To Walk Alone in the Crowd

by Antonio Munoz Molina

  * * *

  OVER THIRTY-FIVE THOUSAND PROFESSIONALS TO LOOK AFTER YOUR ORAL HEALTH. Every few seconds the shot changes as the camera veers in its fluid motion. You and a group of your friends are in a Jeep Renegade, laughing excitedly, probably on a Friday night. Your hair blows in the wind as you speed along. Everyone is young. Men, women, mostly white, a Black man too, perhaps, or at the very least dark-skinned, with dreadlocks, and all the men wear scruffy beards, headbands, T-shirts or unbuttoned shirts, and all are muscular and have tattoos. You raise your arms up high in celebration, like people on a rollercoaster do. Then you’re dancing wildly to the pulse of electronic music, each of you lost in the huge crowd, joining in the general rapture, but always in the end together, complicit, waiting to get back in the Jeep. Time is compressed into a series of strobe-like flashes. You’re outside the night club, wolfing down some hot dogs at a street stand to regain your strength, lit by its neon sign and by the light of early dawn. All of it happens silently across a series of screens mounted high up in the airport’s shopping area. Now the Jeep is no longer driving through city streets, but down a muddy road with lush vegetation. Mud and water spray under the car’s powerful wheels, which easily gain traction in this wild terrain. The car bounces and you laugh and fall over each other. You laugh so hard now that your mouths no longer close and you can see your tongues, your gums, the almost frightening teeth of a cannibalistic joy. You experience everything at full intensity, top speed, without fatigue. The tempo never wanes and there is never a dull passage in your life.

  * * *

  I’M SEARCHING FOR A NEW SKIN. The entire story of that endless night cannot be more than sixty seconds long. Now the Jeep is parked in the sand, at the end of the trail that its own wheels have left on the beach. You’ve lit a bonfire without much trouble and you’re dancing around it, silhouetted against the flames, which cast a red glow on your glistening faces and on your legs and your bare shoulders. It’s a cross between a tribal dance and a cool party that is also countercultural. Then, instantly, as soon as the word JEEP and the evocative name of the model—Renegade, with its alluring sense of rebellion—have risen over the beach, the story starts again, looping back with the same exact euphoria, a superhuman joy that suddenly seems ghastly in its eternal return: the same highway, the same town, the same club, the hot dog stand, the fire, the beach, never giving way to rest or sleep, but only going back to the beginning, again, forever, on each of the many screens that are playing the ad throughout the airport.

  THANK YOU FOR GIVING US LIFE. You have to be young, but not too young, perhaps thirty, thirty-five, no more than that. You can be in your twenties if you’re enrolling in the study abroad or the master’s program of your dreams, or if you’re requesting or deserve one of the tuition scholarships offered by a bank. In that case you’ll be a girl with long, straight hair and glasses, pensive and hopeful, smiling as you ride a bicycle through the cobblestoned streets of a peaceful university town somewhere in Europe, carrying a bag on your shoulder that is made not out of plastic but from recycled materials, with maybe a long celery stick poking out one side and your books and notebooks in the bicycle basket. You’ll be talking on the phone or looking up your route on Google Maps, so people can tell that as a native of the digital age you’re comfortable with the newest technology. It’s acceptable to be older and to have gray hair if you’re going to drive luxury sedans through cities with skyscrapers and empty streets, or through the mountains or a desert, or a cliff overlooking the sea. You can also be over forty, even past forty-five, if you’re tanned, in perfect shape, and wearing a very expensive watch. Beyond that age, the possibilities narrow: you can be sixty, just a little over sixty, and have white hair, and be a couple, so you can take a winter cruise or walk barefoot on the beach at sunset with your pants rolled up, enjoying the peace of mind provided by a solid pension plan.

