Faces in the Crowd

by Valeria Luiselli

  *

  Note (Owen to Salvador Novo, Philadelphia, 1949): “Here, in summer, women develop miniature Mount Etnas they call breasts; they’re very unsettling things that sometimes turn out to be what are called ‘cheaters,’ which can be bought in any women’s fashion store.”

  *

  For the last few days there have been workmen in the house across the street. They’re taking up the old floorboards and replacing them with parquet. They listen to the radio the whole day. That’s how I find out what’s happening in the outside world. There was an earthquake in Asia; sham elections in Nepal; the Mexican army found a mass grave in Tamaulipas with the bodies of seventy-two undocumented Central American migrants. The workmen have sussed out what time I breastfeed the baby, in a rocking chair by the window. They watch me from the roof, lined up like recruits, candidates for a feast to which they won’t be invited. I close the blinds and unbutton my blouse.

  *

  In the mornings, my husband continues to read what I’ve written the night before. It’s all fiction, I tell him, but he doesn’t believe me.

  Weren’t you writing a novel about Owen?

  Yes, I say, it’s a book about Gilberto Owen’s ghost.

  *

  Note (Owen to Josefina Procopio, Philadelphia, 1948): “As this month the fourth was a Sunday, logically tomorrow will be Tuesday the thirteenth and I’m to die on a Tuesday the thirteenth. But if tomorrow isn’t the day, Death will wait for me, or I for her, the appointment won’t be this year. Let’s see what happens.”

  *

  In One Thousand and One Nights the narrator strings together a series of tales to put off the day of her death. Perhaps a similar but reverse mechanism would work for this story, this death. The narrator discovers that while she is stringing the tale, the mesh of her immediate reality wears thin and breaks. The fiber of fiction begins to modify reality and not vice versa, as it should be. Neither of the two can be sacrificed. The only remedy, the only way to save all the planes of the story, is to close one curtain and open another: lower one blind so you can unbutton your blouse; unwrite a story in one file and construct a different plot in another. Change the characters’ names, remember that everything is or should be fiction. Write what really did happen and what did not. At the end of each day’s work, separate the paragraphs, copy, paste, save; leave only one of the files open so the husband reads it and sates his curiosity to the full. The novel, the other one, is called Philadelphia.

  *

  This is how it starts: it all happened in another city and another life. It was the summer of 1928. I was working as a clerk in the Mexican consulate in New York, writing official reports on the price of Mexican peanuts on the u.s. market, which was about to crash. Almost twenty-five years have gone by since then; even if I wanted to, I couldn’t write this story as if I still lived there and were that thin young man, full of enthusiasm, translating Dickinson and Williams, wrapped in a gray bathrobe.

  (I would have liked to start the way Fitzgerald’s The Crack-Up begins.)

  *

  My husband has a future life in Philadelphia I know nothing about. A story that perhaps unfolds on the back of his plans. I don’t want to know anything more about it. I’m tortured, irremediably, a priori, by pieces of a life already traced out but not lived, in which there’s a woman, in a house without children, a self-confident criolla, who moans when she fucks. My husband sketches it all out and believes I don’t know.

  *

  The children live with my ex-wife in New York. I have an apartment and a grave in Philadelphia. She’s a criolla who vamps criollos. Fair-skinned, wealthy. She comes from an old, established Colombian family. I never belonged in that world. My father was an Irish miner who didn’t bequeath me his red hair but did pass on his sense of class resentment and a talent for debauchery. We met in Bogotá, and married there. We had two morganatic children and were, like almost everyone else, unhappy—“largely unhappy,” as the Yankees would elegantly put it. A few years ago we both did a “criollazo.” I lost everything in a Bogotá gaming house. She went off to Manhattan to start a career as a resentful poet. I came to Philadelphia, though I’m not quite sure what I intended to start.

  Criollazo: the act of leaving one’s husband in one’s prime, before hitting forty, to dedicate oneself to other women’s husbands. Criollazo: the act of leaving one’s wife, on the threshold of fifty, to dedicate oneself to women without husbands.

