Faces in the Crowd

by Valeria Luiselli

  It doesn’t, I’m just saying he could have.

  Exactly, and that’s what matters.

  *

  The first installment of the sham transcription was a success. I arrived on Friday with a bundle of pages written in Word, 1.5 spacing, Times New Roman. White read them in front of me and was clearly interested, even enthusiastic. If they were indeed translations of poems by Owen made by Zvorsky, we’d found a treasure trove, I said. He replied that I was the best literary contranslator he’d ever met. Then he asked to see the original manuscript, which we both knew didn’t exist.

  I had to fabricate the manuscript over the weekend, with the help of Moby—he was the only person I knew with the tools and the talent to forge such a thing. He turned up at my apartment with a 1927 Remington and old paper. We worked all weekend. As a sort of reward, we made love on Sunday. He told me he liked my breasts, though they were a bit small. I said: Thank you.

  *

  Note: Owen died blind, victim of liver cirrhosis, on March 9, 1952, in Philadelphia. He’d swollen up so much that he’d grown breasts.

  *

  We have a neighbor who breeds frogs. And Madagascar cockroaches to feed to the frogs. We meet him at the front door and the boy tells him that he has a dinosaur beside his bed, though it’s made of foam rubber, because the hard plastic one got broken.

  Live frogs are better, says the neighbor, because they eat the mosquitos and cockroaches.

  The boy looks at him steadily.

  My dinosaur eats mosquitos and frogs. But he doesn’t eat cockroaches, he thinks they’re disgusting.

  *

  I returned to Detective Matias’s office many times. On my second visit, we had a coffee in the interrogation room while he asked me questions and I answered, convinced it was going to turn out that I was the guilty party. At that moment, looking Detective Matias in the eyes, I repented having stolen a calculator in my convent school at the age of eleven; I was assailed by the memory of the time a math teacher washed my mouth out with soap, arguing that I couldn’t go home with such a dirty tongue; all the books I’d stolen from so many libraries weighed on my conscience; the kisses I gave my girlfriend’s boyfriend; the ones I gave my girlfriend. And then there was the forged collection of poems by Owen, translated by Zvorsky.

  How many whiskies did you drink that night? he asked.

  Less than one—perhaps a half, or three-quarters of one.

  How would you describe the individual who blocked your way when you were leaving the bar?

  Medium build, not tall but not short either, darkish skin, maybe Hispanic.

  Would you like to add anything?

  No, thank you.

  Detective Matias promised to call me when the case was solved. It would take a few weeks, perhaps months.

  *

  Our neighbor is preparing his forty-first birthday party. On Sunday he buys forty-one animals in the Sonora market and sets out boxes, fish tanks, and cages in the courtyard before the astonished gazes of other neighbors arriving, slightly tipsy, from their family lunches. I watch them from the living room window. The children admire the neighbor. He’s going to liberate the animals on the day of his birthday, one animal for every year: three frogs, three turtles, two birds, thirty-two Madagascar cockroaches (Gromphadorhina portentosa), and a wall lizard. All the neighbors are invited to the party. He tells a story about a trip to Thailand, a Buddhist ceremony, a temple, a woman, thirty-something animals, but I’m not listening. In the middle of the courtyard, two giant cockroaches are copulating inside a fish tank.

  *

  After the loan of the Remington, Moby felt free to come to my house more and more often. He’d spend whole days there, lying in my bathtub, cooking, watering the plants, and drinking coffee with Dakota. I began to hate Moby. He smelled bad. He left horrible curly blond hairs on my soap. I started borrowing Salvatore’s armchair on the tenth floor, and returned home when I was certain Moby had left.

  *

  Yesterday my husband asked if he left hairs on the soap.

