Faces in the Crowd

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Faces in the Crowd Page 8

by Valeria Luiselli


  *

  Dakota wanted to organize a going-away party for me. We decided to hold it in the empty apartment. Her ex-boyfriend came, and some of the rotating members of the band. Pajarote came with Fani. We didn’t invite Moby alias Bobby. Baldy turned up with his ex-wife—a slightly silly Mexican criolla who had put herself through a master’s at NYU only to end up teaching Spanish in a Brooklyn secondary school; and she brought her new partner, another Mexican criolla who repeatedly quoted lyrics by Joaquín Sabina. And that was all.

  In the kitchen, Dakota’s ex-boyfriend asked me why I was just up and leaving like that. I told him that I’d turned into a ghost; or maybe that I was the only living girl in a city of ghosts; that, in any case, I didn’t like dying all the time. He stroked my forehead. I didn’t know what to do. Spontaneous gestures paralyze me. Perhaps I could have touched his face; licked the naked scar that furrowed it into two possible faces. I could have told him that I was going because I was incapable of sustaining and inhabiting the worlds I myself had fabricated, that I also had a scar splitting my face in two. Perhaps I could have made love to him in the bathtub. Perhaps I did make love to him.

  *

  The rest isn’t important. My husband moved to another city. Let’s say, Philadelphia. He went out the front door with a single suitcase and a portfolio full of plans, and that was the last we heard of him. Maybe he found himself. Let’s say he met other women: casual mulattas, an elegant Japanese lady, neocolonialist gringas who soothed their first-world consciences by sleeping with third-world intellectuals, and even Mexican criollitas for whom life was a compendium of songs by Joaquín Sabina. Or maybe he just got fed up, locked himself in an apartment in Philadelphia, and allowed himself to slowly die.

  *

  I bought the NYRB at a newsstand and read White’s article, sitting on the floor of my empty apartment. White had decided not to reveal the whole story. He had written a long piece explaining that he had made a mistake, that the translations we had previously published with my introductory note were apocryphal, and that, caught up in our enthusiasm, we had fallen into the trap.

  During the following months and years, as I learned much later from snippets of editorial news on the internet, the mistake White had taken responsibility for, knowing that it would mean the end of his reputation as a publisher (as, of course, it did), provoked an unusual interest in Owen. The translations were published by a large, mass-market publishing house under the name of Zvorsky and, to the extent that books of poetry can be, were a success. The obscure Mexican poet became, in time, the new Bolaño or, rather, a new Neruda. But that day, while I was reading the article in the NYRB, neither White nor I knew what would happen about Owen. I tried to call the office once more when I’d finished reading the article but nobody answered. I took a long hot bath.

  *

  The boy sings to the baby while we bathe her: Autumn leaves are falling down, falling down, falling down. Autumn leaves are falling down and Mama’s crying.

  *

  In that apartment there were no children, no cockroaches, no ghosts. It was on the seventh floor. There was only a bathtub.

  *

  Pajarote drove me to the airport the next day. We said our goodbyes outside. He wrapped a single arm around my shoulders and kissed my forehead. When he’d gotten back in his car, I went into the terminal, alone. I shed a few tears while the lady at the United Airlines check-in counter processed my boarding pass. Just a few. Or maybe lots.

  *

  I don’t know what to do with the three cats who appear to want to move in here permanently. A couple of nights ago I poured whisky into a saucer, thinking maybe that would make them renounce me as the lord and master of their three miserable little lives. But my gesture must have touched them, because the next morning the three woke up on different parts of my mattress and came to lick away my sleep at the stroke of six.

  *

  I lived a few blocks from Federico García Lorca, but he used to spend the whole day in a student hall at 2960 Broadway, writing his poems. I sometimes bumped into him on the way to the subway and we’d shake hands. He was a plump, pampered little Spaniard, with a tight little ass, who virtuously complained about his bohemian life in the big city: doves and swarms of coins, buildings under perpetual construction, vomiting multitudes, alienation, solitude. The problem with Federico’s poems was that they all ended up being Federiquized. The Spañolet (as Salvador Novo called him) overindulged in his strange metaphors: he converted them into one-way streets, unique systems of equivalence. He liked Harlem and the blacks, he didn’t speak English. His parents sent him a hundred dollars each month, which he frittered away in the city bars. I liked the Swedish and Yankee women, I studied English the whole damn day; I liked tertulias, café conversations à la Henry James, with generic Aryans—French, German, and the speechless, perpendicular, unsociable English, as James describes them.

  On one occasion I wrote a letter to Xavier Villaurrutia saying much the same thing, but he never got the joke, perhaps because prophetic jokes aren’t funny. The worst defect of the Yankee, I told him, is his incapacity for bad-mouthing people. In a certain sense, I was right. But then, in that life, I was unaware of the Yankee’s most incisive ability—I was living opposite Morningside Park, among blacks who ate watermelon and fried chicken every Sunday (like Mexicans), and an inordinate number of crickets, which made the United Estates sound like the main plaza of a town in Sinaloa. The Yankee’s greatest virtue—as I now know—is not saying anything; feeding the silence until the other person begins to dig himself a grave in the nearest cemetery, conscious of his inability to keep an appointment at five in the afternoon or to appreciate the joy of Sundays, to be a good sport at all times, and so on.

