10 No Island Is an Island (Even if It’s Still an Island): Nation and Alienation in Eduardo Lalo’s Simone

The title of Eduardo Lalo’s Romulo Gallegos Prize novel, Simone (2013), is inspired in the person of twentieth-century French intellectual Simone Weil. It’s a curious choice. Weil, as we shall see, has both everything and nothing to do with Lalo’s novel. Who was Weil that we both are and are not mindful of her?

First, Simone Weil was smart. A precocious student, at age six she was quoting lengthy passages by seventeenth-century French poet Jean Racine. At twelve she was fluent in Greek. She learned several other modern languages, then decided to give Sanskrit a shot. At age fifteen she completed her secondary studies and entered the prestigious École Normale Superior, earning outstanding examination scores. At the conclusion of her studies, she again placed first in the exams in Philosophy and Logic, one place ahead of another Simone, surnamed de Beauvoir. By age twenty-two Weil had earned the equivalent of a doctoral degree. She pursued a career in teaching and writing. When she died at the age of thirty-four, her recorded thoughts filled twenty volumes.

But Weil was also unusual if not downright strange. She was arguably as odd as she was brilliant. At age six, a young Simone excised sugar from her diet in solidarity with similarly sweets-deprived World War I French soldiers. At age ten she declared herself a Bolshevik. By late adolescence, she was writing political tracts and marching in rallies. After completing her doctorate, she devoted her professional time not to teaching the brilliant or well-prepared but the barely literate. One of the great minds of the century devoted her attention to helping ill-equipped workers learn to read the most basic texts. For all her brilliance, she was frequently unable to prepare her students to pass their exams. Frustrated by repeated failure, Weil took a break from teaching to labor as a local factory worker, hoping to better understand her clientele. Still later she joined anarchist columns in the Spanish Civil War, her sense of human solidarity overcoming her ideological pacifism. Over the course of these same adventurous years, Weil, despite an agnostic upbringing, took a keen interest in Catholicism. By 1937, at age twenty-eight, Weil was in the thralls of an impassioned spiritual awakening. She began to enjoy frequent, full-blown mystical episodes. Despite this, she refused baptism. Instead she pursued further enlightenment in non-Western religious traditions. By age thirty-four when Weil died—unintentionally starving herself to death out of solidarity with victims of yet another world war—this precocious talent was not only a brilliant intellectual and committed political activist but a modern day mystic. For such strange behavior and its extraordinary results, she was known in certain circles as “The Martian.”

Puerto Rico, like Weil, has everything and yet very little to do with Lalo’s novel, at least not the Puerto Rico we might expect. As in the case of Weil, some clarification might help.

Puerto Rico is the smallest and easternmost island of the Greater Antilles. It has been inhabited for somewhere between four and six thousand years by a variety of indigenous groups and, after the arrival of Columbus in 1493, by Spaniards, African slaves, and a variety of European immigrant populations. Today its tropical climate makes it a popular tourist destination. It is home to over three and a half million people.

But like Weil, Puerto Rico also has its strange side. Puerto Rico may be seen as both more than and less than an island. Puerto Rico has, at least since its first encounter with the European other, never been just Puerto Rico. The island spent four centuries as a Spanish colony, then another century-plus as a territory of the United States. And yet as a colony, it wasn’t much of one; unlike the Spanish territories on the American mainland or on the other islands making up the greater Antilles, Puerto Rico received little attention from Spain in the development of plantations or industry. More often than not the island served as a mere way station and occasional fortress, always in the service of others. Thanks to this, though, it became a place of significant cultural mixing. The native Taínos mixed first with Spanish soldiers, then later with African slaves. Still later came the French, Italians, Irish, Scots, English, and Corsicans, among so many others. When Cuba and the Philippines gained their independence from Spain in 1898, Puerto Rico simply flipped from one hegemon to another. Yet again, Puerto Rico was both possessed and neglected. Today its population density is equivalent to packing the entirety of the world’s population into the territorial borders of the United States. There, living cheek-by-jowl, the population languishes, neglected as much as they are protected by its U.S. big brother, a supernation that would own them but not employ them. Stuck for centuries in a continual state of limbo, Puerto Rico’s debt is massive and its citizens’ rights few. Even the position of its residents vis-à-vis its occupiers is confused: status-quo occupation and protection or statehood or outright independence? Plebiscite after plebiscite on the question hardly moves the needle, as if a population so unaccustomed to real democracy has no idea what to do when they at last get the vote. Nearly two decades into the twenty-first century, change appears nowhere on the horizon.

