To Walk Alone in the Crowd

by Antonio Munoz Molina

  * * *

  NOW YOU CAN BE THREE INCHES TALLER WITHOUT ANYONE KNOWING. This is the shortened, interrupted night of return. I open my eyes and look at the phone in total darkness. It says it’s two o’clock in the morning. It seems like the trip and the night will last a good while longer. Then suddenly the lights come on, breakfast is hastily served to a bunch of crammed, befuddled passengers like animals in an industrial cattle farm. The window shades go up, a flood of unexpected sunlight fills the cabin as the airplane tips sideways for landing.

  FEEL LIFE THROUGH YOUR EARS. I walk very quickly through the vast empty spaces of the terminal, faster still down a moving ramp. Panoramic windows show a landscape of arid hills bathed in a kind of desert light. I overtake the other passengers, who are dazed with sleep or lost in an airport that is so unpleasant the first time you are there. I walk with instinctive assurance, knowing that I am in my country, my world, Europe. I am not afraid of the policemen or the immigration officers. I won’t see anywhere the ostentation of American flags or the official portrait of the yellow-haired megalomaniac. I barely have to stop at passport control. The sign that says EUROPEAN UNION CITIZENS always fills me with joy. I am able to go even faster because I didn’t check a bag and am not forced to endure, as many times before, a grim wait at early dawn by a baggage belt that will not start. Lack of sleep, and being back, fill me with a light and floating sense of unmoored clarity, as in a dream. Polished floors and gliding ramps assist my progress. Elevators and moving stairways spare me any effort, like obliging porters in the time of the Orient Express. Automatic doors swiftly fly apart when I approach. As soon as you step outside an airport terminal you notice a country’s smell: the arrivals hall at JFK smells of fast food, fried grease, hot pizza dough. The first waft of early morning air in Madrid carries a Spanish smell of tobacco and coffee with milk.

  * * *

  LEARN TO READ YOUR BODY. At the taxi stand I barely have to wait. As soon as the driver opens the trunk, I place my bag inside, heavy with all the notebooks. Everything is on a smaller scale. People are not as tall, or muscular, or obese. Cars are smaller and drive faster over an immaculate highway. Everything is quick and simple. The city lies in a lazy calm that makes it seem like Sunday morning. “Everyone’s left town for Easter,” says the taxi driver in a strong Spanish accent that I always find a little startling when I return from a trip.

  TRY ON A NEW IDENTITY. I used to arrive at this same time of day during those first years when I didn’t yet live permanently in Madrid. I would spend the whole night on the train and see the sun rise as the taxi drove through the city. If I came by plane, on the first morning flight, I got as little sleep the night before as if I had taken the train, from eagerness and impatience, or worrying that the alarm would not go off or that I would fail to hear it. The moment of arrival and delight was also the moment the countdown to departure began. But during those first hours, that first day, time was an untouched treasure, a bright, safe home, the one she had arranged in every detail with all her care, with all her instinct for beauty and light. It was our shared house, even if I was only there for part of the year. We furnished it together and we split the rent in affirmation of our life together despite the distance or the time we had to be apart. I would set the suitcase on the floor and open the front door with my key, and as I stepped inside I would be met by morning sunlight and a faint perfume of cleanliness that was already like taking in a deep breath of the nearness of her body. Places change over the years, pictures in an album. But the feeling of arrival and of warmth remains the same: the purity of space, the sense that the air itself is tinged by her presence. Sometimes I arrived after a tiring journey or a bad hotel night, discouraged by some problem in my work, some setback, oppressed by some commitment, or by fear or regret. Sometimes I was tired, sleepless, hungry, filled with desire, in need of shelter and reprieve and absolution. The particulars fade, though they are meaningful and do not deserve to be lost. Early on I would write down each time we met or had sex. I should remember how she wore her hair on a certain morning, what perfume she had on, what we said to each other when we met, assuming there was any time to speak; what the house was like, what the view was from the balcony or from the window. Everything is reduced to a few decisive strokes, like a tale whose essence is preserved through very different retellings: the trip, the early morning in Madrid, the house when I arrived, and how I gazed and breathed its calm, and then the passionate encounter, the darkened room, the day outside, the gifts I’d brought with me: a pair of earrings, a cigarette lighter, a tin boat in bright colors, a terracotta horse from China, the silk robe, the one with the red flowers.

  * * *

  REVITALIZE YOUR SKIN. Now the taxi comes to a stop. Two months ago I took a different taxi at this same time of day and in the opposite direction. Everything is the same and everything has changed. It was a colder morning, but the light was just as clear as now. The first time Louis Armstrong went back to his house in Queens after a tour he was so moved that he couldn’t get out of the cab. He and his wife had bought the house not long before. For the first time in his life, past the age of fifty, he was about to go into a house that belonged to him. He looked out the window at the fence, the small yard, the brick facade, and could not bring himself to step out of the car. The taxi driver grabs my suitcase from the trunk and is surprised to find it weighs so much despite it being a carry-on. There is a sequence of continuous motions, as at the airport earlier; a fluid, everyday choreography. The doorman helps me carry the suitcase and backpack up the front steps, then he holds open the elevator door and closes it behind me. My heart is beating very fast.

