Faces in the Crowd

by Valeria Luiselli

  *

  Among the fallen books, we find one of my old Post-its.

  A piece of your book, Mama!

  Let’s see.

  Here, you read it out.

  Note: As a child, Owen had “the six magic senses.” He predicted earthquakes. The doctors in El Rosario suggested opening up his head to find the cause.

  *

  The narrator of the novel should be like an Emily Dickinson. A woman who remains eternally locked up in her house, or in a subway carriage, it makes no difference which, talking with her ghosts and trying to piece together a series of broken thoughts.

  *

  I don’t think Without is in the house anymore, Mama.

  Why do you say that?

  Because I think that if he was, he’d help us.

  *

  One day the narrator of this novel finds a pot with a dead tree on her doorstep and brings it inside. She waters it but it never really revives. She begins to write about what that plant sees from a corner of one of the rooms. The plant will start to impose itself on the voice of the narrator until completely taking it over. The dead tree narrates from a corner, to one side of the front door, from where the kitchen, the small lounge, and part of the bedroom can be seen. It likes watching the woman get undressed at night in her bedroom before going to the bathroom to brush her teeth: it watches the tangled trail of her pubis as she passes, then it studies the shape of her ass as she returns to the bedroom.

  *

  Help us do what?

  I don’t know, help us find spiders, catch flies and cockroaches, eat cereal.

  Would he help us glue the house back together?

  Glue the house, Mama, what for?

  So it can withstand the next earthquake?

  Earthquakes don’t exist, Mama.

  *

  I get up from the kitchen table and head to the bathroom for a piss. I can report, with the greatest certainty a man in my condition is conceded, that I am now positively, absolutely blind. But blindness isn’t what I expected. Instead of a definite whiteness or blackness—which would have been a respite from the confusing chiaroscuro of the last months—things are beginning to appear again. Just when I’m starting to disappear. I flick on the bathroom switch. Electric light makes hardly any difference these days and rather serves, as that repugnant German philosopher wrote, to illuminate my almost total ignorance of the world. But on this occasion, the opposite occurs—or, perhaps more disturbingly, the opposite of the opposite. Perhaps this is unblindness. I switch on the light and see the whole bathroom, the floor carpeted with cat shit, the nearly empty bottles of discarded toiletries, half-finished rolls of toilet paper forming a pyramid next to the lavatory, a bottle of whisky in the sink, a creeper growing in through the small window that ventilates the miniscule space occupied by the bathtub. Around me, a score of flies, or perhaps mosquitos, buzz in the heavy air.

  I glance toward the mirror to locate myself within this nightmarish scene. But I’m not there. Instead of my face, I see a flicker of Nella Larsen’s. So my theory was correct. This is my blindness. My unblindness. This is my hell. I turn off the light and unblindly complete my modest hygiene ritual.

  *

  And where can Without have gone?

  I don’t know. Perhaps he’s on top of the house. Or perhaps he went to Philadelphia with Papa.

  Papa’s not in Philadelphia, my darling.

  Pa-pa, says the baby.

  *

  Standing by the sink, with the light out, I try to gargle. I can just make myself out in the invisible bathroom mirror. I’m a shadow, with the fading grimace of myself encrusted in the hole where my face used to be. I rinse my mouth and the contact of the cold water with my palate makes me retch. Squatting down, I vomit into the toilet bowl. My face is no longer enclosed by a contour; it extends toward the edge of something that can no longer contain me, like a glass on the point of overflowing. I’m afraid of coming unstuck from myself, I don’t want to turn around and spill over, outside my epidermis, like the antiman in that poem José Gorostiza finally finished, who says he is “besieged” in his epidermis. What an obscenely clinical word. Why not simply say “skin”?

  The gargling makes me feel sick. I throw up into the sink. If the kids were to see me, they’d say I was the vomiting dwarf.

  *

  The children and I walk around like three cats in the dark corners, picking up things that have fallen and go on falling. The baby crawls happily on the floor carpeted with books.

  *

  One of the cats, most probably Cantos, my favorite, is waiting for me outside the bathroom door. I feel quite moved. It’s as if it understood that something was happening to me. That things aren’t going very well today. I try to stroke him, and as I slide my damp hand gently down his spine I realize that he no longer has a tail. Has he been fighting with That and Paterson? Bastards.

  *

  Mama, says the boy, looking out of the living room window into the patio, come and see.

  What is it, my boy?

  A little cat without a tail!

  There is indeed a tailless cat walking around the patio as if it were the most natural thing in the world. It’s a disturbing sight. I take the two children back into the kitchen. We’re safer there.