Lalo’s Simone is like the island of its setting and the person of its title. Simone is both a deeply Puerto Rican novel and a novel that often appears to have nothing to do with Puerto Rico. It is also a novel that often appears to have nothing to do with being a novel, a work that critic María Paz Oliver has described as being as much essay or poetry as narrative fiction (570). To complicate matters still further, Simone Weil, the person who lends her name to the title of Lalo’s novel, had herself, as we’ve seen, despite a tremendously rich life, nothing whatsoever to do with Puerto Rico.

She does, however, lend her name to one of the novel’s characters, one Li Chao, a twenty-five-year-old Chinese-born Puerto Rican. Chao though calls herself Simone only as part of a lengthy, beguiling, and often frustrating cat-and-mouse love affair with the novel’s protagonist. This protagonist also happens to be the novel’s narrator and presumably a representation of the author, Eduardo Lalo. Yes, another autofiction. Implicitly, however, the novel’s title could be said to describe the novel itself: precocious, beguiling, and frequently unexpected if not downright frustrating.

On the one hand, the novel could be celebrated as an insightful and, hence, troubling representation of the Puerto Rican condition. Indeed, it might merit attention as the novel par excellence of the Puerto Rican condition in the early twenty-first century. Its narrator-protagonist, an unnamed autofictional Lalo, is stuck on an island that offers him not only no future but really no present and even no past. His sole option is to wander about town and write. The act and art of walking has, in fact, been a principal focus of much of the critical work done on Lalo to date. María Paz Oliver has written in some depth on our protagonist’s wandering, showing how walking becomes a way of reappropriating and reinterpreting the global city (577–78), while Carolina Sancholuz has noted the importance of walking about San Juan in Lalo’s work in general, though never mentioning Simone in particular. Francisco Javier Avilés compares Lalo’s characters in the novels leading up to Simone as flaneurs in the tradition of theorist Walter Benjamin, the leisurely urban walker transgressing the prescribed codes and conducts of urban planners to evade what Avilés calls “the domestication of the distant Other” (890).

When not wandering, our protagonist writes. What does he write about? Writing, of course: “Escribir. ¿Me queda otra opción en este mundo en que tanto estará siempre lejos de mí? Pero aun así sigo vivo y soy incontenible y no importa que esté condenado a las esquinas, a las gavetas, a la inexistencia. Pensar desde la nada, desde este nada pasa, desde aquí. Y lo digo con la euforia del que ha perdido la esperanza y sigue y pervive” [Writing. What other choice do I have in this world, where so many things are forever beyond my reach. But I’m still here, alive and irrepressible, and it doesn’t matter if I’ve been condemned to corners, to cupboards, to nothingness.’ Thoughts emerging from out of nowhere, from the ‘nothing’s happening,’ from the here and now. I say this with the joy you feel when you’ve lost all hope yet still persist, still survive] (19). Quite regularly, in the early pages of the novel, our narrator-protagonist, the possibly fictional though unnamed Lalo, avails himself of opportunities arising from his carefully observed life to explain the Puerto Rican condition itself: “Pienso en todas las veces que he leído o escrito el concepto ´Puerto Rico´. Son miles, acaso decenas de miles de veces y, sin embargo, estas palabras apenas son leídas o escritas fuera de aquí; es más, son prácticamente desconocidas o sugieren imágenes muy débiles, que poco tiene que ver con lo que significan para mí estos vocablos” [[I think about all the times I’ve read or written the concept, ‘Puerto Rico.’ Thousands, perhaps tens of thousands of times, and yet those words are hardly ever written or read anywhere but here. What’s more, they are practically unknown, or they suggest very weak images having little to do with what they mean to me] (26); “¿Alguién nos cuenta, existimos para alguien los que vivimos en esta isla, en esta tarde sigilosa, intentando separarnos del ruido, del calor, del polvo? ¿A quiénes llegan las historias de nuestras vidas? ¿En algún lugar existe algo que no sea nuestro cliché o nuestra explicación vaga y elemental, sin compromiso con nuestra humanidad?” [Is anyone counting us, the people living on this island? Do we exist for anyone, on this secretive afternoon, as we try to detach from the noise, the heat, the dust? Who hears our life stories? Are we known anywhere by anything other than clichés about us or vague, simplistic accounts of us that deny us our humanity?] (30); “¿Qué queda de los hombres y las mujeres de este país, sino el paso del café y de la leche por alguno de los tubos de acero, por alguna de las manijas de plástico por las que se vierten los cafés de los siglos de esta isla?” [What is left of the men and women of this country? What remains but the coffee and the centuries, ground down and percolated, flowing through steel tubes, pouring from plastic spigots?] (60); “Pero aquí no, aquí no vale la pena, aquí merecemos la salvajada” [But not here, here it isn’t worth it, here we deserve this atrocity] (67). Just as often we see this frustrated and frustrating country through tiny vignettes that, rather than seconding our narrator-protagonist’s observations, offer up the most banal, contradictory, and ironic conversations overheard on his frequent meanderings about town: a ridiculous conversation between a Puerto Rican and two Cubans over seeing a cow, or two women commenting on one’s hair dye (32, 36).

