Faces in the Crowd

by Valeria Luiselli

  *

  The boy comes back from school and shows me his knee:

  Look at my cut.

  How did that happen?

  I was running around in the playground and a house fell on me.

  A hose?

  No, a house.

  *

  This house has a new fridge, a new piece of furniture next to the bed, new plants in terracotta pots. My husband wakes up at midnight from a nightmare. He starts to tell me about it while I dream of something else, but I listen from the beginning, as if I’d never fallen asleep, as if I’d been waiting for the start of that conversation the whole night. He says we’re living in a house that grows. New rooms appear, new things, the roof gets higher. The children are there, but always in another room. The boy is in danger and we can’t find the baby. At one side of our bed there’s a piece of furniture that unfolds and produces music. Inside he finds a tree, a dead tree but deeply rooted into the bottom of a box. In the logic of his dream, it’s the tree that produces the sense of doom in the house that grows; he tries to uproot it; the branches reach out and scratch his testicles. My husband cries. I hug him and then get up to go to the children’s room. I give the boy a kiss and check the crib to see if the baby is still breathing. She’s breathing. But I have no air.

  *

  I liked cemeteries, parks, the roof terraces of buildings, but most of all cemeteries. In a way, I was living in a perpetual state of communion with the dead. But not in a sordid sense. In contrast, the people around me were sordid. Moby was. Dakota too, sometimes. The dead and I, no. I had read Quevedo and internalized, like a prayer, perhaps too literally, the idea of living in conversation with the dead. I often visited a small graveyard a few blocks from my apartment, because I could read and think there without anyone or anything disturbing me.

  *

  I go back to writing the novel whenever I’m not busy with the children. I know I need to generate a structure full of holes so that I can always find a place for myself on the page, inhabit it; I have to remember never to put in more than is necessary, never overlay, never furnish or adorn. Open doors, windows. Raise walls and demolish them.

  *

  When she stayed in my apartment, Dakota did voice exercises with the bucket I used for mopping the floor. She would put her whole head inside and produce really piercing notes, like a badly tuned violin, like a moribund bird, like an old door. Sometimes, when I came back from a few days away, I used to find Dakota lying on the living room floor with the blue bucket beside her. Resting my back, she’d explain.

  Why do you always take my bucket out of the bathroom?

  So your neighbors can’t hear me.

  I don’t think they can.

  So I can hear myself.

  Dakota never answered a question directly.

  *

  My husband draws rapidly; he makes a lot of noise. His pencil scrapes on the paper, he sharpens it every five minutes with the electric pencil sharpener, starts a new piece of paper, walks around his drawing table. He constructs spaces and, as they appear on the sheet, names them: bathroom, spiral staircase, terrace, attic. He stops, sits down. Then he goes to his computer and reproduces the lines using a program that gradually makes the spaces three-dimensional. I can’t make spaces from nothing. I can’t invent. I only manage to emulate my ghosts, write the way they used to speak, not make noise, narrate our phantasmagoria.

  *

  Pajarote didn’t talk much. He lived in New Brunswick, a horrible town in New Jersey, and drove to Manhattan in his old car every Wednesday because he was taking a course at NYU on Thursday mornings. His real name was Abelardo, but everyone called him Pajarote—literally, big bird—after the Sesame Street character, whom he resembled in physical but certainly not mental stature. He was a philosophy student, and took life philosophically. The only complaint I ever heard him make was about the way non-Spanish speakers were always trying to put either a hard j or a wimpish h in the middle of his name. He spent every Wednesday night at my place. I liked sleeping there when he was around. He used to wrap a long, hairless arm around me. But we never made love. It was an unspoken pact that protected our friendship. Every Thursday, he’d get up early and buy bread and Coke in the supermarket on the corner. We would eat breakfast together without saying a word. One day I broke the silence and asked him what his course was about.

  It’s to do with vagueness, he said, chewing a piece of bread.

  Just that? Vagueness?

  Well, vagueness and fuzzy temporal boundaries.

