To Walk Alone in the Crowd

by Antonio Munoz Molina

  THE WAIT IS OVER. I wanted to fill every page of every notebook. I covered them in penciled writing and with clippings that I pasted as contentedly as a child or a craftsman, taking pleasure in my eyes and hands, the sound of scissors slicing paper, the smell of glue, the concentration needed to cut with care around a sign or a silhouette. I have learned, at least, to leave a margin. I have filled my mornings with long and ceaseless walks and I have spent my afternoons at the desk by the window, in my movable office, which for a while was sedentary.

  * * *

  COME EXPERIENCE SOMETHING DIFFERENT. When I arrived two months ago I thought that in this time of solitude and withdrawal I would be able to finish the task. Now I am about to leave and realize it is not done, because the journey back, both in anticipation and once it is accomplished, will be a necessary part of it. I pack my bags but the task continues. I put away the notebooks in the suitcase, then the binders, the pencil cases, the cardboard boxes, until there is little room for anything else, a few books, a few items of clothing perhaps that will mostly serve as cushioning. The bulkiest book is a wonderful biography of Baudelaire that I have read compulsively of late, a book that keeps me up at night, unable to sleep, and that I will finish tonight during the foreseeably sleepless flight to Madrid. I have put away the splendid case of twenty-four colored pencils and also the inkwell, which I never use since I can only write in pencil. Imagination comes to a halt, words run dry when I try to write with a pen.

  * * *

  YOUR BODY WAS MADE TO MOVE. Every object turned into a clock, an urgent stopwatch in these last few days, an hourglass telling time by a visible diminution of its size or of its contents, a shampoo-clock in the shower, a bodywash clock, marking the end of this period of seclusion and of my life in the city. The jar of honey from which I took a spoonful each morning for my coffee is more than half empty. The medicine bottle rings hollower each time I grab it from the cabinet. There are no more calendar pages with numbered boxes to cross off. But it makes no difference, since every object is a clock. The pencil I wrote with during these past few weeks is so short now that I can barely hold it between my fingers. The first thing I’ve done each morning upon waking, sometimes also in the middle of the night, has been to look at the red numbers on the nightstand clock. In the kitchen there are other clocks, one on the oven, one on the microwave. In the living room there is one on the DVD player and one on the cable box. On my phone there is a clock and a stopwatch, on my wrist there is a watch with numbers and small moving hands. There is another stopwatch in my pulse and in my eyeballs when I rub them with fatigue, and another one is beating like a solemn pendulum inside my rib cage. The light, lingering a little longer each day in the window and on the building opposite, has been a sundial. The shade, rising gradually from the sidewalk to the upper floors and finally extinguishing the last remaining glow on a western cornice, has been a shadow dial. There is a water clock of words spilling onto the paper from my hand and from the tip of the pencil as I write. When I walked alone for many hours through the city my legs were the ticking hands of a clock measuring time in a two-step rhythm. In the afternoon and in the middle of the night, the metal sounds coming from the heating pipes and radiators were another clock embedded in the fabric of things. My breathing was a clock, the air that fills my lungs and is released shortly after with a faint whistle before rushing back in. Writing was another way to measure time. The particles of graphite coming off the pencil were like grains of sand.

  WHAT’S YOUR RITUAL. In the past I have left New York with a sense of rupture, as if something that had never managed to become complete was being interrupted once again. Today I am surprised by a neutral mood that is only altered by a slight dizziness. The fatigue of going back and forth so many times suddenly weighs on me. Perhaps there is a temporal instinct inside me, a clock that measures long durations, saying I will not return. I feel no sadness at this premonition, or almost none; I feel relief. As far back as I can recall, no period of my life, or lives, has been without a fracture—between places, loyalties, desires. I did not plan it this way, but I realize now without sorrow that it is all coming to an end.

