Faces in the Crowd

by Valeria Luiselli

  *

  God and people come out in solidarity with victims. Not just any victim, but victims who successfully victimize themselves. My ex-wife, for example. When we got divorced, the criolla turned herself into a poet and a victim; the prophetess of divorced poet-victims.

  She’s just published a small book of deeply embittered prose poems, self-edited and bilingual, with a so-called publishing house owned by her mentor, a French-American poet who runs a writing workshop called SDML (Spiritual Daughters of Mina Loy). I don’t think Mina Loy knows about them. My ex-wife has had the discourtesy to invite me to the launch, which is to be celebrated in her own apartment. I know I have to stay in her good books, because if I don’t, she’ll never let me near the children, so I have the courtesy to go to New York to see her.

  A butler opens the door to me. I ask after the children; they’re asleep. The apartment smells of a mixture of uptown perfumery, makeup, newly ironed clothes, and asparagus. The butler offers me a martini and, of course, a plate of boiled asparagus. My sight might betray me, but I’m still a hound dog when it comes to sniffing out a coven of witches gathered around their bitterness and a plate of expensive appetizers. I hang my jacket up near the door, among handbags and women’s coats of every possible size and texture; I accept just the martini and make my way to the salon.

  I can’t see the women very well, but from the noise and stench they give off there must be over twenty, over thirty of them, sitting in concentric semicircles around my ex-wife and two other speakers—the three witches of Macbeth, but more vulgar and angrier with life. Standing facing the room, my balls suddenly shrink. Two peanuts. Perhaps they completely disappear. I stand there behind the last row of seats, as close as possible to the butler, terrified.

  My ex-wife is reading in her international Bogotá accent. The poor woman has a very ugly voice—she moans the guttural consonants, elongates the open vowels, and squeaks the i’s like a badly tuned machine. She reads a poem about the practical utility of husbands. Her mouth always curved slightly downward when she was reading aloud; also when she was reproaching me for my infinite list of faults. I imagine the bitter grimace, now further emphasized by the furrows and bags of aging skin. From time to time, bursts of hyena-like laughter break out from the invitees. Maybe, when the ceremony is over, they’ll undress me, tie my hands and feet, lift my eyelids, and fill my eyes with gobs of spit. They’ll shit on me—years of intestinal retention.

  She finishes reading the poem and the whole room reverberates with an ecstasy of applause. I reach out my hand to see if the butler is still beside me. There he is. I put my arm around his shoulder:

  Don’t desert me, brother, stay here close by.

  I’ll be here, sir, I’m not moving.

  She reads another poem, and another. When she’s finished the final one, presumptuously dedicated to Mina Loy, the women give her a standing ovation. The chairs scrape against the floor. (Where can she have gotten so many chairs from?) My ex-wife, a spider in the center of her web, looks at me from the opposite corner of the room. I feel her stare. I’m a tiny fly trapped in her sticky universe. The butler removes my arm to attend to the ladies’ demands; I stay put, not knowing where to put my free hand; and the one holding the martini is now trembling slightly.

  The international Bogotanian starts talking: poetry, the breakdown of identity, life in exile, and who knows how many more criollo clichés. She pauses, and to round off says: I’m grateful for the presence of my ex-husband, an unjustly obscure but highly capable poet. The little heads turn in my direction. What does she mean by “capable”? I get an urgent need to piss. Dozens of painted snouts smile—I can still make out white on black and know they’re smiling because the darkened room suddenly lights up like a startoothy sky. The olive throbs in my glass. My organs, in my suit, throb. The faces looking at me throb; out there, the city throbs: the persistent pumping of the blood, the temperature of humiliation. Speech! Speech! I wish for an instant death I am unable to bring about. Then I speak:

  I came because I was invited.

  (Silence.)

  I came because I’ve always been a dedicated feminist. Viva Mina Loy! Viva!

  (Silence.)

  In fact, María, I came because I wanted to ask you to lend me just a few dollars to take the children to the fair next weekend.

  (Silence.)

