Why did you hire me, White? I asked after taking a long swig from the bottle.
Because, the day I interviewed you, I realized you smoked the same brand of tobacco as her. It was a way of smelling her every day. But, what the heck, let’s talk about Owen and Zvorsky. Maybe we can plan an anthology of Latin American poets translated by false William Carlos Williamses and Pounds.
I’d been stung, I realized a few hours or perhaps a few days later, to understand that White had never believed in me. Or Owen. If he’d hired me, it was because I smelled a bit like his wife. If we were going to publish Owen, it was because White wanted to publish Zvorsky, albeit apocryphally. I was just a whiff, a trail, a puff of smoke.
*
I suppose that’s what illness is like: you stand down and are replaced by the ghost of yourself. But at the same time, illness, and maybe particularly one like mine, which expresses itself in blindness, allows the sufferer to observe himself, as he would the picturesque, headlong descent of a cataract—from afar, without getting soaked, alarmed but not touched by the experience. Everything that had begun to happen to me since my arrival in Philadelphia—my constantly expanding body, my face disappearing before me in the mirror, the shadows of things replacing the things-in-themselves—started happening to that other person, the ghost of me, the poor idiot trapped under the constant rush of a cataract.
*
All novels lack something or someone. In this novel there’s no one. No one except a ghost that I used to see sometimes in the subway.
*
I used to check my weight every day in the subway station on 116th Street. It was always less, I was disappearing slowly inside my little unloved bureaucrat’s suit, but I wrote to a very pretty girl to say that I was filling out, that I was now a man, nearly, that she should give in and marry me. I lied: 125 pounds, 126 pounds. Beloved Clementina, sweet Dionisia, my letters began. At heart, even I didn’t believe anything I wrote, but I liked the idea of being a despairing poet in New York. I was leading an imbecilic life, but I liked it. I kept an almost metaphysical distance from things and people, but I liked it. I felt ghostly, and I liked that most of all. I didn’t know that I was one of those people with a talent for creating “self-fulfilling prophecies,” as the Yankees say. I didn’t know that, with time, I would really become a ghost. I was twenty-something, I allowed myself the luxury of writing about my thin body, of masturbating in the window, wrapped in a gray silk bathrobe, gray as my Harlem youth, dull as all youths in neighborhoods with literary names.
*
Not a fragmented novel. A horizontal novel, narrated vertically.
*
Three or four days after my conversation with White, I got an invitation from some institute or other that organized tributes to Mexican artists based in Brooklyn. From the outset, I knew the sort of nightmare I’d be getting into if I decided to go. It seemed to me, even then, and I believe rightly, that those events were just a modern-day version of Latin American civilized barbarity. The only difference being that now there was no contemporary Rubén Darío to write a redemptive column justly pillorying the participants.
I asked Pajarote to go with me. We’ll be rubbing shoulders with criollo trustafarians! he said—and for a moment I didn’t know if this was said with eagerness or sarcasm. Pajarote explained that “trustafarians” were wage earners, like us, except the wage came from their parents. In New York they lived a Bohemian life, but in Mexico they had uniformed maids. They snorted cocaine but were vegetarians, vegans, or even freegans. They dressed like teenagers—in T-shirts saying “Brooklyn” and “Mind the Gap”—but the guys didn’t have much hair and the women had premature crow’s feet.
We hired period costumes from some place in SoHo—to tell the truth, I don’t know if they were from the twenties or the fifties or a cobbled-together mix of the two—and drove to Brooklyn. We arrived arm in arm, seething with middle-class resentment. We were offered a shot of mescal and a bag of sherbet candies called Space Dust: Green or orange? asked a good-looker in hotpants, wearing a nametag that said “Fani” and a false mustache à la Frida Kahlo. We both chose green then mingled with our trustafarian compatriots.
