To Walk Alone in the Crowd

by Antonio Munoz Molina

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  WHY GO SOMEWHERE ELSE WHEN EVERYTHING IS HERE. If you listen carefully you can distinguish between the steps of women wearing sandals and those wearing heels. Come to a Gin Masterclass. Your beauty center. Car insurance for just thirty-two euros a month. A gin masterclass sounds like an Intro to Alcoholism. Offers, gifts, proposals, overtures, all of it spreading before you on either side as you walk down the street. Find a new reason to keep smiling. A slim brunette stands on a beach in a bikini, looking off toward the sunset in a man’s arms. If you like the Dead Sea, wait till you see what else is here. Come in for a free consultation. Ask us about health insurance. Smoking causes cancer. Insure the future. Come in and discover the ingredients of life. At each step there is a voice, a door that opens into radiant discoveries and revelations. Come in. Find out. Come in and ask. Come in and see how technology is changing sports. I am holding a cell phone, like everyone else around me, but not to my ear. I hold it near my mouth instead so that I can repeat what I read or what I hear, mumbling as I walk, pretending to be busy with some urgent task, perhaps giving someone instructions over the phone or telling them I am coming to the office, to a meeting, while in fact relaying all the secrets I observe. Trust, reliability, peace of mind. NeoLife Age Medicine. NeoLife could be the name of one of those apocalyptic technological foundations dreamed up by Don DeLillo. All safety regulations are mandatory. Welcome to the secret world inside your cell phone.

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  REDISCOVER ALL THAT A PHONE CAN DO. I switch on the voice recorder to repeat something I’ve read. I press stop but a moment later I have to switch it on again. Give blood. We buy gold. The signs along the sidewalk gradually fall into a cadence. We buy silver and gold. Give life. An automated chirp at the corner lets you know that it’s okay to cross. Through the sound of footsteps, now that the cars have stopped, I can hear the tapping and scraping of a blind person’s cane behind me. In the movie M, a blind man follows the child murderer at night through the streets of a stage-set city. Oriental massage 24 hours. Asian girls. Fifteen minutes 30€. Twenty minutes 45€. One hour 70€. Complimentary drink. A digital stopwatch is running silently on a nightstand in a room where an Asian girl lies naked. Her heavily made-up eyes glance sideways at the clock in an artificial half-light of clandestine lust. Beautiful and discreet. There’s heavy breathing on her face and neck, and in the background she can hear the morning sounds of traffic, the same siren that I hear approaching and that will be recorded by my phone. I’m just an app away. Where time doesn’t matter. Discover the pleasures of tantric massage. Take a bit of our taste with you. You make me melt, says an ad for ice cream with a tongue and a pair of red lips licking a chocolate cone. Giovanni Bojanini Skin-Care Clinic. Change anything you want. Centaur Security. There’s a painting by Velázquez where a centaur in the background seems to be calmly chatting with St. Anthony in a field next to a river, like neighbors who have just run into each other. Attend a special tasting. As unique as you. Want to eliminate the toxins that build up in your digestive tract? Centaurs and security guards, plastic surgeons and young Asian prostitutes, rows of silver fish and orthopedic shoes and white canes and locksmiths. The voyage is you. Who are they taking away in that ambulance that just went by, the sound of its siren drilling into my ears before it got stuck in traffic up ahead? Internal cleanses from fifteen euros a month. Stop & Go. The city speaks in polyglot voices. Cream and Coffee. More apartments than ever. Shop online. Wedding and reception rentals. Argonaut. The word Argonaut is a spark of poetry, like siren or centaur. Café Prensa Pizza open 24 hours. Luxury apartment for rent, newly renovated. By removing the prepositions they speed up the tempo of language. Magic House Riddles and Mysteries. March to Abolish Zoos and Aquariums. We Love Churros con Chocolate. We catch shooting stars.