  *

  When I brush the boy’s teeth, we count to ten for the middle of the top row, ten for the bottom, fifteen on one side (top and bottom), fifteen on the other. He has tiny, pointy teeth, like a baby shark’s.

  You’ve got teeth like a baby shark, I say to the boy.

  Do baby sharks have teeth, Mama?

  I don’t know, I guess so.

  But sharks are blind, and I’m not.

  I know, I said teeth, not eyes.

  Yeah, but still.

  Come on, off to bed.

  *

  I’ve only ever known a single blind man in my life. He was called Homer Collyer and in 1947, a little after his death and a year before my definitive, fatal return to the United Estates, he gained a fleeting celebrity. But long before that, when I arrived in Harlem in 1928, Homer was living with his brother Langley a few blocks from my apartment, in a mansion on the corner of 128th Street they had inherited from their parents.

  Homer was licking an ice cream on the front steps and I went up to ask the way to a church where there was a special service that Sunday that the boys at Contemporáneos had asked me to write an article about. Excuse me, sir, where’s St. John? I asked. He pointed his walking stick toward the sky. I laughed discreetly, but honestly, and stood there like an idiot, waiting to see if, somehow or other, the joke would lead to terrestrial directions.

  Did you know that chocolate ice cream is made from cocaine powder?

  No, sir, I didn’t.

  That’s what my brother Langley says. Met him?

  Your brother? No, sir.

  I sat down next to Homer on the step.

  He’s a good man. A bit of a pig, but diligent in his own way. He says that if I sit in the sun for an hour every morning and eat enough cocaine ice cream, I’ll gradually get my sight back.

  Well I never, you’re blind?

  Homer took off the dark glasses he was wearing and smiled at me—he had teeth like a horse’s: big, rounded, and yellow.

  *

  I enjoyed long tertulias during which I could unfold my ideas slowly, cast scorn on my fellow writers, feel that the world fell short of my standards. Amero used to arrange to meet us in a bar. The owner liked to be called “Mexico” (he was a very yankee Yankee, who had fought on the side of Pancho Villa in the Mexican Revolution and for that reason alone believed himself to be a metonym for the country). I rarely went to these things, but when I did, I was in for the long haul. The regulars were Emilio Amero, Gabriel García Maroto, and Federico, who almost always brought Nella Larsen. Sometimes I joined them, as did our friend Z, who, between whiskies, talked about objectivism, a word Federico was incapable of pronouncing. He’d say something like “ohetivicio” and then turn to me, seeking complicity.

  One night we all drank like ladies and got drunk as skunks. I think Nella Larsen was a bit ashamed of us right from the start, because she changed tables before the floor show began. In one corner of the bar, the famous Duke Ellington, who I had never seen perform before, took the stage. Federico stood up and pulled up his socks. He had short, plump little legs, covered in wiry hair, and the poor guy insisted on wearing Bermuda shorts (a European thing, bloody bunch of fairies). The Spañolet applauded so euphorically that, before sitting down at the piano, the musician tipped his hat and personally thanked him. Federico turned to me as if to say, See? The Duke and I are big buddies. Ellington sat down and began. Z took off his spectacles and left them on the table, among the glasses. García Maroto, possibly the most boring person in the world, listened to the whole thing with his eyes shut, or perhaps he just fell asleep.

  During a break
in the applause at the end of the first set, Federico put his mouth close to my ear and said: Don’t turn around, Ezra Pound’s behind you. I rose from my chair so quickly that I almost upset the table. All the glasses fell over, the ashtrays spilled their contents, ice cubes jumped into the air. García Maroto woke up with a start and averted the cataclysm by slamming down his hand, which landed on our friend Z’s spectacles, which, in turn, broke. Tiny shards of glass went flying, something like fragments of a child’s world: that chair, that man, that poet, that sad, that broken; that sad, broken poet man. Federico cracked up and Z was on all fours looking for the pieces of his spectacles. Fooled you, Mexicanito. What made you think Pound could be here? said Federico between snorts of laughter (his tongue was small, red, and rough, like a cat’s, and he stuck it out, possibly too far, when he laughed). We made such a scene that a big beefy guy, clearly not overburdened with brains, came up with two other toughs and booted us out. I believe that that night, instead of whisky, they served us hair lotion, because we were all in a frankly hallucinatory state. It’s possible that as I was leaving the bar someone stabbed me and stole my shoes and all my money, because the following morning I woke up unshod and without a dime in a hospital in Harlem. That had to be the second time I died.

