To Walk Alone in the Crowd

by Antonio Munoz Molina

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  SITTING DOWN CAN BE A GREAT ADVENTURE. There was always a moment of strangeness right before I recognized him. He had a quality, or suffered from a condition, that I have noticed in just a few people over the course of my life: his physical features were forgotten as soon as he was gone. As if he were impermeable to recollection, covered in an insulating film that prevented the mind of anyone who knew him from clinging to his image. I must add that, in his case, this peculiar quality was strengthened by a kind of talent he possessed never to be seen head-on. I can picture him clearly with his back to me or in profile, or if I do have an image of him sitting directly across the table at the café, what I remember are his hands or the gleam of his glasses, the tilt of his head, never his face looking me directly in the eye; never his features in the pale light that came in from the street, the gray light coming through dusty glass into the Café Comercial.

  YOU’LL WISH THE ROAD NEVER ENDED. In Edinburgh, in a museum as small and intimate as a private home, I saw a pair of boots that belonged to Robert Louis Stevenson. They were high boots, strong and supple, with thick soles and many laces, the kind of boots an explorer or a horseman in the Far West might have worn, or perhaps a hero in an adventure novel or travel book of the sort he used to write. Not, however, the kind of boots in which you would explore a city. It made me wonder what kind of boots Baudelaire wore when he roamed Paris (stylish, perhaps, though battered by his long walks down dusty, muddy, unpaved boulevards) and what kind of boots or shoes Dickens wore in London when he spent entire days walking and avidly watching people and places, fleeing as well the black spectral shadow of depression. I picture Dickens’s boots as larger than Baudelaire’s, the shoes of a strong, active man without the least trace of foppishness, someone who never fell prey to the languid fumes of opium or the toxic luxury of any other artificial paradise—a literary workhorse, a family man with many obligations rather than an idler like Baudelaire. As for Poe, he must have worn the kind of boots that you would find on a drunk or a dead man; on one of the living dead, a man embalmed in alcohol and opium. Probably a pair of narrow, pointy boots that a young rake from old Virginia could have worn. The boots as well of a wretched man crushed by addiction, heartbreak, and financial ruin; soiled by the muddy clay of graveyards and the urine and sawdust of tavern floors. Apparently they were literally falling to pieces: one of Poe’s friends saw his boots come apart and fall into the mud as he jumped over a puddle.

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  THE PERFECT WAY TO START A TRIP. There is a picture of Fernando Pessoa in a pair of laced-up, thin-soled shoes that would be rather useless for a long walk, let alone the steep hikes required by the streets of Lisbon. Coming down the Chiado and hurriedly turning the corner of the Bernard bookstore, Pessoa looks a bit like Tintin: a man in round glasses, a thin mustache, a trench coat, and a pair of tapered pants that expose his ankles, carrying a satchel under one arm like a valiant comic-book character flitting here and there through Lisbon without in fact ever straying very far: the Baixa, the arcades of the Praça do Comércio, the banks of the Tagus, the Chiado, and little else. Bernardo Soares, his shadow or literary counterpart, never seems to wander very far from the Rua dos Douradores, where he lives in a rented room that is just a stone’s throw away from his office. Just once he mentions taking a streetcar. The longest journey he recounts is a short train ride to the neighboring town of Cascais and back, a trip from which he returns as exhausted as if he’d taken the Trans-Siberian Railway to Vladivostok. Despite their thin, partly patched soles, Pessoa’s shoes probably never became too worn or soiled with dust and mud. He must have carefully cleaned them every night in his lonely bachelor’s quarters, with that widowed air that always seems to haunt him in photographs.

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  THE TOUGHEST CHALLENGE FOR AN AVID RUNNER. Lester Young only wore loafers made of the lightest and softest leather. He must have walked in them as stealthily as he played the saxophone, like a Zen master, shifting weightlessly from place to place, much like his melodies gradually trace the contours of a song without the least effort. Lester Young’s loafers must have gotten soaked in the snow and in the sharp, freezing rain of a New York winter, even though he rarely went out on the street, just to get from his hotel to the club where he was playing and back: wet socks, frozen feet, a chill that lingered under the thin blankets in one of those seedy hotel rooms near Times Square with a tall vertical sign glowing with spurious poetry in the dark of an alley.

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  THIS SUMMER, TRAVEL BACK IN TIME. I picture a museum for the shoes of literary wanderers. A somewhat funereal place, given the stark, posthumous air that always clings to shoes even when you simply leave them at the foot of the bed, those twin, sepulchral witnesses to the journeys and travails of life. A museum filled with all their boots and shoes, from generation to generation. Poe, De Quincey, Baudelaire, Charlotte Brönte, Charles Dickens. Emily Dickinson’s tiny boots and house slippers; Charles Dickens’s shoes; the shoes of Benito Pérez Galdós, who did his share of walking in London and Madrid. Virginia Woolf’s austerely proper English shoes and Vivian Maier’s big, ugly, flat-soled shoes. Diane Arbus’s shoes, whose heels must have been bent out of shape from so many hours of wandering through New York City among the freaks and the insane. Frank O’Hara’s elegant (I imagine) shoes when he went out to lunch in Midtown, in the fifties, walking in a kind of quick and volatile tap dance. Truman Capote’s little black shoes. The sober though unkempt shoes that must have carried John Cheever like a helpless sleepwalker to the nearest liquor store.

