To Walk Alone in the Crowd

by Antonio Munoz Molina

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  FIND OUT THE HIDDEN SECRET. The more that coarseness, negligence, and ignorance are touted as signs of spontaneity, the more she cares about preserving forms and manners. She takes pleasure in them in the company of others, when she goes out in public, but also when no one is around to see or to pass judgment. More so, perhaps, in those cases, since no one can watch her as closely as herself. She feels that forms and manners, in shaping our acts and organizing time, serve to order as well our moods and minds. She puts on makeup and tries on different pairs of earrings with the kind of deliberation and self-critique that a painter might put into a work in progress. She does not impose particular forms on herself or on the things around her: it all emerges from within, expressing her best possibilities, grounded in an acceptance of herself and of her limits. Limits are precisely what allow us to draw the contour of a shape: what’s given, what you accept and take into your work, the materials and experiences that constitute a life, the time in which you happened to be born, and what the passing years have bestowed on you and what they took away, everything you didn’t choose but must learn nevertheless to use, faithfully, cautiously, with civility and without waste. Putting together what she bought yesterday and what she happened to find in the pantry or the fridge she gives shape to a meal as she will then arrange and give shape to the table, sometimes also to the group of people she invited. A spray of flowers and the particular vase she selects for them are as important as the main dish or as the way the plates and the basket of sliced bread are set on the table. The potter’s hands and wheel give shape to a lump of clay just as words give shape to a story, or as food, kindness, the glowing lights of a house, the darkness of wine in a glass give shape to a gathering of friends that transpires gracefully and leaves behind some memories. To preserve the proper forms, to tend to them, seems to her a noble exercise of our aesthetic conscience, action, and contemplation, a pageant where the actors and the audience are one, and there is no pretending. Forms are orderly and conscientious but neither solemn nor rigid. A truly expert musician seems to play without effort. Rigid strictness is merely protocol. Form lives in the simplicity of our daily rituals.

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  WHEN SILENCE SPEAKS, LISTEN. This may be why making breakfast is her favorite task of the day. A form is all the purer when free of any social obligations. Each properly repeated step is a minor consummation, an exacting pleasure. As she opens the coffee tin, the trapped scent spreads in the air, awakening her sense of smell and starting to rouse her. Scented air goes deeper into the lungs. She must place the paper filter in the coffee maker. She must fill the jug with water. After so much travel and change, so many temporary stays, she’s starting to learn the layout of the house. Gradually her gestures fall into a fluid sequence as she grows accustomed to the kitchen, the smell of its fresh finish, its crisp echoing sound, and she no longer hesitates or makes mistakes, as she did before, when she looks for something in particular. After much training, each finger goes naturally to the right key. With every day that passes, each drawer and cabinet will offer more exactly what she needs. Where are the knives. Where are the glasses. How many doors will we have to open and close to find out which drawer is hiding the pot of honey or the vanished orange juicer. Bread can once again be sliced on the cutting board reserved specifically for bread; with the long, serrated knife that has just turned up compliantly where one expected. Each implement and tool has a single purpose, one that belongs to it alone on account of its shape, like the tools in a workshop. Milk and coffee come together in a kind of eucharistic mystery. So do bread and butter, quince and cheese, bread and olive oil.

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  ALL YOU LOVE. Once everything is finally in place, its proper form achieved, as simple and harmonious as a still life by Juan Gris, one should, before taking the first sip of coffee or juice, remain for a few seconds in a religious or simply astonished silence, and give thanks. What matters is the form, the ceremony. Juan Ramón Jiménez said that, in poetry, form is on the inside. Forms have their own intrinsic meaning, at once objective and symbolic. No need for doctrinal addenda, just as a work of art has no need for a label or a wordy explanation. The work, the form, explains itself, radiating silent meaning. She wants to give thanks for all that is obvious and ordinary: the fresh clean water coming out of the tap, the electric light in the kitchen at dawn, the stillness of the house, where she feels safe, the bees that pollinated the orange trees and made the honey that sweetens her coffee, the milk that ran in white rills from the udders of a cow, the elaborate chemical processes that pasteurized it, the skilled hands that picked the coffee beans in a farm that according to the label is in Guatemala. She wants to give thanks, with some remorse, for being safe, in a house, in a country that is not at war, for not hearing above her the engines of planes dropping bombs on a city from where even at this very moment a foreign radio correspondent is transmitting live. What seemed firm and indisputable just a moment ago becomes uncertain. She hears the cries of people mobbing a truck that is delivering food to a refugee camp. She hears the voice of hatred, making threats, basking in the triumph of its terrifying crassness. There are urgent slogans now, prodding her to buy, to try, not to miss this special chance. Call now. Live a unique experience. Take advantage of this offer. Don’t miss out. Last few days. The car of your dreams. Unlimited calling. They speak so quickly and so loudly that each moment brings a new and crushing flood of words. Click now. People in progress. Experience the Champions League live. Power to you. She turns off the radio and is grateful for the fresh morning silence. It seems even purer, wider, unaccustomed as she is to hearing it in this house.

