Faces in the Crowd (6 page)

Can I say something too?

Yes.

I want to tell you both that I didn’t see the end of
Raining Hamburgers
because I fell asleep.

*

The men I slept with used to fall asleep immediately after having sex, while I suffered insuperable sleeplessness, especially if the person had been able to give me pleasure. In that other city, in that apartment, I simply got out of bed and sat at my writing desk. I used to study Owen’s portrait, which looked back at me like an apocryphal fruit from the autumn of yellow Post-its accumulating on the branches of the dead tree.

Owen had a distant, gloomy, spiritual face, like that of a religious martyr; high cheekbones, pointed chin, eyes disproportionately small. The body, languid, dispirited, submissive. Traces of Indian ancestry and an aristocratic criollo demeanor: none of the parts added up to the whole. I once read somewhere that personality is a continuous sequence of successful gestures. But the opposite was true of the man who appeared in the portrait: the fissures and discontinuities were obvious. Examining it closely, it was even easy to imagine the places where he’d attempted to cover a certain fragility with pieces of other personalities, firmer, more confident than his own.

*

My husband asks if it’s true that I can’t sleep after sex. I say:

Sometimes.

And what do you do when I fall asleep?

I hold you, listen to your breathing.

And then? he insists.

Then nothing, then I go to sleep.

*

During my second pregnancy, all I did was sleep. The contractions woke me up in the thirty-ninth week. My husband was reading beside me. I took his hand and placed it on the dome of my belly. Can you feel it? I asked. Is it kicking? No, it’s coming. My first labor had to be induced and I ended up having a cesarean because I wasn’t feeling anything, no contractions. This time, the sensation started in my lower back. An icy heat. Then, beginning in my sides, my skin raised itself up and tensed. A geological rather than biological phenomenon: a tremor, a slight arching, my entire belly rose up, like an emerging landmass, breaking through the surface of the sea. And the pain, a pain like a glint of light, the gleam of a comet, which leaves a trail, and fades away as incomprehensibly as it returns.

*

Note: Owen was born in El Rosario, Sinaloa. But that’s not important. He was born on February 4, 1904. Or perhaps May 13.

*

When I can’t sleep, I go into my children’s room and sit in the rocking chair. I listen to their slow breathing filling the whole room. The baby was also born on a fourth of February. The boy, on a thirteenth of May. Both were born on a Sunday.

*

I told Salvatore about the forgery. He had never heard of Gilberto Owen, but listened carefully to my rambling explanation. Owen had lived in Manhattan from 1928 through to 1930, at the height of the Harlem Renaissance and the beginning of the Great Depression. Although Owen left letters, some diary entries, and a handful of good poems, little is known of his period in New York. But it is known, I told Salvatore, that Owen lived in an old Harlem building opposite Morningside Park and that during those very years, on the other side of the park, Lorca was writing
Poet in New York
. A few blocks from there, Joshua Zvorsky was beginning his long poem
That
. Farther north, Duke Ellington was playing in Mexico’s. But Owen’s writings from that time give the impression that he hated New York and was, in fact, on the margins of all that. It’s most likely that he only came across Lorca once or twice, never met Zvorsky or saw Duke Ellington play.

So what? asked Salvatore.

So what what?

So what does it matter if he never met Lorca or saw Duke Ellington play?

It doesn’t, I’m just saying he could have.

Exactly, and that’s what matters.

*

The first installment of the sham transcription was a success. I arrived on Friday with a bundle of pages written in Word, 1.5 spacing, Times New Roman. White read them in front of me and was clearly interested, even enthusiastic. If they were indeed translations of poems by Owen made by Zvorsky, we’d found a treasure trove, I said. He replied that I was the best literary contranslator he’d ever met. Then he asked to see the original manuscript, which we both knew didn’t exist.

I had to fabricate the manuscript over the weekend, with the help of Moby—he was the only person I knew with the tools and the talent to forge such a thing. He turned up at my apartment with a 1927 Remington and old paper. We worked all weekend. As a sort of reward, we made love on Sunday. He told me he liked my breasts, though they were a bit small. I said: Thank you.

