To Walk Alone in the Crowd

by Antonio Munoz Molina

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  SAN RAFAEL BOTANICA AND DISPENSARY. The botanicas are bursting with the profuse imagery of baroque chapels, crammed with the assorted junk and tackle of every cult and miracle. The archangels Michael and Raphael brandish their swords and step on Satan’s serpent head. Figures made of plaster or plastic look like a mix between calendar saints and Marvel superheroes. Victor Florencio Visionary Child Prodigy of the Bronx. Retail and wholesale distribution of a wide selection of religious articles. Anais Fernández Spiritual Adviser. The Virgin of Guadalupe, the Virgin of Lourdes, the Virgin of Fatima, the elephant god Ganesha, a cheerful Buddha with a bulging belly, Shiva with his wheel of arms, a Black Christ on the cross, an Indian medicine man holding a pipe, St. Martin de Porres, St. John Paul II, a Darth Vader with a saint’s halo, a Santa Muerte holding a skeleton Baby Jesus in its arms, a character from The Lion King. In the window of the San Rafael Botanica and Dispensary stands a life-size Ecce Homo with sores and lashes and a baroque tangle of rancorously twisted thorns digging into his brow. Instead of being tied to a column, he leans piteously on a pair of golden crutches.

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  IF YOU SEE SOMETHING, SAY SOMETHING. Everything changes constantly. Plump Hispanic women holding children by the hand, then a moment later beautiful African or Pakistani or Bangladeshi women whose faces are framed and accentuated by veils. He is no longer aware that he’s walking. He is nothing but the rhythm of his steps and the tracking shot of his gaze. He has no attachments or memories anymore, no ties, nowhere to go back to, no life left vacant in which to reassume his place. All eyes, all ears. Nothing but eyes and ears. He walks up Jerome Avenue as he walked up Frederick Douglass Boulevard before, and Martin Luther King Boulevard before that, and a shady stretch of lower Broadway, but also Menéndez Pelayo in Madrid, Oxford Street, other streets in Paris and Berlin that were known to Walter Benjamin, the Rue des Beaux-Arts, following the footsteps of Oscar Wilde. A blank space, suddenly, a black hole after the botanicas, the poultry markets, the hair salons, and the auto shops: an entire city block taken up by a low building, a kind of tumulus without any windows or signs, a black hole, gray-walled, as dreary as a prison or a grave, with all the nondescript, distinct inhumanity of the United States’ official architecture. A building that conceals itself, refusing to display a window or a narrow slit or so much as a name to the outside world, a perfect bureaucratic barrow, probably correctional, with cameras in every corner, and as impervious to posters or to any visual marks as it is to sound. The walls look like pumice stone, giving back no light, absorbing sound. There’s a glass door but it is dark inside and all you can see is a patch of bare linoleum and a withered ficus, the kind of tragic waif of a potted plant that you discover here and there in some corner at an airport. There’s a line of people waiting outside the door, each person isolated from the rest by a certain amount of space on the sidewalk and by a particular form of visible affliction. An obese woman in a wheelchair sucks on a straw from a plastic bucket with the Wendy’s logo. Her hair is dirty and she wears old-fashioned glasses with thick lenses. Then another woman: miniskirt, fishnet stockings, dyed blond hair, rickety high heels, knees pressed together against the cold. A third woman standing in line in front of her lifts a cigarette to her mouth and half her teeth are missing. There’s a man with a shaved head and pale blue eyes, his neck entirely covered in tattoos, his hands as well, a gothic letter on each of his knuckles. Among all the dark-skinned, bronze-skinned foreigners going about their work, only the people waiting in that line are visibly white and native-born. They alone stand motionless, pale as zombies, gaunt as corpses, or buried in the quicksand of their own obesity. They wait and stare into the void. Whatever they are waiting for, as well as the affliction that has brought them here, has some relation to this barren building and the grim radiance of its architecture.