  *

  Years ago, I took a photo of Gilberto Owen. Or so I told Salvatore. It was the first time I told that lie. By now it’s an elaborate lie, repeated to myself so often that it’s come to form part of my repertory of events, indistinguishable from any other memory. Of course, I’d never seen Gilberto Owen, much less when he was young, and had certainly never taken a photo of him. But that’s what I told Salvatore, not that he believed me. I was in a Lebanese café in Calle Donceles in the historic district of Mexico City, and Owen walked past under a huge black umbrella. It was a few minutes after five in the afternoon. There had just been one of those summer rainstorms, the likes of which only fall in Mexico City and Mumbai. The sidewalks were beginning to fill again with ambulant street vendors, tourists, cockroaches, and that sad peregrination of public servants hurrying back to their cubicles, suffused with satisfaction and guilt—their shirts wrinkled, their skin glinting with grease—after a short but sweet encounter in one of the pay-by-the-hour hotels in the zone. I told all that to Salvatore and then repented it. Describing Calle Donceles that way to a foreigner has an air of literary imposture I’m now ashamed of. But Salvatore nodded, committed to my story, and, emboldened, I went on. I’d been in the Lebanese café for a few hours waiting for the rain to pass, half reading a scholarly edition of Rousseau’s Meditations, half studying a group of old men drinking coffee and silently playing dominos at the next table. I’d got stuck on a Rousseauian phrase, possibly more ingenious than rational, about how adversity is a schoolmistress whose teaching comes too late to be truly useful. Salvatore remembered that meditation, he said. I had a Pentax with me that I’d just picked up from one of the camera repair shops on the street and, more from boredom than real interest, I’d been taking photos of the old men. Slow-witted pupils of adversity, Salvatore concluded, thinking himself very clever. When it finally stopped raining, I took a last gulp of coffee, put a twenty-peso bill under the sugar bowl, and made my way to the door. (Passing the old men’s table, I overheard them speculating about the firmness of my ass.) I stopped in the doorway for a moment to look along the street: rain-soaked, Mexico City returns to being that valley that obsessed Cortés, Juan Zorrilla, and Velasco. I raised the camera, focused on a Rousseauian pedestrian who, at that moment, was jumping over a puddle, and shot.

  *

  Note (Owen writes): “The public servant commonly suffers the abominable influence of the rain with Christian resignation and calmly prepares to edge his way meticulously from his home to the office, avoiding the mud and the potholes, doing balancing acts that make him sentimental and philosophical.”

  *

  Today I found Rousseau’s Meditations on my husband’s bedside table. He says he needs them for an article he’s going to write for an urban-planning magazine. I can’t imagine what relationship there might be between the two.

  *

  One night, Salvatore wanted to sleep with me. Do you know Inés Arredondo? I asked while he stroked one of my legs. Of course, he didn’t. I’m going to give you her best story to read. It’s called “The Shunammite Woman.” It’s about a young woman who goes to visit her uncle in the provinces. The uncle is dying and sends for her because he wants to bequeath her everything he owns. The young woman arrives in the town and her uncle immediately starts to improve. He forces her to marry him and to sleep in his sickbed. Thanks to the niece’s vital presence, the uncle gets better by the day, until he’s completely recovered. Salvatore caressed me; I, out of compassion, didn’t stop him. That night, after dinner, I went back to my apartment. Before going to sleep, I cried a little and masturbated, looking at Owen’s photo.

  *

  I took White the forged original. The truth is that with a little help from the villainous Moby, I had produced something worthy of being sold to an authentic collector. White promised to have an answer for me the following Monday and gave me the rest of the week off.

  *

  That
bit about masturbating with a photo is disgusting, comments my husband. I’m annoyed, I defend myself like an insect and, so as not to go on listening to his reproach, I read aloud from a pamphlet the neighbor who breeds frogs and Madagascar cockroaches gave us: “When it is attacked or angered, the giant Madagascar cockroach flattens itself against the floor or ground and sharply expels the air in its respiratory passages, producing a disturbing snort, the aim of which is to frighten the aggressor.”

  *

  During my week off, Dakota and Moby were both staying in my apartment. I couldn’t cope with the two of them at once, so on Friday I decided to go to Philadelphia to visit Laura and Enea, and see if there might be an archive with documents about Owen in the Mexican consulate. The three of us had breakfast together and then I left. Moby would spend the entire weekend in his boxer shorts. Dakota would be occupying the bathtub the whole time. Perhaps, at some point on Saturday, Moby went into the bathroom and saw Dakota’s clothes scattered on the floor, by the toilet. He saw a shapely calf and a foot, the nails painted. He apologized and went out, made himself a coffee or fried some eggs. Dakota would have come out a little later, wrapped in my towel. Maybe they had coffee together. They certainly made love in my bed and had breakfast together again on Sunday. Perhaps, some other Sunday, the three of us would have gotten into bed together.

