Alibis

by André Aciman

  There is more. The Plaça Nova, a block or so west of the cathedral, faces the remains of the main entrance to the old Roman town of Barcino. The walls of that town, like repressed desires, surface everywhere, above ground, underground, and in a women’s accessories store in the Barri Gòtic. Next to the Plaça Nova is the Avinguda de la Catedral, a pedestrian esplanade and a totally modern invention. To create a large public space—beneath which lies a huge garage—old, presumably tottering buildings built against the Roman walls were torn down, replaced by a sea of hardened, dark-gray rectangular flagstone slabs. (These slabs now pave the entire Barri Gòtic. The original cobblestones and street gutters have been altogether removed, giving the old city, including the famed Ramblas, Barcelona’s long metropolitan promenade, a cold, synthetic look. The Ramblas’s tiles are slightly different—but the effect is the same.) In one corner of the Avinguda de la Catedral, a fake Roman arch protrudes from the ancient wall, and a ramp, made to look like a drawbridge that has been let down, leads to a tiny road adjoining the cathedral. The Pont dels Sospirs (Bridge of Sighs) connecting two buildings is also a twentieth-century invention. The whole area begins to loom like one giant bionic space where the old and the new, the genuine and the prosthetic, have been indissolubly fused. The feeling becomes eerie when on some stones of the building that used to house the royal archives of Aragon, abutting the cathedral, one makes out inscriptions written in, of all languages, Hebrew. They are fragments of headstones taken from the Jewish cemetery on the hill of Montjuïc.

  This is no mere palimpsest. It is more like a five-part invention by Bach and reminds me of one of a genre of tapas in Barcelona, called montaditos, from one of my favorite restaurants, Ciudad Condal. It is made of a slice of baguette rubbed with tomato, on top of which a thin sliver of foie gras has been spread, which is then covered (mounted) by a strip of anchovy, over which is placed a sliced dried date, topped by the tiniest mound of Roquefort cheese. A six-part invention. It’s a mess, and you’d never think any of its ingredients would go well together, but it works. And this Barcelona does best. It is reverse archaeology in a city that practices reverse chic in so many ways.

  I thought I had discovered an authentic alcove in the small Plaça de Sant Felip Neri. It is a quiet spot, with very few trees, and a tiny fountain whose water spouts ever so placidly. Here, Antonio Gaudí, Barcelona’s most touted architect, who died in 1926, used to come to sit and be alone with his thoughts. It is said that he was run over and killed by a trolley on leaving this precise square. And here, I too would return to think of this city that I will never fathom because it plays so many tricks on me. Like an eternal striptease, it takes off with one hand what it puts back on with another, removing a lie to reveal a far subtler one and not for a second exposing a swath of truth.

  Yet even in this quiet oasis of a square I encountered multilayered inventions. The façades of the buildings housing the coppersmiths’ guild and the shoemakers’ guild are not indigenous to the Plaça itself; about fifty years ago, they were moved from elsewhere in the city and grafted here. As in Girona, the job is seamless and well done. Inside one of the façades is a small school adjoining the Iglesia de Sant Felip Neri. They say a hotel may be built in this square. Finally, there is the Baroque church itself. One of its walls still marks the spot where a bomb was dropped during the civil war. There are those who say that this is where Franco’s henchmen carried out their executions. The wall is riddled with what could only be bullet holes. But you wouldn’t know it. There is no plaque to explain anything. Indeed—and the thought will never leave me—there seem to be no plaques to speak of in Barcelona. This is a city that not only toys with its past but also suffers from willed amnesia. And for good measure, it blankets itself with hard, gray slabs. Stones do not speak here—or what they say is altogether garbled, if not silenced.

  Barcelonans do not talk about the civil war. They do not remember it, the way they do not really remember their Jews. Yet these are two of the most harrowing pages in the life of their city.