  But Federico: the Spañolet and his beautiful asslet, as Salvador Novo used to say.

  *

  I was thin and lost weight at an incredible speed. I believed in poetry. I wanted to translate my favorite American poets: Pound, Dickinson, and William Carlos Williams. I didn’t really believe in anthologies, but I wrote to the great Alfonso Reyes, suggesting the idea of a collection of these three North American poets. I was disturbed by the idea that Pound had lived in a cage; that Williams was a gynecologist; and that Dickinson had never left her house. There was a strange correspondence between that constellation of poets, somehow determined by the cage, the house, the vaginas. I suppose that those are the kinds of reasons that matter. But I didn’t, of course, mention that in my letter to Reyes, just spoke of the importance of incorporating the voices of those three giants into our canon. When the maestro replied enthusiastically, I dashed off translations of over two hundred poems by Dickinson and posted them to an address in Brazil. They probably never even crossed the Hudson River.

  I was thin and had long, strong legs, as he probably had. I believed in poetry, but not anthologies. They seemed to me a petty form of exercising editorial power. I just wanted to translate my favorite Spanish-language poets into English. I only once tried to publish my translations. It didn’t work out.

  *

  I printed out the last ten pages to read them aloud, cross out, rewrite. By accident, I left them on the kitchen table overnight. This morning I came down for breakfast and found my husband in the kitchen. While lighting the stove to make coffee, he asked:

  Why have you banished me from the novel?

  What?

  You wrote that I’d gone to Philadelphia. Why?

  So something happens.

  But if I go, there’s no sense in writing two novels.

  Then you stay.

  Or perhaps it’s better that I go. Are you letting me go?

  Or perhaps you die.

  Or perhaps I already died.

  *

  In Manhattan I died every so often. I believe that the first time it happened I didn’t even realize. It was one of those summer days when it’s so hot that your brain goes into a bland, boggy state of lethargy that impedes the sprouting and consolidation
of even the simplest idea. The brain just burbles. I had to attend to an affair the consul considered a top diplomatic priority. A pilot by the name of Emilio Carranza had attempted to fly nonstop from Mexico to New York and the poor man went and crashed into a small mountain in New Jersey. I was asked to write a report on the death of the pilot. It took me more than three hours to produce a paragraph.

  When I’d finally finished, I left the consulate in a stupor, feeling terribly sad about the poor stranger who had been splattered that morning. I walked the usual blocks and started down the stairs at the entrance to the subway. That’s when it happened. Perhaps I tripped and cracked my head open on the edge of the steps. Afterwards, I must have gotten up, walked to the platform, stepped onto the train, and fallen asleep in the carriage, because I can’t remember anything about the journey. That watchmaker angel who wakes people up exactly at their stations woke me at the 116th Street stop.

  The first thing I do remember is the face of Ezra Pound in the crowd waiting on the platform for the train. Of course it wasn’t really him. The doors opened and there he was on the platform, leaning against a pillar. We looked each other straight in the eye, as if in recognition, although he couldn’t possibly have heard anything about me, a young Irish Mexican, neither red haired nor good looking, more bastard than poet. I was transfixed—instead of getting off the train, I let the passengers leave and be replaced by others, identically ugly, overheated, and ordinary. Pound didn’t board the train. He was lost among the crowd of faces on the platform, faces like the wet petals of his poem.

  *

  Federico had one or two virtues. During my first months in Manhattan we used to see each other every week in a diner over on 108th Street. We met because Emilio Amero, who could never manage to stick one idea to another, had asked us both to collaborate with him on the script of his next film. I don’t know what Federico’s motivation was, but I accepted because it was a way to speak Spanish with someone from outside the consulate once a week. It was an unfilmable script about voyages to the moon. I wanted endless journeys in an elevator filling up with eyes; Federico, deeply resentful, rewrote sequences by Buñuel and Dalí in a soft-boiled New York style. And in that way we began to become friends.

  “We ended up having so little to talk about that Federico decided to invite another poet to join us, in order to criticize him afterwards. To be honest, that’s how we began to be close friends. We Hispanics have always been good at that. Spanish is a language that lends itself to fault-finding and for that reason we are bad critics and good enemies of our friends. The poet was a thoroughly decent Yankee called Joshua. But we addressed him by his surname: Zvorsky. And, between ourselves, when he wasn’t there, he was simply “Z.” He had a nose as long and phallic as the island of Manhattan and huge egg-shaped spectacles, which made his face look exactly like the sexual organs of a colt. He was beginning a long poem, as long as Ezra Pound’s Cantos, he explained. Federico didn’t understand a single word of what Z said, since he spoke English as if he were saying mass in Yiddish, so I used to translate for them. Not that I understood much. The poem will be called That, explained the poet, because a little boy, when he’s learning how to talk and enumerate the world, always says: “That dog,” “That lollipop” and so on and so forth. He says his book is going to be called That, I explained to Federico, because a little boy always says “That perro” “That paleta” or some such thing.

