To Walk Alone in the Crowd

by Antonio Munoz Molina

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  DINE IN THE DARK SERVED BY BLIND WAITERS. In Trieste, in Paris, James Joyce invents Dublin. In Lisbon, Fernando Pessoa invents Lisbon itself in minute detail. Walter Benjamin visits Baudelaire’s grave in Montparnasse and Proust’s and Oscar Wilde’s in Père Lachaise. I, too, in a former life, went to Proust’s grave, a dark, austere block of marble, and saw Jim Morrison’s grave as well, covered in graffiti and strewn with plastic flowers. Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus wander through Dublin like Bernardo Soares through Lisbon. In 1914, during the war, Proust walks through the streets of Paris by night after the curfew, when all the lights are out and the city glows beneath a full moon that is as slow and stately as a German zeppelin. Soldiers on leave are out on the streets and Proust sometimes follows after them, tempted by their youth. He is fifty but he looks much older, heavyset, feverish, dressed in a thick coat and wheezing on account of his asthma. Faint lights call out to him in the dark from the doorways of the male brothels that he visits with some regularity. Wilde may also have gone through those doors, mumbling his assumed name, Sebastian Melmoth, the perpetual wanderer, as if murmuring an incantation to conceal his true identity. Clarissa Dalloway steps out one morning into a fresh and sunny London street to purchase flowers. Doctor Yuri Zhivago searches Moscow for a blond woman he will never see again. Sometimes, for an instant, he experiences the false joy of thinking he has recognized her in some other woman who resembles her. In Paris, Walter Benjamin likes to go to the last showing at the movie theaters, usually to watch American films. He falls in love with Katharine Hepburn. He pays close attention to the actors’ voices because he is determined to learn English, a step toward a planned immigration to the United States that he can never quite set in motion. Peter Lorre wanders by night through a dark, expressionist city, like a vampire or a Mr. Hyde, whistling Peer Gynt. On the other side of the world Juan Carlos Onetti walks down a brightly lit avenue in Buenos Aires with nothing to eat. In London, on successive nights during the early fall of 1821, Thomas De Quincey stays up for nights on end walking through the city in a kind of temporal hallucination, wandering through the same streets that he had roamed many years before when he was looking for a prostitute he never found again, a girl he knew only by her first name, Ann.

  OUR DIGITAL EXPERTS WILL DESIGN YOUR SMILE. Summer dresses that give a supple outline to the body, to the legs, exactly like the skirts Egyptian dancers wear on bas-reliefs, on carvings of young women bearing gifts, or that wooden statue of a girl carrying on her head a platter with a goose: such ease and lightness, not just to the clothes but to the hair as well, falling loosely over their bare shoulders and backs or covering half the face down to the collarbone. The sandals too seem slightly Egyptian, supple on their shifting feet, and then the flowing motion of the hand as they sweep their hair from their faces or type a message on their phones: long, swift fingers tapping the screen with delicate precision, the merest brush, hovering in the air above the small, smooth screen with a sense of imminence or wonder, as if the paint on their fingernails were still fresh and they needed to be held up in the air to dry. Styled hair and polished, painted fingernails and pedicures, the exquisite ministrations of the beauty parlor and the salon. Pamper your feet. Put a little style in your step. Feline beauty. Slim legs. Sandals are in. Latin American or Asian immigrants, probably undocumented, bend over a pair of bare feet with a reverential care that could itself belong in an Egyptian bas-relief, their mouths and noses covered by masks that will not protect them from the toxic vapors of the products they employ, solvents and lacquers that poison their lungs just like the chemical waste of textile factories poisons the rivers of their native countries.

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  ONCE I GAZED AT YOU IN WONDER. Beauty flows in sandaled feet. In currents of air scented with fragrance and shampoo. Hair and skin as smooth as silk, glowing lips and nails, smooth legs made supple with moisturizing creams. There is a plenitude, a consummation, the beauty of the body and the artifice employed to heighten it in order to instill desire or contemplation, not a rancorous and perhaps at bottom hostile craving, but simple gratitude, a momentary joy in apparitions that meet us on the street and then are quickly gone. What Salinger said of joy can also be said of beauty, it is not a solid but a liquid; not a stable, predictable assemblage of perfections but a kind of visual tremor, neither fully tangible, nor purely momentary, nor merely an illusion. A figure seen in profile from afar or looking away in the distance. A pair of crossed legs on a nearby seat in the subway.

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  WIN AN EXCLUSIVE PACK. Sometimes, too, a gesture. A woman fixes her hair or stands a little straighter because she realizes she is being watched. Or a smile that could be a mere reflex, a crossing of glances in which nothing is requested and nothing is offered, just a flash of mutual recognition, discontinuous, without consequence, too brief to even leave behind a memory.

