To Walk Alone in the Crowd

by Antonio Munoz Molina

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  CHAQUE ACHAT DESSINE UN PEU PLUS VOTRE PROCHAIN VOYAGE. Now I go to Paris and return to the same hotel where I stayed at the start of summer, when the task was just beginning and I did not know exactly where it would lead. Not that I do now. There is no need for a project when what I simply do by habit can give me such complete and childlike fulfillment. When I first came to this hotel, I was about to move out of my house and I had no idea how long it would be before I found a new one: how many hotels, and trips, and stays in rented or in borrowed rooms. While several hours each day will have to be devoted to work, I will also have long stretches of idle time. The receptionist at the Hôtel de l’Abbaye remembers me. I switch languages just as I switched out of my summer clothes to come here. The brain has strange unconscious mechanisms. I change coloring like a squid diving into a language I enjoy so much. The trip awakens a mimetic disposition that grows stronger with age. I would like to be able to change as easily as Thelonius Monk changed hats, with that mix of humor and calm earnestness. “A man of many hats,” as they say. I’m always intrigued by the ability some people have to be eternally themselves no matter where they are or where they go, impervious to the surrounding atmosphere, never giving in to its flux, possessed of a ceaseless constancy that is seemingly without effort. What I enjoy most about wandering on my own or speaking a different language is the partial interruption of identity. A brief holiday from yourself. Like the shopkeeper who hangs a sign on the door that says he will be out for a short while. He hasn’t gone far, he will be back soon, but he will nevertheless have disappeared, going off on his own or with someone else, in private, secretly, I wonder who. One of Eric Dolphy’s greatest albums is titled Out to Lunch! I will have to try in the next few days to find these absent intervals among my obligations. You come back more clearheaded after a quick meal, a cup of coffee, a walk around the neighborhood, ready to be moored again in normalcy, to be with others. I need these intervals and I enjoy them. They have something in common with a hurried encounter between lovers or with the warmth of friendship.

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  THE PERFECT WAY TO START YOUR JOURNEY. There is no ambient music in the hotel lobby, just the sound of quiet conversations among guests. French hotels are free of that panicked aversion to anything old-fashioned that makes the common areas of Spanish hotels so unpleasant. Someone is coming soon to pick me up. I go into the courtyard to have a cup of coffee and I look around in the hope of seeing Isabelle Huppert again, as on that afternoon in June, the glow of her fair skin and the reddish gold of her hair. I could fall in love with Isabelle Huppert’s face. I wonder if in the thirties this hotel might have been the kind of slightly sordid place where Walter Benjamin found lodging. There are iron chairs and tables in the garden and a large fountain in the shape of a tortoise. It was at the Hôtel de l’Abbaye that I woke up remembering a red sign for a hotel called the Cólera-Miró. Before leaving my room to come down to the lobby, I made sure to carefully arrange on the table the various implements that make up my office.

  MALGRÉ LE TEMPS QUI PASSE. Looking at Fantin-Latour paintings in the Musée du Luxembourg I am seized by a powerful feeling that is shot through with grief, a kind of overwhelming joy imbued with gratitude and melancholy. The beauty of pure contemplation in his portraits and his vases of flowers holds me in its mesmerizing spell. Fantin-Latour depicts the very act of contemplation and so induces it as well in the viewer. He captures like no one else the spirit of pure absorption in a task that fills our inner life, stopping time or reaching beyond it: a woman reading; a man writing; a woman starting to draw and then pausing, standing still by a blank canvas facing a vase of flowers that contains at that moment all the mystery of reality and painting, the presence of motionless things. I try to imagine Emily Dickinson painted by Fantin-Latour. His vases of flowers radiate a sense of calm and spiritual contemplation as powerful as the statue of a meditating Buddha. Looking at his family portraits, and learning to recognize the faces that recur in them, I have the impression that he may have been in love with his sister-in-law, Charlotte, a haughty redhead that looks straight at the viewer, unlike her sister, Fantin’s wife, who always avoids our gaze by taking refuge in a book or in a reverie. I too would have fallen in love with his sister-in-law. I even like her name. There is a sensuousness in names. One of the early signs that we are in love is a predilection for a certain name, a name that suddenly becomes mysterious, that we think about or whisper as if it were a secret, or say aloud and shiver.