  As with the Ramblas, Avinguda de la Catedral has become the site of a fringe economy staffed by street performers and an entire macédoine of freaks and mountebanks. The most popular are the human statues, part of an international fad. Young men and women paint their skin silver, white, or copper, put on a costume, and, by freezing their posture for hours, imitate statues, i.e., imitate the imitation of human beings. Unlike the beggar lady by the cathedral, they do not thank you when you drop a coin into their hat; instead, they perform an elaborate, meant-to-seem-mechanical bow-pirouette that also allows them to stretch their muscles. The “statue” of Columbus, imitating the imposing statue standing at the foot of the Ramblas, where Columbus looks out to the Mediterranean and over and beyond it toward the New World, will, when you drop a coin, take out his telescope, scan the horizon, then lower his arm, look up again, and resume his timeless posture. Clearly this performance touches a nerve somewhere, for children are always asking their parents to drop more coins into Columbus’s bowl. But no one, not the children, not their parents, not the tourists, not the statue of Columbus, much less Columbus himself, could have predicted that the discovery of the New World in 1492 would not only coincide with the departure of all Jews from Spain but would also, by opening new trade routes and new harbors, ultimately spell the ruin of the seaport of Barcelona. That Columbus may have come from converso stock is treated as an apocryphal detail. That the Jewish exodus may have proved disastrous to the Kingdom of Spain, or that Spain, until the death of Franco, had not yet recovered from what could possibly have been its worst blunder in history is something it is probably working on—working through, rather. That Barcelona has finally recovered after five hundred years is, however, the true miracle. That I could live to say it is no minor miracle either, seeing that, but for a fortuitous series of events, my ancestors would most surely have perished in the arms of the Inquisition. I am willing to forgive. And Barcelona is willing to forget.

  New York, Luminous

  Sometimes I won’t go home. I’ll leave my office, or an evening party, or a place where I stopped for coffee in the afternoon and, on impulse, find myself taking a long walk. There’s nothing I’m really looking to do on these walks, though I could make up errands along the way, and there is no one I’m hoping to meet, though I’d love to run into a friend and be asked to linger over a beer or another coffee. And yet it’s really the city I am reaching out for, not people, the city I long to encounter and hold on to for a while before I let go of it, or it tires of me and lets me go my way. The city after a busy day. The city on rainy afternoons. The city when you take a day off, or get up at the wrong hour, or get off at the wrong stop and let yourself wander down unfamiliar streets and suddenly find a movie theater you never thought existed and can’t wait to enter. A writer’s city; a moviegoer’s city; a white-nights city; a sleek, cold, modern metropolis with towering glass buildings that can, within seconds, turn into a diminutive neighborhood with its own invasive, earthy, homespun ethnic foods scenting the cobbled lanes that go back a hundred years and speak of times no one recalls and most invent.

  One man understood the secret language of cities and how even sidewalks, like Sirens, can lure us and speak to us: Walter Benjamin, the German Jew who took his own life when escape seemed impossible. He had loved Paris and Berlin, not just for what they were but for the shadows that hovered over them—the shadow of time, the shadow of experience, and of wishdreams, a shadow that touched him like strange intimations from bridges and stonework but that could just as easily have emanated from deep within him and, like a film, left its imprint on the narrow passages and inner courtyards he grew to love so much. Everything he touched and returned to seemed haunted by this inner film, this inner version of a city that seems forever eager to confide in him, to meet him halfway, to love him back, and, in the end, helps him dream up homelands anywhere. Without this illusory film he projected he had no way to connect to, much less touch or love, anything at
all.

  At dusk, I’ll walk up Broadway starting at the imposing Time Warner center overlooking Central Park. Like everyone, I have my choice spots, my private, incandescent nerve centers in the city. I revisit these mini-altars with some apprehension, because if I know that stores and buildings have disturbing ways of vanishing without warning, what I fear more is to watch my old haunts turn from me, or my feelings for them suddenly grow cold.

  Today, as I walk past the ghost of so many movie houses that have disappeared on Broadway—the Regency, Cinema Studio, the Embassy, the old Beacon, Loews on Eighty-third Street, the New Yorker, the Symphony, the Thalia, the Riviera, the Riverside, the Midtown, the Olympia—I know I’ll earmark a moment to lament their passing. But memory is fickle, and the mind stakes everything on new thrills. Which is what I want on today’s walk—new thrills, new vistas, new spots. I want to draw something new from the city, though I don’t know what it is yet.

