To Walk Alone in the Crowd

by Antonio Munoz Molina

  WELCOME TO A NEW ERA. He notices so many things now that he never did before, he explains—before the project, when it all became an obsession and he couldn’t help it anymore, especially after finding the whale. “You wouldn’t believe it,” he says, stopping on the sidewalk to emphasize his words, stretching out his arms as if to encompass something impossibly large. “Ten thousand pounds. Broader than the sidewalk and longer than a city block.” He stands there like a man from an earlier era, a time when people went on walks to have a conversation, and as he speaks about the whale I begin to notice more closely the heft of his body, the complexion of his face, his beard and his tousled hair, which are both white despite the fact that he is still quite young. His evocation of the whale seems even more powerful on account of his strong hands and a jacket that is like the coat of a sailor or a mountain man. The same species, by the way—he adds—as Moby-Dick: a sperm whale. One day it turned up on the beach like a giant heap near the marine station where he and his colleagues had been working on the project for several months, and it was like a flood, a ravaging tsunami that alters everything; even though his obsession had been with him for months already, a constant presence that never seemed to fade, even at the end of the year when they were done compiling their tables and counting and classifying all the objects they had found.

  * * *

  LOOK AT LIFE WITH DIFFERENT EYES. “And it’s still there,” he says of the obsession, “right now, even as we speak, as we walk down the street, and earlier, while we were having coffee. I’ll be thinking of something else, or talking to someone, and suddenly I realize that I’m no longer paying attention or that I lose the thread of my thoughts because I’m looking at someone flicking away a cigarette without a thought or walking out of a drugstore with a plastic bag in one hand that holds maybe a single bottle of pills. Things like that. Do you know how many cigarettes are smoked in the world in a year? Over five trillion. And one way or another, all those cigarette butts and the thousands of toxic substances they contain will end up in the sea.”

  * * *

  TECHNOLOGY MOVES YOU. “Look at that, for instance,” he says, pointing to a soda bottle and a takeout container that someone left behind on a bench along with a torn, empty bag of potato chips lying on the ground. “You’d have to follow one of these people,” he often thinks, “and keep a record of the trail of plastic trash they leave behind in a single day, or a year, or in the course of their lives. Imagine the kind of biography that would make: what we all leave behind us without even remembering we did, or being able to help it. Even me, despite my obsession. I’ll buy a pair of scissors or a toothbrush and injure my hand trying to open the stiff plastic cover. Then I think that those sharp edges will tear like a knife at a sea turtle’s throat, for instance, when it tries to swallow it mistaking it for a squid, and I remember the burst stomach inside the whale when we cut it open, all the plastic waste and debris that spilled out. There was no food at all,” he says. “Its intestines were empty. It died from a gastric rupture, but it was already very weak because no food could reach its stomach. And I can’t stop noticing, looking,” he says, “no matter what I do. Sometimes I can’t help it and I tell someone to pick up the plastic bottle or bag they just threw on the ground. I mentally classify each thing I see into the list of categories we created for the project. Bottle, food container, beverage can, hygiene product, fishing net, farming equipment…”

  * * *

  MAKE THE MOST OF IT. He stops again, this time at the busy corner of Goya and Alcalá, among the profusion of people and things, a big Corte Inglés department store with a boatload of merchandise in each of its floors and basement levels. “When I go by this store, for instance, I remember all of the Corte Inglés shopping bags we collected in the course of the year, or rather the bags the fishermen collected for us, just on that small section near the coast.” He looks at the people going by with their shopping bags and thinks of the big warehouse where the objects they collected gradually piled up during the year when his incurable obsession began. “It was a reverse Corte Inglés,” he says, “a great department store of garbage.” And, since his imagination is prone to quantifying and classifying, he provides figures to illustrate. “Forty-seven thousand items in a year. Forty-seven thousand and one, to be precise. For a whole year the fishermen along the coast near the research center brought in whatever garbage they picked up in their trawling nets. We were especially interested in trawling boats because their nets sweep the ocean floor,” he says. “Seventy percent of all plastic in the sea lies at the bottom. Each day we got a new load.” At first they used a system of waste classification developed in Norway. But they soon realized it was not what they needed, because the Norwegians did not pick up waste from agriculture. “Whereas here,” he says, “we’re right next to all the greenhouses in Almería, and all the ones being built each day in Granada and Murcia. There were thousands of pounds of the clear plastic sheeting they use for roofing material, square miles of it, and of the stiffer sheets of black plastic they lay on the ground to preserve heat and moisture. For years they’ve thrown into the sea the plastic sheets that are too worn out to be used anymore. Or if they’re not thrown in, they’re snatched by the wind and carried into the sea. Plastic crates, rope, netting, plastic pots. We found two plastic pots and twenty pounds of plastic sheeting inside the whale’s stomach.”

