I.
OFFICE OF LOST MOMENTS
LISTEN TO THE SOUNDS OF LIFE. I am all ears. I listen with my eyes. I hear what I see on advertisements, headlines, posters, signs. I move through a city of voices and words. Voices that set the air in motion and pass through my inner ear to reach the brain transformed into electrical pulses; words that I hear in passing, perhaps if someone stands beside me talking on their phone, or that I read no matter where I turn, on every surface, every screen. Printed words reach me like spoken sounds, like the notes on a musical score; sometimes it is hard to unscramble words that are spoken simultaneously, or to infer those I can’t quite hear because they’re whisked away or lost in a louder noise. The varied shapes of letters give rise to a ceaseless visual polyphony. I am a tape recorder, switched on and hidden away inside the futuristic phone of a 1960s spy, the iPhone in my pocket. I am the camera that Christopher Isherwood wanted to be in Berlin, a gaze that must not be distracted by even the merest blink. The woods have ears, reads the title of a drawing by Bosch. The fields have eyes. Inside a dark, hollow tree glow the yellow eyes of an owl. A pair of large ears dangle from a burly tree as from an elephant, nearly grazing the ground. One of Carmen Calvo’s sculptures is an old wooden door studded with glass eyes. The doors have eyes. The walls have ears. Electrical outlets can hear what we say, according to Ramón Gómez de la Serna.
* * *
PERFECTION MAY BE CLOSER THAN YOU THINK. I go out as soon as it gets dark. It’s the late dusk of the first night of summer. I hear the rustle of trees and ivy from neighborhood gardens. I hear the voices of people I can’t see, eating outdoors on the other side of fences topped with creeping vine or mock orange, sheltered from the street by thick cypress hedges. The sky is dark blue at the top and light blue on the horizon where the rooftops and chimneys stand in silhouette as on a garish diorama. I don’t want to know anything about the world, I only want to be aware of what reaches my eyes and ears at this very moment, nothing else. The street is so quiet that I can hear my footsteps. The rumble of traffic is far away. In the soft breeze I can hear the rustle of leaves on a fig tree and the slow, swaying sound of the high crown of a sycamore, like the sound of the sea. I hear the whistling of swallows flitting through the air in acrobatic flight. One of them, swooping to catch an insect, touched the surface of a garden pond so pristinely that it didn’t cause the slightest ripple. I hear the clicking of bats finding their way through the air by echolocation. Many more vibrations than my crude human ears can detect are rippling simultaneously through the air at this very moment, a thick web of radio signals spreading everywhere, carrying all the cell phone conversations taking place right now across the city. I want to be all eyes and ears, like Argos in the ancient myth, a human body covered in bulging eyeballs and blinking eyelids, or perhaps in the bare, lidless eyes on Carmen Calvo’s door. I could be a Marvel superhero, the Eye-Man, or a monster in a 1950s science-fiction film. I could be a random stranger or the Invisible Man, preferably the one in the James Whale movie rather than in the novel by H. G. Wells. It is the film, more than the book, that really attains the height of poetry.
* * *
TECHNOLOGY APPLIED TO LIFE. I read every word that meets my eyes as I walk by. Fire Department Only. Premises Under Video Surveillance. We Pay Cash for Your Car. There is a kind of beauty, an effortless fruition in the gradual approach of night. The word Libre, lit in bright green on the windshield of a taxi, floats above the darkened street as if clipped and pasted on a black background or a page in a photo album. A glaring, empty bus rushes from the mouth of a tunnel like a ghostly galleon in the high seas. Its entire side is taken up by a large ad for gazpacho. Enjoy the taste of summer now. Words fall into a rhythmic sequence. We buy silver. We buy gold. We buy silver and gold. Donate blood. We buy gold. At every bus stop there is a glowing panel advertising a new film. Gods of Egypt: The Battle for Eternity Begins. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Out of the Shadows. There are invitations, commands, prohibitions that I never noticed when I walked down this street before. Do not leave plastic containers outside the trash bin. No pedestrian traffic. Enjoy our cocktails. Celebrate your event with us. Long before you walk past the sidewalk tables outside a bar you are met by a murmuring choir of voices, tinkling glasses, the sound of silverware and china. I go through the thicket of voices and smells without stopping. Roast meat, animal fat, fried fumes, shrimp-shells, cigarette smoke. Try our specialties, lamb cutlets, grilled meats. Try our lobster rice. The lavish verbal succulence of the lettering on the signs is not unlike the splendor of a Dutch still life. Croquettes. T-BONE STEAK. Gambas al ajillo. Callos a la madrileña. CHEESES. Eggplant and gazpacho. Grilled sea bass. Tuna fritters. Paella. Entrecôte. On a June night, the sidewalks of Madrid have a languorous seaside calm like a beach filled with families on holiday. As I drift along, I realize this is the last night I will live in this neighborhood where I have spent so many years. A man and a woman, white-haired but youthful, press their faces together and smile in the window of a store that sells hearing aids. Old people in advertisements smile with a certain optimism. Young people laugh and laugh, opening their mouths wide and showing their gums and tongues. I never noticed this particular sign before, its invitation or command, the white letters on a blue background, the joy of retirees wearing invisible earbuds: Be All Ears. Hear the genuine sounds of life.
GO AS FAR AS YOU CHOOSE. I close my eyes so that the sounds can reach me more clearly. On the Metro I sit down and close my eyes as if I’d fallen asleep. I try to keep them shut all the way from one station to the next. I notice the weight of my eyelids, the faint quivering touch of my eyelashes. When I finally give up and look around, the faces around me are even stranger. There’s a book in my satchel but I don’t read it. I only read the signs I come across, each in turn, from the moment I hurry down the stairs and push open the swinging door. So many things that I never noticed or that I read without paying conscious attention. Entrance. Shorn of articles and verbs, the phrases become crude robotic indications. Estación Cobertura Móvil. Some subway official believes in bilingualism and in literal translations: Station Coverage Mobile. No smoking anywhere on the subway system. Insert ticket. This is a Public Announcement from the Metro de Madrid. Don’t forget to take your ticket. A group of grinning, multiethnic, multinational youths in an advertisement. Join the largest design network in the world. One of them is Asian. He’s wearing glasses and looks at the camera. Another is Black, with a pierced nose and his arm around the shoulders of a girl who is clearly Spanish. Turn this summer into something unforgettable. Use it or lose it. Exclusive opportunities for those who act quickly. Going down the escalator I close my eyes though not completely. For your own safety, hold the handrail. An emergency intercom addresses me with an almost intimate suggestion: Use me when you need me. The city speaks the language of desire. Instead of instantly turning to my phone while I wait on the platform, or searching for something else to read, I stay on my feet and squint at nothing for a few moments. “Use Me” was the title of a song I used to like many years ago. You are being filmed. Over a thousand cameras are watching over your safety. At each step there’s a new instruction or command. Break only in case of emergency. Don’t be afraid to use me, the song said. Commanding voices join the written injunctions. Next train approaching the station. The lack of an article or even a verb heightens the sense of imminence. This is a public announcement. The ground shakes a little as the train approaches. Do not enter or exit subway cars after the signal sounds. I look at people’s faces and listen to their voices. I am all ears. I move closer to a man who is talking on his phone. Nearly every person in the subway car is absorbed in a cell phone screen. A tall, serious girl is reading a Paulo Coelho book. Her choice in literature is a discredit to her beauty. “I’ll tell you everything,” someone says, right behind me. He leans his head against the glass and lowers his voice, so I can no longer hear him over the automated message that begins to announce the next station. “All right, perfect, okay, all right. See you soon.”
