To Walk Alone in the Crowd

by Antonio Munoz Molina

  YOUR LOW-COST URBAN OASIS. I put on earbuds and listen to the recordings on my phone with an open notebook and a pencil in my hand. I transcribe quickly what I hear but I fall behind and have to stop and rewind to the moment I left off writing. Some phrases and bits of conversation I remember well, and can recall exactly where I was when I first heard them. At other times it is all unrecognizable. Or the noise of traffic is so loud that it drowns out my voice and I’m unable to understand what I said, no matter how many times I replay it. My voice sounds very strange, deeper than I would expect and a little weak or faltering. It is only on the recording that I become aware of the full volume and intensity of the endless noise that I failed to notice even as it was drowning out my voice and everything else around me. I thought I was capturing every little sound as I walked down the street when in fact I could barely hear the loudest sound of all, the one that never ends, like the roaring of the sea, growing worse if a truck or a bus happens to pass by or if there’s a clamor of engines, a clatter of machines and clanging metal plates laid over potholes, of bulldozers and pneumatic drills tearing up the asphalt and digging into the sandy soil beneath. Over the monstrous bass of the city’s traffic you can hear the beeping sound of a crossing signal, the long wail of a siren or an ambulance.

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  WE HELP YOU DISCOVER WHAT’S INSIDE YOU. I hear quick bursts of conversation of which I can only distinguish a few words. I hear the age-old singsong of a man selling fruit on the street. “Cherries, cherries, señora, have a look at these red cherries, señora, good cherries, señora.” Unexpectedly I hear a woman’s voice that I recorded while waiting for the light to change on Velázquez Street. She was speaking calmly in a high, clear voice, just a few steps away from me. People talk loudly on the phone without realizing others could be listening in or spying on them. I have to play her monologue a few times to catch every word. It was a young woman, I remember. She was pushing a baby stroller with both hands and holding the phone to her ear by craning her neck against her shoulder, almost between her chin and clavicle. “Dinner was good, very good. It was with the American ambassador. And you’ll never guess who came along with him. Harrison Ford. I swear. Oh, it was great, just so cool. Just great. So cool. Wonderful people. Harrison Ford was totally down-to-earth, with that beard of his. I mean, I don’t think it suits him. And everyone was really pleased about the elections. It was great, really great.”

  * * *

  YOUR TOP FITNESS MOMENTS. There are rare stretches where all you can hear is traffic and the sound of footsteps. Nobody’s footsteps. My voice, which can usually be heard repeating a phrase I read on the street or recounting what I see, has disappeared. There’s a sound like the sound of wind blowing through the trees or of waves crashing on an empty shore. Someone listening to these fragments wouldn’t be able to tell in what city they were recorded. A ceaseless sound without a name. Whenever I stop speaking into the phone I turn off the recorder, but sometimes I forget, or miss the button, and the seconds and tenths of a second keep ticking away in an accidental recording that sometimes lasts for several minutes. I walk in silence and the phone continues to record inside my pocket. Sometimes the noise grows faint and distant. I must have turned off an avenue and gone down a quiet street. My footsteps are heard more clearly, and birdsong, too, faint but perceptible, sparrows in the branches of an acacia tree on some side street in Madrid, or a magpie, the screeching of parrots. A specialized sound engineer could find this recording and begin to catalog each of its acoustic signals, lifting them apart like layers in an archeological site. The sound of shutters being abruptly lowered. An automatic garage door being raised. The birdlike clamor of children playing in a schoolyard. Sounds from a different era, a different century. A knife-grinder’s whistle. The sea, which had been calm, is suddenly stirred, revealing a vast expanse of sound stretching in a series of receding planes to the horizon. The wail of a police siren in the far distance. An ambulance, faint at first, then drawing near, drowning out all other sounds, then gradually diminishing until it is finally lost in the great acoustic fog.

