To Walk Alone in the Crowd

by Antonio Munoz Molina

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  ONCE NIGHT FALLS YOU’RE NO LONGER SAFE. You think you remember a voice clearly, but it’s not true. You realize this when you actually hear it, or when you unexpectedly hear another voice that resembles it. Once, I called my uncle Juan on the phone and suddenly heard the exact voice of my father, his older brother. I wonder if in my children’s voices there is something of my own that I don’t recognize, just as their faces have some of my features, which others see but I cannot, since closeness blots out a likeness that is visible from afar. I remember well the fresh, deep voice of the man who was my second father, Manuel Lindo. After his death, we found it unexpectedly on messages he’d left on our answering machine. Only now do I realize that in moving to a new house and changing our telephone number, those messages that seemed to come from the other world were lost. I can’t remember the voices of my children when they were little, though surely they exist in some recording, some family video that has gradually been tinted with strange hues, the chemical reactions of what moves into the past. They used to record our greeting on the answering machine, back when that kind of thing was done. Time passed and their real voices changed, but their old ones remained, squeaky and shrill, almost unrecognizable, leaping out at us each time we called that number and no one answered. What is it about a voice that makes it more distinctive than a face? I call my mother on the phone and the voice I hear is the same she had when she was young. The telephone preserves our voices from the effects of time. When I was a child the world was richer, acoustically, because we lived among the faceless, disembodied voices on the radio: presenters, actors, actresses in radio plays, people we never saw but with whom we felt a deeper closeness because it came only from their voices. On Sunday evenings my father would listen to a show about the bullfights. You could hear the music of the band, the pasodobles, the roar of the crowd. When the bugle calls rang out, my father would explain what each one meant. On New Year’s Eve you heard the frail, high, singsong voice of General Franco. Falling in love meant the feeling you had when you heard the sound of a voice that was unlike any other.

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  YOU CAN’T IMAGINE WHAT AWAITS YOU. I like to listen to recordings of her voice from the time before we met. I like it and I experience as well a retrospective envy, a desire to amend that portion of the past. I get to hear her voice because back then, in her twenties, she hosted a radio show. It was in the 1980s, those years of manic freedom. Everything was yet to be done, to be invented, nothing of any value or luster could bear the slightest trace of the past. The young were bursting into the world and taking the place of the old, who were stunned, bewildered, hopelessly discredited by their complicity with the dictatorship or simply by the fact that their lives had coincided with it. Suddenly youth was an advantage, a natural condition of the times. The new socialist president was forty years old and some of his ministers were just over thirty. Today, this precociousness is inconceivable. The old, the very people who were young back then, have ensconced themselves more thoroughly in their entitlements and their positions than the heirs of the dictatorship ever did. She was twenty-three or twenty-four and she had a radio show where she did interviews. Pictures show a girl in short hair that is dyed red. Her lips are bright red as well and she’s smoking a cigarette in front of the microphone, holding it at the very tips of her fingers. There was a time when those recordings would have been lost, or would have been inaccessible. Now I can listen to them quite easily on the internet. It’s still her voice, but a bit different, more youthful, of course, but not higher; actually the opposite, a deeper voice, youthful and assertive, with that conscious and almost boastful confidence one heard in Madrid back then, when the young jumped as brazenly into their newfound political autonomy as into the maelstrom of their personal freedom. A confidence that had rushed into the radio stations, those heavy, somber buildings that might as well have stood somewhere in Ceaușescu’s Bucharest, filling them unrepentantly with pop music and racy shows about everyday life, the frivolous wonder of nightlife and popular fashion. She was very young and she was a woman, so she had to stand her ground in a world of older men who spoke commandingly and categorically, having inherited, whether they were politically on the left or on the right, a congenital sense of masculine self-assurance.