* * *
PARROT COULD BE KEY WITNESS IN MURDER CASE. Wearily, a woman turns the pages of a free newspaper. Beyoncé unveils outfits for upcoming tour. The train is moving more slowly and more quietly and I am better able to hear the male voice talking on the phone behind me. He’s so close to me that I have no idea what he looks like, this man who now begins to laugh. “His mother is eighty-seven and she just went to the dentist to get braces.” I have Montaigne in my backpack but I don’t take the book out; I don’t even look for a seat. I am alert, waiting for whatever new instructions will be addressed to me in an imperious or enticing tone. Let passion be your guide. This seat reserved for people with disabilities. Beneath the noise of the train there is a murmur of voices, almost all of them talking on the phone. “You have no idea how many years I’ve lived in England.” The voices of people I’m not able to see seem especially near. “Neither you nor your siblings should sign anything until you’re sure.” A screen hangs from the ceiling. A young man with a shaved head and a black beard moves his lips and the words appear below. I am Gay. Then another man, younger, beardless, wearing eyeliner and also moving his lips. I am Trans. The face of the man with the shaved head appears again. They flicker back and forth so quickly that their features superimpose. I am me. And then a third face. I could be you. Live your difference. Then a purple screen. Another invitation. Another command. Someone must have measured the minimum time required for the faces not to become indistinguishable. A woman is speaking softly, very close to my ear, in a tone of warning or censure. “He says he’s changed, that he wants to come back. But it’ll all depend on how he behaves.” I try to inscribe in my memory the phrases I hear, the bits and pieces of conversation. Words flow together, blurring and disappearing as soon as I hear them. Forget-It-Fast, says an ad, though I’m not sure what it’s selling. Words are drowned by the noise of the train or by announcements on the intercom. “We’ll see if he’s really changed. I don’t even believe twenty percent of what he says.” Emergency hammer. I read everything, even the headlines on the pages of the free newspaper that the first woman holds right up to my face.
* * *
POLICE WILL KNOW WHEN YOU USE YOUR CELL PHONE EVEN WHEN THEY CAN’T SEE YOU. Salamanca man beheaded by eighteen-year-old son. Emergency exit. The great arctic adventure. I barely notice the faces, just the voices and the printed words. A ringtone. The sharp trill of a text message. Everyone is connected to something or someone who is somewhere else. “I’m on the subway. Just in case we get cut off.” When the train comes to a stop, the doors open in front of an advertisement that reaches up to the curved ceiling of the station. The best family holidays ever. First-time ocean dives. Find a new landscape at every turn. A group of young people is jumping off a cliff joyfully into the sea. Some are about to plunge fearlessly and others are already floating against a deep blue. The fun of summer can be yours. Click for incredible prices. Some reservations can’t wait. Book now. Find out more. Find out now. Buy it now. Try it now. All the different messages seem to come from the same voice, the same source, and to be addressed to the same person: me, you. It’s me, but it could be you. You, yes, you, says a lottery ad, as if pointing a finger to single you out in the crowd, a face that can see you and has chosen you from a TV monitor. You can be a millionaire. Master the elements with your fingertips. Find the perfect class for you. The woman who was reading the newspaper left it on the seat when she got off the subway, a mess of crumpled sheets. Join the leading brand in hybrid technology.
* * *
TRACK YOUR DNA. Get there sooner. Let nothing stop you. Don’t wait until you’re down. In just a few years, printed newspapers have lost all their material dignity. Madrid sets a world record in the hunt for Pokémon. They crumple and fall apart immediately, squalid and superfluous, especially now, in summer. An entire page can be scanned as quickly as a screen. Enjoy a fabulous gourmet experience by the sea. I close my eyes again to hear more clearly as I let myself be carried along by the train’s motion. The city makes a thousand simultaneous promises. Choose everything. Enjoy it whenever and wherever you like. One need not choose a particular thing anymore and forego what was not chosen. Save while you spend. No regrets. Lose weight by eating. Create your custom trip today. I have an old, irresistible addiction to cheap newsprint and the smell of ink. Cannibalistic fight between hammerhead and tiger shark videotaped at sea by tuna fishermen. We move heaven and earth to bring you the best.
TAKE A BIT OF OUR TASTE WITH YOU. First, all of a sudden, it was that word, REMEMBER, up on a traffic sign on a street I used to walk down every day, but now detached from its context by a chance shift in my attention which up until the prior instant had been busy with other things—not the things around me but the things within me—like a sleepwalker suddenly awakened by that visual knell, RECUERDE, forcing me to open my eyes and ears even though I had seen the sign many times before and though it is in fact quite common, a metal triangle with a pair of simple black silhouettes alerting drivers to a pedestrian crossing outside a school. Remember what, I suddenly wonder. Who is asking or ordering me to remember; what inaudible, printed voice is forcing me to look at something I have seen all my life but that I now perceive as if for the first time, on this sidewalk, this corner, this crossing, the triangle high up on a metal post with its powerful and simple color combination: red along the edge, white on the inside, black for the silhouettes and for the single word in large block letters. Two children holding hands and carrying satchels, a pair of antique children without backpacks, a boy and a girl who seem in a hurry, as if they were about to break into a run. I look more closely and they are indeed running. The satchels in their hands are nearly flying behind them. Children out of a fairytale, brother and sister, abandoned by their parents and lost in the woods; or children fleeing an airstrike on their way home from school in Aleppo.