  *

  Note (Owen to Araceli Otero): “I’m not dying so often now. I seem to myself chaste and already modestly strong. I eat very well and am an inconjugatable tense, the future pluperfect. I’m interested in my temperature, but what most interests me about it is what I lose by it, measured in year-pounds. I weigh 124 months. New York is blue, gray, green, gray, white, blue, gray, gray, white, etc. Sometimes it’s also gray. (Only at night it’s not black.) (But gray.) And you?”

  *

  My husband reads the children an improving, moralistic book they bought at the zoo about a baby dolphin who loses his family in the sea because he doesn’t listen to his mama and papa.

  Perhaps a blind shark’s going to eat him, speculates the boy. Their voices reach me as if from far off, as if I were beneath the water and they out there, I always inside and they always outside. Or vice versa.

  “Baby dolphin starts to cry. He gives a very high-pitched whistle that cuts through the water like an arrow,” continues my husband.

  Can arrows cut through water? interrupts the boy. “The voice of each dolphin is unique,” my husband continues reading, “like fingerprints.” The boy makes noises like arrows cutting through a body of water.

  Pay attention, his father scolds. We’re almost finished.

  I think about his question.

  My husband goes on: “Mama dolphin hears her baby from very far off. She swims the whole sea in search of him.”

  Does she find him? asks the boy.

  Yes, look, here on the last page you can see how she finds him.

  *

  When the children were smaller and we were still living in Calle 70 in Bogotá, we used to play hide-and-seek. I’d hide behind the slender branches of a young jacaranda tree. Where’s Papa? I’d ask them. The two would run to me and grab a leg apiece. Here! my little girl shouted. We’ve found you! said the boy. No, I’m a tree, I’d reply, and lift them up into the air, one on each of my branches.

  *

  Homer, the blind man, had one eye bigger than the other. One of them, the small one, was permanently turned toward his lachrymal gland, immobile. The larger one rolled in its violet socket like a demented white bird—it was like one of those doves trapped inside a church or railway station, beating its wings against a high, closed window. I enjoyed watching that erratic eye, which didn’t see me. Homer would be waiting for me every Sunday with a chocolate ice cream in each hand, at 10:00 a.m. on the dot. If I arrived two or three minutes late, my ice cream would be half melted, running down his fist.

  You’re a ghost, Mr. Owen, isn’t that so? (He pronounced my name the way my ancestors must have done.)

  Why do you say that, Mr. Collyer?

  Well, because I can actually see you.

  And couldn’t it be that you’re getting your sight back from eating so much cocaine ice cream?

  No, sir, that’s not it. You’ve got the face of an American Indian but the build of a Jap. And you have the air of a German aristocrat. Today you’re wearing a hat, perhaps gray, and a jacket that doesn’t suit you one bit.

  Don’t you like my jacket?

  You’d look good in tweed. Next Sunday I’m going to lend you one of my brother Langley’s tweed jackets. I’ll have to find it and clean it first. My brother’s got a lot of things in there.

  I never went inside the Collyer residence, although later, when the brothers died and every paper in the city was talking about them, I learned that the house had been slowly filling up with rubbish over the years. Langley had, for some time, been collecting all the papers published in the city and piling them in towers and rows that served as a retaining wall to stop Homer bumping into all the Victorian furniture in the mansion. But Langley, apparently, amassed not only city newspapers but also typewriters, strollers, wheel hubs, bicycles, toys, milk bottles, tables, spoons, lamps. Homer never spoke to me about his brother’s zeal for collecting, but now I can imagine that it was not gratuitous. Perhaps he thought that by bringing examples of everyday objects to the house, his blind brother would be able to hold onto a notion of the things that foolishly supported the world: a fork, a radio, a rag doll. Maybe the successive addition of shadows would end by shoring up the thing-in-itself and Homer would be saved from the void that was gradually making its way through his head.