I wanted to talk to Pajarote. He was the only person with moral intelligence I knew in the city, the only one who would tell me if I should go ahead with my publication plans. I wasn’t morally encumbered. I was afraid. And angry with White. More than anything, I’d lost any sense of purpose. But that night Pajarote had left his intelligence at home. He immediately Space Dusted Fani: he was wearing outsized fake glasses with heavy frames, and was feeling very self-confident. Although he in fact looked a bit like a Latino version of the young Zvorsky, he was convinced he resembled a London rock star—languid, indifferent. I went on drinking mescal, pretty much alone, diligently standing before all the pictures and installations in the venue (a loft). I was looking at a series representing a woman’s veined feet when I was cornered by a small bald man who could have been interesting if he’d tried a little less hard.
These gimcrack paintings are mine.
Who do all the feet belong to?
My ex-wives.
Sorry.
No pro . . . Do you have a card?
(That’s what he said: “pro.”)
No.
The young lady has no card!
(He was one of those people who speak with exclamation marks.)
Here’s mine . . . If you’ll let me . . . I’ll paint you something . . .
(He was one of those people who speak with dot-dot-dots.)
Thanks.
What’s your name? he asked.
Owen.
Isn’t that a man’s name?
Could be.
I’d like to see your feet . . .
My what?
Baldy invited me to his own loft (upper-class Mexicans pronounce it laaaft). I’m an artist, he said, I live right here in Brooklyn—as if saying artist and Brooklyn in the same breath was to create a self-sustainable world. We took a cab for which he, naturally, paid. Before leaving, I said good-night to Pajarote, ashamed, beaten, humiliated, and feeling that in some way it was his fault that I was going home with a trustafarian. I got into the cab, took off my shoes, and settled my bare feet in Baldy’s crotch.
*
I think that when I was young I was weighed down by a constant sense of social inadequacy—I was never the most popular nor the most eloquent at a table; never the best read nor the best writer; not the most successful nor the most talented; definitely not the most handsome nor the one who had most luck with women. At the same time, I harbored the secret hope, or rather, the secret certainty, that one day I would finally turn into myself; into the image of myself I’d been elaborating for years. But when I now reread the notes or poems I wrote then, or when I recall the conversations with other members of my generation, and the ideas we so boldly expounded, I realize that the truth is I’ve been getting more imbecilic by the day. I’ve spent too many years sleeping, dozing. I don’t know at what moment an inversion began to occur in the process that I imagined as linear and ascending, and which, in the end, turned out to be a sort of pitiless boomerang that flies back and knocks out your teeth, your enthusiasm, and your balls.
*
The boy asks:
Do you know what’s under the house?
What?
Little balls.
And what else?
Little dots, about fifty-six little dots.
And on top of the house?
On top there’s a man having a little sleep.
*
When I was in other people’s beds, I slept deeply and got up early the next morning. I’d dress quickly, steal the odd personal item—my favorites were towels, which smelled good, or white singlets—and depart in a good mood. I’d buy a coffee to go, a newspaper, and sit in some very public space, in full sunlight, to read. What I most liked about sleeping in other people’s beds was precisely that, waking up early, rushing out, buying a
real newspaper, and reading in the sun.
*
My husband stands behind me as I write. He massages my shoulders, too hard, and reads what’s on the screen.
Is it him saying that or you?
Him—she barely speaks now.
And what about you, how many men have you slept with?
Only four, or perhaps five.
And now?
No one else. What about you?
*
Note (Owen to Villaurrutia): “I’m not in love. She’s Swedish. And I had her as a virgin, a mystical experience I can recommend. She’s got a cold passion. She throws herself at me like a Hindu woman onto the pyre on which the body of her prince consort burns. And as she gets up before me, I’m never sure if I didn’t go to bed with an ice sculpture that has melted.”
*
I spent four days and three nights hiding, I don’t know from whom or from what, in Baldy’s house. The first night he couldn’t get it up. The second day, he went out before I woke up and didn’t return that night. I called Pajarote to see how things had gone with Fani, the hostess, but no one answered the phone. When it was clear that the owner of the apartment wasn’t coming back that day, I rang Dakota and invited her to spend the night with me. She came around at about ten and we watched Pet Sematary projected onto an enormous white wall. We ate cans of smoked oysters and had a bath together in a tub filled with cartoon characters of the 1990s: there was Ursula the octopus woman, the hyena from The Lion King, Aladdin, one of the fat fairy godmothers from Sleeping Beauty, and a philosophical Smurf. Dakota sang all the bits of the songs she could remember. When I could, I helped out with the backing vocals. When we got out of the bathtub, wrinkly, we dried each other using immense towels with Baldy’s initials embroidered in gold thread, and Dakota asked me to put cream on her back. We anointed each other and put on a DVD of a television series starring a blond guy who invariably saved the world.
