12 A Tale of Three and a Half Cities: Geographies of Identity in Mayra Santos-Febres’s Cualquier miércoles soy tuya

French philosopher Gaston Bachelard wrote that we humans “don’t so much know ourselves in time as in a sequence of spaces” (8). Our experience of the world is always spatial and geographic. We experience our present in specific locales. We remember our pasts within the context of spaces and places. If afterward we organize these recollections into a temporal sequence that allows us to tell the tale of our lives, the building blocks of that chronological ordering are spatial. We are first and foremost spatial beings, what geographer Robert Sack calls Homo geographicus.

This is even more the case in the modern world. We no longer participate in some long, slowly developing history experienced over a lifetime from the comfort of a single home, village, church, and town square. Today growing numbers of human beings live their lives continuously on the move. We inhabit any number of homes between birth and death. We vacation, labor, and learn in an even wider variety of spaces. Moreover, we are aware that so many of the events of our lives are shaped by forces occupying other spaces and places. We are embedded and sometimes feel ourselves entrapped within a deep spatial dynamic. Per Michel Foucault, “the anxiety of our era has to do fundamentally with space, no doubt a great deal more than with time” (22).¹⁹

Among our first academic lessons in reading literature is the question of setting. After learning to think about storytelling in the obvious terms of plot and character, we, as schoolchildren, are invited to consider a thing called setting. While the order of the first two—plot and character—might flip depending on who was providing the instruction, setting is invariably third. As such, setting may seem a kind of afterthought, something to identify but not to discuss. It provides mere background, simple scenery that promotes the sense of reality against which characters appear to come to life and plots twist and turn in ways that feel real. At most, setting might function metaphorically, working via analogy to encourage appropriate interpretations of character or to underscore subtle contradictions between words, thoughts, and actions. That, at least, is what we are generally taught.

We know, however, that sometimes space, place, and geography work within literature in far more profound ways, particularly in the twentieth- and twenty-first-century novel. James Joyce’s Dublin, William Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County, the jungles of Horacio Quiroga’s short stories, or more recently Gabriel García Márquez’s Macondo are more than mere backdrops for character actions. The geographies, the streets, the forests, the sultry heat, or the bracing cold overwhelm and outlast the people who pass through them. Sometimes they are the principal antagonist, the overwhelming force against which characters struggle. In extreme cases, such as John Dos Passos’s Manhattan Transfer or Camilo José Cela’s La colmena, one is tempted to name the cities of those works the very protagonists. Who or what else features so prominently? Who or what else evolves so much over the course of the novel? Who or what else does the novel bring so clearly to life?

In Puerto Rican novelist Mayra Santos-Febres’s novel Cualquier miércoles soy tuya (2002), geography doesn’t grab the reader’s attention in the same way. Nevertheless, in the end, a handful of spaces shape character actions, and, from the beginning, the novel’s problematization of the space of Puerto Rico itself makes the story much more than a simple noir thriller.

The spaces of Santos-Febres’s novel initially seem more akin to traditional settings. The book jacket calls Cualquier miércoles a “Latin noir mystery that brings to life the San Juan underworld.” Rich descriptions of Puerto Rican nightlife abound:

Dicen que las ciudades son el lugar de la acumulación anónima pero, en estas islas perdidas en el medio del Caribe, sólo unos cuantos transitan las ciudades nocturnas. Y por tanto, sólo ellos se reocnocen. Una vez que cae el sol, el hormiguero de oficinastas, empleados corriendo de ayuntamiento en ayuntamiento, tiendas, cafeterías y colegios se retrae hacia el submundo de loas urbanizaciones a la oriall transformada de los campos, de los mangles y las playas. La ciudad queda como una inmensa plaza de pueblo chiquito, lista para acoger a los merodeadores de la noche. (12)

`[They say cities are full of nameless crowds but in these islands adrift in the middle of the Caribbean, only a few loners cruise the cities at night, and they recognize each other. Once the sun goes down, the swarm of suits and workers running from office to office, from stores to delis to schools, retreats back to the suburban underworld in the shifting outskirts of the country, the swamps, and the beaches. The city is like a huge park in a small town, ready to welcome the night’s marauders.]

