To Walk Alone in the Crowd

by Antonio Munoz Molina

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  WALK IN BLISSFUL COMFORT. The next stage, for the slow, is to lie huddled in a heap of rags on a street corner or in the gutted entrance to a vacant store or simply in the middle of the sidewalk. Someone suddenly stands still, lacking the strength to push their walker uphill or through a pile of dirty snow left behind after a storm. Someone collapses to the ground and does not move. On a corner outside a Popeyes a Black man in dirty clothes is lying faceup on the sidewalk. His belly is showing, he is missing a shoe, the nail of his big toe is sticking out through the sock. Some walk by without looking, some stop for a moment and then continue on their way. An older woman leans down and touches his face, asking him something. The man’s eyes are closed. His chest is heaving irregularly. It is much colder in the shade, you can see his breath condensing. A few customers look out the window of the Popeyes. Others continue eating. A police cruiser arrives. People look from a distance.

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  AFRICAN HAIR BRAIDING. Big shoe stores and clothing stores on 125th. Bank branches and boarded-up stores, new buildings made of glass and old apartment blocks of redbrick. Men’s barber shops with pictures of Black models. Women’s beauty parlors offering relaxers and African braids. Bright African robes and headwraps in shop windows: green, yellow, red. Stacks of videotapes in the window of a music store that closed years ago, Blaxsploitation films, grimy sun-bleached posters advertising horror movies and erotic films and thrillers. Street stalls line the sidewalk. They sell African sculpture, necklaces, pendants, cell phone covers and chargers, crude knock-off luxury handbags, scarves blowing in the wind in imitation silk, Christian saints, Buddhas, Virgins, African gods or warriors, fertility goddesses with udder-like wooden breasts. They sell perfume bottles with xeroxed labels, rows of glass vials with dubious glistening oils that smell of sandalwood and patchouli. A fat woman in a bronze-green Statue of Liberty robe is handing out flyers for legal services. Her face is the same shade of green as her rubber crown. Her boots and the bottom of her robe are stained with muddy slush from the puddles of dirty snow along the curb.

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  PAWNBROKER CASA DE EMPEÑO. He has noticed as well a different type of person who moves slowly, the type that talks or shouts, announcing Christ’s imminent coming or whipped into a frenzied tirade against invisible foes. A man in an oversize jacket that reaches below his knees is spinning on the sidewalk, the sleeves of his coat flapping and dangling like rubber arms. He stops and raises an accusing finger at someone. The mannequins in a clothing store. Then he starts spinning again. He begins to kick a wall covered with peeling posters, backing up to get a running start before he strikes. He strikes at the wall as if knocking on a huge door.

  JEWELS DIAMONDS GOLD WATCHES. The new prevails over the old; the swift over the slow; steel and glass over brick and stone. Banks and real-estate firms have much larger storefronts than African salons and barbershops. Logos for cell phone brands; young white people laughing on billboards with their mouths wide open. The poor cling as best they can to the punished surface of a city that was once theirs and from which they are being evicted. Names stir the imagination and the urge to walk: Harlem, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard, Malcolm X Boulevard. The two men, who in life were adversaries, are posthumously reconciled in the shared destiny of their assassinations and the coming together of their names at a street crossing.

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  THE ALHAMBRA BALLROOM. He collects place names like an explorer. Past a certain point, the walk becomes an exercise in sustained hypnosis where he is both the hypnotist and the subject. He crosses worlds and continents. There are no more Starbucks now but there are many churches; modest churches in what used to be old shops, and then the corner stores they call bodegas, using the Spanish word. On the doors of the bodegas there are oversize color photographs of scrumptious food: grilled hamburger meat, fatty bacon strips, melted cheese, thick slices of roast beef or turkey smeared with runny yellow mustard. Now he walks through knots of men speaking African French. They are leaner than American Black men, the way they sit is different, the way they stand and talk in groups. There are new smells that are not the smells of fast food: rice, grilled fish, grilled plantains, unleavened Ethiopian bread.

