To Walk Alone in the Crowd

by Antonio Munoz Molina

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  CONNECTED TO EVERYTHING. He came up the dark canyon of lower Broadway through the financial district, running into flocks of tourists and bank clerks and executives. The waves of tourists are as tightly packed as on the Rialto in Venice. From the loading dock for the Statue of Liberty to the bronze bull that symbolizes either finance or the stock exchange there is an overwhelming flood of tourists. They come from the far corners of the Earth to take selfies, raising extendable sticks high above the heads of all the other tourists. They crowd around a terrified squirrel to take its picture. They press against the bronze bull as if taking part in an atavistic ritual, circling, lifting the selfie stick as if it were a candle or a liturgical object. A very fat woman in a wheelchair is stuck in the middle of a crowded group of Chinese tourists. Garbage overflows from metal cans on every corner. Homeless people rummage inside to find slices of pizza, a half-finished bottle of Coke, a hot dog with the ends chewed off.

  EMBARK ON A ONE-OF-A-KIND EXPERIENCE. He has seen the homeless stationed along Broadway at a certain distance from one another: the silent ones, who stay still, wrapped in blankets and sleeping bags, and the ones who pace the sidewalk, accosting people and shaking plastic cups with a rhythmic jingle of coins. The ones who sit on the ground are white and do not say anything. The ones who pace the sidewalk or prop themselves against a building or a piece of scaffolding are usually Black. He looks as he goes by at the signs written on pieces of cardboard. There are army veterans, HIV patients, blond kids, pale and staring into space or reading and writing, never asking aloud. A woman in her forties with disheveled hair is sitting on an upturned plastic bucket, smoking and holding on her knees the cardboard sign that tells of her misfortunes. Sometimes there are two of them, a boy and a girl, always blond, blue-eyed, with dirty faces. They huddle together or against a big dog dozing at their side. Today their faces and their hands are red on account of the cold, red and slightly blue. A young man sits alone by a cardboard sign that says he killed his father to stop him from abusing his mother and sister, and was then put in a psychiatric ward. Melville walked these streets and so did Bartleby, his imaginary clerk. A city of low houses, of docks and sailing ships, of churches, graveyards, darkness lit by whale oil. Only the churches and the graveyards with their worn headstones remain. Large open spaces used to spread to the north where the narrow streets gave way: Broadway ended and the old winding footpath of the Lenape began. It was an island of forests, hills, low swamps and marshes, streams and lakes. Trappers had killed off all the beaver for their fur. Of the Lenape, all that remained was a small population living on a patch of virgin forest at the island’s northern end. Herman Melville witnessed all of this. Poe did as well, or some of it at least, during those last years of heartbreak and misfortune in the city, or rather in what used to be a rural area of Dutch-style farms and peasant houses lying well outside the town. Poe and Melville know each other. They cross paths on their walks through the troublesome city, a muddy waste of horse manure and filthy snow during the winter months, or they find themselves at the same bookshop or as guests at functions given by wealthy women with literary tastes. Melville has read Poe’s tales of terrors at sea: the one about the shipwrecked sailors caught in the maelstrom; the one about the traveler who reaches the ice fields of the South Pole.

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  BEYOND ALL LIMITS. The Mississippi of Broadway, Melville says; the Amazon, the Nile. At Fifth Avenue and Forty-Second Street stood the city’s water reservoir, which resembled an Egyptian citadel or temple. There was a prison known as The Tombs that had an Egyptian portico with tall, thick columns crowned by capitals in the shape of lotus flowers. The city gradually altered over time much as Broadway alters in the course of the walk. Avidly he traverses its many worlds, its times and places. To walk is to do something and to do nothing. It means wandering aimlessly along but also in a particular direction traced by the course of a street that he has followed from its very beginning. He stays always on Broadway and always on the west side of the street, the one in the sun. He has gone through noisy, crowded stretches and through places of sudden silence: the violent beating of a hammer on the metal plates with which they cover potholes; bulldozers digging into the asphalt and cracking it open to lift up piles of debris; pneumatic drills that make the earth shake and the windows rattle; giant trucks from Canada or the Pacific coast. A ripped-apart, eviscerated city, a city under construction and under destruction. He has walked past trenches as deep as craters that take up entire city blocks where colossal buildings were still standing just yesterday. He has seen latticed metal structures rise and grow and turn from one day to the next into glass towers. This is the clattering work and the machinery of the world, the seismic and volcanic force of money shaking the island to its innards of hard schist.

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  COME EXPERIENCE SOMETHING DIFFERENT. There is a heartbeat, an ebb and flow to the slow and ceaseless shaking of the Earth. The noise attains a maximum and then subsides as you cross a street that acts as a border. North of Canal Street there are wide zones of silence. Also past the riot of construction and the crowds that spill a little beyond Times Square. Near Columbus Circle the road and the sidewalk grow wider. You can see far into the distance. Suddenly it seems impossible to have endured such a density of human beings; of noise, traffic, things, digital displays as large as the screens in old movie theaters; of beggars and of people in a rush, bumping and shoving each other, women striking the ground in high heels; colossal shops; cheap restaurants and fast-food places. Walking north, he felt a growing sense of suffocation. The endless repetition of bank branches, Starbucks, Duane Reades gives rise in him to a dull sense of timelessness and overwhelming corporate omnipotence. He walks and walks, and every corner is the same corner. The forward energy of the straight line crumbles into a circling vertigo.