And this:

Después del semáforo intermitente, entrando por las callecitas de las joyerías a descuento, oficinas de envío de valores, sastrerías y colmados anunciando mercancía fresca por altoparlantes, quedaba la ciudad. Una ciudad chillona y desigual, pintarreteada de colorines de feria—azul celeste, fuesia, amarillo mangó—con su cielo tajeado de cables eléctricos donde reposan las palomas de su constante vuelo para recoger migas de la brea siempre caliente. (42)

[The city spread out through blinking red lights, narrow streets lined with discount jewelers, money transfer outfits, tailor’s shops, and markets hawking their fresh tomatoes on loudspeakers. A harsh and ragged city, awash in colors—sky blue, fuchsia, mango yellow—whose skies were crisscrossed by power lines, where pigeons perched after their constant search for bread crumbs on the hot tarmac.]

Unlike Eduardo Lalo’s Simone, Santos-Febres’s Cualquier miércoles appears to be delivering the tropical, big city San Juan, Puerto Rico that we imagine, the perfect setting for a textbook Latin American novela noir.

Except from the beginning there’s a catch. As Guillermo Irizarray has noted, San Juan is, in fact, never named in the novel. We only assume we’re reading about San Juan. Victor Figueroa elaborates on this observation, noting that the failure to call San Juan by name actually heightens the importance of the city in the novel. While the city certainly functions as San Juan for a casual reader—as the book jacket itself evidences—the setting could be any other Hispanic-Caribbean city: San Juan, of course, but also Santo Domingo, Havana, or one of the Santiagos. The unnaming frees up the semantic possibilities of the novel’s spaces, even suggesting the same slippage at an island level.

We have already noted during our reading of Lalo’s Simone the curious, frustratingly liminal nature of Puerto Rico itself. It is a place that from the Spaniards’ first discoveries was more of a way station than a place to settle. Today it is a place that can’t decide what it is or would be, let alone how to get there. But as depressing as the vision Lalo outlined over the course of his novel, even more devastating was the analysis of the Puerto Rican condition laid bare by Lalo’s friend in his discussion with the esteemed Spanish novelist in the waning pages of the novel. As he argued, for all its challenges, Puerto Rico is ultimately a synecdoche for the postmodern, globalized condition that similarly binds the Spanish author, if not Lalo’s global readers. Lalo, as we observed, ultimately returned to Puerto Rico, despite his deeply critical take on his homeland, because he could finally find no difference between it and the Paris to which he had escaped. Once the romantic varnish wore off, the place of myth was just another space of liminality.

Figueroa, in his reading of Cualquier miércoles, has noted that the violence that Santos-Febres’s novel depicts is itself sadly global, part and parcel of the neoliberal market economy that, Lalo’s novel pointed out, had flattened differences (444). The drug trafficking that we will see feature so prominently in Cualquier miércoles, like other more legal and much more celebrated global supply chains, builds bridges and forms connections between separate classes, races, ethnicities, places, and economies. It’s all part and parcel of the globalized world.

In Cualquier miércoles, these connections happen on islands, in unnamed cities, in curious places, and in spaces that hardly function as places. Nadia V. Celis, for example, has noted the proliferation of what she calls “spaces of desire”—cabarets, motels, and bordellos—as metaphors of the Caribbean in Mayra Santos’s novel. Alfredo Sosa-Velasco, while focusing on the role of the writer in the novel, notes that writing functions as a kind of walking—an occupation for the novel’s protagonist and for readers—of the city’s spaces (90). As these critics demonstrate in their spatially focused readings of the novel, in space, to return to Baudrillard, we know ourselves. In spaces, supply chains—licit and illicit—meet.