  * * *

  THIS BUILDING IS ONLY FOR TENANTS AND THEIR GUESTS. And here it comes, trudging up the narrow sidewalk, the slow procession of the hooded and the ragged, pushing supermarket carts, men and women who are sometimes hard to tell apart, just as it is hard to tell apart the young ones from the old, the drunk from the merely destitute, dragging their feet, holding their carts as they ease them down the curb to keep the bags of plastic bottles and of empty soda cans from toppling down. At the entrance to a supermarket they will put them into a recycling machine, a penny a piece, or they will sell them at redemption centers where you can see, through a darkened entryway, a high nave with a metal roof and mountains of bottles, cans, plastic containers, pierced by dusty shafts of sunlight that come in through the skylights. They had to come on foot because their cargo prevents them from riding the subway. They arrive from all over the Bronx, perhaps from Harlem or even farther south. They resemble Inuit, bundled up and hooded in their jackets and their coats, in heavy boots and gloves, their faces burned and blackened by the cold, red with drink, a pair of wet, beady eyes behind a ski mask or a scarf, their bodies bowed by rummaging in garbage cans.

  IF YOU SEE SOMETHING. There is a bracing sense of imminent arrival; a nearness that gives objects, faces, voices, and smells a dreamlike precision. There is a sense of faltering fatigue, of dizzying overabundance, relieved only by a parallel sense of nearly complete impersonality. At first, during the walk, the sense of self recedes. Then it seems to lapse. Finally, it disappears. You give yourself so entirely to everything external that you end up, for long stretches of time, for several hours, being practically no one. The riches of the world are better stored in an empty house. The street is not a path he follows but a current carrying him along. He is led by his footsteps, not by his will, his motion governed by the cerebellum with the same automated and primitive efficiency that regulates his heartbeat and his breathing. He has walked for hours at the same steady pace and it has also felt like sitting by a window on a train, watching everything go by without the least effort.

  * * *

  EXPERIENCE THE SPELL. There is a widening of space, a growing brightness as he leaves behind Jerome Avenue and the elevated subway tracks. New Fordham Road is the penultimate stage of his route. Fordham was the name of the village or rather the loose grouping of farms and meadows where Edgar Allan Poe came to live with his wife and mother-in-law. The light of the sun transfigures everything after so many overcast days. Rills of water trickle from the eaves as the snow begins to melt. The sidewalks widen in the sun, making space itself seem larger. At the intersection of Fordham Road and the Grand Concourse of the Bronx, an encampment of vendors spreads as at a crossroads in the ancient world. After the long uphill climb, the Bronx opens into a wide plain, a kind of Central Asian plateau traversed by trade routes stretching away in all directions. In the far distance of the Grand Concourse there are views of continental solitudes, bluish silhouettes of towers like those deceptive domes and minarets that rose before De Quincey’s eyes during an opium trance. Looking closely you can see the pencil profile of the Chrysler Building and the Empire State, which are not as tall or as thin anymore as the new luxury towers of the inconceivably rich, the unseen lords and masters of the Earth.

  * * *

  WE HAVE A LOT TO TELL YOU. Real and imaginary worlds will gradually begin to mingle when you’re alone. Under the effects of opium De Quincey glimpsed down a dirty London street the golden domes and spires of a dazzling mosque gleaming in the sun. There is a breadth to the Grand Concourse like that of an urbanized Communist capital, a horizon of tall buildings terraced like Tibetan monasteries. At the top of a huge brick tower there is a broken clock. Every window on every floor is boarded up. Many years ago he saw an identical tower in a dream that he never forgot. It was night in the dream, and the tower was crowned by a glowing red star. Someone’s voice said in his ear: “That is the star of the Bronx.”

  * * *

  TRAVEL THROUGH SOUND. He has come to a place in a dream, a caravansary somewhere on the Silk Road. Cheap fabrics, multicolored hats and scarves of fake silk flash in the sun and wave in the wind. Forei
gn tongues mingle under the canopies as do the heavy scents of food and perfumes brought by merchants from distant lands. Women in high Mesopotamian headdresses sit majestically on plastic stools next to their stalls. An immemorial commerce is carried out by brisk gestures and loud, haggling cries. The poor come to this place to look for provisions, for merchants who speak their own language and will sell them things that smell and taste of the worlds they left behind. The same stand sells bead necklaces, seed necklaces, gold hoops and earrings, fake African sculptures, flip-flops, cell phone chargers, cell phone covers. English is just another language in the riotous Babel of tongues efficiently and summarily spoken in heavy accents. Much more common is the luscious Spanish of Santo Domingo, Mexico, Ecuador, and Cuba. “Le pregunté qué tú quieres y ella me dijo que su mayor prioridad en este mundo son las uñas.” On the sidewalk, a group of old Cuban men is playing dominos in the sun, listening to Celia Cruz on a big boombox of the kind that kids with a supple step and a defiant look used to carry on their shoulders at full blast in the eighties. The old men are talking about someone who is a súper but wants to resignar because the guys in his building put trash down the toilet and make his life hell. They’re on a sidewalk in the Bronx but they could just as well be sitting outside a café in Havana. A counterpoint takes place between the dry clicking sounds of the dominos and the high, honeyed voice of Celia Cruz. “Como era millonario, qué digo, multimillonario, billonario, ese hombre ya lo tenía todo y lo único que le faltaba ganar era la oficina más poderosa del mundo.” “Fue el papá de él que le dejó una inmensa fortuna.”