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  A 3D JAW CAN GIVE YOU BACK YOUR SMILE. Charlotte’s profile is that of a beautiful and assertive woman, her attitude suggesting imminent motion. In a family portrait where her parents and sister stay seated, statically ensconced in a rather bloated bourgeois domesticity, Charlotte is on her feet, dressed to go out (one glove is already on, she holds the other in her hand), eager to look out into the world, to go give German or English lessons to some pupil who must be secretly enthralled by her. Unless the private lessons are a lie, and Charlotte is on her way to meet her lover. It suddenly seems like a great pity that her brother-in-law never painted a nude portrait of her. Charlotte painted in the nude by Fantin-Latour would be more brazen and perturbing than Manet’s Olympia. It is like imagining Caravaggio painting a nude portrait of his venal muse and model, Fillide Melandroni, with her mane of red hair. In each portrait he paints of Charlotte, Fantin-Latour watches her more intensely, discovering a new angle, a different aspect to her beauty. Love is a gaze that never rests and is never satisfied. His portraits are filled with a lover’s joyful rapture at all the variations of the face he loves, like the changing beauty of the phases of the moon. In profile; foreshortened; facing him directly; smiling furtively to convey some secret that exists between them; or serious and composed; or restless. Perhaps I am just making up what I want to believe. But I feel as if I have been in those rooms, breathed their atmosphere, faintly veiled, the way the texture of the canvas shows through a most delicate layer of paint. Fantin-Latour is married to one sister but in love with the other, and what the three of them know but can never say is disclosed with cautious impudence in his painting. It is disclosed even now, right now, in the present, on this afternoon in late September 2016, in a room in the Musée du Luxembourg that is almost entirely empty.

  YOU WILL TAKE INVISIBLE PICTURES. There is a chilling portrait of Baudelaire by Fantin-Latour: he is seated in a group, but completely alone. His face is pale, thin, smooth, clean-shaven. His long hair, combed back, is of a dark gray that seems at odds with the ravaged youthfulness of the face, the high forehead and the fixed, commanding eyes that seem to look at you from a height and also from deep within. In the empty room of the museum, Baudelaire’s eyes seem to notice me and to exchange a glance.

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  AS UNIQUE AS YOU. Courbet, who painted a portrait of Baudelaire as a young man, complained of how difficult it was to achieve his likeness. The look on his face was too shifting, too fleeting to be captured by a pencil or a brush, a moving target that made it impossible to take aim. At a time when most men wore big beards and great mops of hair, his shaved face and lank hair, which was always combed back to reveal his forehead, gave him the striking aspect of a slightly sinister priest or (as an acquaintance once said) of a bishop in traveling clothes. Only priests used to shave back then. In Brussels it was rumored that he was an agent of the French secret police. In a self-portrait in pen and wash he appears as a dark, muffled figure; the lapels of his coat are turned up and the brim of his top hat almost covers his eyes. He looks sideways, as if plotting or keeping watch, a lit pipe in his mouth and the gaslights of a dark city behind him. He could be Dr. Henry Jekyll or Mr. Hyde. He could be Detective C. Auguste Dupin wandering through Paris at night, or Sherlock Holmes paying a visit to an opium den in the sordid alleys of the London docks.