  *

  As I cross the living room to return to the kitchen, carrying Cantos in my arms, I see Ezra Pound, clear as daylight, sitting in my Reposet, making notes on a piece of paper. Above his head, flies are gyrating in perfect circles, tracing a vortex. He’s focused on his task, and I don’t want to disturb him for fear of interrupting some important, or at least clever, poem. I pass him in silence, and enter the kitchen once more.

  *

  We’re not going to leave the kitchen anymore, I say to the boy. It’s too dangerous. If there’s another tremor, things could fall on us.

  Houses, Mama?

  Yes, houses.

  *

  Back in the kitchen, I pour myself a little more whisky and search for That and Paterson under the table. There they are, the catty things. I feel for their tails: nothing. How can three cats suddenly lose their tails? Not even a stump, a scar. Nothing. Just round little asses and thick fur where formerly there were tails.

  I begin to write the children a letter that I’ll send when their mother tells me where they are: If they tell you I’ve died, kids, it’s a lie, I’m just fading away. The doctors say I’m going blind. But that’s not true either: what’s happening is that I’m rubbing myself out. And it’s not just me. The cats of this world are also rubbing themselves out. Watch out for their tails during your trip. You’ll see that some of them haven’t got any. Did you know that was possible? I didn’t. But even if I’m rubbing myself out, you two will always be able to see me if you want to. Anyway, what’s true is that I’m potbellied. And that I live with three tailless cats you’d really like. Their names are That, Paterson, and Cantos.

  *

  There are cockroaches in the kitchen. I don’t know what’s happened, but they’re everywhere. Maybe our neighbor’s frogs died in the earthquake and the cockroaches have multiplied. Maybe they’ve always been there, under the house, and have now come up through the rubble. The boy and I squash them under the soles of our shoes.

  *

  If I could talk to Homer once more, I’d start:

  Can I ask you a question, Homer?

  Fire away, Owen.

  What’s the last thing to disappear?

  I’m not sure what you’re referring to, Owen.

  To death, of course.

  Did you know that certain animals can exist without their heads?

  *

  While we’re treading on insects in the kitchen, the boy tells me that if you cut a cockroach’s head off, it goes on living for two weeks. He says he learned that at school. I get a fit of giggles. So does he. The baby doesn’t laugh: she gazes at us in serene silence.

  *

  I believe I would have preferred just to go b
lind. Unblindness and disappearing, erasing myself while I begin to see others clearly again, doesn’t seem to be the best way to end my days. I’d already gotten completely used to the idea of not seeing anything or anyone. And now what happens is that Nella appears to me in the bathroom. Pound in the Reposet. A while ago, I thought I heard, very clearly, the slightly nasal voice of Guty Cárdenas singing “Un rayito de sol.”

  From my briefcase, I take out the picture of the evening of the Moor. I’m sure I was there, I remember it. In any case, I don’t think I’ll go back to the photography studio. I don’t want to leave the house. In fact, I think I’ll call in sick tomorrow.

  *

  We’ve finally finished killing all the cockroaches. I tell the boy to get under the table. We’re going to make a bed and sleep here, I say.

  *

  Someone knocks. I get up from my chair and head to the door of the apartment. As I begin to open it, I hear a din like thousands of cockroaches’ tiny feet going up and down the stairs of the building. A slow, paralyzing fear settles in my stomach and seeps down into my limbs. My legs become rigid and a tremor shakes my hands. I double-lock the door and head to the bedroom, sliding one hand along the wall of newspaper that now almost completely covers the left side of the passage.

  *

  Why do we have to sleep under the table, Mama? Can’t we sleep on top?

  No, it’s dangerous. We’re going to sleep under it.

  Like cats?

  Yes, like three little cats.

  *

  I go into the bedroom and Federico is shaving his legs by the lamp next to my bed. Beside him, sitting at my dressing table, Z is cleaning his spectacles. I don’t say anything—I was brought up to believe it’s always better not to make waves, although my first instinct is to tell Federico it was about time he got rid of all that leg hair. They’re taking up all my space. I hurry back to the kitchen, pour myself a glass of water with an inch of whisky, and gulp it down. The cats are under the table. Maybe I can lie down on top of the table, next to the orange tree. That way I can think about the novel a little longer. Maybe I can try to get some sleep.

  *

  I try to get some sleep under the kitchen table with the two children huddled against my body, covering each of them with an arm. I’m afraid of the darkness because the cockroaches might come out for a walk and we won’t see them. I’m woken by the sound of their little feet, scratching on the cement or the metal of the fridge. I cover the children’s ears so the cockroaches can’t get in, so they can’t get into their dreams.

  What’s that noise, Mama?

  Nothing.

  *

  I take off my blazer, fold it to make a pillow, and get onto the table.

  *

  I think it’s the cockroaches, Mama.