  I thought it was a joke, I teased him a bit, but he said: It’s cutting-edge analytical philosophy. His classes that month would cover puzzles about temporary coincidence, where the example was a cat, now with a tail, now without a tail. Pajarote continued chewing as he was going on about cats and vagueness, so that small archipelagos of spittle and crumbs accumulated in the corners of his mouth.

  Is it the same cat? he asked, after a long explanation that I’d stopped listening to. I nodded, and then said no, or that in fact I didn’t know. Perhaps it’s like Hemingway said: One cat just leads to another. Pajarote didn’t laugh. He never laughed. Or perhaps he did, but never at my jokes. He was more intelligent than me, more serious than me. He was very tall and had long, hairless arms.

  *

  That apartment gradually filled up with plants, silent presences that from time to time reminded me that the world required care and perhaps even affection. There were practically never any flowers. There were leaves, yes: some green and many yellow. I’d see a handful of withered leaves on the floor and feel guilty; I picked them up, put water in all the pots, but then forgot about them for another couple of weeks.

  There’s nothing so ill advised as attributing a metonymic value to inanimate things. If you think the condition of a plant in a pot is a reflection of the condition of your soul, or worse, that of a loved one, you’ll be condemned to disillusion or perpetual paranoia.

  *

  That’s what White used to say. He didn’t have keys to my apartment. But he went there twice. On both occasions, after a couple of drinks, he told me the same story. There was a tree outside his house in which he was constantly seeing his dead wife. He didn’t actually see her, but he knew she was there. Like fear in a nightmare, like a sudden sadness that fills long afternoons. Every night, when he got home, he said good-night to her, to the tree, to her in the tree. He didn’t speak. He just thought about her as he passed the tree and grazed it with his fingertips. It was a way of saying goodbye, again, each time.

  One night he forgot. He went into his apartment, brushed his teeth, and got into bed. Then he realized that he’d forgotten his wife. He was stricken with guilt and went outside again. He didn’t put on his shoes. He hugged the tree and cried until his socks, feet, and knees were soaked by the snow covering the street. When he went back inside, he didn’t take his socks off to sleep.

  *

  The boy asks:

  What’s your book about, Mama?

  It’s a ghost story.

  Is it frightening?

  No, but it’s a bit sad.

  Why? Because the ghosts are dead?

  No, they’re not dead.

  Then they’re not very ghosty.

  No, they’re not ghosts.

  *

  There are different versions of the story. The version I liked was the one White told me when we’d been working late in the office and had to wait over an hour for a train. Standing on the platform, listening for the shuddering in the interior of things produced by the imminent arrival of a moving train, he told me that one day, in that very station, the poet Ezra Pound had seen his friend Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, who had been killed in a trench in Neuville-Saint-Vaast a few months before. Pound was waiting on the platform, leaning against a pillar, when the train finally pulled in. The doors of the carriage opened and he saw the face of his friend appear among the people. In a few seconds, the carriage filled with other faces, and Brzeska’s was buried in
the crowd. Shocked, Pound didn’t move for several moments, until first his knees and then his entire body gave way. Leaning his whole weight against the pillar, he slid down until he felt the concrete caress of the ground on his ass. He took out a notebook and began to write. That same night, in a diner in the south of the city, he completed a poem of over three hundred lines. The next day he reread it and thought it too long. He went back every day to the same station, the same pillar, to lop, cut, mutilate the poem. It had to be exactly as brief as his dead friend’s appearance, exactly as startling. After a month of work, removing everything extraneous, only two poignant lines survived, comparing faces in the crowd to petals on a dark bough.

  *

  Dakota and I met in the toilet of a bar called Café Moto. She was making up her face with a sponge when I went to the sink to wash my hands. I never wash my hands in public toilets, but the woman touching up the future face of Dakota with a sponge seemed to me unsettling and I wanted a closer look. So I washed my hands.

