To Walk Alone in the Crowd

by Antonio Munoz Molina

  OPEN YOUR LIFE TO THE CELEBRATION OF NEVER MISSING OUT. Their laughing mouths are stretched painfully wide by a terrifying joy, a fanatical, collective, unanimous euphoria. They are the suicide squads of happiness, its fundamentalists, caught in a gruesome glee that forces them to jump from cliffs and trampolines. Any day can be a party when you have everything you need. They laugh in a circle, looking separately at their phones and at the same time joined by the excitement radiating from each glowing screen. They all laugh: couples, families, friends, mobs of people. They also laugh alone, as if they were insane, taking a selfie, listening to something on their headphones, looking at their phone or at an iPad. They laugh, they roar and bellow, contracting the muscles of their jaws so that their teeth and gums and tongues show even more. They clench their fists, puff out their chests, the veins and tendons in their necks become so taut that their faces turn crimson. Enjoy the wildest content. Watching commercials on YouTube, or peering through his magnifying glass at the pages of the magazines he gathers everywhere, he studies those big happy smiles and feels a kind of admiration that may be slightly tinged with resentment. He does not remember ever having known such joy or having burst into that kind of laughter, strong enough to shake the needle of a seismograph.

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  LEARN THE MAGIC OF REMARKETING. Perhaps he secretly envies their youth, their gleaming teeth, the flagrant promiscuity between men and women. Perhaps he envies their nocturnal lives, the sandy beaches where they take selfies, laughing wildly, raising bulbous glasses with tropical drinks; or the collective trance of soccer games and concerts, the swarming, bouncing crowd inside a disco, if such a name is still used. They wear sunglasses, swimsuits, colorful bands in their hair, and they get covered in sand and are always laughing. The reason they laugh is that they’re enjoying a cold beer or a certain brand of gin or just a soda, which seems to turn as soon as it touches their lips into a powerful laugh serum. They laugh joyfully as they hold an iPhone 6 or a Huawei 9 up in the air like a trophy; they laugh when they discover the huge variety of sports and movie channels, the many series they’ll enjoy on a 4G network. So you can talk as much as you like. So you can always stay connected to the ones you love, no matter where you go.

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  YOU’LL HAVE THE WHOLE BEACH TO YOURSELF. When the analog or digital needle reaches its highest levels, a warning signal will begin to flash. A light comes on and the needle quivers as if confused. It detects a dangerous point where laughter could turn convulsive, the jaws become unhinged, the lungs begin to fail, their breathing turning to a dry and spastic heaving, and the eyes, growing wider and wider with joy, come out of their sockets like the eyes of zombies in a film, and the veins of the neck begin to swell until they burst, bleeding out internally, and the face turns blue from lack of oxygen. At the very end, a moment will come when laughter will give way to barking and then to a pure and frantic chattering of white teeth, like a windup toy or a sewing machine, quite capable of severing their tongues. You’ll split your sides. You’ll die laughing. You’ll have the time of your life. Enjoy without limits. Never stop.

  SIDEWALK NARRATIVES. A woman in a red business suit and red heels walks magically through a city as if she were floating, impelled by a breeze that quickens her step without ever lifting her entirely off the ground. She steps off the sidewalk and the white stripes of a crosswalk turn red beneath her feet, a glowing, Estée Lauder red, the same red as her shoes, blazer, handbag, and lips. She walks under a tree and one by one its leaves turn red as well, as does its spreading shade on the pavement.

  I CAN’T STOP LOOKING. There is only one face that you will fall in love with. One alone among all other faces, the hundreds of faces you meet and notice on the street every day. Proust says that beauty is “le charme individuel,” a face whose utter individuality takes you by surprise and at the same time fills you with a sense of instant recognition. You see it for the first time and it feels like you are seeing it after a long and distant separation. You find it so beautiful that you begin to fall in love with it, weak with desire and at the same time filled with a heartbreaking tenderness. It only happens a few times in life. Perhaps at each of those decisive ages, those various lives into which we are reincarnated with no memory of who we were before. It doesn’t guarantee you will be happy, much less that it will be reciprocal. It is a game of chance where you stake your life or at least one of them. Nothing is possible, after all, without a sense of beauty, which in the end has little to do with objective criteria. It’s all or nothing. “All or Nothing at All,” as in the old song that Billie Holiday sang best. Like Baudelaire crossing paths in Paris with a mysterious woman in mourning, or James Joyce finding Norah on a Dublin street, or Pierre Bonnard getting off the tram to follow the young, short-haired woman that he will spend the rest of his life painting. Like Walter Benjamin seeing Asja Lācis walking the streets of Capri. All of the discoveries that follow, the tracing out of mutual sympathies, affinities, may deepen your initial fascination or belie it, but they will not replace it. You either fall in love or you don’t. And once you have fallen in love, you either fall in love even more deeply or it all comes apart like an illusion. Time will either strengthen love or make it dissipate. With every step that draws you closer there’s a risk that the spell might be broken. The fleeting nature of a mirage does not degrade its beauty. But the most precious spell is one that grows and is sustained by both physical attraction and impassioned talk, weaving together instinct and reason. The moment when you fall in love shines with complete clarity, as does the mystery of a lasting desire. When you saw her for the first time, you instantly felt you had known her forever. From this moment on, through the years, if you meet her unexpectedly at a restaurant or a hotel that you came to separately, you will feel again that you are seeing her for the very first time.

