Faces in the Crowd (3 page)

*

Dakota and I met in the toilet of a bar called Café Moto. She was making up her face with a sponge when I went to the sink to wash my hands. I never wash my hands in public toilets, but the woman touching up the future face of Dakota with a sponge seemed to me unsettling and I wanted a closer look. So I washed my hands.

*

The publishing house was at 555 Edgecombe Avenue but I spent half the week in libraries around the city, looking for books by Latin American writers worth translating or reissuing. White was sure that, following Bolaño’s success in the American market some five years before, there would be another Latin American boom. A paid passenger on the runaway train of his enthusiasm, I brought him a backpack full of books every Monday, and spent my working hours writing detailed reports on every one of them. Inés Arredondo, Josefina Vicens, Carlos Díaz Dufoo Jr., Sergio Pitol; nothing caught his interest.

Weren’t you a friend of Bolaño? White shouted from his desk (I worked at a small desk beside his, so the shouting was unnecessary but it made him feel like a real editor). He took a long drag on his cigarette and continued in the same mode: Haven’t you got any letters from him or an interview or something we could publish? he shouted. No, White, I never met him. Shame. Did you hear that, Minni? We have the honor of working with the only Latin American woman who wasn’t a friend of Bolaño. Who’s he, chief? asked Minni, who never knew anything about anything. He’s the most popular dead Chilean writer ever. His name gets dropped more often than coins into a wishing well.

*

I walked very little in that city where everyone goes for walks. I went from my apartment to the office, from the office to some library. And, of course, to the cemetery a few blocks from my house. One day, in her eternal eagerness to bring about a change in me, my sister Laura sent me an e-mail from Philadelphia. It said simply: 115 West 95th Street. Laura lived in Philadelphia with her wife, Enea. They still live there. They’re active people, pleased with themselves. Enea is Argentinian and teaches at Princeton. Laura and Enea belong to all sorts of groups and organizations; they’re academics; they’re left-wing; they’re vegetarians. This year they’re going to climb Kilimanjaro.

I left my apartment, bundled up in my gray tights and the red coat with enormous pockets. I coiled a scarf around my neck and walked directly to the address Laura had sent me.

The location existed, but it was the number of an imaginary house. Instead of doors, windows, and steps, there was a brick wall on which someone had painted a window frame, a vase of flowers, a cat snoozing on the sill, a woman looking out into the street. Too late, I realized it was one of Laura’s sophisticated jokes. A trompe l’oeil that functioned as a trope for my lifestyle in that city. I don’t know what Laura would say now that my only walks are from the kitchen to the living room, from the upstairs bathroom to the children’s bedroom. But Laura knows nothing of this, nor will she be told.

On the way back to my apartment, I stopped at a rummage sale outside a church. I bought a 1950s anthology of modern American and British poetry for one dollar and a small bookcase with four shelves for ten. I used to like walking along the streets carrying furniture. It’s something I don’t do anymore. But when I did, I felt like a person with a purpose. Back in my apartment, I put the bookcase in the center of the only wall in the living room without windows and placed my new book on the top shelf. From time to time I’d open the book, choose one of the poems, and copy it out. When I left the house to go to the office, I took the sheet of paper with me to memorize the poem. William Carlos Williams, Joshua Zvorsky, Emily Dickinson, and Charles Olson. I had a theory; I’m not sure if it was my own but it worked for me. Public spaces, such as streets and subway stations, became inhabitable as I assigned them some value and imprinted an experience on them. If I recited a snatch of
Paterson
every time I walked along a certain avenue, eventually that avenue would sound like William Carlos Williams. The entrance to the subway at 116th Street was Emily Dickinson’s:

Presentiment is that long shadow on the lawn

Indicative that suns go down;

The notice to the startled grass

That darkness is about to pass.

*

Milk, diaper, vomiting and regurgitation, cough, snot, and abundant dribble. The cycles now are short, repetitive, and imperative. It’s impossible to try to write. The baby looks at me from her high chair: sometimes with resentment, sometimes with admiration. Maybe with love, if we are indeed able to love at that age. She produces sounds that will have a hard time adapting themselves to Spanish, when she learns to speak it. Closed vowels, guttural opinions. She speaks a bit like the characters in a Lars von Trier movie.