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  MAGIC IS A GIFT. I listen to that voice again, to its cadence, and I feel like I am doing something slightly illicit, listening in on something private. Back then I used to fall in love with voices on the radio even more than I do now. So I am certain that I would have fallen in love with her voice, with her, as soon as I heard her speak. Now I play a recording of her old show and in the few seconds it takes me to recognize her voice I have already fallen in love. I am annoyed at myself for not having listened to her show back then. What was I doing. Sunk in what thoughts, what fears and distractions. I am flooded with a retrospective love for that woman and that youthful voice, a stranger I might have never met, whose face I might have never seen. And through that voice, as through a veil, I fall in love again with the woman she is now.

  WOMAN BURNED ALIVE IN NICARAGUA. Her name was Vilma Trujillo and she died after being burned in a bonfire. Aged twenty-five, the mother of two fought to stay alive in agony for over a day after sustaining second-and third-degree burns that scorched 80 percent of her body: her breasts, her thighs, part of her face, and all of her back were charred. This was the punishment she was forced to undergo after members of her church determined that she was possessed by the devil and must be burned in a bonfire to cast him out. She agonized, gruesomely burned, in the remote hamlet of El Cortezal in an eastern province of Nicaragua.

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  THE NEFARIOUS BELIEF IN THE DEVIL. El Cortezal is a no-man’s-land. There is no municipal building, no hospital, and no police station. Religion is the only law. The local priest is the highest authority. El Cortezal is not even a village, just a dot on the map. It is located in the high mountains of Nicaragua’s central region, surrounded by bean fields and by wide pastures stripped from the tropical jungle. Getting there from the nearest village requires a four-hour drive down a terrible road with large potholes filled with mud. The car tumbles along until it reaches the end of the road. Then one must walk for three hours through the jungle, crossing rivers, climbing steep, rugged mountains and ravines where a single false step could mean falling to one’s death. Frequent rests are necessary so as not to collapse in the high heat and the stifling humidity.

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  IMMERSE YOURSELF IN NATURE. The earth in El Cortezal is black and stony, under a bright blue sky that can change to a stormy dark gray in an instant. The evangelical church stands on a hill, a crude wooden building where the congregation meets every Saturday under its pastor, Juan Rocha, who is twenty-three, and who gave the order to burn Vilma Trujillo. Facing the church is the pastor’s house, also made of wood, with a dirt floor, a door, and a single window for light. The dark, stifling room where the pastor lives is also where Vilma Trujillo was confined after her sentence was passed. In one corner the floor is charred. The congregation made a small fire to burn Vilma’s feces since she was forced to stay inside at all times. A few feet away, at the foot of a hill, some blackened stumps and branches remain from the bonfire where she was burned.

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  STRENGTH AND POWER TO THOSE WHO ARE BRAVE. The population of El Cortezal is made up of poor farmers who grow beans and raise pigs. They live in flimsy wooden huts that always seem about to collapse under the strong winds that batter the region. They are reclusive people, unaccustomed to strangers. There is no electricity or running water. Their only connection to the outside world is through a few battery-operated radios that are always tuned to religious stations. Children run around, dirty, some of them with bloated bellies or ridden with sores, poorly fed on beans, corn, and green plantains cooked over an open fire. Their lives are entirely subjected to religious belief. Faith rules everything they do. Days begin at three in the morning and end at eight in the
evening. Everyone attends mass. Adultery is a crime punished by banishment. And every single person believes in the devil.

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  HER FLESH SHOWED THROUGH AND HER SKIN WAS COVERED IN CRUSTS. On the afternoon of February 15, Juan Gregorio Rocha, pastor of the Church of the Celestial Vision of the Assemblies of God, visited Vilma Trujillo. He said that she was sick, that she suffered from hallucinations and did not answer when addressed. Her family, which is deeply religious, allowed the pastor to take her away and to declare that healing prayers be said for her. Vilma remained in the pastor’s house, bound hand and foot, until February 21. The pastor decreed a period of fasting and long communal prayers. He was aided by two members of the congregation, Franklin Hernández and Esneyda del Socorro. They concluded that Vilma was possessed by the devil. After six days of fasting and prayer, Esneyda said she had received a divine revelation. God told her they must light a bonfire and cast Vilma into the flames to release her from the devil’s grip. The ceremony was carried out at five-thirty. The men lit a bonfire and Vilma was thrown in, bound at the wrists and ankles. The young woman frantically resisted. The fire burned through the ropes and allowed her to jump out of the flames when her body was already charred. “When I saw her, it was night already,” says a witness whose initials are M. T. G. “She was all burned. She was writhing and saying, ‘Ay, ay, I’m going to die.’ The pastor was happy. He kept shouting, ‘She’s going to die, and then she’ll be reborn! As soon as she dies we’ll take her into the church and deliver her to God, then she’ll be healed and she won’t have these burns anymore.’”