The third day, Baldy turned up in stud mode with a box of oil paints, assorted bottles of liquor, condoms, and hard drugs. Dakota and I were comfortably ensconced on his leather sofa, watching the blond guy’s courageous efforts to save New York from a germ bomb. He offered us a martini; we accepted on the condition that we could finish watching the whole DVD. He gave us a lecture on the episodic nature of series and their relationship to the structure of Don Quijote. He was an intelligent but complicated man. Owen would have said that he spoke with spelling mistakes. He offered us Colombian cocaine, and took five hundred photos of our feet with a digital camera while the blond guy was torturing three Muslims with one hand.
By the time the DVD finished, the sun was already coming up. Dakota and Baldy had moved to the bed. I rushed out. I got a coffee in the street, bought a newspaper, and started walking to the subway—I had an appointment with White the next day.
Dakota kept Baldy, as she had kept Moby, and all my other leftovers. She was like a lobster; and I, like the filth that accumulates on the seabed.
In the subway, on my way home, I saw Owen for the last time. I believe he waved to me. But by then it didn’t matter, I’d lost my enthusiasm. Something had broken. The ghost, it was obvious, was me.
*
I suppose that the difference between being young and being old is the degree of frivolity in our relationship with death. When I was young, my disdain for life was such that I was constantly imagining ever more extravagant deaths. It’s Sod’s Law that now, when I’d prefer to be simply alive and spend time with my kids, I’m suffering a slow, humiliating, boring death, through no fault but my own. My deaths in Manhattan were quick and had external causes: a subway train cracked my skull open; a man buried a knife in my chest when I was leaving a bar; my appendix burst at midnight; I allowed myself to fall to the ground from the top floor of a Financial District building. But death in Philadelphia is approaching like a bedraggled cat: it rubs its dirty ass up against my lower leg, licks my hands, scratches my face, asks me for food; and I feed it.
*
I called Pajarote late on Sunday night. I told him about White and Owen, said that I was going to see White the following day. I told him about Baldy and Dakota. He listened.
Imagine a series of men, he said. The first of them has a full head of hair and the last is completely bald. Each successive member of the series has a single hair less than the one before. It would appear that the three following statements are true:
1. The first man in the series is not bald.
2. If a man is not bald, a single hair less will not make him bald.
3. The last man in the series is bald.
And so what?
That’s the sorites paradox.
What?
The paradox is that, although those three statements appear to be true, in conjunction they involve a contradiction.
And what am I supposed to do with that?
Nothing, understand it.
*
On the day of the interview I got to the office early, carrying the wooden chair I’d stolen almost a year before. White and I had decided to meet up a few hours before the interview to go over the details of our story, from that first letter with the address of Owen’s old apartment in Harlem, to the notes and Zvorsky’s translations. White was like a child, more excited than I’d ever seen him. I even thought that the shadow that had been darkening his brow for months or years had disappeared. He wanted to tell the critic about the episode in the bar, when I’d hallucinated Owen eating the remains of Pound’s peanuts while Zvorsky conducted an imaginary orchestra. White was saying this when I cut him short.
I’m not going to do it.
What?
You know I translated those poems by Owen, not Zvorsky.
Huh? Are you trying to tell me you want your name on the book? he asked, as if not wishing to understand.
No, I’m telling you I’m not going to do it.
White’s upper lip trembled slightly, he didn’t say a word.
*
Note: Owen went to Detroit a few days after Black Tuesday, when the Great Depression began.
*
My husband is packing. They’re going to start building the house in Philadelphia. I’m not really sure why an architect has to be there the whole time during the construction of a house for which he’s already drawn up the plans. But he insists that’s the way it’s done, that the architect always has to be present on site. The baby wakes up at midnight. She cries. She needs a bottle.
