Faces in the Crowd

by Valeria Luiselli

  I sit down on the edge of a stone from which I can see the window of my old room, in number 63 of the street bordering the park. I can’t actually see the window, of course, but it’s a scene I know well and can easily reconstruct. Moreover, with every swig of alcohol, a new color reappears, the lost contours of things become sharper. The reconstruction is interrupted, intermittently, by the great breasts of the wife of my new friend. I used to sit at that window writing letters to Clementina Otero; I asked her to marry me again and again. The woman’s enormous breasts dance, she dances and eats the last piece of watermelon—our only contribution to the party. My son’s made a home run, the head of the family reports to me, and we all applaud from afar. This was where I used to study English obsessively, underlining phrases in the issues of the NewYorker the landlady had put in a bookcase together with various editions of the Bible, always the New Testament. The woman bites into the watermelon and looks at me. Hey Mexican poet, she says. Everything slips and slides, and she has a black seed stuck in her cleavage. I can see the seed perfectly and my hook eye fastens on it, something tangible in my planet of shadows. I used to masturbate, I was young, looking at my naked reflection in that very window. The children throw themselves on my son and form a small mountain on top of him: Papa, he shouts from afar, Papa, they’re hitting me. She dances, she dances me. The cleavage, the seed, my present-day body leaning toward her, my swollen arms making a grab for her waist, her slaps, You madafaka, my tongue pounces on the seed, follows the soft line of the cleavage, Papa, there was a Spanish poet better than me, he was called Federico, They’re hitting me, Papa, the woman tastes of lotion, and there was a very good American poet, his name was Z, a sharp blow on the back of my neck, the paterfamilias hits me again and again with an empty bottle, You madafaka, there’s glass everywhere, thousands of tiny shards embedded in my head, everything disappears. The children play baseball and leaves of grass tickle my right ear.

  *

  Note (Owen to Araceli Otero): “The blacks are transparent. At night they dress in glass. I have sometimes walked through Harlem among a river of voices without a course, without a spring (cry that no one uttered). Through them all, the night is visible, transparent. . . . They talk like your Yucatán people. C’mon, c’mon in, misser, two dollahs. One day I went in. It’s impossible to write without music and dance.”

  *

  Who are you hiding from, Mama? From Papa?

  No.

  From Without?

  From nobody.

  If you want to hide, Mama, you have to find a more hidey place.

  Isn’t the bed hidey?

  No, the bed’s springy and a bit nuisancey when I want to run.

  *

  Federico and I decided to found a group inspired by our friend Z. Perhaps at his expense, but not necessarily to his detriment. It was Federico’s idea, but I was becoming his sidekick, so I not only agreed, but got fully involved and even contributed some ideas. In spite of his insistence on including Nella Larsen, we finally decided that there would be only two members and that the group would be called the Ohetivices, a word, unlike Objectivists, that Federico could pronounce. The idea was that I’d make a quick-fire translation of Z’s poems while he was reading them and then Federico would recite or sing them in public places (his theory was that everything rhymes in Andalusian, so it would be easy to keep the spirit and the impossible rhymes of Z’s poems, even, or above all, if we made some purely phonetic translations). We could, moreover, ask for a little money in exchange.

  Z, of course, knew nothing of our plans, and thought we wanted just to hear him, so when we asked him to do another reading of the verses from That we’d liked so much, he came along to College Walk thoroughly content and well dressed. This time he explained that in the extract he was trying to make objects speak. I explained to Federico:

  He says, here, objects are going to speak.

  How can objects speak?

  Federico is asking how come do things speak.

  Z gave us a slightly paternal look and said, with absolute solemnity: I’m trying to make the table eat grass, although I can’t make it eat grass.

  What? asked Federico.

  He says shut up and sit down on the grass.