Three and a half spaces situate and give significance to the action in Santos-Febres’s novel. The first is the Motel Tulán, the principal setting for the bulk of the novel and the space in which the vast majority of the story’s key characters cross the paths that drive the novel’s detectivesque plot forward. The Motel Tulán is the place our protagonist, Julián Castrodad, goes for work when he realizes his job as a reporter at the local paper isn’t going to last. His coworker on the motel night shift is one Tadeo Chamdeleau, a Haitian-Dominican who has worked illegally for years in Puerto Rico. He plans to save enough money to reunite with his family one day and build his aged mother a decent house back in Haiti. Julián, with nothing to do but serve and observe the clients coming and going night after night at the motel, soon becomes mixed up in an affair with an older woman he and Tadeo refer to as “la Dama Solitaria” or Madame M (for “mysterious”). The Dama Solitaria stays at the motel every Wednesday night, shuts herself in her room and writes. Soon after Julián’s arrival she opens a space in her writing schedule to seduce the newcomer. Julián and Tadeo also note on their watch the comings and goings of drug traffickers, union bosses, and their lawyers among others. The motel rooms provide the ideal space for their clandestine activities. The confluence of all these groups will eventually come to a head, providing the novel its moment of climax followed by a swift, comitragic denouement.

It doesn’t take a theorist to point out that motels are rather unusual spaces. Most of us, every night, retire to our homes and to our own beds where we drift into a renewing unconscious of which we have little recollection even seconds after awakening. From there we bathe, dress, and likely breakfast before departing for a life lived in the myriad spaces that comprise the rest of our days. The place we daily rest soon becomes our most sacred space. It is our place of deepest intimacy, our site of individual rest, renewal, often of spiritual prayer, sexual play, and our most private of conversations. Our homes and our bedrooms, then, are typically charged with deep meanings. They have rich histories of either human interaction or regular respite from such interactions. They are spaces that geographer Robert Sack has referred to as “thick.” “Thick spaces”—homes, public parks and plazas, cities and states—contrast in turn with “thin spaces,” typically privatized, carefully controlled locales which admit only certain types of people under very specific conditions and in which their actions are carefully controlled. The motel is the “thin space” par excellence.

But motels are more than just thin. Michel Foucault includes motels in a category of spaces he terms heterotopias. Motels, like other apparently commonplace locales such as village cemeteries, hospitals, theaters, passenger trains, planes, and ocean liners, are “counter-sites.” They look like so many other normally thick places (Sack’s term, not Foucault’s), but their function is radically different. They are where societal norms are regularly, even ritually, transgressed (24). Inside them momentary admixtures of a wide variety of otherwise carefully distinguished space-time arrangements are permitted and even encouraged. Within this mixture, according to Foucault, “all other real sites that can be found within the culture, are simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted” (24). Heterotopias, when seen in the complexity that exposes what they really are, hold a mirror up to society, wherein we may recognize what for Foucault are the “messy, ill constructed, and jumbled” geographies of reality (27).

But while thin and heterotopic for its patrons, the motel is simultaneously the place where our protagonist, Julián, and his friend Tadeo work night after night. They are the gatekeepers who maintain and manage the heterotopia, keeping its social transgression safely thin for the sake of broader society. For them, however, the motel is a space as real and thick as any they inhabit over the course of the novel. It functions for them as a kind of home. Indeed, home is in high demand in the novel. In the course of the plot we readers essentially enter only three homes, none of which feel very thick. Of those three, the only one we spend any significant amount of time in is that of our protagonist, Julián. But the few times we see him there he’s engaged in rather indifferent, perfunctory conversations with his otherwise perfectly lovely girlfriend, Daphne. Even their moments of intimacy within are more driven by physical lust than any sense of commitment to a caring relationship. While Julián squanders his chances for love on the homefront, Tadeo stays focused on work in hopes of someday providing a home, or rather, two of them, one for his mother in Haiti, and another for the family he hopes to have someday in Puerto Rico. And while Julián appears on the one hand to squander his chance at a home, his failure to nurture his relationship with Daphne may suggest a desire for something deeper and more enduring than that manifest in a rented apartment. Even if mistaken, his experience in bed with the Dama Solitaria is illustrative:

Ser otro en la ausencia del yo que busca, perder el motivo de la búsqueda en el trazo del roce y de tan perdido ni preguntar por dónde se anda. De tan perdido perder la distancia entre lo buscado y el que busca. Que la distancia entera fuera lo único existente, uno diluido en ella, siendo parte de ella, su cuerpo, las partículas del cuerpo del deseo, de la muerte misma que anunciaba las cabezas caídas para jamás levantarse. (225)

[to become someone else in the absence of the ‘I,’ the one who is always searching to lose the motive of the search when contact is made and to not even be able to ask where I am because I remain so lost. So lost that the distance between the searched-for and the search has disappeared. So lost that the entire distance was the only thing that existed, you lost in her, becoming part of her, her body, the particles of the body of desire, with death itself announcing that the fallen heads will roll, never to rise up again.]