  * * *

  YOU FEEL YOURSELF CONNECTING. After that, all that’s left is to be an endearing grandfather or grandmother, probably the former, with a good set of teeth that can glisten a bit excessively when you walk hand in hand with your grandson enjoying the things that really matter in life or laughing together as you sit on a couch sharing an iPad. A good head of white hair also goes well with hearing aids. Hear your life again. Shrunken old people who lead an active lifestyle can wear Apple earbuds, since age is not at odds with technology or with physical exercise. I am growing young, says, or thinks, a slim, attractive, and supple woman with short gray hair, standing on the beach wearing a T-shirt in an ad for a pension fund. Whenever white-haired people stand on a beach there’s always a beautiful sunset, to suggest tactfully, discreetly, that their lives are setting too. Whether they are at the beach, leaning on the white railing of a cruise ship, playing with a grandchild in the dining room, or in an office in a bank where they’ve just signed some papers related to their pension plan, white-haired people smile as if lit by an inner joy that often leads them to gaze dreamily into the distance, filled with all the experience of a long, rich life and all the hope for what is yet to come. Do you know when you will be able to retire?

  * * *

  RAISE YOUR ADRENALINE TO THE MAX. In order to observe the smallest details, and to better carry out his task, he sometimes uses a magnifying glass that he keeps in the satchel or in one of his pockets. Inspecting an ad on the window of a bank, he’s like an expert standing very close to an old master painting with a powerful loupe in his eye or lifting his glasses to study a particular stroke, a stylistic trait that can establish its authorship almost as indubitably as a fingerprint might. This is how Sir Anthony Blunt must have inspected a Poussin in the collection of the Queen of England, to study a mythological reference and to ascertain from the nature of the brushstroke that it was authentic. Poor Anthony Blunt, concealing his homosexuality as well as the fact that he was a Soviet spy. In fact, he thinks, being a spy and studying the form and the hidden or overt meaning of paintings are professions that complement each other well. An advertisement in the window of a bank; a video that pops open as he reads the paper online; a TV ad; a glossy magazine generously given away at a travel agency or a cell phone store; these are his Hermitage, his Tate, his Frick, and his Wallace Collection. A private and highly distinguished museum—never mobbed by crowds of tourists wielding selfie sticks—of which he is the sole curator, a kind of disciple of Aby Warburg or Erwin Panofsky in a tweed jacket with elbow patches, pale from staying up all night looking at old drawings under a powerful lamp, masterpieces of doubtful authorship whose analysis requires an even greater effort if one is to trace their origins, their story, the meaning they once held for their contemporaries, which once was obvious but is now entirely lost or very hard to decipher.

  * * *

  RECAPTURE THE FEELING OF DISCOVERING SOMETHING NEW. You might call this field “high-precision iconology.” If a man and a woman, young, maybe in their thirties, are smiling, together or separately, they must have found the perfect loan to grow their business or to renovate their house; that or a mortgage specifically tailored to their needs. Let your project take shape. If you’re a couple in that age group you must live in very spacious rooms, sunny, with light-colored furniture; and you must sit side by side on the couch as you look together at something really fascinating on a cell phone, or better still a tablet or a laptop resting on your knees. Whatever you’re looking at is making you smile what could be called a complicit smile. Perhaps a picture of the new house you can finally afford, or of the beach where you will spend a well-deserved vacation; or why not, the table with the payment periods and the highly advantageous mortgage rates offered by your bank. Get the most for your money quickly and easily. Or you could be a youthful entrepreneur meeting other entrepreneurs around a big glass table, holding cell phones and tablets, casually dressed, perhaps jeans and a wool sweater that looks vaguely Scandinavian, sometimes a knit cap on your head at a jaunty angle, or a three-day beard, or alternatively a long and carefully groomed beard like
the ones you might see in an Assyrian bas-relief. Best of all would be a flannel shirt over a T-shirt. We believe in your dreams, and we can help finance them.