*

Note: Owen died blind, victim of liver cirrhosis, on March 9, 1952, in Philadelphia. He’d swollen up so much that he’d grown breasts.

*

We have a neighbor who breeds frogs. And Madagascar cockroaches to feed to the frogs. We meet him at the front door and the boy tells him that he has a dinosaur beside his bed, though it’s made of foam rubber, because the hard plastic one got broken.

Live frogs are better, says the neighbor, because they eat the mosquitos and cockroaches.

The boy looks at him steadily.

My dinosaur eats mosquitos and frogs. But he doesn’t eat cockroaches, he thinks they’re disgusting.

*

I returned to Detective Matias’s office many times. On my second visit, we had a coffee in the interrogation room while he asked me questions and I answered, convinced it was going to turn out that I was the guilty party. At that moment, looking Detective Matias in the eyes, I repented having stolen a calculator in my convent school at the age of eleven; I was assailed by the memory of the time a math teacher washed my mouth out with soap, arguing that I couldn’t go home with such a dirty tongue; all the books I’d stolen from so many libraries weighed on my conscience; the kisses I gave my girlfriend’s boyfriend; the ones I gave my girlfriend. And then there was the forged collection of poems by Owen, translated by Zvorsky.

How many whiskies did you drink that night? he asked.

Less than one—perhaps a half, or three-quarters of one.

How would you describe the individual who blocked your way when you were leaving the bar?

Medium build, not tall but not short either, darkish skin, maybe Hispanic.

Would you like to add anything?

No, thank you.

Detective Matias promised to call me when the case was solved. It would take a few weeks, perhaps months.

*

Our neighbor is preparing his forty-first birthday party. On Sunday he buys forty-one animals in the Sonora market and sets out boxes, fish tanks, and cages in the courtyard before the astonished gazes of other neighbors arriving, slightly tipsy, from their family lunches. I watch them from the living room window. The children admire the neighbor. He’s going to liberate the animals on the day of his birthday, one animal for every year: three frogs, three turtles, two birds, thirty-two Madagascar cockroaches (
Gromphadorhina portentosa
), and a wall lizard. All the neighbors are invited to the party. He tells a story about a trip to Thailand, a Buddhist ceremony, a temple, a woman, thirty-something animals, but I’m not listening. In the middle of the courtyard, two giant cockroaches are copulating inside a fish tank.

*

After the loan of the Remington, Moby felt free to come to my house more and more often. He’d spend whole days there, lying in my bathtub, cooking, watering the plants, and drinking coffee with Dakota. I began to hate Moby. He smelled bad. He left horrible curly blond hairs on my soap. I started borrowing Salvatore’s armchair on the tenth floor, and returned home when I was certain Moby had left.

*

Yesterday my husband asked if he left hairs on the soap.

*

Years ago, I took a photo of Gilberto Owen. Or so I told Salvatore. It was the first time I told that lie. By now it’s an elaborate lie, repeated to myself so often that it’s come to form part of my repertory of events, indistinguishable from any other memory. Of course, I’d never seen Gilberto Owen, much less when he was young, and had certainly never taken a photo of him. But that’s what I told Salvatore, not that he believed me. I was in a Lebanese café in Calle Donceles in the historic district of Mexico City, and Owen walked past under a huge black umbrella. It was a few minutes after five in the afternoon. There had just been one of those summer rainstorms, the likes of which only fall in Mexico City and Mumbai. The sidewalks were beginning to fill again with ambulant street vendors, tourists, cockroaches, and that sad peregrination of public servants hurrying back to their cubicles, suffused with satisfaction and guilt—their shirts wrinkled, their skin glinting with grease—after a short but sweet encounter in one of the pay-by-the-hour hotels in the zone. I told all that to Salvatore and then repented it. Describing Calle Donceles that way to a foreigner has an air of literary imposture I’m now ashamed of. But Salvatore nodded, committed to my story, and, emboldened, I went on. I’d been in the Lebanese café for a few hours waiting for the rain to pass, half reading a scholarly edition of Rousseau’s
Meditations,
half studying a group of old men drinking coffee and silently playing dominos at the next table. I’d got stuck on a Rousseauian phrase, possibly more ingenious than rational, about how adversity is a schoolmistress whose teaching comes too late to be truly useful. Salvatore remembered that meditation, he said. I had a Pentax with me that I’d just picked up from one of the camera repair shops on the street and, more from boredom than real interest, I’d been taking photos of the old men. Slow-witted pupils of adversity, Salvatore concluded, thinking himself very clever. When it finally stopped raining, I took a last gulp of coffee, put a twenty-peso bill under the sugar bowl, and made my way to the door. (Passing the old men’s table, I overheard them speculating about the firmness of my ass.) I stopped in the doorway for a moment to look along the street: rain-soaked, Mexico City returns to being that valley that obsessed Cortés, Juan Zorrilla, and Velasco. I raised the camera, focused on a Rousseauian pedestrian who, at that moment, was jumping over a puddle, and shot.