Extreme perhaps, but a manifestation of some kind of lack in his life, nonetheless.

His desire to move beyond mere motel trysts, or in other words to take the relationship with the Dama Solitaria from thin to thick spaces, drives the plot of the novel. While Tadeo wiles away the hours at the motel attending to the needs of lovers, union bosses, and drug traffickers, Julián pursues the Dama. Ironically, the semi-homeless Julián initiates what we might call his search for a thicker space by abandoning what is actually the only real thick space remaining in his life, that of the motel desk. His relationship with Tadeo is the last meaningful relationship Julián has. Despite this, he appears helpless to resist the tug of the heterotopic space rented out by the Dama Solitaria.

In the midst of the pursuit, however, Tadeo and Julián stumble into side work assisting the drug traffickers. Their first payday brings readers to a second key space in the novel, the shopping mall: “Una multitud entraba y salía con bolsas o con las manos vacías, intenando entretenerse con el pasatiempo más valorado en la ciudad: comprar.” [A mob of people were going in and out with bags or with their hands empty, trying to amuse themselves with the city’s favorite pastime: shopping] (110). Shopping centers, like motels, are places that see a rich mixture of humanity pass in and out on a regular basis. In contrast to motels, however, very little of intimacy occurs therein. Motels maintain boundaries but only outside their rented rooms. Once within, anything goes. And it’s an anything that over space and time involves the entire gamut of humanity. In the shopping center, in contrast, nothing goes but what is permitted and controlled for. A mall serves very limited purposes. Those who cannot abide by those purposes will not remain for long. Little of meaningful human interaction—whether open or clandestine—occurs there. As noted, the mall features only briefly in the novel, but thanks to its connections to other behaviors, it’s a space that we might say pervades the novel, a synecdoche for the multiple factors driving our protagonist, the Dama Solitaria, Tadeo, and perhaps others to engage in their various risky behaviors. It is the Xanax the Dama Solitaria’s friends take in order to survive: “lo major era huir hacia el aire acondicionado, hacia el hábitat artificial donde hasta la luz era de plástico…Plaza Las Américas era el lugar…Así era como aquella multitud espantaba, al menos por una horas, la sensación de vació y aturdimiento con la que vivían el resto de sus días” [The best thing to do was to escape into the air-conditioning of the mall, an artificial environment where even the light is plastic.… Plaza de Las Américas was the place.… Which is how the masses cast away—for at least a few hours—the empty, bewildering feeling they live with the rest of their lives] (109). The shopping center, with its cheap consumerism, symbolizes the superficial culture that has whittled away the readership of the newspaper where our protagonist once worked. Julián is in the motel because everyone else is in the shopping mall. He discovers the shopping mall because he is in the motel. Ironically, he rejects the shopping mall, turning instead to the motel room where he hopes to find something deeper, even while in an adjacent motel room politicians, mobsters, bosses, and their lawyers cut the deals that extend and expand the shopping mall culture.

The location of the job Julián once had—the newspaper office—proves the third key space for reading Santos-Febres’s novel. Similar to the merely referenced shopping mall, the newspaper office is a place Julián visits only a couple of times over the course of the novel. But it is the setting in which we first meet our protagonist, it is the place to which he will return for answers at the novel’s climactic moment, and it will be his reward at the plot’s conclusion. Julián is, after all, first and foremost a writer. Indeed, some critics read the novel through the lens of the familiar trope of a writer’s aesthetic formation (see Sosa-Velasco and Grau-Llevería). If the home symbolizes Julián’s lack, the newspaper office literally embodies the hopes, beliefs, and dreams of a writer who believes in something more than the thin existence of Xanax-ed shoppers. If the shopping center is a nonplace (thinned out and emptied of meaningful human interaction) and the home is a desired utopia (thickly imagined but always in the end rather thin as experienced within the novel), the newspaper office is the thickest of spaces, a place through which the information of the world passes and in which real, no-holds-barred human encounters occur.

