Faces in the Crowd

by Valeria Luiselli

  Will they put me in jail if someone sees me cutting down the tree? White was asking.

  I think so, White.

  The sonorous rivers: sidewalks, steps, and frost. The whistling of amorous breezes; the rhythm of my footsteps in the snow. In the logic of the sick person, of the idiot, the mad, everything is about to fall into place.

  Would you help me cut it down?

  What?

  The tree.

  But nothing ever falls into place. At the hospital, they thought I’d taken the drugs of my own free will. To calm me down, they gave me Valium: the tranquil night. Perhaps I died again, like I died that day on Owen’s roof. I slept: at the approaches of the dawn. I don’t know if it was hours or minutes: the silent music, the murmuring solitude. When I woke up I asked White for his cell phone and rang my sister to tell her what had happened. She explained: You had a panic attack. I said: No, I was drugged and robbed, and a no sé qué que quedan balbuciendo.

  White stayed at my bedside until I stabilized. Around midday, we left the hospital and he walked me to the door of my building. Still a little dopey from the Valium and very grateful to White, I promised to help him fell the tree. He promised to read the notes I’d made about Owen more carefully. Just do me a bit more research so we can write a biographical sketch, he said, giving me a hug. He also told me I could keep the chair, which, anyhow, no one used. I entered the building, greeted the doorman, went up to my apartment, and brushed my teeth. Or perhaps I didn’t brush my teeth.

  *

  We’ve all come down with a virus. The first to get it was the boy. Then the baby. Now my husband and I, but worse. The boy says we’ve got a virus each, so altogether, that’s four viri.

  *

  In that country people complained and filed reports. They called the police. Dakota came to see me a few days after the incident in the bar. She asked:

  Have you reported it?

  No. What for?

  She made the call, dramatizing the events, putting on a foreign accent. Last night some men drugged and robbed me, she said. They used my credit card and cleaned out my account. Dakota was very good when she was dramatizing. A few hours later, two uniformed cops turned up at my apartment. They took coffee in the dining room and notes in a notebook. The detective will call you in a few days, they said before going. I liked the idea of a detective calling me one day. The younger of the two handed me a piece of paper with his full name, phone number, and a heart with a smiley face in the center. I propped it up on the branches of the tree, next to my writing desk. Dakota and I got a little tipsy and watched a Jim Jarmusch movie.

  *

  My husband likes Stanley Kubrick and zombie movies, all zombie movies. The four of us have been in bed with a bug, alternating Kubrick and zombie movies. I can’t understand how he can like the two things at the same time. I confront him: It’s as if you like men and women at the same time. The boy contributes: It’s as if you liked Corn Pops with milk.

  *

  The detective rang my house a few days later. It was Sunday. Detective Matias speaking, he said. The following day, I went to see him in his office in a federal building opposite St. Mary’s Primary School. In the reception area, some wooden chairs and a cork board with that week’s notices: photos of missing people, emergency numbers, lists of possible offences, a typed announcement about a Catholic priest who’d been beaten about the head with a baseball bat wielded by the members of a gang. Again and again: facial and cranial injuries.

  The waiting room smelled of piss. A secretary directed me to a room in which, presumably, interrogations were carried out. A squat little man with an Andean face and a Bronx accent came in. He was the caricature of a detective: hat, raincoat, and a toothpick. Detective Matias said:

  Cup of coffee?

  *

  I don’t like zombie films. Why did you write that I like zombie films?

  Because.

  Please, cut the zombies.

  *

  One night, when we had to finish reading some manuscripts, White invited me to have pizza at his place. We worked late and, around four in the morning, White fell asleep with his head resting on the table. I catnapped in an armchair until dawn, reading a book called That, by Joshua Zvorsky, which I had found on the top of one of the many towers of books White had piled around the house. I listened to the sound of his placid snoring across the table. White had an affinity for Zvorsky. And there I was, sitting at the break of day, reading his poetry. I didn’t understand much, but it occurred to me that this could be my means of convincing White about the importance of Gilberto Owen. That’s the way literary recognition works, at least to a certain degree. It’s all a matter of rumor, a rumor that multiplies like a virus until it becomes a collective affinity.

  *

  Over the next few months, I returned to the Columbia University library several times in search of books, newspapers, or archives, whatever might cast a little light on the period Owen spent in New York. Nothing. But I took out Zvorsky’s That and read it with great care.

  On White’s recommendation, I began to keep a record of anything that bore any relationship to Owen. I made notes on yellow Post-its and, when I got back to my apartment, propped them on the branches of the dead tree, so as not to forget, so as to return some day and organize them. The idea was that when the tree was bursting with notes, they’d begin to fall from their own weight. I would gather them up as they fell and write the story of Owen’s life in that same order. The first one was:

  Note: The NY subway was constructed in 1904, the year of Owen’s birth.

  I still have these notes. When we moved to this house, I took them out of the envelope I’d put them in years before, when I left that city, and stuck them on the wall opposite my writing desk. The boy is learning to read and spends hours by the wall trying to find some meaning in those Post-its. He doesn’t ask me questions. My husband, on the other hand, wants to know everything.