*

I write: I met Moby on the subway. And though that is the truth, it’s not really credible, because normal people, like Moby and I, never meet on the subway. Instead, I could write: I met Moby on a park bench. A park bench is any park, any bench. And that, perhaps, is a good thing. Perhaps it’s right that words contain nothing, or almost nothing. That their content is, at the very least, variable. Typically, the bench would be green and made of wood. So, not to be predictable, I should write: Moby was reading a newspaper on one of the white, slightly battered concrete benches in Morningside Park. A bent, submissive gardener was trimming the hedge with a pair of clippers. It was 10 a.m. and the park was almost empty, like the word
park
and the word
bench
. Maybe I ought to explain why I was crossing the park from east to west at ten in the morning. I’d lie: I was going to mass. I was going to the cemetery, or the supermarket, which perhaps are more or less the same thing. Or better: I’d spent the night sleeping on one of those benches.

But what’s the use of all that if the truth is: I met Moby on the subway. I was reading some book whose title I can’t now remember—
A orillas del Hudson
by Martín Luis Guzmán, perhaps—and he was next to me, turning the pages of a fascinating book with stills from films by Jonas Mekas. I asked him where he’d found the book and he told me he’d produced it himself. He handed me a card for a printer, his printer, in a town outside the city.

*

It was very easy to disappear. Very easy to put on a red coat, switch off all the lights, go somewhere else, not go back to sleep anywhere. No one was waiting for me in any bed. They are now.

Now I know that when I go into the children’s room, the baby will catch my smell and shiver in her crib, because some secret place in her body is teaching her to demand her part of what belongs to us both, the threads that sustain and separate us.

Then, when I go into my own room, my husband will also demand his portion of me and I will give myself up to the indefinite, sudden, serene pleasure of his touch.

*

Moby had a big nineteenth-century house in a town that was soulless, but pleasant in its puritan way, not far from the city. The house didn’t have electricity or running water. Moby lived there, lived alone. He heated up cans of soup on a kerosene stove and slept on a mattress on the floor. His bedside book was the biography of Santayana. He got up at five every day, made a cup of green tea, and worked at the printing press until after midday. He lived that way of his own volition, not because there were no other options. There are two types of people: those who just live and those who design their lives. Moby was in the latter category. You had to take off your shoes before entering his house and put on Japanese slippers. There was something affected in that life, in the over-aestheticization of that reality, designed as if to be viewed through a lens. I definitely did not fit into Moby’s filmic life. That’s why I accepted the green tea, why I let Moby undress me, wrap me in a Japanese robe, and then undress me again in order to run his bony hands, his narrow nose, his thin, almost invisible lips over my body. That’s why I slept naked on that mattress next to the printing press, and hurried away the following morning. I was in the habit of carrying around two sets of keys to my apartment—one in my bag and the other in the pocket of my red coat in case I lost one—and, before going, I left a set for Moby, on top of a note with my address.

*

The baby’s asleep. The boy, my husband, and I sit on the stairs, facing the front door. He asks his father:

Papa, what’s a wasp?

It’s a dangerous bee.

And a sperm whale?

It’s a Moby-Dick.

*

One night I acquired a writing desk for my empty apartment. I didn’t buy it. But I didn’t steal it either. I suppose I should say that it was found for me. I was in a smoker’s bar. I’d spent the evening rolling cigarettes, browsing through a terribly boring anthology of Mexican poets—friends of Octavio Paz and, perhaps for that reason alone, translated into English—while waiting for Dakota to finish her last set in a nearby bar. When my mind momentarily wandered from my reading, I had the sensation that someone was watching me from outside. Through the window, I saw Dakota on the sidewalk, sitting on something, straightening her stockings. She waved and beckoned me over. I paid. Dakota was sitting on an antique writing desk, her dainty red high-heeled shoes beside her.

I found you a writing desk, she said, so you can write your stuff.

And how am I going to get it home?

We’ll carry it. See, I’ve taken my heels off.

