To Walk Alone in the Crowd

by Antonio Munoz Molina

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  RELAX YOUR SENSES. I was going to say no, but I no longer dare. One has seen so many movies that it seems better to remain silent and not say anything that can be used against me. From the bottom of the suitcase, beneath the huge biography of Baudelaire, the guard accusingly removes the splendid case of twenty-four colored pencils, a thin metallic box, more elegant even than the MacBook Air. Holding the case in one hand, standing over the open suitcase and backpack and surrounded by clippings, pencil shavings, erasers, notebooks, and pencils, the guard looks me up and down and asks what I do for a living. I have to make a large mental adjustment: he is not older than I am; he is not an adult invested with authority and facing a defenseless young man. He is the young one, and I am a gray-haired man of sixty-one. “What do you do for a living?” he says, beginning to put everything away carefully and in reverse order, except the scissors and the inkwell.

  CONNECT WITH WHAT YOU REALLY LIKE. Now my office is the minimal space of the tray table next to the window, beneath the lonely overhead light in the darkened cabin. I ate almost none of my dinner and I’m not sleepy. I took a sleeping pill, but the space is so tight and the seat so uncomfortable that it will be impossible to rest. My office is the tray table, the pencil, the open notebook. Later on it’s the laptop where I read Spanish newspapers with all the expectancy of impending return. I made the mistake of purchasing Wi-Fi. There was a time when you would set off on a transatlantic journey and know that you were isolated from the outside world for many hours, in a state of perfect indolence that you couldn’t be faulted for since it was forced on you. Now there is no solitude, no silence, no respite. Online banners, photographs and videos open around the articles or even suddenly inside them without prior notice. I should have sat still with my eyes closed, or continued reading the biography of Baudelaire. Nervous stimulation tires you out and simultaneously makes it impossible to rest. Spanish voices, heard again after two months, seem as intrusive in the restless dark, amid the faint breathing and stirring of bodies, as the loud headlines and the online ads. Now, suddenly, so close to the end, on the eve of return, I feel afraid that they will never fade again, those voices that were so intoxicating in the past few months, after I began to notice them a year ago, like a scientist inoculating himself with an excessive dose of the pathogen whose antidote he was hoping to find. The voices surround me still, as if they came from the sleeping bodies in the cabin.

  * * *

  CONNECT FROM WHEREVER YOU WANT. The man shot dead at the Paris Orly Airport yelled, “I am here to die in the name of Allah.” The theft of a Secret Service laptop worries American authorities. Marine Le Pen is the favored candidate for young French people between the ages of eighteen and twenty-four. A woman accuses her ex-boyfriend of pouring glue on her vagina. Two elderly people die when their house burns down in Alicante. Angelina Jolie buys a twenty-five-million-dollar mansion to start a new life. The mystery of the sixty-one infant skeletons found on a beach remains unsolved. Police kill a man who tried to take a soldier’s gun at Orly airport. Celebrities reap the gains of their social media following. Astrologer Susan Miller is an internet sensation. The actor who played the Red Power Ranger confesses that he is guilty of murder. A wave of robberies in Los Angeles claims Kendall Jenner’s jewelry. Jude Law says the war in Syria must end. Emily Ratajkowski walks the streets of New York in her underwear. A brothel featuring realistic sex dolls opens in Barcelona. An Algerian novelist is charged with blasphemy. Fake-meat scandal reaches Brazilian supermarkets. Torrential rains affect sixty thousand people in Peru. Fifteen bodies found in a ditch inside a jail outside Caracas. Arrested after hitting his wife on the head with a hammer in front of their baby. Victoria Beckham registers her daughter’s name Harper as a trademark. The man taken into custody in Antwerp after trying to run down a crowd of pedestrians had a rifle in his car. Police detain a man dressed as Hitler in the German dictator’s native town. Scarlett Johansson opens a gourmet popcorn store in Paris. Officers who shot and killed an unarmed Black man in Louisiana are freed without charges. A group of apes kills its former leader, returned from exile, and cannibalizes his body. A segment of the Appian Way is found beneath a McDonald’s.

