To Walk Alone in the Crowd

by Antonio Munoz Molina

  YOU CAN GO TO PLACES BEYOND WORDS. The less he feels like traveling, the more he likes a travel agency, an advertisement for a Caribbean cruise, or a tour of the Greek islands, a full-spread advertorial about some luxury resort in Cuba or Santa Domingo. Gorgeous color brochures on glossy paper, free, sometimes with a picture of a woman gazing at the sunset from the deck of a luxury liner with a smile of inner joy on her face, the wind playing with her hair and sculpting a light white dress against her body or spreading it behind her like a nuptial train. He copies down the slogans or he cuts them out with scissors and glues them carefully. Choose the right experience. Choose your destination and be free. Find your private paradise. A journey you’ll never forget. He stands outside, looking through the window at posters with pictures of tropical paradises that he never plans to visit. Names that seem taken out of a novel, golden temples in the jungle, Balinese dancers with heavy makeup on their eyes, joining and lifting their hands, or an arctic landscape lit by an aurora or the midnight sun, the natives smiling in their furry sealskin jackets and their bright wool caps. The flukes of a whale rise like a glorious, instant monument out of an explosion of foam off the coast of Patagonia.

  * * *

  DARE TO GO FURTHER. He looks at the pictures and reads the names, saying them out loud to savor their geographic poetry, extracting from each one the pulp or juice of its promise of adventure. Experience South Africa. Cuba, the Genuine Island. Exciting El Salvador. What he likes best, however, is to peer inside the agencies themselves, through those plate-glass windows that keep them isolated from the noise and light, sequestered in a green and pleasant shade, calm and air-conditioned. Travel agents sit in front of computers whose large screens can better display the exact colors of those dreamed-of places, the clear blue waters, the dress of tribal dancers, while all around them are posters with amazing views of man-made or natural wonders: the snowy summit of Mount Fuji or Kilimanjaro against a deep blue sky; the Taj Mahal; a Mayan pyramid rising from a Guatemalan jungle that is probably (he thinks maliciously, though reproving of his own sarcasm) infested with mosquitos that transmit malaria and with squads of drug dealers and sicarios. From the street you can see a long line of desks, all in a row so as to greet in unison whatever would-be traveler comes through the door. Each agent sits by a computer and is provisioned with an endless supply of free brochures printed on fancy paper that imbues the pictures and the place names with an added glow. They are pleasant to hold in your hands and even more pleasant to cut with a pair of sharp scissors, slicing melodiously through the kind of glossy paper that is used in fashion magazines or catalogs for watches, sports cars, cruises, a heavy paper that makes them thick and dense like metal ingots, with a foldout to encompass the whole spread of a long beach with palm trees and thatched huts equipped with all the amenities, or to suggest the span of the horizon from the deck of a yacht in the South Pacific, the emerald glow of the big ball of the world itself.

  * * *

  IT’S TIME FOR YOU TO KNOW WHAT IT FEELS LIKE. On the wall, above each head bent studiously over a monitor, different clocks tell the time in cities around the world. The name of the city and the face of the clock combine to show the vastness of the Earth, all the different time zones, climates, distant lands one must traverse to reach those places. New York, Hong Kong, Tokyo, Sydney, Istanbul, Bangkok, just reading all those names and seeing all those time zones makes him feel a little drained, a little dizzy, and it gets worse if he looks at the map of the world hanging like a backdrop behind the silhouettes of all the travel agents, a map of such colossal size it might contain the actual oceans and the continents.

  * * *

  THE PERFECT PICTURE AWAITS. He has noticed, with a little dismay, that travel agencies are becoming harder to find, like newsstands, stationers, hardware stores, grocery stores, birds, gorillas. For some reason he can’t understand, almost everything he is fond of is going extinct. Recently, however, he was pleased to find a travel agency that looks auspiciously prosperous, even affluent. The premises are large, well situated, as spacious as the inside of a bank, with a big window where he always stops to look at posters for tourist destinations he will never travel to, safaris, desert crossings in all-terrain vehicles that leave you heroically covered in dust. A world of unique experiences. On the photographs of tropical islands and coral reefs there is no sign of the mountains of plastic waste that are carried there every day by the currents of the Pacific. El Salvador is a lush hillside where an endearing peasant in a straw hat offers a handful of coffee beans to a tourist couple. On a dirt road in Africa, tourists aboard a Land Rover smile joyfully at the sight of a dusty rhino that is at no risk of being killed by poachers who will leave its huge carcass to rot in the sun because they only care about the horn, which they will sell to a Chinese billionaire eager to regain his sexual powers by drinking it as an infusion once it has been ground into a powder. Being a loner, he stares a little enviously or with a faint sense of spite at the posters for honeymoon destinations. The bride and groom appear happy and relaxed in a pair of white bathrobes, gazing dreamily into the distance from the end of a long pier that juts out into the sea. Have your honeymoon anywhere in the world. Guatemala, land of the Mayas. Experience the magic of Cuba.