  * * *

  CELEBRATE EVERYTHING YOU HAVE. My voice is gone and so am I. There are just footsteps, which don’t seem like mine, don’t sound like footsteps at all but rather like a hollow pounding or the heartbeat of a very large creature, the uneven steps of a heavy man, limping, perhaps a man with a big shoe and a brace of metal rods and screws around his leg. It sounds like a piston or a pair of bellows, opening and closing, an ivory leg, a wooden leg striking rhythmically on a wooden floor. In the background there is a kind of clumsy, groaning accordion. For a moment, the sharp click of high heels sets off a counterpoint to the clomping of the orthopedic shoe, of Ahab’s shoe, old Ahab wandering around Madrid. I go back to the start of the recording and it seems both stranger and more unquestionable that those steps belong to me. Then I listen more carefully to the faint metallic sound: keys, or coins, rattling with each step and striking against something. The reason the footsteps sound so deep and uneven is that they’re recorded from the side pocket where I carry the phone. The metallic sound is the sound of keys and coins striking against the phone itself.

  TRY ON A NEW IDENTITY. On a TV screen at the airport, a blond woman takes a cab in Copenhagen. She’s wearing dark glasses, high heels, and a black suit. A moment later the city she glimpses through the window of the cab is London. She types something on her phone; when she looks up again the blue pillars and harp-like cables of the Manhattan Bridge are gliding past the window. This time yesterday I was walking through Madrid on a warm summer evening, now I watch a red sky turn purple from a sidewalk in Paris, breathing in the same balmy air. The sudden sense of distance alters and widens my spirit, heightening within me a feeling of anticipation or of trembling premonition, as if these were the last days before some great event, the last night of an era that only in retrospect will be seen clearly to have been drawing to a close. Days that feel like photographs, touched by the faint aura of what will come to be remembered, to be witnessed years later in a documentary: people walking down the street in period dress, or seated outside a café, unaware of the future archaism of their clothes or of the faint archeological air that clings to them, their hats, the way they wear their hair, the cars going by, which already look like museum pieces.

  * * *

  OFF TO THE CITY AT THE LOWEST POSSIBLE PRICE. To walk through Paris with nothing to do and no one to meet after a day’s work is to be here on this precise evening in June and simultaneously to remember it years or decades later, when things that are hazy or even entirely invisible in the present will appear in the crisp, irrefutable outline of their historical becoming. Crowds of young people are drinking and chatting under the bridges along the Seine, their bare legs dangling from the stone embankment and their cheerful voices ringing out as on a square in Madrid. The river’s current is swift, rough, powerful, with an oily sheen under the streetlights like the back of a huge aquatic creature. By the flowing Seine I remember the Hudson. I lose track of how long I have been walking. There are squares and avenues flooded with a stifling crowd of tourists, like Venice on a summer day, and then, a step away, smaller squares and narrow streets sunk in a kind of antique silence, the black-and-white Paris of Brassaï. All day the sun beat down on the limestone buildings. After months of gray skies and ceaseless rain, women are out again in skirts and blouses, baring their shoulders and their pale legs. Time and space seem to distend in the thick, warm air and in the lingering daylight, inviting people to drift lazily along. At ten in the evening there is still light. Young people wade into the fountain on the Place Saint-Michel, beneath the bronze archangel treading on a demon with his wings outspread, raising a sword.

  * * *

  WE HAVE EVERYTHING YOU NEED. At street corners, or in the hollow doorways of shuttered shops, large families or tribes of Romanian gypsies have set up camp, taking over the sidewalk with their mattresses and their old blankets and sheets. Men and women with children, or al
one, or holding babies in their arms; small flocks of lively, ragged children with flashing eyes and dirty faces, the racket of a gypsy camp right next to the luxury shops and the lights of the cafés. At the outdoor tables there are open newspapers with alarming headlines, as in a documentary about the 1930s. And just as in those old pictures, there seems to be no connection between the ominous news and the placid normalcy of life. My verbal tenses slip into the past. The Brexit referendum just took place, but the results will not be known until dawn. Outside the brasseries there are piles of oysters and shellfish half-sunk in glaciers of chopped ice that are lit to heighten their freshness. Trays of beer mugs capped with foam seem to glide in the air, held aloft over the waiters’ heads.