  TO MAKE US ENJOY THE GOOD TIMES. And what can you do in the midst of it all? What use are your childish avocations, your love of the task, placing one word after another, drawing or composing a sentence as carefully as possible and then, after placing a period, starting another until a page is filled, and then a notebook, and then another? But not just that; also everything you never used to notice, thinking it was insignificant or unworthy of your work: making the bed in the morning after opening the bedroom window to let in the clean, cold air; appreciating what you would never have discovered on your own, the beauty of immediate and ordinary things; preparing a good meal for your loved ones and cleaning the kitchen as you go, setting everything in order just as you clean your desk or as you clean a sentence of errors and distractions or superfluous adjectives. What can you do? What depends on you? To what degree does it matter or mean anything, what you do, what you have done for so many years? Many of the finest works ever written, painted, or composed received no attention and resulted in no spiritual or moral benefit or reward for their authors. Many more than you think must have disappeared without a trace.

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  REALITY SURPASSES THE IMAGINATION. What to do, then? What is the impulse that guides you? What justifies you in this task to which you devote your life, often for days on end, without pause, from the moment you wake up to the moment you go to bed, and before that, too, and also after? Terrible things are happening in the world at every moment. For a writer or an artist to be ignored is a laughable misfortune. People are tortured and hanged in underground jails in Syria. Central American immigrants are robbed and murdered on that terrible train they call The Beast. People drown in the Mediterranean trying to cross from Africa to the shores of southern Europe. Walls and barbed-wire fences rise along international borders, lit by searchlights at night, equipped with automatic sensors and patrolled by soldiers and police with attack dogs and automatic weapons. A cement wall can split between two worlds an olive grove in Palestine as small and as carefully tended as the one my father had on the road to Granada. Helicopters and armored ATVs give chase to emigrants who manage to cross the border into the deserts of Texas and California. A girl’s face is burned with acid in Afghanistan because she wants to go to school. A gang of five drunken men rapes a girl at a barbaric Spanish feast day, recording it on their cell phones and egging each other on as they take turns, then gloating about their exploit on the internet. Another terrifying gang of men tortures a hippopotamus for an entire night in a filthy tank at the San Salvador zoo, using axes, hammers, even a chainsaw. A sperm whale washes ashore on a beach that looks like a picture in a travel brochure; it has starved to death and they find sixty pounds of plastic bags inside its stomach. In the middle of the Pacific, on the Midway Islands, the most remote from any landmass, the albatross feed their young with plastic cigarette lighters that they find floating in the ocean and mistake for squid, which are their usual food. A demagogue with a head of dyed-blond hair runs as a candidate in the Dutch elections and is enthusiastically supported by ignorant and resentful crowds. Political demagogues crop up and multiply across the world like an epidemic of terrifying clowns. So far they can be identified by the utter shamelessness with which they incite hatred and by their big yellow hair.

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  NEVER HAVE FISH AND PLANKTON IN THE MEDITERRANEAN FED ON SO MANY HUMAN BEINGS. And what do you do in the meantime? How do you not give up and hide? Where do you find not just the strength but the rationale to devote yourself to this, to be always doing what you’re doing even now, in an airplane seat at two in the morning under a reading light, so uncomfortably that it borders on contortionism, surrounded by sleeping bodies in the dark while leaning over an open notebook on a folding tray that shakes with the smallest turbulence? The pencil I was using go
t so small that it was hard to hold. In the backpack I found another pencil that I bought in Lisbon, with a thick lead. The kind of pencil a carpenter might use. It forces me to write in a larger hand, more loosely, with a more expansive gesture. It makes a thick line and it wears rapidly, so I have to keep the pencil sharpener ready. Luckily I always carry a few. It is a tradesman’s or an artist’s pencil, tending to make diffuse marks rather than lines; a pencil that pulls me along, carrying me at full speed over the notebook’s pages and covering them with writing in an instant, so I have to turn them quickly. The sound it makes on the paper is richer and more nuanced, a sound of crumbling matter. If I knew how to draw I could use this pencil to create shade and volume. What am I doing with this pencil at two in the morning, as far from arriving anywhere as I am from having left, thirty thousand feet above the Atlantic, overexcited by lack of sleep, listening to the scratching sound of a pencil on a piece of paper beneath the giant roar of airplane engines?

