To Walk Alone in the Crowd

by Antonio Munoz Molina

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  FORGET EVERYTHING YOU KNOW. Maybe now and then there is a different sound that may at first be hard to identify, the sound of a pencil turning in the hollow of a metal sharpener. A dark blotch appears and dissolves across the translucent pane of glass, which lets shadows through but not volumes or clear outlines. He must have gotten up to stretch his legs, gripped by the instinctive urge to walk that is always in him, and taken a few turns around the table in the cloudy light of a window that probably opens into an inner courtyard. Then he goes back to his task, leaning over the table and rubbing his hands together one more time, as absorbed in his work as a tailor, one of those tailors with a measuring tape draped over their shoulders like a liturgical vestment and a worn piece of chalk behind the ear or as a watchmaker peering through his loupe, enthralled by tiny escapements and miniature wheels that come together as meticulously as the words that he cuts out with his scissors, the ads, the pictures, the slogans and lurid headlines, all jumbled together like a set of dominos, forming connections that are as wondrous and unforeseen as chemical reactions.

  SECRETS THAT DO NOT PERMIT THEMSELVES TO BE TOLD. The cities that Edgar Allan Poe knows well do not appear in his stories. He writes in Baltimore, New York, Richmond, and Philadelphia, but his stories take place in the vague landscapes of a gothic novel or in a European city like Paris or London. There is no literature for Poe in his immediate surroundings. His imagination is as out of place in his native country as his disastrously unstable life. As a child he had once been to London, which he chose for the setting of “The Man of the Crowd.” That ancient memory can hardly have helped him write the story, which nevertheless seems as literal as a firsthand account pieced together from direct experience of the streets of London. The city through which a nameless narrator follows a stranger without pause for twenty-four hours—in the crowd, down empty streets, in the glow of gaslight, past storefronts, through vast open markets, down dark alleys—is the London of De Quincey’s Confessions; the same city that shines darkly in Dickens and Wilkie Collins and in the adventures of Sherlock Holmes. Forty years later, the sinister, withered stranger in Poe’s tale will become Stevenson’s Edward Hyde. Even the gas lamps remain, although in Stevenson’s time there were many more of them lighting up the larger streets. Their glow shines against the darkness of the poorer, narrow streets and alleyways. “The street shone … like a fire in the forest,” Stevenson says. He greatly admired De Quincey. As a young man he had often crossed paths with that strange errant figure in the streets of Edinburgh. His description of Mr. Hyde exactly matches every testimony we have of De Quincey’s appearance in his old age: “Mr. Hyde was pale and dwarfish, he gave an impression of deformity without any nameable malformation.”

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  WE CAN’T CHANGE YOUR PAST. “The Man of the Crowd” is a story without a plot. It could be a prose poem, anticipating the ones that Baudelaire would write years later under Poe’s direct influence. It has a beginning and a guiding mystery but not a clear ending or an explanation. Poe, who so often drew up elaborately sinister plots, now allowed himself a remarkable narrative freedom. “The tale is garbled, the sorrow clear,” as Machado says in one of his poems. There are no proper names. Freed from the trammels and the obligations of plot, the story flows like life itself or with the musical movement of poetry. We do not know the narrator’s identity, his profession, where he comes from, or why he is in London. We are told that he is convalescing but not from what illness. The state of convalescence is crucial: he takes pleasure merely in breathing, and feels, he says, “a calm but inquisitive interest in every thing.” He is an immobile spectator, a figure in a photograph, sitting by a bow window at a café inside a hotel with a cigar and an open newspaper on his lap, in perfect idleness. Occasionally, he says, he glances at an advertisement in the paper or he lifts his eyes to look at the other customers in the café. Newspaper ads were still a recent commercial invention when Poe was writing his story. Many more people could read, and technical advances had made cheap mass printing possible. Baudelaire’s poems and prose pieces appeared in Parisian newspapers, lost in large pages crammed with tiny print. The few of Emily Dickinson’s poems that were published during her lifetime are nearly impossible to find in the crowded columns of a local paper, anonymous and so concise as to be almost entirely clandestine. In the pages of the New York Sun, a penny sheet, Poe published an extensive and entirely spurious account of a manned balloon flight across the Atlantic that had supposedly reached the United States in just three days. Thousands of copies had sold by the time people realized it was a hoax.

