To Walk Alone in the Crowd

by Antonio Munoz Molina

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  LONGER HYDRATION FOR YOUR EYES. Glenn sees his visitor to the door. “It’s always nice when someone comes,” he says. “Weekends are busier, especially in summer, but during the week it can get a little lonely.” He admits with some regret that the two other houses where Poe lived, in Richmond and Baltimore, are larger and attract more visitors. He shivers and rubs his hands together at the door like the owner of a house eager to return to his domestic warmth. On June 20, 1849, Poe left the cottage for the last time. An anxious feeling of being confined to a single place for too long must have been as powerful a motive as the need to earn money. He intended to give public talks, to find journals that would accept his work again, to muster up subscribers for a literary journal he had envisaged for years, in chimerical detail: the layout, the type of font, the various sections, the list of contributors who would send pieces from abroad, the immediate success in sales, the money that this time no one would stint or steal from him. He just needed to persevere until he found subscribers and an investing partner to set things in motion. Nothing more.

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  TO FLEE THROUGH THE STREETS, TO SEEK SHELTER IN THE UPPER FLOORS. He carried a briefcase or a valise with his lecture notes and a trunk filled with books, manuscripts, and a few changes of clothes packed by Mrs. Clemm. He said as he was leaving that he regretted it, and was afraid of not coming back; that he would write daily and send money once he earned some. An outbreak of cholera had just been declared. That summer more than five thousand people died in New York City. When Poe reached Philadelphia by train, the cholera had spread there too. He fell sick. To ease his fever he took calomel, a compound of mercury. It made his gums bleed and it caused confusion and what he called “cerebral congestion.” There is no reliable account of what happened in Philadelphia. It seems that he ran into some acquaintances and got abysmally drunk with them. A few days later he was in jail, charged with drunkenness and disorderly conduct. One morning he turned up at the workshop of a printer and engraver known to him from earlier trips, John Sartain. Poe was wearing only one shoe. He said that he had lost the trunk with his books and clothes and the briefcase with his lecture notes. He claimed he was fleeing from enemies who were trying to kill him. He had heard them on the train, carefully plotting his murder, and they had followed him at night through the streets of Philadelphia. He needed to change his appearance so he could elude them. He asked Sartain for a razor to shave his mustache. His hands were trembling so badly that Sartain feared he would hurt himself, cut his own neck. Sartain clipped Poe’s mustache with a pair of scissors.

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  MAKE YOUR ASPIRATIONS A REALITY. Now his face seems strange again and naked. He asked to borrow some shoes but Sartain could only provide him with a pair of slippers. In cloth slippers, without a mustache, a suitcase, a cent, or the least judgment, Poe wanders through Philadelphia like a lost soul. He tells Sartain about some of the hallucinations he experienced in recent days. Standing at the window of his cell, he would see a woman dressed in white calling out to him from the prison tower. Or the door of the cell would open and his enemies would bring in Mrs. Clemm with her hands tied behind her back. Two of the men would restrain him while the others began to mutilate Virginia’s mother with hatchets and saws: one foot, then another, then a leg up to the knee, a hand, the other hand. During his brief spells of sanity, he writes letters to Mrs. Clemm begging her to come find him. Just as cruel is a different hallucination where he sees the white cottage and the cherry trees standing clearly before him, and knows the door will never open again to let him in.

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  BLOOD THAT SLOWLY LOOKS OUT OF THE CORNER OF ITS EYE. Somehow or other, with Sartain’s help, he manages to get to Richmond on June 14. He has recovered his trunk, though not his lecture notes. It is not a serious loss since he practically knows them by heart. In Richmond the cholera epidemic has subsided and public slave auctions have recommenced immediately with great success. Richmond is the city of Poe’s childhood and early youth. Unexpectedly, he is renewed by being there again. The outcome of his harrowing trip has been a peaceful and pleasant return to the past. In Richmond, refined people with a taste for books are flattered to know that this old acquaintance of theirs is now a famous writer. He gives a few successful lectures. He recites “The Raven” in a hypnotic, singsong cadence. He reencounters a love of his early youth, Elmira Shelton, now a wealthy and attractive widow. They make plans to get married. Poe abstains entirely from drinking. He also finally manages to find an admirer with deep pockets who is willing to fund his journal. In late September he must return to New York to make arrangements before the wedding can take place, and also to see to the journal and let Mrs. Clemm know about this new life in which naturally there will be a place for her.