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  ALL OUR ATTENTION IS CENTERED ON YOU. Asja Lācis recounts the first time she met Walter Benjamin, in Capri, in 1925. Two people from cold northern countries who found themselves in the summer light of the Mediterranean. She and her daughter had gone into a shop to buy almonds but she did not know the Italian word. A man standing next to her at the counter translated her request and offered to help her. “Would you allow me to walk with you and help you carry the bag?” She was a modern, independent woman, involved in theater and the avant-garde, as well as a militant Bolshevik. She must have been surprised by this old-fashioned and ceremonious man. She said he walked like a turtle. “Glasses that sparkled in the light; thick dark hair; a thin nose; clumsy hands. He kept dropping the bag.” Lācis wrote these words years later, when Benjamin had been dead for a long time and she had survived the Gulag. He told her that he had been watching her in the square for days. “I have been watching you for two weeks. In your white suit, with your long legs, you seem not to walk but to float across the square.” He would watch her go by with her daughter. Perhaps the visible resemblance between them made him fall in love even more.

  EVERYWHERE YOU LOOK. In September the city seems about to overflow. Too much traffic on the streets, too many people on the sidewalks, a sign outside every bar and restaurant with a long list of daily specials; and then the cluttered corner stores, one after another, and the bakeries with light wooden counters and young, polite attendants in aprons made to look handcrafted or from an earlier era. Too much of everything, a flood, a dizzying profusion—especially of trash, which pours out everywhere like water from the drains after a storm. The garbage cans are brimming with paper waste and plastic containers, and the ashtrays on top are stuffed with cigarette butts. The metal dumpsters on the sidewalk outside building sites are spilling over too, not just with debris, which they are meant for, but with all the things that people discard as they go by: doors, toilets, bidets, broken furniture, pipes and faucets, tangled skeins of insulating material, smashed dresser drawers, piles of binders stuffed with bills and papers, bursting garbage bags. Every tree grate becomes an ashtray crammed with cigarettes that spill on
to the sidewalk too, trampled by people’s feet just like the crumpled packs that are thrown on the ground, each with its gruesome color picture of a dying person or of some internal organ eaten away by cancer or embalmed in tar. Shuttered shop windows are covered in a thick layer of posters and signs, freshly glued or old and tattered, like ivy taking over an abandoned house. Covered in graffiti, the old signs continue to repeat their dire warnings, LAST CHANCE, EVERYTHING MUST GO, FINAL DAYS, in big red letters on a white ground.

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  WHEN THIRST CALLS. Lampposts and streetlights are covered in signs that have been glued or attached with masking tape, even surgical tape. Sell your car. Bolivian girl available for eldercare and housework. Freight and moving services. We buy gold. We buy silver. A locksmith you can trust. Window repair. Spanish house painter. Cars that stay parked in the same spot for a few days begin to bristle with flyers stuck under the wipers or in the windows. Massage, Asian Girls, Latin Bombshell, A Volcano in Bed, Master Doma Grand African Seer. Since it hasn’t rained for many days, and since the street sweepers have not been out, the edge of the sidewalk is covered in a thick compost made of many different kinds of garbage mixed with dry leaves. Master Suleh Seer Medium Medicine Man, Professor Dide Famous African Seer. There are piles of dog shit on the ground like little stinking monuments. Master Bamba Seer Fortune-Teller Medicine Man. A sidewalk bench is littered with empty beer cans, squeezed ketchup packets, plastic containers for prepared foods. Master Ma Djeneba the Greatest African Shaman. If it’s Saturday there is a smell of uric acid and fresh vomit everywhere from last night’s revelers. Beautiful feminine feet, pedicured and sandaled, step swiftly around the bits of trash on the sidewalk. The shuttered entrance to a travel agency is littered with pieces of cardboard and old clothes strewn on the ground, the remains of a now abandoned shelter put up overnight by a beggar who must have woken up early.

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  FOUR SECONDS ARE ENOUGH TO CONTROL YOUR IMPULSES. Urgent, barking, prodding voices tell, implore, command, or warn you that time is running out, the offer will expire. Pulsing in a corner of the screen, entreating or demanding, or, if necessary, making you feel anxious, they give out curt instructions, pushing, pointing, barking like a drill sergeant, elbowing and urging you to find out more, search now, ask for more, explore. It’s now or never. Buy it now. You drag the little icon of the open hand and click on the word now, or the word more, and every possible desire is revealed and instantly fulfilled. Learn more. Visit now. Start here. Click here. Sign up. Click to buy. Search now. Find a doctor. Shop here. Find your sign. + Info. Book this minute. Experience it now. Book now. One-syllable English words quicken the pace and urgency of their demands. Shop now. Skip ad. The simplest rhythm, the most effective, the most primitive, one that is not consciously felt by areas of the brain related to higher thinking but by the cerebellum, which governs the most basic bodily motions. Get more. Shop here. Your heart quickens, just as when you hear the beat of electronic music on the street or the thumping bass of a passing car. Buy it now. The rhythm of your steps and of the beating of your heart, one-two, expanding and contracting, the breathing of your lungs, the pulsing of your blood. Click here to learn more. Buy now. Everything in the curt robotic syntax of the imperative. See more. Ask now. Skip ad. A voice accosts you on the street or lies in wait for you inside your phone, which buzzes frantically each time you click on a website to follow the news. Read more. Click here. Try it now. Find out what you like. Find out more. Just for you. It knows exactly what temptation it should place before you.