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ISN’T DISCOVERING NEW THINGS WHAT KEEPS YOU ALIVE? You can tell it’s an old-fashioned sign because it employs the polite form of address, recuerde, in a city where every other voice addresses you informally. In saying “recuerde,” it also brings to mind the first word of the first verse of Jorge Manrique’s Coplas on his father’s death: “recuerde el alma dormida,” let the sleeping soul recall, which is in fact an appeal to the soul to awaken rather than to remember. My eyes felt suddenly as though they’d opened wider, my ears too, as when they pop from a change in pressure, “avive el seso y despierte.” And I began to notice other things as well, momentarily forgetting the path I was on and the darkness seething in my brain: I saw a handwritten sign taped to a lamppost, “Reliable person available for housework and eldercare”; I saw a picture of a tanned blonde in a white swimsuit in the window of a drugstore, “This summer, lose weight when you eat”; I saw a chalkboard sign outside a bar listing the day’s specials, “squid, lentil stew, octopus salad,” with a steaming plate of stew skillfully drawn in several colors. A young woman went by just then, talking on the phone, waving her free hand so that a loud jingle of bracelets accompanied the imperious staccato of her steps. A woman transfixed by anger, who had no qualms about speaking loudly. “Mom, she’s your daughter. Are you listening, Mom? What do you care what her husband says? There’s no reason for you to pay for your daughter’s gym. Are you listening, Mom? When have you ever paid for anything for me?”
WHERE YOUR FANTASIES COME TRUE. Ever since that day I’ve been on a secret mission when I walk down the street. I used to do it intermittently, if I happened to think of it on the way to some other task. Now those other tasks are disappearing. They are just an excuse to go out on the street. I don’t choose the quickest routes but those that are likely to be more fruitful. I almost never ride a bicycle and I never take a taxi. I either walk or I ride the subway. All my worries and obsessions are dissolved in ceaseless observation. I am no longer my own thoughts, the things that I imagine or remember, just what meets my eyes and ears, a spy on a secret mission to record and collect it all. I used to check my phone for messages every few minutes. I used to lower my head and scrunch my shoulders, caught in a toxic bubble of gloom, traversing an endless tunnel of mid-morning anxiety. Anxiety was my shadow, my guardian, and my double. It kept up with me no matter how fast I walked. It stood beside me as I went down an escalator, whispering into my ear. It turned the mild dizziness I got from my medication into vertigo and nausea. There was a morbid magnetism to the muzzle of the train when it came from the depths of the tunnel into the station. There was a voice in my ear, inside my head, far back at the nape of the neck, and in my throbbing temples. Now there’s no longer one voice but many, a flood of voices, coming always from the outside and as immediate as the things I see, the people going by, the noise of traffic. “Niña, two pairs of stockings for three euros, niña, look, two pairs, three euros.” Expert tailoring alterations and repairs. So that your business can run full speed. How can I have walked down this street so many times without noticing the river of spoken and printed words I was traversing, the racket, the crowds, the clothes in the window of a dingy store. Wool slippers, orthopedic footwear, shoes for sick children. Orthopedic shoes in the window of a store selling prosthetic supplies. Crab, shrimp, huge lobsters in a restaurant’s refrigerated display, Gran Cafetería los Crustáceos, and rows of silver fish with toothed, gaping jaws and glassy eyes. Try Our Lobster Rice, twelve euros per person. The nauseating smell of fish at ten in the morning blending with the nauseating smell of tobacco.
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WHY GO SOMEWHERE ELSE WHEN EVERYTHING IS HERE. If you listen carefully you can distinguish between the steps of women wearing sandals and those wearing heels. Come to a Gin Masterclass. Your beauty center. Car insurance for just thirty-two euros a month. A gin masterclass sounds like an Intro to Alcoholism. Offers, gifts, proposals, overtures, all of it spreading before you on either side as you walk down the street. Find a new reason to keep smiling. A slim brunette stands on a beach in a bikini, looking off toward the sunset in a man’s arms. If you like the Dead Sea, wait till you see what else is here. Come in for a free consultation. Ask us about health insurance. Smoking causes cancer. Insure the future. Come in and discover the ingredients of life. At each step there is a voice, a door that opens into radiant discoveries and revelations. Come in. Find out. Come in and ask. Come in and see how technology is changing sports. I am holding a cell phone, like everyone else around me, but not to my ear. I hold it near my mouth instead so that I can repeat what I read or what I hear, mumbling as I walk, pretending to be busy with some urgent task, perhaps giving someone instructions over the phone or telling them I am coming to the office, to a meeting, while in fact relaying all the secrets I observe. Trust, reliability, peace of mind. NeoLife Age Medicine. NeoLife could be the name of one of those apocalyptic technological foundations dreamed up by Don DeLillo. All safety regulations are mandatory. Welcome to the secret world inside your cell phone.
* * *
REDISCOVER ALL THAT A PHONE CAN DO. I switch on the voice recorder to repeat something I’ve read. I press stop but a moment later I have to switch it on again. Give blood. We buy gold. The signs along the sidewalk gradually fall into a cadence. We buy silver and gold. Give life. An automated chirp at the corner lets you know that it’s okay to cross. Through the sound of footsteps, now that the cars have stopped, I can hear the tapping and scraping of a blind person’s cane behind me. In the movie M, a blind man follows the child murderer at night through the streets of a stage-set city. Oriental massage 24 hours. Asian girls. Fifteen minutes 30€. Twenty minutes 45€. One hour 70€. Complimentary drink. A digital stopwatch is running silently on a nightstand in a room where an Asian girl lies naked. Her heavily made-up eyes glance sideways at the clock in an artificial half-light of clandestine lust. Beautiful and discreet. There’s heavy breathing on her face and neck, and in the background she can hear the morning sounds of traffic, the same siren that I hear approaching and that will be recorded by my phone. I’m just an app away. Where time doesn’t matter. Discover the pleasures of tantric massage. Take a bit of our taste with you. You make me melt, says an ad for ice cream with a tongue and a pair of red lips licking a chocolate cone. Giovanni Bojanini Skin-Care Clinic. Change anything you want. Centaur Security. There’s a painting by Velázquez where a centaur in the background seems to be calmly chatting with St. Anthony in a field next to a river, like neighbors who have just run into each other. Attend a special tasting. As unique as you. Want to eliminate the toxins that build up in your digestive tract? Centaurs and security guards, plastic surgeons and young Asian prostitutes, rows of silver fish and orthopedic shoes and white canes and locksmiths. The voyage is you. Who are they taking away in that ambulance that just went by, the sound of its siren drilling into my ears before it got stuck in traffic up ahead? Internal cleanses from fifteen euros a month. Stop & Go. The city speaks in polyglot voices. Cream and Coffee. More apartments than ever. Shop online. Wedding and reception rentals. Argonaut. The word Argonaut is a spark of poetry, like siren or centaur. Café Prensa Pizza open 24 hours. Luxury apartment for rent, newly renovated. By removing the prepositions they speed up the tempo of language. Magic House Riddles and Mysteries. March to Abolish Zoos and Aquariums. We Love Churros con Chocolate. We catch shooting stars.