  * * *

  MY OFFICE ALWAYS TRAVELS WITH ME. I worked so intensely over the past two months that I now feel the need to rest, to return. I purged and cleansed myself internally by spending so much time alone devoted to a single task. This place has been my office and my workshop, my cell, my monastery. I do not know how many miles I walked or how many pages I wrote by hand, in pencil, in these past few months. The laptop can tell the exact number of words that accrued as I made a fair copy of the writing, turning it into something less haphazard. Each blank page appeared before me like a smooth slab of concrete on a city sidewalk, like a storefront, a window display. I clipped, gathered, and recorded so many fragments of conversation, so many newspaper headlines and advertising phrases that I now have a great need for silence. Too many voices—heard, read, imagined, or invented—give rise in combination with intense solitude to an incipient sense of delirium. You have to close and shut down everything before you leave, and then do nothing. Close the laptop, and the suitcase, and the final notebook; close and lock the door to the apartment, your abolished cloister, just as the taxi driver will finally close the trunk to the car.

  * * *

  DRIVE TOWARD THE UNEXPECTED. It is a Sunday afternoon, so there is little traffic on the way to the airport. The loud bustle of the street vendors continues in Harlem. From the window of the taxi you can see the city fall away, recede, catch a glimpse of it across the East River through metal beams and suspension cables. There is a soft, objective clarity to the April afternoon. The edges and the outlines of things are unblurred by distance. Even the worry of having neglected or forgotten some crucial thing at the last moment is not very pronounced. Fatigue acts as a sedative. There is a great relief in being done, in being able to consign a part of life to the archive of concluded things; as if one had finished a task, or were about to. Beneath it all, like a perpetual undercurrent, is the notion that the future is no longer boundless. There is no more time for life experiments, as there still was during the past few years. Ten or fifteen years ago my life was still bordering on youth. Ten or fifteen years ahead lies that strange and inconceivable thing, old age. There will be no new city to indulge in the illusion of beginning a new life.

  CURIOSITY WILL BE YOUR COMPANION. Baudelaire travels to Brussels for a few days in 1864 and is trapped in a puzzling paralysis, a strange, self-imposed exile that will be the last episode of his conscious life. During the twenty years prior, though he always stayed in Paris, he changed his address constantly, moving from place to place without forethought or rest, writing poems or essays on art for the newspapers, fleeing from creditors who never ceased to pursue him, sending his mother awful letters filled with desperate pleas and blackmail. In total he lived in thirty different places in Paris, once moving six times in a single month. One night, at eleven o’ clock, he gets to Brussels by train and goes directly from the station to a nearby hotel, the Hôtel du Grand Miroir. He will stay there indefinitely, even though he finds it a loathsome place. But then Brussels, too, strikes him as a ghastly city, and Belgium as a revolting country, yet he will do nothing to distance himself from an atmosphere that he finds stifling and a place where he can find no way to make a living. The owner of the hotel torments him with her demands and her acrimony when he is late with the bill. He makes constant plans to go back to Paris and always cancels them at the last minute. In long, convulsive letters to his mother he promises to visit, but then defers the trip for just a day, a day or two, a week, and in the end he always finds an excuse, sickness, poverty, work. In Brussels, where the weather is almost always foul, he doesn’t even enjoy walking. Brussels is a town of muddy streets and hostile strangers where it is impossible to take a pleasant walk.

  * * *

  DISCOVERING NEW THINGS IS WHAT KEEPS YOU ALIVE. Sick, forced to stay in one place, confined to his dark room in t
he hotel of the Great Mirror, Baudelaire writes terrible things against Belgium, the Belgians, Belgian women—who seem vulgar and fat to him—and against the ugly fashions of Brussels, and the king, and his subjects’ bovine deference. His health worsens every day. He is afraid to go out because he suffers from vertigo and fainting spells. He fears that he will lose his mind. One day he writes with clearheaded terror that he felt the flutter of the wing of imbecility brush against him ever so slightly. He plans books that he will never write. Perhaps they seem more real to him when he describes them in detail in his letters to his mother. He wants to write a book of Confessions, like Rousseau, and a long, ferocious pamphlet against Belgium. He wants to finish the volume of his poems in prose, which changes fluidly in form and even in title as it moves through various incarnations, and which, in a conjectural and approximate way, may already exist, scattered across the pages of the various papers and defunct journals that published the poems. Sometimes this future work is called Paris Spleen, sometimes not. Baudelaire will never get to hold it in his hands. On the large, densely printed pages of mass newspapers devoted to business, politics, and advertising, it will be hard for anyone to notice those brief, barbed pieces of poetry, with their delirious visions of the city and its monstrous or eccentric denizens. Paris, that underwater realm of strolling opium eaters.