  Or maybe it’s your papa.

  *

  As I lie in the darkness of the kitchen, eyes wide open, I hear the buzzing of a fly. Or maybe a mosquito. The sound turns into the distant siren of an ambulance that never quite arrives, returns to being a fly, and goes back to being a siren. I can’t see the mosquito or fly, of course. But when it comes close I swat it. I wonder if this is going to be my last handle on the world: a Doppler effect that comes to nothing, that never finishes. I sweat, tremble, turn over on one side on the hard wooden surface. William Carlos Williams comes in through the door and says:

  I’ve spent the whole day delivering children in ambulances. Why don’t women give birth in hospitals anymore?

  I don’t know.

  If you don’t mind, Gilberto, I’ll just use your sink to wash my hands.

  Go ahead, William. Or is it Carlos?

  I take my blazer from under my head, cover my face with it, and try to sleep.

  *

  No, Mama, it’s flies. And mosquitos. During the day, they hide inside the shower and at night they bite us.

  *

  It’s terribly hot in the kitchen. I uncover my face. William Carlos has finished washing his obstetrician’s hands and is watching me, standing at the foot of the table, like a surgeon about to begin his rounds. I say:

  What do you think of this couplet I just wrote? Dead fly song of not seeing anything, not hearing anything, that nothing is.

  Not bad. A bit like Emily Dickinson, but not bad.

  He checks my pulse and tells me I’ll be O.K. Then he leaves the kitchen. I cover my face again. The flies or mosquitos are still buzzing nearby.

  *

  The baby has woken up and is crying. The boy and I try to calm her.

  Cradle her, suggests the boy.

  Cradle her?

  Yes, to see if it calms her down.

  I rock her in my arms. Nothing. She keeps on crying. Her sobs fill the room. We get out from under the table and walk around the kitchen.

  Why don’t we sing to her, Mama?

  *

  I think the mosquitos are voices. I can distinguish two: one belonging to a little boy, and the other to a baby. The baby cries a lot and the child sings a disturbing nursery rhyme.

  *

  The boy sings. He has a beautiful, tuneful voice: Autumn leaves are falling down, falling down, falling down. Autumn leaves are falling down and Papa’s missing.

  *

  I don’t want to hear anything, song of not seeing anything. Beside me, in the white darkness, I hear a soft laugh, the merry chortle of a baby. I feel the blazer that covers my eyes rising, the heat of the room entering and shaking my body, the excited voice of a little boy beating my face:

  Found!

  CHRISTINA MACSWEENEY has an MA in literary translation from the University of East Anglia and specializes in Latin American fiction. Her translations have previously appeared in a variety of online sites and literary magazines. She has also translated Valeria Luiselli’s volume of essays, Sidewalks.

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  MANIFESTO À VELO

  An essay from Sidewalks by Valeria Luiselli

  Paper • 978-1-56689-356-5

  eBook • 978-1-56689-357-2

  Stop

  Apologists for walking have elevated ambulation to the height of an activity with literary overtones. From the Peripatetic philosophers to the modern flâneurs, the leisurely stroll has been conceived as a poetics of thought, a preamble to writing, a space for consultation with the muses. It is perhaps true that in other times the greatest risk one ran on going out for a walk was, as Rousseau related in one of his Meditations, to be knocked down by a dog. But the reality is that, nowadays, the pedestrian can’t venture out into the street with the same extravagant spirit and modernist love for the metropolis as the eclectic Swiss writer Robert Walser professed at the beginning of his novel The Walk: “One morning, as the desire to walk came over me, I put my hat on my head, left my writing room, or room of phantoms, and ran down the stairs to hurry out into the street.”

  The urban walker has to march to the rhythm of the city in which he finds himself and demonstrate the same single-minded purpose as other pedestrians. Any modulation of his pace makes him the object of suspicion. The person who walks too slowly could be plotting a crime or—even worse—might be a tourist. Except for those who still take their dogs for a walk, children coming home from school, the very old, or itinerant street vendors, no one in the city has the right to slow, aimless walking. At the other extreme, anyone who runs without wearing the obligatory sports attire could be fleeing justice, or suffering some sort of noteworthy panic attack.

  Speed cameras

  The cyclist, on the other hand, is sufficiently invisible to achieve what the pedestrian cannot: traveling in solitude and abandoning himself to the sweet flow of his thoughts. The bicycle is halfway between the shoe and the car, and its hybrid nature sets its rider on the margins of all possible surveillance. Its lightness allows the rider to sail past pedestrian eyes and be overlooked by motorized travelers. The cyclist, thus, possesses an extraordinary freedom: he is invisible. The only declared enemy of the cyclist is the dog, an animal obscenely programmed to chase any object that moves faster than itself.