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  THAT LONG CREVASSE OF SHADOW. He saw a massive, shirtless man coming down the street with a shaved head and a snake coiled around his neck like a scarf. He saw an emaciated woman holding in her hands what seemed like a basket or a tangle of wires or wickerwork, but turned out to be her fingernails. They were so long that they twisted and grew entangled like the nails of a strange predatory bird, a flying dinosaur, on a body and a face that were themselves a kind of corneous growth, skin as dry as parchment draped over bones and stretched over her jaws and clavicles. He sensed in the man with the snake and the woman with the long fingernails an intimation of terror, something like the start of a monstrous metamorphosis: Snake Man, the Clawed Woman, creatures out of a cheap horror film, sideshow freaks crudely advertised in garish colors.

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  THE RUMBLE OF THAT FEARSOME CROWD. He is no one. He feels devoid of weight. But the feeling now is one of fear rather than freedom. An inkling of how easy it would be to disappear, leaving no other trace than a black-and-white silhouette recorded in a flood of people as it streams past a security camera. Nobody knows him. He is one more among the city’s invisible denizens. Not as invisible nevertheless as that undocumented Mexican tightening the bolts on a piece of scaffolding, or as the beggar dragging his loose pants along the ground as people pass him by without looking, a skill that is one of the city’s distinctive traits. To see and simultaneously not to see. To determine within a fraction of a second who is visible and who is not; or who will become visible for only a few minutes and then be erased in the blink of an eye or the wave of a hand. No need to avert your eyes, since you made sure beforehand not to turn them in that direction. Put your guard up from a distance without seeming to notice the very thing you want to avoid. This is a city of zombies glued to cell phone screens, of invisible men and invisible women. Those who contract invisibility are changed by it over time. They turn into ghosts or into shipwrecked castaways gradually regressing to a savage state in the absence of human company. Again and again this morning he encounters people who look like they have survived for twenty years on a desert island and lost their minds. They walk down the
street as through a forest or a heath where no one else is present. No one else is present because no one looks at them. As with all survivors on desert islands, they haven’t had a haircut in years and they’re still dressed in the rags and tatters of the clothes they wore when they were shipwrecked. Although they are surrounded by people, they eat in the middle of the street, or alone at a McDonald’s or a Subway, in the savage solitude of hungry animals. They piss or shit wherever the need finds them. No one ever comes near, so they have gradually forgotten the habit of reserve. They scratch in the sun like sleepy beasts or they speak or yell at no one in particular. Silence, as much as the monotony of always hearing only their own voice, has driven them insane. On the island they’ve grown hairy and their clothes have spoiled. Their skin is hard and coppery from always being outside. Their nails are dirty and thick; it’s been years since they cut them properly, given how unlikely it was that they’d find a nail clipper in the wreckage of the ship. Some carry on their backs the burrow, the hovel, or the cave where they go hiding. The hood over their faces is the entrance to the cave, so deep that no face can actually be seen; their rags are like a hut made of skins and furs on a winter steppe; the stench that envelops them marks the borders of their territory, driving away even more effectively anyone who comes near. They sleep in a corner of a subway car from which the rest of the passengers move away, anchorites in a desert that is also a garbage dump, cowled like misanthropic monks.

  THE BEASTS ARE AMONG US. He realizes that he tends to keep his head down as he walks, looking at the ground. His eyes travel in a sweeping arc, from the sidewalk in front of his feet, to the faces of the people coming his way, to the heads and shoulders of those who walk ahead of him in the same direction. He has walked for so long through so many cities and never found sidewalks so agreeable to walking and looking as these. They are made of square or rectangular slabs of cement. The lines that divide them form a grid that helps measure the length of your steps. The cracks that spread over their surface trace winding patterns that often resemble branches, drawings of trees, rivers flowing into deltas, the outline of a mountain range. Arshile Gorky said the cracks on a sidewalk are always captivating. After they repair a sidewalk, when the cement is still fresh, shapes are impressed on it that last forever, hard and clear like fossil prints. Splayed hands, names, scribbled words and drawings, tracks of dogs and birds, human footprints. But especially hands. People walk by a slab of wet and freshly smoothed cement and they cannot resist the urge to press their open hands on it, just like twenty thousand years ago on the clay walls of a cave. On the city’s sidewalks you find the palms of open hands and also little claw prints left behind by birds: pigeons, sparrows, starlings, species able to adapt and survive in an environment so hostile to almost any kind of life. Their tracks can form delicate, meandering lines across the width of a slab, like strings of leaflike hieroglyphs, schematic dinosaur prints, the scattered marks left by seagulls and plovers on a stretch of sand that has been smoothed by the receding tide. When a slab of fresh cement is poured in autumn, the shapes of fallen leaves are impressed upon it as precisely as on Egyptian bas-reliefs or as the leaves of fossil plants: a long wreath of tiny acacia leaves; the wavy fan of a gingko leaf with the small, clean stroke of its curving stem.

