posthumously in a film, Before Night Falls, Reinaldo Arenas, thin and wan, and wretchedly broke, also frequented the center and had gotten his first job in New York, teaching writing, through its office. I happened to have met Renaldo, whose short and slight body was topped by an implausibly large head, his skin quite pocked, his handsome features ever so tender, in Books & Co. on the East Side one evening. We spoke (in Spanish — how I did it, I do not know) about the fact that he had grown up in Holguín, where my mother came from; I told him I had just published a novel, and he seemed quite touched to meet a kindred soul. (I gave him a copy of Our House, which I got off the shelf and paid for. He accepted it, while confessing he couldn’t read English. “Pero gracias, hombre,” he told me, handing me his card in exchange.)
Most impressively, the center also hosted one of my idols, Jorge Luis Borges, whom I met briefly, and whose hangdog but beatific otherworldly face I have obviously not forgotten. Altogether, those fetes, which welcomed everyone, were of a moment that would never be seen again, a moment when such a place, like the Americas Society, afforded two worlds, that of Latino and non-Latino, the opportunity to come together and celebrate the grandeur of a shared culture. (I am not certain of too many things, but I will venture to say that I doubt the word spic had ever been uttered, or even thought of, in that building.) Compared to any American literary cocktail party I’d ever attend, those evenings seem now like some distant dream.
I may have had an ordinary job, and I may have had a hundred doubts about myself as a Latino, and all kinds of gripes about a million things, but, lordy, when I’d leave that center, I’d feel really good about my Latin roots, and in a way I never had before, even if, by the next afternoon, after trudging through one subway station after the other and catching a few stiletto glances stabbing into the back of my head, from Latinos who didn’t like whitey, that glow of belonging — and relating to that literature — might ebb and eventually fade. All I know is this: Since those days, I’ve never again experienced a literary scene so inclusive, nor so nurturing through the sheer heft of intellectual sharing, nor one in which being a Latino writer really counted for something.