Still, if this is the great Puerto Rican novel of the twenty-first century, we should acknowledge that it is also a strange candidate. For within its pages we readers are hard-pressed to identify even a single “typical” Puerto Rican. Our protagonist, though born and presently living on the island, is a writer who has enjoyed lengthy and important stays in Europe and has recently enjoyed a small modicum of success with his writing, placing a handful of volumes on the shelves of local bookstores. As a writer and intellectual, Lalo has had experiences and observations that can hardly be described as typical. So too those of his small handful of friends we meet over the course of the novel. One is actually living abroad at present, and not in New York City or some other enclave of the stereotypical Puerto Rican diaspora. Another is a fellow writer who, like our protagonist, enjoyed a significant European stay before returning to settle down in his homeland. Both share similarly atypical Puerto Rican takes on the world at large and their island home in particular.

If seeing Puerto Rico through the eyes of privileged intellectuals is not enough, the only other major characters in the novel are members of a reclusive Chinese community. Most of these were born abroad and, in the case of every last one, are so limited by economic and social circumstances that the Puerto Rico they inhabit is no more than a web of Chinese restaurants and other Chinese-run businesses from which they rarely sally forth. The explicit Puerto Rico of the novel is more the labor underworld of Chinese restaurants and convenience stores the world over than anything typically “Boricua.” With the exception of several appearances by a former girlfriend of the protagonist in the early pages of the novel, plus the already noted intellectuals, Puerto Ricans are not even secondary but tertiary characters in the novel’s literary universe. They appear only via brief overheard conversations (32, 36, 48) or ironic observations (24, 33). To make matters all the more interesting, for the most part we see these more “typical” Puerto Ricans only in the early stages of the novel when there is yet no storyline, when there is so little plot movement that we readers are not yet even sure we’re reading a novel. In a sense, “typical” Puerto Ricans simply aren’t in this very Puerto Rican novel.

Eduardo Lalo has often been understood as more a writer than a novelist, an author more of generically unclassifiable works than of straightforward novels. Detective fiction this novel is not—even less so some of his earlier works. In its earliest pages, Simone appears to be no different from those earlier ones. It commences unapologetically as yet another in a long series of writer’s notebooks. Its opening passage doesn’t record a murder, lament a lost love, or unveil an enchanted setting. It is instead simply a bit of musing on writing and more specifically on writing for its own sake. The author can’t think of—or doesn’t know of—anything else to write about or, for that matter, to do: “Escribir. ¿Me queda otra opción en este mundo?” [Writing. What other choice do I have in this world] (19).

These early entries—just the first of a short novel comprised of approximately one hundred seventy brief fragments—introduces us to our protagonist and narrator who, as in the autofictional works of the Chilean Alejandro Zambra and the Argentina Patricio Pron (see chapter 9), appears to be the same Lalo whose name figures on the cover and title page of the book in hand. Through entries in Lalo’s writer’s diary we gain a rather full if depressing, psychological portrait of our protagonist. He is a frustrated, marginally successful but mostly marginalized writer who once lived abroad but who is now resigned to the nonlife his island home offers him (again, reminiscent of Pron and Zambra, not to mention Javier Cercas, the author of the Spanish novel Soldados de Salamina that gave the autofiction genre such life in the first years of the new century). Lalo’s life, in particular, consists of a mediocre lectureship at a local university, several occasional, strained, and ultimately unfulfilling friendships, and a lot of aimless wandering about town meditating on the meaninglessness of existence and the utter lack of opportunity: “Hoy todo duele demasiado y, sin embargo, casi estoy en paz. Es por la costumbre del dolor. Ya no percibo su zumbido incesante” [Today everything is too painful, and yet I am nearly at peace. It’s because pain has become a habit. I no longer notice the incessant hum] (24); “He aprendido a vivir entre el detrito, satisfecho de no estar satisfecho” [I’ve learned to live amid the rubble, satisfied not to be satisfied] (38).

There is no plot at this point because, well, when you’ve lost all hope, you have nothing really left to lose; plot relies at its most basic level on a simple pattern of loss and recovery. Fort-da, as Freud identified it in the children’s game of peak-a-boo.¹⁸ And yet, while there’s nothing to drive the plot, our protagonist—whom we may be reading as merely our narrator at this point—already reads as a tragic hero, though his is a rather minor tragedy. We get the feeling, moreover, that it’s a tragedy that has played itself out in previous works where, once upon a time—perhaps before his first foray abroad or when he first saw an early work published—there was illusion. Now he is what Lalo himself has referred to in previous writings as a “quedado,” one who has stayed when so many others left or who has returned realizing the dreams of a life elsewhere were just that. As such, the “quedado” represents for Avilés the excess produced by the debilitating legacy of colonialism, the abject condition of those who call their colonized territories home though it is never theirs (882).