  IT WILL TAKE YOU TO AMAZING PLACES. Walter Benjamin was carrying a kind of black leather briefcase when he tried to flee to Spain across the Pyrenees. He was never without it. That briefcase, or satchel, made him seem all the more bizarre as he walked down some wild country path in his glasses and tie among smugglers and sheep herders, dressed in his incongruous city clothes in a sweltering heat that was unusual for late September. He suffered from heart disease and had the weak lungs of a smoker. He pressed the briefcase to his side and said its contents mattered more to him than his own life. It must have held the documents that he thought would save him: an entry visa to the United States, a permit to cross into Spain and Portugal. He would stop to catch his breath, to wipe the sweat off his face with a handkerchief, and the other fugitives in the group would gradually leave him behind and have to stop and wait for him, always fearful that the French guards would find them. That briefcase, or satchel, or travel bag, seems to have still been in his possession when he checked into a room at the Hotel de Francia in Portbou. It appears in the final list of his belongings, yet it was never found. The gas mask he carried with him when he fled Paris, on the eve of the German entry into the city, must have been left behind somewhere else. Nor did anyone ever find his pocket watch, inherited from his grandfather, which used to dangle from an old-fashioned chain attached to his lapel—the sole surviving relic of the bourgeois existence he once led in Berlin.

  EVERY PIECE COMES WITH A STORY. Whenever you move houses, certain things disappear and others turn up again. I was in the study in the new house and she brought me the lighter she gave me when we first became lovers, the one I used when we were first together in New York. It must be twenty-five years since I last saw or thought of it, ever since I gave up smoking. It is made of steel, with a curved surface that makes it pleasant to hold. It retains a certain glow but is scratched and dented along the edges, worn smooth like any small everyday object that is used frequently and kept in a pocket. You had to flip it open in order to light it. There is a kind of Art Deco sensuousness to its shape, its curved metallic surfaces, pleasing to look at and to hold. My hands were much younger when she gave it to me, and the skin around the nails of my index and middle fingers was tinged the faint yellow ochre of nicotine.

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  YOUR FINGERS DESERVE A BETTER FATE. She gave it to me one morning when I went to see her in Madrid, a visit that was going to be even shorter than usual. In a few hours I would take another plane that would carry me much farther away. We fell into each other’s arms with the ardor of arrival and of separation, and of the promise of a new encounter in a city she had never seen before and I had been to only once. The lighter was a kind of keepsake for my trip. It lay on the nightstand with the ashtray and the cigarettes, next to the bed where we were already embracing a few minutes after I arrived. Our breathless kissing in the taxi, at the entrance to the building, in the elevator and the hallway was all the more arousing from the scent of nicotine, the way it seemed to faintly veil her lips. The gift of the lighter stood for other gifts: her bright and sudden nakedness; the reckless way she gave herself to me completely, without conditions. Taking it with me would be like having her by my side. Whoever noticed that peculiar lighter would inadvertently perceive as well her presence in my life; the mark of her aesthetic sense, quietly at work in everything she wore, her things, the places where she lived, the space I entered into when I was with her. To carry the lighter, to light a cigarette with it, to bring it out when someone asked me for a light was to profess to a secret flame that would burn inside me all through the trip, fed by memory and expectation. Whenever I set it down on a table or as soon as I took it out of my pocket people would notice it. She conferred on me a touch of distinction even when she was far away. All through the nights I spent across the ocean, in some huge hotel room in the Midwest, her gift on the nightstand or between my fingers was a light to outlive distance.

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  THIS IS YOUR CHANCE TO TAKE OFF. We used to listen to boleros back then. I would lie on a huge hotel bed thinking about her, looking out the window at one more endless parking lot or at a wheat field stretching into the distance. Lighting a cigarette meant repeating the gesture of her hands when she would do it for me after we made love. Her body would have been even more slender and youthful on that immense bed. An enormous room in Columbus, Ohio, became the small bedroom in Madrid where we spent entire mornings with the shades drawn. The afternoo
ns would darken into evening long before we turned on any lights, and waking up in the middle of the night was as sweet a pleasure as falling asleep exhausted. In one of our favorite boleros Moncho used to sing, Darling, don’t smoke in bed, no fumes en la cama. Now I place the lighter on my desk, moving aside some papers and notebooks to make room for it next to a photograph I took of her on a bench in Central Park, not long after she gave it to me. It’s not so much that memory can bring back the past faithfully (it almost never does) as that every now and then, time just ceases to be. Those days are as tangible as the lighter I hold in my hands today, twenty-five years after I last touched a cigarette.