  * * *

  ALWAYS A STEP BEYOND. With each passing day, as the truck came and dumped its muddy, jumbled load, a kind of taxonomical delirium took hold of him, an urge to classify every single bit of waste and garbage. Objects larger than two inches had to be washed, dried, labeled, weighed, and measured. Snarled-up nets and skeins of shredded plastic had to be untangled. Once, they found a huge ball made up of eighty-nine different kinds of netting. When they were finally able to untangle it, they found that it had formed around a teddy bear with a conical wizard’s hat. Entire shelves were devoted to toys that were then classified into smaller subdivisions: plastic superheroes; articulated dolls; drowned Barbies with big eyes and drenched hair; teddy bears of all sizes; plush penguins; a strange zoology of hippos and giraffes and tragic babies with finely rendered human faces, of Disney princesses whose hair was tangled up in mud and algae.

  * * *

  I MAKE A PAYMENT AND I HAVE IT ALL. “And TV sets,” he says, “old ones as well as newer plasma screens, and whole refrigerators, dishwashers, portable fans, toy cars and trains and fighter jets and spaceships, and wool or rubber gloves like hands coming out of the water begging for help, and plastic swimming pools and floaties, sneakers, plastic sandals, condoms, swimming goggles, birdcages, traveling crates for pets, buckets, engines, bicycle tires, whole bicycles, synthetic sponges, car tires, huge trailer-truck tires.”

  * * *

  WHEREVER AND WHENEVER I WANT. “And the plastic bags,” he says, “the plastic bags and bottles and food containers, which are the three most frequent items. Such a huge quantity of plastic bottles,” he recalls, “carefully arranged, like an army or like the pieces in a deranged game of chess. Soda bottles, laundry bottles, cleaning products; bags and plastic cups and plates; plastic knives and forks for some huge feast, and rows of toothpaste tubes, toothbrushes, plastic straws, baby diapers, plastic kitchen sets, candy wrappers, bags that used to hold potato chips or cheese puffs: bright, intact, still shiny once you washed them.”

  * * *

  EXPERIENCE INCREDIBLE SENSATIONS YOU’LL NEVER FORGET. One day someone came and told them about the whale. It seemed even more immense on that sheltered cove. To get on top they had to climb its slippery mass, moving around it in their orange body suits and safety goggles like deep-sea divers or astronauts as they cut it open with chainsaws. In the black rampart of its head there was an open eye that was already swarming with flies. Working very quickly so the growing stench would not spread over the beach, they arranged on the sand the various objects that would later be taken to the warehouse to be permanently classified. “It was like b
eing on a different planet,” he says. His eyes no longer dart sideways as he speaks. They are fixed on that memory. The whale, cut open like a trench filled with innards and organic matter; the burst sack of its enormous stomach, from which they kept removing things; and all the human figures walking on top of the dead animal in rubber boots and masks to cut it into pieces. A crane and a bulldozer waited to one side. “You may not be able to actually imagine it,” he says. “It weighed nearly five tons. There were forty pounds of plastic in its stomach. The record for that species currently belongs to a whale that was stranded on a beach in California with 161 pounds of plastic in its gut. Most of the plastic inside our whale was greenhouse sheeting. But there were also nets, plastic nursery pots, a spray can, plastic bags, cigarette lighters, food containers.”

