by Paul Auster
Nine years earlier (1970), while serving on the crew of the S.S. Esso Florence, you threatened to punch and even kill one of your shipmates for baiting you with anti-Semitic insults. You grabbed hold of his shirt, slammed him into a wall, and brought your right fist up against his face, telling him to stop calling you names or else. Martinez backed down immediately, apologized, and before long you became good friends. (Shades of Madame Rubinstein.) Nine years later, meaning nine years after your father’s funeral (1988), you almost punched someone again, which was the last time you came close to engaging in a fight similar to the ones you fought as a boy. It was in Paris, and you remember the date well: September first, a special day on the French calendar, la rentrée, the official end of the summer holiday season, and therefore a day of crowds and inordinate confusion. For six weeks prior to that, you and your wife and children had been staying at your French publisher’s house in the south, about fifteen kilometers east of Arles. It had been a restful time for all of you, a month and a half of quiet and work, of long walks and rambling excursions through the white hills of the Alpilles, of outdoor dinners under the plane tree in the yard, probably the most enjoyable summer of your life, with the added pleasure of seeing your one-year-old daughter take her first tottering steps without holding on to her parents’ hands. You must not have been thinking clearly when you scheduled your return to Paris on September first, or perhaps you simply didn’t understand what would be waiting for you when you got there. You had already put your eleven-year-old son on a plane back to New York (a direct flight from Nice), and so there were just three of you traveling north on the train that day, you and your wife and small daughter, along with a summer’s worth of baggage and half a ton of baby supplies. You were looking forward to arriving in Paris, however, since your publisher had told you that an extensive article about your work would be appearing in that afternoon’s Le Monde, and you wanted to buy a copy of the paper as soon as you climbed off the train. (You no longer read articles about yourself, no longer read reviews of your books, but this was then, and you still hadn’t learned that ignoring what people say about you is beneficial to a writer’s mental health.) The trip by T.G.V. from Avignon was a bit frazzling, largely because your daughter was too impressed by the high-speed train to sit still or sleep, which meant that you spent most of the three hours walking up and down the aisles of the cars with her, and by the time you pulled into the Gare de Lyon, you were ready for a nap. The station was mobbed with people, large masses of travelers surging forth in all directions, and you had to jostle and fight your way to the exit, your wife carrying the baby in her arms and you doing your best to push and pull the family’s three large suitcases—not the easiest task, given that you had only two hands. In addition, there was a canvas bag slung over your shoulder, which held the first seventy-five pages of your novel in progress, and when you stopped to buy a copy of Le Monde, you slipped it into the bag as well. You wanted to read the article, of course, but after checking to see that it had indeed been printed in that afternoon’s edition, you put it away, assuming you could take a closer look at it while you were waiting in line for a taxi. Once the three of you made it through the exit door, however, you discovered that there was no line. There were taxis in front of the station, there were people waiting for those taxis, but there was no line. The crowd was immense, and unlike the English, who are in the habit of queuing up whenever more than three of them are present and who then stand there patiently until it is their turn, or even the Americans, who go about it more sloppily but always with an innate sense of justice and fair play, the French turn into fractious children whenever there are too many of them gathered in a confined space, and rather than collectively try to impose some order on the situation, it suddenly becomes every man for himself. The pandemonium in front of the Gare de Lyon that day reminded you of certain news clips you have seen of the New York Stock Exchange: Black Tuesday, Black Friday, the international markets are crashing, the world is in ruins, and there, on the floor of the exchange, a thousand frantic men are screaming their lungs out, each one about to drop dead of a heart attack. Such was the crowd you had joined that September first twenty-two and a half years ago: the rabble were on the loose and no one was in charge, and there you were, no more than a stone’s throw from where the Bastille had once stood, stormed two centuries earlier by a mob no less unruly than this one, but revolution wasn’t in the air just now, what the people wanted wasn’t bread or freedom but taxis, and since the taxi supply was less than a fiftieth of what it should have been, the people were fuming, the people were shouting, the people were ready to tear one another apart. Your wife was calm, you remember, amused by the spectacle unfolding around her, and even your little daughter was calm, taking in everything with her big, curious eyes, but you were becoming aggravated, you have always been at your worst when traveling, edgy and irritable and never quite yourself, and more than anything you hate being trapped in the chaos of crowds, and therefore, as you sized up the predicament you had fallen into, you concluded that the three of you would have to wait