  * * *

  A WHOLE WORLD OF PLEASURES. As a young man he was frugal, drinking almost nothing except the light wines of Burgundy. Now he drinks cognac and laudanum. Opium dissolved in alcohol relieves some of his ailments while causing and magnifying others. Now, in Brussels, in his darkened hotel room, Baudelaire has become a true disciple of De Quincey, a full companion in the brotherhood of addicts. In the course of two years he travels to Paris only once, shortening his stay so that a few days later he is already back in the needless horror of his life in Brussels. On March 31 he suffers a stroke that paralyzes half his body. Friends carry him back to the hotel. A few days later he develops aphasia. When Baudelaire finally boards a train for Paris, leaving Brussels and the Hôtel du Grand Miroir, he is a ghost of himself. His smooth and closely shaven face has never been so pale. With his white hair, his unwrinkled features, and his withered body, he is a zombie staring fixedly ahead in complete silence. The longer the silence lasts, the more piercing his gaze becomes. Sometimes, barely opening his lips, he utters a repeated sound, a kind of croak that his friends finally decipher: “Crecoeur, Crecoeur.” He is not even able to pronounce the words Sacré-Coeur.

  * * *

  I WANT TO CRY CALLING OUT MY NAME. He had once written: “Sometimes I am overcome by a desire to sleep for an infinite time.” Baudelaire spends the last year of his life in a room in a sanatorium, by a window overlooking a garden. On the wall there is a painting by his friend Manet and a reproduction of one of Goya’s portraits of the Duchess of Alba. Only his eyes and the set of his mouth remain unchanged: his lips are pressed together in the same attitude of concealed stubbornness, arrogance, disdain; his eyes are filled with an impenetrable solitude. Those eyes, that mouth, the outsize forehead and the weak chin, that face that seems so strangely naked can be seen in all of Nadar’s photographs and especially in the portrait by Fantin-Latour. Years earlier he had translated a short story by Poe in which a man, hypnotized during his final agony, continues to heed commands and to reply in a hideous muttering voice from the other side of death. What took place in Baudelaire’s mind and in his imagination during that last year of his life cannot be known—what dreams he had, what lasting visions in the grip of opium, what poems and what imprecations must have briefly taken shape in him and vanished instantly. When his friends came to visit he would stare at them fixedly, as much of a stranger among them as in Fantin-Latour’s group portrait. Occasionally he would grip someone’s hand and stare at him without blinking. He would open his mouth and seem about to speak, but in the end the words never formed inside his throat or on his lips. Sometimes he managed to say a few simple things, “Oui, Monsieur,” “Bonjour, Monsieur,” mimicking an acquiescence that had never been part of his character. Sometimes the photographer Nadar came by and took him to a dinner with friends. Baudelaire remained motionless, docile, impassive, sitting at a corner of the table amid loud laughter, conversation, bottles of wine and clouds of cigar smoke. He became his own wax statue: pale, smooth-skinned, close-shaven, with an old man’s scrawny neck rising from an open collar that was now too wide, his eyes as fixed as if they were made of glass.

  * * *

  I DON’T KNOW WHAT IT IS OR HOW YOU SAY IT. One day, when Nadar came looking for him at the sanatorium, he silently refused to leave. He didn’t move his head, just pressed his lips together and looked away. Soon after, he stopped getting out of bed. He lay under the sheets that came up to his waxen face. His mouth stayed firmly shut. No words came out of it anymore, and barely any sounds. His eyes stayed fixed on the ceiling. When people visited he turned his face toward them, seemed to heed whatever trivial words of comfort they would say, then turn his face back to the wall. He began to develop sores and ulcers on his back from lying in bed so much. He squirmed in pain and discomfort but never let out a single moan or complaint. When he died, no one realized it in time to close his eyes. They stayed open even in the coffin.

