To Walk Alone in the Crowd
Page 17
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LIFE BEFORE YOUR EYES. Since I still had a backpack, a pair of sandals, a good pair of hiking boots for days when I walked far; since I still had a notebook, a credit card, a pencil, a sharpener, an eraser, I kept up my active and irresponsible summer life. I had to plan new routes, calculate new walking distances from our new address. A serious wanderer will not rely entirely on Google Maps, but rather carefully keep track of time, distance, useful shortcuts, and auspicious detours. One morning I set out at nine-thirty and by ten-fifteen I was already walking down the Travesía de San Mateo to the Museum of Romanticism. The uniformed guard looked up from her cell phone, a little surprised to see a visitor. Then she became absorbed again in what seemed from the sounds that came out of the phone like an engrossing shoot-’em-up game. I had discovered Tichý’s photographs a few years back in New York. I was glad they had come to Madrid, and that a persecuted and derided body of work that was seemingly doomed to oblivion had nevertheless become known and attained a certain posterity. Life can play out in strange ways. I saw one of Tichý’s cameras displayed in a glass dome, with its lens that looked like a castaway’s spyglass and its bits of rope, rusted gears, discarded odds and ends precariously held together with electrical tape. Unexpectedly, I saw as well another visitor, a man sitting with his back to me on a narrow plastic chair that was barely wide enough for his buttocks, looking at a monitor as it silently played a documentary about Tichý. He was wearing headphones, so he hadn’t heard me come in.
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THEY WILL STAY WITH YOU FOR THE REST OF YOUR LIFE. As always, I failed at first to recognize him. As always, I was surprised a moment later not to have known immediately who he was. This time my confusion was dispelled more quickly because he was easier to recognize from the back than from the front, and also because the setting—an antiquated and rather ill-fated place—seemed already to anticipate or to favor his appearance. Something in him was contrary to the sensuousness of sweltering heat, light clothes, bright colors, the turmoil of a summer crowd. So there he was, large and furtive, heavier now than I remembered, not because he’d put on weight but due to the peculiarly erratic traces he left in one’s memory, which had led me in the past to be surprised at how much taller, shorter, thinner, balder, or less formal he seemed. Perhaps it was the fact that he was wearing glasses, or that he wasn’t wearing them. But there he was, on that chair that would have needed to be wider or sturdier to preserve his dignity. His satchel or briefcase was beside him on the floor, and when I looked at it I noticed too that his trousers rose a little high above the ankles, revealing a pair of dark socks that didn’t quite manage to cover his pale, fleshy calves, which were hairless where they rubbed against the edge of the sock and which had rarely been exposed to the air, the sun, or the healthy shock of the sea. You could tell his shoes had never trod on sand.
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TELL ME WHAT YOU SEE. I saw him, not without a pang of joy, sitting perfectly still, his broad, upright back like that of a Buddha made of bronze or terracotta, and on his head a pair of large and ancient headphones befitting an obscure cultural institution of scant means, a pair of clunky headphones that made him look like an engineer or a Soviet spy. Over time, laziness and misanthropy—though mostly laziness—have left me without friends. So I was even happier to suddenly run into him, even if I wasn’t exactly expecting a hug or a slap on the back, or even a handshake. He was someone I knew, after all, someone with whom I had a relationship, even if I couldn’t remember that earlier life anymore, that pristine time, never to return, of a nascent vocation, the joy and the uncertainty of all beginnings. I felt that I could not approach him without giving him some kind of notice; first, so as not to startle him, and then because a rigid, almost mummified or sepulchral formality had gradually established itself between us, partly from reserve and partly out of masculine ineptitude. I was wondering how to approach him when my cell phone rang. The phone was new, because I’d managed to lose the old one, with all the recordings of voices and city sounds I had made in the past few months. I was not familiar yet with the jingle that rang by default when a call came in, nor had I taken the time to replace it with something less irritating. I patted my pockets frantically while the merciless tune kept ringing at full blast, aware that I had jolted the guard out of her pleasant absorption in the video game and feeling the brunt of her censuring glance, the way she rose up in her seat to direct at me the full weight of her uniformed authority. Who could be calling me at ten-thirty in the morning on a Saturday in August. With an anxious sense of guilt and a pathetic clumsiness that will accompany me forever, I finally found the phone, its much-touted slickness rendered even more slippery by my sweat, and I walked hurriedly out of the room, tapping the screen repeatedly to pick up the call or at least to put an end to the vile tune, pursued by a forbidding glare from the guard that was reinforced by the penal sternness of her uniform. A girl with a gentle Venezuelan accent addressed me warmly by my first name, said her name was Maika, and joyfully, urgently announced that I still had time to take advantage of the Love Is All You Need Family Plan by Orange. I pictured her sitting in a white plastic cubicle in front of a computer, in a building without natural light or air conditioning in an industrial park (for instance) on the outskirts of Ciudad Juárez. The way Maika said my name as if she knew me made it hard to hang up on her without a word. But that is what I did, cravenly taking advantage of the distance between us and the lack of any foreseeable consequences. I put away the phone. My fingers were a little clammy from agitation and a sense of my own baseness. The guard, appeased, had now sunk back into her game, her belly strapped and harnessed in a military-looking contraption that held a gun, a baton, and a pair of handcuffs that would surely never be needed. The chair facing the monitor, however, was empty. The headphones had been carefully placed on the seat.