  * * *

  SUNNY DAYS ARE BACK. One day he will pluck up his nerve and go in. Confidently, with a slightly formal air, inquisitive, polite, carrying his satchel under one arm. He would prefer it if the agents (are they called agents, since they work in an agency?) were busy when he came in, first because it would be a good sign that business is going well, and then because he’d have more time to look around and enjoy the silence, so well preserved by the double-paned window, and to enjoy as well the temperature, so pleasant in the midst of a merciless summer on account of the soft, cold breeze blowing from the AC, which is turned up a bit high, even if he has wisely taken the precaution of wearing a light jacket. An agent who is taking care of another customer will greet him from behind her desk and ask him to take a seat. He thinks approvingly of a phrase you hear frequently when placed on hold during a call: “All our representatives are busy at this time.” The best travel agencies have a waiting area with comfortable chairs and glass tables stocked with a pleasant abundance of catalogs and brochures. Paris for lovers. All the allure of the Far East. Discover the Amalfi coast. Unforgettable Vietnam. Mythical Cambodia. He has to make an effort not to open the satchel right away and stuff it with flyers. The noise of traffic in the background is as delicate as the sound of palm trees in the breeze or as ocean waves breaking on a reef. The air conditioner makes everything as cool and fresh as when he walks down El Retiro in the early morning, when the fragrant lawns have just been watered. He can’t imagine a better destination than this travel agency.

  * * *

  DISCOVER AS MUCH OF THE WORLD AS YOU CAN. A map of the world as wide and as blue as the sky; a row of identical clocks, each telling a different time; beautiful city names that are always more beautiful than the cities themselves; lavish photographs that promise paradise, and couples more joyful than Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, and families, too, happily gathered around Mickey Mouse in Disneyland Paris or sliding fearlessly in a welter of laughter and water down a chute in a theme park in Florida. Not only are these lavish documents—produced and printed regardless of cost, with the largesse that only the old international photo magazines could once afford—not only are they given as freely as the fruits of paradise to our first parents, but the employees (the agents) want to make sure that you take as many brochures as you like, even looking through their drawers for other, more sumptuous brochures. Then they swivel their screens to show you pictures of the seaside bungalow where you can stay once you’ve completed a twenty-hour trip filled with the serial humiliation of clearing multiple security checkpoints. Going one by one through every pamphlet and brochure within his reach, in no kind of hurry to see an agent, he enjoys a breeze that seems to come not from an air-conditioning duct but from the very b
eaches in those photographs.

  * * *

  THIS IDYLLIC RETREAT WILL PUT YOUR SENSES TO THE TEST. Comfortably seated in an ergonomic chair he looks at the customers, who are treated with the exceptional solicitude shown by the staff at a grand hotel or a luxury cruise. Most of them are young couples, soon to be married, looking at honeymoon options that seem as varied as their own prospects in life. They share complicit looks, happy to agree on a particular option, worried about prices, packages, discounts, payment plans, the best date and time to fly. When they are not seeing a customer, the travel agents type on their keyboards with a look of busy concentration, as if they were not just making travel arrangements but also coordinating weather patterns, temperatures, sunsets, the right phase of the moon, a herd of gazelles crossing a plain at the perfect moment.

  * * *

  SOMETIMES A LIE CAN HELP PEOPLE LIVE. He puts the brochures in his satchel a little stealthily, admiring the quality of the paper, which is as pleasant to hold and touch as it will later be to cut through with a pair of scissors. All those magnificent monuments lit up by night, the Colosseum, the Great Sphynx, the Taj Mahal; all those rich fonts and poetic phrases; all those pictures of white, sandy beaches that are never touched by an oil spill, never reached by dying birds whose stomachs are filled with disposable lighters or by whales that die stranded, crazed, disoriented by the engines of oil tankers, cruise ships, or cargo ships carrying mountains of metal containers. No hurricane will raze those thatched bungalows offering complimentary Wi-Fi. No logging companies will profane with controlled burns, bulldozers, and massive tree-cutting machines these forests that are home to gorillas, wild orchids, luxury resorts with tiki bars where exotic, dark-skinned girls discreetly serve you specialty drinks with Polynesian names.

  * * *

  DISCOVER THE LAND OF THE RISING SUN. He watches and waits, affably, at ease, appreciative, making small involuntary gestures of approval and holding the satchel on his knees, a satchel that is in itself a kind of credential, the sort of thing a serious if slightly antiquated man might carry, made of supple materials that age well, “bonded” leather, as they say. He stands up perhaps a bit too quickly when the same woman who greeted him as he came in—perhaps a manager, her hair is dyed and she wears eyeglasses with a little chain around her neck—comes over and asks him to follow her, to take a seat on the chair (still warm) where the future bride was sitting a moment ago. One forgets that the human body has a constant temperature of around 98.5 degrees. It’s precisely as he notices the warmth of the seat, which, unlike the synthetic texture of its lining, is not unpleasant, and as he looks at the smiling woman, who folds her hands over a mouse pad with a picture of the Iguazú Falls, that he realizes he has forgotten to think of an excuse, a travel plan that would justify his visit. His mind goes blank for a few seconds, during which he has the impression that the woman’s smile begins to fade and that the knuckles of her clasped hands (she is wearing several rings and some bracelets that look vaguely tribal or ethnic) begin to whiten. Her question hangs in the air, among the various objects floating around him at different heights, the clocks, the city names, the domes of the Taj Mahal and of Hagia Sophia. “Well then, what destination do we have in mind?” Her use of the first-person plural gives him a little comfort. He looks stealthily around, somewhat overwhelmed by the weight of that word, “destination,” so many destinations, so many destinies before us at every moment. He catches sight of a poster with a picture of some towers rising from a jungle canopy and looking like a nightmarish cross between a skyscraper, a temple, and one of Jean Nouvel’s obscene cylindrical buildings. He reads the name and says, too quietly at first for the woman to understand him, “Kuala Lumpur.”