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  GET READY FOR THE COLD. When people are shot, or when they die in aerial bombings, they are often missing a shoe. The bare yellow feet of the dead poke out of their pants as if they were already lying on a marble slab at the morgue. One foot is bare, the other is wearing a sock, pulled down to the ankle, a toenail sticking out through a hole. One wonders what shoes Federico García Lorca was wearing when they beat him with the butts of their rifles and loaded him onto a truck to drive him to the place where he was going to be shot. Whether it is true that he was in pajamas. Whether he put on his shoes in a hurry and didn’t have the time to put on socks, and couldn’t quite manage to tie his laces. Sometimes when a man was shot in a decent pair of shoes one of his executioners would steal them, or someone else would take them, coming by early on the following morning to look at the corpses.

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  TRAVEL TO ANOTHER WORLD WITHOUT LEAVING YOUR COUCH. I often think about the shoes or boots that Walter Benjamin must have worn. According to some of his acquaintances, he had a strange way of walking, abrupt, then slow, like someone in a great hurry who a moment later is idling in front of a toy-store window. We know as well how Lorca used to walk: clumsily, on account of his flat feet, which also pointed out, and of his build, which was short and thick, like a peasant’s; a big head, dark hair, a wide and weather-beaten face. Was he taller or shorter than the men who shot him, or than the other men facing the firing squad beside him, in the glare of the headlights? How strange never to have thought of this, the shape of his figure next to the others, the school teacher Dióscoro Galindo and the two bullfighters. Galindo, who was missing a leg, must have hobbled on crutches over the dark earth and the dry brambles on that summer night. The final, adventitious camaraderie of death, the bond between four men who only met a few minutes before they died.

  AT A HOTEL BY THE SEA. Although the beach is nearby, you have to make an effort to hear the sound of the sea from the balcony outside the room. There are dim, discontinuous strokes, some faster than others, the faint slap of little waves against the shore, the echoing sound of those that are farther out. Trees sway in the breeze like ocean fronds, pulsing creatures that are neither plant nor animal in this liquid night where no distinction holds between air and water. Voices ring as clear as echoing sounds in a vaulted room: a burst of laughter, a couple speaking quietly as they come down the promenade between the sea and the hotel, and then a pop song, fa
r away, and the voices of children who have been allowed to stay awake until almost midnight on this summer night, tired and elated, farther out beneath the lampposts where the darkness begins. If you listen more closely you can hear the chirping of crickets. As Borges famously said of the rain in one of his sonnets, the chirping of crickets always takes place in the past. This night turns into a different, distant night that happened many years ago. The breeze picks up, stirring the pages of the notebook and shaking the crowns of the trees with a rustle of branches and leaves.

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  PERHAPS ON AN ISLAND. Beneath the various sounds, so clear and distinct, there is a silence as deep as the bay. Drifting voices reach your ears much like the glimmer of lights reaches your eyes across dark water from the opposite shore. The crash of a larger wave lingers on the curving shore. Each branch, each leaf and pine needle quivers with its own particular motion. Palm trees sway more readily than pines. I could stay all night here, on the balcony, never going back to the warm, thick air inside the room. I could stay until they close the bar and the last few children have gone to bed and no more voices are heard; until, if someone passes by, you can hear the sound of their footsteps distinctly against the backdrop of the sea, whose brief, transparent waves keep vanishing into the sand. Life always begins in a salty fluid, whether inside a cell or in the mild, calm waters of this bay. When I go down to the beach the water is lit by the lights of the bar, which is empty now except for the waiters clearing the tables. In the water, floating over the sand and pebbles among the ragged seaweed, there is a school of little fish, each as transparent as the water itself, darting and flickering as swiftly as sperm cells in the salty medium of semen.

  DRAW A PICTURE OF WHERE YOU WANT TO LIVE. Draw her outline on the surface of her body with the tip of your finger. Draw with three trailing fingers the loose strands of her hair. Draw the curve of her forehead and the shape of her eyebrows. Draw her lashes as carefully as possible and the shape of her eyelids, feeling the faint throb of her eyes just under the skin. Do not forget to draw her ears, the inner groove of cartilage, the softer outer part, which is a little like a cup handle, and then the earlobe, softer still, hanging like the dot beneath a question mark. Do not forget the contour of her cheekbones, perceiving, beneath the smoothness of her skin, the solid bone, its pure and formal beauty. Draw her thin lips, too, and then the smile that starts to form the more you draw, two tiny creases of delight appearing at the corners of her mouth. Touch her tongue and let it wet your fingers with saliva as you draw, so that, moistened like a brush or like the thick tip of a pencil, they can go back over her lips to darken them. Go down to the chin, conclude the drawing of her face in profile, which began with her forehead, her hair, and went down to her nose, and now continues sliding from the chin down to her neck. Draw her clavicles, spread like wings in flight, and draw the frontal volume of her naked shoulders, each one rounded like a fruit, an apple or a peach, one that you should graze lightly with your lips or gently bite.