  * * *

  YOU STILL HAVE TIME. It took me a few seconds to find the key. I couldn’t remember where I put it in the backpack two months earlier. I opened the door and was met by the clear light of early morning. The sun has just come up over the rooftops across the street. The house still smells like new, the light that comes in through the windows makes the varnished floor gleam. Draw the house you want to live in. Draw a blueprint of your desire. Each object, each book on the shelves by the entrance has been carefully chosen by her. Even the curved Japanese plate for the keys. I take it all in, rapidly and slowly, as if time were standing still. To see the apartment and breathe in the air is already like seeing her, like entering into her life, witnessing beforehand her simple gestures and the way she moves and speaks; like sensing with complete immediacy the peculiar quality of her soul and the cast of her intelligence, seeing her and at the same time seeing everything else through her eyes. Lorca writes in a letter: “Draw a blueprint of your desire, and live there always under a rule of beauty.”

  * * *

  TELL US WHAT YOU’RE LOOKING FOR AND WE’LL FIND IT. I looked up and saw in her eyes the same surprise as mine at this unannounced encounter. But if I happened to look up just then, in that particular direction, it was because I was sharply and unconsciously warned by my sense of hearing and perhaps of smell. “I didn’t know you’d be here so soon.” She stands there in the silk robe with red flowers, sleepy and surprised, her hair a little tousled. The robe has stayed intact through all these years, from the very beginning, the first encounter, across so many cities, countries, different houses and hotels, departures and returns. The colors have not faded, the fabric has not frayed or lost its sheen. It has only grown more supple, more inviting, closer to her skin which has burnished it with its ceaseless touch; warm silk and flushed skin sliding on each other over the years without wilting or fading; silk falling to her feet like a spreading circle of petals when she undoes the belt; when the robe, ebbing from her shoulders, slides with ease along her body to the floor, spilling as she rises, as she puts her hands around my neck and brings her mouth to mine.

  * * *

  AN IDEAL PLACE TO HIDE. I am all ears, in the silent bedroom where the warmth of bodies is preserved after the night is over, in the early Sunday calm. I want to hear her newfound voice in my ear and my own voice wh
ispering into hers. I am all ears, all eyes to look at her, all hands and fingertips, a body clasped to hers. There is a strange sterility to a body that doesn’t touch another. Trace the outline of her face with your fingers, trace her chin, her nose and mouth, the shape of her smile as it begins to form across her lips. I am suddenly aware, just as they vanish, of all the anxiety and fatigue of work and travel, the loneliness of those long walks, like an unpleasant and incessant noise that only becomes perceptible when it stops, so that only as silence spreads like a miracle do we notice it is gone. This is my house, my island. Nothing will happen to me here. We are each other’s shelter. Memory remembers poorly, or imprecisely, obscurely, without sensory qualities. I had not remembered her face properly, her voice, even less the things we cannot see or hear, the particular feel of her skin, the smell of her hair, the taste of her mouth. When she whispers my name, I am no longer nobody. When I say hers, I am no longer invoking a ghost or a dream.

  SINCE AT ANY GIVEN TIME AND PLACE. It was the first summer of my adult life. For the first time I had a job, a paycheck, a place of my own. It was a rental apartment in a bland, recently built and nearly uninhabited development on the outskirts of Granada. The only bus that went there had to drive through empty fields and past the very last of the city’s working-class neighborhoods, the Polígono de Cartuja. Part of the area had paved roads and streetlights that turned on at night, but no buildings. There was a single, dreary store. It sold everything and it languished in the general desolation. The few pieces of furniture in my apartment were as blank and featureless as the many identical buildings you could see through the windows. The development had been christened with one of those auspicious names so typical of the time, Nueva Granada Park. The word Granada was almost as unreal as the word Park. Some of the passageways between buildings resembled strange streets without any front doors. With my first paycheck I made a down payment on a rather large tape deck that sported the novelty of having detachable speakers. Mostly I listened to tapes that my friends made for me. One of these friends, a great music lover, had introduced me to Monteverdi’s Il ritorno d’Ulisse in patria. I would listen by turns to Monteverdi, Charles Mingus, Lou Reed (Rock ’n’ Roll Animal), Patti Smith (Horses), and a small-time band from Madrid called Leño. I also paid the first installment on the Summa Artis encyclopedia, which I had read avidly as a student at the university library. Each evening after dinner I would read a chapter. During those first few months of my new working life I read the entire volume on prehistoric art and the one on ancient Egypt. For some reason I got bogged down forever in Mesopotamia.