  *

  Dakota used to sing in three or four different bars and, when she needed extra cash, she sang in the subway. One night I went to see her in a station on the 1 line. I took my wooden chair and placed it against the platform wall, facing the rails. Dakota and her boyfriend had installed themselves in the middle of the passage. He was playing the guitar beside her and looking at her the way ventriloquists do their dummies, the way parents look at their children. The trains went by to one side of them. It was obvious that he despised and respected her at the same time. The trains stopped in front of me. He adored her and was afraid of her. He played well that night, and she sang as I had never heard her before. But none of the hundreds of people who alighted from the trains stopped to listen. Dakota’s public persona was a mixture of Vincent Gallo’s languid elegance and Kimya Dawson’s rakish ease. She had a sturdy build and moved with the grace of a cabbage, but the timbre of her voice carried along the platform and pierced my head with the blunt violence of sorrows that run deep. A train stopped. Behind Dakota I thought I saw Owen’s face among the many other faces of the subway. It was only for a second. But I was sure he had seen me too.

  *

  Note (Owen to Celestino Gorostiza): “New York has to be seen from the viewpoint of the subway. The flat horizontal perspective vanishes in there. A bulky landscape begins, with the double depth, or what they call the fourth dimension, of time.”

  *

  Dakota liked my dead tree. And I liked her liking it.

  It keeps me company and we talk about lots of things, she once said.

  And what does it say to you?

  It doesn’t say anything, it’s dead.

  She watered it while I was away on a work trip. Spring had arrived and flowers were blooming everywhere. The narcissi are always first, Dakota explained, that way they do some kind of poetic justice to their namesake’s eagerness to be seen. But the tree wasn’t budding. When I got back from my trip, Dakota had made me fish and spring greens. We drank a bottle of wine. She told me she wanted to leave her
boyfriend, and asked if she could live with me for a while, until she found a place of her own.

  Why are you leaving him?

  I’m not sure.

  Dakota had beautiful features. She liked to say she had a ravaged face—she’d read Marguerite Duras in her early twenties and had got the idea that beauty was a French kind of thing. And perhaps that was true. Dakota looked a little like Anaïs Nin and had her hair cut short like Jean Seberg in À bout de souffle.

  *

  Moby wasn’t interested in the tree holding Owen’s future story. He used to hang his gloves on it when he came to the apartment, as if it were a hat stand.

  *

  I never unearthed anything important or revealing during my library searches, but I lied to White. I told him that, in the small, disorganized library of Columbia University’s Casa Hispánica, I had found an original, badly typed and barely legible, in which were a series of annotated translations of poems by Owen. The translations were almost certainly by Zvorsky, I said: They’re signed JZ&GO. It was the most unlikely of all possible lies about Owen, and White never believed it, but he decided to go along with me. I promised to bring him my own literal transcriptions of the text. I was hanging my hopes on the idea that, by making Owen sound like Zvorsky, I could convince White to publish him.

  *

  Dakota moved in with me. She turned up with a grass-green suitcase in one hand and a new bucket in the other. When I didn’t spend the night elsewhere, we both slept in my bed, though Dakota almost always got back very late from work. She would get into bed naked and put an arm around my equally bare waist. She had soft, heavy breasts; small nipples. She used to say she had philosophical nipples.

  *

  My husband has started reading some of these pages again. Did you use to sleep with women? he asks.

  *

  If you really want to get under a person’s skin, make an accusation about their moral hygiene. That’s what Salvatore used to say. He was an elderly biologist from Naples who lived on the tenth floor of my building. Salvatore and I met in the elevator. He had a tangle of white hair on his head, a hooked nose, enormous nostrils edged with crusts of snot. We were both going to the basement, where the washing machines and the trash cans were located. I was carrying a bag of dirty laundry; he his trash. He wasn’t carrying trash, he had junk in a gray suitcase. Stuff, he said when I asked him what he had in there. Standing by the trash cans, he took out his things, separated them into small piles, and slowly deposited them in the different containers. Standing by one of the machines, taking longer than usual to carry out my modest hygiene ritual, I watched him out of the corner of my eye. The last thing he took out was an old record player. I went over and asked if it worked. Yes, it did. He let me take it back with me. I’ll give you some records later, he said. He never kept his promise. But one day he invited me to dinner on the tenth floor.

  *

  But have you ever slept with a woman? my husband asks again. No, never, I reply. I wouldn’t know how.

  *

  Note: Owen used to weigh himself every day before getting on the subway. There was a weighing machine in the 116th Street station that confirmed his belief that he was disintegrating: 126 pounds, 125 pounds. He never knew how many kilos he lost a week.