  YOU CHOOSE WHAT YOU WANT AND WHEN YOU WANT IT. I want to live like this, unencumbered, taking walks, reading books, carrying a backpack with notebooks and pencils, wearing a pair of sturdy hiking boots that give a slight elastic impulse to my heels and to the muscles in my legs, the head of the femur sliding in the hip socket, the strength of the hip, an ancient bone, the base on which the spinal column rests. I want to live on foot, by hand, by pencil, at ease, responsive to whatever I meet, loose like the air that moves around my body as I walk or like a graceful swimming stroke. I want to remain astonished. To set aside or put on hold what I am and what I carry, and give myself instead to what I find or to the things that come my way, like a character in an old tale, without a past, with no biography aside from his fortuitous encounters, the travelers he meets and talks to or that he overhears when he stops to rest, when from a table nearby or from a different room the voices of a conversation drift his way. I want to wear light, practical clothes. To walk with my hands in my pockets. To get lost by stretches in the two-step rhythm of the walk. I want good pockets that can hold the things I find, a slightly larger one to hold a book—a pocketbook, of course, quite light, that I can read however I please, from beginning to end or by skips and jumps, at random. I want to settle into time as into a broad landscape that I am in no hurry to traverse, even if I enjoy the briskness of the walk.

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  LIVE ON THE ISLAND OF INVISIBLE THINGS. I remember in Holland the country paths outside Amsterdam, the flat fields and the wide Atlantic sky, which seemed to broaden space without making it alien or oppressive. I want to have a room, my room, with my papers and notebooks, my music, my pictures, my pencil cups and cases, the wide window that all through the day lets in a pale and clear light, the armchair with a footstool where I sit and read with a view of the sky over the rooftops of Madrid. But I also want to carry my room with me wherever I go, like an itinerant scrivener, able to set up at any moment wherever I may be. I want to spend hours in a café, reading the newspaper, looking out the window, or simply noticing the people walking by and overhearing conversations. I want to bring out my notebook and pencil at a reading table in a public library or in the restaurant where I eat alone, and take advantage of the wait to jot things down that I might otherwise forget, a quick verbal sketch of an interesting face at a nearby table. I remember Chez Fern
and, in Paris, and the Café Guaraní in Oporto. I remember a table by the window at the corner of 113th and Broadway, on the second floor of the public library, where the homeless and the mentally ill seek shelter in winter. There is a café at the corner of Fernán González and O’Donnell with a wooden counter all along the plate-glass window and a framed poster of a drawing by Giacometti that I like to look at, the mere suggestion of a human figure, a smudge of charcoal that seems to vanish as if traced in smoke or dust. I like the silence of my room and I like the noise of people all around me in libraries and cafés.

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  TAKE ME WHEREVER YOU LIKE. When the Café Comercial in Madrid was closed for two or three years, I yearned for it with hopeless nostalgia. When I go back to The Hungarian Pastry Shop in New York, it feels like I was there the day before even if many months have passed. I want to live unhurriedly, without anxiety or haste, without remorse or artifice. I want to know that those I love are in good health and in good spirits; and not too far away, if possible, though I don’t need to be with them constantly or to always know what they are doing. I want to read poems and to say each word softly to myself, to learn a few by heart so I can recite them as I walk or as I wait in line at the supermarket, at night as well when I can’t fall asleep. I want to glimpse the sparks of poetry that suddenly shine forth in advertisements, or in the newspaper, or in a conversation that I overhear on the street. I want to make love with the woman I love, sweetly, without haste, and fall asleep beside her for a while, and then when I wake up remember having sex as if it were a dream, with all the poetry of dreams and all the visual, tactile, carnal poetry of real life.

