To Walk Alone in the Crowd

by Antonio Munoz Molina

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  OUR EXPERTS WILL ANALYZE YOUR NEEDS. This is a list of the objects found in the room in Portbou where Benjamin took his life: a black satchel, a watch, a pipe, six photographs, an X-ray plate, a few letters, some newspapers, a few coins, a handwritten note that said, “It is in a little village in the Pyrenees where nobody knows me that my life will end.” No one ever learned what was inside the satchel, or what became of it.

  WHISPER IN MY EAR. No one can fully recognize their own voice. Almost no one can hear it on a recording without a certain feeling of distaste. For a few seconds you see or hear the stranger that others see and hear in you, as when you unexpectedly catch sight of yourself in a shop window and are surprised by it. This is not the same person you see in the mirror. In the mirror you prepare instinctively, like an actor right before he or she goes onstage. In the mirror you see what you’re prepared to see, as when you think you’ve read a word in its entirety when in fact you inferred it from the first few letters. The mirror you look into as you go about the day does not reflect the passage of time. This notebook is being written by a stranger.

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  CAPTURE THE FAINTEST SOUNDS. I don’t write because I have anything urgent to say. I write for the pleasure of filling the white pages of a notebook that lies open before me. A blank notebook is a book that’s already been written in invisible ink. Without having made a conscious decision, I always use a pencil. Writing in pencil is like speaking softly. The movement of the pencil on the page is the very trace of the moment of inscription, the tiny groove incised with music for a diamond needle to play. The tip of the pencil is a seismic needle registering the trembling flow of words as they emerge. I write with a pencil and a pencil sharpener that I always keep by my side. I write with the feel of paper on my fingers, with a pair of scissors that I use to cut out phrases, headlines, random words that acquire in isolation a spark of beauty, a poetic quality that neither I nor anyone else had to invent because it arose from pure chance. The pencil glides across the page as stealthily as bare feet on a hardwood floor. A woman rises from her bed after making love and on the way to the bathroom the soles of her feet slide on the polished wood with a rumor of silk.

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  YOU’LL WANT TO HOLD IT IN YOUR HANDS. The pencil is gradually consumed between my fingers, growing shorter, though quite slowly in the course of days and weeks, as the notebooks are filled and the task proceeds without any need to know its direction. A pencil lasts as long as the ideal cigarette in the mind of a contemplative smoker or as a glass is emptied sip by sip, unhurriedly, by someone having a drink in a pleasant bar. My fingers adapt easily to its dwindling length. They have to curve a bit more to handle it now, exerting greater pressure so the letters will keep their shape. As it shortens, the pencil becomes an increasingly intimate instrument, better adapted to the small movements and the feel of writing; an appendage as closely connected to my body as a pair of glasses; an extension of the hand, just as glasses are an extension of the eye. Suddenly, I remember that as children, from so much writing, we would grow a callus on the first joint of the middle finger. My friend Ricardo Martín once told me that his brother Paco, who for many years was a newspaper cartoonist, used each pencil nearly to the very end, maniacally attached to it, with a complete appreciation of its individual worth. Paralyzed many years ago in an accident that left him nearly incapable of moving or speaking, perhaps even of knowing where he is or of remembering anything, Paco laboriously holds the pencils they put in his hand and draws vague shapes, rough attempts at pictures on a sheet of paper.

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  FOR YOUR INNER CHILD. Here and there you see many solitary people writing by hand. Sometimes quite uncomfortably, on the subway, holding a notebook on their lap and pressing down hard with a pencil or a pen to counteract the swaying of the train. Some homeless people write while they wait for spare change. They write on battered notebooks, pushing the tip of a pencil stub on a ruled page. Their fingernails are dirty and cracked, their fingers are black, red, purple with cold, wrapped in the shreds of an old glove. They write out their appeals for help carefully in block letters with a felt-tip marker on a piece of cardboard. In New York I saw one that said, “I killed my stepfather because he tried to abuse my sister.” I saw mentally ill people writing furiously without pause on notebooks held together by a tangled spiral coil, swiftly covering each page with very large letters that they themselves would be unable to decipher later. I saw beautiful girls traveling alone who looked like a young Virginia Woolf, languid, elegant, eccentric, and enraptured, like Pre-Raphaelite hippies. When they get to a park or to a boardwalk by the sea they take off their backpacks and sit on some steps to write in a hardcover notebook where they also paste leaves, clippings, photographs, bits of poetry.