  *

  Before we moved to this house, my husband, the boy, and I lived in a tiny, dark, ground-floor flat. The only place with any natural light was the bathroom, where we had an old washing machine next to the bathtub, and a small cupboard full of medicines, jars of cream we never used, and sometimes coffee cups, and dirty socks that had lost their pair. The day we did the pregnancy test my husband sat on the washing machine while I peed. The bathroom was our adult corner and those were our places, the toilet seat and the washing machine: there we made decisions, there we quarreled so the boy wouldn’t hear. I bungled the first test and he had to go and buy another. While he was out, I put all the clothes I could find scattered around the apartment on to wash. I added the tea towels, our sheets, and a teddy bear. The boy, who was at that time still the little boy, was watching a cartoon in the living room. I kissed his hair and closed myself in the bathroom again. When my husband came back, he sat on the machine and I peed three drops of pee. This time I didn’t mess anything up. I lowered the toilet lid and put the test on it. I sat on the edge of the bathtub and waited, resting my head on my husband’s legs, which were rocking gently with the damp, heavy, uterine, circular purr of the washing machine.

  You’re going to have a baby sister or brother, we announced to the little boy later that evening. He went on watching his cartoon.

  I’d prefer a baby rabbit.

  *

  Salvatore gave me spaghetti for dinner. His apartment on the tenth floor of the building was full of books, cups, filing cabinets, useless things. They cried out for someone to impose a sense of narrative order. There was a bookcase crammed with LPs, but no longer anything to listen to them on. Salvatore pulled some out while he was cooking dinner. This one’s a gem, he said, Roberto Murolo’s early songs. I studied the track list, side A and side B: I didn’t know any of them. You’ve got to hear this one, it’s Neapolitan, too. And we’ll have to listen to this one together some day. The small mountain of records went on growing—I piled them on the dining table. When the meal was ready, Salvatore put them back in their places. While we were eating, in what was perhaps a petty form of revenge, I talked to Salvatore about Latin American authors he hadn’t read.

  *

  We’re having sweet tamales for dinner. During the meal we first talk about the Hiroshima bombing, because the boy wants to know what an atomic bomb is, and then about the singer from Joy Division, whose name we can’t remember. My husband embarks on a monologue about how he was one of the first people in the entire Spanish-speaking world to discover that band. We all nod and listen in silence. After a while, the boy interrupts him:

  Can I say something too?

  Yes.

  I want to tell you both that I didn’t see the end of Raining Hamburgers because I fell asleep.

  *

  The men I slept with used to fall asleep immediately after having sex, while I suffered insuperable sleeplessness, especially if the person had been able to give me pleasure. In that other city, in that apartment, I simply got out of bed and sat at my writing desk. I used to study Owen’s portrait, which looked back at me like an apocryphal fruit from the autumn of yellow Post-its accumulating on the branches of the dead tree.

  Owen had a distant, gloomy, spiritual face, like that of a religious martyr; high cheekbones, pointed chin, eyes disproportionately small. The body, languid, dispirited, submissive. Traces of Indian ancestry and an aristocratic criollo demeanor: none of the parts added up to the whole. I once read somewhere that personality is a continuous sequence of successful gestures. But the opposite was true of the man who appeared in the portrait: the fissures and discontinuities were obvious. Examining it closely, it was even easy to imagine the places where he’d attempted to cover a certain fragility with pieces of other personalities, firmer, more confident than his own.

  *

  My husband asks if it’s true that I can’t sleep after sex. I say:

  Sometimes.

  And what do you do when I fall asleep?

  I hold you, listen to your breathing.

  And then? he insists.

  Then nothing, then I go to sleep.

  *

  During my second pregnancy, all I did was sleep. The contractions woke me up in the thirty-ninth week. My husband was reading beside me. I took his hand and placed it on the dome of my belly. Can you feel it? I asked. Is it kicking? No, it’s coming. My first labor had to be induced and I ended up having a cesarean because I wasn’t feeling anything, no contractions. This time, the sensation started in my lower back. An icy heat. Then, beginning in my sides, my skin raised itself up and tensed. A geological rather than biological phenomenon: a tremor, a slight arching, my entire belly rose up, like an emergi
ng landmass, breaking through the surface of the sea. And the pain, a pain like a glint of light, the gleam of a comet, which leaves a trail, and fades away as incomprehensibly as it returns.

  *

  Note: Owen was born in El Rosario, Sinaloa. But that’s not important. He was born on February 4, 1904. Or perhaps May 13.

  *

  When I can’t sleep, I go into my children’s room and sit in the rocking chair. I listen to their slow breathing filling the whole room. The baby was also born on a fourth of February. The boy, on a thirteenth of May. Both were born on a Sunday.

  *

  I told Salvatore about the forgery. He had never heard of Gilberto Owen, but listened carefully to my rambling explanation. Owen had lived in Manhattan from 1928 through to 1930, at the height of the Harlem Renaissance and the beginning of the Great Depression. Although Owen left letters, some diary entries, and a handful of good poems, little is known of his period in New York. But it is known, I told Salvatore, that Owen lived in an old Harlem building opposite Morningside Park and that during those very years, on the other side of the park, Lorca was writing Poet in New York. A few blocks from there, Joshua Zvorsky was beginning his long poem That. Farther north, Duke Ellington was playing in Mexico’s. But Owen’s writings from that time give the impression that he hated New York and was, in fact, on the margins of all that. It’s most likely that he only came across Lorca once or twice, never met Zvorsky or saw Duke Ellington play.

  So what? asked Salvatore.

  So what what?

  So what does it matter if he never met Lorca or saw Duke Ellington play?