To Walk Alone in the Crowd

by Antonio Munoz Molina

  I’M ONLY AN APP AWAY. A faint slapping sound, a quick wet snap, a warm parting of flesh like a flower whose thick leaves have not yet come unstuck, damp with fluid and saliva, the spit of mingled mouths. A shared and secret thing, the face you love, the face you truly see only at this very moment, so close to you that touch and sight become one thing, the seeing hand, the eye that feels, astonished, rapt in observation of this moment that is always the first time, eternally the same in endless variation, each small thing so familiar yet unlike it ever was before, a smile that suddenly contracts with pleasure, gone as soon as it begins to form around the corners of the mouth, a sharp, exquisite throbbing that never quite turns into pain, a readjustment, the unfamiliar features of a horizontal face rising or emerging, the stubborn, childlike chin, the cherished hardness of her cheekbones rising from her tousled hair, the way her forehead now seems broader, higher, curving where the hair begins, the hard and beautiful and clear curve. There is a joint rhythm, quickening or slowing like the rhythm of a hammock swaying on its own. Like palm leaves or a thicket of bamboo on a windless night, ceasing, slowing to a moment of ecstatic stillness, of pure and mutual imminence.

  * * *

  FEELS LIKE THE FIRST TIME. Pay attention then. Slow down your breathing. Listen to the sound, the way it starts and stops, the way it seems to waver without haste, a secret innocence, the purity of sacred things that would be spoiled if they were shown. The sound of water slapping gently on the shore at midnight, in a cove, and something warm, wet, sticky, quickly growing cold outside, preserving for an instant the temperature of bodies, the sweet and harmless fever inside them and between them, “secrets which do not permit themselves to be told,” as Edgar Allan Poe said in the opening lines of “The Man of the Crowd.” All that is demurely sacred, incorruptible. All that happens privately behind closed doors, for no one else’s sake.

  GRAND OPENING OF THE CONSUMER ELECTRONICS SHOW. One morning like any other, I arrived at the Café Comercial and found it closed. When I came out of the Metro the windows were boarded up and there was a chain with a big padlock securing the doors. They had closed it without notice, from one day to the next, without explanation or even a sign saying thank you or goodbye to their longtime customers, people of all ages who suddenly found themselves in a kind of exile, rudely banished from that gloomy and austere place that, though never too inviting in its decor or in its service, had nevertheless grown so indispensable that we now found ourselves condemned to wander aimlessly during that early time of day when a lazy, retired, or superfluous person, or one devoted to essentially concocted occupations, has nothing better to do in life than sit in a café. We were banished to bleak diners, fake artisanal bakeries, the poor imitations of a real café; or to the local branch of an international chain, the corporate regularity and rapaciousness of a Starbucks or of something even worse, absurdly named, Pans & Company, things of that sort. Places that force their employees to wear caps and uniforms with their first names written on a label over their chests; where you have to stand in line to order breakfast and then carry it on a plastic tray while looking for a table in a space as inhospitable as an industrial warehouse—even if decked in artsy, pseudo-artisanal, or downright poetical decor, with color photographs of adorable old bakers or of tiny villages that look like a Christmas ad for Nescafé. On top of which you had to drink your coffee in a paper or a plastic cup, leaving behind when you were finished a trail of unsalvageable waste: straws, forks, spoons, disposable plates.

