I was considering this, watching the palms flash by me and feeling the sun on my face, when I was suddenly thrown against the windshield as we came to a screeching halt. At the same instant a pink taxicab streaked across the intersection, missing us by six feet.
Sala’s eyes bulged and the veins stood out in his neck. Mother of God! he screamed. Did you see that bastard? Right through the red light!
He jerked the car into gear and we roared off. Jesus! he muttered. These people are too much! I’ve got to get out of this place before they kill me.
He was trembling and I offered to drive. He ignored me. Man, I’m serious, he said. I’ve got to get away — my luck’s running out
He had said the same thing before and I think he believed it. He was forever talking about luck, but what he really meant was a very ordered kind of fate. He had a strong sense of it — a belief that large and uncontrollable things were working both for and against him, things that were moving and happening every minute all over the world. The rise of communism worried him because it meant that people were going blind to his sensitivity as a human being. The troubles of the Jews depressed him because it meant that people needed scapegoats and sooner or later he would be one of them. Other things bothered him constantly: the brutality of capitalism because his talents were being exploited, the moronic vulgarity of American tourists because it gave him a bad reputation, the careless stupidity of Puerto Ricans because they were forever making his life dangerous and difficult, and even, for some reason I never understood, the hundreds of stray dogs that he saw in San Juan.
Not much of what he said was original. What made him unique was the fact that he had no sense of detachment at all. He was like the fanatical football fan who runs onto the field and tackles a player. He saw life as the Big Game, and the whole of mankind was divided into two teams — Sala’s Boys, and The Others. The stakes were fantastic and every play was vital — and although he watched with a nearly obsessive interest, he was very much the fan, shouting unheard advice in a crowd of unheard advisors and knowing all the while that nobody was paying any attention to him because he was not running the team and never would be. And like all fans he was frustrated by the knowledge that the best he could do, even in a pinch, would be to run onto the field and cause some kind of illegal trouble, then be hauled off by guards while the crowd laughed.
We never got to the university because Sala had an epileptic fit and we had to turn around. I was rattled, but he shook it off and refused to let me drive.
On the way back to the paper I asked him how he’d managed to keep his job as long as a year.
He laughed. Who else can they get? I’m the only pro on the island.
We crept along in a huge traffic jam and finally he got so nervous that I had to drive. When we got to the paper the vicious bums had disappeared, but the newsroom was in turmoil. Tyrrell, the workhorse, had just quit, and Moberg had been beaten half to death by the union goons. They had seized him outside the building and avenged their loss to Yeamon.
Lotterman was sitting on a chair in the middle of the newsroom, groaning and jabbering while two cops tried to talk to him. A few feet away, Tyrrell sat calmly at his desk, going about his business. He had given a week’s notice.
Four
As I expected, my talk with Segarra turned out to be wasted time. We sat at his desk for almost an hour, trading inanities and chuckling at each other’s jokes. Although he spoke perfect English there was still a language barrier, and I sensed immediately that no real meaning would ever pass between us. I got the impression that he knew what was going on in Puerto Rico, but he seemed to know nothing about journalism. When he talked like a politician he made sense, but it was difficult to see him as the editor of a newspaper. He seemed to think that as long as he knew the score, that was enough. The idea that he should pass on what he knew to anyone else, especially to the public at large, would have struck him as dangerous heresy. At one point he gave me a jolt when he mentioned that he and Sanderson had been classmates at Columbia.