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  AN ANSWER TO EVERY QUESTION. It could all be a mirage. The dazed, fragile mirth of a vanished world. I was told that in the outer neighborhoods of Paris there are groups of Muslim watchmen patrolling the streets to impose Sharia and punish women who go out without covering their heads. The bookstores that stay open late into the night are as resplendent as the brasseries. L’Écume des Pages is as full of customers and as well stocked with all kinds of appealing books as always. In Paris you swim in the high spectacle of the city, giving in to an endless craving for bookstores and for the French language, for hearing, speaking, and reading it, a language as sumptuous as French food and producing in the returning enthusiast a mild inebriation like that of French wine. The Rue des Beaux-Arts is so quiet that I can hear my own footsteps as I look again for the facade of the hotel where Oscar Wilde once lived and died. I have walked for hours on an empty stomach and I’m starting to feel hungry. At an old bistro named Chez Fernand I dine on boeuf bourguignon and drink plenty of red wine served in a carafe. My feet are sore and I am sated and happy and keep walking until midnight. Almost every corner is haunted by some revered ghost. Brassaï went through that doorway on the Rue des Grands-Augustins many times to visit Picasso and photograph his sculptures. Balzac lived and wrote nearby as well. Oscar Wilde checked into the Hôtel d’Alsace under the name Sebastian Melmoth. In New York, in a glass case at the Morgan Library, I once saw a bill bearing that name. Wilde got very sick and was never forced to pay it.

  YOUR ROAD THROUGH THE WORLD STARTS HERE. Insomnia breeds inside a hotel room like moss in a shady place. I go to bed dead-tired but I stay up, avidly reading and examining the books I just bought until my eyes close. Sleep, though not fatigue, dissipates as soon as I turn off the light. A captivating book is a kind of stimulant similar to caffeine. I find in what I read an intimation of a loose and scattered music that I would like to capture in my notebook, clipped and supple, the honed precision of Marguerite Duras or of Paul Valéry. I wake up suddenly from a deep and troubled sleep and am lost in darkness, unable to remember having turned off the light or even where I am. I dreamed of the facade of a hotel that looked like this one, whose name I could read on a bright sign: Hotel Cólera-Miró. My phone, which had been off, is casting its white glow on the nightstand. I see on the screen the latest numbers from the British referendum, the calamity that no one thought would happen.

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  YOU WILL MEET NEW CHALLENGES WITH RESOLVE. I lie awake, then fall into short stretches of restless sleep from which I wake once more to fall asleep again, so that the night in the hotel seems to go on forever. I wake up and think that I’ve slept for a long time, surely it will soon be morning; I even mistake the glow of the streetlamp coming in through the curtains for the first light of day. When its true character becomes apparent, it seems impossible to have mistaken it for the sun. And when I pick up my phone, fumbling in an unfamiliar darkness where habit has not yet laid its signposts, the screen lights up and I’m astonished to see that it is three in the morning. Many hours of darkness remain. I go from sleep to waking and back again as if moving through a series of identical communicating rooms. I can’t tell if they’re always different or if maybe there are just a few rooms through which I pass again and again.

  * * *

  CUSTOMIZE YOUR PROFILE. In the meantime, silence is a sedative against what seemed like a return of anxiety. The gift of insomnia is a deep, broad silence that can never be found during the day or in the evening hours when people are still out. Insomnia is a place of hidden crypts and soundproof chambers, of subterranean lakes whose smooth, translucent waters are lit by glowing microscopic organisms. It’s precisely in this silence that the task can come to life, become auspicious and appealing, a promise of effortless absorption so enjoyable that it doesn’t matter if it turns out to be useless or to dissolve into nothing, just one among the many projects that rise like splendid clouds in your imagination, taking the shape of continents, arctic cliffs and archipelagos, cities full of terraces and golden galleries and domes like the ones De Quincey saw in his opium dreams—until they waver and begin to lose their shape, and finally dissolve without a trace into the blue.