  * * *

  BE THE STAR OF YOUR OWN MOVIE. Standing outside the Comercial, on that street corner that was suddenly shuttered and cold, I thought dejectedly that from that morning on I’d have nowhere to rest when I walked through that part of Madrid. I realized as well that I had no idea where to find my friend—or acquaintance, or accomplice in extravagant and rambling conversation—since I had only ever met him at the café. I didn’t have a phone number or an email address. I could no longer ask the waiters of the shuttered café. Instead, without any real hope of receiving an answer, I went over to the newsstand and asked the man that sold discounted DVDs. The closing of the café would surely be a catastrophe for him as well. But he didn’t know what I was talking about. It’s true that I did not provide him with a description that could have helped identify the man. How could I, when it was so hard to remember him, to recall even his most concrete and recognizable features? Which in turn led me, on that morning of crushing discoveries, to another realization: I didn’t even know his name, or if I did I had forgotten it, just as I always forgot between one meeting and the next whether he wore glasses, or if his hair was gray or white, or whether in fact he was bald. “A middle-aged man,” I told the owner of the newsstand, “maybe a few years older than me.” “Middle-aged, or old?” He spoke with the characteristic bluntness of Madrid. I felt a little hurt. “Hombre, I wouldn’t really say old.” I found it hard to retrieve any accurate visual details. “He usually wore a coat, and he carried a satchel. A black satchel, I think.” “Did he wear glasses?” he asked in his harsh voice. “Well, I can’t quite remember. He used to put them on and take them off. He would clean them with a wipe. But I’m not sure if he was taking them off to clean them or if he only had to put them on to look at things up close.”

  * * *

  MAKE AN ADVANCE APPOINTMENT ANYTIME. The owner of the newsstand looked at me from up on his perch, behind the counter and among his magazines, reigning over an expanse of merchandise that had been prosperous until quite recently but was now threatened with decline by the closing of the café. Cardboard boxes filled with movies cataloged by genre: silent films, monster movies, Spanish soft porn, Westerns, horror movies, each set of DVDs in perfect order in a shoebox with a handmade label. I selected two or three movies, feigning—in a servile attempt to befriend him or at least to invite some concern no matter how condescending on his part—an interest in film that was not especially strong at the moment. I went on, handing him the movies, while he quickly tallied up some number in his head that was no doubt completely arbitrary. “I’m sure about the satchel. He always carries it.” But he demolished my sense of certainty as swiftly as he calculated an inflated price for my secondhand movies. “Does it look like a briefcase or more like a backpack?” I wasn’t sure about that either. Perhaps both. Sometimes he carried it by the handle and sometimes under one arm, depending on how full it was. Sometimes it seemed empty and sometimes to weigh a lot, as if there were bulky things inside, books or packages.

  THERE ARE 1,440 MINUTES IN A DAY. Late on a summer day the poet Catulle Mendès arrives at the Gare du Nord station in Paris. In the crowd of people filling the platform he sees a familiar face. It is Charles Baudelaire, carrying a suitcase in one hand and looking a little lost. For Mendès, Baudelaire is a master, a sacred and heroic figure. It was when he read his poems as a teenager in the countryside that his own vocation was awakened. He used to scour the newspapers for his articles and his short essays on art. Now, seeing Baudelaire alone in a crowd of strangers, he gathers up the nerve to approach him. He notices that his clothes are elegant but also old and frayed: the jacket and trousers, the boots, the limp knot of his cravat. Unlike most of his contemporaries, Baudelaire is cleanly shaved. His skin is smooth but he is very pale, probably sick. His hair is combed back and thin and gray, almost white, even though he only just turned forty-five. Mendès notices how people’s faces change when they are alone in a crowd, unaware they’re being watched. He sees Baudelaire stripped of the arrogance that he puts on when he enters a café or poses for a photograph. When Mendès addresses him, Baudelaire reacts with the bewildered and alarmed gesture of someone lost in his own thoughts. He says that he just missed the night train to Brussels and must now look for a hotel to spend the night. There’s no other train until the morning. Mendès tells him that he has rented a room not far from the station and that it has two beds. If he does not mind sharing the room, it would be a great honor to have him stay the night with him. Then, in th
e morning, he will be conveniently near the station.