  *

  The problem with criollos, and even more so with criollas, is that they’re convinced they deserve a better life than the one they have. (Note how often a criolla uses the word deserve in any conversation with another criolla.) They firmly believe that inside their head is a diamond someone should discover, polish, and put on a red cushion, so that everyone can be amazed, marvel, understand what they have been missing.

  *

  I’ve been living in Philadelphia for three years. After a bit of string-pulling in the Foreign Ministry, which I’d prefer not to linger on, I managed to be appointed honorary consul here. It was the only way I had of living near the children. But none of that matters now: I’m going blind, I’m fat, so fat I’ve got tits, sometimes I tremble, perhaps stutter. I’ve got three cats and I’m going to die.

  *

  The subway, its multiple stops, its breakdowns, its sudden accelerations, its dark zones, could function as the space-time scheme for this other novel.

  *

  Every fortnight I go to Manhattan to visit the children. Returning, a couple of decades on, to that city where I died so many times has something of a pilgrimage to the cemetery about it, except that instead of taking flowers to a relative or grieving at the grave of an unknown child, I go to meet the men and women I never was but, at the same time, have never been able to stop being.

  *

  The subway used to bring me close to dead things; to the death of things. One day, when I was traveling home from the south of the city on the 1 line, I saw Owen again. This time it was different. This time it wasn’t an external impression caused by something outside me, like that night in the bar in Harlem, nor a fleeting impression like the time before in the subway, but the stabbing certainty that I was in the presence of something at once beautiful and terrible. I was looking out of the window—nothing except the heavy darkness of the tunnels—when another train approached from behind and for a few moments traveled at the same speed as the one I was on. I saw him sitting in the same position as me, his head resting against the carriage window. And then nothing. His train speeded up and many other bodies, smudged and ghostly, passed before my eyes. When there was once again darkness outside the window, I saw my own blurred image on the glass. But it wasn’t my face; it was my face superimposed on his—as if his reflection had been stamped onto the glass and now I was reflected inside that double trapped on my carriage window.

  *

  A horizontal novel, told vertically. A novel that has to be told from the outside in order to be read from within.

  *

  Naturally, there are a lot of deaths in the course of a lifetime. Most people don’t notice. They think you die once and that’s it. But you only have to pay a bit of attention to realize that you go and die every so often. That’s not just a poetic turn of phrase. I’m not saying the soul this and the soul that, but that one day you cross the street and a car knocks you down; another day you fall asleep in the bathtub and never get out; and another, you tumble down the stairs of your building and crack your head open. Most deaths don’t matter: the film goes on running. Except that that’s when everything takes a turn, even though it may be imperceptible, and the consequences are not always apparent straight away.

  I began to die in Manhattan, in the summer of 1928. Of course, no one except me noticed my deaths—people are too busy with their own lives to take note of other people’s little deaths. I noticed because after each death I got a temperature and lost weight.

  I used to weigh myself every morning, to s
ee if I’d died the day before. And though it didn’t happen all that often, I was losing pounds at an alarming rate (I never knew how much it was in kilos). It’s not that I got any thinner. I just lost weight, as if I were hollowing out, while my shell remained intact. Now, for instance, I’m fat and have man boobs, but I scarcely weigh three pounds. I don’t know if that means I’ve got three deaths left, as if I were a cat counting backwards. No, I don’t think so. I think the next one will be the real thing.