EVERYTHING YOU NEED TO ENJOY THE SUMMER. It was the summer of short, light dresses like tunics on a Greek frieze, of shorts cinched at the top of the thigh and flat sandals with thin leather straps and toenails painted in bright colors, red primarily, though also green, blue, or yellow. Your skin, your city. A destination that will reach your heart. Night begins when you decide. It was the summer of bare shoulders and bare legs and a glowing sense of change and newness, as when miniskirts first appeared in the sixties. An overflow, an excess of youth and beauty during those first days of mild weather following a long winter. Choose your next adventure. Young girls walked down the street in straw hats that they wore tilted back on their heads. They talked on the phone or gazed at their screens, completely absorbed, typing swiftly with long, wavering fingers and painted fingernails that pecked on the glass like birds. To help us enjoy the good times.
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WHEREVER YOU GO THIS SUMMER. The sharp edges of the present were softened and veiled as if by the sudden retrospective distance of the past. Show your best smile. No sooner did something happen than it seemed to have taken place long ago, as if instantly deprived of its immediacy by a dizzying combination of trivial and terrifying incidents. The sunny days are back. Now is the moment to enjoy the moment. It was the summer of long, straight hair cascading down a tanned back. This is us. Anxiety and nostalgia were twin poles between which I oscillated at every moment. The novelty of the latest fashions seemed to announce their own anachronism in advance. Groups of young people in ads for banks or cell phone companies glowed with the unanimous joy of a cadre of red guards or of peasants and proletarians in the posters of the Chinese Cultural Revolution. Quiero ser happy. The midnight air in Madrid was as thick as syrup and all through July the cicadas buzzed into the evening as if it were still the heat of day. The French army was declaring war on Pokémon. The brother of a Pakistani model murdered in an honor killing said he felt no remorse or shame at taking her life. The present tense slipped into the past at the very moment something was written down or said in conversation. Summer, at its height, seemed lit by the glow of the final summer at the end of an era, the one that people would remember soon after with an exaggerated sense of distance, the last summer before a war, an epidemic, or a great disaster. Spain was the seventh most wasteful country in the world in food consumption. Every day the papers said that a new temperature record had been set, that larger swaths of ice were melting in the North Pole and Antarctica. Blue or emerald cliffs crumbled into the sea as solemnly as ancient temples brought down by earthquakes. Don’t miss the chance you were waiting for. Fall in love with our bargains before summer is out.
* * *
NO MATTER WHAT YOU THIRST FOR. Ocean currents were going to cause huge storms all over the world. Full-page ads, color brochures, and digital screens in the windows of travel agencies offered lavish, adventurous cruises to tropical paradises. The place you were dreaming of is real. This summer, take your best selfies. Many coastal cities to be under water in a hundred years. Star Wars characters make an appearance at the Brussels airport. A woman was dying after being attacked by several tigers at a Beijing zoo. It was the summer of Pokémon Go and of suicide attacks. A fashion student in London used a tuft of Alexander McQueen’s hair to develop a type of human leather honoring the dead designer. Go as far as you want to. In Kabul, a radical Islamist set off a suicide vest in a crowd, killing ninety people. Pope Francis was urging cloistered nuns not to use the internet to escape the life of contemplation. Mick Jagger was expecting the arrival of his eighth son at age seventy-three. The Unquenchable Fire of Rock-and-Roll’s Most Sexually Active Great-Grandfather. Reduced to fewer and fewer pages, and printed on the cheapest possible paper, newspapers literally began to fall apart in their readers’ invariably aged hands. They ran opinion pieces on politics and terrorism, or devoted entire pages to horoscopes and Egyptian tarot readings. In Nice, the driver of a truck prayed to God, took a selfie and posted it on Facebook before unleashing terror and mayhem. Ask the Oracle of Ammon whatever you want to know. A German climbed the outside of the tallest building in Barcelona to catch a Pokémon. Your past is buried inside the Great Pyramid. Horror and idiocy flooded the headlines in equal measure. A Dutch man was hospitalized after spending ten days in a Chinese airport waiting for a woman he had met on Facebook.
* * *
INVASIVE SPECIES STRIKE BACK. The trivial and the apocalyptic appeared in such close proximity that they sometimes seemed to turn into each other. Porn actress Carla Mai dies after falling from a window at a party where cocaine was being consumed. Man’s head found in waste treatment plant. The stories in the paper were like disaster movies, and the movie trailers seemed to be about calamities and horrors that were really taking place. The Zombie Apocalypse hits Mexico City once again. The world unites to save the Earth from an alien invasion and the total extinction of the human race. Cleveland pays five million dollars in compensation for the death of a Black boy shot dead by police while playing with a toy gun. It was the summer that I was without a permanent address for several months. We moved from hotels to borrowed houses or to other cities, carrying backpacks with our laptops and notebooks and dragging behind us a massive suitcase, a whale of a bag that got heavier and took up more space with each passing day. Five hoodlums between the ages of fifteen and twenty-two terrorize moviegoers at a shopping mall in Fuenlabrada.
* * *
ONCE NIGHT FALLS YOU’RE NO LONGER SAFE. I was reading Baudelaire, Thomas De Quincey, Lorca, Fernando Pessoa, and Walter Benjamin as if I was twenty and had never read them before. The pranksters put on masks and went into a theater that was screening Ride Along 2. Shouting “Allah is great,” they threw firecrackers and backpacks into the crowd, panicking terrorized patrons who had gone to see a lighthearted comedy and now thought they were in the midst of a full-fledged terrorist attack. Four hundred stranded whales were dying on a beach in New Zealand. I was looking for a music of words, one that belonged simultaneously to poetry and to everyday speech—advertisements, headlines, fashion magazines, erotic classifieds, horoscopes: an inconspicuous music that you could simply breathe in like the air, but that no one had ever imagined or heard before. Go where you didn’t know you wanted to go. E-cigarette explodes in a man’s pocket in California. Humans and robots may become indistinguishable in the future. I felt as free of everything I’d ever done as of the house we’d left behind, the furniture, the closets full of clothes, the books for which I no longer felt the slightest need. I was never without my notebook anymore, or without the dwindling pencil I had bought in Paris at the start of summer. Elephant populations were being decimated by an ivory rush. The largest species of gorilla in the world was about to go extinct. Dutch police were training birds of prey to hunt down drones suspected of carrying explosives.