  * * *

  WE DEVISE A WINNING STRATEGY JUST FOR YOU. Mendès puts out the light and notices that Baudelaire is restless, tossing and turning in the other bed, unable to fall asleep. He came from Brussels to Paris for a few days to see if he could find an acceptable offer for some of his work, but had no luck. The contracts he was offered and that he had no choice but to accept deprive him of his rights to the work in exchange for very little compensation. His creditors are after him wherever he goes, in Brussels or in Paris. He doesn’t want to stay in Paris but he doesn’t want to be in Brussels either. He hates Brussels, Belgium, the king of the Belgians, all Belgians, all of humanity. No one has written more offensively about a country than Baudelaire in his rantings against Belgium. Three years ago he went to Brussels in the hope of finding good publishing contracts and making a little money by giving conferences. It all turned out a failure. So few people came to the conferences that the organizers canceled them outright. In Brussels he lives in extreme poverty, no friends, no newspapers willing to publish his essays. He fears he will be forgotten if he stays away from Paris for too long, in a city he finds dreadful, with its terrible weather and its muddy streets that won’t allow him even the brief solace of a pleasant walk; with its coarse men and its fat, rumpled women. The lady who owns the hotel where he lives is constantly torturing him with demands for payments that are long overdue. The only respectable thing about the hotel is its name, the Hôtel du Grand Miroir. Ever since he squandered his father’s fortune in his youth, Baudelaire has been without the least financial security. He has always depended on his mother’s scant and humiliating generosity; staying in filthy hotels and rented rooms, always on the move, besieged by creditors, chasing editors to see if a newspaper will publish his articles or to demand whatever pay is owed to him. Increasingly the tragic wandering life of Edgar Allan Poe seems like a prefigured version of his own. He doubts he will live much longer than Poe, dead at forty in complete ruin; a heroic failure, a martyr of literature in a crass society where money is the only thing that matters. He is ill. He has fevers and spells of dizziness and nausea. He is forty-five and wrecked by syphilis. Years later Mendès will recall how Baudelaire spoke all through the night, muttering in the dark. Out of curiosity, out of respect, Mendès did his best not to fall asleep.

  * * *

  TURN YOUR ILLUSIONS INTO A REALITY. Baudelaire’s rambling soliloquy gradually acquires the strange, arithmetical character of a delirious act of bookkeeping. Bemoaning his poverty, he goes back over every payment he ever received for the essays, poems, and translations he published in the course of more than twenty years. He seems to hold it all in his head like a deranged accountant, incapable of sleep, caught in the delirium of an endless sum. Perhaps he has taken laudanum. Mendès hears his voice close by in the dark and it all feels like a dream, though Baudelaire is actually there, whispering almost directly in his ear, obsessively rehearsing sums and dates of publication, adding, multiplying, while the young man, whose own health fosters and requires sleep, dozes off and wakes up to the endless singsong tally and the bitter complaint, to work so hard and for so long and to receive so little, to reach his age and to have nothing, not even one of those bureaucratic sinecures that clever men of letters know how to procure, or some official recognition, a decent editor, a paper that would pay him well and treat him with a measure of respect. Calling back to memory the ancient journals and the measly payments, Baudelaire begins to realize how many pages he has written, all those pieces that his young disciple has been reading and rereading ever since he was an adolescent, all the things he gradually discovered, the objects of his passion, the things he wanted to disseminate during his life, contemporary painting, music, the masters of caricature, his defense of Poe and Wagner when no one cared for them, his permanent rebellion against public indifference and the stupidity of critics, and that long poem in prose, The Painter of Modern Life, where he defined before anyone else a liberating and exacting notion of modernity, a word that he himself invented.

  * * *

  THE VOICE OF EXPERIENCE. Baudelaire runs through it all in his mind on that sweltering night in July when the heat may have made it even harder to sleep, placing next to each title the sum, the paltry amount that is now added to the rest. Being very tired, and confused, he frequently loses the thread and is forced to go back, to begin again, wrought up by his own mental turmoil. At last he reaches a satisfactory sum, it seems that he is soothed and that he will finally allow Catulle Mendès to fall asleep. But then he wonders out loud how much he earned on average during each of the twenty years of his publishing life. He carries out the calculation in his mind. Assuming he earned some fifteen thousand francs in twenty years of steady work, how much is it per day? What have been his wages as a writer and translator? He falls silent, but Mendès can hear him whispering, speaking in a faint murmur under his breath, as if he were falling asleep but the numbers kept seething in his fevered brain. “One franc and nine centimes,” he finally says. “That is all I was able to earn. Less than a factory worker or a tradesman.” Catulle Mendès thinks with melancholy outrage of the paltry wages given to the most acute mind and the greatest poetic talent the French language has seen in a century. Finally he falls asleep, unable to tell if he is dreaming of Baudelaire’s voice or if he truly hears it by his side. When he wakes up in the morning Baudelaire’s bed is empty, and he never sees him again.

