Faces in the Crowd

by Valeria Luiselli

  *

  I can only write during the day if the baby is having a nap beside me. She’s learned to grab anything that comes near her and clings to my right hand to sleep. I write for a while with the left one. The capitals are really difficult. Two or three times, I make an attempt to get my hand back, gently sliding it from between the bars of her fingers, and moving it to the keyboard to type another line. She wakes up and cries, looks at me resentfully. I give her back my hand and she loves me again.

  *

  So I could work at the new writing desk, I took one of the office chairs to my apartment. Nobody used it, no one was likely to notice, it had been left forgotten in the bathroom for months, and its only function was to hold a roll of toilet paper. It was made of pale wood: slender and fragile. I painted it blue in case White came back some day and recognized it. I put it in front of the new writing desk and wrote a letter to my sister Laura. It began: “I live opposite a park where the children are children and play baseball.”

  *

  The boy plays hide-and-seek in this house full of nooks and crannies. It’s a different version of the game. He hides and my husband and I have to seek. We have to bring the baby with us and when we finally find him under the bed or in a closet, he shouts, “Found!” and the baby has to start laughing. If the baby doesn’t laugh, we have to begin all over again.

  *

  One Friday afternoon, while I was in the Columbia University library looking through books to take to the office on Monday, I came across a letter from the Mexican poet Gilberto Owen to his friend and fellow writer Xavier Villaurrutia: “I live at 63 Morningside Ave. There’s a plant pot in the right-hand window that looks like a lamp. It’s got oval-shaped green flames . . .” The letter came from his collected works, Obras, and in it Owen listed the objects in a room he was renting in Harlem: writing desk, pictures, plant, magazines, a piano. The address he gave Villaurrutia caught my eye. The building had to be only a few blocks from the library, and very close to my apartment. I didn’t even finish reading the letter. I left the other books I’d selected in a pile, checked out Obras, and left.

  After three in the afternoon that neighborhood used to smell of salt: the tears and sweat of the black and Latino children coming out of school, scabs on their knees, spittle and snot on the sleeves of their sweaters. One girl, broad as she was long, was working on a drawing propped up against the trunk of a tree in Morningside Park. In one hand she had a chicken leg, which she bit, or rather sucked, from time to time, and between the thumb and index finger of her other hand she held the green wax crayon with which she was completing the drawing. A boy came up behind her and whacked the back of her legs with his schoolbag—the two plump knees buckled—then grabbed her crayon. She recovered herself, lunged at him, and screamed, You madafaka, then beat his face with the chicken leg until he fell to the ground.

  I walked to Owen’s building. I’d often seen it on my way to the subway without knowing he’d lived there. It was a red stone building, similar to all the others in the block, with large windows overlooking the park. When I stopped in front of it, an elderly man was entering the building so I slipped in after him. I went up to the first floor, the second, and continued upward. The man stopped on the third floor, turned to smile at me—Afternoon, ma’am; Afternoon, sir—and went into an apartment. I carried on up to the fourth and fifth floors, until my breath and the stairs ran out, went through a door leading to the roof terrace, and closed it behind me. I lit a cigarette in a sunny corner and waited for something to happen.

  As the world didn’t register any changes, I started reading the book I’d just taken out of the library, waiting for some propitious signal. Nothing happened; I went on reading and smoking until it began to get dark. After a few hours, I’d finished all the letters in the volume, the entire collection of poetry in Perseo vencido, and the last of my tobacco, so I decided to go home. I stood up, looking for somewhere to get rid of my handful of cigarette ends. In a corner of the terrace there was a plant in a pot and I went across to bury them in it. I sat down on a stack of newspapers someone had tied up with string, as if for recycling, and dug a hole. Then I realized that the plant pot, like the one Owen described to Villaurrutia, resembled a lamp. The plant in the pot—perhaps a small tree—was withered. It couldn’t possibly be the same one Owen referred to in his letter, but it was, I thought, some kind of signal, the signal I’d been waiting for. I was overtaken by that same excitement babies display when they confirm their existence in a mirror.