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  LEARN TO READ YOUR BODY. Draw this body, so familiar and beloved, lying on the bed like a model for a painting who will also be the canvas and the drawing itself. Graze the areola as if to shade it with a bit of charcoal, draw the nipple, which seems to rise just as your circling finger begins to faintly trace it. Spell the letters of her name softly on her stomach as if drawing them on sand, the sand where even now, through the curtains, you can hear the ocean breaking feebly. Draw the belly button with a slight, twisting motion, then downward, a simple stroke to show the body’s symmetry. Give the utmost care to the place where her naked skin, a little sticky now with sweat, shades into the faint beginnings of her pubic hair, a darker area that, to draw it, would require neither the tip of your finger nor even the edge of your fingernail but a brush as fine as a single hair. The warm gloom is always the same, the lazy air of midafternoon, but the faint light coming into the room will do so now through drawn curtains in a hotel by the sea. Trace the twin line of her thighs, and as you reach their meeting point let your fingers delve a little deeper. Do not stop drawing, do not stop looking until the very moment when you close your eyes, like a thirsty man who, bending down to drink, undoes with his mouth the perfect image of his face on the still surface of the water.

  SILKY FEET IN JUST A FEW MINUTES. One night you can’t hear the sound of the sea no matter how hard you try. The air is so calm that even the tips of the leaves are perfectly still on the palm tree facing the balcony. The bay is as smooth as a pool of India ink. The near presence of a silent sea turns the acoustics of the balcony into those of an old town square closed off to traffic on a summer night. High up in the sky a full moon casts a dusty glow. Voices ring clear in the warm, motionless air and over the still surface of the water. A tinkle of glasses, cups and coffee spoons, of ice cubes in a glass or in a metal bucket. They have turned off the noisy, manufactured music, and only a few voices remain. I can’t quite tell what they are saying from this far, I can only recognize the sounds and the cadence of British English. The only branches beginning to stir again are those of the palm trees, the most sensitive to the breeze. Every night I like to stay on the balcony and notice how the voices gradually disappear: a last few peals of laughter, then silence, deeper than ever, now that even the soft ripples on the shore become too faint to hear. A jug, a glass, when struck, will make a sound as pure as that of a Japanese gong or one of those Tibetan bronze bowls that are struck or rubbed along the rim with a wooden handle. Voices seem both very near and very far against the clear backdrop of the sea. I can faintly hear conversations, the soothing sound of people talking calmly. Voices that are speaking here and now yet also seemingly on some distant night, past or future, any of the identical nights they’ve spent in this hotel over the course of many years while we were somewhere else. Men and women who are now grown were still teenagers or children when we were last here. Suddenly a sound I was not aware of ceases. The silence grows even wider, spreading in the hollow of the bay, and I can hear the voices of the last few customers finishing a drink or having a conversation long after the bar has closed. I become aware as well of a stereo effect: there are voices coming from the beach and voices coming from the balconies of nearby apartment buildings.

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  BECAUSE YOUR FUTURE BEGINS NOW. An illusory sense of timelessness arises in this calm. To have arrived a few days earlier, to remain a few days more seem like superfluous circumstances. Nothing exists right now except this night, there’s no before or after. Nothing but this moment and this bay, ink-black, with tiered dots of light far in the distance. I can see the mute, gliding headlights of cars along a curving road that must follow the opposite side of the bay. When people speak or laugh, the sound echoes like a clap. The trees are as still as the artificial vegetation in a diorama. The sharpened tip of the pencil makes a steady grazing sound as it moves across the page. Once I place the final period, only the white silence of the blank portion of the page will remain. I will take care this time not to give in to the vice of filling every bit of space with writing.

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  AS IN THE WORLD’S BEST AIRPORTS. Recent memories are blotted out: lives in transit, caught in a dead time. Airports are impervious to memory or presence. All time becomes a dead time. The memory of something seen or done at an airport dissolves a few hours later without a trace. By the following morning nothing is left. Fear, too, is more abstract in airports. Two ordinary-looking men can be seen pushing luggage carts in a grainy clip from a security camera. They slip away in the crowd and afterward no one can serve as a reliable witness. The more a space is regulated and closed off, the more complete our loss of memory. If we do remember something that happened in an airport it is only by a sudden chance association, like a dream that we forget on waking and that unexpectedly returns while we’re having lunch or in the afternoon, slipping its strangeness into our lives when we are most awake.