To Walk Alone in the Crowd

by Antonio Munoz Molina

  WHAT HOPE FOR THE DEAD? But he could have escaped. He could have postponed for a single day the decision to take a lethal dose of morphine at the Hotel de Francia in Portbou and found the border open, the path clear across a ravaged Spain to Lisbon and then New York, safe at last, stunned, restored by the calm and the fresh air of the ocean crossing. After all the walking he did in Berlin and then in Paris, New York would have been a continual temptation to venture forth. I saw his ghost from the back, the way his friends used to say he was instantly recognizable in a crowd, “stooped like a turtle,” Asja Lācis said ironically, as those who aren’t in love can always afford to be toward the ones who go on loving them despite their coldness and perhaps because of it. Walter Benjamin is walking down Broadway in the conspicuous suit of a European exile, formal, as always, even down to the moment of his terrible end—the suit, the tie and vest—invariably polite, curious and half blind, experiencing a giddy sense of pleasure in observing everything around him, the signs, the lettering and logos of the brands, sometimes too with a sense of being back in Berlin, something he never felt in Paris, the noise, the rush, the general air of commercial vulgarity, the people speaking German, Yiddish, English with a German accent, the Jewish smells and flavors in the delis, the joy and guilt of having fled the apocalypse in Europe. He would have felt much less foreign and alone than during his years in Paris. Many of his old Berlin friends were in New York, the ones who arrived before the war or at the same time as him, and then the ones who would come later, the survivors, the resurrected, who came back from the land of the dead telling awful stories or keeping an even more terrible silence, wearing long sleeves even in summer to conceal the blue numbers tattooed on their forearm.

  * * *

  ESCAPE IS THE ONLY OPTION. He would walk past Columbia or along Riverside Drive, holding on to his hat and glasses in the wind that blows from the Hudson. He would sit on a bench in the sun in Straus Park. He would finally recover, after the war, all the documents and manuscripts he had left behind in Paris under the care of Georges Bataille, the unruly mass of his book on Baudelaire and the arcades and the world of the nineteenth century. Perhaps he would attain what had proved impossible no matter how hard he tried during his earlier lives in Paris and Berlin, a relatively secure position in life, a job at a university, perhaps the New School, something that would allow him to have a fixed address, a decent income, the necessary calm to write all the books that always had to be deferred because of poverty, political uncertainty, the precariousness and urgency of his newspaper writing. In émigré apartments on Riverside Drive or West End Avenue, in curtained rooms lined with books and cluttered with European furniture and ornaments, he would have plunged for hours into a thick fog of tobacco smoke and German philosophy. With a friend, on the street, he would have come to a sudden stop in order to explain something, oblivious to the irritation of those behind him at seeing their straight and expeditious paths disturbed. He would not have accepted the heat as an excuse to give in, like almost everyone else, to open shirts and light-colored jackets. The dead remain remarkably faithful to the past. No country is more hostile or more foreign to them than the future, that place where those who survived were able to settle so casually once they let go of all their memories.

  PREDICT YOUR FUTURE. So I can’t say that I was very surprised to see my old acquaintance sitting in Straus Park that day, as I had seen him before in Madrid, perhaps in Granada as well, and now more recently in places that had become such an important part of my life in the city, The Hungarian Pastry Shop, the farmers’ market up by Columbia on Thursday and Sunday mornings. He seemed entirely out of place and yet as much a part of the scene as the lost souls who populate the park when there is even a little sun. I was familiar with almost all of them. Lost souls are as faithful to certain places as ghosts to the houses they haunt. There was a fat woman with cropped hair and childish bangs who used to sit with her hands on her big thighs, raising her face slightly to the sun. There was something masculine about her, but with a soft, eunuch-like quality. Around her neck she wore a collection of keys and a wreath of subway cards and loyalty cards from various drugstore chains in the neighborhood. Sometimes she spoke to herself, sometimes to the homeless person or the tired old man sitting on a nearby bench. When she spoke to herself, she seemed to be peremptorily addressing someone else; when she addressed others she seemed to be talking to herself. Some days she was still and quiet, others she was talkative and restless. Then she would smoke, taking quick drags on the cigarette, avidly but with a kind of repressed constraint.