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  WE ALWAYS KNEW THEY’D COME BACK. What I don’t want is for that shadow to come back, that voice that I alone could hear even when it spoke softly in a crowded, noisy place; a creature with a dark muzzle that came to prod and wake me in the dark, urging me to open my eyes so I could hear the voice even before the sun was up, and all through the day, and then at night, from the moment I woke up to the moment I fell asleep, when as my eyes began to close I told myself, as if the voice itself were saying it but also to escape from it, as if it were whispering in my ear a command or a suggestion of the only way to finally escape from it forever, a thought that was my own, of which I felt ashamed: “I hope I never wake up.” But it would seep into my dreams as well, arranging every detail like an exacting film director who takes care of everything himself, the plot, the dialogue, the music and lighting, planning each of the scenes of his horror movie. It weakened my legs to make it harder to go out, since in the open air and in the light of day its power would sometimes wane. It held fast to my knees to make it difficult to walk. It attached lead soles to my shoes while I slept. It climbed on my shoulders and pushed me down, forcing me to tumble forward. It squeezed my throat so I could barely speak. When I listen now to some recording of myself back then, I can’t understand how I failed to realize how strange I had become, how weak my voice was and how shrunk with fear.

  DARE TO LIVE THE NEOLOVE EXPERIENCE. “Who can stand it now, the artsiness of art,” he said to me the last time we spoke, or rather that I heard him speak, in the Café Comercial, never raising his voice despite his distaste, never lifting his eyes from the marble tabletop, behind the lenses of his glasses which, by the way, were not very clean, a pair of round glasses that gave his gaze the startled fixity of an owl—a myopic owl, of all things, or some slightly deranged and erudite émigré in a Parisian café circa 1938. “Who can tolerate anymore the theatricality of theater, the filminess of films, the bookishness of novelistic novels, the wittiness of wit, the comedy of comedy, the Photoshopped beauty of beauty, so perfectly perfect, and the gimmicks that everyone can see coming a mile away, so when they finally arrive they fail to produce even a yawn or a slight stir of indignation; and the sentimentality of all those sentimental effusions, of put-on candor, offered to the public as shamelessly, though more hypocritically, as the stumps and medieval deformities displayed by a Romanian beggar on any corner of Madrid. The only beauty I find boring is the official beauty of all the famous actresses and models. On any given street I can find more beauty and feminine grace in ten minutes than in all the pages making up those massive blocks of glossy paper they call magazines, or in one of those red-carpet galas with photocalls (as you can see, I am familiar with all the latest terminology).”

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  MERCURY WILL BRING SUCCESS TO YOUR LIFE. “And tell me, is it possible not to be sickened by the poetical poetry of poems, or the artistry of artists who call themselves simply ‘artists,’ without qualification, artists of Art, even when they haven’t actually made anything. Can they really say calmly of themselves, ‘I am an artist,’ as who should say, I am an accountant, I am a lion tamer? Even worse, how is it possible to call oneself a ‘poet’? How would you know that you’re a poet? Because you write verses that sound poetic? Art just happens, my friend. Poetry flashes forth. It comes of its own accord, a sudden, dazzling apparition that somehow remains, sending forth a kind of radiation, like uranium dust, for centuries or even for millennia. ‘Une étincelle qui dure,’ says poor Apollinaire, his head all wrapped in bandages on account of a war that was brought about by the patriotism of patriots. He knew what he was talking about. He could find beauty in the flash of a mortar in the night. A spark that endures: the sudden glow of a firefly; images and words that have a kind of bioluminescence, like microscopic algae or crustaceans lighting up the sea at night or glowworms deep inside a cave; diamonds, gold pips in the ore and slag of a ceaseless logorrhea that can never be turned off. You have to dig up mountains to get a single gram, though sometimes an entire lode is found at once. Each fragment of poetry is one of those millions of oysters at the bottom of the Hudson Bay, cleaning and filtering the toxic waste out of the water. Doesn’t a single battery pollute three thousand liters of fresh water? A poem does the opposite with three thousand polluted words. Like blades of grass or the leaves on a tree, taking atmospheric CO2 and turning it into fresh sap while clearing it from the air.”

