Now that I was alone, I was so filled with excitement I could hardly think straight. Dada, first, and Surrealism, second, were my favorite periods in art history. And because of my interest in these movements when I had been in Paris, I knew the Paris art scene of the twenties better, in many respects, than most of the people who had participated in it. And Debierue-Jacques Debierue! Debierue was the key figure, the symbol of the dividing line, if a line could be delineated, in the split between Dada and Surrealism! In my exhilarated state, I knew I wouldn't be able to sleep. I was going to put on a pot of coffee and jot down notes on Debierue from memory in preparation for the interview. Tomorrow, I thought, tomorrow!
I turned the key in the door and opened it to unexpected light. The soft light streamed in from the bathroom. Silhouetted in the bathroom doorway, wearing a gray-blue shorty nightgown, was my tawny-maned schoolteacher. Her long, swordlike legs trembled at the knees.
"I-I came back, James," Berenice said tearfully.
I nodded, dumbly, and lifted my arms so she could rush into them. After she calms down, I thought, I'll have her make the coffee. Berenice makes much better coffee than I do . . .
Debierue is a difficult artist to explain, I explained to Berenice over coffee:
"No pido nunca a nadie is a good summary of the code Debierue's lived by all his life. Translated, it means, 'I never ask nobody for nothing:
"I think that's the first time I've ever heard you talk in Spanish, James."
"And it might be the last. It didn't take me long to quit speaking Spanish after we moved to New York from San Juan. And as soon as I wised up to how they felt about Puerto Ricans, I got rid of my Spanish accent, too. But the Spanish No pido nunca a nadie sounds better because the reiterated double negatives don't cancel each other out as they do in English. And that's the story of Debierue's life, one double negative action after another until, by not trying to impress anybody, he ended up by impressing everybody."
"But why did you give up speaking Spanish?"
"To prove to myself, I suppose, that a Puerto Rican's not only as good as anybody else, he's a damned sight better. Besides, that's what my father would've done."
"But your father's dead, you told me-"
"That's right. He died when I was twelve, but technically I never had a father. He and my mother separated before I was a year old, you see. They didn't get divorced because they were Catholics, although my mother made semi-official arrangements with the church for them to live apart. There was no money problem. He supported us until he died, and then we came up to New York, Mother and I, with the insurance and the money from the sale of our house in San Juan."
"But you saw him once in a while, didn't you?"
"No. Never. Not after their separation-except in photographs, of course. That's what made things so tough for me, Berenice. What I've had instead is an imaginary father, a father I've had to make up myself, and he's what you might call un hombre duro-a hard man."
"What you mean, James, you've deliberately made things hard on yourself."
"It isn't that simple. A boy who doesn't have a father around doesn't develop a superego, and if you don't get a superego naturally you've got to invent one-"
"That's sffly. Superego is only a jargon word for 'conscience,' and everybody's got a conscience."
"Have it your way, Berenice, although Fromm and Rollo May wouldn't agree with you."
"But you've got a conscience."
"Right. At least I've got one intellectually, if not emotionally, because I was smart enough to create an imaginary father'
"Sometimes I don't understand you, James."
"That's because you're like the little old lady in Hemingway's Death in the Afternoon."
"I've never read it. That's his book on bullfighting, isn't it?"
"No. It's a book about Hemingway. By talking about bullfighting he tells us about himself. You can learn a lot about bullfighting in Death in the Afternoon, but what you learn about life and death is a matter of Hemingway."
"And the little old lady. . . ?"
"The little old lady in Death in the Afternoon kept asking irrelevant questions. As a consequence, she didn't learn much about bullfighting or Ernest Hemingway and toward the end of the book Hemingway has to get rid of her."
"I'm not a little old lady. I'm a young woman and I can learn. And if I want to understand you better, I should listen to what you have to say about art because it's a matter of life and death to you."
"You might put it that way."
"I am putting it that way."
"Would you like to hear about Jacques Debierue?"
"I'd love to hear about Jacques Debierue!"