  * * *

  THE OFFICE IS WITHIN YOU. On the next bench over was the crippled Vietnam veteran, red-faced, his hair and beard a dazzling white under the military cap. In decent weather he wore shorts. When he got to the bench, he would unscrew his prosthetic leg and place it upright on the ground next to the good leg, in the same white sock and shoe. He massaged the stump and exposed it to the sun, letting it jut out over the edge of the bench. Two Black women in formal hats and mourning clothes gave out religious pamphlets and copies of the Jehovah’s Witnesses magazine. That day the only novelty was a well-dressed, long-haired young man who was scribbling rapidly on a spiral notebook that he held open on his knees. He might be there just that once or he might turn into a regular, attracted by the park’s peculiar magnetism, its small triangular garden, the statue of Mnemosyne lying on her pedestal as on a comfortable bed. It was fitting for a neighborhood so rich in names and ghosts to be presided over surreptitiously by the muse of memory, even if she mostly went unnoticed. Over time, some of those who were most faithful to the park would disappear. I always remembered a very tall, very thin old man, extremely pale, with a faint white fuzz of hair on his skull, which protruded beneath the yellow skin. He had no teeth, no flesh on his cheeks or muscle on his arms. Walking was becoming increasingly hard. He moved forward on stiff legs, swaying to keep his balance and dragging his feet. He would sit down and spend hours without doing anything or speaking to anyone, just holding a cup of coffee in one hand. I’m not sure exactly how much time had to pass before I realized he never came anymore.

  * * *

  FIND OUT RIGHT NOW IF YOU’RE A WINNER. I could tell it was him even from across the street, less on account of his face than of his manner, the way he sat, the cap with the earflaps buttoned on top under a kind of pompom, and the perennial satchel on which I noticed a pair of straps that allowed it to be carried like a backpack. He had spread a cloth napkin on his knees and tied another one around his neck as a bib. The canteen and a small plastic bottle stood beside him on the bench. I saw him unwrap a sandwich and offer some to the fat woman with the keys and customer cards around her neck. She looked at him, perhaps not understanding the meaning of his gesture. As soon as the light changed I would cross over and greet him. It was lunchtime, and up until that moment I had not spoken to anyone or used my voice in any way. Now the fat lady was smoking, sucking on the cigarette as if she were spitting, and she was also telling him something, even though she was looking away. He was nodding thoughtfully. I could have crossed now but I preferred to go on watching. He would drink from the canteen or the small bottle and carefully wipe his mouth. Then the light changed again, so I had to wait. I saw him give the fat woman a piece of sandwich and a paper napkin. Then he folded the square of foil in which the sandwich had been wrapped and put it away in his satchel along with the two napkins, the one that had served him as a lap cloth and the one he had used as a bib. He took a map from the satchel and spread it open on his knees. He was looking at a cell phone and jotting things down on the map, which he then folded up neatly and slipped into his coat pocket. He stood up and said goodbye to the fat woman, whose mouth was full of food. For an instant I thought that he had raised his hand to his cap in greeting. That he had seen me. Then he looked away. The light was green, but I didn’t cross. I felt suddenly afraid that he wouldn’t recognize me when I approached; that I would call out to him and not be heard; that my voice wo
uld not come out of my throat, as when you want to speak in a dream and are unable to do it. I saw him walk past the Jehovah’s Witnesses and, much to their surprise, take the pamphlet and the magazine they were offering and put them in his satchel. He slipped the straps around his shoulders and crossed Broadway heading east, past the corner with the Duane Reade (though there is a Duane Reade on almost every corner, a Chase, a Bank of America, a Starbucks; they only begin to disappear as you go into Harlem). And that was the last time I ever saw him.