  TIME IS THE ESSENCE WE ARE MADE OF. The novelty of being back is a blessed shock. I am back from absence, darkness, the depth of something like a coma, a long trance, or a seizure. I am as weak, grateful, and fearful as a convalescent. I am back from something that has no name, though one might give it one, or several, the old literary names or the modern names of psychiatry and neuroscience, clinical labels, diagnostic words of suspect accuracy. I am back from waiting rooms that usually have no windows and are stocked with stale, wrinkled magazines. In one of them, New Age was playing in the background. In another, Kiss FM, rather loudly. Those who wait, alone or in someone else’s company, hold an open magazine on their lap but look down at the floor or at the opposite wall, never saying anything when someone walks in, or else just muttering a vague greeting without lifting their eyes. I am back from rooms where the curtains are drawn during the day, as if they were meant for vampires. A coma or a seizure would have been better, then at least I would have been unconscious. I would have felt no fear, that sharp, clear stab of fright when I woke up, the hypnotic menace of the subway entering the station at a propitious speed. I am back from evenings like long tunnels, nights without sleep, a morbid sense of clarity that furnished me exclusively with reasons to sink more deeply into darkness. I am back from pills, from nausea, from despondent monologues given to strangers who looked at me from across a desk, the bookshelves behind them filled with psychiatric volumes, pretending to take notes on a sheet of paper while they looked sideways at their watch. Their secretaries charged for the visit in cash, with a polite, discouraging smile that foreclosed in advance the possibility of a receipt.

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  ENJOY THE IMMERSIVE ENTERTAINMENT EXPERIENCE YOU WERE WAITING FOR. I could be coming back from farther away. From twenty years ago, to a present time that was once the future; from a dream or a coma that lasted twenty years. No one then would be more of a stranger. So little time would have passed, yet I would no longer recognize the world. I go looking for a telephone booth, to call people, to tell them I am back, walking down one street after another without finding one. When I finally do, there is no phone inside. In the next one there is a phone dangling from a cable but it has no dial tone. I grow more and more anxious, the way one does in dreams. When I finally reach a cabin that seems undamaged I realize that I don’t know how it works. None of the coins in my pocket will fit into the slit. As if Clark Kent got back to New York and started looking desperately for a booth where he could turn into Superman, but lost his powers and the chance to display his heroism because none could be found. Searching for some kind of refuge, I wander toward my old neighborhood. I get to the square where my house used to stand and recognize it with immense relief and with bewildered gratitude. The fruit shop next door is still open and still called Casa Aragón. The newsstand still stands at the corner by the church railings. I realize that, until then, I hadn’t seen a place to buy the paper. Buñuel once said he would like to come back from the grave every few years, buy a newspaper and find out how the world was doing before happily going back to his eternal sleep. But the newsstand, which used to spread onto the sidewalk with its large offerings of magazines and papers, is now shuttered and abandoned, tagged with graffiti, the words and cryptic scribbles of the strange language of the future. The awning hangs in faded tatters. Beneath its frame there is a pile of bags, suitcases, old clothes. An African woman in exotic rags has set up camp next to a mangled beach umbrella that remains half open.

  ALL THE MYSTERIES OF THE UNIVERSE WITHIN YOUR REACH. There is a café down the block with a framed poster of a drawing by Giacometti. I look at it every day when I go in to have a bite to eat, or to buy bread or a couple of croissants for breakfast. It’s a narrow place without any tables, just some barstools and a counter that runs along the length of the plate-glass window. It’s run by a couple of Venezuelan émigrés who are turning more and more into exiles with each day that passes. Jazz is always playing discreetly in the background, so those who care for it can hear it and others can ignore it. The day’s papers are on the counter along with some new and some old magazines. Sometimes in the morning I like to take my time over a cup of green tea, facing the window, looking out into the street at the passersby or waiting to cross at the light. I flip through the papers, and since I always have my notebook and pencil handy, I sometimes jot down a headline or a phrase in an ad. Israel launches cyber campaign to conquer the desert. Dare to feel it. Climate change exposes buried Cold War secret. Lady Gaga unveils in LA the outfits for her upcoming tour. I listen to someone talking on the phone by my side. “You’re wearing it right now? Really? You put it on to talk to me?”

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  YOU DON’T ALWAYS WANT EVERYTHING. My eyes always wander to the Giacometti drawing. It’s a human figure sketched in pencil with a few thick strokes, a man in a hat who seems to be turning around as if someone had called out his name. He seems about to vanish, to dissolve into the white surface of the paper as if the pencil marks were drawn in smoke. A passing shadow made of smoke and graphite, as faint and fading as a handful of dust that’s blown or scattered into the air. He is transient, both in the sense that he is passing by and in the sense that he is on the verge of disappearing. He is visible and invisible. A silhouette cast through a window into a basement as someone passes by outside. A figure dimly seen through frosted glass or on the other side of a lit cinema screen: the Visible Invisible Man, a comic-book hero from the forties or fifties, Shadowman, or from a low-budget science-fiction film in black and white: vaporized, perhaps turned into a shadow by exposure to a radioactive flash, like the Incredible Shrinking Man. His misfortune gave him powers that set him apart from other humans, a curse that’s also an extraordinary gift. As a shadow he is capable perhaps of going through walls and closed doors; or he can follow people to spy on them, perfectly concealed as their own shadow. He walks down the street like a busy ghost, a little like the green man in the crossing signal or like those white figures in New York that mark the paths belonging to pedestrians from those reserved for bicycles and joggers.

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  SO IMMERSIVE YOU’LL FORGET YOU’RE LOOKING AT A SMARTPHONE. As I look at the Giacometti drawing, something makes me realize that I wasn’t paying attention to the music. I like listening to it like this, through the voices of the customers at the café, the gentle Venezuelan accent of the waiters, the noise of traffic that periodically
grows louder when the automatic doors slide open and shut. Following the music as one would follow a person in the crowd, someone we know and want to be with. Now I pay more attention because Thelonius Monk is playing “Crepuscule with Nellie,” a ballad of enduring conjugal love that is suddenly threatened by the fear of loss, written when his wife was sick and in the hospital. The melodies are as simple, as free, as intertwined as the lines in the drawing, a wisp of smoke, Thelonius Monk’s bejeweled hand tracing figures in the air like a sleepwalker, up on a small stage at some club. Thelonius Monk. Thelonius Sphere Monk, one of the most magnificent names in all of music, as worthy of his supreme extravagance as his hats, those fedoras, trilbies, and caps that could have been the headdress in a Rembrandt painting. Among the musicians who played with him there was one whose name was nearly as powerful: Rossiere Wilson, otherwise known as Shadow Wilson. While others played, he seemed to gently move around them, appearing, disappearing, like a shadow. He got his nickname from “his beautiful light touch with brushes,” the way he grazed the cymbals and the snare. He, too, seemed to be drawing in sand, in dust and smoke, each bristle leaving behind its delicate trace like Giacometti’s pencil, which must have made a similar sound, rich and secret, as it slid across the sheet of paper leaving a trail of graphite particles behind. Shadow Giacometti, rapt in the unique absorption of working with one’s hands, of drawing or playing the drums, when you allow yourself to be carried by the act instead of trying to direct it, an expert mastery that has no need of an intention or a will.