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  WE UNDERSTAND WHY YOU WOULDN’T WANT TO LOOK THROUGH THAT WINDOW. Now and then the narrator looks out the window. The day is waning, the streets are filled with people leaving work and coming out of shops. The gas lamps are being lit as dusk begins to fall, bodies and faces stand out in unnatural relief beneath the yellow glare as in a parade of figures drawn by Daumier. All classes of people, all characters, occupations, and types of dress mingle confusedly as night descends and the gaslight grows brighter. “The rays of the gas-lamps … threw over every thing a fitful and garish luster. All was dark yet splendid.” The intensity of Poe’s writing arises in part from the strain to which language had to be subjected to depict new sights. The faces of the crowd spread and multiply in the gaslight as hideously as in De Quincey’s hallucinations. One particular face among them, for no clear reason, awakens in the narrator the urge to go out on the street and begin a pursuit. It belongs to a little old man, a figure who once again seems strikingly like the ghost or double of De Quincey: “a decrepit old man, some sixty-five or seventy years of age,” “short in stature, very thin, and apparently very feeble,” “in filthy, ragged clothes.” Something in the stranger suggests “the ideas of vast mental power, of caution, of penuriousness, of avarice, of coolness, of malice, of blood-thirstiness, of triumph, of merriment, of excessive terror, of intense—of supreme despair.”

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  WE’RE WAITING FOR YOU. There is a pressing urge to keep the stranger in view, to know more about him, about the wild history “written within that bosom.” For twenty-four hours the Man of the Crowd and his pursuer devote themselves to an episode in the ceaseless wandering motion that defines their century: “roaming far and wide until a late hour, seeking, amid the wild lights and shadows of the populous city, that infinity of mental excitement which quiet observation can afford.” For an instant the narrator catches a glimpse “both of a diamond and of a dagger” in the dark folds of the man’s old coat. But nothing more is said, no answer is given at the end of the search, and they shine on as pure, inscrutable mysteries. Just the flash of a dagger, the glint of a diamond in the gaslight.

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  AN ÉMINENCE GRISE. Poe’s other city is Paris. As a young man he liked to recount trips he had never taken. He claimed to have been to St. Petersburg and China. He had never been to Paris but he read about its crime-ridden slums in cheap French feuilletons that were translated and pirated in American newspapers. He was familiar as well with De Quincey’s ghoulish narratives, attempting on occasion and with little success to imitate the gallows humor of “On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts.” Newspapers are a cheap mass product for quick consumption, without the least concern for the truth. They print lavishly illustrated stories about gruesome crimes, premature burials, resurrections by electric current, balloon flights to the moon, mesmeric trances carried out on agonizing men who continue to speak at the hypnotist’s command when they are already dead. American publishers are not interested in books by American authors because they can earn much more by pirating popular English novels. A writer must make a living. Poe will never stop writing and he will never come out of poverty. A girl named Mary Rogers had been murdered and thrown into the Hudson from the New Jersey shore, probably to erase all traces of a failed abortion. For Poe, remoteness is a necessary ingredient of literature. He writes a story in which Mary Rogers becom
es Marie Rogêt, substituting Paris for Jersey City and the Seine for the Hudson. The murder of Marie Rogêt will be investigated by amateur detective C. Auguste Dupin, who also solved the murders of the Rue Morgue.