  FEEL EVERY FIESTA MOMENT. Every time you wait at a corner for the light to change there is a quick human vignette, a still frame in the continuous sequence of the walk. At Amsterdam and 110th, a Black kid is skipping in place like a runner trying to stay warm, bouncing on his rubber-soled sneakers as if he were climbing. Music can be heard coming out of his headphones so clearly that it must be blasting in his ears. He skips on one foot and then the other, dropping his head to let the hood drape over it more fully, and he begins to cross before the traffic comes to a halt. Farther up, in front of the cathedral, a man and a woman are having an argument, standing very close together and so near the curb that a passing bus has nearly grazed them. Mutual hostility makes their closeness suffocating. The man looks very serious though a little distracted. The woman lifts her eyes to speak to him and her mouth is twisted with weeping. The man is holding two plastic bags full of stuff, one in each hand. The woman, choking back her tears, can no longer speak and merely rests her closed fists without violence on the lapels of his old coat, as if capitulating, while he glances sideways at the light, perhaps waiting for a chance to flee.

  * * *

  STUTTERING THE FIRE THAT BURNS WITHIN ME. Now there is a blind man. They are at Amsterdam and 125th. He would like to ask him what the city is like when you cannot sense it through your eyes. All ears. Nothing else. The noise, the clatter, the rumble of a bulldozer or of subway cars passing beneath your feet. He would like to know the peculiar quality of each person’s footsteps: slow, quick, dragging, rhythmic, random, heavy; each as distinctive as a human voice. He imagines the sound of all the different footsteps on a single street, of all the footsteps in the city, moving in polyphonic rhythm. The ones that are drowned by the noise of traffic and construction, the ones that grow distinct again as silence spreads in interludes of calm. Like many times before, and just as he was entering Harlem, he left the phone’s recorder on without realizing it. He listens to it later, closing his eyes though he doesn’t really need to: a particular acoustic archeology belonging to that day and no other, to the streets of this city, so distinct from any others. He can hear again, on the recording, things that he doesn’t remember having heard: sparrows during a lull in traffic; the voices of children at play, laughing loudly; then a long scream that is initially hard to place. It was a Black man, at 125th and St. Nicholas, pacing in circles on the sidewalk. He appeared to be shouting at the mannequins in the window of a store that sold cheap African clothing, accusingly pointing a finger at them as if they were callous witnesses, then launching himself at a stone wall, taking a few steps back to get a running start and kicking it as if he meant to climb it, finally raising a fist as if to strike it though he never did; it was always just that furious gesture, as if he were knocking on a huge door that no one else could see. Perhaps images are fixed more firmly in memory than sounds: he remembered perfectly the man’s circular dance on the sidewalk and the way he struck the wall, but he had forgotten his scream, a kind of long wail, really, preserved in the recording, blending with the noise of buses and sirens and the periodic beeping of the crossing signal for the blind.

  THE BOX OF TERROR. There are as many different stories as there are different faces, says Svetlana Alexievich. As many voices too. And for every face, for every voice and every story there is a different way of walking, a different gait and rhythm to the steps. The way people walk is as unique as their voice or as their face. It will never be repeated. With the invention of the daguerreotype it became possible to preserve faces. Voices began to be collected just over a century ago. We know Baudelaire’s face, but not his voice. We have photographs of Chopin, and the last months of Poe’s life are documented in a series of increasingly disturbing pictures. But we have no moving images of any of them. There could have been some of Pessoa or Benjamin. We could have known what their voices were like, but they were never recorded, or if they were, the recordings were lost. Walter Benjamin spoke often on the radio. There could be an early film of Oscar Wilde. Objects in motion remained invisible to photography for a long time. Passersby, carts, horse-drawn carriages, leave behind a faint trace in some of Eugène Atget’s pictures, a kind of glowing, foggy exhalation. The streets of Paris are always empty in his photographs, not because he wanted it that way but from technical limitations in how the image was captured. This confers on them an unplanned realism, a poetry of disappearance. People, horses, dogs, busy gentlemen as well as idle ones, workers, seamstresses, bill-stickers with pots of glue, they are all there but they leave no trace. They are there and they are gone, which is the common lot. Then, as the first moving pictures appear, one does begin to see human beings, but they pass very quickly, hastening to vanish as soon as possible, driven by an urge to extinction. What would it be like, a moving picture of De Quincey, a film where for a few seconds you could recognize him, very old, dressed like a beggar, lost in the crowd on Oxford Street with that look about him of a decrepit child.