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  THIS IS THE TIME TO LIVE. When Elmira says goodbye to her fiancé he does not look well. She presses his hand and finds it hot with fever. The last daguerreotype is taken around this time. Poe is once again wearing a mustache. But he has more than ever a look of anguish and despair. His eyes are unfocused, his mouth contracted. His necktie, put on anyhow, is too tight around his neck. There is no relation between that face and the external facts of his life during those days in Richmond. He looks like a man in the grip of terror.

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  ON A SINGLE DAY. We know he was in Baltimore on September 27. There was no reason for that stop. There are different accounts of his reappearance on October 3 after a gap of a few days. One of them says that he was found unconscious in the gutter. According to another, a witness claims to have found him in a tavern during one of those corrupt election days when drunks were rounded up and taken to the ballots. He is carried to a hospital. The doctor in charge of him is an educated, compassionate man who has read his work and recognizes him. His name is Dr. John Moran. Poe does not know where he is, has no idea how he got there or who brought him. Nor does he know where he got the filthy clothes he’s wearing. Near dawn his arms and legs begin to shake and he lapses into delirium. He is drenched in sweat. He speaks and points to the wall as if he recognized people walking down the street, people who sometimes fill him with terror and other times with an urgent need to call out and be answered. He makes motions with his legs as if to walk after them. He repeats a name, Reynolds. To calm him down, Dr. Moran says that a good friend of Poe’s is coming from Baltimore to keep him company. Suddenly clearheaded, Poe looks him in the eye and says, “My best friend would be the man who gave me a pistol that I might blow out my brains.”

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  THE FACE OF NIGHT. He spent six days in the hospital, going through spells of delirium and extreme exhaustion. On the walls of the room he saw shadows and faces. On the morning of Sunday, October 9, he grew very calm and quiet. Dr. Moran leaned down because he saw his lips move. He heard him say, “Lord help my poor soul.”

  THEY GROW LIKE MUSHROOMS. He has left the cottage. Evening is coming on. The sun is still high but there is a hint of dampness in the air and the shadows of the trees have lengthened over the gravel walks and the park’s ragged winter grass. He sat down to rest on a bench, to reconsider or absorb what he has seen. The satchel lies open on his lap and he is looking for an apple among his various papers, clippings, documents, folded maps. He bought it at the farmers’ market on Union Square, who knows how many hours, streets, compressed lifetimes ago. The immediate past widens like the skies and avenues of the Bronx. It is a perfect apple, easy to hold in one hand, red, green, yellow, with a scent that seems like it was preserved in a deep wooden chest where the harvest is stored from year to year. He wipes it with the handkerchief that he always keeps neatly folded in his pocket. Leonard Cohen had a knack for folding his clothes when he packed or unpacked his luggage in a hotel room during a tour. He cleans the apple, or rather gives it a polish to bring out the colors in the cold, blond light of the late-winter sun. He takes a first hungry bite and his mouth fills with its rich juice. On a nearby bench there is a flurry of young Black
women with small children talking and laughing loudly, showing each other their cell phones. They have long stick-on nails that in some cases are starred and striped like the American flag. Schools are letting out. Down the paths that crisscross the park come Central American mothers with indigenous faces, holding hands with children bundled up in big hoods, like young Inuit, carrying their satchels on their backs. A homeless man goes by pushing a supermarket cart full of junk and rags, dragging his feet, leaving behind him a smell of alcohol, urine, and shit.