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  BITE INTO OUR FLAVORS. “And when I speak of art and poetry, I include what is disdainfully referred to as ‘craft.’ The craftsman does not impose a personal will on his materials. That’s what artists do. His work depends on having as thorough a knowledge as possible of his materials and the rules of his craft, which are as impersonal as those of meter or of tonal harmony. The rules have been so thoroughly assimilated and have been practiced for so long that they seem to become unconscious habits. Which is not to say they are mechanical. It only means they’re not applied or governed by an act of will, a whim, a random preference. Technique only becomes fertile once you’re able not to think of it. You don’t think about the letters in a word before you write it. You don’t even think about the word, or choose it. The word appears in your mind or on the tip of the pencil and you decide to write it down, or not, but you were not the one who summoned it, detaching it from a warehouse of available words, as in a dictionary. You only get to decide if you leave the word on the page or you replace it by another. André Breton and his fellow bureaucrats in the department of surrealism were quite skilled at claiming authorship of what is already obvious to everyone. There is no writing that is not to a large degree automatic.”

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  CREATE YOUR OWN CUSTOMIZED PACK. “… There is no orchestral effect anymore that I don’t see coming, no false note that I miss. It can be irritating, but it is also freeing, and a relief. I no longer have to like anything other than what I truly enjoy. Every trick seems an affront to me, a kind of personal betrayal, unless it be the shameless trickery of melodrama, of a bolero, or the cynical impudence of advertising. I don’t mind reckless imperfection, or what is done with daring inspiration even if without technique or expertise. What I can’t stand, what strikes me as debasing and even as a kind of crime, is shoddy work covered up in grave solemnities. I love the literature of newspaper headlines, the way they compress
a wild story into a single phrase. Man dressed up as Hitler arrested in Hitler’s native town. That is true concision, my friend. Kinky girls are here to take you for a ride. Scarlett Johansson opens gourmet popcorn store in Paris. I love the stories in the back pages, the news wires that read like fiction. I love the mercenary poetry of an ad for makeup or perfume, or for a trip or a luxury car. The graphic power of a photograph cut out of a magazine. The visual plot of an ad that pops open when you read the paper online, or one of those videos playing simultaneously on many screens at airport terminals or subway stops. I have developed particular food allergies, so serious and acute that the smallest dose of certain harmful things will make me quite ill. The sports pages, the editorials, the opinion pieces, the political stories, the arts and culture section, my God, that is by far the worst, the culturedness of culture.”

  FEEL LIFE THROUGH YOUR EARS. The voice, the spoken word, exists for a few seconds, a few minutes at most, and is lost. So many billions of human voices, each one completely distinct from the rest ever since hominids began to produce articulate sounds with precise meanings—so many voices, and almost all of them are lost. What was the voice of Socrates like. Of Buddha, Sappho, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Emily Dickinson, Herman Melville. What was the voice of Walt Whitman like. How strange to think that Cervantes had a voice as distinctive as yours or mine, and as familiar to those who knew him. I find it hard to recall my own father’s voice, and he only died twelve years ago. And the voice of my grandfather Manuel, and my grandmother Leonor, and my grandfather Antonio, who spoke so softly and so little, a bashful man who didn’t feel at ease with words, and who, for many years of his life, had no need of them as he worked silently on his small farm. Two decades ago it was reported that a radio recording of Federico García Lorca might have surfaced in Buenos Aires. I asked his sister, Isabel, a strong, lucid woman in her eighties, and she said to me, “I wouldn’t be able to tell. My brother was killed more than sixty years ago. I don’t remember his voice.” There is a temporal boundary for voices as there is for faces: before and after the invention of recorded sound; before and after photography. That is why the voices that are just on this side of the line, the first ever to be recorded, are so moving. The first photographs, the first daguerreotypes: Emily Dickinson at seventeen, or that devastating picture of De Quincey taken in his old age, which makes him seem even more distant. What was it like, the voice that issued from that fallen, shrunken mouth, De Quincey’s toothless mouth, as full of malice as his eyes. For years, in Berlin, Benjamin took part frequently in radio programs, reading short essays that he composed expressly for an ephemeral and instantaneous medium that he found very inspiring. None of those recordings have survived. How strange, to suddenly think that we have no access to the voice of someone as near to us in time as Benjamin.