Faces in the Crowd

by Valeria Luiselli

  *

  The first and last appearance of the Ohetivices was, predictably, a failure. Federico and I found ourselves a nice wide passage in the subway. We brought a low stool on which Federico would stand for the duration of the recital. He would declaim in Spanish while I spoke the lines in English, more quietly, at his side. We also brought a Hoover vacuum cleaner, as we had agreed that this was the object on which the wonderfully obscure fragment of That centered. The cue to start would be that Federico pointed to the on button of the Hoover and then:

  The outcome was the one thing most capable of hurting Federico: no one even stopped to watch us, despite the Spañolet and I having learned our lines by heart and reciting them with more affectation than an elephant in heat. When I realized that no one was taking any notice of us, I sat on the ground, behind the stool, and started to read—to pretend I was reading—and to savor the letter I would write to Salvador Novo describing the small muscular spasms of the asslet of his adored Andalusian as his whole body and every ounce of charm he possessed strained to attract the attention of the most unmovable race on the planet. Perpendicular people.

  Federico had a virtue, or I a defect. Or perhaps it was the other way around. He was not afraid of looking ridiculous. I dreaded it, ended up explaining myself. And there is nothing I abhor more. I get the story all tangled, trip myself up, lose my edge.

  That’s the reason why I didn’t say anything to Federico when I saw the woman in the red coat pass us carrying a wooden chair—slender and a little fragile, like her—but I jumped up, as if someone had stuck a rocket up my ass. I abandoned Federico on the spot and followed her through the station toward the exit. But when she got to the stairs, she didn’t go up, didn’t go out into the street. She paused for an instant. I waved, but I don’t think she saw me, because she turned back into the station.

  *

  How does this thing about remembering the future work? I asked Homer one day while we were stuffing ourselves with chocolate-and-cocaine ice cream.

  You’re an idiot, that’s what you are. (The expression he used was moron, but as I didn’t know the word the first time he spoke it, I wasn’t sure if it was a compliment or an insult.)

  How come?

  You’re a novelist, aren’t you?

  I’ve written a couple of lyrical novels, sometimes in the light of, and others in the shadow of, André Gide.

  Then you’re a bad novelist, but you are a novelist.

  Given.

  If you dedicate your life to writing novels, you’re dedicating yourself to folding time.

  I think it’s more a matter of freezing time without stopping the movement of things, a bit like when you’re on a train, looking out of the window.

  And it’s also not unusual that if you’re a novelist, you’re an idiot.

  *

  I walked very little in that city where everyone goes for walks. My days went by, bowed over a bureaucrat’s desk, composing reports. But one afternoon, while I was eating my sandwich in the kitchenette, I read a news article that put me in such a good humor that I dropped everything and went out to the street. A young husband was asking the Newark district court judge to grant him a divorce because his fiancée hadn’t told him until the wedding night that, instead of a right leg, she had a wooden prosthesis. He had stolen the false leg as evidence for his hearing, and she’d filed a suit for robbery. The article stopped there. It was a perfect story that begged an ending, which I would perhaps have written that very night if another story hadn’t completely distracted my attention.

  I left the consulate in a self-literizing mood and walked through the backstreets of the south of the city, a bit like that Edgar Allan Poe character who chases after crowds without any clear purpose. Turning a corner, I saw a woman. She was one of those Scandinavians who would never join the United Estates upper classes, but who justify all the gobs of oil spat into the sea by transatlantic liners, all the tons of cement poured onto the island of the poor Manhattoes, all the greasy hamburgers, all the toilets, the cockroaches, the truncated vocabulary of newcomers who ask for a sunny-side-up for breakfast. I think that was the third time I died.