As a “quedado,” in his stuck condition, Lalo approaches writing as if it were simply his fate. It is all he has, all he knows how to do, and what he knows he will do, even if he’d rather not. And yet he does so knowing he has few if any readers and that he is likely never to have many—which is where the bit of Puerto Rico as tertiary character that we discussed earlier comes in. The Puerto Ricans he observes discuss hair coloring, share dirty jokes, and drive around with absurd bumper-sticker combinations stuck to their cars (24, 36). Their world, like Puerto Rico itself, is shaped by others: “Por ellos habla el deseo, pero también el aburrimiento y la mentira” [Through them, desire speaks, but also tedium and lies] (46). They live on an island that is, again, neither a nation nor really a part of one. Their hypermarginal political status leaves them in economic and social limbo: “We claimed to be a country, but in reality even many of those who were convinced of that fact acted as if we were nothing but a stop on an empire’s bus route” (14). And yet they mock any who would pursue an alternative, calling them “terrorists and potheads” (41). And so it goes with these first several dozen pages, opening up to us readers a depressing vista of hopeless characters within a stagnated but indifferent society. While there is no plot, there is, again, a tragic hero, stuck this time around in an apparent anti-tragedy, where death has already been meted out to all prior to the opening curtain. Our protagonist is the ghost fated to wander the rest of seemingly endless days among the living dead of a forgotten island kingdom.

Until, that is, China steps in—China speaking about Puerto Rico, that is, and disguised as France. Stepping out of the university one day, our protagonist discovers a brief question written in chalk on the pavement beside his car: “¿Hasta qué punto podemos construir una sociedad basada en la mentira y el olvido?” [To what degree can we build a society based on lies and forgetting?] (35). The unexpected note will prove the beginning of what will become a torrid and momentarily redeeming love affair. Initially, however, the scribbled query captures our protagonist’s attention for its apparent political or at least social critique. At the same time, its form—a question, written in chalk, and with a childlike hand he describes as “ephemeral”—is markedly different from San Juan’s typically more aggressive graffiti. Several days later, a note written in the same hand appears in his university mailbox. It declares an intention to communicate with our protagonist but without being seen. Its author hopes to find him and hopes for him to find the author but to do so without speaking; its author wishes that they might only “read” each other: “prefiero que me lea y leerlo Ud” [I prefer for you to read me and for me to read you] (35). This time the note comes with a signature: “Simone.”

In the coming days, the game proceeds, though still at an unusually slow clip. Readers may still wonder if anything will ever happen in this writer’s diary beyond a kind of love note, cat-and-mouse game that feels more like another excuse to provide additional social commentary that might give some sense of purpose to his otherwise aimless life. Even so, the perspicacious reader might note that once the Simone-delivered messages begin appearing, the diary entries begin to move beyond cynical social commentary to more engaged aesthetic reflections. On art, Lalo cites Walter Benjamin (“in our time the only work truly endowed with meaning—critical meaning, as well—would have to be a collage of quotations, excerpts, echoes of other works” [30]) and then a fellow-Puerto Rican writer, Máximo Noreña (from whom we will hear plenty later on). Lalo also offers his own reflections, as when wandering the streets of San Juan listening to the music of contemporary minimalist composer Arvo Part: “el arte era la consolación de los que aguardaban su derrota” [Its art was to console those who await defeat] (74). Of his own writing, he observes: “Escribir fragmentos, escribir notas en una libreta al vuelo de los días, es lo que más se acerca a una escritura que no sabe que miente” [Writing fragments, writing notes in a notebook as the days fly by, is the closest I can come to creating a text that doesn’t know it’s lying] (58). It doesn’t require much to see each of these notes as commentaries on the very novel we have at the moment in our hands. What is it at this point but still mostly a collage of quotes, the consolation of a man who awaits his final ending? And our consolation that what we’re getting is real—or at least as real as it gets—in a world where our narrator has long ago concluded, everything is a lie.

In the meantime, the cryptic notes keep coming. Quotes from the French intellectual Simone Weil predominate, but also random passages from Robert Musil and Vicente Molina Ruiz. The modes of delivery also vary, some dropped in his mailbox, others delivered via random couriers, still others left on his answering machine or, again, written in the street. Though our protagonist has no idea as to the identity of his interlocutor, he notes an almost immediate connection to her or him as so many quotes capture the same sense of existential and even political isolation, alienation, and resignation to which he has devoted so many pages of his diary. Eventually he admits to himself that he has all but fallen in love with his faceless, nameless pursuer, however absurd such a fact may seem.