  *

  On Sundays, my husband, the children, and I listen to Rockdrigo and eat pancakes for breakfast. But not this Sunday. My husband is angry. Through my own carelessness, he’s read some more of these pages. He asks how much is fiction and how much fact.

  *

  During that period, I took to telling lies. I lied more and more often, even in situations that didn’t merit it. I suppose that’s the logic of lies: one day you lay the first stone and the following day you have to lay two. When I was in Philadelphia, my sister took me to see a doctor because my left kidney—or perhaps ovary—was hurting. The consulate was closed the whole weekend, so all I did was walk with Laura and Enea, eat Chinese food, and then visit the doctor, having overdosed on monosodium glutamate. The receptionist handed me a form, which I filled in more or less like this:

  Is this your first visit here? Yes.

  Have you got a pain in your chest? Yes, it’s really bad.

  Are you unemployed? Yes.

  What ethnic group do you belong to? Caucasian.

  Do you belong to a church? Yes.

  Which? Anglican.

  Is there a history of cancer in your family? No.

  What is your Social Security number? 12345.

  *

  Today was our neighbor’s birthday: he didn’t invite us to his party in the end.

  *

  The postman came by this morning. He hands me a postcard and I give him five pesos. It’s from a woman in Philadelphia. It’s for my husband. I read it. Perhaps, a few years ago, we’d have read it and laughed together; we’d have analyzed the exaggerated syntax of those who are selling some form of bygone happiness, then we’d have gotten drunk and made love in the kitchen, pretending for one night that we had no past. But we always choose—in some way it is our choice—to rehearse the beginnings of the end: beforesshocks, pretremblings.

  *

  When I got back from Philadelphia I immediately went to see White at the office. He wasn’t there, but I found a long note stuck to my computer: “You win. We’ll publish a few poems in a magazine first. You can write an introductory note saying they’re most probably by Z. But you still need to work on a lot of the poems. They’re sloppy. When you’re finished and the time’s ripe, we’ll bring out a book of the complete translations of O. Yours, White—P.S. Did you go to the cemetery in Philadelphia? I did some research and found out that Owen was buried there.”

  *

  Note (Postcard from Owen to Josefina Procopio, Philadelphia, 1950): “Robin Hood Dell. There’s never before been an auditorium so completely open to the other world. The ghosts from Laurel Hill Cemetery, just behind the Dell, come to give concerts that other ghosts, from the great cemetery named Philadelphia, applaud. When it seems the Dell is full, they take a photograph and everything comes out empty because the film isn’t sensitive to ghosts. I’m the shadow marked with an X.”

  *

  I suppose it’s normal. The day comes when your husband’s former lovers look at their legs, shed a few tears, put on fishnet stockings, and write a postcard to their first love. Some nights, when their own husband and children are sleeping, they put on an old record. Get modestly drunk. They write messages with overly complex, desperate grammar: discontinuous lines like varicose veins. The next morning they go to yoga classes and dye their hair bright red. Maybe, one day, they get a spider tattoo on their stomach. What’s more likely is that this first love has been corresponding sporadically with them for years, so they feel free to write or call whenever and however they please and demand their share of lost youth, their drop-by-drop, prescribed dose of happiness. The men, if they’re unhappy with their wife, will reply. The women, if they aren’t yet ashamed of their body, will invite them to a hotel. Perhaps a hotel in Philadelphia.

  *

  I made an appointment with Detective Matias and went to see him at the police station. I haven’t come to talk about the case, I said as I sat down in front of his desk—I’d been to see him so often that he no longer received me in the interrogation room. I’ve got a question for you, that’s all. He listened.

  What happens if someone publishes something, pretending someone else wrote it?

  Like a literary ghostwriter?

  More or less.

  I don’t know. I don’t read much. But last Christmas my daughter gave me The Maltese Falcon. Have you read it?