  * * *

  COLLECT THESE WONDERFUL GIFTS. I’m always watching, waiting for the sudden apparition of beauty, calmly, without masculine bitterness or craving, just heedful, passionate, observant, grateful, like the boy of eleven or twelve who knew nothing about sex but would look entranced at modern girls in miniskirts, falling hopelessly in love for a few minutes with certain bodies and faces but not with others, not because he chose to but only in response to a feeling that flared up in an instant, as irrevocably as when you heard certain songs.

  FEAR THE WALKING DEAD.

  Southeast Florida overrun with putrid algae.

  Three suicide attacks sow fear in Saudi Arabia.

  Germany urges its citizens to stockpile food in case of an attack.

  Hate spreads through social networks.

  Biodiversity at risk everywhere on Earth.

  ISIS carries out deadliest massacre of the year in Turkey.

  Major cities are besieged by deserts.

  Starving vultures attack cattle.

  Terror strikes again in France.

  Millions of players all over the world take to the streets

  to hunt down monsters.

  Dozens dead after truck plows through a crowd

  in the Promenade des Anglais in Nice.

  Biodiversity at risk everywhere on Earth.

  Barbaric attack spurs outrage.

  Bodies were flying everywhere.

  “I saw shoes, glasses, bags strewn on the ground.”

  People jumped into the sea to take cover.

  “Everyone turned around and we saw

  a thirty-ton truck plowing into people

  and driving onto the sidewalk to crush them.”

  A huge white truck drove at full speed

  into the crowd swerving to hit

  as many people as possible.

  It passed just a few feet away from me

  and I didn’t even notice it.

  I saw bodies flying like bowling pins.

  I heard noises and screams that I will never forget.

  I saw horrible things that will haunt me for the rest of my life.

  I saw two children crushed under the truck’s tires

  while their parents screamed in desperation.

  I was paralyzed. I could not move.

  All around me was sheer panic.

  I saw the path of destruction.

  People were running, screaming, crying.

  Then I realized what was happening. And I ran with them

  toward the Crocodile, a place where everyone

  was taking shelter. Only a few seconds went by

  and it seemed like an eternity.

  “Take cover,” “Don’t stay here,” “Where is my son?”

  I heard these voices all around me.

  Then I went out. I wanted to know what had happened.

  The promenade was deserted.

  Not a sound. No sirens. No cars.

  I ran into Raymond, a man in his fifties.

  He said to me, crying, “There are bodies everywhere.”

  It was true. Right behind himr />
  there were corpses every ten or fifteen feet.

  Lifeless. Some of them were missing limbs. They brought water

  for the wounded and towels to cover

  those who were beyond hope.

  At that moment I lacked courage.

  I would have liked to help, to do something, but I wasn’t able.

  I was still paralyzed.

  A second wave of panic

  made me go back to the Crocodile. The killer truck

  came to a stop a little farther on,

  riddled with gunshots. I didn’t hear the shots.

  Just screams, “Come back, come back,” and crying.

  “We were all like zombies, just running and screaming.”

  I kept walking. I got on my motorcycle

  to get as far away as possible from this hell.

  There were bodies and wounded people everywhere.

  The first ambulances began to arrive.

  Followers of the terrorist group rejoiced

  on social media over the attack.

  “If you do not have bombs, or bullets,

  do all you can to find infidels

  and break their heads open with a stone, slit their throats

  with a knife, run them over with a car, throw them down a ravine,

  strangle them, poison them.”

  THE PULSE OF THE FUTURE IS STRONGER THAN EVER. I like the look of painters, except when they dress up consciously to look like painters, or even worse, like artists. A great artist doesn’t need a costume. I like their attitudes, the sturdy, healthy air they have about them, which often lasts until a ripe old age since many painters live long lives and stay active to the very end. There is a glowing vigor to their faces, to their gaze, the look of people who work hard at something they enjoy, thoroughly absorbed for hours and days in a fully imaginative yet also fully material task to the point of losing all sense of time, or rather of finding within themselves a different kind of time, a pure, inward present in which they live and work as much as within the four walls of the studio, among their tools, jars, brushes, palette knives, their own works lying carelessly about and then a thousand things they keep at hand in the hope of putting them to use some day, stained rags, pencils, cans of turpentine, large sheets of paper from a drawing pad as well as tiny notebooks where they make sketches or scribble notes. Useful things, and useless too; things that seem like junk but end up being revelations, and things that go the other way, the coins and cigarette butts that Jackson Pollock picked up off the floor or took out of his pockets to stick into a thick dab of paint on the canvas.