  Every walk carves out a new city. And each of these tiny cities has its main square, a downtown area all its own, its own memorial statue, its own landmarks, laundromats, bus terminal—in short, its own focal point (from the Latin word focus, meaning fireplace, hearth, foyer, home), warm spot, sweet spot, soft spot, hot spot.

  Sometimes, heedless of whatever others on the street will think, I like to stop on one such spot and stand and watch. Watch the prewar buildings with their rows and columns of lighted windows reminding me of a gargantuan periodic table. Watch the crowds hurrying home after work. Watch those who’ve already been home rush out to the theater wearing their expectant nightlife on their faces. Watch the stores that have hours to go before closing. Watch the occasional madman peddle hallelujahs around the American Bible Society building, or bicycling food-delivery boys tear down the sidewalk, or the crowd come out from underground, and as ever around Lincoln Square, watch the dazzle of carnival lights in this clamorous, floodlit Milky Way, which, scarcely forty years ago, was a humdrum no-man’s-land, thrust like an afterthought between the residential Upper West Side and the Hell’s Kitchen of West Side Story fame.

  The brownstone at number 51 West Sixty-seventh Street no longer stands, but it’s the address for The Apartment, the film that won an Oscar for best movie of 1960—the old West Side, still mom-and-pop in those days, fringing decency, though barely, a hinter-accent of an English no longer spoken. There C. C. Baxter (Jack Lemmon) rents an affordable apartment from his landlady, Mrs. Lieberman, with old Dr. Dreyfuss next door and his kind, gossiping wife rushing to save Miss Kubelik (Shirley MacLaine) when she swallows too many sleeping pills. “I live in the West Sixties,” says Jack Lemmon, “just half a block from Central Park. My rent is eighty-four dollars a month.”

  A few blocks north sits Woody Allen–land, where Hannah and her sisters still visit their parents on Thanksgiving each year. Not far away on West End Avenue are Sergei Rachmaninoff’s and Edgar Allan Poe’s homes. Then, past the Pomander Walk, where Bogie lived, Gershwin’s home, and, three block up, Duke Ellington’s. Sometimes my hot spots are aligned to the city’s own official centers: Columbus Circle, Dante Square, Richard Tucker Square, Sherman Square, Verdi Square, Straus Park, each dotting the night, when you happen to fly over New York, like speckled clots marking the city’s mysterious, magnetic erogenous zones.

  But New York has its eccentric centers as well—clandestine, unstable, rival centers—totally my own. Like a midshipman with a sextant, or a dowser with a rod, or a trained acupuncturist with his needles, I like to pinpoint the exact coordinates of these imaginary centers, knowing they are nomadic, whimsical, and as shifty as an unstable polar star that keeps drifting to confuse the axis of our planet. And perhaps it’s these private, eccentric spots that I go looking for on my walks. Not faces, not the crowd, not even the city. This is how our terrifying, spire-studded, Draconian megalopolis called New York City begins secretly to draw us in; on snowy days, it suddenly shrinks to life-size proportions to become a Westphalian village; on steamy summer days it acquires a smell, a sallow, flushed Old World face, a human scale, a fishing hamlet.

  In that spellbound moment when we’re suddenly willing to call this the only home we’ll ever want on earth, New York lets us into a bigger secret yet: that it “gets” us, that we needn’t worry about those dark and twisted, spectral thoughts we are far too reluctant to tell others about—it shares the exact same ones itself, always has.

  And suddenly I realize what this is all about—from Melville, Whitman, Crane to Lorca, de Chirico, Cummings, Camus—the miracle of intimacy with a place that may be more in us than it is ever out there on the pavement, because there may be more of us projected on every one of its streets than there is of the city itself.

  New York may end up being no more than a scrim, a spectral film that is none other than our craving for romance—romance with life, with masonry, with memory, sometimes romance with nothing at all. This longing goes out to the city and from the city comes back to us. Call it narcissism. Or call it passion. It has its flare-ups, its cold nights, its sudden lurches, and its embraces. It is our life finally revealed to us in the most lifeless hard objects we’ll ever cast eyes on: concrete, steel, stonework. Our need for intimacy and love is so powerful that we’ll look for them and find them in asphalt and soot.