  * * *

  JOIN THE MECHANICAL REVOLUTION. How am I able to overcome the insecurity that comes back so often without warning to paralyze and batter me; the fear that the result of my efforts may be well below my aspirations; the general dismay at seeing how little room is left for literature? I live in this world, and not another. In this time. The fact that I am foreign to it, or feel that way, grants me no immunity. An immigration officer can lock me up in an airport cell if I seem suspicious. An inspired fanatic can set off an explosive vest next to me while I have a cup of coffee at a sidewalk table in Paris or Madrid. As I sit writing with my pencil, deaf even to the roar of the plane, Donald Trump and his new accomplices will be plotting at some secret meeting of new ways to despoil the rivers, the earth, and the air. Any creep can defame you with a phrase on Twitter. Nearly everything you love is at risk of disappearing. You can’t even enjoy an escape into nostalgia, since you know there never was in fact a better time. You feel nostalgia not for things that happened but for what might have taken place; not for what was, but for what without too much difficulty might have been. While those people destroy the world, increasing their wealth immensely through the destitution of the vast majority of human beings, you want to build something, to see something through. It will not require you to squander resources or to exploit anyone else. Chances are it will also be entirely useless. The most you can aspire to is to provide some stranger with a little company.

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  A JOURNEY TO THE HEART. On the subway, sitting across from me a few days ago, a young woman was reading a Samuel Beckett novel with evident excitement. An old woman, my mother, slowly and laboriously reads the novel that Elena Fortún was never able to publish, recognizing in its pages the bitter capitulations as well as the secret pride of her own life. In a squalid cell in Birmingham, Alabama, Martin Luther King Jr. strengthens his will to resist by reading Thoreau’s “On Civil Disobedience.” Those same pages had been read, sixty years earlier and in a different cell in South Africa, by a young lawyer who was not yet known as Mahatma Gandhi. An unknown work can survive like a buried seed to multiply and spread through secret channels, finally bursting into the light after a very long time. In his last days fleeing through France, Walter Benjamin took solace and distracted himself by reading Le rouge et le noir. At age seven, Stendhal finds a copy of Don Quixote in the gloomy house where his father took him when his mother died. Reading the adventure of the windmills, he finds himself laughing out loud for the first time since her death. You do what you want, or what you can, or what you can’t help yourself from doing, and you give it your all. But you can’t know what the result will be, nor are there guarantees of any kind. Trendy, mediocre works are usually acclaimed. Truly good ones are overlooked for such a long time that when their qualities are finally recognized the author may be long dead, in which case some rich collector will make even more money by buying and selling what was crafted in obscure poverty. One of Poe’s many desperate letters begging for a small loan or pestering editors for his pay can be sold at auction for half a million dollars. A copy of the first edition of Ulysses is worth $450,000 because it was kept in a safe for eighty years, suffering no deterioration and losing none of the rich blue tint of the original cover. A Basquiat painting of crowned Black heroes and boxers hangs on a thieving Russian oligarch’s bathroom wall.

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  ALL PATHS THAT LEAD TO MADNESS. Nor should you think that failure and obscurity are proof of talent simply because they frequently go together. You may be neglected and be worse than someone who enjoys great success or a measure of recognition. Your love for literature need not be requited. Your zeal and your devotion to the task do not mean that the end result will be memorable. Perhaps you won a prize because they didn’t want to give it to someone else. And if you didn’t win a prize you thought you deserved, it doesn’t mean you’re better than the one who did. You have no certainty. You never will. The one who praises you may be lying or lacking in judgment. The one who makes a painful and negative remark may be right. You do what you can, not what you want, and you do it because you can’t help it. Nobody asked you to. Nobody owes you anything. Some will find it laughable, even reprehensible, that at a time of so many urgent social causes and terrible injustice you devote all this effort to something that is primarily justified aesthetically, beginning and ending with itself: a good painting, when there were still generally accepted criteria to judge paintings; a sonnet that meets at least the objective demands of meter and rhyme. As a teenager I was very impressed by some of Gabriel Celaya’s verses: “I could write a perfect poem / but it would be indecent in our times.” Why indecent? How can it be indecent to do something well? And what are the grounds for such arrogance? Is perfection such a simple thing? Are you so sure of attaining it simply because you decide to pursue it?