  THE ALLURE OF YOUR AGE. For as long as I have known her she has always been the right age for me. Now I can hardly believe that when we first held each other she was twenty-eight and I was thirty-four. Neither one of us realized how young we were. As the years passed she went through new stages of her beauty, like phases of the moon that were never exactly alike. She remained youthful but she attained new forms of plenitude that only time could bring. Life continued to shape her to my taste. She shaped herself, carefully attentive to her person, an exact observer without the least self-indulgence. She changed and she became someone else by remaining herself. She was and she was not the same person she had been a day, or two months, or two years before. One could witness these changes in photographs. She got a short haircut once that gave an adolescent glow to her smile. She thought of dyeing her hair a platinum blond but never did. She would put her hair up in a bun, which made her seem taller and emphasized the flowing grace of her walk. For a while she had two identical linen dresses, simple, short, tight-fitting, one red and one yellow. The bright colors and the cut gave her a sixties air, like the bun in her hair. She would ask me to hold her lipstick when we went out so she didn’t have to carry a bag or anything else. She liked to go out entirely unburdened, and could do so, in that time prior to cell phones. She would not say pintalabios, lipstick, just pinta. That clipped word held for me all the excitement of the way people talked in Madrid and of the new life we were sharing together.

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  EXPRESS YOUR STYLE FREELY. She used to wear a pair of very graceful shoes that I had given her, black and white, with a leopard print and heels that were not too high. She would glance sideways at her reflection in a shop window in a way that was both coquettish and critically discerning. Since she and I are always moving through time together, we barely notice its passing, just as someone drifting in a balloon in a faint current of air will be unaware of its motion. When she was forty I was turned on by the fact that she was so attractive as to look ten years younger. I look at her past fifty and I can’t imagine anyone more desirable. All the more so because of her age. She is enriched by the treasure of time. Her skin is so soft that the slightest brush is a caress. Time has shaped us separately and it has shaped us together in our ceaseless contact. We are who we were when we were born, and when we met, and as we have become in being together. We are the air that the other one breathes. When she is gone I like to open her closet and breathe her presence in her clothes. When I sleep alone I never take her side of the bed. I remember her reading me some lines by Donald Hall about his wife, Jane Kenyon, who is herself a wonderful poet: “She came into her beauty like into an inheritance.”

  MADE TO FIT YOUR HAND. He found an interesting sheet of paper in a box full of old typewritten forms that someone left by the side of a garbage bin. It has the dimensions of a shoebox lid and it is thick, though not stiff, and spotless white despite lying among old papers and all kinds of waste. He wishes, as so many times before, that he had the least bit of talent for drawing. The piece of paper is of the right size and shape to draw something precise and austere, like a Juan Gris sketch for a still life or one of Giacometti’s lonely human figures. He tucks it away in his great omnivorous satchel without first looking around to see if anyone is watching. As he walks down the street he is aware of the beautiful and secret possibility that he carries with him. He enters a drab café that is quite crowded. The empty tables are littered with trays and leftovers that those who just had breakfast didn’t bother to remove. But there is one table, just one, that is clean, and it happens to be by the window, a miracle that he must take advantage of before it disappears. He sits down at the table without ordering anything and pulls out the sheet of paper. For a moment he searches his pockets uneasily for a pencil, worried that he might have lost it. The smaller a pencil stub gets, the more cleverly it will conceal itself. A fold in his clothing or the depth of a pocket provides it with a perfect burrow. Just as he suspected, the sheet of paper has the perfect texture, smooth enough to write on swiftly without being slick. He licks the sharpened tip of the pencil, and only when it touches the paper do the words begin to emerge.