  * * *

  CALL US, WE CAN HELP. But he is not a gloomy or a bitter man. His voice is as calm as his face, which seems youthful by contrast with his white hair and beard. He counteracts the dizzying welter of apocalyptic figures by an inclination to think concretely, attending to what is feasible and near at hand: the well-defined parameters of an experiment; the time span of a project; things that can be measured, counted, and reliably assessed. Sometimes, when work was done for the day, he would stay behind in the warehouse, alone, surrounded by the forty-seven thousand items they gathered and classified that year, wandering among his collections with a certain sense of pleasure that belonged not so much to a proprietor as to a kind of museum director. Some small corner of reality had been organized and measured. I tell him that perhaps at those moments his satisfaction was more aesthetic than scientific, and it makes him smile. But then he looks serious. “Why should there be any difference,” he says.

  * * *

  BE THE FIRST ONE TO OWN IT. It’s a little before noon and we’re having a beer and some tapas at a bar on Menéndez Pelayo. October in Madrid. All around us people are talking and drinking, sharing plates of tapas at the bar. Some rest their elbows on the counter with an unconscious air of easy wisdom. The broad sidewalks and its closeness to El Retiro give this part of Madrid a sense of openness, like that of a city by the shore. Along with our beers they brought us a few slices of bread and a tin of mussels in oil and vinegar. There is a kind of perfection to each small thing, a consummate coming together of pleasure and common sense. The walk, the conversation, and the glass of beer give a glow to his face. He speaks in a soft Andalusian accent, calmly, without emphasis, his words trailing off into their aspirated endings. “The worst part is not what we saw,” he says, “but what we never found. All the plastic that is swept to unknown depths by marine currents stronger than large rivers; all the plastic that gets broken up into microfibers measuring five millimeters or less. Plastic never goes away. A water bottle or a silly shopping bag may disappear after a thousand years, but that’s irrelevant: the microfibers remain and are absorbed by living organisms, causing unknown reactions at the cellular and molecular level.” He points his fork at the mussel he is about to eat: it surely contains traces of plastic, pesticides, antibiotics, antidepressants. “A smoker even inhales rat poison,” he says, “and pesticides, and heavy metals that will pollute the bit of ground next to that tree where people throw their cigarette butts when they’re done smoking them by the raised tables that the owners of the café have installed on the sidewalk.”

  * * *

  WOULD YOU LIKE TO BE HERE TOMORROW? He is ever watchful. Nothing escapes him. A waiter just threw away a small plastic basket with several untouched slices of bread; the attractive woman who stepped out with her glass of beer to smoke on the sidewalk crushed an empty cigarette pack and threw it on the ground. He watches with amazement but without misanthropy the irrational or simply catastrophically careless actions of human beings. His erudition ranges in peculiar directions, and he turns out to know a lot about Proudhon and other utopian French socialists. He shares one of Proudhon’s sayings (he may be the first person to mention Proudhon to me in more than forty years): “Well-being without education turns people into brutes and makes them insolent.” He has begun another project related to the problem of Chinese tires. On a virgin and nearly inaccessible cove he found a tire dump. People buy Chinese tires because they’re much cheaper, but since they are illegal in the European Union, they can’t take them to official recycling centers when they wear out. Instead, they dump them wherever they can, including that exceptional beach. Since it lies far down at the foot of a nearly vertical cliff, all they have to do is tip the dump truck from a bend in the road. So he started a project. He got some funding. Someone said they had a crane he could borrow. Members of a mountaineering club will rappel down the cliff. He thinks there are two to three hundred tires on the beach, all in a black heap like the stranded whale at the edge of the sea—a deep blue sea whose waters no longer contain the least speck of plankton, and are thus empty as well of all the fish that once came to the cove seeking food and a shelter from predators.