  DO SOMETHING INCREDIBLE NOW. A camera mounted on a tall crane moves down the nave of a church filled with people. A bride and groom are kneeling before a priest dressed in lavish vestments who is about to give his blessing. But the woman shakes her head. The priest, the groom, and the groomsmen exchange stunned glances. The woman turns around and breaks into a run, the train of her dress spreading on the crimson carpet and her veil flung back in the rush of her flight. Running is difficult because she’s wearing high heels. The camera frames her in a new aerial shot as she runs down the church steps. The landscape seems Italian: hills, olive trees, pine groves, blue mountains in the distance. The church could be a village church or a private chapel in a princely estate. The bride runs down the steps, stumbling but keeping her balance, and then continues to run down a gravel path leading her through gardens and trees. The camera stays with her as she runs, as if it too was taking part in her escape. Suddenly it rises higher, as if lifted not just by a crane but by a helicopter, showing the white figure below, the trailing dress, the veil, the fields and crops. Now the camera swoops down like a hawk, straight, swift. Now it shows a close-up of the bride from below, the heaving of her chest, her tousled hair against the bright blue of the sky and the dark green of a double row of cypresses. Her face is shining with sweat. She smiles, joyfully, a little recklessly. She takes off one shoe and then another, even as she continues to run, flinging them furiously away. She can run faster now, even if she’s barefoot. She casts away the bouquet of flowers, which lands on the path at a little distance from the white shoes. Still running, she tears off the veil with the same anger and joy.

  * * *

  LET YOURSELF BE TEMPTED. The veil floats down in slow motion while she runs away. There must be music, to accompany her flight and to exalt it, but it can’t be heard on the plasma screen at the duty-free fragrance section in the airport. The daring bride leaves the path and begins to run through fields and orchards up into the hills. She doesn’t feel the cuts on the soles of her feet. Then, instead of just holding up the skirt of her dress as she runs, she tears it off in a single motion, emerging, sweaty and fit, in a rather improbable skintight suit that a swimmer might wear. The camera rises to show a helicopter flying low to the ground and reaching the crest of the hill she is climbing, which suddenly turns into a mountain. The helicopter comes closer. The meadow ripples like water in the wind of the rotors, which tosses her shining hair in the sun, a whirling halo of gold around her face. She’s soaked in sweat, but she’s not tired. Without ever stopping, she leaps and grabs one of the skids on the helicopter, swaying and giving herself momentum like an acrobat to come to a kneeling posture. The helicopter rises and the former bride lets her legs dangle in the air. An arm, strong and tanned, a powerful hand reaches down to her, wearing a multifunction steel watch that flashes in the sun.

  * * *

  FIND OUT JUST HOW FAR YOU CAN GO. Now we see the pilot’s face for the first time. He’s in his thirties, his bronze skin has been hardened by expeditions and adventures, his hair is a dark blond or chestnut brown. He may be David Beckham or someone who looks a lot like him. He wears sunglasses, and a dark stubble covers his jaws and his strong chin. She sits next to him in the helicopter and caresses his face, the muscles and the bulging veins of his neck. Her pupils dilate with desire, her nostrils flare at the scent of Dior Homme Cologne. Suddenly she is back in the church, as if it had all been a dream, and the priest, with all the temporal incoherence of dreams, is about to resume the blessing motion of his hand. But she shakes her head, jostling the bridal veil, and she turns around and runs toward the door, followed by the stunned faces of the wedding guests as she rushes down the steps.

  NOW YOU’LL KNOW WHAT YOU WERE MISSING. Ten screens in ten different places of the same concourse show ten different but equally frantic stories to people hurrying to their boarding gate. You will end up watching some of them, no matter where you’re standing. Unless you are already watching them, or something like them, on your phone or on the computer you hold open on your lap to pass the time a little faster, like a smoker taking a few quick drags from a cigarette. People fly and float with ease. Gravity is optional. People jump from a seaside cliff or from the edge of a glass building and stay afloat. They laugh wildly and their hair blows in
the wind. They fly like swimmers in a dream over the rooftops and the streets. They jump from a tall building into the void, and their calm, elastic leap transports them to some other building nearby. You can have, if you so desire, the flying and the acrobatic powers of a superhero. You can drive luxury cars down highways that are always empty, on winding seaside cliffs, at sunset. “The North and the South are mine. The East and the West are mine. All seems beautiful to me.” The voice falls silent, the car speeds away on a desert road, the word VOLVO rises from the earth like the red ball of the sun at daybreak.