  * * *

  ALL I DO NOW IS SMILE. It’s permitted to have children, who can be of various ages, though never sullen teenagers. You will play with them on a rumpled bed, mom and dad together, confident that their future is secure thanks to the bank’s warm generosity, or enjoying all the fun and connectivity offered by the latest cell phone models and an all-inclusive family plan. Discover a new dimension of games and entertainment. There will be joy and camaraderie, as if you were friends or colleagues, really, instead of parents and children, and you’ll sit on a couch gathered around a screen or several screens, each member of the youthful family enjoying their own device, though all together in convivial warmth. I can share my gigabytes with anyone I choose. Get a second 3G phone line free. A father who is perhaps divorced will make breakfast for his two children, six and eight, on a splendid kitchen island. A call will have come in on the father’s phone, and in answering it he will have caused a minor but very amusing mishap, perhaps involving the scrambled eggs or the orange juice. The son will laugh at his father’s endearing clumsiness. The girl, by his side, will hold a banana up to her ear as if it were a telephone. Sometimes a couple, lying very close together in bed, will be thinking confidently about the child that is visibly about to arrive, and this will lead him to rest his hand on her round belly with an intimate closeness that is not without a slight air of mischief. If a pregnant woman is alone, she’ll stand and gaze firmly into the distance, sometimes shading her eyes with one hand as if to discern the future. We have the right plan for you. With a deeply humane and touching sense of sympathy.

  * * *

  WE UNDERSTAND WHAT YOUR MOST IMPORTANT PROJECT IS. Couples will tumble festively onto a comfortable couch or a wide Scandinavian bed with their small children. So I can think more about my life, and less about my mortgage. A bright, cheerful, Sunday morning light will filter through the curtains. We want your dreams to become a reality. Generally, books are not allowed. There can be at most a few art books on a low designer table. The couple will be lying in bed, smiling, heads touching, with a child between them. It’s not mandatory, but the child will probably be a boy, with blond hair. Sometimes it will be a girl with very curly hair, dark-skinned, or Black, pleasantly exotic and commendably adopted. Her curls, or her braids, or maybe the colorful bands in her hair, will provide a welcome multicultural air. We bring you closer to what really matters.

  IN THE SHADOW OF YOUR EYELASHES. He wakes up in darkness and silence, in the pure abstraction of time. He floats in black space, a time without shape or outline since he doesn’t know how late it is. He only knows it is Sunday. Last night, when they went to bed, she closed the shutters completely, an old pair of large, heavy shutters with wooden slats that block out all the light. Nor do any sounds come in from the outside, since all the windows are double-paned. He feels entirely clearheaded, without a trace of fatigue. It could be three in the morning or ten in the morning. If he reached for his phone on the nightstand he would know, but he decides not to. He is ensconced in bed like a silkworm in its cocoon or a fetus floating in amniotic fluid; enveloped in successive layers of comfort: the sheet, the light blanket, so pleasant after months of stifling heat, the warmth of her embrace and of her body as she sleeps in her underwear beside him, a human warmth that in the course of the night has been gradually communicated to the air in the room. He is sheltered and at the same time suspended, enveloped in a sense of weightless freedom as if floating in water. Waking up without anxiety is still a source of wonder, of astonished gratitude. In the darkened room, as in a camera obscura, parts of his dream persist and are projected in bright colors and rich detail, a strange blockbuster movie that is screened exclusively for him. He dreamed he stood on the shore of a lagoon from which large, widemouthed fish began to emerge. They crawled to the shore and then kept crawling swiftly on the ground. Pebbles and aquatic fronds glimmered in the green and clear water of the lagoon, which seemed a memory of the glassy waters of the bay in Mallorca. When the first fish came out of the water and crawled toward him he felt afraid. Now he gazes at the fish with curiosity and wonder, as if watching a scene from The Origin of Species or Genesis, the moment when aquatic creatures began to colonize the earth. They are also the fish in the creation panel of The Garden of Earthly Delights. Except the fish in the painting, after crawling like tiny seals around the grassy shore and in the shade of the trees, plunge back and disappear into the pool.