  * * *

  CALCULATE THE PRICE OF YOUR ALARM SYSTEM. Twenty years earlier, the photographer Nadar frequently catches glimpses of Baudelaire walking down the street. Both of them live on the Île Saint-Louis. Baudelaire’s clothes are elegant and eccentric: a blue working smock, an unstarched white shirt, leather gloves that have been dyed pink. He is a young man of twenty-four, with a faint goatee. Nadar remarks on an additional extravagance: he doesn’t wear a hat. He says that Baudelaire walks through the neighborhood with uneven steps that seem at once languid and anxious, like a cat, choosing carefully where to step, as if the streets were covered in eggshells he was afraid to crush.

  MULTIPLY YOUR HAPPINESS. Once or twice I thought I saw him walking down what always struck me as an implausible street, either because it was far from the neighborhood of the Café Comercial or because in some instinctive way I couldn’t connect it with his reclusive manners. In fact, I had no reason to be surprised, since I had never managed to discover where he lived. Once, riding a subway that was just leaving the Cruz del Rayo station, and looking distractedly out the window as the platform vanished into the tunnel, I saw him or I thought I saw him sitting on a bench, his satchel on his knees, poring over what looked like a travel agency brochure. And I saw him, on a cold and clear morning in winter, looking into a crate of old books at a stand along the Cuesta de Moyano.

  * * *

  TO LOOK INTO THE EYES OF CATS. The only time I felt truly certain, the only time I saw him from up close was in a room at the Museum of Romanticism that had at first seemed empty. There was an exhibit of the work of Czech photographer Miroslav Tichý that must not have been attracting many visitors. I had gone early, right as the museum opened, to avoid as much as possible the terrible summer heat. The sky was a dirty white, presaging a stifling afternoon. It was in the emptiest days of August, after the fifteenth, when everyone who planned to leave the city has already left and no one has come back yet. We had finally settled into the new house after a long series of delays that forced us to travel or to stay in borrowed homes and hotels. The house was half furnished and seemed as barren as a warehouse or a sound stage, too much space all around, a sense of vacancy, of encampment, rooms without furniture, bare bookshelves, stacks of boxes filled with books in the middle of a room, paintings leaning against the wall, a sound system in pieces on the floor and its tall speakers still in their boxes. In the kitchen, which we were already using, the cabinets and drawers were mostly empty and the dishes and cutlery were not entirely sorted and put away, so in or
der to find anything we had to open each cabinet, each supposedly helpful drawer where you always found things you weren’t looking for. A bed lay on the floor with its legs off in a room that wasn’t quite a bedroom yet. The nightstand was a cardboard box with a desk lamp on top.

  * * *

  MY JOURNEY THROUGH THE WORLD STARTS HERE. It was a warehouse and a campground. A campground inside a warehouse, in a hangar where the house we already lived in was still being built. The two of us stood out even more conspicuously against that nearly blank background, as empty and bare as the windows in the walls. The view through their frames was the only thing in the house that seemed finished. At the foot of the bed, the large suitcase we had dragged behind us for months was still open, at hand, like an affirmation of a perpetually nomadic life. I still kept my notebooks and pencils in the backpack to make sure they wouldn’t get lost. Our voices seemed different in those empty spaces where nothing absorbed sound. They seemed like new and younger voices, imbued with the sense of newness that reigned through the house, a blank slate, the smell of plaster and of paint and varnished wood, of all that has been freshly finished and unveiled. The TV set and DVD player were in place on the low table where they belonged, but the colored cables hanging down in bundles seemed to us beyond all possibility of ever being reconnected. Going out and walking down the street still felt like exploring a new city. Everything was so new that we were a little abashed to see each other naked, and the first night was even more of a first night because we had never been in the house after dark. It was when we first had sex that it became our house, even if the walls were bare of photographs and paintings and our books were not yet on the shelves. As I drifted off to sleep, eased by love, I resolved to remember every bedroom, every room where we had sex for the first or the only time; to mark on a map each and every city where we ever made love.