  It’s not steel or concrete we love. Steel and cement are the mordant, the primer over which we apply our wishfilm. Without our wishfilm there is no city. The wishfilm we leave on our walks glistens on the city’s hard surfaces like the luminous imprint of fish scales left on a butcher’s block hours after the fish was caught, cut, and cooked—outside of time. It still glistens, still pulsates, reaching out to strangers, calling out to them, sometimes long after we’re gone. The remanence of our presence, our lingering afterimage on this city—the best in us.

  * * *

  These are my wishfilms:

  The wilting city at noon. The city of buses that become beaming vaporetti on foggy mornings. The after-hours city at 2:00 a.m. when a cabbie stops and a hasty jitter of underdressed girls pelt the cobbled street with spike heels and are instantly rushed into a club. The city on clammy weekend summer nights when the whir of air conditioners holds vigil on quiet side streets that have all but slipped to the Hamptons. The city on crisp, winter-clear mornings. The old city of splashing fire hydrants—do children still play in the water when time stops and the heat rises and all you long for is a brief rain shower to break the spell? The city holding its breath, gauging the clouds. The city when it finally does rain. The city of long shadows. The city of bridges speckling the night. The noir city of Richard Widmark and Dana Andrews. The city when it hops in NoLIta, TriBeCa, NoHo, NoHar, SoHo, SoHar—the city that has no time for sleep, the city that wouldn’t know how to sleep. Fake chill of June nights everyone knows will turn unbearably hot. Fake summer in February when we’re all out in T-shirts. Soothing duplicity of Indian summer days—better the illusion of summer than face October this year. Autumn in the city: how quickly we forget our romance with summer. The dreaded winter we all know we love.

  * * *

  Sometimes I go looking for the city as I know it will never be again. Derivative city that fancies itself more in novels and films than on its own sidewalks. My city. The city that reinvents itself by the minute but never knows where it’s headed, the city whose enemies love it more than it loves to hate itself. The city that’s always compared to Rome—because Rome had to fall one day—but will never be Athens because it’s way too young to have a past.

  I go looking for this city on my walks. The New York that has no date. Atemporal, unreal, spectral, and luminous.

  The city as Walter Benjamin might have seen it had he hurried and crossed the Pyrenees before the Nazis closed in on him. The might-have-been city of Benjamin’s might-have-been life. His spirit hovers in its precincts precisely because he never made it. The perduration of ghosts that have never been alive here.

  I’ll find a bench somewhere, sit down, be with him. Benjamin Square. Benjam
in Place. Maybe this is his invisible altar, the ultimate hot spot, the ganglion that always glistens at night before its light fades. From here all things radiate and here they all return. New York’s imaginary Place de l’Étoile. Paris’s Grand Army Plaza.

  At some point I may take the bus. Have I encountered something today? I don’t always know. Did I step into an iridescent hot spot where time stopped and I was one with myself and this city? I don’t know that either. One never knows. One just stops and stares—this building, that building, this narrow road that makes a strange J-turn and summons up something no flimsier than a fantasy, a would-be shroud behind which lurks the imprint of a life unlived awaiting us. Even the bus could turn out to be a hot spot in disguise. All whisper in this pressing secret language of cities—but I’m not always listening, and I don’t always hear, and sometimes I don’t understand the words.

  I look again but suddenly the narrow road with the fancy J-turn freezes, the buildings are mute, and the bus is just a bus again.

  The city is ours to borrow, not to keep, and therefore always on spec; it could any moment give us the slip and disclaim us.

  This is my world, this my life. One last glance before I head home. Desperately, I hold out for something, a last try, until something finally trickles to consciousness in the form of a question: What’s in me that keeps wanting something out there? Which is another way of asking: What’s out there that keeps beckoning something in me?

  I come with this question and I leave with this question. There are no answers. What remains instead is the feeling that the real question is not even a question, but a double-edged plea that says: Do not take it away. Above all, do not take me away.