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  ALONE I WANDER EXHAUSTED BY THE RHYTHM. He never tires of gazing at the far horizon, the wide-open skies of the Bronx. When he gets up he becomes aware of the whole unexpected weight of his fatigue. He wipes his hands and mouth with the handkerchief and puts the apple core into an overflowing garbage can, making sure it won’t roll to the ground. All around Poe’s cottage there are very tall leafless trees, oaks, or perhaps maples. When Poe was alive they were cherry trees. He has to stuff his hands in his pockets and walk briskly to shake off the cold. As he nears the crossing of the Grand Concourse and Fordham Road again, he begins to come back to the present. The cottage was a time capsule. Now reality returns as a loud, teeming scramble of busy lives and haggling commerce. Vendors yelling over their merchandise, music pouring out of wide-open storefronts and from cars going by with the windows down. People buy and sell, people feed, people scrounge for shelter and sustenance in this hostile environment, improvising a portable version of the life they left behind. They play their music very loud. They open cheap markets that sell bright textiles, women’s veils, tight party dresses on wide-hipped, big-bosomed mannequins. They bring with them their hair salons for men and women specializing in African braids, extensions, and relaxers. Their fruit stands. Their food carts. Their street vendors yelling from the back of a van that has been turned into a shop counter, “fresh fish, octopus, shrimp, fresh fish, octopus.” An ice cream man goes by pushing a cart painted with the Ecuadorean flag, ringing a little bell. An indigenous woman with braids has placed a large pot of rice and beans in a supermarket cart. Puerto Rico Qué Rico. Another woman sells fried churros dusted with sugar, and a third sells candied peanuts from a pushcart with a tin funnel that sends out puffs of fragrant smoke smelling of burnt caramel. On every corner there’s a different Spanish accent. “Así soy yo, mi amor. Si no te gusta, esta es mi vida. ¿Qué otra cosa podemos hacer?” Voices and melodies change and blend, and so do smells, the scent of corn, beans, fried chicken, and roast pig. It is Fordham Road and it is also Africa, Santo Domingo, Southeast Asia, the beautiful face of an Indonesian woman framed by a veil. It is rural Mexico, Peru, Ecuador, the Andes. With quick, polite gestures he collects the ads and flyers that are offered at every step and that go into his overflowing pockets. He turns on the audio recorder so as not to miss any sounds. He takes photographs of advertising posters and jots down what he reads on shop signs. In the window of a bakery there are Barbie dolls in bell-shaped dresses that are birthday cakes. In a botanica there is a Christ on a cross made of seashells of all sizes that are painted white, and next to it a Black goddess or priestess in an Egyptian headdress holding in her open hands a gold snake with glass eyes.

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  QUICK CHEAP DIVORCE AND PAPERWORK ONE HOUR. Chicken, eggplant, pork, okra, chayote. Lula Seafood Fish Stew. Juan Peña Style Barber Shop. Juan Ángel Lezama El Coyote Pride of Oaxaca. Tina African Hair Braiding. Loans Empeños We Buy Gold Compramos Oro. Beauty Salon La Flaca. African Caribbean Market. Tacos Tortas Burritos Quesadillas Sopas Nachos Carnitas Huevos Rancheros Sopa de Marisco Chicken Sandwich Enchiladas Steak and Onions Mexican Soda 2 Liter Bottle. Perfection Hair Salon Straightening Highlights Hair Extensions. Banco Azteca Wire Transfers. La Perla International Latin Food Specialties and Seafood. Tripe Chicken Pork Fresh Goat. Specializing in Mexican Sodas. Send Money Anywhere in the World. Jesus Is the Path the Truth and Life. An Incredible Selection of Meats in One Place. Mango Tamarind Delicious Coconut Ice Cream. La Migra Los Magos del Norte La Banda Sinaloense with Sergio Lizarán The Prodigy Final Farewell Singing All His Hits DJ Cholo Jay.