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  FIRST EBENEZER BAPTIST CHURCH. As he turns north again it all grows more subdued, the sky expands, the street seems wider because the buildings are no longer tall. A broader prospect opens up before him, a large horizon that makes him breathe more freely and provides new vigor to his tired legs. Later, on the accidental recording, he will notice how the sounds begin to fade or disappear until nearly all that’s left is the monotonous rhythm of his steps. The sidewalks, too, are unobstructed, with barely any people. Beauty parlors, bodegas, churches, African or Haitian community centers. Farther north you start to hear voices speaking Spanish, to notice Spanish signs on the bodegas. In front of him a boy with a backpack in a hooded winter coat is walking hand in hand with his father. It’s not something you see very often in the city. Here children old enough to walk by their parents’ side are pushed along in strollers that are too small for them, scrunched up, staring at an iPad or a phone. Some strollers have extendable arms or supports into which the device is placed so that the child, without needing to hold it, can look at the screen from an adequate distance. The father, mother, or caretaker pushes the stroller while talking or typing on the phone. He slows down so as not to pass the father and child. The boy is saying things, the father leans a little in his direction. The hooded coat, the boots, the satchel on his back make him look like a boy in a fairy tale. Unexpectedly he is seized by a jolt of tenderness that solitude and time turn into sadness. Suddenly nothing and no one is near.

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  ASSOCIATION DES MALIENS DE NEW YORK. It is even quieter now, a wide street, a broad expanse without traffic, like a square or like one of those American towns with low buildings that gradually give way to the plains. A kind of nearly secret and deserted border zone. What was vertical has become horizontal, clamor has turned into silence. A two-story motel with a wide parking lot reinforces the sense of strangeness. In front of the motel there is a small park enclosed by a railing. Farther still, an auto shop, a garage, a post office, also quite low, with a flag waving against the clear sky. As if the walk had lasted so long that it led him into the interior of the country. He sees a river or a broad canal, the curved crossbeams of an iron bridge that is painted white, a sheaf of highways, the fluvial and geological divide that separates the island from the great continent beyond, Manhattan from the Bronx. A name that rings with the slow, deep sound of a bell or a gong: the Bronx, as powerful as the name of certain Asian capitals on a school map, Samarkand, Ulaanbaatar.

  BUILT TO FIT YOUR LIFE. Rivers and bridges are the United States’ greatest beauty, the joint wonder of nature and engineering forcing each other into heroic disproportion, an immense river tamed and a human work exalted to the scale of a landform—a canyon, a gorge, a mountain range in profile against the horizon. Each crossbeam and pillar, each rivet and rusted surface of peeling paint is witness to the great drama of matter’s resistance to the onslaught of wind, rain, and snow. Worn, bent, expanding with heat and contracting with cold, from one extreme to another, and then the ceaseless violent vibration of cars and trucks on the roadway, the force of rushing water against a pillar, the powerful pull of gravity. Crossing the bridge is like passing beneath the solemn gates one pictured slowly opening in fabled city walls, the gates of Ulaanbaatar, the Great Gate of Kiev. By car, one would barely notice. On foot, you know from the moment you step on the quivering walkway and gaze at the silent river below that you are crossing a border. Whatever lies ahead will be very different from what came before, a new world for your foreign eyes and ears.

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  HAPPINESS IS HAPPENING. Three guardian-like figures sit at the other end of the bridge. He keeps walking at a steady pace, overcoming without effort the impulse to go back. He can’t tell yet if they are facing him or if the
ir backs are turned. They are motionless, positioned at the exit to the bridge, by the side of the road. Two of them walk away toward the highway that rises from the river. As he gets closer, he can see the way they reel and stagger in a kind of strange and stiff Saint Vitus dance. One of them is missing a leg and leans on a crutch. They move among the cars that are waiting at the light, one of them holding up a piece of cardboard with some writing on it, and the other, the one with the crutch, shaking a plastic cup by the drivers’ windows. The light changes and they scurry as best they can between the moving cars. The third man has not stirred. He is sitting on a low stone wall, letting his legs dangle. The hood of his parka completely covers his face. Walking past him, he is aware of being watched and he hears the jingle of change in the cup. He is not good at not looking, has not learned to walk past another person as if no one was there. He turns his head and is met by the man’s dark gaze. His eyes are bright, the whites around the irises very clear in the shade of the hood. He is a Black man, old, with a grizzled white beard. His gaze is full of dignity. Walking past him and looking away, he hears the sound of the man’s voice at his back. “Good morning, sir,” it says politely and sarcastically.