  I AM FULL WITH A THOUSAND SOULS. There is a kind of invisibility to Herman Melville, as if lost or perpetually estranged among the people walking down the street with him, or in the smaller sphere of his literary circles, the bookstores and cafés. Walt Whitman, who was his exact contemporary, must have crossed paths with him. When Melville’s first book was published Whitman wrote a favorable review in a Brooklyn paper. Melville was a reader of Poe, and both frequented the same bookstore in New York, whose owner they knew well. But they never met, or if they ran into each other now and then, to the point of becoming familiar strangers, we will never know it. Melville walked quickly, in long strides. He said Broadway was a Mississippi flowing through Manhattan. During a trip to London in 1850 he spent his days exploring alleyways and courtyards, bookstores, theaters, cafés, dubious streets he would have avoided in other people’s company, where women stood at the corners offering themselves under the gaslight. De Quincey was still alive and it is very likely that Melville had read his Confessions, as well as Poe’s “The Man of the Crowd.” Melville took quick notes in his journal as he traveled. Moby-Dick must have been taking shape in his imagination, its first episodes, Ishmael’s first night in New Bedford rising dimly in his mind like a dream or like a memory. One day, in London, he lets himself drift in a festive crowd that fills the streets. At some point, when it is too late to step aside or to try to turn back, he finds out that all those people are going to a public hanging. “The brutal multitude,” he writes with disgust in his journal. There was another witness elsewhere in the crowd that day, one who was just as repelled: Charles Dickens. Dickens and Melville, standing separately in that moving mass of people thirsting for cruelty, so unknowingly close to each other.

  * * *

  WE SEE REMARKABLE THINGS IN YOUR FUTURE. Starting in December 1866, and for the next twenty years, Herman Melville takes the same walk through the streets of New York City six days a week. Leaving his house at 103 East Twenty-Sixth Street, he takes the tram, which is still horse-drawn but already on rails, and heads south. He gets off and walks west, toward the piers along the Hudson, the scenery of his youth. His father used to take him for walks along the piers when he was still a well-to-do businessman, before he became ill and went bankrupt. They would walk hand in hand. Now Melville wears a blue cap and a dark-blue uniform with gold buttons. His official title is Assistant Inspector of Customs. Poe had sought a similar position a few years earlier to no avail. A friend arranged for an appointment with the president at the White House so Poe could offer his services and explain his precarious situation. He got so drunk the night before that he never turned up. Melville’s task is to ensure that proper dues are paid on the merchandise coming to New York on ships from all over the world. He works in a kind of large wooden shed. The job is especially unpleasant to him because everyone around him is corrupt. Fifteen or sixteen years later he will change his route, though not his job. He is transferred to a dock on the East River, far north, near Seventy-Ninth Street. The city is undergoing rapid change. Now Melvill
e goes to work on the elevated train that runs along Third Avenue. There are no tall buildings yet to block the view. From the window of the train, the seated traveler can see the broad span of the city: the two rivers girding it on either side, and the docks bristling with masts and as the years go by, with the tall stacks of steamships belching out black clouds of smoke and sounding their deep horns.

  * * *

  JUST WHEN YOU NEEDED IT MOST. No one knows or remembers who Herman Melville is anymore. Tall, serious, sitting on the train with the same fixed, distant gaze he has in every photograph, with that grand old-fashioned beard that has now turned gray, he is as imposing and as anachronistic a figure as the rare sail ship that now and then still docks at the piers. The same man who sailed so widely in the first part of his life would never go to sea again. No one remembers any of his books, not even the first ones, which had turned him into a somewhat scandalous literary celebrity because they told tales of cannibals and of the sensual natives of the Southern seas. Henry James, who knows everyone in the literary circles of New York, never mentions his name. Of the 3,000 copies of Moby-Dick printed for its first (and only) edition, 2,400 remained for years in the printer’s warehouse, entirely forgotten. Then they were burned in a fire that destroyed the building. The flames must have spread quickly through that mass of paper, that purgatory of unwanted books, the same words and the same pages identically repeated over and over again. Gross sales of Moby-Dick in the United States amounted to $556.37. There is a rather ghostly photograph from around 1890 showing the esplanade of the Battery at the tip of the island, with a railing over the Hudson and the bay. Several male figures appear at a certain distance, each standing alone, men out in the sun in dark formal dress and top hats on what seems like a winter morning. One of them could be Herman Melville. In the 1920s, when Moby-Dick was printed again and Billy Budd was first published, an old man who had worked in his youth as a clerk in a New York City bookstore said that he remembered having seen Melville many times. He said he was a private man, always kind and generous to the employees who worked in the shop.