At last, nearly halfway into our narrator-protagonist’s diary, he—and we readers—finally meets, in person, the antagonist that will lend this notebook its longed-for novelistic shape. Simone, as we noted earlier, is not French, nor Puerto Rican, but instead Chinese, the only “Chinas” [Chinese girls], she notes, in the entire Puerto Rican higher education system. Not at all what our author expected and not even immediately attractive to him, she nevertheless draws him to her as she insists, not on deep conversation or a stroll along some romantic promenade, nor even on an explanation for her weeks of cryptic messages, but on a game of chess. Again, as readers, we are nonplussed. Our protagonist, however, appears utterly unruffled, and, after the first night of chess, begins frequenting the Chinese restaurant where Simone has worked most her life. There he hears tales of a past shaped by exile and near imprisonment. As a young girl, with her mother, Simone, whose real name is Li Chao, fled the Chinese Cultural Revolution and ended up, improbably, in Puerto Rico. From the day of her arrival, she and her mother have spent their days paying off both the debts of their immigration and their ongoing upkeep through almost continual labor in a series of Chinese restaurants and businesses. Along with dozens of Chinese, Li Chao is trapped in near isolation from regular Puerto Rican society. Li Chao, thanks to innate smarts and a headstrong character has defied both the odds and Chinese-Puerto Rican authority to complete her primary and secondary studies and then enroll—though not after delays along the way—in the same local university where our protagonist teaches. There she studies Comparative Literature. The process, rather than forging a path for her within traditional Puerto Rican society, has made of her a double outcast. To Puerto Ricans, she notes, she is always merely la China, or the Chinese Girl, the only person of Chinese descent in the entire college. Neither her professors nor fellow students know quite what to do with her. At the same time, in the world of the local Chinese businesses, Li is the black sheep, the ungrateful rebel dissatisfied with the room, board, work, and community that milieu offers. Finally, Li identifies with the French “Martian,” Simone Weil, a woman who sacrificed her comforts, her relationships, and ultimately her life in search of illusive solidarities, first domestic, then socio-economic, and finally celestial.

Despite such striking differences between our narrator-protagonist and Li Chao/Simone, the sense of mutual understanding and mutual desire only grows, the more they learn of such differences. It is as if Li’s very otherness, her ultimate elusiveness, is the force drawing our protagonist in. That force grows unabated until the moment when, after a magical afternoon about town, it would appear that they are at last ready to move beyond mere talk. There does appear to remain one final sticking point to this forthcoming consummation. Li/Simone has been clear from nearly the beginning of the relationship that she is lesbian. Even so, they appear to be falling in love. If we can have any faith in our narrator, it would appear that sex is in the cards, as if Otherness can at last be overcome, literally and symbolically, in one climactic act. Except once they actually proceed, we discover just as suddenly that there will be no climax. At least no traditional one. Li informs our protagonist, in mid-act, that with her, however far they go, however deeply they explore, there will be no penetration.

Despite this, but certainly thanks in large measure to their mutual condition as extreme Others, their lovemaking achieves a depth of emotion and sensation previously unknown to our protagonist. He notes:

La soledad y el sufrimiento acumulado por años, el peso de toda una vida, nos había llevado a este punto. Eramos náfragos que compartían la misma balsa en el océano de las calles de San Juan y estaba claro que sin esta indigencia jamás nos hubiéramos encontrado. Lo que hacíamos, s se miraba bien, era inviable. En el lugar imposible en el que hacíamos el amor como tullidos, fuimos ciegos ante a un abismo. Caíamos uno sobre el otro, mordiéndonos, deslizando las lenguas … sin pestañear, sin bajar la mirada. (106)

[The loneliness and suffering that had accumulated for years, the weight of an entire lifetime, had brought us here. We were castaways sharing a single raft in the ocean of San Juan’s streets and it was clear that if we hadn’t been so deprived we would never have met. What we were doing, to be honest, was unworkable. In the impossible place where we were making love like cripples, we were blind people at the edge of an abyss. We would fall on each other, biting, sliding tongues… without blinking, without looking away.]

And for weeks thereafter their relationship continues on, passionate and unabated. The two enjoy weekly excursions around an island Li has never known and spend her occasional free evenings in our protagonist’s apartment watching movies, creating art, and making love—though always on her terms.