*

Note (Owen writes): “The public servant commonly suffers the abominable influence of the rain with Christian resignation and calmly prepares to edge his way meticulously from his home to the office, avoiding the mud and the potholes, doing balancing acts that make him sentimental and philosophical.”

*

Today I found Rousseau’s
Meditations
on my husband’s bedside table. He says he needs them for an article he’s going to write for an urban-planning magazine. I can’t imagine what relationship there might be between the two.

*

One night, Salvatore wanted to sleep with me. Do you know Inés Arredondo? I asked while he stroked one of my legs. Of course, he didn’t. I’m going to give you her best story to read. It’s called “The Shunammite Woman.” It’s about a young woman who goes to visit her uncle in the provinces. The uncle is dying and sends for her because he wants to bequeath her everything he owns. The young woman arrives in the town and her uncle immediately starts to improve. He forces her to marry him and to sleep in his sickbed. Thanks to the niece’s vital presence, the uncle gets better by the day, until he’s completely recovered. Salvatore caressed me; I, out of compassion, didn’t stop him. That night, after dinner, I went back to my apartment. Before going to sleep, I cried a little and masturbated, looking at Owen’s photo.

*

I took White the forged original. The truth is that with a little help from the villainous Moby, I had produced something worthy of being sold to an authentic collector. White promised to have an answer for me the following Monday and gave me the rest of the week off.

*

That bit about masturbating with a photo is disgusting, comments my husband. I’m annoyed, I defend myself like an insect and, so as not to go on listening to his reproach, I read aloud from a pamphlet the neighbor who breeds frogs and Madagascar cockroaches gave us: “When it is attacked or angered, the giant Madagascar cockroach flattens itself against the floor or ground and sharply expels the air in its respiratory passages, producing a disturbing snort, the aim of which is to frighten the aggressor.”

*

During my week off, Dakota and Moby were both staying in my apartment. I couldn’t cope with the two of them at once, so on Friday I decided to go to Philadelphia to visit Laura and Enea, and see if there might be an archive with documents about Owen in the Mexican consulate. The three of us had breakfast together and then I left. Moby would spend the entire weekend in his boxer shorts. Dakota would be occupying the bathtub the whole time. Perhaps, at some point on Saturday, Moby went into the bathroom and saw Dakota’s clothes scattered on the floor, by the toilet. He saw a shapely calf and a foot, the nails painted. He apologized and went out, made himself a coffee or fried some eggs. Dakota would have come out a little later, wrapped in my towel. Maybe they had coffee together. They certainly made love in my bed and had breakfast together again on Sunday. Perhaps, some other Sunday, the three of us would have gotten into bed together.

*

On Sundays, my husband, the children, and I listen to Rockdrigo and eat pancakes for breakfast. But not this Sunday. My husband is angry. Through my own carelessness, he’s read some more of these pages. He asks how much is fiction and how much fact.

*

During that period, I took to telling lies. I lied more and more often, even in situations that didn’t merit it. I suppose that’s the logic of lies: one day you lay the first stone and the following day you have to lay two. When I was in Philadelphia, my sister took me to see a doctor because my left kidney—or perhaps ovary—was hurting. The consulate was closed the whole weekend, so all I did was walk with Laura and Enea, eat Chinese food, and then visit the doctor, having overdosed on monosodium glutamate. The receptionist handed me a form, which I filled in more or less like this: