To Walk Alone in the Crowd

by Antonio Munoz Molina

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  FIND OUT RIGHT NOW IF YOU’RE A WINNER. The process didn’t end when the picture was developed. His prints varied according to whatever random tray or support was available, and this impoverished delight in his materials affected the outcome of the work, as did the equally impromptu backboard on which he stuck the picture or the unavoidable accidents resulting from his precarious process: spots, blemishes, areas that were out of focus, defects in the paper or the piece of cardboard or the chemicals. No accident could spoil the outcome: each, as it took place, became a necessary part of his creative work. There was no need for proper storage, since damage and decay were like additional touches: a rim of moisture; the nibbling of a moth or mouse; the layer of dust that in such a dirty house began to cover the print even while it was still wet. Disorder, carelessness, forgetfulness, and neglect carried out a selection that he would never have bothered to make. The anonymity of his subjects and the passage of time gradually gave his pictures the very mystery of temporality, a sense of the frailness of the past. There is a tremulous freedom to the women in bikinis whose pictures he took in the sixties and seventies, a half-fearful yet assertive sensuality that would not be as alluring or as intriguing to us if it did not shine against the backdrop of time. Those public swimming pools and lazy summer days are tinged with the uncertain quality of weather that will soon turn gray and cold. That barely tasted freedom, like water in a pool that is a bit too cold, is the freedom of the Prague Spring, even if Prague was far away and Tichý had no TV or radio, and never read the papers or spoke with nearly anyone, or would have shown much interest in whatever happened to be taking place. Tichý’s lens, which he used as an improvised spyglass to look at what was right before him, is now a telescope through which we glimpse a distant world—more distant still on account of its apparent nearness, of how his pictures show us the beginnings of a modern way of life that is, for some of us, our own.

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  FEEL THE CONNECTION. We, too, were shy and secretly fervent witnesses to the opening of the first swimming pools, the girls in bikinis or miniskirts. Tichý comes from that same past, a castaway outside of time, a Robinson Crusoe wandering down our century, quite old, unkempt, and toothless in those color pictures of his final years, burned by the sun, coarse fingernails edged in black, like a pauper’s, and yet as well a kind of king, sarcastic, skeptical of his own abrupt celebrity, a more or less unscathed survivor of the communist regime that tried to crush him with its power only to sink into oblivion as he strolled along, a kind of Buster Keaton, dazed, unharmed, while all around him the house collapses. Scratching with gnarled fingers at his filthy hair and beard, Tichý laughed a toothless laugh at his success just as he had laughed before at anonymity, at tyranny and destitution. And now he turns up like a ragged, glorious ghost one August morning in Madrid, in a museum, on a monitor that shows a documentary about his life to an empty chair. He turns up here just as he turned up at the great communist parades and patriotic celebrations on the main square of his city, among the flags, the crowds of docile citizens in traditional dress that looked away and wouldn’t even stand beside him, waiting for a police van or a psychiatric ambulance to come and take him out of circulation until further notice. Tichý would amiably climb into the van and take a seat, politely greeting the policemen or the orderlies, some of them by name.

  WHEN YOU’RE ON YOUR CELL PHONE YOU LEAVE THE WORLD BEHIND. The painter tells me that he wakes up every day around four in the morning, rested, alert, clearheaded, and begins to think immediately about the painting he is working on or a new idea that came to him suddenly in the dark. Not a complete image, just a glimpse, an intimation that is nonetheless enough, a kind of little crack or signal, perhaps a figure or a silhouette in a corner of an empty canvas, one of those dark spots that were formed by damp patches on his bedroom ceiling when he was a child, which quickly and without the slightest effort on his part turned into clouds, ships, horses at a gallop, elephants, or lion heads. It’s the urge to work that gets him out of bed, so briskly that he forgets he is quite old, soon to be eighty-one. He washes his face with cold water. He puts on an old pair of pants, slippers, a smock, and goes downstairs to his studio. Through a big glass door he sees the garden still in darkness. If the weather is nice, he goes outside and stays there for a while, doing nothing, lifting his face in one direction or another—like a dog, he says, lifting its muzzle, recognizing smells and sounds, so fresh and clear at this time of day.

  * * *

  FIND A NEW REASON TO KEEP ON SMILING. He drinks a glass of water from the tap and he begins to paint without having had anything to eat. “It’s only now,” he says, with an accepting, retrospective smile for all the oddity and weakness of human beings, that he truly enjoys his work. I ask him why and he takes a moment to consider it. “I’m not afraid now,” he says. “I’m not afraid of anything. I find it hard to believe it took so many years. But I find it even harder to believe that I am not afraid. I’m not afraid that the gallery will not like the painting, or the critics, or that no one will want to buy it, given the current state of the art world. I’m not afraid that it will turn out worse than other paintings I have done, or worse than other people’s paintings. I don’t compare myself to anyone. That is the greatest relief. It has taken me my whole life,” he says, “my whole life. But I could have died without ever getting well. Not to look askance, not to feel stung when someone else gets a fancy retrospective at the Reina Sofía and I don’t, when a price is announced for someone else’s work that I’ll never even approach. Nor am I afraid that the painting will fail, that it won’t work, that it will start off well and be spoiled as I go, or that it won’t match what I imagined. If it doesn’t work, I put it aside and start a new one, or I just paint over it.”

  * * *

  YOU WILL HAVE A NEW LIFE. His studio is tidy and clean. He says he doesn’t like to get things—or himself—dirty. “Strange, for a painter, right?” In a kind of cupboard he keeps rows of jars, tubes of paint, pigments, brushes, palette knives, and pencils. There are pencils of various thicknesses, and cases of cheap school pencils with which he also enjoys working. In school, he says, as a child, they were a luxury. He didn’t have colored pencils then, or anything else. The room was cold, he says, and he was hungry, and the teachers used to hit the kids. During the war the teachers kept disappearing and classes were canceled half the time. They couldn’t find replacements quickly enough for the ones who were put in jail, or murdered, or purged. The war was not a bad time for children in Madrid, at least until food began to run short, and especially until “those people” arrived. “Those people,” he always says, without further clarification. There are areas of time that never came to an end for him. “In school we had no pencils or notebooks,” he says. “Just a piece of slate, a rag, some bits of chalk that you had to care for as if they were made of gold—or bread, rather.” He remembers how much he enjoyed writing on the smooth black surface of the slate with a piece of chalk. “Have you seen the paintings on slate by that Russian or Lithuanian painter—what’s her name—Vija Celmins? Try remembering a name like that when you get older,” he says. “That woman knows. Artists can only work with what they truly know.”

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  THE YOUNGER I FEEL. He gets excited when he talks about chalk or charcoal, about the stains they leave on your fingers. He looks at his own thin fingers, the fingers of an old man, tinged yellow even now from when he used to smoke, so many years ago. He used to take a sharp piece of charcoal and draw comic-book characters on the walls of his father’s little coal shop, or characters from the cartoons they played at the neighborhood cinema. “Like a child painter in Altamira or Lascaux,” he says. “Did you know they found out that some of the cave painters were children? They can tell from the size of the hands.” He drew pictures of Diego Valor, Donald Duck, Mickey Mouse. “I was doing pop art before its time and never knew it. I was a prehistoric pop-art child painter.” He says it took him his whole life to be able
to draw again with that careless joy. The wonder of tracing an outline that is recognizable, a silhouette, a shadow, the shape of a hand on a wall.

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  THE BEST OR NOTHING. He paints before sunrise, by electric light, in a silence as deep as the silence of a well, a cave in Altamira. “Why did they go so far inside, what did they see when their shadows were projected on the walls?” Time passes so quickly as he paints that it takes him a while to realize there is daylight in the studio, that many birds can be heard, not just blackbirds anymore, and there’s the noise of traffic on the expressway, people driving anxiously to get to Madrid. He doesn’t have the radio on when he paints, or play any music. He used to listen to the classical music station, Radio Clásica. Now he listens to his own breathing and to the sound of his feet coming and going on the linoleum floor, approaching the painting, stepping back, facing it, viewing it from a certain angle, from another, in silence. I picture him in his black slippers, his smock and his black pants, moving through the studio as slowly as if he were practicing Tai Chi. He says that silence sharpens his ability to see. It works like an extremely clean and polished magnifying glass. He never stays still for very long. He learns what he needs to do a few tenths of a second before he does it. Not being as physically strong as he once was, he no longer makes those big gestures that pivoted from the shoulder and left behind a streak of color or black ink across the canvas. “It was a little theatrical,” he says with a laugh. “We wanted to be abstract American painters.” These days he gets closer to the canvas, painting, as he says, not with his whole body but with the wrist, and lower still, with his fingers, as if he were writing in pencil. Sometimes the difference between a good painting and a failed one is a tiny mark, a small spot that creates or fails to create a sense of balance across the whole composition. “Look at those drops, those tiny spots of paint in Bosch,” he tells me. “Look at them closely. The merest dab of white and you have the medieval headdress of a woman seen from the back, far away, in a forest, on a field where a horrible army approaches.”

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  NO MATTER WHAT YOUR STYLE MAY BE. By nine in the morning he is tired and hungry. He makes breakfast, and now he does turn on the radio. He eats facing the garden. A good breakfast, but not too abundant. “A piece of toast with oil and tomato,” he says, “toasted just right, not so lightly that it stays white and porous, but making sure it doesn’t burn.” He talks about the toast as he would about an artistic question. He loads the dishes in the dishwasher, wipes the table, sweeps any crumbs that may have fallen to the floor, and turns off the radio. He brushes his teeth and gets in bed and sleeps until noon. “Like a child. As I have never slept before.” For the rest of the day he doesn’t feel the slightest need to go into the studio. He doesn’t really remember what he did, he says. Some days he sleeps so soundly that when he wakes up and takes a shower it seems to him that he only dreamed he was painting. “But one should paint while dreaming,” he says. “It’s the only decent way to paint. Much of what they call primitive painting, the art of the Aboriginal Australians or the Native Americans, is made of dream visions.”

  REASONS TO STAY HOME. There is a deliberate aesthetic quality to everything she does, a thoughtful yet fluid and natural ease, like a musician improvising, simultaneously aware of the general shape of the music and of the next step to be taken, though not perhaps of the one after that. She is attentive to every detail of her presence and to every little thing around her. She looks at herself carefully, though out of the corner of her eye, in every mirror and shop window. And she wanders, curiously attentive though lost in her own thoughts, through the city where she has lived all her life, a space as familiar and well-known to her as her own house. Her aesthetic sense turns into spiritual alertness when she watches other people. She’s as sensitive to the ways in which others see her as she is to the outward signs of their character or the inner life that is sometimes revealed in their gestures, their attitudes and words, more often still in the particular way they say them or in the expression on their faces as they speak. She’s endowed with extremely delicate sensors that pick up the most subtle variations in other human beings, her loved ones, her acquaintances, even total strangers whom she encounters only once, in passing. She can readily imitate voices and facial expressions, how people walk, how they sit at the table, gestures that are visible to others, too, but which she alone seems to notice. When she imitates a voice, she imagines that she is inside the person, looking through their eyes, moving their mouths and their facial muscles, which at that moment seem connected to her own, like a mask.

  * * *

  THE SLEEPLESS EYE. She is keenly aware of herself from the inside and the outside. She carefully observes and studies her own reactions and moods, and tries as well to see herself as others do, whether it be a casual observer or someone as close and as attentive as she is. She walks down the street absentmindedly, as when she was a young girl crossing El Retiro to get to high school, but noticing everything that takes place around her: the people walking by, the shops, the architecture, the light, the first signs of a change in fashion, of a new expression, or a turn of speech. She looks affectionately at the older women, the waiters, the children, the grandmothers, the store clerks, the animals—cats, birds, dogs, a caged parakeet inside a store in Cádiz, a noble, tired horse yoked to a tourist carriage in Central Park, a raccoon, its snout and bandit eyes peeking out behind some bushes. She dresses and she puts on makeup very slowly yet with careless grace, as if she were writing something destined for others and in equal measure for herself, for the cultivation and delight of her own senses. The knowing wisdom of her eyes as she looks in the mirror, the feel of her clothes and hair, the pleasure of breathing in the scent of soap, of shampoo, a bit of perfume redolent of flowers and of talcum powder.

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  WHAT THEY NEVER TOLD YOU. She watches those who are dearest to her with great attention. Solicitous, a little anxious, intuiting their burdens or their sufferings, their sadness. Anticipating, too, their needs, thinking of possible work connections for them, a friendship, a relationship, practical advantages that would improve their lives. She takes nothing for granted and she accepts nothing as set in stone. She lives in hope and fear, in joy at being alive and in troubled awareness of the fragility and the shortness of life. Her amiability softens her critical sense of others. Her judgment of herself is usually less lenient, and can at times be punitive. But it doesn’t weaken her sense of fairness or her anger at being treated unjustly, the old wound of failing to be recognized when she knows she deserves it. She is sensitive to affronts, which makes her more vulnerable but also sharpens her love of justice.

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  NOW IT’S EASIER TO FIND WHAT YOU NEED. I am all ears. Her steps, soft as silk on the wood floor; then the bathroom faucet, the bidet, the stream of urine behind the closed door; and then, earlier, her shyness, which is as arousing as her wantonness, the way she breathes through parted lips, the signs, contained yet undeniable, that she is coming. To see, to hear and touch. To touch her face, pressing her bones, her cheekbones beneath the skin, the throbbing pulse of her eyelids, which my fingertips touch, caressing her as avidly as if my hands were the hands of a blind man. Au bout des doigts. No limits. Everything you desire. The moment is now. Come and let me show you what you will never see without me. “Let me see your beauty when the witnesses are gone,” says Leonard Cohen in one of his songs.

  WE GO WITH YOU WHERE OTHERS CAN’T. An immediate and pragmatic sense of beauty is at play in everything she says and does, the clothes she wears, the way she sometimes tosses her hair to give it volume, the objects she finds to outfit and to decorate the house. Nothing is left to chance, yet the general effect you feel, consciously or not, in every space she has arranged is of a natural and balanced spontaneity, as uniquely hers as the pure simplicity of everything she says or writes or of the conversations she so quickly enters into with a stranger—a waiter, someone working at a store or at the bakery where sh
e selects a piece of bread and some croissants for breakfast as attentively as she once chose the cups, the tablecloth, or a particular butter dish. She has, instinctively, a Japanese sense for the beauty of ordinary things and places: fluid yet formal, ruled by an inner restraint even at its most free. She has an utmost gift for what is near and concrete. Neither abstractions nor generalities entice her. She is puzzled by people who display a great sensibility toward the artistry of art or the poetry of poems but are unable to perceive the beauty or the ugliness of the prose of life, or take pleasure in the poetry of reality. Even more puzzling to her are those great benefactors of humanity who champion grand causes but in their private lives are miserly or inconsiderate; apostles of the people who can nevertheless be disrespectful to the waiter serving them, or speak sarcastically to those they scorn so as to wound them. Just as some people are allergic to the smallest dose of certain substances, she is allergic to sarcasm, and rebels against the thought of mocking those unable to defend themselves. She chooses her words in speaking as in writing with scrupulous precision and care. She wants to say what matters to her with the greatest possible clarity, but she does not believe that clarity has anything to do with crudeness, or truthfulness with aggression. She is never insensitive to pain, no matter who it is that suffers, a human being or an animal. She has gained her strength of mind and the freedom of her soul at a very high cost. It has taken her all her life to become who she is, all her life and a substantial part of mine as well. But you can tell, looking at an old photograph or at a family movie in the strident and now fading colors of the seventies, that as a child she was already the person she is now.