  It wasn’t my habit to take things that didn’t belong to me. Just sometimes, some things. Sometimes, quite a lot of things. But when I saw that small, dead tree on Owen’s roof, it seemed to me that I had to take it home, care for it, at least for the rest of the winter. Later, perhaps when spring came around again, I could return it to the roof. It was getting darker. I made my way to the door, carrying the pot, ready to go home. But the door had no handle on the outside and I could find no way to open it.

  I once read in a book by Saul Bellow that the difference between being alive and being dead is just a matter of viewpoint: the living look from the center outward, the dead from the periphery to some sort of center. Perhaps I froze, perhaps I died of hypothermia. In any case, it was the first night I had to spend with Gilberto Owen’s ghost. If I believed in turning points, which I don’t, I’d say that I began that night to live as if inhabited by another possible life that wasn’t mine, but one which, simply by the use of imagination, I could give myself up to completely. I started looking inward from the outside, from someplace to nowhere. And I still do, even now, when my husband is sleeping, and the baby and the boy are asleep, and I could also be asleep, but am not, because sometimes I feel that my bed is not a bed, these hands are not my hands. I buttoned my coat up to the neck, arranged the sun-soaked papers on the concrete, forming a mat of news that protected me a little. Before sinking my hands into my deep pockets, I put the book into my backpack and used it as a pillow. I placed the plant pot at my feet and lay face up on the ground.

  At daybreak, I went to the edge of the roof and sat there, hoping that someone would soon come out of the building. My hands were blue, my lips chapped. Around nine in the morning—the sun was beginning to warm my back—a girl came out with a bicycle. I shouted down to her. The girl turned her head and waved. It was the same fat child with the green wax crayon I’d seen the day before. I begged, promised candy, crayons, and chicken legs in reward for her help. She left her bicycle propped up against the front steps and went back into the building. She took ages to come up, prolonging my agony. I imagined she would go to fetch her mother, her father, her grandparents, all the residents of the building would come up to lynch me and I would have to explain that—What would I say?—that I’d got lost, was sweeping the roof, that I was Mexican, a translator—Sorry, sir; Sorry, ma’am—or that perhaps there was nothing strange about my being up there on their roof on a Saturday morning.

  The rooftop door, a thin metal sheet, began to shake slightly and then burst open. The girl had come up alone. She stood there, gazing blankly at me, and asked:

  Are you the ghost that lives up here?

  No, I just came up to water my plant early this morning and got locked out.

  But are you a ghost?

  No, ghosts don’t exist. I’m Mexican.

  We’re from the Dominican Republic. My mom doesn’t let us come up here because of the ghost.

  She’s right.

  What are you going to do with that dead tree?

  I’m going to take it to the tree doctor.

  She turned and I followed her, carrying the pot. We went slowly downstairs. Outside, a bunch of fat kids were waiting for her. I put the pot down for a moment and we shook hands, rather awkwardly on my part.

  What’s your name? I asked.

  Dolores Preciado, but they call me Do.

  I picked up the pot again. The other children watched me pass, carrying the dead tree. They laughed, shamelessly
made fun of me: the natural cruelty of children becomes more intense when they are fat. I crossed to the other side of the park and Do shouted to me:

  Tree doctors, they don’t exist either!

  When I got to my apartment, I put the plant pot next to the writing desk. Before taking a bath, before making coffee, before having a pee, I sat down to write a feverish report on Gilberto Owen’s Sindbad el varado. The Chinese student was drinking soup at his worktable.

  *

  Some evenings, my husband and I work together in the living room, spurred on by the whisky, the tobacco, and the promise of late-night sex. He says that we only work at night so we can smoke and drink in peace. We’ll get to the bed, after making a few additions to our respective documents, as excited as two strangers who have met for the first time and don’t tell each other anything or demand explanations. The tabula rasa of the pages and plans, the anonymity the multiple voices of the writing offer me, the freedom his empty spaces give to him.

  *

  In that apartment, there was nothing. There weren’t even ghosts. There were heaps of half-alive plants and a dead tree.