  *

  Dakota and I visited the cemetery near her house in Queens. We went to leave a bunch of flowers for Lucky Luciano, a mafioso to whom she claimed to be distantly related. Luciano had been stabbed in the face in 1929, and was left with a squint in one eye. Dakota described the scene to me with almost literary precision as we were making our way down the long cemetery paths lined with photographs and white lilies. Three men had forced him into a limo at gunpoint and destroyed his face with a knife, but made sure he was still alive. They dumped him on a beach on Long Island. Lucky Luciano walked to the nearest hospital, covering the socket of his injured eye with his hand. The story seemed to me more hilarious than tragic, despite all Dakota’s efforts to move me. After searching for his grave for a while, we came across Robert Mapplethorpe’s. Dakota had an attack of mock nostalgia and wanted to stop for a moment. She requested silence. I’d never liked Mapplethorpe’s photos, but I condescended to sit with her in the sun, one on either side of the gravestone, like two premature effigies of Patti Smith. After a few minutes a white cat appeared from among the bushes and prostrated itself in Dakota’s lap. That seemed to her a sign of something, and perhaps she was right. She wanted to take it home. I tried to dissuade her, because cemetery cats never get used to the company of the living, but Dakota took no notice. We left Mapplethorpe the flowers we’d brought for poor old Lucky Luciano and went to buy cat food.

  *

  Salvatore was having a party. Come with your friends, he said. He was in an overexcited, celebratory mood, preparing for his seventieth birthday. He reviewed the menu with me, over and over: pork stuffed with pomegranate seeds, salad with cashew nuts and goat’s cheese, white rice with coconut milk. I brought Dakota, who brought the new cat and her ex-boyfriend; I brought Moby and Pajarote; I called White, who didn’t turn up; I brought Salvatore back his record player. His friends also arrived, in a painfully slow trickle. A woman who’d been a ballerina and was still displaying her collarbones and pulling in her abs, as if this would heal the blow of so many years without leotards and tutus; an elderly entomologist who mated fruit flies in a laboratory; a young girl, Salvatore’s student, who was trying to score points with the birthday boy.

  We ate around an oak coffee table, covered in papers, in the center of the living room. We listened to records while gently touching legs and shoulders, lounging on the couch or the floor, generating false hopes of the degenerate orgy that never occurred. Salvatore talked for hours about the erection of a young Neapolitan guy he’d seen on a nudist beach when he was seventeen. While we were chewing pieces of pork, he made some reference to a movie by a Portuguese director, whose name I can never remember, in which someone is nibbling a pomegranate. Apparently, it was an erotic scene. One of the guests threw up in the kitchen. Dakota’s cat ate the vomit. The entomologist took the baton, speculating about the relationship between the quantity of sugar in the fruit and the reproductive cycles of the flies. Salvatore’s student sat on the back of the armchair, behind him, and demonstrated the principal points of Thai massage while commenting on how sad it was that the Australian shark was in imminent danger of extinction. Pajarote fell asleep on Dakota’s lap. She was singing something by Bessie Smith and stroking the head of her ex-boyfriend, who was sitting on the floor, rubbing his foot against mine while leafing through the papers Salvatore had laid out on the table in staged disorder, specially for that night, the night of his birthday.

  Anyone for coffee? asked the birthday boy, after a long silence.

  Several hands were raised.

  Salvatore left the living room and didn’t return. He’d fallen, exhausted, onto his bed. Before leaving, we all filed into his room. His student kissed his forehead and we emulated her, as if it were a funeral. Then, everyone left at the same instant, like the ghostly members of a hypothetical corps de ballet. Moby and I stayed on. We tried making love in Salvatore’s armchair, he touched my breasts. I wanted to kiss him, but his neck smelled of pomegranate and pork and I had to go to the bathroom to throw up. When I came back, Moby had gone. That was the last time I saw him.

  *

  I’ve stopped breastfeeding the baby. Five days with my boobs hard and red. But the thought of not producing milk is heartening. It wasn’t easy, it’s never easy, being a person who produces milk.

  *

  When Moby disappeared, Pajarote began to come on Wednesdays again. We breakfasted on toast with cheese and honey; I drank coffee with cream, Pajarote had a can of Coca-Cola. He explained some theories about the degree of semantic opacity and conventionality of metaphors. He was writing a paper on judgments and their semantic relationship to a word associated with the literal and figurative meanings of utterances. I preferred the cat theory. Pajarote used to talk with his mouth full of toast. The crumbs fell on the table and kitchen floor. When he’d gone, I furiously vacuumed the apartment.

