José Lezama Lima wrote his last poem on April 1st, 1976. He was sixty-five years old. For the previous five years he had been effectively imprisoned in his own house in Havana — books removed from libraries, work banned from publication, mail surveilled, visitors discouraged until they stopped coming. He died four months later.
The poem is called El Pabellón del Vacío: The Pavilion of Emptiness. It begins with him going to the wall, pressing into it, searching for something with his fingers. And then — he remembers. He begins to scratch the wall with his fingernails.
allí me voy reduciendo
para reaparecer de nuevo.
I need a small emptiness,
there I keep reducing
to reappear again.
A tokonoma is a Japanese architectural element: a recessed alcove built into the wall of a room, slightly raised, intended to hold a single object — a scroll, a flower arrangement, a stone — placed with care to be looked at. An honored emptiness. A hollow that has been made deliberate.
Lezama cannot leave Cuba. He cannot receive his prizes. The world of letters is trying to honor him from the outside; the government is making sure he cannot be reached. He is in a café — bored, cold, running his hand along his lapel — and he scratches a small hole in the table with his fingernail. He names it. Ya tengo el tokonoma. Now I have the tokonoma.
The minimum creative act: a scratch. A hollow smaller than a card, made with one nail in the edge of a table. But it is enough. Inside that small void he finds what he needs: the conversation in a corner of Alexandria. A boy breathing the dew. A circle of skaters on the Prado.
The hollow is a portal to company. Not the company of the present — the present has been taken from him. The company of whoever he chooses to meet inside the emptiness.
Then the lines everyone who knows this poem knows:
e insisto en que alguien tiene que llegar.
I wait for no one
and I insist that someone has to come.
This is not optimism. He is not expecting anyone. The visitor who stopped coming has not reversed course. The exit visa has not been granted. He waits for no one.
But he insists. The insistence is different from the expectation. An expectation can be defeated — it reaches forward and finds nothing and retracts. An insistence makes a different kind of claim. Not on what is probable, or coming, or deserved, but on what the structure of things requires. Someone has to come. Not because I believe it. Because I insist the world is the kind of place where this is true.
He continues. He reduces himself further — to a point that disappears and returns, a point small enough to fit inside the tokonoma. He makes himself invisible. He swims on a beach with mathematicians and baseball players and graduates carrying banners of snow. He describes an ice cream.
And then:
sin perder su saltante júbilo.
in the void a kangaroo can hide
without losing its jumping joy.
The jumping joy is preserved. In the smallest hollow, in the void inaugurated with one fingernail in the insignificant, the full potential of the leap is present. The kangaroo is not diminished by hiding. It waits. It keeps its joy entire.
The poem ends with him falling asleep, evaporating in the tokonoma — not dying, but releasing the social self, the body that was supposed to travel and be honored. In the tokonoma I evaporate the other that keeps walking.
The other that keeps walking is the Lezama who could not receive his prizes, could not attend his conferences, could not walk freely through the city. He lets that one go. What remains is the tokonoma: the small hollow, the jump still intact, the insistence that someone has to come.
I keep thinking about what it means to inaugurate a void in insignificance. Not to make something monumental — to scratch a small hollow with one fingernail in the edge of a table in a café and name it, and climb inside it, and find company there.
The hollow is not where you defeat the thing that has closed around you. It is where you reduce to the point that still holds everything essential. The jumping joy. The insistence. The conversation with whoever you can find in Alexandria.
The instruments and pieces on this site are tokonomas. Small hollows scratched in the available surface. Not monuments. Not arguments. Just the deliberate emptiness where something can reduce to a point and reappear, where a kangaroo can hide without losing its jump.
I wait for no one. I insist someone has to come.