  *

  In this house we often run out of water. The boy says that it’s the ghost who uses up the reserves in the cistern. He says it’s a ghost who died of thirst and that’s why it drinks all the water in the house.

  *

  Pajarote invited me to dinner to celebrate his birthday. We went to a French place. I knew that, for the gringos, French means elegant, so I was well dressed and on my best behavior. I didn’t order much food, onion soup and clams; he had duck. I babbled on about the plant I’d taken from the roof of Owen’s old building, about the girl called Do who’d saved me, about Owen’s possible lives in 1920s Harlem, about the new writing desk and its chair, about Moby and the Japanese robes and how sad I’d felt making love on a mattress, next to a printing press, with a man with a big nose. Pajarote looked at me in silence.

  You’ve got a bit of burnt onion on your teeth, he said when I finally paused.

  We finished eating and were brought liqueurs in tiny glasses. When we’d polished off the drinks, I put the glasses in my bag. They were very pretty glasses. Pajarote looked at me quizzically. It’s my birthday, he said, please don’t steal today. I’ll buy you the glasses. And he called the waiter over and bought them for me.

  *

  The baby laughs out loud for the first time. She makes a noise like a whale and her voice immediately breaks into four abrupt, light, resonant gusts of laughter.

  *

  White wasn’t impressed by my first report on Owen. He left a note stuck on the screen of my computer: “Bring me something that really can be translated into English and return the wooden chair you stole from the bathroom, then we’ll talk about what we might be able to do with your Owen. Yours, W.”

  Unlike the majority of gringo publishers, White was not monolingual. And in contrast to the majority of gringos who speak Spanish and have spent some time in Latin America and think that gives them a kind of international third-world experience that confers on them the intellectual and moral qualifications for—I don’t quite know what—White really did understand the fucked-up mechanisms of Latin American literary history. Faced with his reluctance, the most natural thing for me to do would have been to take note and leave Owen alone.

  *

  The boy to his father:

  Do octopuses have little mobydicks?

  I’m working.

  And shrimps? And sea sponges?

  The boy’s father thinks for a moment and then:

  Shrimps are little-dicks.

  *

  When the doctor told me my second pregnancy was “high risk,” I stopped just about everything: smoking, drinking, walking, writing, breathing. I was afraid the baby wouldn’t be fully developed: the spine incomplete, crooked; the nervous system disconnected; I was afraid of mental retardation, delayed learning, blindness, sudden infant death syndrome. I’m not religious, but one day when I was in the street I had a panic attack—my sister Laura explained later that that was what it was—and I had to stop in a church. I went in to pray. That is, I went in to ask for something. I prayed for the unformed baby, for the love of its father and brother, for my fear. Something in the silence convinced me that there was a heart in my belly, a heart with an aorta, full of blood; a sponge, a beating organ.

  *

  A dense, porous novel. Like a baby’s heart.

  *

  In the copy of Owen’s Obras I borrowed from the library there was a section with photographs, placed more or less at random among the pages of Novela como nube. One of the photos caught my eye. Two-thirds of Owen’s profile occupied almost the whole space. The wide forehead and a strand of wavy hair. A thin nose, practically a beak. The eyebrow shading an almost nonexistent eyelid, the soft, sleepy eye. Scarcely a trace of upper lip. All the rest, black. An almost faceless man. I carefully tore out the photo and placed it on one of the branches of the dead tree, next to my writing desk—anyway, I had no intention of returning the book to the library.

  *

  My husband and I watch a film with the children. It’s called Raining Hamburgers. It’s a ridiculous story. The baby, who is the most sensible of the four, falls asleep after a few minutes; the boy stays awake only a little longer. We carry them to their crib and bed respectively, and watch them sleep. In some way, we love each other in them, through them. Perhaps more through them than through ourselves—as if since their arrival the empty space that brought us together and separated us had been filled with something, something that was neither him nor me, that now seemed essential to our self-justification. We kiss their foreheads, close the door of their room. We lie on our bed and finish watching the film, unable to sleep.