  TRYING TO FORGET HIS NIGHTMARE. In the Bronx, the worst nightmare of the yellow-haired megalomaniac came true. Still standing on the Grand Concourse are the monumental buildings of a civilization that fell mysteriously into decay and was abandoned by its original inhabitants: banks with columned porticos, large stores with Art Deco towers and facades, movie theaters that look like Roman baths or basilicas. Tribes of strange-speaking, dark-skinned, slant-eyed people of short and rugged build overran the borders, occupying buildings so solidly made that they did not fall into ruin even after centuries of decay. In abandoned movie theaters they set up their places of worship and celebration; in what had been department stores with tall mirrors, carpeted stairs, and burnished counters they crammed their food stands and their stalls of cheap merchandise. They lit bonfires in public gardens to hold their primitive feasts. The wide, solemn sidewalks were filled with their teeming crowds, their cluttered stands of cheap fake goods and their strange music which was often deafening, vulgar, always a little threatening. Where an old, distinguished business used to stand—a bank, a law firm—there was now a pawnshop, a greasy restaurant, a beauty shop for women who wore flamboyant hairstyles and long artificial nails in garish colors. On the plains of the Bronx, within sight of the city, which is a blue and chimerical island far in the distance, the barbarian tribes have pitched their camps. Each morning, very early and still in the dark, they descend on the city. They take underground trains that go beneath the river and elevated trains that shake with metallic fury as they cross a bridge. They go there to serve food, to pick up garbage bags in restaurants, to cook, to scrub dishes in airless basements that turn into ovens in the summer months, to sweep the streets, open car doors, wipe old people’s asses and care for their Alzheimer’s; they go there to care for people’s children, to climb the scaffolding outside a building, raise skyscrapers that reach ever higher, deliver food on bicycles through blizzards, open ditches in the asphalt with pneumatic drills, breathe toxic substances without masks, work twenty stories up without insurance, dump chicken parts into a deep fryer, drive a taxi for twelve or fourteen hours straight, and never once be able to get sick and miss a day of work. The same trains will carry them back at night, exhausted, dozing in their seats or on their feet, holding on to a subway pole so as not to fall asleep and crash to the ground.

  REMEMBER YOUR HANDS. He’s no more than an observer among them, a camera, an iPhone’s audio recorder accidentally left on inside his pocket, tapping rhythmically against a set of keys or some pistachio shells. Since the phone is in his right-hand pocket, the steps on that side can be heard much louder, as in the limping walk of a crippled, stubborn man, the seconds and minutes changing ceaselessly on the cell phone screen in an endless metamorphosis of numbers rising at different speeds. Someone, later, may be able to study this recording. It will be possible to reconstruct much of his path from the footage of police surveillance cameras and of the cameras outside the banks: a face that is hard to distinguish in the shadow of the hat, between the raised lapels of the winter coat he wore on that cold morning, on the long, timeless day of the walk. A figure lost among others as they come and go, swift or slow, pushing baby strollers or supermarket carts with plastic bags full of beverage containers that tremble and seem about to fall, the tinkling of glass bottles and aluminum cans. All of this will be recorded. A timestamp will mark the moment he appeared at each corner: the hour, the minute, the second and tenth of a second. The route traced by the GPS on his phone will be a long diagonal beginning at South Ferry, heading north on Broadway, east at 106th, north again at 125th.