  *

  My husband and I have been asked to a dinner party with old friends. I go into the bathroom to do my face before leaving. I put on eyeliner, mascara, and brush my teeth. I’ve got dark shadows under my eyes. We turn off the gas, shut the windows and doors overlooking the inner patio. We switch off all the lights, except the one in the hall. We say good-night to the children and the babysitter. I take his arm when we’re outside and he tells me that, before we left, he killed a Madagascar cockroach by the baby’s crib. Then he quickly says: I may have to go to Philadelphia to oversee the construction. I drop his arm and say I have to check the baby one more time, that the cockroach thing terrifies me. I go inside and turn on the lights. My husband follows me. I open the gas tap and the door to the inner patio. I don’t want to go out, don’t want to go to a dinner party. I go into the children’s room and the creak of the door wakes the baby. She cries, I have to pick her up. I can’t go with you, I say, you go alone.

  *

  Leave a life. Blow everything up. No, not everything: blow up the square meter you occupy among people. Or better still: leave empty chairs at the tables you once shared with friends, not metaphorically, but really, leave a chair, become a gap for your friends, allow the circle of silence around you to swell and fill with speculation. What few people understand is that you leave one life to start another.

  *

  Note: From 1928 to 1929, Owen had an unimportant job in the Mexican consulate in New York. During that time, he wrote an article entitled “Production-line system for shelling, cleaning and grading peanuts.”

  *

  The boy talks to the ghost in our house. He tells me so while we’re bathing the baby together. He pours water on her head with a sponge while I clean her whole body with neutral soap. We know we’re handling something very fragile. Folds and folds of delicate flesh.

  D’you know what?

  What?

  Without doesn’t scare me anymore.

  That’s good.

  Don’t you worry, Mama, Without’s going to look after us when Papa goes to Philadelphia.

  Why do you think Papa’s going to Philadelphia?

  But where is Philadelphia?

  *

  A selection of the forged poems was published in a small bu
t prestigious magazine and afterwards, thanks to the kudos conferred by the name of Zvorsky, came the shower of mentions an author needs to find a place in the market: reviews. First on obscure internet sites specializing in third-world authors, translations, and minority writers in general (ethnic, racial, sexual, et cetera). Later, articles appeared in academic journals, attesting to the authenticity of the “manuscript containing translations by the poet Zvorsky of the great Mexican poet Gilberto Owen, found in the Casa Hispánica of Columbia University.” The Department of Hispanic Literature at the University of Austin opened an “Owen Archive”; the articles Owen had written for El Tiempo in Bogotá in the 1930s and 1940s appeared, edited by a university professor and issued by a well-known publishing house in Mexico City, and were immediately translated for Harvard University Press. A hail of apocryphal manuscripts, all related to Owen’s sojourn in New York, appeared. A “lost” issue of the magazine Exile, edited by Ezra Pound, came to light, with extracts from Línea, the collection of poems Owen published around 1930. Our plans were going well. I’d keep working on the rest of the poems and we would have a book ready in a few months.

  *

  The design for the Philadelphia house is, finally, almost finished. My husband left the plans on his desk and now it’s me who’s looking for something. I rummage. On some of the plans there are two figures, a man and a woman roughly sketched in pencil, who live in that house. They’re eating in the kitchen, taking a bath together in an enormous tub, sleeping in a room with a huge window.

  I log on to his computer to see if I can find another clue there. The program he uses is called AutoCAD. I open it, press keys, more and more windows open, a whole house, in three dimensions, spacey, with white wooden doors. There are labels where there will eventually be chairs, bookshelves, plants, and pictures. But I do not find him there, or her.

  *

  Dakota moved to her new house at the beginning of summer. It was an apartment in Queens, near a cemetery. The day they handed over the keys we went out to buy three cans of paint. She wanted her whole house to look like Juliet Berto’s cobalt-blue bathroom in Céline et Julie vont en bâteau. We opened all the windows and stripped down to our panties. We painted the bathroom, the kitchen, but only half of the bedroom because we ran out of paint. We painted each other’s nipples cobalt blue. When we’d finished we lay face up on the bedroom floor and lit a cigarette apiece. Dakota suggested we swap panties.