* * *
TIMELESS LITERATURE IS BACK LIKE NEVER BEFORE. I took notes in bars and restaurants, on a bench in El Retiro, lurching along on a bus on the outskirts of Madrid. By 2025 the oceans will contain more tons of plastic than fish. Video of an eighteen-year-old Irish girl practicing serial fellatio on a score of drunken young men in exchange for a drink at a Mallorca nightclub goes viral all over the world. Choose your own adventure. Go where your dreams take you. In Germany, a Syrian refugee attacked a pregnant woman on a train with a machete. Break the mold. An idiot in a Zorro costume caused a panic inside LAX. Young woman dies after being struck by a car on a pedestrian crossing on Goya Street. Crimes and hoaxes caused the same amount of fear. Panic on Platja d’Aro as a prank is taken for a terrorist attack. On the promenade, in Nice, people thought the first shots fired by police against the terrorist truck driver were firecrackers from a pyrotechnic show that had just ended. Chinese mining villages were buried in landslides that blocked the course of rivers. New York was gripped by fear following a bomb explosion. Everything you desire is so much easier now.
CREEPY CLOWNS TERRORIZE GREAT BRITAIN. A student started a panic at Brunel University in London this week by running through campus dressed as a killer clown wielding a chainsaw. A clown frightened people in Leicestershire when he was seen wandering through a cemetery near a school. A blurry picture posted on Facebook showed the clown carrying an ax in one hand. Two clowns in a black van drove up to a pair of girls on their way to school in Essex and asked if they wanted to come to a birthday party. In response, the school board of Clacton County ordered students to remain inside school buildings during lunch. The epidemic of creepy clowns seems to have spread to England from the United States, where novelist Stephen King recently warned on Twitter to “cool the clown hysteria.” Dozens of similar incidents were reported across Great Britain in the last few days according to the police. A clown jumped out of a hedge in a park. Another one walked up to a car at a stop light, opened the door, and sat next to the driver before running away. Anti-clown patrols have formed in some areas. Professor Mark Griffiths, a psychologist at the University of Birmingham who specializes in addictive behaviors, said that several children who were traumatized by clown sightings had to be kept home from school. The sudden rise of creepy clowns has caused alarm in Australia as well. Last Tuesday, police arrested a clown carrying an ax in Victoria, in the country’s southwest, after it accosted a woman in her car. On Sunday, the Thames Valley police said they had received fourteen calls reporting frightening clowns in a twenty-four-hour period. Professor Griffiths says that coulrophobia, or fear of clowns and jesters, is a well-documented syndrome that can cause panic attacks, cold sweats, and difficulty breathing.
IT’S NOT SUMMER UNLESS YOU HAVE A STORY TO TELL. “My mother was a very good swimmer, but she never got her hair wet,” he says. I am all ears. I listen with my ears and with my eyes. I notice the moment when an ordinary conversation changes course and begins to turn into a confession, as unexpected for the person making it as for the one receiving it. You hear yourself speak with a feeling of disbelief, of gratitude and reprieve, a witness to your own telling. It was the way he said his mother’s hair never got wet that warned me. I did not ask any questions, I just waited. I saw the expression on his face change along with the tone of his voice. Suddenly he is more present than before, yet also much farther away, a time traveler. These things are never planned, they only happen by chance. The person telling the story didn’t know a few minutes earlier that he was about to do so. He didn’t even remember the story. It was the circumstances, a moment of distraction, something unexpected and a little awkward. The two of us are alone because we arrived at the restaurant early. We have known each other for years but have never been alone until today. We arrived before anyone else, each of us separately, at midday, on a Sunday in summer. The neighborhood is as empty as the restaurant. There are flags and paper lanterns from a recent feast day, Manila shawls are still draped over some balconies. We sit facing each other at a table for six. Being alone is pleasant and strange. We both know we are fond of each other, but we have never shown it beyond the ordinary pleasantries of a family gathering. Now that no one else is present—his wife, my wife, the rest of the family—I can see him as an individual, freed of all generic attributions. He is no longer my niece’s husband, one more among the many youthful faces that once belonged to children who are now grown-up, even if we continue to see in them a mirage or a persistence of that earlier age; as if their childhood selves were still their true identity, and everything that followed, all of this, were simply an addition, meaningful, perhaps, but only insofar as it confirms their congenital dispositions, childish features that have simply surfaced more distinctly with the passing years.
* * *
DISCOVER THE STORY BEHIND THE STORY. I want to listen to him and no one else. I want to see him on his own, outside any group portrait, those generational pictures like the ones in the cell phone ads. It’s easier now because we are alone. Our mutual affection prevails over the ordinary masculine reserve. “We always went to the same beach during the holidays,” he says, “to the same hotel that you and your family go to.” He is quite young, but there is silver in his hair around the temples and in front, over his forehead. He has a deep voice, perhaps slightly put-on from the habitual need to command respect at work, but his eyes are extraordinarily frank and his cheeks are ruddy with a healthy, childlike glow. The expression on his face is at once indelibly forlorn and full of gratitude and pure joy at being alive. When the waiter brought us two glasses of beer he drank half of his in a single thirsty gulp, happy in the midday heat, wiping the froth from his lips. These are the gifts of Madrid. He says there’s nothing he enjoys more in life than drinking a cold beer while he makes lunch on Sundays listening to the radio. He finds it amusing and endearing that his wife, my niece, doesn’t know how to cook even a fried egg or some broth from a bouillon cube. They were married two years ago in a ceremony that seemed a bit inspired by some American film, on the grassy lawn of a country house outside Madrid in an area surrounded by shopping malls, highways, and parched fields. They got married and he is happy with his wife and with her family, her mother and sister, her uncles, all of us, some of whom, six to be precise, agreed to meet today at a late Spanish hour that he and I wanted to abridge. That is why we arrived before anyone else and why we find ourselves here, at a table for six, in our summer shirts and our sneakers and shorts, joined by a camaraderie that at least on my part is somewhat of a misunderstanding. As the years go by, our perception of our age grows disconnected from reality. Our true age keeps rising but our perception of it stops, not in the prime of youth, since then it could be easily refuted, but later, in our early forties. He must be around thirty, yet to me we do not seem so far apart: he could be a somewhat younger friend, surely not someone so young as to belong to another era, another world. Our summer shirts and sneakers and the easy flow of conversation make it possible, at least for me, to feel a closeness that is in fact illusory. I am not a somewhat older friend. I could be his father.