  *

  Both toilets in the house are blocked. The downstairs one went first. It overflows if you pull the chain. Shit flows out all over the place. My husband unblocks it, swabs the bathtub with bleach, mops the floor frenetically. No use. Next it’s the upstairs one. Same problem. The boy says it’s the neighbor’s cockroaches blocking the pipes.

  *

  The literal and figurative meanings of utterances: Salvatore wasn’t a biologist, he was a professor of biology.

  *

  Detective Matias didn’t contact me again for several months. But, finally, he called. We’ve closed the case, he announced over the phone, I’ve been transferred to a different precinct. He personally apologized for not having gotten anywhere. The truth is that I’d stopped caring about the case, and simply liked visiting him once in a while, asking him questions, listening to his answers. I went to see him one last time in his office on 126th Street. He offered me coffee and talked about growing up as an Ecuadorian kid in the Bronx. He unashamedly hated blacks. When he was a boy, two Afro Americans cracked his skull open in the schoolyard because he couldn’t get the ball in the basket. They beat me up and pulled down my shorts and my underpants. They saw my little ass, mi culito, he said, using Spanish for the first time.

  *

  The 1 line runs the length of Manhattan. It starts at the ferry terminal at the southern tip of the island, goes through part of Chelsea and up to Columbia University on 116th Street, where Owen used to take the train every day to the south of the city, after weighing himself on a machine by the ticket office. The line continues up to Harlem and I don’t know how much farther. The track goes on and on, beyond the island, beyond this story.

  *

  My husband announces at breakfast that he’ll be going to Philadelphia soon, and doesn’t know how long he’ll be away. Have you got a workery in Philadelphia? asks the boy. My husband ignores him and goes on talking. Papa, Papa, the boy insists, have you got a Philadelphia cheese workery, Papa?

  Pa-pa, says the baby.

  *

  Philadelphia is falling down. And so is this apartment. Too many things, too many voices. There are three cats that appeared out of the blue one day. And a ghost, or several ghosts, also appeared. I can’t see the ghosts, nor can I make out the cats very clearly, but in my world of white shadows they’re one more obstacle to bump into every day—like the writing desk, the Reposet chair in which I used to read, the doors left ajar.

  Of course, my blindness wasn’t instantaneous, and neither was the appearance of all these new tenants. But the day those things began to arrive—the blindness, the cats, the ghosts, the pieces of furniture
, and dozens of books I hadn’t bought, and, of course, later on, the flies and the cockroaches—I knew it was the beginning of the end. Not mine, but the end of something I had identified with so closely that it would soon do away with me too.

  If eyes can be compared with reflective pools of water, then the punishment of terminal blindness falls on them like a cataract. Blindness, like castigation and cataracts, comes from above, with no obvious purpose or meaning; and it’s accepted with the humble resignation of a body of water trapped in a pool, perpetually fed by more of itself. My blindness is black and white and I have a veritable Niagara on my brow.

  *

  Finally there came the day White had been waiting for so eagerly. For months, I had worked hard on the poems, and the book was scheduled to go to print in a couple of weeks. We were going to publish another selection of poems in advance of the book, this time in the New York Review of Books, and a renowned critic had asked to interview White and myself for a full profile of the poet Gilberto Owen, his years in New York, and his relationship to Zvorsky. We booked an appointment with him for the following week.

  White invited me to raise a glass for Owen and cut down his tree. He’d finally made up his mind to do it. We’d use an electric saw, connected by an extension lead to a socket in his apartment. We had two pairs of thick, leather gloves. Wellingtons. A bottle of whisky. Aplomb.

  But the saw didn’t work, so we ordered pizza and sat on the steps outside his building. White talked about his wife, how difficult the first years without her had been, the impossibility of throwing out her clothes, her books, her toiletries. White was an inconsolable man. He’d decided to set up the publishing house because the project had been her idea.