For Julián, the office is a kind of hallowed space where desire and reality meet, a kind of axis mundi for the modern world. The newspaper where Julián once worked is called La Noticia. It is not Noticias or Una noticia. It is boldly, unapologetically, La Noticia, that is, The News. The paper represents a belief in facts, in truth, even the possibility of Truth with a capital T. Its inability to resist the challenge of sensationalist gossip initially leaves Julián out of work and ultimately seeking a way out—leaving behind his stable girlfriend and their semblance of home in search of the utopia represented by life with the Dama Solitaria. The slow-burning crisis of traditional news in the face of the shopping-mall society drives Julián into the heterotopia in which he will see society for what it is and gain the knowledge and experience to at last build a real space, a thick geography wherein he might dwell.

As noted above, at the climactic moment of the novel, Julián turns to La Noticia for answers. By this point, it’s been three weeks since the Dama Solitaria has visited the motel, while Tadeo has been arrested for working as a mule for the motel drug runners. Julián’s excuse, however, is the disappearance of a union lawyer who also frequented the motel. The lawyer’s whereabouts have become a question of national interest, connected to a union strike that has knocked out power across the island. Julián knows from his work at the motel that the lawyer has connections to the drug boss who hired Tadeo. He has further discovered that the lawyer is none other than the estranged husband of the Dama Solitaria. If he can find the lawyer, he just might be able to simultaneously reunite with both Tadeo and the Dama. In that search, within the walls of La Noticia, he seeks what he calls “the truth.” Instead he hears the following:

—¿A perseguir qué, la verdad? La verdad es eso que queda cuando terminas de tener pesadillas, esa sensación de que te estás ahogando… La verdad no existe, existe la razón, ni el orden lógico del universo… Lo único que existe es la experiencia de la verdad, y esa experiencia es única e intransferible… 

—¿Y la literatura, la historia, la fotografía, este mismo peridódico?

—Intentos fallidos desde el inicio. Todas esta patrañas son facsímiles razoables que queremos hacer pasar por ´los hechos,´o por lo que se esconde detrás de los hechos… Déjame preguntarle algo, señor Castrodad, ¿su vida, tiene sentido para usted? ¿Acos usted no la vive como si fuera una mentira, como si todo lo vivido no fuera sino un estorbo para entender esa cosa que se supone que queda más allá de cada hecho, eso que sin que usted sea capaz de notarlo, pero que intuye, crea una red de asociaciones, un order por debajo de lo que lo hace respirar, mentir, buscar otros cuerpos, ir al baño, trabajar…Pues esa búsqueda es la única experiencia que usted tiene disponible de lo que pudiera llamarse la verdad.

—Entonces la verdad existe y es comunicable.

—Como búsqueda.

—Sí, como búsqueda. (202–03)

[—Pursuit of what, the truth? The truth is what you have left when you’re done drowning in nightmares.… Truth does not exist; neither does reason, nor the logical order of the universe.… The only thing that exists is the experience of truth, and that experience is unique and nontransferable…

—What about literature, history, photography, this very newspaper?

—Failed attempts from the start. All that crap is but a reasonable facsimile of what we’d like to pass for the ‘facts,’ or for what hides behind the facts.… Let me ask you something, Mr. Castrodad, does your life make sense to you? Don’t you live it as if it were a lie as if everything you lived was nothing but an obstacle to understanding that which lies beyond each fact, that which you don’t notice but sense, and which builds a network of associations, an order underneath the one which makes you breath, lie, see, other bodies, go to the bathroom, work?… Well, that search is only the experience that you have available of what could be called the truth.

—So then truth exists and can be communicated.

—As a pursuit.

—Yes, as a pursuit.]