there for a good hour or two before finding a cab, perhaps six hours, perhaps a hundred hours, and so you said to your wife that maybe it wouldn’t be a bad idea to look for a taxi somewhere else. You pointed to another taxi stand down the hill, a few hundred yards away. “But what about the bags?” she said. “You’ll never be able to carry three heavy bags all the way over there.” “Don’t worry,” you said. “I can handle it.” Of course you couldn’t handle it, or could just barely handle it, and after lugging those monsters for just twenty or thirty yards, you understood that you had vastly overestimated your own strength, but at that point it would have been foolish to turn back, and so you kept on going, pausing every ten seconds to reorganize the load, switching the two bags and the one bag from your left arm to your right arm, from your right arm to your left arm, sometimes putting one of them on your back and carrying the other two with your hands, continually shifting the weight, which must have totaled about a hundred pounds, and naturally enough you were starting to sweat, your pores were gushing in the heat of the afternoon sun, and by the time you made it to the next taxi stand, you were thoroughly exhausted. “You see,” you said to your wife, “I told you I could do it.” She smiled at you in the way one smiles at an imbecilic ten-year-old, for the truth was, even though you had made it to the next taxi stand, there were no taxis waiting there, since every driver in the city was headed for the Gare de Lyon. Nothing to be done now except hang around and hope that one of them would eventually come your way. The minutes passed, your body started cooling down to more or less its normal temperature, and then, just as an approaching taxi came into view, you and your wife saw a woman walking in your direction, a young, extremely tall African woman dressed in colorful African clothes and walking with perfectly erect posture, a small baby sleeping in a sling that was wrapped around her chest, a heavy bag of groceries hanging from her right hand, another heavy bag hanging from her left hand, and a third bag of groceries balanced on the top of her head. You were looking at a vision of human grace, you realized, the slow, fluid motion of her swaying hips, the slow, fluid motion of her walk, a woman bearing her burdens with what appeared to you as a kind of wisdom, the weight of each thing evenly distributed, her neck and head utterly still, her arms utterly still, the baby asleep on her chest, and after your embarrassing display of ineptitude as you hauled your own family’s bags to this spot, you felt ridiculous in her presence, awed that a fellow human being could have mastered so well the very thing you yourself could not do. She was still walking toward you when the taxi pulled up and came to a stop. Relieved and happy now, you loaded the suitcases into the trunk and then slid into the backseat beside your wife and daughter. “Where to?” the driver asked, and when you told him where you were going, he shook his head and told you to get out of the cab. At first you didn’t understand. “What are you talking about?” you said. “I’m talking about the trip,” he replied. “It’s too short, and
I’m not going to waste my time on a measly fare like that.” “Don’t worry,” you said. “I’ll give you a good tip.” “I don’t care about your tip,” he said. “I just want you out of the cab—now.” “Are you blind?” you said. “We have a baby and a hundred pounds of luggage. What do you expect us to do—walk?” “That’s your problem, not mine,” he answered. “Out.” There was nothing left to say to him. If the bastard in the front seat wouldn’t take you to the address you had given him, what choice did you have but to get out of the taxi, unload your bags from the trunk, and wait for another cab? You were seething with anger by then, as angry and frustrated as you had been in years, no, more angry, more frustrated, more outraged than at any time you could remember, and when you had removed the bags from the trunk and the taxi man had started to drive away, you took the canvas bag that was slung over your shoulder, the bag that contained the only copy of the manuscript you were working on, not to mention the article in Le Monde that you were so anxious to read, and hurled it in the direction of the departing taxi. It landed with a great thud on the trunk of the car—a deeply satisfying thud that carried all the force of an exclamation mark set in fifty-point type. The driver slammed on the brakes, got out of the taxi, and began walking toward you with clenched fists, shouting at you for having attacked his precious vehicle, itching for a fight. You clenched your own fists and shouted back, warning him not to take another step toward you, or else you would dismantle him piece by piece and kick his sorry ass into the gutter. When you spoke those words, you had no doubt that you were prepared to tangle with him, that nothing was going to stop you from carrying out your promise to destroy this man, and when he looked into your eyes and saw that you meant what you were saying, he turned around, climbed into his cab, and drove off. You went out into the street to fetch your bag, and just then, as you bent down to pick it up, you saw the young African woman walking down the sidewalk with her baby and her three heavy bundles, well past you now, perhaps ten or twenty feet beyond where you were standing, and as you watched her move into the distance, you studied her slow and even gait, marveling at the stillness of her body, understanding that beyond the gentle swaying of her hips, not one part of her was moving except her legs.