  Z took out his papers and began to read. The poem began with the rather strange verb behoove and had a rhyme system that seemed at odds with its meaning, whatever that actually was. I think that, more than what his poems meant, it was interesting to see what they did. I tried my best to translate for Federico: At the beginning he seems to be talking about Hoovers, those machines for vacuuming the floor that make an infernal noise. But he might’ve said “behoover,” so it’s to do with the action of vacuuming, you know how English is always making the bloody nouns into verbs. So the objects ask to be vacuumed by a Hoover, or something like that. And after that there’s a bit about whiskying—another damned noun-verb. And then there’s some kind of biblical image about infinite locusts. Or maybe it’s locos. Then it goes: Damn (or perhaps Palm) and something about weed (or wheel). And the line ends: this accordion to fuck us. (Probably because he’d misunderstood me, that last bit excited Federico, who was taking careful notes for the next meeting of the Ohetivices.) I continued: The last four lines are the ones he read us before. You know, about the way time changes us. They’re magnificent. I’d better try to translate them on paper and let you know. In the meanwhile, you get down all the important words and then we’ll see what we can do.

  The good thing was that as Z didn’t understand Spanish, and Federico only pretended to understand me, there was no way I’d end up looking like an idiot.

  *

  I’ve decided to name the three little blackguards, who have now taken up permanent residence in my apartment. I don’t know if they’re male or female and I’m loath to prod their stomachs for fear they’ll scratch me if my shaky hand suddenly comes up against a pair of feline testicles. They’re called Cantos, Paterson, and That. Naturally, I never know which is which, so I sometimes just call out: “That Paterson Cantos!” and the three of them appear. But those names are too serious to be spoken lightly, so I mostly call them all by their common characteristic: Fucking Yanks.

  *

  The children play hide-and-seek in this house full of holes. It’s a different version of the game. The boy hides the baby and I have to find her.

  *

  After the incident in Morningside Park, my ex-wife wouldn’t let me come back to Manhattan to see the children. You go and get drunk on me, Gilberto, and the children get frightened on me. The señora liked that “me” thing, as if everything were a conspiracy against her person. Some kids went and hit the poor little boy on me and the girl had to find a cab on her own to bring you all back; and you in that state, Gilberto, why do you do these things to me?

  The first weekend I should have been with them, they were taken to Coney Island. The children call me from there, with the Sunday pocket money their mother gives them. They know I was born on a Sunday and for that reason alone can get very depressed. That’s why they call, they’re well-brought-up children: Today we’ve seen the sideshow with the vomiting dwarf and he reminded us of you, Papa, but smaller. He drank pints and pints of water and then sicked it up into a bucket. It wasn’t a trick, Papa, he really did drink and sick up lots. And then Mama bought us some strawberry lollipops. But you’re allergic to strawberries, Papa, and you could die.

  *

  I had to tell the boy off for hiding the baby in one of the compartments in the fridge.

  *

  I’ve begun to suspect that during that summer of ’28 I made a kind of Faustian pact. I can’t remember having done it, of course, nor do I really believe in the Devil, Goethe, or Marlowe, not even in Thomas Mann, who brought out yet another Faust a few years back. But something must have happened during my successive deaths, something that explains the three-pound fat blind man I am now. It’s not that the devil has given me anything in exchange, so I can’t understand the s
courge of the man boobs or this so inelegant death.

  *

  In that life, hardly anyone had definitively died. Xavier, for example, hadn’t, although he would also die every so often. Sitting beside my orange tree, I used to write letters to them all as if we were already ghosts, as if, with my sinking-ship descriptions of Manhat-tan, I was contributing to the enactment of our future. “Through the two windows, came the park, full of children’s voices,” I wrote to Xavier. “It’s a terraced park, like a show seen from the gallery of my window. Here the children are children. The grown-ups kiss, sometimes, when they’re not too tired. I’m alone and naked, with only a silk bathrobe covering me”: the syntax of aspirational unhappiness.