The truth he discovers is that there is no truth. Only its pursuit.

Julián’s search for the lawyer, the drug dealer, the Dama, and Tadeo steers him in the direction of what we have referred to earlier as the half-spaces of the novel. These are the sites that the rest of us call home. Julián’s initial search for answers takes him back to the apartment he shares with Daphne. We first experience him there the morning after first meeting the Dama Solitaria. There he engages in rather furious sexual intercourse with Daphne. But we know what’s on his mind. Sex here is not lovemaking but betrayal. By the end of the novel he and Daphne have amicably parted ways, and while Julián keeps the apartment, it is Daphne we learn who has found a new partner and a new home. Julián simply has a place to sleep.

Home for Julián is represented by the Dama Solitaria. Appropriately, Julián spends a significant chunk of the final days of the novel’s action keeping vigil outside the Dama’s house, hoping against all odds to salvage the relationship but also to save Tadeo. The Dama eventually lets him in, but there is no warmth to be found in this house for our protagonist. The Dama offers him little warmth and essentially no new information. Dead bodies have been located but it is unclear whether one of the bodies belongs to her husband, the lawyer—the official story—or to the missing drug lord. Just as there is no valuable information for Julián there, neither is there any kind of home. Indeed, the house has perhaps never been a home, but rather a place of long-endured suffering for the Dama. In the novel’s concluding pages we will learn that the Dama Solitaria has left the home for good. Someone else will move in.

The Dama Solitaria’s home, like the handful of other homes and neighborhoods noted over the course of the novel, exists behind a variety of gated communities. Thick homes have traditionally situated themselves within thickly lived neighborhood spaces. Not so the gated communities. The Dama is isolated and alone behind the protective bars of her community. A second gated community in the novel houses a mansion where Julián once accompanied the drug lord to witness a Syncretist religious ceremony. Through a combination of music, dance, spoken word, and ritual, the most disparate elements of Puerto Rican society not only intermix but share a moment of ecstatic spiritual communion. The supposed communion, however, is lost on Julián. His most meaningful interaction at the house is an awkward encounter with one of his dad’s former legal associates. Despite the spectacle of ecstatic union going on around Julián, the ritual appears to have done little to forge real community. How could it, located behind protective, controlling barriers, accessible to only a preselected, elite minority, however diverse their appearances may appear.

The other side of the coin to the gated community is the shantytown, Paralelo 37, from which hail the drug traffickers who meet at the motel. While Paralelo 37 is not literally gated, it might as well be. It cuts off both those who would enter and those who would exit. As Julián and Tadeo come to know the traffickers through their encounters at the motel, they find in the inhabitants of Paralelo 37 the reverse mirror image of the wealthy. While the rich practice the syncretism of the poor in the comforts of kitschy, air-conditioned mansions, the poor sport the Rolexes of the rich. All of it—the ceremonies, the watches—is ultimately for show. There’s little chance of breaking free from either class position. Indeed, when Julián admonishes one of the traffickers to remove his watch in order to pass successfully for someone he’s not, the Paralelo 37 local refuses. Success? It’s a notion hardly worth contemplating. If failure is inevitable, why not look good along the way?

If the novel is a tale of three and a half spaces, it’s also a story of the three-and-a-half people who cross those spaces. Most don’t, after all. Of the many women in their gated communities, only the Dama Solitaria refuses the respective architectural and ideological confines of the Xanaxed shopping mall and the sensationalist journals. She moves from the half-space of home to the heterotopia of the motel. And despite mistakes she will escape her thinned-out hell by novel’s end.

Tadeo is the most obvious of all spatial migrants. His life has literally been dedicated to moving from place to place. First Haiti, then the Dominican Republic, then Puerto Rico, and by the end of the novel, the United States, where he sits in federal prison for drug running. But even under lock and key he remains a migrant, dreaming of the day of his release. He knows when it will come, and he has plans for when it does. His travels transform him. They constitute his most poignant memories. His most powerful relationships stretch him psychically across oceans. And, of course, for the bulk of the novel he is a migrant between the thick and thin spaces that constitute the motel heterotopia.