  * * *

  AUTHENTIC HUMAN HAIR. He can hear his own footsteps on the accidental recording and they seem even stranger to him than the sound of his voice. They are somewhat arrhythmic, heavy, clunky, stubborn like a mechanism made of simple gears and bellows. He wants to close his eyes and hear the footsteps of every person who walked down the same streets as him on that day, up Broadway, Amsterdam, making gradual readjustments as if charting a course at sea, straight north at first for hours, then northeast, then east along 125th Street, north again on Frederick Douglass Boulevard and then northeast, to the very end of the island, the river, the great geological barrier of the Bronx, marked by a belt of highways and bridges. This city, where people seem to walk faster and in a straighter line than anywhere else, is also full of slow, plodding motions, of halting steps and dragging feet. There is a city of the swift and a city of the slow, mixing and flowing together in the Mississippi of Broadway like the many different currents that form a river’s seemingly uniform stream. The swift will not allow the slightest interference with their stringent paths, urging those who walk more slowly to step aside lest they be delayed for a single instant. They could step aside themselves, but it would be an abdication of the privilege conferred on them by their health and their physical momentum. They run up or down the steps to the subway at a gallop, angrier and more impatient still because people who walk slowly take even longer to climb a flight of stairs.

  * * *

  NO RATS NO ROACHES NO MICE IN YOUR HOUSE. The swift are impelled by health, money, physical appearance, the pressures of work, the golden substance of time, measured in minutes and seconds. The slow are going nowhere, or if they are, it makes no difference if they get there late or if they never arrive. The slow are old, fat, sick, homeless, deranged, paralyzed, hobbled, missing a limb. Extreme obesity is an unconquerable slowness. Normal bodies suddenly display a kind of excrescence, a giant, shapeless rump hanging to one side like a stuffed bag. A small man limps forward lifting and extending the giant sole of an orthopedic shoe. A very fat woman in a wheelchair with a missing leg. Some wheelchairs are motorized and others must be pushed by hand. Some are highly complex machines that can be guided with the chin or with the tip of one finger. People walk on rounded plastic legs, or legs made of metal bars, or jointed legs that end in an athletic shoe. The slow are wearing busted sneakers without laces, old slippers that can barely hold their swollen feet, or they just wrap their feet in shreds and rags and tattered plastic bags. They are bowed, hunched over, twisted, slumped over the frame of a walker or t
he handle of a supermarket cart where they carry their groceries or the junk they pick up here and there, anything they can find. There is something exorbitant to almost all of them, a disproportion, an excess, extreme old age, obesity, a hunched back, a stench, a general decay.

  WELCOME TO TRINITY CHURCH. They hobble by on light aluminum crutches or old wooden crutches or leaning on canes and sticks like pilgrims and prophets, a broomstick, a piece of plastic tubing. They move like cripples in a diffuse medieval procession to a miraculous shrine. Some are lame, some crawl, some are pushed in wheelchairs or go a little faster on motorized tricycles. Some are bloated with sugars and greasy toxic foods, some had a foot cut off because they could not afford treatment for their diabetes. Some are families that were evicted from their homes, often Black women with several children, carrying or dragging a suitcase. Otherwise they stand on the sidewalk next to their bags with a look of stupor and fatigue outside a subway station, heading who knows where once they begin to move. Nearby, like arrows, the swift go by at the height of their powers, pressed for time, indestructible, with a hard, sinewy youth about them, fresh from the gym, immune to age, with a sports bag slung over their shoulder, the women in tights, their hair pulled back, a bottle of vitaminwater in one hand and a cruel resolve to their upturned chin.