  * * *

  TECHNOLOGY MOVES YOU. I like the picture of Alex Katz that I am looking at now, a color picture that I cut out of a magazine and glued with admiration and a bit of envy to a blank sheet of paper, wanting to experience myself some of the glorious feeling of working with one’s hands. Katz is leaning back in an old folding chair, a solid piece of 1930s office furniture that he may have found at a secondhand store or picked up off the street. He’s close to ninety but he seems much younger, in sneakers, a T-shirt and sweater, his arms crossed in an attitude that seems either pleasantly idle or slightly and calmly arrogant. His powerful shaved head resembles that of Paul Motian, who lived to be almost as old and who always stayed so active and free, unpretentiously original, perpetually inspired, faithful to himself yet never going back to what he did before, free of all nostalgia for his own past mastery, when he was young and played drums with Bill Evans in the early sixties. The last time I saw him play at the Village Vanguard was on a weeknight after a snowstorm and there were only a few people in the audience. He was a last-minute replacement for a then-famous singer who had been unable to get to New York because of the snow. He played with a small band, three or four musicians who were all young and deferential, perhaps a bit intimidated by his legendary status. He was generous with them, discreet to the point of furtiveness so as not to overwhelm them, trying rather to raise them into his own splendid mastery. They finished, thanked the small audience, and sat down at a side table to have a beer. I remember Paul Motian’s shaved head, his broad back, a turtleneck of the kind an old-time boxer might have worn.

  * * *

  BOOST YOUR CREATIVITY. Alex Katz has the sober, solid presence of an American artist strengthened by work and by an active life, in the manner of Edward Hopper. David Hockney looks like a klutz who other than drawing, painting, and smoking would be incapable of doing much with his hands. A frail old smoker who stays up all night; with those pale, watery eyes that stare so pointedly in his late self-portraits, still so curious and so fiercely inquisitive, the eyes of an old man who will cast off his age and seem like a man of thirty as soon as he starts working. Thirty being the perennial time at which the consciousness of your own age seems to stop for someone who, like him, devotes himself to a task that never changes, whether in the studio or simply at a bar, looking at people and thinking what it would be like to draw them, or driving down a highway in California or a country road in the region of England where he was born, eyes eager and alert, fingers tinged yellow from smoking and perpetually busy with a pencil, a camera, a brush, an iPhone, an iPad, anything at all. Hockney can draw like Ingres or Picasso; much better than Matisse. I like his vigor and vitality, the way he fled England to find a new life in Los Angeles, the sharpness of his interviews and writings, the nerve with which he sets upon new tasks despite the years, exploring innovations in technique, as rapt over a sheet of handmade paper as over a digital screen, with an air of stupefied amazement reminiscent of Peter Sellers and wearing all the stylish props of his public persona, the messy mop of yellow hair, the glasses and suspenders, the perennial cigarette. “When I paint, I am thirty years old,” he says. I, too, am thirty when I begin to write and forget everything around me, or when I cut and paste newspaper headlines, or stop in front of a shop sign to write down what it says in pencil in a notebook that I take out of my pocket, holding it against the wall or on a trash can for support. But being an eternal thirty now is different from when I was really thirty. In the limpid temporal illusion of the moment, as I begin to work, as I take pleasure in my life, I am younger even than I was back then.

  WHEN SILENCE SPEAKS, LISTEN. If astrophysicists can hear through their telescopes the cosmic background noise, that fossilized remnant of the big bang, it will surely one day be technologically possible to hear city noises from a hundred, a hundred and fifty, two hundred years ago. If scientists found a way to take a picture of the universe as it was being born, they will likewise be able to devise a telephoto lens that, just as current lenses can reach into the depths of space, will reach into the depths of time. Who could have imagined just twenty years ago that we would be able not just to walk down the street talking to someone on the other side of the Earth but even to see their faces, the room behind them, the light coming in through the windows. He finds it regrettable that having developed so many technological devices that are entirely useless, or worse, horribly destructive and even lethal, we have not been able to produce even a rudimentary version—say, the equivalent of Edison’s first wax cylinders—of the parabolic chronoscopic antenna (to give it a name) or a temporal photobathyscaphe capable of diving to ever greater depths of time.

  * * *

  3D IS EVERYWHERE. He imagines himself inside the cockpit of the chronobathyscaphe, as cramped a space, due to the technological constraints involved, as the capsule of an old Apollo rocket. He is surrounded by lenses, cameras, electronic depth gauges, keeping an eye on the space-time coordinates and peering through the glass (perhaps a small round window, as in a bathyscaphe) into a pitch-black darkness where gradually a few uncertain shapes begin to be discernible: bits of light, figures that are not immediately resolved, in part because the instruments have a limited range and in part because what can be seen “out there,” as they say in the movies, is a dark and murky medium like the bottom of the sea. “Oxford Street, London,” says the future onboard equivalent of Google
Maps. “August 19, 1821.” A day on which De Quincey says in his diary that he’s sat down to write after going for a walk: the fog rising from the river, the smoke of chimneys broken here and there by gaslight, and that figure, that silhouette of a man walking down a street that is nearly deserted now, close to midnight, when London lies wrapped in a glowing fog that Turner might have painted. Or the chronobathyscaphe could explore the streets of Baltimore between the nights of September 26 and October 3, 1849, piercing the gloom with the lamp on its prow, like the Nautilus, following each stumbling drunk that passes by and shining its light on their faces as they lean against a wall to see if one of them is Edgar Allan Poe.