the story of josé alfonso wellington-lee

From the Book of Failure: The Story of José Alfonso Wellington-Lee

José Alfonso Wellington-Lee died of unspecified reasons in the spring of 1974, after a lifetime of failure. There is not much to tell about Wellington-Lee, but we will tell it all.

José Alfonso Wellington-Lee was a benign tumor: ever out-of-place, spawned from nothingness, but useless and unsettling rather than harmful. At this time, it is difficult to paint a detailed portrait of how he may have looked during his youth (for other people, some would say “prime”, but such a word would be a misnomer in the case of Wellington-Lee, because his life had no “prime”; it was always a steady line, with no peaks or climbs, and no descents — because there is no falling from utter plainness). We can guess that he probably wore suspenders and white, buttoned shirts. He also wore glasses, round ones, which from time to time he would take off and wipe with the distant urgency of a nervous tic. There is one thing we know for sure: his fingers and his pants were never stained, his clothes were never rumpled, for he did not know carelessness, he was never focused on anything long enough to be distracted, and thus did not know what it was like to suddenly notice a stain in your clothes or in your skin, and wonder how it got there. His clothes were always ironed, seemingly ready for important events that would not come.

He married young, though it is hard to determine with available records whether or not that made him unhappy. It is known that every afternoon, after his retirement, he would wander outside to drink a glass of lemonade in his porch, while the teenagers from a nearby private school walked by on their way home. Several adjectives could be used to describe these girls —young, nubile, beautiful— if one were inclined to write about them, but Wellington-Lee never did, because, among the many things he was not, he was not a writer; not a good one, in any event. He produced a clumsy prose that attempted to imitate what little he had read.

He was also not an artist, not a painter. He drew —doodled, really, and badly. It is hard to determine why he kept doing it, but he apparently carried on for years: after his death, many sketch books full of unsightly, ridiculous drawings were found, haphazard lines barely discernible as human silhouettes and landscapes.

Wellington-Lee did not smoke cigars, as some great men of his time may have. He was asthmatic, and when he attempted to smoke, looking perhaps to put on an air of distinction or accomplishment (though there is no way to determine whether such things occurred to him), he was prone to coughing ridiculously.

Wellington-Lee came from a middle-class, bourgeois family, apparently white, and he never reneged on those roots. Several explanations have been suggested for his Hispanic first and middle names. The foremost and most accepted by the academics of failure is that his father's mother, whose nationality is officially unknown, was Mexican. It has been confirmed that Thomas Wellington, his grandfather, lived near the Texas-Mexico border at the time he met his future wife.

It is doubtful that Wellington-Lee ever realized he was one fourth Mexican. In fact, it is doubtful that he ever had any insights about himself at all, that any truths hidden deep inside ever unfolded before him after a moment of reflection.

Wellington-Lee quit college early, but that was not so much a failure as the continuation of other failures, because he never did well in school, and was therefore not wasting any opportunities or previous potential when he stopped going to classes. Upon quitting, he quickly found clerical employment. Although it is unknown what type of work he did, one can imagine him reading or shuffling long and yellowish paperwork, writing things in pads, staring dumbly at what he did not understand. He might have spoken with coworkers, flirted with secretaries.

Wellington-Lee’s custom of wiping his glasses excessively was his only eccentricity. He lacked the nobility of mental disorders. Unlike great men of his time, he had no compulsions, no neuroses. He did not hear voices or was depressed. Some said he was happy —shamefully happy, one would hope, considering the fact that he had accomplished nothing.

When he retired, Wellington-Lee set about doing something important. For years, he had planned to spend every day creating something once he retired. He would write. He would draw. He would invent.

Every afternoon, he went down to his basement and stared at a long, clean writing table his wife had set up for him, a stack of blank sheets, pens and pencils, rulers and watercolors and tools. He stared vacantly at the wall, imagined himself putting things together. He never produced anything, but he spent time in that basement nearly until his death.

On his deathbed, he had no last words to offer, almost as if he had never thought about it, never thought about dying. When asked how he felt, he smiled, preposterously. Then he slowly died, his mediocrity finally excised from the breast of humanity.