  * * *

  FORGET WHAT YOU KNOW. Then he is standing in a square in Granada, at dusk, in early summer. The trees are the same that stood at the edge of what was perhaps the Earthly Paradise: trees that you might see in a painting by Bosch or in a well-tended garden or a park. The space around him is so broad and open that it can only be the Plaza Nueva. He sees a young woman coming his way in a light summer dress, with a pair of sunglasses on her head. Although he thinks they’ve never met, he says to her, “You got a haircut.” She looks at him, pleased. “You noticed.” He can’t see her face clearly in the dream, or at least he’s not able to remember it now. The facade of the Real Audiencia rises like a stage set behind them. He says to her, “I will be in love with you my whole life.” He doesn’t want the images to fade; he doesn’t want to forget them. The fish coming out of the water, the pebbles and the fronds near the shore, the trees—privets, perhaps, or orange trees—the silhouette of her light dress. He thinks about the possibility of inventing a camera that would take pictures of dreams, instant pictures with the processed, slightly faded tones of an old polaroid. He realizes that the mesmerizing beauty of a polaroid came from the fact that it portrayed the present moment as its own preemptive memory, tinged already with a sense of distance and of disappearance.

  * * *

  THE FUTURE BEATS STRONGER THAN EVER. He reaches for his phone; the screen lights up and casts a glow over the nightstand. Somehow its effulgence seems part of the strange light of the dream. It’s eight-thirty in the morning. No need to rush. He gets up, pleased with the thought of going for a walk. A shirt, light trousers, espadrilles, a sense of ease, so many hours still ahead of him and nothing in particular to do. His neighborhood is as empty on this Sunday morning in September as if it were still August and everyone had left Madrid. As if it were all a stage, still free of memories and habits, arranged as for an apparition or a viable dream.

  DISCOVER YOUR DS3 PERFORMANCE LINE. They jump up in the air, separately or in groups, squinting their eyes in a big happy smile or laughing outright with glee; all of their desires coming true without the slightest effort as their youthful bodies rise into the air and float suspended, like seagulls swaying motionless in the breeze. Express yourself in every dimension. They rise like pole-vaulters who never had to strain their muscles in any way, or, needless to say, subject themselves to the tedium and discipline of training; like members of a modern dance troupe, impossibly suspended in midair. Thirteen cyclists defy gravity in China. Performance in your hands. A unique flight experience where every detail counts. Express yourself in motion. Boost your senses. They launch themselves fearlessly on hang gliders from a cliff, floating over landscapes of green hills or over deserts stretching all the way to the horizon. Virtual landing takes place in Pluto. Fly at the best price. Find a new dimension. They fly whenever they want. Don’t settle for a lesser flight experience. They fly without even realizing it, transported by their own joy, looking at an iPhone, maybe listening to music, closing their eyes and tossing their hair, caught in a dance that’s the more enjoyable because it’s solitary, the white cord of the earbuds tangled in their hair. Once I learn to fly, I’ll never come down. We’ll give you all the hits of summer, and add another thirty million songs. Picture a world without gravity. They rise in the air holding a frosted beer bottle, a bottle of Coca-Cola, a lottery ticket that will no doubt win the prize. Enjoy the moment. Fly over land and water
. Three young models, as severe as vestal virgins, walk in single file in the desert wearing boots and long black dresses. They leap and rise in slow motion as if they were dancing and their stage were the blue sky and the desert sand. Are you afraid of flying? Join our Fearless Flying workshops. Take a chance. On the fly. Be the first.

  * * *

  TECHNOLOGY THAT’S CHANGING THE WORLD. They glide horizontally over rooftops, parks, and busy streets as lightly as in a dream, without any effort or any sense of vertigo. A long-haired girl in a summer dress flies barefoot over a spring meadow, picking a flower and smelling it as she goes. Dive into the now. Lightness you can feel. The power of dreams. They jump like superheroes from the edge of one glass building to another. Show us your most fun and adventurous side. Fly Vueling. They fly from the sheer joy of starting a master’s program at the business school of their dreams: a backpack on their shoulders, their arms wide open, hovering a dozen feet above a campus that is even more ideal because the sun is setting and a golden glow spreads over the redbrick buildings and the grassy lawns. They float and move as slowly as astronauts in a space station. Are you the kind of person that looks for new experiences? Feel the call. Start your adventure. Fly through the air. Abuse your imagination. Celebrate everything you have. Free unlimited. Hurry up and live. Cammina nel blu. You won’t know if you’re on the ground or in the sky. Defy gravity with the newest breakthrough from Shiseido. A young couple flies hand in hand over a city on a bright day, against a blue sky, freed by ING from the dead weight of banking fees. Do you know how to fly?