  But one day the orange tree went and died. I’d gone on a trip to Niagara Falls, and didn’t water it before leaving. When I returned, it was completely withered—as if years had passed instead of scarcely two weeks. Its sudden, absolute death made me so sad, seemed so prophetic in its way, that I took it upstairs to the roof terrace of my building and abandoned it right there.

  *

  Mama, guess what I’ve got in my hand.

  I don’t know. What is it, darling?

  An orange tree.

  What?

  Didn’t that make you laugh?

  No.

  Well, it didn’t make me any oranges.

  *

  Once, toward the beginning of fall, I was able to see the woman with the dark face and shadows under her eyes for longer than the brief instants our respective parallel train journeys normally allowed us. The doors of the train in which I was traveling had got stuck and we’d been stranded in the station for more than ten minutes. Then another train approached from behind on the adjoining track and stopped next to ours. In the opposite carriage, her head resting against the window, was the woman, wearing an olive-green cloth hat and a red coat, buttoned up to the neck. She was reading a hardcover book. By leaning forward a little, I managed to see the title, which, to my surprise, was a Spanish word: Obras. The woman felt herself being watched and raised her head—the enormous shadows under her eyes, her enormous eyes. We stared at each other like two animals dazzled by a strong beam of artificial light until her train pulled out.

  *

  I haven’t talked to my husband for over a week. I know he spends the night in the house, because sometimes, when I can’t sleep, I sense him getting into the bed. He smells bad. He smells of the street, restaurants. He smells of people. Other times, I know he gets into our son’s bed and sleeps there. I hear them getting up together in the morning, taking a shower, having breakfast with the baby, leaving for school. Sometimes, he takes the baby with him for the whole day. At others, he leaves her here with me and doesn’t come back until late evening. When he does return, he says good-night to the children and lies down on our bed to watch television. When I get into bed, he gets up and starts working on something.

  This is unbearable, my husband says to me.

  I know. I can’t withstand it either.

  *

  Have you ever been married, Homer?

  Do you know the difference between analytical and synthetic utterances? he asked in turn.

  I’d been silently licking my cocaine ice cream and thinking of telling him about having once wanted to marry a woman called Clementina who didn’t love me one little bit.

  No, sir, I replied. What is it?

  He wiped his hands on a colored handkerchief and began in a professorial tone:

  Analytical: utterances that are true by virtue of their meaning. Example: “Every bachelor is an unmarried man.” Synthetic: utterances that require something from the world to make them true. Example: “Every married man believes enduring happiness is dancing his whole life with the ugliest woman.”

  And which am I?

  You’re not an utterance, Owen.

  *

  The boy overheard our conversation last night, and questions me while I get him ready for school.

  So who’s Withstand, Mama?

  What do you mean?

  You said something about Withstand to Papa.

  Withstand is just a word, my love.

  What about “Without”?

  *

  Now I am just that: an utterance. And that’s exactly why I left my wife, because I wasn’t, at forty-something, in the mood for dancing with the ugliest woman. Not even like this, so fat, so blind.

  *

  Last night I got home, a bit more drunk than usual, from a dinner in the house of the English vice-consul. There was the host, his wife, an Argentinian dandy, and three Yanks (men, not cats) with three Yankee women (also not cats, though not far off). The moral problem with Yanks (male and female) is that they think they are Swedes, yet, in certain circumstances, they’re just as bad-mannered as Mexicans, but more calculating and hypocritical. We talked the whole night about public works in Philadelphia, the new governor, the dreadful summer climate, the number of flies (male and female), until the dessert arrived and one of the ladies broached the topic of the scandalous infidelity of some famous politician. The gentleman with most seniority, and surely the most experience of the very behavior he was decrying, began speaking. While twisting his wedding ring—as if tightening the screw of an obsolete gear system—he constructed eloquent phrases on the ultimate meaning of marriage vows. Someone mentioned Russell’s Marriage and Morals. I recalled—I’d read the book in my youth—that the chapter entitled “Marriage” was followed by another called “Prostitution.” I said this aloud and everyone looked at me in silence until one of the Yankees, the man on my right, gave a paternal cackle, patted me on the back, Oh, you Mexicans. I felt a desperate need to piss—this always happens when I become the center of attention. One of the wives demanded an explanation, which I did not have to give thanks to the fact that the Argentinian got up to take his leave and eased the tension. The ladies formed a group, the gentlemen lit cigars, and, as soon as I could, I also took an effusive farewell of the English vice-consul and his friends, and went out the front door.