  It must have happened as I was crossing the avenue toward the corner where she was standing. Most probably one of those demented cab drivers ran me over. Afterwards I continued across and stopped by a streetlamp to get a closer look. She took ten steps in one direction, turned, and took ten steps in the other. Heel toe, heel toe. Always ten. She had bony feet, the color of cream, balancing on dark sandals with two straps that wound around her slim ankles and ended in a bow halfway up her calves. A single one of those legs was worth more than all the others in the city, or in the world. If the poor lame woman who was heading for an early divorce had had at least one of those legs, her young husband wouldn’t have felt that he’d been hoodwinked and asked for the divorce. I went up to her and put a hand on her shoulder. She turned, I didn’t know what to say—though later I lied to Villaurrutia in a letter: “She’s Swedish and I’m not in love with her, but I had her as a virgin.”

  The truth is that Iselin was neither a virgin nor Swedish. She was, to put it delicately, a very hardworking Norwegian woman. But I went down like a rock. I fell in love with her the way a stone might become enamored of a bird. That afternoon she took my hand, led me to a room in a Bowery Hotel, and had me as a virgin. I stopped being, as they used to say then, a poor cherry, and felt, all 1.45 meters of me, a true macho.

  *

  My husband doesn’t read anything I write anymore, it no longer matters to him, it no longer matters. I don’t think he cares the least bit about Owen, this Owen, who is perhaps his future ghost in Philadelphia, his future life.

  *

  My ex-wife wants to take the children to Europe. She thinks that part of the basic education of a good criollo is rubbing shoulders with people who are fairer and better dressed. What she doesn’t know, what doesn’t even occur to the Great Bitch, is that the only thing she’s going to achieve with this trip is to sow a little seed of self-loathing in my children. Aware that she would feel some sort of guilt at squandering her family fortune on dresses for cocktail parties that would always end up with her spreading her legs for some dilettante given to murmuring verses by Mallarmé to wealthy Latin American women, I asked her to lend me the Manhattan apartment while she was away. I don’t think that’s a good idea, Gilberto, she said, with that petulant look of a person who believes it to be her obligation to educate her ex-husband.

  *

  Note: Owen’s grave in Philadelphia has no epitaph. His family wants to transfer his remains to El Rosario.

  *

  It’s the weekends that I find hardest without the children. On workdays I make a coffee at six in the morning, I drink it in the bath, get dressed with the patience and resignation of a father dressing his son, every button a ritual, tying the tie, the pause and a half of knotting the shoelaces. I leave something for the cats, which I imagine the ghosts must eat because a living being would never consume a bar of soap or a pint of cologne. I go to the office, leave, get moderately drunk, alone or with some colleague, and return to the twilight of my apartment full of things the ghosts keep bringing. Today, for example, a bicycle appeared in the kitchen and a tower of books on the windowsill. The same thing every day. Some nights I don’t manage to take off my suit and sleep clutching a pillow until it’s six again, my alarm clock goes off, and the Fucking Yanks arrive to lick my eyes.

  But on Saturdays I don’t have the pretext of the tie or the mentholated hope of the shaving cream. I also believe that this is the day when the ghosts go out for walks, because there isn’t a sound to be heard and the house feels emptier than usual. I go out too, to buy the papers, which of course I can no longer read properly. But I hoard them in towers, like the Collyer brothers, and soon I’m going to make a rampart, splitting the apartment in two: I’ve already got three towers in the kitchen, almost my own height. Before returning home, I buy a coffee on the corner and
continue on my way, taking short little slow steps, spinning out as far as possible my return to that world without laughter or quarrels or children crying, longing for at least the ghosts to have come back from their walks. When I arrive, I lie in my Reposet chair and set about stroking the three cats, who jump into my lap as if they were the ones who needed consolation.

  *

  I returned to the same corner in search of Iselin. She wasn’t there. I went back two, three, four times. Her fellow workers weren’t keen on giving me a telephone number, an address: Don’t get fond of her, kid. At the fifth attempt I found her on her corner. I took her out for dinner in the Bowery. Afterwards, she took me to a hotel. What choice was there?

  *

  I’m getting attached to the three cats. What’s more, they’ve turned out to have a useful, very supportive side. I no longer put either cologne or soap out for them, just leave my leftovers on the table and they come along to lick the plates. They lick them so well, so thoroughly, that I don’t have to wash up anymore. I’ve taken to stroking them all the time. I like passing my hand from the top of their heads to the tip of their tails.