  Federico’s second-greatest virtue was that he always got excited when he grasped a new idea. But then straightaway he’d be filled with disillusion: that was his greatest virtue. When the Yankee poet had gone, we talked about Gide and Valéry. However differently we spoke the language, as Spanish speakers, our close ties with Latin and Greek gave us a sense of superiority: we were the heirs to a noble linguistic past. English, in contrast, was the barbaric bastard son of Latin, constantly gloating over its discoveries: the demiurgic function of articles, inventing the world by enunciating it. The only ones worth the effort are Eliot and Joyce, I used to say. And Williams, Pound, and Dickinson too. Federico liked Langston Hughes and had just discovered Nella Larsen. Our friend Z was a dog and a lollipop but he was also one of the best poets around.

  *

  Do you think I could have seen Pound in the subway? I asked Federico on the way home after a session at the diner.

  How do you mean?

  The poet, Ezra Pound.

  But he’s in Italy or Paris or I don’t know where.

  He’s in Italy, I said, but what does that matter?

  Ah, now I understand. Definitely not, it’s impossible for someone like you to have seen him.

  Someone like me?

  *

  Homer believed me when I told him I’d seen Ezra Pound in the subway and that there was a woman I kept seeing on another train. What’s happening, he said, is that you can remember the future too.

  But I had not only seen Ezra Pound. I realized one day, during my comings and goings from the consulate, that for some time I’d been seeing a series of people in the subway, and that they weren’t, as you might say, ordinary people, but echoes of people who had perhaps lived in the city above and now only traveled through its overgrown whale’s gut. Among these people was a woman with a brown face and dark shadows under her eyes, whom I saw repeatedly: sometimes on the platform, waiting, at others onboard the train, but always a different one from mine. The woman appeared to me most often in those moments when two trains on parallel tracks are traveling at almost the same speed for a few instants and you can see the other people go past as if you were watching the frames of a celluloid reel.

  I wrote a letter to Novo and told him about that woman, who was always wearing a red coat. I told him about her head resting gently against the carriage window, reading, or sometimes just looking into the darkness of the tunnels from the platform, sitting on a wooden chair. I told him about Pound too, and all those people who were and were not in the carriages of the subway, a bit like me. He replied that I was a “subwanker” and that instead of going around looking for ghosts where there weren’t any, I should send him a poem about the subway or something that would fill the pages of the magazine Contemporáneos. And I took note and wrote a poem of over four hundred lines, because I always took note of what Salvador said. But the brown-skinned woman with sad eyes continued appearing to me up to my last day on the island of subwankers.

  *

  On the windowsill of the room I used to rent in the building opposite Morningside Park, there was a plant pot that looked like a lamp. The pot had oval-shaped green flames and there was an orange tree growing in it. Under the meager shadow of that small tree, I used to write love letters to Clementina Otero, the Gorostiza brothers, Salvador, and Villaurrutia. I told them about my life in the metropolis, again and again, as if to make it my own, conscious, maybe, that happiness also depends on syntax: Dear X, I live at 63 Morningside Ave., again and again, to each of my invisible correspondents.

  *

  It’s Saturday, my day for seeing the kids. I arrive at my ex-wife’s building on Park Avenue and wave to the doorman from the street. He immediately calls up for the children and comes out to smoke in silence with me until they arrive, full of stupid enthusiasm for life. They tell me that their mother has acquired a new radiogram, that she gave them who knows how many new toys, that they watched a war movie in an enormous cinema, and that the following weekend they’re going to the coast. I take them, one by each hand, to walk in Central Park.

  It’s time to go to see the ducks, kids.

  We always go to see the ducks, Papa.

  So far, I’ve managed to cover up the problem with my sight. When the sun goes down and things start to hide from me, I say to my little girl: Captain, tell me the English names of everything you can see, and she begins: a duck, a lake, a big tree, a little tree. She pronounces the English words with an exaggerated Yankee accent, as high-class Latin American children typically do. She says: that’s a dahk, that’s a layk, that’s a
beeg twee, and that’s a lidel twee. And to the older boy, when we’re paying for ice creams at the end of the walk, I say: Soldier, count out the coins and give the ice cream vendor the exact change.

  When we’re saying good-bye again at the foot of the steps to the building, I give them each a kiss on the forehead with my eyes closed, so they won’t give me away—I imagine my eyes like two raisins, grayish, wrinkled, small, rotten. Then I take the train back to Philadelphia. In the carriage, I lean my head against the seat and touch my closed lids to see if my eyes are still there. There they are, brimming with water, with the memory of my children like wounded effigies imprinted on them.

  *

  It’s Sunday and my husband will take the children to the zoo. They’ll take a long walk in Chapultepec Park and the boy will come back, still sweaty and overexcited, to tell me about the elephants, who can never go to bed because they wouldn’t be able to get up again. Afterwards he’ll get a little sad and ask me why: Why can’t the animals leave the zoo or you leave the house, Mama?

 

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