MEXICO SHOCKED BY MYSTERIOUS BUS VIGILANTE.
Mexico is searching for an Exterminating Angel.
He has no name, age, or face.
But everyone knows what he did. Last Monday
at six in the morning
he spread the wings of vengeance
on an intercity bus
and killed four robbers without hesitation.
It was a chilling, merciless,
abysmal execution. He waited
in the shadows
of the back seats
for the robbers to ransack the passengers,
and when the robbery was nearly complete
he stood up and killed them one by one.
Then he returned the passenger’s belongings
and was lost in the lawless Mexican night.
None of the witnesses would give a statement, not even
the bus driver. All of them claimed it was too dark
so as not to have to describe him.
There are some who openly approve of the killings.
The incident took place between five and six in the morning.
It was still dark and the bus was heading
from San Mateo to Mexico City.
Forty miles of good road.
Fifty-three passengers were dozing in their seats.
The robbers got on the bus when it stopped in San Pedro Tultepec.
A few miles later the robbery began.
Their leader held the driver at gunpoint.
The others began to take money, jewels, credit cards,
and cell phones from the passengers.
There were insults and blows. One man put up a fight
and was subdued by force. Knives in hand,
the robbers stuffed their loot in a pair of backpacks.
After driving another twenty miles
the bus began to slow. The leader of the band
had been on the phone the whole time.
They had almost reached the appointed place
and the robbers began to move toward the door.
That was the moment when the man
sitting in the ba
ck chose to get up.
He took out a gun. He took aim silently
and squeezed the trigger four times in a row.
Each bullet struck one of the robbers.
The bus kept moving.
The first to fall was the leader. The bullet
went through his left shoulder blade and pierced
his carotid artery. He bled to death on the floor.
His three companions, wounded and terrified,
huddled by the door. From the back of the aisle
the Exterminating Angel came for them.
The bus screeched to a halt.
Its doors opened. The body of the leader
tumbled out. Then the three other robbers jumped.
They tried to flee, but vengeance
would not let them get very far. One after another
dropped by the side of the bus
as they tried to flee.
With death in his eyes, the Exterminating Angel
took the blood-soaked backpacks
and after returning what had been stolen
he asked the passengers not to give him away.
He stepped off the bus
in the middle of La Marquesa National Park
and walked into the woods.
The mystery of his identity fuels speculation
and there are almost no clues. The hope of finding him
has waned. No one knows
where the Exterminating Angel might be.
His tracks are lost in the night.
FIND THE PERFECT CONTENT FOR YOUR NEXT CREATIVE PROJECT. Miroslav Tichý was a Robinson Crusoe in castaway rags, walking through his native town as if it were a desert island or one of those large cities where any eccentricity is accepted as a regular part of the landscape. He carried with him a strange camera made of discarded materials. A reversed bottle cap pierced by a thumbtack served to advance the film, while the lens was like a section of a spyglass salvaged from the sea and held together with bits of rope and tape. Tichý lived in a kind of shed or hut, surrounded by all kinds of junk that he found here and there, like flotsam that is cast ashore or like the contents of a dumpster next to a construction site. Out of it all Tichý gradually built himself a shelter, chaotic but inhabitable, like a castaway on a desert island who has no access to the benefits of civilization and must make use of whatever is at hand. He lacked all human company, but he made up for it in his desert island with a few animals that became his only interlocutors—an audience for his soliloquies, as well as the sole witnesses to his feats of domestic ingenuity. Rats, mice, cockroaches, birds that came in through a cracked and dirty windowpane, ants that marched in line across the floor to harvest bread crumbs or to plunder the grand organic feast of a dead cockroach. An empty space would form around him as he walked down the street, like a leper or an untouchable, protected from intruders or any excessive closeness by his stench and his misanthropy.