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  YOU WILL HAVE A NEW LIFE. He begins to leave it all behind, to walk past it with his satchel and his sportsman’s or explorer’s cap, unmistakable from the back, anonymous Mr. Nobody, pausing here and there at the window of a botanica or a cell phone store that is blasting electronic Arabic music, a kind of thumping hip-hop blended with the floating chant of a muezzin. He switches sidewalks frequently, though mostly now he tries to stay in the waning sun. He slows down to take pleasure in the warm smell of corn tortillas or in the variety of hairstyles offered on a sign for a Nigerian barbershop. Fordham Road goes gently east, downhill, sustaining in its course the rhythm of his steps despite his great fatigue. No matter how far he walks, the city will always spread farther, without end, past the Bronx and the iron bridges, the swamps and the far, low-lying neighborhoods of Queens. He goes deeper into the crowd and at a certain moment he is suddenly lost from sight, in the blink of an eye, as abruptly as if he had gone down into the subway. Inside his coat pocket the voice recorder is still on. A police or a fire truck siren can be heard far away, and the steady rumble of the subway up above; then it all begins to fade, to grow distant and disappear, all except the stubborn rhythm of his steps.

  COME LIVE A FITNESS EXPERIENCE. I came to the city two months ago with a MacBook Air in my backpack and a suitcase full of notebooks—some blank, others already covered in writing—and with binders full of clippings and envelopes stuffed with flyers, and with pencil cases, erasers, pencil sharpeners. I brought a phone to take pictures of shop signs and to record conversations as I walked down the street. Now, as I prepare to go back, every notebook is filled with writing and there are yet more clippings in each binder. A cylindrical cardboard box that once held a fancy flask of cologne is now the little chest where I keep the pencil stubs I have used up. I don’t know if the task brought me here seeking its own completion or if it took advantage of this trip and co-opted it, imposing these two months of solitude and withdrawal just as it had earlier imposed on me the habit of writing in pencil and of filling every notebook from the very first to the very last page. The task began as an accidental distraction in my life and ended up taking it over entirely. I don’t know, either, if I came here under its influence or following a different impulse that remained initially concealed and has gradually come to light: the need to say goodbye. Consciousness reveals only a small part of what happens in the mind. Our will may be an illusion, and what is truly decisive may occur at depths known to us only through the equivocal evidence of dreams.

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  VENTURE INTO THE WORLD. You never know how many places you will have to go to, how many you will have to leave behind in order to appease the anxious urge to keep on looking for a new situation in life, an urge that will turn out to be like all the other ones you feel. Some extraordinary thing is waiting that you can’t miss, a film, a book, a piece of music, a new love, a new town. You read a review and you want to buy the book immediately; you feel oppressed by the quiet and comfort of your home one morning and are desperate to go out, not knowing where; a newspaper article and some color photographs of a city make you want to visit or to move there. It may not be so different from the urge that others feel for a new car, a cruise, a trip to a Caribbean resort, the urge that makes them stand in line all through a winter night so they can buy the newest cell phone.

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  UNEXPECTED DREAMS. This room, this desk by the window, has been my office for the past two months. I have looked through this window for who knows how many hours and days over the past eight years. I have seen the bare branches of the gingko tree outside gradually covered in leaves in April and I have seen them turn yellow in November, casting a faint golden glow as dusk began to fall a little earlier with each passing day. March and early April have been unusually cold this year and the leaves on the gingko have yet to sprout, just as the almond and the cherr
y trees along the river have yet to blossom. I will not be here when they finally emerge, fan-shaped leaves of a tender green fluttering in the breeze, a rush of sap rising from the roots, the chemical prodigy of photosynthesis.

  SEE ART EVERYWHERE. For several weeks, during the grayest days of February, a plastic bag was caught in a high branch of the gingko tree. One of those generic bags they give out in every store, always with the same inscription: THANKS FOR SHOPPING WITH US. There was an ominous air about it, like a tattered rag, a flag, a black pennant for the triumphant invasion of plastic trash. Nearly every tree in the neighborhood has one or several plastic bags caught in the branches, some intact and others torn to shreds. Some have been there for so long that they are faded, frayed, shaking in the wind like Tibetan prayer flags. This particular black bag was directly in my line of sight when I looked out the window as I worked. It hung limp and dismal when there was no wind. It shook and fluttered when the wind picked up, swelling and rising like a captive balloon, or lashed by drifts of snow and by those gusts of freezing rain that bite into the skin like needles and peck at the glass like furious birds. One night, the wind roared and whistled so violently that I woke up at dawn and didn’t manage to fall back asleep. When I looked out that morning the bag was gone.

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