  The neighbors on his block have rockers and flowers on their porches: probably gardenias, geraniums, petunias. I went up the steps of one of the houses and pissed on some scented geraniums. As I turned to go back down to the street, I walked into a plant pot, which rolled down the steps, spilling its contents. In the darkness, I managed to collect up some of the scattered soil, which I stuffed back as best I could, and, for no other reason than not leaving traces, I took the pot home with me.

  I opened the door and greeted the Fucking Yanks. I put my new acquisition on the dining table and pulled up a chair to sit and share the last of the stash of whisky with them. The cats circled, suspicious or curious, I don’t know which, around the new object. When I’d set our four glasses on the table and, blindly, poured a tot into each, I put my hand on the plant pot. I felt around its edges, removed the loose earth with my nails. In the center, a shrub was growing, or a small withered tree—a dead orange tree, judging by the trace of a scent, the texture of the trunk, and the uneven arrangement of the branches. I touched the container, first with my palms and then with my fingertips. I knew almost immediately that it wasn’t just any old plant pot. Running my fingers over the surface, I was able to confirm that it was my pot, the one with green flames, beside which I had penned all the good things I’d written in my younger days. And if it wasn’t my old plant pot, it was exactly the same, and that was enough. I was so excited that I kicked the Fucking Yanks around the room. On a piece of paper I found on top of the refrigerator, I began a letter, as if to a dead friend, or perhaps the preliminary notes for a novel.

  I read them again today, in daylight with a magnifying glass. The only thing I can make out is: The novel will be narrated in the first person, by a tree a woman with a brown face and dark shadows under her eyes, who has perhaps died. The first line will be these words by Emily Dickinson: “I heard a fly buzz when I died.”

  *

  It was with Homer that I developed m
y theory of multiple deaths. Or perhaps I should say that it was he who proposed it, and I just elaborated it at his side.

  What happens is that people die many times in a single life, my dear Mr. Owen.

  How come, Mr. Collyer?

  People die, irresponsibly leave a ghost of themselves hanging around, and then they, the original and the ghost, go on living, each in his own right.

  And how can you tell who’s whose ghost?

  Sometimes it’s easy. Physical similarities, especially the ears. Have you heard of a young writer, Samuel Beckett, who published a story this year called “Assumption”?

  No, never.

  And the Viennese philosopher who, a few years back, brought out some crazy stuff about language and logic that he’d written in a trench during the war?

  Of course, Ludwig Wittgenstein, he’s really famous: “The world is everything that happens.” But I haven’t read him either.

  Well, it’s not important. The other day my brother came home with the newspaper. As he does every day, he read me the society, culture, and politics pages. In politics there was a note about Wittgenstein, and in culture, one on young Beckett. It seemed to me that both notes were talking about the same person. I asked him if there were pictures of the two of them. My brother confirmed my suspicions: the same ears. We turned the affair over for hours and both agreed: of the two, Ludwig is the ghost and Samuel the original.

  But isn’t Wittgenstein older?

  That’s not important.

  Huh?

  Damnit, Mr. Owen. Aren’t you the one who can remember the future?

  *

  The children never come to Philadelphia. Yesterday I sent them a letter saying that Papa was happy and flourishing again, and in the envelope I put a Duchamp-like photo I took of myself, in which I’m hidden behind my plant pot with its armful of dead branches: “I, a fat New Romantic in a tie, standing in front of my eternal, childless, public-servant-papa writing desk on the coastless east coast of this genderless country. Papa’s missing you both here, Gilberto (2nd January 1951).”