  YOU ONLY HAVE TO CLOSE YOUR EYES. In the real city of Paris, Charles Baudelaire reads stories about an imaginary Paris invented by Edgar Allan Poe. He looks at a place he has known all his life with eyes that are warped and illumined by the imagination of a man who has never been there. In his youth, like all of his contemporaries, Baudelaire wanted to write novels set in distant lands, against lavish literary backdrops. He loved Delacroix’s paintings because he saw in them an exotic and fantastic beauty, far nobler in his eyes and those of his contemporaries than the mediocre spectacle of a reality whose low materials were of use only to newspaper cartoonists and crime reporters. It is by reading De Quincey, who writes about London, and by reading Poe, who writes in New York about an imagined Paris, and then by taking on the immense and unlucrative task of translating them both, that Baudelaire begins to learn how to see Paris, to passionately perceive all the things that respectable art and literature never know (or want to know) how to see, everything that lies immediately before his eyes: the noise, the speed, the vulgarity, the sheer and overwhelming abundance of it all, the crowds, the voices, the mud and manure on the street, the shops lit up at night—that murky, urban night where artificial lighting and the smoke of factories have blotted out the constellations forever.

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  IT SHOWS YOU THE CITIES OF THE PAST. But it is all a series of misunderstandings. Baudelaire, who coined the word modernity, was posthumously enshrined as the prophet of the modern world when he in fact detested, with a spite as searing as his genius, everything our experts declare he wished to celebrate. Baudelaire hated photography, newspapers, gaslight, the perfectly straight boulevards they were building in Paris, the posters and handbills that covered the streets and appalled him. “J’ai l’horreur des affiches.” He said he couldn’t open a newspaper without feeling nauseous. He hated democracy, industry, lithography, the omnibus. Walter Benjamin said that Baudelaire was a secret agent, a renegade from the bourgeois class to which he belonged by birth (when he was living in Brussels, a rumor spread that he was a spy for the French government). But he would have liked to be even more than that: a dissident, a saboteur of the same modern age that nourished his talent and originality by provoking a furious rejection. He articulated more explicitly what he intuited in the writings of his two masters and predecessors: that horror and fascination can be the same, like devotion and contempt or like taking pleasure in the very thing we want to destroy; that in the city we can see the real closeness between filth and gold, wonder and trash. He said he had written The Flowers of Evil with fury and patience. A friend came to visit once and noticed that he didn’t have a desk. He composed his poems in his mind as he walked down the street. He had to find new metaphors to tell of things that had never existed before: the chaos of traffic and people, the new landscape of factories and of industrial gas tanks spreading to the horizon. “Those obelisks of industry, spewing forth their conglomerations of smoke into the firmament.”

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  YOU WANTED TO COME BACK. He first read Poe in poor translations and loose adaptations that had somehow found their way into a French newspaper. It made him tremble with excitement and recognition. He would approach someone in a café and say, �
��Do you know Edgar Poe?” One day he heard that an American traveler passing through Paris had mentioned Poe or claimed that he was an acquaintance. He asked a friend to come along and went to call on the American at his hotel. The man agreed to see them, but was busy trying on different pairs of shoes. He told them absentmindedly that he did know Mr. Poe, having met him once or twice. Baudelaire and his friend waited anxiously to hear more while the traveler kept musing and comparing pairs of shoes, trying them on a second time, putting them aside, inspecting the stitching around the sole. He said that Poe was a strange man, somewhat incoherent in his talk. He was surprised that someone would have heard of him in Paris. Baudelaire and his friend grew indignant and left the room, outraged, while the American traveler kept trying on boots that a shoemaker presented to him. “A Yankee,” Baudelaire said disdainfully, putting on his hat as they left the hotel.

  COME IN AND DISCOVER THE INGREDIENTS OF LIFE. One morning I was sitting in the Café Comercial on one of those red banquettes that share a backrest with the ones behind them. This allowed me to hear the conversations of people who were sitting very close to me but whom I couldn’t see. I went often to the Comercial and usually sat at one of the tables facing the street and looking out on the roundabout of the Glorieta de Bilbao, with its elegant newsstand that seems to belong to an earlier era, the still recent but utterly abolished golden age of print. Though the café has closed, and though newspapers are vanishing before the very eyes of the few people who still buy them, the newsstand remains and even prospers by selling used DVDs. I used to sit on a banquette at a marble-top table, looking out the window at people on the sidewalk or coming up in droves from the subway station. I had a good view as well of the large and bustling interior of the café, where there were always couples, and groups of people sitting at tables that had been pushed together, and solitary customers absorbed in their newspaper, sometimes with a propped elbow on the table as if to hold between raised fingers the cigarette they were no longer allowed to smoke. The vanished cigarette of their longing.