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  HOW FAR WILL YOUR STYLE TAKE YOU. Baudelaire is that impassive, distant face that a young Catulle Mendès recognized in a crowd of st
rangers at a train station in Paris. He is an inquisitive figure strolling among the people and the trees on a sunny Sunday afternoon in the Tuileries, while a band plays in the distance. His friend, or rather his disciple, Manet, who knew him so well and was so fond of him, chose to draw his portrait as a stranger in the city crowd, one more among the bourgeois gentlemen dressed in a black coat and top hat. But it takes some effort to recognize Baudelaire among so many people, a crowd that seems festive at first but gradually becomes more and more stifling. He is off to one side, in profile, in the back, seemingly talking to others, recognizable by his mane of gray hair and his neatly shaven face. Then, as you look more closely at the painting, clicking and expanding that small area of the screen, his face turns out to be without features, just a dab of paint, barely outlined. The futility, which so alarmed Courbet, of trying to depict what is in constant motion. In a picture that Nadar took of him in 1855 his features are once more a little blurred and hazy. Sitting for a photograph back then meant keeping perfectly still for several minutes. Quick motions were invisible to photography. Of all surviving portraits of Baudelaire, the most mysterious was found just a few years ago. We cannot be certain it is really him, just as we do not know if Herman Melville is one of those bearded figures in top hats in an old photograph of the South Ferry, or Emily Dickinson one of two slightly aged women standing very close together in dark dresses and forbidding hairdos in a photograph I saw this winter at the Morgan Library in New York. Uncertainty heightens our desire to know. In the foreground of the photograph in question there is a man with big whiskers and pale eyes sitting in front of a studio curtain with a top hat on his lap. In the back, standing behind the curtain, barely pulling it aside with one hand like a person peering cautiously into a room, there is a figure with a blurry face that would appear to be, or one might say is almost surely, that of Baudelaire: straight hair, high forehead, shaved chin. And if it is him, one wonders what he was doing in that studio, what connection he had to the man sitting for his picture, whose identity has not been ascertained. It’s like looking into a precise moment of the past through a time machine or bathyscaphe that is equipped with, among other instruments, a photographic camera.

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  DISCOVER THE SECRET OF YOUTH IN A PILL. Nadar lived until 1910. He survived his friend by forty-three years. During the first decade of the twentieth century, in those years before World War I that saw the rise of cinema, the automobile, the airplane, and the electric light bulb, there were a few people at least who would have remembered seeing Baudelaire fifty years earlier, in a long-lost Paris. Oscar Wilde, in his Parisian exile, could have met Nadar, and chatted with old people who would have told him what it was like to catch a glimpse of Baudelaire on the street; to recognize his face, his silhouette, to see him staring into space through the window of a café. Toulouse-Lautrec drew Oscar Wilde exactly as Manet had painted Baudelaire: as a stranger.

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  THERE COMES A DAY. At a certain point, the last thread of living memory snaps. When Walter Benjamin arrived as an émigré in Paris in 1933, no one who ever knew Baudelaire remained alive, though there were still people who had known Wilde, and Proust, and Degas. I once had dinner in New York with the poet Paul Pines, who in his youth had been a pupil of Heinrich Blücher, Hannah Arendt’s husband. Suddenly, as in a blinding sequence of neural connections, an evening in March 2017 became linked by a string of memories to a past that had always been, for me, purely imaginary. Pines, a working-class Jew from Queens who had been in Vietnam during the war and later in the jungles of Guatemala, and who now lived in a house in the woods near the Canadian border, told me in that noisy restaurant that in the sixties he had been to Arendt and Blücher’s house on Riverside Drive and 109th. Years later, in hindsight, Pines told me how grateful he was to have been a disciple of those German exiles, the last beacons, he said, and bearers of the great humanist culture of Europe. In Blücher’s classes, and from their conversations in an apartment that was filled with books and whose big windows faced the Hudson, Pines said he had learned things that were vital to his intellect, his life, his rebellious sense of civic duty, and his calling as a writer. Had Benjamin lived, Paul Pines would have met him in Arendt and Blücher’s apartment. James Joyce says that future events cast a shadow on the present. A past that might have happened throws a similar shadow on what came after. That is where the ghosts live, in that bit of conjectural space-time, their blurred faces peering from behind a curtain, moving incognito through the places where they might have lived.