But then almost as suddenly as the relationship began, its wheels begin to fall off. When our protagonist makes the mistake of asking simply “¿Nunca me vas a dejar?” [You’re never going to let me?] (126), Li begins to vanish—from our protagonist’s life and from the novel. She blames her initial absences on an illness; but a pattern is clearly established whereby the closer their relationship approaches predictable heterosexual norms, the more precarious it becomes. But then just as it appears Li will vanish from our protagonist’s life, the relationship looks to gain back its previous solidity. The couple reunite one day where they pass the afternoon at the beach, Li building sandcastles, even blushing for the first and last time when our protagonist baldly declares her beauty. Back at his apartment that night, Li at last not only allows sexual penetration but instigates it. Per our protagonist the moment fulfills every expectation: “Fue un momento mágico, sin palabras, sin una mirada, sin contactarnos en el contacto más absoluto, un espacio que ambos descubríamos simultáneamente y en el que nos ofrecíamos la libertad de perdernos en un placer que era casi autista” [It was a magical moment, without a Word, without a glance, without coming into the most absolute contact, a space that we were both discovering simultaneously and where we offered each other the freedom to lose ourselves in a pleasure that was almost self-absorbed] (148). And then without warning, while he lies asleep, she attempts to leave.

Before she’s able to get out the door, however, our protagonist awakens, rushes to block her exit and then demands an explanation. Li at last opens up. She reports that she was an ongoing victim of sexual violence over the course of her adolescence, trapped in close, inescapable quarters by a Chinese coworker who took advantage for years of her youth, loneliness, and fear. Since then she finds solace and rekindled desire only in the arms of female lovers. Moreover, she reveals that our protagonist is merely a temporary placeholder for Li’s longtime lover. She is in a long-term relationship with one of our protagonist’s departmental colleagues—and ironically, one he doesn’t think much of. The present relationship has been possible only because the colleague has been off at a U.S. university doing a stint as a visiting scholar.

With the explanation, the sting of loss simultaneously softens and doubles. Our protagonist understands at last just how unreachable Li may be. She has suffered losses he can perhaps never appreciate. At the same time, the new sting he feels feeds on professional and intellectual jealousies far beyond Li’s social horizon. Our protagonist, who throughout the novel acknowledges his outsider status, fails to understand the true nature of that status and what part of it he actually shares (and doesn’t share) with his always already temporary Simone. The relationship that has for the moment saved him, has done so, not so much because the other member of that relationship shared his outsider status, but because the relationship itself was so utterly beyond the expected. Our protagonist, we come to understand, still would have it both ways. He would be the outsider Li requires but at the same time bring that relationship into the norm. But he has only experienced a previously unavailable sense of purpose—underscored symbolically by flashes of abnormal sexual ecstasy—only as long as he has played by Li’s extreme outsider rules. He has mistakenly believed that this could be a prelude to some kind of restoration to sameness. He claims to reject the center but, in the end, can’t resist the temptation to normalize his relationship, to bring it back to heterosexual expectations. In so doing, of course, he destroys the thing he has loved. Li Chao, who, in contrast, has lived not merely the existential otherness of our protagonist but a much more literal, material otherness her entire life understands Otherness at an entirely other level. She is Simone Weil, the Martian. She is la China. She is the violated and the dishonored. She is the forever penetrated and yet impenetrable Other.

In the days that follow the breakup, our protagonist finds himself once more wandering the streets of San Juan. He breaks up his daily walks with stops at the local Chinese restaurants in search of his lost Simone. On one such occasion, he asks to see Li’s “great uncle” Wen Da, and a conversation ensues that proves insightful to both our protagonist and us readers. Wen, in addition to being a venerated elder within the Chinese enclave, shares Li’s literary and artistic bent, as unusual as it is unappreciated within his own community of immigrant laborers. Wen invites our protagonist into his room, where they speak candidly for over an hour. Of the conversation, our protagonist reports: “Algo más real que los idiomas, más elemental y poderoso, se había dado en esas cuatro paredes de miseria” [Something more real than languages, more elemental and powerful, had come about within these four walls of misery] (161). This is, to be sure, helpful since Wen speaks no Spanish, and our protagonist speaks no Chinese. For readers, the conversation reads as a kind of type and shadow of our protagonist’s relationship with Li. For both men the long talk “[les] había venido bien” [had done (them) both good] (161). They had experienced a sense of real listening and thus felt free to express themselves. For both it serves as a moment of essential peace in the midst of days of significant turmoil. The fact remains that neither of the interlocutors has any idea exactly what the other has said. And yet, our protagonist appears to have learned. He hasn’t sought an intermediary to translate or explain, though the building is rife with Chinese Puerto Ricans sufficiently fluent in both languages. Our protagonist intuits that the sense of understanding they have achieved is enough.