  *

  Z was a major poet. On one occasion he summoned Federico and me to read us some extracts from That. We met on a bench on College Walk, in the center of the Columbia University campus. Federico arrived late, with his habitual star-on-the-verge-of-discovery arrogance. I was with Nella Larsen, he explained, as if to say that he’d been frolicking with the King of France. Federico was like a Narcissus who’d read Freud but, instead of being horrified, had been moved.

  Z launched directly into his reading, as do the thoroughly self-confident or those all too unsure of everything. Listening to him read was like witnessing an Abyssinian religious ceremony. I hardly understood anything, even though my English had improved considerably. Some of the poems were riddled with Marxist, Cabetist, Spinozist theories, theories in general, and this allied them to the prophets who used to stand on corners of the Financial District foretelling the end of the capitalist world, of the world as we know it. But beyond the theories there was a plasticity in his poetry that I hadn’t heard in any of my Yankee peers (who, moreover, never even suspected I was their peer). Certain lines about how time changes us were etched in my mind. I’ve never been completely able to understand them, but they return to me from time to time, and they roll me around like a sow in the detritus of her discontent.

  *

  Perhaps if I put a bar of soap in their saucer or a bit of shaving lotion, these blessed cats will die and leave me in peace.

  *

  We play hide-and-seek in this enormous house. It’s a different version of the game. I hide and the others have to find me. Sometimes hours go by. I shut myself up in the closet and write long, long paragraphs about another life, a life that is mine but not mine. Until someone remembers that I’m hiding and they find me and the boy shouts: Found!

  *

  This Saturday I have to go to Manhattan to see the children. Their mother goes away for weekends—to the luxury beachside houses on the Long Island coast—and I stay in the rich-girl’s apartment in the high numbers of Park Avenue.

  I arrive a little late and the doorman lets me up to the apartment. I know that there is, though now I have a problem seeing it, a marble table in the hall with a vase of fresh flowers; there’s a long table and a room for entertaining guests. There’s a canteen of cutlery and the crockery from which I ate many meals, a wall covered in family portraits among which I do not figure—except in the scar made by a nail. There’s a piano
and its illegible sheet music, trays, a uniformed maid, a bed as vast and bitter yellow as the sea at Mazatlán. There’s a cabinet full of all-important spirits.

  My ex-wife has had the delicacy not to be there to greet me. She leaves me a note with instructions the maid reads out to me: the boy mustn’t eat sugar, for now; the little girl has her bath at eight o’clock. As if I didn’t know.

  It’s a bright, splendid afternoon. I put the note in my pocket, grab a bottle of Colombian hard liquor, and take the children for a walk in my old neighborhood.

  We want to go to the fair, Papa.

  Can’t be done, kids, there’s no money.

  We take the subway to the low hundreds and walk across the city from east to west. On a corner, we buy a watermelon and sodas. When we get to Morningside Park, we sit under an American sycamore, over fifteen meters high, its shadow tangled, like black people’s hair. We break the watermelon open with our hands, a stone, a stick, and our teeth; I make them eat the whole thing, sitting on our sweaters, because we’ve forgotten the special rugs their mother keeps for picnics.

  We can’t eat any more watermelon, Papa, we’ll explode, they plead.

  Keep eating, nothing comes free.

  Nothing except the Colombian liquor, which goes down a treat. There’s something miraculous about alcohol for a man in my condition: it unshackles something, relaxes the nerves on the other side of the eyeballs, and allows what for a long time has been hidden behind the cataracts to become visible.

  I make out a family a few yards away from us. They’ve got tablecloths, music, drinks, children with baseball mitts. With my slightly drunk Dutch courage, I approach the group and strike up a friendship with the head of the family. He offers me rum. My hard liquor has all gone, so I accept. I call my children, who hesitate a little before the new clan. One of the younger kids, a sturdy, cheerful girl, introduces herself: I’m Dolores, but you can call me Do. Pleased to meet you. My boy finally agrees to put on the mitt and his sister follows his example. The children play baseball in Morningside: it’s a bit like happiness.