* * *
LIVE YOUR DAY WITHOUT LIMITS. In fact he has no father or mother, despite being young. He is a lawyer with significant credentials, and holds a position of considerable responsibility at a legal publishing house. Our perception of our age may be an illusion, but that does not eliminate the risk of condescension. In a little while the others will arrive and our conversation will be forgotten. It will even be as if it had never happened. But right now he is speaking and I am listening. The supreme authority of pain does away with the privilege that my years might have conferred on me.
* * *
NOW YOU MUST LEARN EVERYTHING. “I was thirteen,” he says. “We’d gone to Mallorca on vacation, my parents, my siblings, and I. We boarded our car into a ferry in Valencia and spent the night at sea. I kept leaning over the handrail, it all felt like a movie. That day my brother and I were playing on the beach, away from our parents and our older siblings. My mother was a very good swimmer, but she never got her hair wet, never let her head dip in the water. That was how women swam back then. She didn’t like to get her hair wet. My younger brother and I were making sand castles and tunnels and stomping them with our feet. We never got tired of it. Then we saw people running on the beach and gathering into a large group at a little distance. They said someone had drowned, or had nearly drowned but had been rescued by the lifeguard. People speak with such authority of things they know nothing about. I saw my father in the group of people. He was always easy to spot because he was so tall, even if it can be hard to recognize people at the beach. My brother and I left our ruined castles and our pretend fighting and broke into a run. People were standing in a semicircle around a drowned woman. I couldn’t quite believe it was my mother, because at first I did not recognize her. Not because her face was a different color, but because I’d never seen her hair wet.”
THE WAY YOU MOVE REFLECTS WHO YOU ARE. That silhouette coming down Oxford Street now that all the windows are dark, and the stores are shut, and no one is out—no carts, no carriages or horses on the road—is Thomas De Quincey. From a distance he looks like a child, one of the many children roaming the streets, begging, then huddling together against the cold at night under the eaves of buildings. He is small and stunted and he has a creased and childish face that is also the face of an old man. When he walked endlessly through these same streets in his early youth he already seemed aged and shriveled by misery. As he grows older, his features, his gestures, and his always rather alarming figure become at once childish and decrepit. As a boy there was a gleam of ancient malice in his eyes. As an old man, the wicked, canny glint that lingers in his glance produces an incongruous air of mischief that is heightened by his crazy clothes: old hats that come down to his eyebrows, outsize coats that drag along the ground, outfits that could equally belong to a beggar or to an eccentric old man.
* * *
A FIREFLY IN THE FOG. He walks in place, as on a moving walkway, while at his back the city is projected on a screen like a still from one of those old films that were shot entirely inside a studio. He walks at a steady pace that never seems to flag. The pictures change behind him, compressing time and space in a series of juxtaposed shots. An early-morning light begins to spread behind him as he walks, a din of open shops, of vendors’ cries and people hurrying by, of carts and carriages and horses, a rising, endless racket. The light begins to change, from morning to afternoon, and the street is different too. Greek Street, Oxford Street, a wide avenue, an alleyway, then Soho Square. It begins to grow dark and the lamplighters lift their poles to the oil lamps. The far reaches of Oxford Street, out beyond the last lamp on the last corner, are nothing but dark fields. Time is compressed by the walk and the projected image of the city into a single sequence. Sometimes De Quincey is accompanied by a female figure who is slightly taller than him. It’s hard to tell if it’s a girl, a teenager, or a grown woman who is already quite run-down. Her appearance alters in the changing light or as she steps in and out of the shadows. She is fifteen or sixteen, a prostitute. There are many in the neighborhood, heavily made-up, brazen, dressed in rags, their tangled hair infested with lice.
* * *
YOU’RE SO MUCH MORE THAN ANYONE EXPECTS. The projected image changes, now De Quincey is alone and it is no longer the buildings of London but the masts of Liverpool that rise behind him. De Quincey moves very frequently from city to city. Sometimes he is not sure anymore where he is, or whether he’s awake or dreaming, or if the city around him is really there or just a memory or a fantasy implanted in his starving, sleepless brain by a dose of opium. He walks in order to stay awake but falls asleep even as he continues to put one foot in front of the other. He takes shelter at night in the hollow of a doorway or outside a church but hunger and cold will not let him sleep. He and the girl huddle together for warmth, covered in rags. They are young and pale, like those homeless kids begging on the freezing sidewalks of New York, trying to stay warm in their sleeping bags and whatever old clothes they can find in the trash, their fingers and their blackened, broken fingernails poking out of frayed woolen gloves. Some of them read tattered books that they must have also picked up while rummaging about. Some write in spiral notebooks or on mangled pads, urgently, with a pencil stub, or gnawing at the cracked end of a ballpoint pen. In the fall and winter of 1803, De Quincey was seventeen and living on the streets of London, always near the same places, Oxford Street, Soho Square. London is the largest, most populous city in the world and De Quincey doesn’t know a single soul in it except for Ann, a teenage prostitute who keeps him company and gives him a little warmth at night. Sometimes he finds shelter in a big, empty house whose only other occupant is a ten-year-old girl that has no name. Either she doesn’t know it or she forgot it or she never had one. They sleep on the bare floorboards covered by an old blanket they found in the attic. The girl clings to him and trembles thinking that the house is full of ghosts. When they grow still they can hear the scurrying and squeaking of rats.
* * *
LIKE WALKING DOWN A DREAM. By the summer of 1804 De Quincey has managed to earn a little money and finds himself in Liverpool. He goes on endless walks and keeps a diary, making quick notes about his activities, what he sees, what he reads. The diary seems written at the pace of a hectic walk. He is in ceaseless motion, standing on a moving platform from which he never gets off. Liverpool is pulsing with international commerce and the vast wealth it extracts from pillage and the slave trade. Cotton, tea, coffee, sugar, whale oil for lighting homes and streets, big factories working through the night, coal to feed the steam engines, opium to put children to sleep and to soothe the pain, the melancholy and the brutal fatigue of all those men and women trapped in workhouses and coalmines. De Quincey writes everything down in his diary. He seems to be simultaneously writing and living what he recounts. He writes about the taverns and the coffee houses, what he eats and drinks, the various kinds of people from all over the world that he encounters on the narrow streets near the harbor, the bookstores that he visits, the books he buys. He sleeps with a prostitute and instantly records the price he paid, the services rendered, their quality, and his degree of satisfaction. He has not seen his friend Ann again. He said goodbye to her when he had to leave London for a few days in the hope of finding some relief from his misery. They planned to see each other when he returned, agreeing to meet at a certain corner, by a clock tower, at a given time of day. If one of them failed to appear the other would come back to their meeting place the next day and continue to wait. It took a few more days than he expected to get back to London. He went immediately to the place they agreed upon and waited for hours. He went back the next day and the one after, but Ann never came. He wanted to look for her but realized he didn’t know her last name. He left for Liverpool shortly after.