Even so, the pull of love is strong, and so he continues to fight. Perhaps more than love, what really kicks in is the problem of professional jealousy, precisely the difference between our protagonist and Li that most clearly distinguishes their relative degrees of otherness. Li’s lesbian lover is the eminent sociologist, Carmen Lindo. Lindo, readers recall, was a speaker at an academic conference our narrator-protagonist reported on in the early pages of the novel, back when nothing appeared to be happening. The closest to something of significance during that period, the only event that appeared to evoke any emotion in our protagonist, was the conference. The protagonist was struck by the absurdity of Lindo’s jargon-filled presentation, a classic piece of academic balderdash that, for our narrator, epitomized all that was wrong with his world. But more than an abuser of theory and a mispronouncer of the names of the thinkers she most abuses, Lindo epitomizes, in her constant politicking and her frequently mentioned connections to prestigious, resource-rich U.S. research universities, everything our protagonist despises. Specifically, “el profesorado establecido e indolente, de obra breve y dudosa, propenso ya a ataques de gota, paranoia intelectual y calores menopáusicos” [The established and slothful professoriate, with short and dubious lists of published Works, prone to attacks of gout, intellectual paranoia, and menopausal hot flashes] (171). In all her servile politicking, Lindo promotes the Puerto Rican “economía colonial” [colony economy] he has been lamenting over the course of the novel.

It is appropriate then that the climactic scene of the novel takes place at a party Lindo throws for a visiting Spanish author, Juan Rafael García Pardo (the same discussed in the opening lines of this book). Our protagonist, making one last desperate play to win back his Simone, enters the gathering uninvited by tagging along with a mutual friend, fellow Puerto Rican novelist Máximo Noreña. The party, however, offers only limited opportunity to speak with Li. Instead, standing at Noreña’s side, our protagonist finds ample opportunity to engage with guest of honor, García Pardo. The conversation with García Pardo—and not one with Li herself—becomes, significantly, the defining scene of the book. Certainly, alongside the descriptions of lovemaking with Li and the conversation with Wen, it is one of the most memorable fragments in a novel/notebook filled with approximately one hundred and seventy of them. It is, more than any description of notes, picnics, or lovemaking, unmistakably the longest.

Again, as with the protagonist’s visit with Li’s great uncle Wen, the conversation here is a shadow carried out by proxies. While our protagonist participates and Lindo follows at a remove (with Li cast even further into the background), the principle characters in a conversation that evolves quickly into an intellectual tete-a-tete and finally a near argument are the other two established writers, the Puerto Rican Noreña and Lindo’s guest of honor, the celebrated García Pardo. Per previous descriptions Noreña, an older writer with family responsibilities, represents our protagonist’s best-case future, while García Pardo, by name, appearance, and our protagonist’s observations, is a stand-in for the prototypical Spanish author/newspaper columnist. García Pardo, we learn, is merely the latest Iberian author enjoying a book-signing tour of Latin American. The tour is sponsored by his prestigious Spanish publishing house, not a result of any local invitations. Following the tour, we will learn later, he will be awarded one of the most prestigious of the many literary awards that some, like Spanish novelist Javier Marías, argue have plagued Iberian publishing in the last half-century. Here the award is referred to by Noreña in a later conversation with our protagonist as “El Gran Culo de las Letras” [The Grand Asshole of Letters] (157), a name that would surely draw a smile from Marías. The conversation as it unfolds in the novel makes García Pardo into somewhat of a strawman. Still, it allows the author Lalo, through Noreña and his alter-ego protagonist, to engage in one final and culminating critique of the Puerto Rican condition by way of a discussion of the state of Puerto Rican letters.

García Pardo approaches his interlocutors—as he has the party, the island of Puerto Rico, and the entire continent of Latin American itself—with the bearing of a noble emissary of Spanish culture. The Spaniard, he informs his Puerto Rican hosts, is impressed by the cosmopolitanism of their native island and of Latin America in general. The high levels of readership and the surprising interest they display in authors from the motherland are evidence of a culture of which they can be proud. Noreña, however, interrupts the Spaniard to contest that this supposed native curiosity is hardly disinterested or even genuine. García Pardo has been shipped here—like his novels—by powerful European publishing interests against which the local islanders are helpless to compete. García Pardo has come uninvited. Moreover, he is utterly unnecessary. No Puerto Rican authors are in Spain returning the favor, he points out, and not because of a lack of talent but because economics don’t allow it. García Pardo would believe in unique literary and cultural traditions, but Noreña insists that the literary mix they have for sale here in this island community is really no different from what presently sits on the shelves of the Casa del Libro bookstore in Spain. In both they will find the same foreign authors in translation, plus the same list of predictable Spanish authors accompanied, of course, by a handful of the most consecrated Latin American names. The only “surprises” will be a few young talents, really nothing more than market testing for the multinational publishers seeking out the next star to add to their predictable lists. “Hoy España,” Noreña insists, “más que una literatura, es una industria editorial” [Today Spain doesn’t have a literature; it has a publishing industry] (191).