  *

  The publishing house was at 555 Edgecombe Avenue but I spent half the week in libraries around the city, looking for books by Latin American writers worth translating or reissuing. White was sure that, following Bolaño’s success in the American market some five years before, there would be another Latin American boom. A paid passenger on the runaway train of his enthusiasm, I brought him a backpack full of books every Monday, and spent my working hours writing detailed reports on every one of them. Inés Arredondo, Josefina Vicens, Carlos Díaz Dufoo Jr., Sergio Pitol; nothing caught his interest.

  Weren’t you a friend of Bolaño? White shouted from his desk (I worked at a small desk beside his, so the shouting was unnecessary but it made him feel like a real editor). He took a long drag on his cigarette and continued in the same mode: Haven’t you got any letters from him or an interview or something we could publish? he shouted. No, White, I never met him. Shame. Did you hear that, Minni? We have the honor of working with the only Latin American woman who wasn’t a friend of Bolaño. Who’s he, chief? asked Minni, who never knew anything about anything. He’s the most popular dead Chilean writer ever. His name gets dropped more often than coins into a wishing well.

  *

  I walked very little in that city where everyone goes for walks. I went from my apartment to the office, from the office to some library. And, of course, to the cemetery a few blocks from my house. One day, in her eternal eagerness to bring about a change in me, my sister Laura sent me an e-mail from Philadelphia. It said simply: 115 West 95th Street. Laura lived in Philadelphia with her wife, Enea. They still live there. They’re active people, pleased with themselves. Enea is Argentinian and teaches at Princeton. Laura and Enea belong to all sorts of groups and organizations; they’re academics; they’re left-wing; they’re vegetarians. This year they’re going to climb Kilimanjaro.

  I left my apartment, bundled up in my gray tights and the red coat with enormous pockets. I coiled a scarf around my neck and walked directly to the address Laura had sent me.

  The location existed, but it was the number of an imaginary house. Instead of doors, windows, and steps, there was a brick wall on which someone had painted a window frame, a vase of flowers, a cat snoozing on the sill, a woman looking out into the street. Too late, I realized it was one of Laura’s sophisticated jokes. A trompe l’oeil that functioned as a trope for my lifestyle in that city. I don’t know what Laura would say now that my only walks are from the kitchen to the living room, from the upstairs bathroom to the children’s bedroom. But Laura knows nothing of this, nor will she be told.

  On the way back to my apartment, I stopped at a rummage sale outside a church. I bought a 1950s anthology of modern American and British poetry for one dollar and a small bookcase with four shelves for ten. I used to like walking along the streets carrying furniture. It’s something I don’t do anymore. But when I did, I felt like a person with a purpose. Back in my apartment, I put the bookcase in the center of the only wall in the living room without windows and placed my new book on the top shelf. From time to time I’d open the book, choose one of the poems, and copy it out. When I left the house to go to the office, I took the sheet of paper with me to memorize the poem. William Carlos Williams, Joshua Zvorsky, Emily Dickinson, and Charles Olson. I had a theory; I’m not sure if it was my own but it worked for me. Public spaces, such as streets and subway stations, became inhabitable as I assigned them some value and imprinted an experience on them. If I recited a snatch of Paterson every time I walked along a certain avenue, eventually that avenue would sound like William Carlos Williams. The entrance to the subway at 116th Street was Emily Dickinson’s:

  Presentiment is that long shadow on the lawn

  Indicative that suns go down;

  The notice to the startled grass

  That darkness is about to pass.

  *

  Milk, diaper, vomiting and regurgitation, cough, snot, and abundant dribble. The cycles now are short, repetitive, and imperative. It’s impossible to try to write. The baby looks at me from her high chair: sometimes with resentment, sometimes with admiration. Maybe with love, if we are indeed able to love at that age. She produces sounds that will have a hard time adapting themselves to Spanish, when she learns to speak it. Closed vowels, guttural opinions. She speaks a bit like the characters in a Lars von Trier movie.