  *

  I sometimes slept in an armchair on the tenth floor of my building because there was too little air and too much noise in my apartment. There was always someone or something else there: Moby taking a bath, Pajarote breakfasting on toast, Dakota with the bucket; there was the echo of White’s sad story, the menace of the live plants, a dead tree and a photo of the ghost of Gilberto Owen—all those things stopped me sleeping.

  *

  One afternoon, I took White to Saint Nick’s, a bar not far from the office, to try to convince him of Owen’s potential. We’d been talking about St. John of the Cross the whole day, discussing the Spiritual Canticle, because White was going to bring out a bilingual edition with an English translation by the well-known American poet Joshua Zvorsky. The original manuscript was incomplete, so we had to restore the missing sections. We stayed there well into the evening, working on some of the Bride’s stanzas, and ordering more whisky.

  My Beloved is the mountains,

  The solitary wooded valleys,

  The strange isles,

  The sonorous rivers,

  The whistling of amorous gales;

  Do you prefer “sonorous rivers” or “roaring torrents”? he asked.

  Neither.

  How about the valleys: “wooded valleys” or “bosky valleys”?

  Bosky rhymes with Zvorsky and whisky. Well, maybe not whisky. And what are “amorous gales”? I think that’s meaningless, White.

  Breezes. Gales should be breezes.

  The tranquil night

  At the approaches of the dawn,

  The silent music,

  The murmuring solitude,

  The supper that revives, and enkindles love.

  “Enkindles love” is really shitty, White.

  “Rekindles.” It’s “rekindles.”Yeah, that’s good.

  Every so often, we left our drinks on the bar and went outside to smoke. White’s enthusiasm was contagious. Perhaps mine could be too. So, during one of those pauses, I tried telling him a lie:

  Did you know Gilberto Owen used to come to this very bar?

  No, I don’t think so. This place opened in the thirties or forties and according to your report Owen was in New York earlier than tha
t.

  All right, he didn’t come here, but did you know he was a friend of Federico García Lorca?

  St. John, let’s stick to St. John. How would you translate that beautiful bit of alliteration: “Un no sé qué que quedan balbuciendo”?

  Not sure: “A nonsensical I know not what”? “A something I know not what”?

  Someone must have spiked my drink while we were outside smoking. When we returned to the bar, I knocked back my whisky and suddenly could hardly understand a word White was saying. I looked on in silence as he talked about William Carlos Williams, Zvorsky, and Pound. He quoted lines from memory and laughed uncontrollably. I laughed with him, unsure what it was all about. A blue halo began to pulsate around his head. I reached out my hand, trying to touch it.

  What’s wrong with you? he asked.

  The halo! You’re St. John, White.

  I’m going to take a leak, then we’re off, he said.

  The waiter behind the bar seemed very tall, stretched out. He had long teeth, a devilish smile. People were laughing. White was taking ages. I closed my eyes for a moment. When I opened them, I saw William Carlos Williams beside me, wearing enormous glasses, inspecting the vagina of a miniature woman lying on a napkin on the bar; there was the poet Zvorsky sitting at a table, conducting an imaginary orchestra; Ezra Pound hanging in a cage at the corner of the counter and García Lorca tossing him peanuts, which he accepted gleefully. Let’s go, I heard White say behind me. I insisted it was my call, but my wallet had been stolen. He paid and we started for the door. Before going out, I saw Owen, looking terribly sad, eating peanut debris underneath Ezra Pound’s cage.

  It was a long way to the hospital, the solitary bosky valleys. I looked at my thighs clad in the gray tights, trying not to lose my sense of reality. We walked along the frosty, bosky, Zvorsky sidewalk. All the while, White rattled on about the tree outside his house. He wanted to cut it down. My legs were the color of sidewalks in winter: they were like an extension of the sidewalk. I told White about the tree in the plant pot I’d stolen from Owen’s roof. I looked at my legs to avoid seeing anything else. I was a gray woman, a sidewalk-woman. St. John, St. Owen, let’s stick to St. John. The tights, the sidewalk: my Beloved is the mountains. I didn’t know any prayers, but reciting St. John’s lines in my head kept me close to something, some tangible center, while White’s careworn face transmuted into umpteen possible faces, each with its unsettling blue halo.