When García Pardo takes issue, Noreña declaims that a national or regional literature, a culture, even a global literature, is more than a simple list of books. “Hay que enfrentarse a algo” [It has to grapple with something] (191). Noreña’s main point isn’t so much to dismiss García Pardo as different and hence unnecessary, but to argue that he is unnecessary precisely because he is no different from the rest of them. Thanks to his relative economic privilege as a Spaniard—in contrast to his fellow writers in Puerto Rico, Paraguay, or Peru—García Pardo may imagine himself, delusionally, as somehow an aesthetically successful author, someone who has transcended a global culture industry designed to produce articles for consumption. But from the position of Noreña and our author—that of the island, the “Colony Economy” noted earlier—García Pardo is as much a part of the system as they are, the only difference being that, for now, he’s the hot item on the sales rack while they can’t even get on the shelf.

While theirs is merely a literary conversation, with it our protagonist’s story is, for all intents and purposes, finished, and our narrator’s points are all but made. Lindo is furious at the affront to her guest of honor perpetrated by people who she views as two bitter, failed novelists. She tosses the two locals out of her party. Li is similarly furious at our protagonist for his destructive and uninvited appearance. She brushes him off, apparently for good, as he leaves. Within days of the party the entire intellectual community of San Juan is abuzz with news of the affront. Even worse, within weeks of the disastrous dinner party, García Pardo is named Spain’s newest “Gran Culo de las Letras.” As Noreña notes in a follow-up conversation with our protagonist, “Somos náufragos, nos queda el futuro amargo de los que sobreviven a un mundo que no volverá a existir. Lo que quisimos hacer en la vida quizá ya no existe” [We’re castaways; all we have left is the bitter future of those who’ve survived from a world that will never exist again. What we wanted to do in our lifetimes no longer exists] (195).

In an ironic twist, it is now our protagonist who turns his back on Li and gives final closure to our story. This occurs at what appears to be the most disastrous point both professionally and emotionally for our protagonist in the novel. Despite the apparent anger she shows him at the party, she attempts twice more to reconnect. The first comes in the form of a pen-and-ink drawing she sends him. It is an art form that she had practiced over the course of their relationship, almost constantly doodling while they sat on his couch watching movies evening after evening late into the night. The second attempt comes, unusually for the typically indirect Simone, via a final physical appearance at his front door. Whereas previously Simone delivered cryptic messages, treasure hunts, and enigmatic prints, now she simply stands at his door and knocks. But our protagonist, despite being at home, alone, and still suffering the pains of breakup, remains silently on the other side, choosing at last not to act: “Una vez más no emprendería acción alguna,” he writes, “Mi grito de auxilio era el silencio y la inmovilidad” [Once more, I would not undertake any action. My cry for help was silence and stillness] (201).

In the days immediately following Li’s departure, our protagonist returns once again, perhaps permanently this time, to his urban wanderings. Now, however, he occasionally interrupts his steps to mark the walls, the doors, and the lampposts with a line from a poem he composes in the aftermath of Li’s departure: “Esa absurda ausencia de tu cuerpo” [This absurd absence of your body] (201). Absurd, perhaps, that absent body. But, he appears finally to understand, it was only absurd because it was always absent; it was never his—at least if he hoped for it to stay with him. Our protagonist, returned from a failed stay in Paris—the city of old-fashioned literary dreams—had returned back to his island nation with an incipient understanding that there was no difference, that his island nation, for all its own maddening absence, was only a concentrated microcosm of a larger island, the world of globalization, of multinational corporations publishing lists of books and promoting authors like objects, an understanding that had rendered his dreamt-of Paris just another simulacra of the shops and shelves available anywhere and everywhere the consumer might have the means to act. But then Simone, the other whose otherness allowed for connection, appeared.

And that very connection, perhaps like the protagonist’s recent relative success in placing a book on the shelves of local stores, gave, for a matter of weeks, an impression that transcendence might still be possible. But just as Noreña has educated the Spaniard García Pardo, Li—the foreigner or, as Simone was sometimes called, “the Martian”—however inadvertently, has taught our protagonist. In this day and age, this global era, we are all “Island Economies,” we are all mere ports. Of entry and exit. But mere ports. The condition of the Puerto Rican writer is both the condition of the writer and the condition of the Puerto Rican writ large. But so too is it the condition of the Spanish writer, García Pardo, and of the Spanish writer in general and of the Spaniard and perhaps of Spain itself. The absurd absence of the body is the contemporary condition, a condition in which we are all islands, a kind of solidarity of endless, perpetual, inevitable solitude. If connection is possible, it will be, however brightly it burns, temporary and fleeting. And it will not allow a return to the norm, a kind of normalizing consummation. We are islands who, like our protagonist have traversed the city for days, the city we will never again leave, this city now transformed into a text.

A bleak, terribly depressing conclusion. Except that there is this: this city converted into a text. That text is the protagonist’s notebook, full of random observations, quotes, and at times the semblance of a story. What is left but to write? To pull out notebook number x + 1 and begin again. We are islands. But we are ports. Rich ports. And we can always write.