*
Baldy fell for Dakota. She fell for his bathtub. They began a tortuous, dangerous, multilateral relationship.
I received my last paycheck in the mail, with an absurd little note from Minni: Thanks for smiling.
I was going to leave New York as soon as possible.
*
When are you going to Philadelphia?
Next week, next month, I don’t know, as soon as possible.
So why are you packing now?
Because that’s what you just wrote. You left your document open while you were feeding the baby and I read a bit.
But it’s only a novel, none of it exists.
*
Moby existed. But he wasn’t called Moby. His name was Bobby. When I found out—Dakota told me—I was shaken by a fit of giggles, and then tears. But Bobby’s not important, because he perhaps doesn’t exist any longer.
The boy and the baby exist. A house exists, the creaking of the old floorboards, the internal shuddering of the things we own, the palimpsestic windows that hold the impressions of hands and lips. My husband and I exist, though our existence is increasingly separate, and the neighbors, the neighborhood, and the cockroaches that pass silently by also exist.
*
You’re a liar, he says.
Why?
You’re a liar.
So are you.
*
Follow the line of a story, like the line of the ass of an Ecuadorian child who was later a detective in Harlem. Crack heads with everyone, fight everyth
ing, the past, the present, so long as the story moves on. Never stray from the line. Close your eyes, put the bucket over your head, and sing, just to imagine that flat, firm, dark culito.
*
I gave away my furniture and shared all the plants—except for the dead tree—among my acquaintances. I caught the train to Philadelphia. I wanted to leave the dead tree in the cemetery there. Laura and Enea took me, they didn’t ask questions: they’re the kind of people who know how to respect others, not to ask for explanations. We went to the cemetery but never found Owen’s grave. They offered to keep the plant. We’re still watering it even though we know it’s dead, they tell me now, when we speak on the phone. The pot is by their front door. Their neighbors, born-again Christians, ask about the dead plant. They have gardenias in the entrance. They’re born-again people who ask for explanations and have gardenias. That’s what Laura and Enea tell me when we speak on the phone and I ask how the plant is doing: The neighbors hate it, you know, they’re newborn Christians, they have gardenias perpetually in flower on the porch.
*
My husband is going to Philadelphia tomorrow. He’s in the kitchen making dinner for us all. The boy sits down at the kitchen table to draw. I can hear them from the living room:
Look, Papa, I’ve made a house to live in.
Uhuh.
Do you know what happened to my house?
What?
A gyranium wind came and gobbled it up.
You don’t say gyranium, you say twister.
A twister wind came and gobbled it up.
Not twister wind, just twister.
I like gyrawind twister.
*
The day I bought a plane ticket out of New York, I tried to speak to White on the telephone. Almost a month had gone by since the last time I’d seen him, and I at least wanted to say I was leaving the city for good. Minni answered: He says he can’t talk to you now, but not to worry, I don’t know what he meant, you know how he is, but he told me to tell you not to worry. He says you might want to read the next issue of the NYRB.
*
My husband went to Philadelphia today. I suppose it was to be expected. Months and years had piled one on top of the other for this moment to arrive. First, the mutual persecution. Hounding one another until neither has a centimeter of air. Conceiving an infinite hatred of the other. Not so much boredom (that would have been to remain at his side for twenty years and end up sleeping in separate beds). Not so much the contempt (the inadequate size of his hands, the smell of his sleeping body, the taste of his sex). But the hatred. Breaking him, emotionally decimating him again and again. Allowing oneself to be broken. Writing this is coarse. But reality is even more so. Later, the moral accusations. The list of the defects of the accused, always accompanied by the tacit list of the virtues of the accuser. Our final hours together were predictable: the temperature of the arguments rising, the almost comic melodrama of the play beginning. Faces, masks. One shouting, the other crying; and then, change masks. For one, two, three, six hours, until the world finally falls apart: tomorrow, this Sunday, next Wednesday, Christmas. But in the end, a strange peace, gathered from who knows what rotten gut. It was a single gesture that broke me—that finished breaking me: his cry of joy when he had closed the front door.
Faces in the Crowd Page 7