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  WHY GO SOMEWHERE ELSE WHEN EVERYTHING IS RIGHT HERE? But this is all just lack of sleep, the flight, the pleasant Portuguese pencil and the sound it makes, the wide pages of the notebook and the single malt I ordered after dinner, to compensate for the airplane food and to forget I ever ate it. It’s just the oceanic darkness in the window and the single light above me, the light of airplane cabins, that so resembles the light in a religious allegory. I am absurdly reminded of Caravaggio’s Saint Matthew. My right hand and arm ache from so much writing. I have a callus on the first joint of my middle finger like the one I had as a schoolboy. The noise of the engines and the shaking of the tray table have been communicated to my skull. Walter Benjamin, shortly before France fell, wrote in a letter to his friend Scholem that every well-made essay or article one could write and publish in those circumstances was a barrier against the forces of darkness. Sick, and nearly mad, Baudelaire took a final melancholy pride in having devoted his whole life to a single task, the crafting of well-made sentences. You, for your part, will not be hounded by hunger, syphilis, the gestapo, or the NKVD. There is no risk, at least for now, that a tyrant’s henchmen will come at midnight to confiscate what you have written, to lock you up in a cell and sentence you to twenty years in a camp above the Arctic Circle, or just shoot you in the back of the head, not without first making it clear that they will also ruin, because of you, the lives of everyone you love. You enjoy a great privilege. A group of religious fanatics in Nicaragua burns a woman alive because they think she’s possessed by the devil, but nothing like that can happen to you. No one has a sense of proportion when judging personal misfortunes. In one of his songs, Leonard Cohen sarcastically compares the calamity of the European Jews to the bad reviews his albums occasionally receive. The self-centered friend to whom you just bared your soul, telling him that you were diagnosed with cancer or that the love of your life has left you, may go on to complain about what poor reception he gets on his cell phone. But you will not be arrested or stoned to death because of what you write; in part, of course, because what you write, what anyone like you is capable of writing, is not worth the slightest concern. One of the great misfortunes for dissident wr
iters in the Soviet Union was that Stalin held literature in such respect.

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  WEAR YOUR BEST SMILE. Meanwhile, here’s Marine Le Pen, contending for the French election, and Donald Trump with his gold Lex Luthor hairpiece, misgoverning the world like a megalomaniacal villain out of a cheap novel, a Goldfinger, a Doctor No.

  TIME TO DAZZLE. I have closed the notebook. My wrist hurts from writing. I have turned off the reading light. I shut my eyes but I can’t fall asleep. The words and voices I gathered for so long—copying, clipping them with scissors, gluing them into seamless mosaics, storing them in cardboard boxes—keep up a steady murmur that I am no longer able to stop. Live authentically. Enjoy a free exclusive experience. Take control. Call us, we can help. I want to focus only on the moment of arrival, the incredible fact that in a few hours I will be in Madrid, in my other life, my real one, my house. The comfort you deserve. The house of your dreams. Where you want to be. Like my friend the scientist who collects bits of ocean trash, I fear I have fallen into an intoxicating compulsion, an obsession from which I can no longer break free. There is a toxic quality to all those voices that seem to whisper only in my ear, to be directed just at me. Hearing voices that no one else can hear is a sure sign of a mental disorder. There may be a form of madness that makes it impossible to forget them, to stop listening to them, and sweep them from your mind and memory. Choose the bundle that suits you. Bring us your old cell phone. The messages disperse and seem to vanish, but their substance, the toxic compounds they contain, persist even more insidiously because they are invisible to the naked eye, like plastic microparticles lodged in the tissues of marine animals or like amphetamines, antibiotics, and antidepressants excreted in human urine to travel through pipes and water-treatment plants to the sea. Verbal trash builds up in the brain like heavy metals on the muddy ocean floor. It’s not an intellectual but a physical condition. A kind of nausea or malaise similar to the boundless fatigue that came over me during the last days in New York, something as immediate as the first signs of food poisoning. Deep sleep can flush it out. But it has been a long time since I slept with any real sense of rest, plunging into genuine oblivion. I’m not sure how many hours I have been awake. It is no longer New York time, nor is it six hours later in Madrid. When my eyes close I am in complete temporal darkness. Take charge. Experience control. Only sleep and genuine company will heal me. The truth is that I can only sleep now if I’m with her. Living alone for a long time in the thick closeness of the self is like working in a cellar or a pit. The only antidote to ghosts is a genuine human presence. Only the voice of someone dear, the real voice of friendship and affection, can dispel or push away those other voices that no one else can hear but you.