* * *
DRIVE TOWARD THE UNEXPECTED. The silhouette is still walking at the same urgent pace. It seems to draw near but in fact remains at the same distance, outlined in black against the screen behind it. De Quincey is always moving from place to place. He arrives as quickly as he can with the sole intention of leaving as soon as possible. From London he goes to Liverpool. He settles down in Edinburgh, but soon after is living in Glasgow. The city in the background changes at every moment. In a village in the north of England, his wife and his young children are waiting for him. He is gone for months at a time and they have no idea where he is, nor do they receive any money to live or to pay off the debts he left behind. He reads and writes, hoarding books and newspapers as well as tall piles of his own manuscripts, all those pages written in tiny rooms where he works until there’s no more space to move around, even for him who is so small. When the chaos of those jumbled piles reaches a certain point De Quincey leaves it all behind and takes up somewhere else. Sometimes he comes back after a while or after a few years. Some rooms he never returns to, and so escapes being hounded for past rent. He stays up writing late into the night but gets distracted and his hair is singed when his head gets too close to the candle. Sometimes his papers catch fire. He pours water on the burning pages or he throws them on the floor and stomps on them, which makes the whole disaster even worse.
* * *
BENEATH THE SKIN YOU SEE. The walking figure can be seen more clearly now because the background is much brighter. It emerges from what he calls London’s powerful labyrinths. It is night, and the rows of lights on Oxford Street are now much brighter, no longer weak oil-burning lamps scattered through vast areas of darkness, but gaslights. In the autumn of 1821 De Quincey spends his days writing in a garret over a gloomy courtyard and his nights wandering down the same streets that he roamed in the fall of 1803. He has come back to London on his own, leaving his wife and children in the rural house in the north of England. Solitude contributes to the trancelike state in which he writes during the day and walks by night, unable at times to tell the two activities apart, just as when he wandered through those streets as a young man without quite knowing if he was awake or dreaming. Memories gain an even greater hold on him because writing fosters remembrance, and also because the things that come back to him occurred in the same places he now wanders through.
* * *
REGRESSIONS TO PAST LIVES. Suddenly, no time has passed. Time and space distend as in an opium dream. Fantastical views of oriental cities spread before him as he walks, floating domes and minarets that sometimes shift and turn into a claustrophobic maze of battlements and crypts and pyramids. The dreadful thought occurs to him that nothing can truly be forgotten: the pictures that he gazed at as a child in a volume of The Thousand and One Nights, the plates by Piranesi that he glimpsed one afternoon at an antiquarian’s shop come back to him now as visions in the spell of opium. Darkness and exhaustion make the city grow and swell around him, lit by the technological wonder of gaslight. What began as an essay of reasonable length on opium eating begins to spill and overflow onto the page, turning into an immoral confession. Matter encroaches upon form and transforms it into itself. His account of the pleasures of opium and of its torments and hallucinations acquires the very texture of delirium. De Quincey is thirty-six, but looking at the faces he meets in the crowd he sometimes thinks that he can see himself among the wandering children and teenagers of Oxford Street. He dreams the city even as he walks through its streets or as he writes about walking. He gazes at the strange new glow of gaslight in the houses and shops. When he walks past the house on Greek Street where he sometimes slept in the arms of a nameless little girl, all the windows are lit. He looks into a parlor and sees a joyful family gathering. In every woman’s face he searches for Ann’s unforgotten features. He thinks he sees her, walking up ahead, and rushes to catch up with her so he can look at her face. The thousands of strange faces he has seen in London, Liverpool, and Edinburgh appear again in his hallucinations, floating side by side with eyes wide open, swaying in dark ocean waves. De Quincey takes opium in the form of laudanum, a tincture dissolved in cognac or wine. Laudanum has a bittersweet taste and is the color of rubies. He sees something on the street with extraordinary precision and there is a slight change, a ripple that makes him realize he is no longer walking through reality but within a dream. In these visions he searches for Ann as obstinately as in his waking life. One day he finally sees her approach and it makes him tremble with a wondrous, weakening feeling. A moment later he realizes, with bewilderment, with grief, that if he can see her it must be because he’s dreaming.
IT MAY LOOK LIKE GARBAGE TO YOU. Anyone paying attention to him will notice that he picks things up off the street as he walks. He moves like a dignified pauper, furtive and alert, looking around for a moment before rummaging through a garbage can or peering into a trash container. He bends down quickly to pick something up off the ground, something he examines before putting it away in one of the loose, baggy pockets of his trousers or his jacket, which are always stuffed; or perhaps, instead, in one of those leather satchels that people used to carry before there were backpacks, the kind of briefcase a professor or a lawyer might own, but so battered and worn as to dispel any suggestion of affluence or even of practical sense despite its many buckles, side pockets, bottomless compartments that open and shut like the bellows of an accordion. He looks closely at the flyers placed under windshield wipers by people you never see. Colorful cards offering erotic encounters, leaflets for moving services or African fortune-tellers who can cure the evil eye or bring back a lost love, ads for cars, for silver and gold, for fast food or dental treatments. He always looks around him as he leans over the hood of the car, perhaps fearing that the owner will turn up and take him for a thief. He studies carefully each printed, xeroxed, or neatly handwritten sign that people tape at eye level on lampposts and streetlights. He notices the tiny stickers for locksmiths pasted all over the intercom panels on apartment buildings. But he also picks up the empty cigarette packs that lie crushed on the ground, and keeps them too, once he has looked at the horrible pictures of tumors and agonizing maladies and at the printed warnings and deterrents by which no one seems deterred: SMOKING KILLS, in big black letters on a white background, as in an old funeral notice.