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  BE READY FOR WHATEVER COMES YOUR WAY. “All artistic work,” he writes, “however literary or speculative it may be, must in part be a physical task, involving effort and labor and requiring the use of one’s hands. Emily Dickinson would make a clean copy of her poems when she was done writing them and stitch them into little notebooks in which she sometimes also pasted the leaves of trees. Or she would carefully fold the sheet of paper and place inside a pressed flower that often has some relation to the poem. Her room was a comfortable cell for contemplation but she never stayed inside for too many hours at a time. She walked in her garden, tending to it with a farmer’s vitality and skill. The same quick hands that wrote her poems wielded the hoe and the pruning hook, put seeds in the ground and crushed clumps of black earth. Dickinson took part in all domestic chores and was an assiduous cook. Confined to her house by her own volition, she displayed a practical activism similar to St. Teresa of Avila’s though fortunately free of any asceticism, or even of any desire for transcendence. Paradise is here, just like the family house, its garden, its cupboards, the view of the fields from a window and the natural life of plants, birds, insects, and farm animals, the entire world, a roofless Noah’s ark. The human brain becomes deformed and atrophied when the mind is too exclusively concerned with work requiring no physical activity, manual skill, or strong sensory stimuli. To make a drawing you need the resistance of the sheet of paper as well as your determination to overcome the clumsiness of your hand. This encounter with materiality produces setbacks and chance revelations that are more fruitful to the future work than any prior intentions. Words have no material substance but their resistance is just as stubborn as that of wood, clay, or stone. One can force their fixed sounds and meanings only to a certain point. Syntax offers as powerful a resistance as gravity or as the physical composition of matter. Besides, words are used up, mistreated, spoiled by toxic residues just as the bodies of marine animals are poisoned by chemical spills or by the antibiotics and antidepressants that people expel in their urine or simply flush down the toilet.”

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  THREE DAYS OF QUANTUM ACTIVISM. “The nobility of the folk artist has always consisted in working with whatever happens to be at hand; cheap, accessible materials, wood if there was wood, stone if one could find it, clay if there was neither wood nor stone. In Africa there is a man who turns the plastic canisters in which the poor carry their water and gasoline into sculptures that resemble masks or idols. Emily Dickinson stitched together her books of poems with the same needle and thread that she employed for her domestic sewing. She also made her verses out of the simple rhythms and monotonous stanzas of the hymns they sang in church. As a teenager, she made an album containing every species of herb and flower in her garden and in nearby fields. She had studied chemistry and natural history. She pressed plant specimens with great care, making sure that their characteristic features were fully and clearly preserved, affixing the stem to a sheet of pasteboard with tiny strips of paper or fabric and writing the name underneath. Gary Snyder has written poems all his life and never stopped working with his hands, primarily with wood, and doing construction. When he was very young he wrote a poem about stoneworkers carving out steps on the side of a mountain: each verse was as solid and deliberate as a hewn step, tier upon tier to make the path firm. Manual work produces a healthy absorption, you focus on the task at hand and at the same time you forget yourself, your history, your identity, things float weightlessly around you like objects set free from gravity inside a space station. The task has a practical and verifiable aim, yet it produces at the same time a self-sufficing pleasure. The finished
piece, whatever it may be, exists in a fully objective manner even if bound inseparably to the particular life and character of its maker. It seems anonymous, impersonal, standing squarely on its base and occupying a precise amount of space: a jug, a chair, a painting, a wooden box or one made out of cardboard. It was born from someone’s labor yet it has an emancipated existence. It can last for a few days or it can last for centuries or millennia. It can become as elemental as the enduring forms of nature, shaped and altered by time or by the hands of those who use it, like stone steps that are gradually smoothed and worn away by those who tread on them. The head of an Egyptian queen or goddess carved in basalt, its upper half gone. The radiant splendor of its ruin, a chin, half the oval of a face with a broken smile that is all the more beautiful because there are no eyes; halfway between a sculpture and a piece of rubble, between sensuous beauty and a sacred shudder.” A brusque voice makes him look up but it takes him a moment to realize it is addressing him. “You can’t sit here unless you order something.” He nods politely, puts away the sheet of paper in his satchel, slips his pencil in the inner pocket of his jacket so as not to lose it. But its sharp tip is already beginning to poke a little hole in the lining.