One broken bone. Considering the thousands of games you took part in as a boy, you are surprised that there weren’t others, at least several others. Twisted ankles, bruised thighs, sprained wrists, tender knees, sore elbows, shin splints, clunks on the head, but only one broken bone, your left shoulder, incurred during a football game when you were fourteen, which has prevented you from fully raising your arm for the past fifty years, but nothing of any great consequence, and you probably wouldn’t bother to mention it now if not for the role your mother played in the story, which makes it her story in the end and not the story of how you, as the quarterback of your ninth-grade team, went diving for a fumbled ball in the backfield and wound up breaking your shoulder all by yourself, with no help from any of the players on the other team, leaping too far in your eagerness to recover the ball and landing in the wrong spot, on the wrong spot, and thereby breaking your bone when you crashed onto the hard ground. It was a frigid afternoon in late November, a game without referees or adult supervision, and after you hurt yourself you stood on the sideline and watched the rest of the game, disappointed that you couldn’t play anymore, not yet understanding that your bone was broken but realizing that the injury was a bad one because you could no longer move your arm without feeling acute pain. Afterward, you hitchhiked back to your house with one of your friends, both of you still in your football uniforms, and you remember how difficult it was for you to remove your jersey and shoulder pads, so difficult in fact that you couldn’t do it without your friend’s help. It was a Saturday, and the house was empty. Your sister was off somewhere with friends, your father was at work, and your mother was at work as well, since Saturday was always a busy day for showing houses to prospective buyers. About two minutes after your friend helped you take off your shoulder pads, the telephone rang, and your friend went to answer it because you were finding it hard to move now without increasing the pain. It was your mother, and the first thing she said to your friend was: “Is Paul all right?” “Well,” he answered, “not so good, actually. He seems to have hurt his arm.” And then your mother said: “I knew it. That’s why I called—because I’ve been worried.” She told your friend that she was coming straight home and hung up. Later on, when she was driving you to the doctor for X-rays, she told you that a feeling had come over her that afternoon, a strange feeling that something had happened to you, and when you asked her when she had felt this feeling, it turned out that she had started worrying about you at the precise moment when you were diving onto the ground and breaking your shoulder.
You have no use for the good old days. Whenever you find yourself slipping into a nostalgic frame of mind, mourning the loss of the things that seemed to make life better then than it is now, you tell yourself to stop and think carefully, to look back at Then with the same scrutiny you apply to looking at Now, and before long you come to the conclusion that there is little difference between them, that the Now and the Then are essentially the same. Of course you have manifold grievances against the evils and stupidities of contemporary American life, not a day goes by when you are not wailing forth your harangues against the ascendency of the right, the injustices of the economy, the neglect of the environment, the collapsing infrastructure, the senseless wars, the barbarism of legalized torture and extraordinary rendition, the disintegration of impoverished cities like Buffalo and Detroit, the erosion of the labor movement, the debt we saddle our children with in order to attend our too-expensive colleges, the ever-growing crevasse that divides the rich from the poor, not to speak of the junk films we are making, the junk food we are eating, the junk thoughts we are thinking. It is enough to make one want to start a revolution—or live as a hermit in the Maine woods, feeding off berries and the roots of trees. And yet, go back to the year of your birth and try to remember what America looked like in its golden age of postwar prosperity: Jim Crow laws in full force throughout the South, anti-Semitic quota restrictions, back-alley abortions, Truman’s executive order to establish a loyalty oath for all government workers, the trials of the Hollywood Ten, the Cold War, the Red Scare, the Bomb. Every moment in history is fraught with its own problems, its own injustices, and every period manufactures its own legends and pieties. You were sixteen when Kennedy was assassinated, a junior in high school, and the legend now says that the entire American population was bludgeoned into a state of wordless grief by the trauma that occurred on November twenty-second. You have another story to tell, however, for you and two of your friends happened to travel down to Washington on the day of the funeral. You wanted to be there because of your admiration for Kennedy, who had represented such a startling change after eight long years of Eisenhower, but you also wanted to be there because you were curious to know what it would feel like to participate in a historical event. It was the Sunday after the Friday, the day Ruby shot and killed Oswald, and you imagined that the crowds of onlookers lining the avenues as the funeral procession passed by would stand there in respectful silence, in a state of wordless grief, but what you encountered that afternoon was a throng of rowdy, rubbernecking gawkers, people perched in trees with their cameras, people shoving others out of the way to get a better look, and more than anything else, what you were reminded of was the atmosphere at a public hanging, the thrill that attends the spectacle of violent death. You were there, you witnessed those things with your own eyes, and yet in all the years since then, not once have you heard anyone talk about what really happened.
Nevertheless, there are things you miss from the old days, even if you have no desire to see those days return. The ring of the old telephones, the clacking of typewriters, milk in bottles, baseball without designated hitters, vinyl records, galoshes, stockings and garter belts, black-and-white movies, heavyweight champions, the Brooklyn Dodgers
and the New York Giants, paperback books for thirty-five cents, the political left, Jewish dairy restaurants, double features, basketball before the three-point shot, palatial movie houses, nondigital cameras, toasters that lasted for thirty years, contempt for authority, Nash Ramblers, and wood-paneled station wagons. But there is nothing you miss more than the world as it was before smoking was banned in public places. From your first cigarette at age sixteen (in Washington with your friends at Kennedy’s funeral) until the end of the previous millennium, you were free—with just a few exceptions—to smoke anywhere you liked. Restaurants and bars to begin with, but also college classrooms, movie theater balconies, bookstores and record stores, doctors’ waiting rooms, taxicabs, ballparks and indoor arenas, elevators, hotel rooms, trains, long-distance buses, airports, airplanes, and the shuttle buses at airports that took you to the planes. The world is probably better off now with its militant anti-smoking laws, but something has also been lost, and whatever that thing is (a sense of ease? tolerance of human frailty? conviviality? an absence of puritanical anguish?), you miss it.