Our final migrant is, of course, our protagonist, Julián Castrodad. Like Tadeo, he slips in and out of the thick and thin of the heterotopic motel. While he visits the shopping mall only once, the socioeconomic system and cultural values it represents have cost him his job and propelled him on his search. He is the explorer of homes, the proverbial potential home buyer. He moves from space to space in search of the promise of something more, something that the Dama Solitaria appears to offer even if it is finally only an illusion. He alone puts pieces of evidence together to solve the crime of the disappearance of the union lawyer. But, again, he does it not to solve a crime but to find the home he mistakenly believes exists, first, in the arms of the lawyer’s wife and, second, in the company of Tadeo. At the end of the novel he has returned to work in the newspaper office which he now understands will not provide any solid truths he can grasp hold of: “No me moledsta estar trabajando de nuevo en la La Notica. De mis redacciones no espero más de lo que me dan, un montón de historias medio ciertas, medio mentidas a las que debo revisarles lo acentos y la organización gramatical para que parezcan “la verdad” [I don’t mind working again at La Noticia. I don’t expect more of my writing than what I get, which is a bunch of stories that are half true and half false and which I have to check for grammar and spelling to make them seem to be ‘the truth’] (238). He has at last abandoned the idea of homemaking with the Dama. Instead he saves money for a trip to the federal prison in Miami to visit the man who bides his time there, all in order to at last build the home he has long promised his aging mother.

If the Dama, Tadeo, and Julián are the three, who is the half-man, the anthropomorphic equivalent of the half-space? It’s a little-mentioned character named Sambuco. Sambuco is the ultimate string puller. An aside midway through the novel tells his story. Sambuco arises out of the spaces of poverty that have become the novel’s key half-space, Paralelo 37. Does he still live there? We’re never sure. His trajectory has more than once led him to cross paths with those who live behind the gated communities of the wealthy. Indeed by novel’s end it appears that he may be none other than the Dama’s spiritual grandfather, and the possibility exists of a literal parentage. He also appears to be a part of the lives of the drug traffickers but also the union bosses and even the union lawyer, the Dama’s husband. But Sambuco plays no direct role in the novel. He is only named, inhabiting, as it were, the shadows of the novel. It is no surprise then, that when the drug traffickers and the union officials fall, Sambuco remains. He is the lone powerbroker still standing at the novel’s conclusion. Even if we still hardly know him.

He is also—did we mention?—a musician. That is, an artist like our protagonist, the writer Julián. Julián is, curiously, the only character untouched over the course of the novel by this godfather of San Juan, Puerto Rico. Sambuco, the half-man, is the parallel to the half-space. He is home. The ultimate thickness. He appears to be beyond the reach and knowledge of the characters who mention him. Accessing him, like Julián accessing home, appears impossible. And yet, he underlies everyone and everything of importance happening in the novel. Julián longs to be an artist, a longing that manifests itself in a search for a thicker space, a place to call home. At the end of the novel, thanks we might argue to Sambuco’s other kind of artistry, Julián has found the inspiration to return to writing. The novel implies in its final pages that the novel itself may be the product of Julián’s renewed inspiration. Sambuco, the half-man, ironically represents what Julián may through his own artistry yet become. Anchored over the years, the novel explains, by his musicianship Sambuco, has slowly acquired a grounding power that allows him to pull the strings of underworld and government, omnipresent but never touched from the shadows. Julián seeks truth. Sambuco is the truth.

But apparently still beyond knowing. San Juan remains, as Julián’s movements across its landscape have shown, a gated world. The only escapes are transient, the heterotopic motels, the nonplace shopping malls, the numbing felicity of Xanax and cocaine, and the titillating headlines of sensationalist newspapers that put La Noticia out of business and Julián out of work. San Juan is a world of borders, literal and implied, that guide the supply chains of multinational corporations and local drug lords. It is a world comprised of fences and walls, of national highways and international air traffic routes, of store shelves and street signs, of trade agreements and trade tariffs, of citizens and aliens. All have their frontiers, their borders, their walls, their lines. Those lines are not to be traversed. Except perhaps through art, where, if not truth then at least its experience might be found.