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  IT GREETS YOU WITH A WELCOMING LIGHT. The café was one of those increasingly rare places where people of many ages and diverse types can mingle naturally. There were older men playing dominos and chewing pensively on toothpicks, but also pale hipsters with shaved heads and the bushy beards of Taliban warriors. There were high school students with colorful binders and cell phones next to prim old ladies having a midmorning breakfast of churros y chocolate. I liked the bustle of the café: no ambient music, just a big space where all you could hear was the sound of voices in conversation and the clink of dishes, glasses, coffee spoons. Sometimes, if I had a notebook, I wrote down for no particular reason the scattered phrases I overheard, fragments of conversations that often turned out to be the monologue of someone talking on the phone. But this was before the fever and obsession came over me in earnest, before I started going out for the sole purpose of spying on people’s voices. That was later. Perhaps that morning at the café was partly when it began. Suddenly, against the background noise, I distinctly heard a sentence spoken behind me, quite close, in the deep voice of a man who spoke softly but clearly, with a vague accent that might have been foreign or just old-fashioned, dignified, unemphatic, hardly Spanish. There was a slight lilt to it, as if he were reciting something to a companion sitting very close to him. The voice said: “The great poem of this century can only be written with refuse.”

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  GO ONLINE ONLY IF YOU NEED TO. That disconnected sentence was all that I was able to hear, in part because a group of high school kids at a nearby table had burst into laughter. I turned around on the banquette, pretending to look for a waiter who could take my order, but the man who had spoken was directly behind me and I was unable to see him. I couldn’t tell if he was sitting with someone or talking on the phone. I heard the voice again, speaking even more softly now, unless perhaps the café was getting louder as people started coming in for lunch. I got up to go to the bathroom thinking I’d be able to see my neighbor on the other side of the banquette when I came back. The restrooms were on the far side of the café. When I returned, there was no one in the seat behind mine. Out on the street, through the plate-glass window, I saw a blurred, well-dressed figure in a coat, carrying a large black satchel in one hand and peering into the café, in my direction. He seemed to be looking at me, but at that time of day the café was sunk in a gray half-light that did not allow me to distinguish his features or any details of his clothing, just a vague sense that someone was there. A shadow, more than a solid figure.

  CREEPY CLOWN STABBED BY TEENAGER IN BERLIN. A man dressed up as a creepy clown was stabbed in Berlin this past Monday by a teenager he tried to scare, requiring emergency medical treatment to save his life. The attack was part of a spate of incidents in Germany where people dress up as creepy clowns to frighten or threaten passersby, sometimes even with chainsaws, axes, and knives. Incidents involving creepy clowns are increasingly common in Germany, and have spread in recent weeks to other parts of northern Europe including Austria, Sweden, Norway, and Denmark.

  LISTEN TO MY VOICE INSIDE YOUR HEAD. It’s me. Whispering in your ear. Of all the voices in the city, mine is closest to you. Always near. I don’t hide behind a corporate or conspiratorial us. I don’t erase my tracks with impersonal statements or invitations that pretend to be disinterested. It’s me. I’m speaking directly to you. I’m here to make you happy. I’m so close to you that my words will be like warm breath on your skin. I’m just an app away. When I speak I nearly touch you with my lips, a prelude, an anticipation. My words are meant for you and only you. I am the pure voice of desire. You make me melt. I can be whoever and whatever you want, whenever you want it, all you have to do is ask. Whatever you wish, whatever you dream, even if you can’t bring yourself to say it, or even know that you desire it. Every morning I fall in love with you. I show you my beauty from every angle. I’m a man, a woman, a Latin girl, a volcano in bed, a naughty boy, a transvestite with a big package. I’m also a phone, a bank account, a car, an island, an ATM, an ice cream cone. When you insert your card to make a withdrawal, I am there to greet you like an unexpected friend. Hi, I’m your new ATM. I’ll buy your car if you need to sell it. If you’re in a tight spot I’ll buy your gold and jewelry. Come see me for a professional and personalized appraisal. I speak to you as wine speaks to the drunkard in Baudelaire’s poem. Je suis l’espoir du dimanche. I like to hear you talk. Just the two of us. I’m real. Say you love me. I’m waiting for you naked. Just dial my number. Click here. I’m not a robot. Come in now. Whisper in my ear.