  YOU CAN’T IMAGINE WHAT AWAITS YOU. The metal detector goes off as I walk through. But I placed my watch, wallet, cell phone, and keys in the tray. I go through again and the same thing happens. A security guard tells me to stand with my feet apart and raise my arms. The wand beeps when it touches my hips. Then I realize that I was carrying a pencil sharpener in my pocket. The guard holds it between a gloved finger and thumb, inspecting it while keeping an eye on me as well. She says with scornful magnanimity that I can gather the metal objects from the tray, studying the tiny pencil sharpener as if it might contain an explosive device. Just as she drops it in a plastic bag, a different alarm goes off somewhere else. A guard stationed at the X-ray scanner lifts a backpack and asks who the owner is. They have stopped the belt. Another guard is setting a suitcase upright. The backpack and suitcase are mine. When I raise my hand to let them know, the guard who took away the pencil sharpener looks at me no longer disapprovingly but with open contempt. Standing in my socks, holding my belt in one hand and hitching up my pants with the other while I try not to lose sight of my shoes, cell phone, and jacket in their respective plastic trays, I must face the guard who set my backpack aside and the one who lifts my suitcase from the conveyor belt, surprised to find it weigh so much despite its small size.

  * * *

  BECOME A BMW LEGEND. Luggage is beginning to back up, as is the line of tired and impatient travelers. Some look at me accusingly once they realize that I am the reason for the holdup. Yet another guard, stockier and even more serious than the rest, tells me to step aside and go to a separate table. He asks me in a procedural tone if the suitcase and backpack belong to me and if anyone, whether an acquaintance or a stranger, helped me pack them or was in possession of them at any time. I say no, trying to put on my belt and slip my feet into my shoes without bending down while maintaining eye contact with the guard. He asks if I am carrying any liquids or metal objects and I say no and then immediately regret it. He unzips a pocket on the backpack and extracts a pair of scissors and the tiny metal barrel of a pencil sharpener, the kind that stores the shavings in a little compartment. The guard opens the lid inquisitively and the shavings fall and flutter to the ground around him. He looks at me as if expecting an explanation. I stay silent, continuing to slide the belt blindly around my waist, which is quite hard.

  * * *

  FIND EVERYTHING YOU NEED. The guard closes the pencil sharpener and sets it carefully aside. Then he proceeds to the scissors. They are short, blunt scissors with plastic handles, almost like the kind children would use at day care. The guard slides a gloved finger along the edge of the blade and gives me a look that feels somewhat accusing. “Sharp metal objects are forbidden,” he says. I feel a little relieved bec
ause I have managed to buckle my belt and put on my shoes, though the laces are still untied. I try to pluck up my courage and say that I was allowed to carry the scissors through other security checkpoints before, but I keep quiet. Now he sets the backpack aside, though he does not return it, and he tells me to open the suitcase. He asks again if I am carrying liquids or metal objects and I say no, but he no longer believes anything I say. He feels under the folded clothes and slips his hand into a pocket, taking out the inkwell and giving it a shake before my eyes. He unscrews the lid and sniffs the ink before screwing it back on. Holding the inkwell in a gloved hand, he looks at me sternly and asks me what it is. “An inkwell,” I say. I make an effort to speak clearly, to pronounce the English word correctly: inkwell.

  * * *

  BE THE FIRST TO OWN IT. He sets it down next to the scissors and the pencil sharpener as carefully as if he were handling incriminating evidence. He proceeds slowly on purpose, to make me nervous, to let me know that he is in charge, and can make me miss my flight if he so wishes. Luckily I came to the airport quite early. One by one he empties all the notebooks from the suitcase. He opens them as if looking for something hidden between the pages. Clippings, tickets, and loose notes fall out, which are of interest, though for the moment he chooses to disregard all of them except one: a heavily underlined newspaper article about the Islamist attack in Nice. He looks at the various papers and he looks at me. He opens a flat cardboard box that used to hold a cell phone charger, and out come dozens of flyers for erotic services and African fortune-tellers that I collected in Madrid. He looks at the flyers and he looks at me. He puts them back in the box. Now he asks for my passport, my boarding pass, and a document showing proof of residence or stating the motive of my stay in the United States. I show him my green card, to no effect. I show him an ID card from the university where I worked for a time. As a document it is partly false, since I no longer work there, but it expires in two years so it is not entirely improper to produce it. A minor and harmless deception. “Are there any other metal objects in your suitcase?”