  * * *

  WHERE YOUR MOST SECRET FANTASIES. After fourteen months of military service in the Basque country at the bloodiest height of terrorism, it was not an entirely simple matter to adapt back to reality. Also, to the fact that I was no longer a student, that I had to wake up early each morning and go to an office. I was grateful to have a job, and at the same time I tried to adapt my expectations to the constraints of real life. Earning just enough to live was not discouraging, since I’d never had much before. What did worry me was that the job was precarious; I had been given a one-year contract that was not renewable. Also, that my vocation seemed to be going nowhere.

  * * *

  WITH A NEWFOUND EASE. I wrote short stories set in the countryside and partly inspired by Juan Rulfo, or stories in which the mundane and the fantastic came together in the manner of Julio Cortázar. By the end of my military service I had an unfinished draft of a novel that I rarely thought about anymore, though I kept it in a couple of binders stuffed with typed pages and rough handwritten drafts. Now and then I submitted stories to provincial writing contests that did not seem hard to win, but where I never even made the short list: the City of San Sebastián Prize, the City of Motril, etc. I wrote a few lyrics for a friend who sang flamenco, and for a novice rock band.

  * * *

  YOU WANTED TO COME BACK. That summer I spent the afternoons lying in bed in my rented apartment, listening to tapes or reading, so absorbed in books and so inwardly discouraged by my love of literature that I barely wrote anything. I just read. I read crime novels. I read Baudelaire and Thomas De Quincey: Paris Spleen, Artificial Paradises, Confessions of an English Opium-Eater. I must have learned about De Quincey from Borges. I started reading Baudelaire because Francisco Umbral called himself an admirer and a disciple. Umbral’s daily column in El País, which I read faithfully, was titled “Madrid Spleen.”

  * * *

  EVERYTHING FITS IN A POCKETBOOK. Those three books cast such a spell on me that I even stopped reading crime novels. They were like nothing I had seen before. They had great narrative pull, but they were not novels and didn’t even seem like works of fiction. They were not books of verse, either, but there was a poetic force in them as ravishing as in Lorca’s Poeta en Nueva York. There was a testimonial quality to Baudelaire and De Quincey and at the same time a visionary fierceness, as if they were wounded, torn apart, swaying constantly between sharp-edged clarity and delirium. You could take these books with you and read them in spurts, on the bus that took me into town each morning or while having breakfast at a café, even in the office on August mornings when things were slow. As with a book of poems, each reading made them richer and more surprising, disclosing new treasures. And you could read them out of order, as if the chapters were poems falling into new arrangements as random as they were decisive, creating unexpected sequences of inner echoes and connections.

  * * *

  CHOOSE YOUR OWN ADVENTURE. Despite their power, none of the three books awakened in me the spirit of imitation that had been with me since adolescence. I would read a story by Borges and immediately find myself writing something similar, a kind of parody, from the plot to the choice and placement of adjectives. If I read Cortázar, I wrote Cortázar stories. If I read Rulfo, I wrote Rulfo stories. If I read Chandler, I wanted to create a lonely, sarcastic detective with an office on the Gran Vía de Granada. It’s a world that has grown distant, the summer of 1981.

  * * *

  BEHIND EVERY DOOR. It was different with Baudelaire and De Quincey. They both affected me deeply even though there was no relation between their writing and my life. But their voices were so unique that they did not allow themselves to be imitated. It was a music too original and deep for anyone to extract a simple melody that might be copied. A true influence is much more than a particular aesthetic teaching or the emulation of a literary form or style; it is a sudden awakening into the world’s immediate reality, discovering anew and as if from its deepest sources the worth of words and images, the categorical purity of the original names of things. I had been living in Granada for seven years when one day that summer, steeped in Baudelaire and De Quincey, I saw the city for the first time. I saw what stood before my eyes and I saw myself from the outside. In my pocket there was an envelope with a month’s pay. It was cash; not much of it, but still comforting in its concreteness. I had spent the morning in the office, my boss was gone and it was August, so almost no one came. I had eaten at a cheap local place where I was already a regular. I crossed the Gran Vía and went down the Zacatín, shady and cool on that relatively mild afternoon. My head was filled with De Quincey’s vexed peregrinations down Oxford Street and Baudelaire’s through Paris; with their ecstatic glimpses of urban beauty and noise, their raptures, their visions of opium and hunger. When I came to the Plaza Bib-Rambla, it was as if I had landed in a strange seaside town, exotic and unknown, a dazzling souk somewhere on the Silk Road. The same square I’d crossed so many times before seemed aflame with beauty. The lime trees, the flocks of birds, the flower stands, the sound of water in the fountain, the hulking tower of the cathedral rising high over the rooftops, the bronze angel with his sword above the chapel of the Tabernacle, the clamor of voices blending with the noise of water and the song of birds, young women wearing miniskirts again now that it was summer, the shining pulp of figs that Gypsy women dunked in buckets of cold water before they p
eeled and sliced them, the big bright billboard for Winston cigarettes with Rita Hayworth in the black dress she wore for Gilda.