  *

  The boy comes into my bedroom, where I’m writing:

  Look, Mama, this is our house.

  That’s pretty.

  No, it’s not very pretty. A really strong dinosaur came along and the house fell down.

  And who’s this?

  You, you stayed under the roof that fell down.

  And this?

  It’s just a heart that I was painting here.

  *

  Note (Gilberto Owen to Celestino Gorostiza, September 18, 1928): “The landscape and all my aspirations are vertical now. These men of the North, mystical, with not the least trace of eye-to-pore sensuality, are just poor musicians. We move around awake, in wide, real space. They in time. New York is a theory of a city built on the foundation of time alone. Manhattan is an hour, or a century, with the woodworm of the subways boring through it, eating it away, second by second.”

  *

  One day I asked Z if he had ever seen Ezra Pound.

  No, he said, but I sent him some poems a few years ago and he published them.

  And what would you say if I told you I saw him a few days ago in a subway station?

  Well, that he surely will have seen you too.

  I suppose the brown-skinned woman used to see me too. Perhaps she even saw me when I didn’t manage to see her: when I was absorbed in a book, or fell asleep until my stop on 116th Street. Maybe she also looked for me in the multitude of subwankers and only felt that her idiotic day had been worth the effort after seeing me, even if it was just a flash.

  *

  Iselin did it like a man. She was a lot taller and stronger than me. When we went into a hotel room she would throw me onto the bed with amazing force, order me to undress, and overrun my naked body with more aplomb than revolutionary troops in a city that has already surrendered—having a naturally small build, I’d learned to be submissive early in life. When she was on top of me, bursting with preorgasmic juices, her face had a slight but disturbing resemblance to the Mexican president Alvaro Obregón, who had died the previous year, so I would grit my teeth and almost always chose to close my eyes at the moment of orgasm.

  *

  I only leave my bed to make meals for the children, when their father isn’t here to do it. I look at my legs, they’re like two elephants’ trunks.

  *

  Hey, Mr. Collyer?

  Yes, Owen.

  Do you have a ghost?

  Several.

  Who are they, where do they live?

  With the greatest respect, my dear Owen, what the hell does it matter to you?

  *

  I considered a speakeasy an appropriate venue for a date with Iselin. As most places of that ilk had permanently closed down in the Bowery, where she almost always suggested we go, I arranged to meet her at the entrance to the subway on 125th Street, near my house. I waited. She arrived late, dressed à la garçonne, her hair pulled up under a hat. Manhattan has to be seen from the subway, she said, giving me a tight hug, more fraternal than provocative. The people who see it from above, from the Woolworth Building, don’t see anything, they live in a mock-up of a city. Iselin was like a Paul Morand who always got away with that type of pretentious remark just because she didn’t really mean it.

  We went to a dive on 132nd Street. They sold gin. We didn’t stay long because I was sure Nella Larsen would appear and I didn’t want to see her. But we drank quickly and well. After the fourth round, my companion gave her hat to a sax player, saying: You’re the cat’s pajamas, boy. At that time I didn’t understand the expression, but something in me did, and my blood boiled with jealousy. I drank too much, hit the sax player with his instrument, took back the hat, and died again. I don’t know of what, nor did I care: I woke up on the roof terrace of my building, Iselin’s boyish hat on my head, her head on my chest, my hand stroking her straight hair strewn across my shoulder. I believe I really loved her.

  When she had woken up and we were walking across the roof to go down for breakfast, I noted that the orange tree and its horrible pot, which I had left there months before, had gone.

  *

  Then I go back to the novel. A vertical novel told horizontally. A story that has to be seen from below, like Manhattan from the subway.