  * * *

  BLINK AND FEEL GOOD. Now he is in a different city that is not ruled by the straight line, the grid, the horizontal. In the Bronx there are hills, gullies, stepped streets, curving avenues, steep stone walls, staggered planes that rise in the distance to various heights, like those cities in Yemen built on steep hillsides of dark rock. To arrive at his destination he must now walk steadily uphill. Yankee Stadium stands like a coliseum in one of those fantastical cities that in a thousand years will lie ruined in the middle of a desert, or perhaps be gradually taken over by a tropical jungle as temperatures rise and the ocean reaches the foothills of the Bronx, turning them into coastal cliffs. Dwarfed by the breadth of the esplanade and the height of the building, a man is taking a selfie in front of Yankee Stadium, stretching his arm and the selfie stick as far as he can, smiling, straining every muscle in his face, raising the thumb of his free hand in a gesture of triumph or success.

  PUT YOUR MONEY WHERE THE MIRACLES ARE. Today is the day when the sun finally comes out, when it even feels a little warm if you stand out of the shade and the wind dies down. The day when the snow begins to melt, the dirty snow, old and filthy like a pile of wool stained with mud, a kind of pumice stone riddled with grains of soot and burned gasoline, pushed in piles against the sidewalk by the brutal blade of a plow until it turns into an impassable barrier, trampled, puddled into dark lagoons, snow that seems to decompose instead of melting, gradually revealing as it does what lay concealed beneath its lofty shroud, a days-old archeological deposit that emerges now entirely on its own, no one has to dig it up, to classify the things that lie half-buried still, embedded in a substance that no longer corresponds to the word “snow” but is rather a volcanic ash, the burned detritus of a new Vesuvius trapping in its matrix the complete compendium of a civilization’s material signs. A stark air of extinction clings especially to things that have only partially emerged: a woolen glove like a hand coming out of the earth, a Dunkin’ Donuts plastic coffee cup with a straw still sticking through the lid, the corner of a flip-top box of Marlboros, a ghastly toilet scrubber, the broken skeleton of an umbrella, a bird cage, fortunately empty, a bucket of KFC with a few leftover pieces nibbled by rats, a whole rat, still frozen, emerging from the snow, a pile of dog shit, a woolen cap, a plastic fork, a crushed pigeon, a baby diaper, a sponge covered in hair, a microwave, the black suction cup of a toilet plunger, thousands of cigarette butts. Streams of dirty water flow along the curb as the snow begins to melt, dragging small objects toward the sewer grates. The wind disperses them, lifting plastic bags up in the air, snatching at the tattered shreds of plastic on the branches of a tree, branches that are bare and black but will flower overnight as soon as it gets warmer, when the sun begins to shine a little brighter and everything is toppled and transformed again.

  OUT OF THE ORDINARY. Just as the space around him is now wider, sounds and images have grown more powerful. The memory of seagulls and the hazy morning light in which the walk began is now so distant that it seems part of a different life, an earlier era, moistness, fog, like sense impressions left behind in someone else’s memory. Each step requires greater vigor now because the path goes steadily uphill. You have to look at things more closely because the colors have intensified, the words you read or hear are more vehement: a yellow sign on a red background, a blue sign painted over a brick wall, covering it completely, like a brazen demand. Now you hear people speaking loudly in Mexican or Caribbean Spanish. The city has boosted its colors and multiplied its voices and turned up the volume. Hip-hop beats, bachatas, and reggaeton blast onto the street from auto shops and secondhand tire stores. Cars drive by playing deafening music with the windows down. Over Jerome Avenue run the elevated subway tracks. Each time a train goes by, a rhythmic clatter is unleashed that shakes the earth and drowns out every sound. Beneath the tracks you walk as in a shady portico, the ground is barred with stripes of light. Every few minutes the raging storm of clanging metal returns. Sounds and colors are equally strident. Mexican workers wave their arms outside the auto shops and tire stores, lifting colorful signs above their heads with low-price offers to attract passing cars. The sudden novelty of this new world seems to make the earlier worlds traversed over the past few hours recede in time. At street corners where the subway stops, the stalls of African, Indian, and Caribbean bazaars spread at the foot of the iron stairs. There are no more Starbucks and very few banks. He realizes it has been a long time since he last saw a yellow cab go by. There are more botanicas, hair salons, and ethnic restaurants than cell phone stores. Smells are as excessive and intoxicating as the colors and sounds. Elsa la Reyna del Chicharrón. El Gran Valle Restaurante Lechonera. Bizcocho Dominicano de 3 Leches. Bizcocho Dominicano para Cada Ocasión. Las 3 Sirenas Ricos Tacos al Carbón. Gordito’s Fresh Mex. La Esquina Caribeña.