First we dragged it, then we tried carrying it by the corners, one at either end. The task seemed impossible: the apartment was over thirty blocks away. Finally, we got underneath and rested it on our heads and the palms of our hands. Dakota sang the rest of the way home. I did the backing vocals. We got blisters.

*

I can only write during the day if the baby is having a nap beside me. She’s learned to grab anything that comes near her and clings to my right hand to sleep. I write for a while with the left one. The capitals are really difficult. Two or three times, I make an attempt to get my hand back, gently sliding it from between the bars of her fingers, and moving it to the keyboard to type another line. She wakes up and cries, looks at me resentfully. I give her back my hand and she loves me again.

*

So I could work at the new writing desk, I took one of the office chairs to my apartment. Nobody used it, no one was likely to notice, it had been left forgotten in the bathroom for months, and its only function was to hold a roll of toilet paper. It was made of pale wood: slender and fragile. I painted it blue in case White came back some day and recognized it. I put it in front of the new writing desk and wrote a letter to my sister Laura. It began: “I live opposite a park where the children are children and play baseball.”

*

The boy plays hide-and-seek in this house full of nooks and crannies. It’s a different version of the game. He hides and my husband and I have to seek. We have to bring the baby with us and when we finally find him under the bed or in a closet, he shouts, “Found!” and the baby has to start laughing. If the baby doesn’t laugh, we have to begin all over again.

*

One Friday afternoon, while I was in the Columbia University library looking through books to take to the office on Monday, I came across a letter from the Mexican poet Gilberto Owen to his friend and fellow writer Xavier Villaurrutia: “I live at 63 Morningside Ave. There’s a plant pot in the right-hand window that looks like a lamp. It’s got oval-shaped green flames . . .” The letter came from his collected works,
Obras,
and in it Owen listed the objects in a room he was renting in Harlem: writing desk, pictures, plant, magazines, a piano. The address he gave Villaurrutia caught my eye. The building had to be only a few blocks from the library, and very close to my apartment. I didn’t even finish reading the letter. I left the other books I’d selected in a pile, checked out
Obras,
and left.

After three in the afternoon that neighborhood used to smell of salt: the tears and sweat of the black and Latino children coming out of school, scabs on their knees, spittle and snot on the sleeves of their sweaters. One girl, broad as she was long, was working on a drawing propped up against the trunk of a tree in Morningside Park. In one hand she had a chicken leg, which she bit, or rather sucked, from time to time, and between the thumb and index finger of her other hand she held the green wax crayon with which she was completing the drawing. A boy came up behind her and whacked the back of her legs with his schoolbag—the two plump knees buckled—then grabbed her crayon. She recovered herself, lunged at him, and screamed, You madafaka, then beat his face with the chicken leg until he fell to the ground.

I walked to Owen’s building. I’d often seen it on my way to the subway without knowing he’d lived there. It was a red stone building, similar to all the others in the block, with large windows overlooking the park. When I stopped in front of it, an elderly man was entering the building so I slipped in after him. I went up to the first floor, the second, and continued upward. The man stopped on the third floor, turned to smile at me—Afternoon, ma’am; Afternoon, sir—and went into an apartment. I carried on up to the fourth and fifth floors, until my breath and the stairs ran out, went through a door leading to the roof terrace, and closed it behind me. I lit a cigarette in a sunny corner and waited for something to happen.

As the world didn’t register any changes, I started reading the book I’d just taken out of the library, waiting for some propitious signal. Nothing happened; I went on reading and smoking until it began to get dark. After a few hours, I’d finished all the letters in the volume, the entire collection of poetry in
Perseo vencido,
and the last of my tobacco, so I decided to go home. I stood up, looking for somewhere to get rid of my handful of cigarette ends. In a corner of the terrace there was a plant in a pot and I went across to bury them in it. I sat down on a stack of newspapers someone had tied up with string, as if for recycling, and dug a hole. Then I realized that the plant pot, like the one Owen described to Villaurrutia, resembled a lamp. The plant in the pot—perhaps a small tree—was withered. It couldn’t possibly be the same one Owen referred to in his letter, but it was, I thought, some kind of signal, the signal I’d been waiting for. I was overtaken by that same excitement babies display when they confirm their existence in a mirror.