  EVERYTHING YOU NEED TO ENJOY THE SUMMER. It was the summer of short, light dresses like tunics on a Greek frieze, of shorts cinched at the top of the thigh and flat sandals with thin leather straps and toenails painted in bright colors, red primarily, though also green, blue, or yellow. Your skin, your city. A destination that will reach your heart. Night begins when you decide. It was the summer of bare shoulders and bare legs and a glowing sense of change and newness, as when miniskirts first appeared in the sixties. An overflow, an excess of youth and beauty during those first days of mild weather following a long winter. Choose your next adventure. Young girls walked down the street in straw hats that they wore tilted back on their heads. They talked on the phone or gazed at their screens, completely absorbed, typing swiftly with long, wavering fingers and painted fingernails that pecked on the glass like birds. To help us enjoy the good times.

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  WHEREVER YOU GO THIS SUMMER. The sharp edges of the present were softened and veiled as if by the sudden retrospective distance of the past. Show your best smile. No sooner did something happen than it seemed to have taken place long ago, as if instantly deprived of its immediacy by a dizzying combination of trivial and terrifying incidents. The sunny days are back. Now is the moment to enjoy the moment. It was the summer of long, straight hair cascading down a tanned back. This is us. Anxiety and nostalgia were twin poles between which I oscillated at every moment. The novelty of the latest fashions seemed to announce their own anachronism in advance. Groups of young people in ads for banks or cell phone companies glowed with the unanimous joy of a cadre of red guards or of peasants and proletarians in the posters of the Chinese Cultural Revolution. Quiero ser happy. The midnight air in Madrid was as thick as syrup and all through July the cicadas buzzed into the evening as if it were still the heat of day. The French army was declaring war on Pokémon. The brother of a Pakistani model murdered in an honor killing said he felt no remorse or shame at taking her life. The present tense slipped into the past at the very moment something was written down or said in conversation. Summer, at its height, seemed lit by the glow of the final summer at the end of an era, the one that people would remember soon after with an exaggerated sense of distance, the last summer before a war, an epidemic, or a great disaster. Spain was the seventh most wasteful country in the world in food consumption. Every day the papers said that a new temperature record had been set, that larger swaths of ice were melting in the North Pole and Antarctica. Blue or emerald cliffs crumbled into the sea as solemnly as ancient temples brought down by earthquakes. Don’t miss the chance you were waiting for. Fall in love with our bargains before summer is out.

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  NO MATTER WHAT YOU THIRST FOR. Ocean currents were going to cause huge storms all over the world. Full-page ads, color brochures, and digital screens in the windows of travel agencies offered lavish, adventurous cruises to tropical paradises. The place you were dreaming of is real. This summer, take your best selfies. Many coastal cities to be under water in a hundred years. Star Wars characters make an appearance at the Brussels airport. A woman was dying after being attacked by several tigers at a Beijing zoo. It was the summer of Pokémon Go and of suicide attacks. A fashion student in London used a tuft of Alexander McQueen’s hair to develop a type of human leather honoring the dead designer. Go as far as you want to. In Kabul, a radical Islamist set off a suicide vest in a crowd, killing ninety people. Pope Francis was urging cloistered nuns not to use the internet to escape the life of contemplation. Mick Jagger was expecting the arrival of his eighth son at age seventy-three. The Unquenchable Fire of Rock-and-Roll’s Most Sexually Active Great-Grandfather. Reduced to fewer and fewer pages, and printed on the cheapest possible paper, newspapers literally began to fall apart in their readers’ invariably aged hands. They ran opinion pieces on politics and terrorism, or devoted entire pages to horoscopes and Egyptian tarot readings. In Nice, the driver of a truck prayed to God, took a selfie and posted it on Facebook before unleashing terror and mayhem. Ask the Oracle of Ammon whatever you want to know. A German climbed the outside of the tallest building in Barcelona to catch a Pokémon. Your past is buried inside the Great Pyramid. Horror and idiocy flooded the he
adlines in equal measure. A Dutch man was hospitalized after spending ten days in a Chinese airport waiting for a woman he had met on Facebook.