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  THE BEST THINGS CAN’T BE LABELED. I once met a scientist who had a passion for clouds. He always carried a camera, knowing how crucial it was to photograph them quickly. Sometimes if he saw an interesting cloud while driving he would stop the car on the side of the road, even on the highway, and hurry to take its picture. He was a specialist in fluid dynamics, and also, he said, a member of the International Cloud Appreciation Society. Could this be what your writing and your projects are like? Currents of air and molecules of water vapor coming together in bizarre yet predictable shapes, following a fixed repertoire that can be ordered and classified like plant or animal species. Writing takes shape and sculpts itself out of a material nearly as intangible as water molecules suspended in the air. And once it has a shape, acquiring a clear outline in the mind of the reader, it vanishes spontaneously after a few moments or a few minutes, dissolving like a cloud or like the geometric shapes carefully composed in multicolored sands by a Tibetan monk in a mandala, which, once finished, he will erase just as conscientiously with the palm of his hand.

  OUR PASSION IS TO TURN YOUR DAILY ROUTINES INTO UNFORGETTABLE MOMENTS. They arrived with merciless punctuality at eight in the morning, taking the house by storm like a methodical commando. After a few minutes they were moving through the rooms with strategic swiftness, as if they had studied in advance the plans of the fortress they were going to invade. Outside the house they parked a huge truck that took up half the street. They came equipped with tools, dark blankets, coils of rope and twine, unassembled cardboard boxes, retrofuturistic guns that will allow them to lay down and snip long strips of adhesive tape in one motion, a tape that will squeak throughout the day as they apply it and smooth it down and cut it with a quick, loud, repetitive tearing noise. Their blue shirts look vaguely like police uniforms, with sewn badges and epaulettes. The women are female commandos as tough as the men. They wear their hair up in a ponytail and issue curt commands. Some of the men are older but still quite sturdy, strengthened by a job that keeps them relentlessly in shape. The younger ones are foreign, Latin American, perhaps Romanian. They have tattoos and beards and their stiff pants are tucked into their hiking boots. As soon as they arrived, the house ceased to be what it had been for the past twelve years, up until the very instant we woke up this morning, which is our last. The house is an encampment now, a warehouse, its doors thrown open so that people can rush up and down the stairs while we grow smaller and more irrelevant with every passing moment, a pair of inept and puny individuals standing in the way and hesitating when decisions must be made, watching like the weak victims of an invasion as all of their possessions are taken down and packed away, dozens of books pulled off the shelves by the armful to be shoved carelessly into cardboard boxes that the workers carry off with gruff annoyance.

  * * *

  YOU CAN ACHIEVE YOUR DREAM AT ANY AGE. I walk around the house feeling daunted, standing always in the way of someone in a hurry to get through with a heavy load. I watch them empty my record shelves and can’t bring myself to ask them to be careful. I start assembling
a cardboard box and one of them walks over, puts it expertly together and sets it at my feet politely though with a hint of contempt. Some of the women look even more imposing because they carry walkie-talkies. The men only pause to give or to receive instructions on their phones. I start putting things away that, in the midst of the maelstrom, suddenly seem like the strange and elaborately ridiculous contents of a junk shop: paintings, souvenirs, photographs, documents that lay forgotten for years in the back of a drawer, things that accumulated over time from sheer inertia and that I did not remember keeping: drawings that my children made when they were little; telegrams from a not-so-distant time when one still sent such things; old batteries, keys to unknown doors, charging cables for lost and obsolete devices, for digital cameras we never used again, all of it in one big jumble and almost none of it of any use, relics, trash. And there I am, staring at a faded Polaroid or at a note I scribbled long ago on the back of some official invitation, while behind me a group of burly men is carrying a sofa as big as a rhino, sweating and cursing as they try, though it seems hopeless, to twist it through a door, onto a landing, and down a flight of stairs.