  * * *

  A NEW SPECIES IS BORN. He is a secret agent, not from a distant country but from an earlier time, taking note of everything that for those who live in the present is normal to the point of invisibility. His mission is so urgent and so vast that he can never rest. The training he received allows him to move unnoticed among the natives and to handle their everyday devices with sufficient ease. To preserve a perfect cover, he will allow himself no contact with his superiors or with the command post back in his own time. Carefully and surreptitiously he gathers any information that seems relevant. The future is an inaccessible and probably hostile country about which one must learn as much as possible. Once there, an agent knows the grave danger involved, how difficult it will be to return. The progress of technology will enable us to travel into the future without adequately resolving the problem of getting back. Harder than sending a spaceship to Mars is bringing it back with its crew safe and sound. Perhaps he’s trapped now in the present, unable to return to a past that is in fact not even so remote, just twenty or twenty-five years back. He could never have imagined how terrifyingly exotic this new world would be, a place more categorically remote than North Korea, Babylon, Tenochtitlán. One of his tasks would be to study future climates, temperatures, the condition of the oceans and the atmosphere, verifying whether certain forecasts came true and learning possible preemptive lessons. The expedition has been undertaken with the utmost secrecy. But something went wrong, an accident, an oversight, and now he knows there is no going back, all possible escape routes have been blocked, the hidden passageways, the locked door deep down in some dark basement. Banished for life to another time as to a different planet, he perseveres nonetheless out of professional pride or simply because he enjoys the task, living in a calm exile, an inner solitude that will never cease anymore even if he partly begins to adopt the accent and the gestures of this other country, not much more of a foreigner really than any of the men and women he meets among the stalls of Fordham Road and the Grand Concourse. Just one more of them.

  INTERACTIVE MAPS AND 3D TOURS OF THE PLANET. When he was living in the white wooden cottage that is now barely visible across the wide avenue, Edgar Allan Poe wrote a short story that took place exactly two hundred years in the future, in 2048. By then there are hot-air balloons that can rise a hundred miles in the air and carry four hundred passengers at speeds of over 150 miles per hour. Poe was captivated by hot-air balloons. One of his most commercially successful stories was a thoroughly documented and perfectly false narrative of a crossing of the Atlantic in just three days in a maneuverable balloon. It was from Poe that Jules Verne learned the literary allure of a balloon flight, as well as that of polar expeditions. He read Poe in Baudelaire’s French translations. No one knows where the seed of literature will fall, or along what paths. The
photographer Nadar, who was friends with both Verne and Baudelaire, became a balloon pilot and an aerial-show impresario. The balloon was as prodigious an invention as photography. When Baudelaire was living in Brussels, ailing and embittered, Nadar came to town to perform a series of balloon flights. He urged Baudelaire to go up with him, but Baudelaire refused.

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  TO CREATE SOMETHING THAT WILL LAST IN TIME. The white cottage, the tall, leafless oak trees that surround it, the park spreading to one side impose on the eye a suggestion of space that effaces or suspends everything else around, the neutral void beyond the edges of a photograph. The wide concourse and the big apartment blocks vanish into a landscape of farms and meadows, an open sky stretching to far woods on the horizon, with glimpses of the sea. From this elevated plot of ground you can see the island, tapered like a ship, pointing its prow toward the sea and bound by its two rivers. With a powerful spyglass you could make out the church spires and the ship masts far in the distance. More than half the island is covered in fields, farms, pastures, wooded hills traversed by streams, paths traced over the course of centuries by native tribes that are now vanished or decimated. The house stands in an area of farms and meadows that must have changed little since the time of the Dutch settlers. Being so far from the city, it seems a place of refuge or of strict retirement from the world. A writer who spent his whole life tumbling from one city to the next, fleeing creditors, seeking out newspaper commissions, an editor to publish his books, a rich patron to help him pay his debts and start the journal he never stopped dreaming about; a writer who lost himself occasionally in nights of alcohol-induced delirium and amnesia, wants to live now in the countryside, far from the uproar of the city and the hounding of his enemies, surely also from the lure of drink. Poe lives with his wife Virginia and her mother who is just as much of a mother to him, who lost his own when he was three. Mrs. Clemm calls him Eddy and he calls her Muddy. She is his father’s sister. Virginia is his first cousin. She was thirteen when they married. Their life together in the tiny house seems vaguely like a strange confabulation among characters in a tale, defenseless, isolated from the world in a little hut in the woods where now and then a stranger arrives.