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BECAUSE OUR DREAMS ARE NOT CHEAP. Some of the artistic sensibility that he stopped exercising when he gave up painting was surely channeled into perfecting his image as an anchorite, which made him look exactly like a nineteenth-century illustration for a castaway novel. Only by renouncing everything could he make himself invulnerable to coercion, to the threat of having things taken away. Instead of meekly or cynically submitting, instead as well of an active resistance that would have meant immediate self-immolation, Tichý chose or found a radical form of disobedience by becoming marginal, by giving up all needs and so never having to ask for anything, shipwrecked in the desert island of his own provincial and terror-stricken town, lonely as a hermit in the hovel of his own house, the desert of his own land, tyrannized by the Communist bureaucracy and the secret police. Since he had nothing, nothing could be taken away from him. By giving up painting he spared himself the need to purchase materials, plan exhibits, or look for galleries. No one could deny him things he hadn’t asked for, or take away a job he didn’t have, or purge him from organizations to which he didn’t belong. No one could ruin his artistic career, because from a young age he had decided not to pursue one. It was useless for them to try to silence him, since he had long ago decided not to speak; nor could they forbid him to do anything, since all he ever did was walk around, or sit in a park scratching himself in the sun when the weather was nice. They couldn’t make him an outcast, since he had embraced being one from the start. He was not afraid of being forcibly marginalized since for a long time he had been perfecting his own marginal existence. He might have said something similar to what Borges once said to a student activist who was threatening to turn off the lights if class was not suspended to join a strike: “Go ahead, turn them off. I have taken the precaution of being blind.”
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CHOOSE THE KIND OF PARTY THAT SUITS YOU, AND MAKE IT A REALITY. But total renunciation can devolve into sterility, turn in the end into a barren gesture unless it arises from some kind of passionate affirmation. By giving up on being someone, on having anything, Tichý achieved a disinterested celebration of the variety and abundance of life. The asceticism of his indigent existence was made up of irony and guile. His laughter remained just as splendid for all his missing teeth. Poverty sharpened his wit and his ability to make the most of anything that came his way or lay at hand; to always manage on his own, a castaway who must invent and improvise at every step because he is bereft of all, except perhaps for the providentially selected wrack that the sea always casts ashore in novels. His princely patrimony was the vast endowment of all that people threw away. His darkroom supplies cost nothing and there was no danger that a manufacturing or distribution mishap would prevent him from procuring them. Living nearly on nothing, he had all the time in the world to enjoy his free occupations and to practice his art. Even amid the shortages and rationing of a communist economy, the air and the light of day remained not only free but inexhaustible. When they threw him in jail or put him in a psychiatric institution, he enjoyed the comfort of an assured and decent meal, a relatively clean cell, a comfortable bunk, veritable luxuries in comparison with his own disastrous domestic arrangements. In jail and at the mental hospital he passed the time chatting with the other inmates and the staff, even earning a bit of money by painting portraits of some of the higher-ups.
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CHANGE YOUR EYE COLOR TODAY. He lived for his art as completely as Picasso for his paintings or as Flaubert for the precision of his prose. But he was spared the torment of vanity, since there were no critics to judge his photographs or collectors eager to buy them; no praise to be received or denied; no peers with which to draw comparisons. Tichý didn’t have to measure up to anyone because no one else did anything remotely resembling his work, if it could even be called work. He would go out in the morning and spend the day walking around looking at people and things, especially women, young women, bathers in swimsuits at the local pool, girls sitting on a park bench after school in pleated skirts and socks. Desire for him was equivalent to the contemplation of beauty; always spied from a certain distance, often from behind a fence or some other kind of barrier that is never breached even though it wouldn’t be hard to do so. The destitute photographer’s desire does not expect, request, or even imagine any reciprocity. Things are as they are. Even when he photographs them from up close, the women seem enveloped in the haze of a conclusive distance, a distance assumed and accepted by a hand that doesn’t want or is unable to reach out. A deep remoteness is established over a very short physical distance, like glass made cloudy by breath. The distance of one who looks but is not seen, devoting to others an attention they do not perceive; or one who, being very close, remains invisible because his presence causes physical revulsion, discomfort, disdain, or apprehension. Beggars share in this invisibility, as do people standing on street corners trying to hand out flyers while everyone eludes them without a glance. Making eye contact even for an instant would mean acknowledging their existence, establishing a bond.
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