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  INVASIVE SPECIES STRIKE BACK. The trivial and the apocalyptic appeared in such close proximity that they sometimes seemed to turn into each other. Porn actress Carla Mai dies after falling from a window at a party where cocaine was being consumed. Man’s head found in waste treatment plant. The stories in the paper were like disaster movies, and the movie trailers seemed to be about calamities and horrors that were really taking place. The Zombie Apocalypse hits Mexico City once again. The world unites to save the Earth from an alien invasion and the total extinction of the human race. Cleveland pays five million dollars in compensation for the death of a Black boy shot dead by police while playing with a toy gun. It was the summer that I was without a permanent address for several months. We moved from hotels to borrowed houses or to other cities, carrying backpacks with our laptops and notebooks and dragging behind us a massive suitcase, a whale of a bag that got heavier and took up more space with each passing day. Five hoodlums between the ages of fifteen and twenty-two terrorize moviegoers at a shopping mall in Fuenlabrada.

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  ONCE NIGHT FALLS YOU’RE NO LONGER SAFE. I was reading Baudelaire, Thomas De Quincey, Lorca, Fernando Pessoa, and Walter Benjamin as if I was twenty and had never read them before. The pranksters put on masks and went into a theater that was screening Ride Along 2. Shouting “Allah is great,” they threw firecrackers and backpacks into the crowd, panicking terrorized patrons who had gone to see a lighthearted comedy and now thought they were in the midst of a full-fledged terrorist attack. Four hundred stranded whales were dying on a beach in New Zealand. I was looking for a music of words, one that belonged simultaneously to poetry and to everyday speech—advertisements, headlines, fashion magazines, erotic classifieds, horoscopes: an inconspicuous music that you could simply breathe in like the air, but that no one had ever imagined or heard before. Go where you didn’t know you wanted to go. E-cigarette explodes in a man’s pocket in California. Humans and robots may become indistinguishable in the future. I felt as free of everything I’d ever done as of the house we’d left behind, the furniture, the closets full of clothes, the books for which I no longer felt the slightest need. I was never without my notebook anymore, or without the dwindling pencil I had bought in Paris at the start of summer. Elephant populations were being decimated by an ivory rush. The largest species of gorilla in the world was about to go extinct. Dutch police were training birds of prey to hunt down drones suspected of carrying explosives.

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  TIMELESS LITERATURE IS BACK LIKE NEVER BEFORE. I took notes in bars and restaurants, on a bench in El Retiro, lurching along on a bus on the outskirts of Madrid. By 2025 the oceans will contain more tons of plastic than fish. Video of an eighteen-year-old Irish girl practicing serial fellatio on a score of drunken young men in exchange for a drink at a Mallorca nightclub goes viral all over the world. Choose your own adventure. Go where your dreams take you. In Germany, a Syrian refugee attacked a pregnant woman on a train with a machete. Break the mold. An idiot in a Zorro costume caused a panic inside LAX. Young woman dies after being struck by a car on a pedestrian crossing on Goya Street. Crimes and hoaxes caused the same amount of fear. Panic on Platja d’Aro as a prank is taken for a terrorist attack. On the promenade, in Nice, people thought the first shots fired by police against the terrorist truck driver were firecrackers from a pyrotechnic show that had just ended. Chinese mining villages were buried in landslides that blocked the course of rivers. New York was gripped by fear following a bomb explosion. Everything you desire is so much easier now.

  CREEPY CLOWNS TERRORIZE GREAT BRITAIN. A student started a panic at Brunel University in London this week by running through campus dressed as a killer clown wielding a chainsaw. A clown frightened people in Leicestershire when he was seen wandering through a cemetery near a school. A blurry picture posted on Facebook showed the clown carrying an ax in one hand. Two clowns in a black van drove up to a pair of girls on their way to school in Essex and asked if they wanted to come to a birthday party. In response, the school board of Clacton County ordered students to remain inside school buildings during lunch. The epidemic of creepy clowns seems to have spread to England from the United States, where novelist Stephen King recently warned on Twitter to “cool the clown hysteria.” Dozens of similar incidents were reported across Great Britain in the last few days according to the police. A clown jumped out of a hedge in a park. Another one walked up to a car at a stop light, opened the door, and sat next to the driver before running away. Anti-clown patrols have formed in some areas. Professor Mark Griffiths, a psychologist at the University of Birmingham who specializes in addictive behaviors, said that several children who were traumatized by clown sightings had to be kept home from school. The sudden rise of creepy clowns has caused alarm in Australia as well. Last Tuesday, police arrested a clown carrying an ax in Victoria, in the country’s southwest, after it accosted a woman in her car. On Sunday, the Thames Valley police said they had received fourteen calls reporting frightening clowns in a twenty-four-hour period. Professor Griffiths says that coulrophobia, or fear of clowns and jesters, is a well-documented syndrome that can cause panic attacks, cold sweats, and difficulty breathing.