  DON’T MISS THIS ONCE-IN-A-LIFETIME OPPORTUNITY. “Too Much Happiness.” That is the title of an Alice Munro story about a Russian mathematician, Sophia Kovalevsky, who was Fantin-Latour’s contemporary. It is like a great Russian novel with all its scope and all its twists and turns compressed into thirty pages. Who knows how many times I have read it. The main character experiences a secret, inner sense of fulfillment during the same trip back from Paris to Stockholm where she contracts the illness that will kill her, on one of those trains that tunnel through the darkness of a European night in Russian novels. Often, during these past few days in Paris, or in other French cities to which I travel by train, I experience feelings that are too intense, as if I had been granted a secret explosion of momentary joy that cannot last, cannot exist without some kind of retribution or reversal. I gather precious mental images that are connected only by the motion of the train. Fantin-Latour’s redheaded sister-in-law. Isabelle Huppert smiling as she talks with friends over a cup of tea in the courtyard of the Hôtel de l’Abbaye. The portraits and manuscripts of Baudelaire in the Musée de la Vie Romantique, which is housed in a small villa with a garden that could be in the middle of the countryside but actually stands at the end of a narrow, tunnel-like alleyway in Paris. The paintings and drawings he loved; the fierce handwriting of his letters and his dedications; the delirious, hypnotic quality of his eyes in those photographs by Nadar. Also the walk I took in Nantes this morning, the garden I found behind a church, with a fragrant fig tree, an inexplicable palm tree, a fountain that was level with the ground, from which fresh water gurgled. I had an hour on my own between two engagements and sat on a bench to hear the sound of the fountain and breathe in the scent of the fig tree, sheltered beneath its autumn splendor. Too much happiness. The silence and the sound of human voices in a garden tucked away behind a Gothic apse.

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  THE BEST MOMENTS ARE UNPLANNED. I recorded on my phone the silence and the sound of water that I heard in Nantes this morning, and then, this afternoon, I recorded the murmur of human voices in the squares of Toulouse, near the center of town, no cars, no horns, the brick facades were lit by the setting sun, the shops were closing, and all you heard were footsteps, voices, bicycles, the faint tinkle of their bells, people talking in the cafés. The sounds of the town and of people’s lives could once again be heard. The sun was setting and a bit of soft, golden light remained on the upper stories of the buildings, all of them made of that red brick that seems devised expressly to reflect and to attenuate the sun. I went here and there, my hands in my pockets, tired and happy after several days of work, of meeting people, weighed down by the fatigue of travel and engagements but without any sadness, at peace with life in a town that seems expressly built to shelter and protect it.

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  ATTACKS ARE LAUNCHED ON CIVILIAN POPULATION TO FORCE REBELS TO A TRUCE. While I stroll through the main square of Toulouse, while I have breakfast at the café La Cigale in Nantes, beneath ceilings decorated with nymphs and diaphanous nineteenth-century ladies, in a room covered in green and yellow Art Nouveau tiles; while I walk along the banks of the Seine in Paris looking for traces of Baudelaire, Wilde, and Benjamin, or sit for a while by the great circular pool of the Luxembourg, looking at the toy ships, thinking about Temple Drake, Faulkner’s beautiful redhead; while I fervently read Paul Valéry’s writings on Degas, sitting by a window on a high-speed train that whisks me across the fertile fields and the a
ncient glow of Provence; all this time, as I do these things, bombs are raining down on Aleppo, destroying buildings that were already in ruins, finding their way to schools and hospitals, shaking the walls of basements filled with helpless people who will suffer and die, as in all wars, even though they had nothing to do with bringing them about, and have no interest in them. Along the Hungarian border, police are chasing people who fled Syria as they try to jump over coils of barbed wire. In the window display of an electronics store in Lyon an identical image of Donald Trump appears on a battery of curved-screen TVs, gesturing and moving his mouth as he stands before a sea of American flags. In the desert, on the outskirts of Amman, huge crowds of refugees gather among mountains of plastic trash, still terrified by the thundering noise of war. Right now, as I fly back from Lyon to Madrid over the flat and prosperous fields of France, the engines of military planes roar above Aleppo’s battered streets, and bombs shake buildings and basements, blowing up windows, tossing up huge columns of debris into the air while people run blindly in a cloud of smoke and dust that blots out the light of day.