  *

  I write: I met Moby on the subway. And though that is the truth, it’s not really credible, because normal people, like Moby and I, never meet on the subway. Instead, I could write: I met Moby on a park bench. A park bench is any park, any bench. And that, perhaps, is a good thing. Perhaps it’s right that words contain nothing, or almost nothing. That their content is, at the very least, variable. Typically, the bench would be green and made of wood. So, not to be predictable, I should write: Moby was reading a newspaper on one of the white, slightly battered concrete benches in Morningside Park. A bent, submissive gardener was trimming the hedge with a pair of clippers. It was 10 a.m. and the park was almost empty, like the word park and the word bench. Maybe I ought to explain why I was crossing the park from east to west at ten in the morning. I’d lie: I was going to mass. I was going to the cemetery, or the supermarket, which perhaps are more or less the same thing. Or better: I’d spent the night sleeping on one of those benches.

  But what’s the use of all that if the truth is: I met Moby on the subway. I was reading some book whose title I can’t now remember—A orillas del Hudson by Martín Luis Guzmán, perhaps—and he was next to me, turning the pages of a fascinating book with stills from films by Jonas Mekas. I asked him where he’d found the book and he told me he’d produced it himself. He handed me a card for a printer, his printer, in a town outside the city.

  *

  It was very easy to disappear. Very easy to put on a red coat, switch off all the lights, go somewhere else, not go back to sleep anywhere. No one was waiting for me in any bed. They are now.

  Now I know that when I go into the children’s room, the baby will catch my smell and shiver in her crib, because some secret place in her body is teaching her to demand her part of what belongs to us both, the threads that sustain and separate us.

  Then, when I go into my own room, my husband will also demand his portion of me and I will give myself up to the indefinite, sudden, serene pleasure of his touch.

  *

  Moby had a big nineteenth-century house in a town that was soulless, but pleasant in its puritan way, not far from the city. The house didn’t have electricity or running water. Moby lived there, lived alone. He heated up cans of soup on a kerosene stove and slept on a mattress on the floor. His bedside book was the biography of Santayana. He got up at five every day, made a cup of green tea, and worked at the printing press until after midday. He lived that way of his own volition, not because there were no other options. There are two types of people: those who just live and those who design their lives. Moby was in the latter category. You had to take off your shoes b
efore entering his house and put on Japanese slippers. There was something affected in that life, in the over-aestheticization of that reality, designed as if to be viewed through a lens. I definitely did not fit into Moby’s filmic life. That’s why I accepted the green tea, why I let Moby undress me, wrap me in a Japanese robe, and then undress me again in order to run his bony hands, his narrow nose, his thin, almost invisible lips over my body. That’s why I slept naked on that mattress next to the printing press, and hurried away the following morning. I was in the habit of carrying around two sets of keys to my apartment—one in my bag and the other in the pocket of my red coat in case I lost one—and, before going, I left a set for Moby, on top of a note with my address.

  *

  The baby’s asleep. The boy, my husband, and I sit on the stairs, facing the front door. He asks his father:

  Papa, what’s a wasp?

  It’s a dangerous bee.

  And a sperm whale?

  It’s a Moby-Dick.

  *

  One night I acquired a writing desk for my empty apartment. I didn’t buy it. But I didn’t steal it either. I suppose I should say that it was found for me. I was in a smoker’s bar. I’d spent the evening rolling cigarettes, browsing through a terribly boring anthology of Mexican poets—friends of Octavio Paz and, perhaps for that reason alone, translated into English—while waiting for Dakota to finish her last set in a nearby bar. When my mind momentarily wandered from my reading, I had the sensation that someone was watching me from outside. Through the window, I saw Dakota on the sidewalk, sitting on something, straightening her stockings. She waved and beckoned me over. I paid. Dakota was sitting on an antique writing desk, her dainty red high-heeled shoes beside her.

  I found you a writing desk, she said, so you can write your stuff.

  And how am I going to get it home?

  We’ll carry it. See, I’ve taken my heels off.

  First we dragged it, then we tried carrying it by the corners, one at either end. The task seemed impossible: the apartment was over thirty blocks away. Finally, we got underneath and rested it on our heads and the palms of our hands. Dakota sang the rest of the way home. I did the backing vocals. We got blisters.