  IT’S NOT SUMMER UNLESS YOU HAVE A STORY TO TELL. “My mother was a very good swimmer, but she never got her hair wet,” he says. I am all ears. I listen with my ears and with my eyes. I notice the moment when an ordinary conversation changes course and begins to turn into a confession, as unexpected for the person making it as for the one receiving it. You hear yourself speak with a feeling of disbelief, of gratitude and reprieve, a witness to your own telling. It was the way he said his mother’s hair never got wet that warned me. I did not ask any questions, I just waited. I saw the expression on his face change along with the tone of his voice. Suddenly he is more present than before, yet also much farther away, a time traveler. These things are never planned, they only happen by chance. The person telling the story didn’t know a few minutes earlier that he was about to do so. He didn’t even remember the story. It was the circumstances, a moment of distraction, something unexpected and a little awkward. The two of us are alone because we arrived at the restaurant early. We have known each other for years but have never been alone until today. We arrived before anyone else, each of us separately, at midday, on a Sunday in summer. The neighborhood is as empty as the restaurant. There are flags and paper lanterns from a recent feast day, Manila shawls are still draped over some balconies. We sit facing each other at a table for six. Being alone is pleasant and strange. We both know we are fond of each other, but we have never shown it beyond the ordinary pleasantries of a family gathering. Now that no one else is present—his wife, my wife, the rest of the family—I can see him as an individual, freed of all generic attributions. He is no longer my niece’s husband, one more among the many youthful faces that once belonged to children who are now grown-up, even if we continue to see in them a mirage or a persistence of that earlier age; as if their childhood selves were still their true identity, and everything that followed, all of this, were simply an addition, meaningful, perhaps, but only insofar as it confirms their congenital dispositions, childish features that have simply surfaced more distinctly with the passing years.

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  DISCOVER THE STORY BEHIND THE STORY. I want to listen to him and no one else. I want to see him on his own, outside any group portrait, those generational pictures like the ones in the cell phone ads. It’s easier now because we are alone. Our mutual affection prevails over the ordinary masculine reserve. “We always went to the same beach during the holidays,” he says, “to the same hotel that you and your family go to.” He is quite young, but there is silver in his hair around the temples and in front, over his forehead. He has a deep voice, perhaps slightly put-on from the habitual need to command respect at work, but his eyes are ex
traordinarily frank and his cheeks are ruddy with a healthy, childlike glow. The expression on his face is at once indelibly forlorn and full of gratitude and pure joy at being alive. When the waiter brought us two glasses of beer he drank half of his in a single thirsty gulp, happy in the midday heat, wiping the froth from his lips. These are the gifts of Madrid. He says there’s nothing he enjoys more in life than drinking a cold beer while he makes lunch on Sundays listening to the radio. He finds it amusing and endearing that his wife, my niece, doesn’t know how to cook even a fried egg or some broth from a bouillon cube. They were married two years ago in a ceremony that seemed a bit inspired by some American film, on the grassy lawn of a country house outside Madrid in an area surrounded by shopping malls, highways, and parched fields. They got married and he is happy with his wife and with her family, her mother and sister, her uncles, all of us, some of whom, six to be precise, agreed to meet today at a late Spanish hour that he and I wanted to abridge. That is why we arrived before anyone else and why we find ourselves here, at a table for six, in our summer shirts and our sneakers and shorts, joined by a camaraderie that at least on my part is somewhat of a misunderstanding. As the years go by, our perception of our age grows disconnected from reality. Our true age keeps rising but our perception of it stops, not in the prime of youth, since then it could be easily refuted, but later, in our early forties. He must be around thirty, yet to me we do not seem so far apart: he could be a somewhat younger friend, surely not someone so young as to belong to another era, another world. Our summer shirts and sneakers and the easy flow of conversation make it possible, at least for me, to feel a closeness that is in fact illusory. I am not a somewhat older friend. I could be his father.