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  LIVE IT IN SUPER SLOW MOTION. Other leaves are imprinted like shadows or like old photographic plates. Wetted by the rain or trampled underfoot, they adhere to the porous surface of the slab and then, as they are carried away by the wind, or swept, or simply as they decay, their shadows remain on the great, gray sheet of the sidewalk as if drawn in charcoal, fading gradually through the winter months as they are altered by rain, snow, and changing weather. Sometimes an entire slab bears the imprint of a single leaf; sometimes, near the railings of a park, entire constellations can be found, pages of an herbal culled from various trees, arranged entirely by chance as if with a conscious sense of spacing. In the Great Encyclopedia of Accidental Art that he would like to oversee, he would reserve for himself the volume devoted to the sidewalks of New York, spread at people’s feet like a canvas, like Jackson Pollock’s canvas, which he lay on the studio floor so he could step on it and press into its surface whatever he could find, pennies, cigarette butts, the kinds of things that people toss on the sidewalk. That volume will include a full-page color illustration of a hand he saw one early April morning printed on the sidewalk. The sun was shining after several hours of that bleak, demoralizing rain of early spring that soaks your shoes and the bottom of your pants, and seems to punish people with its unacceptable lengthening of winter. It was a big hand, deeply printed, belonging to someone who had pressed quite hard on the cement. The gray sky had turned a clear blue, and in the hollow of the hand, where rainwater had collected to the brim, that very blue was shining even more serenely.

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  ENJOY THE BEST URBAN PICNIC. Out of prudence and even out of politeness he knows that he must curb the habit of looking into people’s eyes. He knows it can be disconcerting and taken the wrong way. People here are not used to meeting a stranger’s eyes. If someone tries to make eye contact with you, it must be for some unwelcome or at least suspicious or annoying reason: a panhandler, a crazy person, someone trying to sell you something, giving out flyers, hunting for signatures with a binder and an aggressively friendly manner, selling tickets for a tourist bus or for bicycle rentals. The thicket of glances that grows as Broadway nears Times Square must be traversed without encountering a single one, making eye contact at most for a few tenths of a second, never longer, so it won’t be mistaken for an intention. Pupils dilate with a sense of threat. A glance that lasts a second too long gives rise to puzzled, mechanical smiles that turn a moment later into hostile gestures, a brusque turn of the chin. Some glances can elicit danger if they’re taken to be defiant. Some dart from the shadow of a hood as from the depth of a basement or a den. Some glow with delirium. Children never look at you, unless they are foreign or very young, a year old or two at most. Children are trained never to make eye contact with strangers. Nor is one permitted to look at them, for that is as dangerous as touching them, even by chance, even simply by patting their heads or putting a hand on their shoulder for an instant. Children move in a visual vacuum from which even their parents’ eyes are often absent.

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  GEOMETRY AND ANGST. Don’t look people in the eye. Look ahead, or stare into your cell phone screen or into space. If you look, they will trap you, they will ask for something, give you something, steal a few minutes of your time, alter the straight course of your path. You must be like someone hovering around an object without ever brushing up against it. Notice every relevant detail as strangers come your way or you approach them, but do it surreptitiously. Or simply stare into your phone, giving the outside world only as much schematic attention as you need to go from one point to the next, like a blind man who can find his bearings with just a few scattered taps of the cane. Learn to look out of the corner of your eye. Instead of looking people in the eye, frisk and feel around their silhouettes, their figures, acquiring all relevant information without seeming to do so. Use a kind of radar, picking up irregularities in any movements taking place ahead of you. If a figure stands motionless in the middle of the sidewalk, it’s already a sign to be on guard. Also if it walks from side to side instead of moving in a straight line. Even before you see the plastic cup or hear the jingle of coins you will detect him. Sometimes, without having to look, your sense of smell will warn you of a hideous stench. If the beggar is sitting on the ground or leaning against the wall, you only need to walk a little faster, staring straight ahead, and seeming not to hear anything at all, the endless litany, “spare change, spare change.” The best way not to hear is to wear a pair of headphones, ideally the bulky ones that fit over your ears, allowing you to live in a closed acoustic atmosphere as sheltered as the inside of a car. If up ahead a human figure blocks the way, you must begin to veer slightly to one side before you d
raw near.

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  CATCH THE BEST FARE AND FLY. He crosses the island diagonally on the same path that was gradually traced over centuries by the footsteps of the Lenape. H. G. Wells’s time machine resembled a bizarre bicycle. More than traveling, he is walking through time. Times Square was a lake surrounded by woods until the eighteenth century, and on its shores and in the streams that fed it, beavers built their dikes and lodges. For centuries the Lenape had hunted beaver to turn the pelts into winter clothing. The Dutch and then the English came to the southern tip of the island and began a trade in furs. They bought from the Lenape as many as they could supply, often in exchange for firearms that made it all the easier to hunt beavers. In less than a century there were no more beavers on the island. Soon after, the Lenape were gone as well without a trace.