  *

  Nella Larsen was a writer. She was also Danish and a mulatta. In that sense, she was a walking, wiggling paradox who united the two characteristics that separated the Owens from the Federicos of this world: the Swede and the African, the world of the whites and the world of the blacks, what was not mine and what was not his. That to which we both aspired in a culture incapable of absorbing us. Nella invited us to a party at her brownstone on the corner of Convent Avenue and 143rd Street. I’ve only invited blacks, but you, Federico (she pronounced the d in Federico as if she were holding a marble between her teeth), are sufficiently black, and you, Gilberto, you look like an Apache or a Suomi, and you have an uglier nose than the average mulatto. Do all Mexicans look that way? Besides, we need a translator for Federico. I smiled at her and said, Thanks, Nella, and then explained to Federico: Nella says that it’s going to be all blacks at her party and the only white person will be you.

  Federico was mad about Nella’s small, perfectly square teeth, her little-boy’s pout, the upper lip slightly darker than the lower; as for me, I don’t know what I liked. I think, deep down, I didn’t like anything. In fact I disliked her. I didn’t want to go to the party, but Federico was in newcomer-to-the-city mode and insisted. I don’t know why I submitted to the torture of those Harlem tertulias: I trotted along to them with Federico like a chihuahua, and was never more than a remote presence who could neither sing nor dance, only translate and bark a little.

  That night at Nella’s there was a lot of whisky. We sat around an oak coffee table. Federico was a long way off, on the other side of the room, and I had no one to talk to. I was served a drink that I sipped in silence until, through the arch separating the lounge from the dining room, came a man, thin, very young and very dark, simple in his mannered way. This is a surprise I’ve brought for you, my darlings, announced Nella, and everyone stopped talking. She turned to me with a half-moon smile: A little Mexican gem, Gilberto, that I’ve brought just for you.

  The guests, uninterested, took up their conversations where they’d left off and the young man came to sit beside me, almost on my lap, and held out a soft hand: José Limón, painter and ballet dancer. Painter or ballet dancer? I asked, and immediately disliked myself. I’ve never been able to say the things I think in the tone I imagine before uttering them. I think it has to do with not having a good ear. That’s why I’ve always been a bad dancer and never learned to play an instrument. It happens with songs: I hear them perfectly in my head but then I can’t sing them. And eloquence of speech comes down to that very thing: being able to say things in the way one imagines them.
Limón seemed to be a decent kid. More of a ballet dancer, he said, with a wide, explanatory smile.

  José Limón was from Sinaloa, like me, and he’d also left as a young child. He had an affected way of telling his story; he was brimming with self-confidence, as if he knew in advance that his was a trajectory and not just a life; a train that left Sinaloa to arrive somewhere. There are people who are capable of recounting their lives as a sequence of events that lead to a destiny. If you give them a pen, they write you a horribly boring novel in which each line is there for an ultimate reason: everything links up, there are no loose ends. But if you stop them talking and set them to dance or paint, you end up forgiving the ugliness, the foolish expression, the unbridled arrogance of a child prodigy.

  Federico began playing a typically Spanish melody on the piano. The guests livened up and took off their jackets. I shrank. Nella sang a little, bending the words of a blues number everyone clearly knew to make them fit into the open-mouthed glass offered by Federico, another super-talented, almost autistic prodigy, now determined to please a bunch of Yankees; blacks, sure, but Yankees all the same. I shrank even further: a chihuahua among mastiffs. The Limón kid sprang up, most probably emboldened by the drinks and the general euphoria, and landed by the piano. When Federico finished the last copla, he whispered something in his ear. The Spañolet smiled in answer and began to play a waltz.

  Limón started dancing, or something like it, and Federico accompanied him on the piano. The guests drew back, forming a semicircle around them; they watched the two of them as you might a family of tropical crabs in a fish tank.

  Limón’s body moved as if dominated by a horizontal vertigo. His pendulum arms swung with apparent independence around an invisible center of gravity at the level of his navel, legs closely following the gravitational pull of his arms. He anticipated the music only to fall back exactly on the beat. There was a certain sad virtuosity in that thin, compact, brown-skinned body negotiating falls and suspensions with life and death. Federico—it was obvious—was leaving his mouth and soul between Limón’s legs.