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  THE GREATEST VISIONARY MEDIUM AND HEALER. Jerome Avenue smells of roast pig, rotisserie chicken, burned fat, rubber tires, gasoline, melted cheese on a Subway sandwich. It smells of McDonald’s, Dunkin’ Donuts, Domino’s Pizza, baked potatoes, and roast yuca. At the entrance to each restaurant there are big color photographs of dishes gleaming with sauces and melted fat, their inordinate abundance paired in each promotional picture with a two-liter bottle of Pepsi. It smells of fast food and Caribbean food and chicken manure. Live Poultry National Chicken Market. The smell of manure is as dizzying as the deafening cackle. In a shed outside an auto repair shop, red-crested roosters pace arrogantly among stacks of tires. The tire stores are like Egyptian temples, deep halls with colonnades and walls and narrow passageways of piled-up tires of every size, huge trailer-truck tires rising in cyclopean stacks. Moving among them are the tiny figures of the probably undocumented immigrants who work there. They toil in groups, removing tires from a car, installing tires, screwing in a fender, taking apart entire cars for scrap. The hammering, the cackle of birds, the pulse of bachatas and reggaeton, a Julio Iglesias song with backup singers and violins, all is drowned by the crashing cataract of metal coming from above each time the subway passes, on and on.

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  HELP US FIND YOU. Rooms for rent. Cuachimalco Flowers. Pentecostal Church of Christ of the Antilles. Christ Is Coming. Loco Sam Cógelo Fiao Buy Now Pay Later. Every bit of available space is taken up by a sign. Dominican Hair & Barbershop. Jehanni Hair Salon & Nails. Color Drops. Duck-Feet. Nails, Eyelashes, Eyebrows. Jesus the Way the Truth and the Life. Barbecue Chicken Breakfast Sandwich. Handwritten signs taped to a lamppost, flashy posters with crowded pictures of music bands, a flyer for a Sunday dance. International Charro Show. Los Rayos de Oaxaca Here for the First Time from Beautiful Oaxaquita. Nigeria Express. Send Money Fast to Ecuador Honduras Guatemala. Vivero Bronx Live Poultry. Pague Aquí Todos sus Billes. Rincón Supremo Lechonero. Pay All Your Bill
s Here. El Original Conjunto Mar Azul. Your Dream Figure Lose Pounds & Inches. Los Preferidos Jorge Rodríguez and his Band.

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  THE LORD’S VOICE CRIES TO THE CITY. Movers, Junk Removal. Empeños Pawn 24 hours. Be at your ideal weight in just a few hours. La Encantadora Jennifer and her DJ Jhovanny Jhovanny. Zacarías Ferreira and Frank Reyes Together Just One Night for a Historic Concert. Frank Reyes and Zacarías Ferreira are dressed like sea captains, in jackets and caps, spreading their arms wide in front of a Caribbean seascape with a cruise ship in the offing. La Encantadora Jennifer is a woman in a low-cut dress, with wavy hair extensions voluptuously cascading over a large bosom that opens like a balcony beneath her. Best of the Best Bachata, El Grupaso LTP the Cyclone of Bachata. Santiago Cruz Interplanetary Tour. Chiqui Bombón Life Tastes Like Fruit. Sunday Matinée Yiyo Sarante’s Official Farewell. Bucket of beer $10. Bottles $80. The Lord of Bachata. But neither the singers nor the bands in their matching hats and outfits nor Chiqui Bombón nor Encantadora Jennifer command as much attention in the posters as the DJs, in all their insolent glory. Haughty looks behind dark glasses or mirrored lenses. Bare chests in silver jackets. Buzz cuts, braids, a sideways hat, fanciful names like Mexican wrestlers. DJ Chulo Jay. DJ Sobrino. DJ Perverso. DJ Krazzy Loco. DJ El Yefry. DJ Lobo.