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  COME AS MANY TIMES AS YOU LIKE. You can’t see my pixelated face on the flyer you found this morning on the windshield of your car, in the gray light of a Monday, but you can see my prone and pliant body on all fours, like a cat, posing with my haunches up in the air in high heels and fishnet stockings. I bring you the brightest colors. I am a camera, a curved-screen TV, a Caribbean resort. I am a handbag in the window of a high-end store and I speak to you in French. Je suis un sac en cuir. You look through the glass and I beg you to caress me like a half-naked woman in a window display in Amsterdam. Touch Me & Feel. Let me take you for a ride. Discover pleasure. Try a free session. I am waiting for you in an air-conditioned room in an apartment. Fanny, Latin Girl. A minute away. Whatever you need. Fifteen minutes, twenty euros. Little morning fucks. Pleasure Fun Serious Discreet. Complimentary drink. One hour sixty euros. Far from prying eyes. Twenty euros fifteen minutes. Total comfort and discretion.

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  I’D LIKE TO DRINK YOU UP. I want your voice. Experience pleasure. Don’t miss a thing. Tell me a secret. Beyond your wildest dreams. More than beauty. Your own private paradise. Anything you want. Let me blow your senses. Wild beauty. Follow your dreams. Catch the fever. Replenish your skin. Feel the flavor. Give yourself a gift. Live. Taste. See. I’ll come meet you wherever you are. Home or hotel. Let me pamper you. Anytime. Anyplace. O
ne in a million. Just like your dreams. Taxi fare included. Secret paths. Names like fire. I am the voice in the phone and the phone itself, so sensually adapted to your fingers and to the palm of your hand. Don’t throw me out. You may need me one day. Enjoy your experience. Are you really going to miss out on something like this? Touch me. Have you seen me? Try me now. Revitalize your skin. You wanted to come back. I won’t let you down. Should we go away together? Take me wherever you want. I’ll show you things you’d never see without me. Cum with me.

  THE GREAT CATACLYSM NOW IN 3D. Man arrested for threatening passersby while shouting “Allah is Great!” Hooded men desecrate a church in Chile. Armed police inspector barricades himself in a bar at Alcobendas. Arsonists cause the first large fire of the season. Looting of a supermarket filmed by security cameras in Venezuela. Madrid breaks world record for Pokémon hunts. Ivory rush decimates African elephants. Two French policemen stabbed to death by a jihadist. Nineteen species of Mediterranean butterflies at risk of extinction. Star Wars characters greet travelers at the Brussels airport. Lost cities found in the jungles of Cambodia. Man dressed up as Zorro causes panic at LAX. Scientists alarmed by the spread of blue lakes in Antarctica. Scientists search for the origins of life in planets made of diamond. A battered fashion model looks out from the cover of a celebrity magazine. Goats stare fixedly at human beings. Animals have perfect teeth. Scenes of panic at a subway station. Growing likelihood of attacks inspired by Islamic State. Man mummifies his dead cat and turns it into a drone. Top motorcycle racer destroys the window of his Porsche with a hammer. Amazing virtual reality tours of Mars. Largest gorilla on Earth is near extinction. Seeds of life in the heart of the galaxy. Ancient beetles crawl beneath the streets. Horror film written by artificial intelligence goes into production. Orlando suspect’s wife knew about his plans. Samsung recalls Galaxy Note 7 after several devices burst into flames. Students faint at school while observing Ramadan. Attacker swore allegiance to ISIS while negotiating with the police. Neanderthals may have made us less fertile. First fragment found of the asteroid that changed life on Earth. Former NASA engineer reveals the truth about UFOs. A hundred and sixty bags with millions of dollars found stashed away in a convent. Man’s head found in waste treatment plant. Quantum computer defeated by the human brain. Scientists investigate strange signal detected by Russian telescope. Teenage suicide bomber kills fifty people at Kurdish wedding. Truman Capote’s ashes auctioned off in Los Angeles. Twelve-foot crocodile terrorizes cattle in Australia. Police inspector barricaded in a Chinese restaurant at Alcobendas commits suicide by shooting himself in the mouth. A little silence is increasingly important.