* * *
THE PERFECT IMAGE AWAITS YOU. He seems to be searching for something he lost, or to be constantly finding unexpected things, or to suffer from some sort of mania, one of those disorders that afflict lonely people in big cities when they reach a certain age: a normal-looking, respectable man with that businesslike satchel under one arm, picking things up off the ground or taking eagerly, almost politely, the flyers being offered everywhere by dismal people no one else notices, stuffing his pockets for some reason with those printed or xeroxed cards that usually peddle erotic massages or some other kind of pleasure dispensed by sweet-faced Asian girls or by large Caribbean women in plunging leotards that show off their big asses and bulging breasts. Maybe at some point he’ll take out his wallet to pay for something at a store and all those compromising leaflets offering erotic services or cash payments for gold will flutter to the ground. When he gets home, or to the tiny office that he rents somewhere on the outskirts of the city so that he can spend hours undisturbed by visitors or by the ringing of the telephone, he empties his pockets one by one, his many pockets, and he also opens the accordion folds of the satchel to dump their contents on the table.
* * *
COME AND START LIVING. The gray metal table is made by the Roneo office supply company and so is the gray filing cabinet by the window, both salvaged from some decommissioned government building. Once he has emptied his pockets, still on his feet and perhaps, depending on the time of year, still wearing his raincoat, he stares at the table as if baffled or overwhelmed by such catastrophic abundance. He takes off his raincoat and puts it on a hanger. He sits on a reclining chair that belongs to an era of office furniture several decades older than that of the table and the filing cabinet. He rubs his hands gently, an ingrained habit that is entirely unnecessary since they tend to stay quite warm, which means he wears gloves only on the harshest days of a northern winter. Then he gets to work, taking out of a drawer a three-ring binder with clear sheet protectors of the kind that were common in the equally vanished era of photo albums. From a second drawer he brings out a pair of sharp pointed scissors, some notebooks, some used envelopes bearing labels that he made himself, cutting and gluing them over the bank or company letterhead. Each label consists of a word or a short phrase that he found and cut out somewhere or other—an ad, a headline, a brochure for hearing aids or plastic surgery—and that he chose and affixed to the envelope entirely at random, just as he fills his blue binders at random with clippings, flyers, business cards, pieces of paper, drug names cut out of the boxes they came in, subway tickets, restaurant bills, a napkin from a bar or a café. If anyone were to stand outside the office door, pressing an ear to the panel of frosted glass, he or she would hear the sound of scissors carefully slicing through paper with a quick, efficacious, rhythmic sound. One might even hear, if equipped with a highly sensitive instrument, the rustle of a pencil moving ceaselessly over the stiff wide pages of a notebook.
* * *
FORGET EVERYTHING YOU KNOW. Maybe now and then there is a different sound that may at first be hard to identify, the sound of a pencil turning in the hollow of a metal sharpener. A dark blotch appears and dissolves across the translucent pane of glass, which lets shadows through but not volumes or clear outlines. He must have gotten up to stretch his legs, gripped by the instinctive urge to walk that is always in him, and taken a few turns around the table in the cloudy light of a window that probably opens into an inner courtyard. Then he goes back to his task, leaning over the table and rubbing his hands together one more time, as absorbed in his work as a tailor, one of those tailors with a measuring tape draped over their shoulders like a liturgical vestment and a worn piece of chalk behind the ear or as a watchmaker peering through his loupe, enthralled by tiny escapements and miniature wheels that come together as meticulously as the words that he cuts out with his scissors, the ads, the pictures, the slogans and lurid headlines, all jumbled together like a set of dominos, forming connections that are as wondrous and unforeseen as chemical reactions.
SECRETS THAT DO NOT PERMIT THEMSELVES TO BE TOLD. The cities that Edgar Allan Poe knows well do not appear in his stories. He writes in Baltimore, New York, Richmond, and Philadelphia, but his stories take place in the vague landscapes of a gothic novel or in a European city like Paris or London. There is no literature for Poe in his immediate surroundings. His imagination is as out of place in his native country as his disastrously unstable life. As a child he had once been to London, which he chose for the setting of “The Man of the Crowd.” That ancient memory can hardly have helped him write the story, which nevertheless seems as literal as a firsthand account pieced together from direct experience of the streets of London. The city through which a nameless narrator follows a stranger without pause for twenty-four hours—in the crowd, down empty streets, in the glow of gaslight, past storefronts, through vast open markets, down dark alleys—is the London of De Quincey’s Confessions; the same city that shines darkly in Dickens and Wilkie Collins and in the adventures of Sherlock Holmes. Forty years later, the sinister, withered stranger in Poe’s tale will become Stevenson’s Edward Hyde. Even the gas lamps remain, although in Stevenson’s time there were many more of them lighting up the larger streets. Their glow shines against the darkness of the poorer, narrow streets and alleyways. “The street shone … like a fire in the forest,” Stevenson says. He greatly admired De Quincey. As a young man he had often crossed paths with that strange errant figure in the streets of Edinburgh. His description of Mr. Hyde exactly matches every testimony we have of De Quincey’s appearance in his old age: “Mr. Hyde was pale and dwarfish, he gave an impression of deformity without any nameable malformation.”
* * *
WE CAN’T CHANGE YOUR PAST. “The Man of the Crowd” is a story without a plot. It could be a prose poem, anticipating the ones that Baudelaire would write years later under Poe’s direct influence. It has a beginning and a guiding mystery but not a clear ending or an explanation. Poe, who so often drew up elaborately sinister plots, now allowed himself a remarkable narrative freedom. “The tale is garbled, the sorrow clear,” as Machado says in one of his poems. There are no proper names. Freed from the trammels and the obligations of plot, the story flows like life itself or with the musical movement of poetry. We do not know the narrator’s identity, his profession, where he comes from, or why he is in London. We are told that he is convalescing but not from what illness. The state of convalescence is crucial: he takes pleasure merely in breathing, and feels, he says, “a calm but inquisitive interest in every thing.” He is an immobile spectator, a figure in a photograph, sitting by a bow window at a café inside a hotel with a cigar and an open newspaper on his lap, in perfect idleness. Occasionally, he says, he glances at an advertisement in the paper or he lifts his eyes to look at the other customers in the café. Newspaper ads were still a recent commercial invention when Poe was writing his story. Many more people could read, and technical advances had made cheap mass printing possible. Baudelaire’s poems and prose pieces appeared in Parisian newspapers, lost in large pages crammed with tiny print. The few of Emily Dickinson’s poems that were published during her lifetime are nearly impossible to find in the crowded columns of a local paper, anonymous and so concise as to be almost entirely clandestine. In the pages of the New York Sun, a penny sheet, Poe published an extensive and entirely spurious account of a manned balloon flight across the Atlantic that had supposedly reached the United States in just three days. Thousands of copies had sold by the time people realized it was a hoax.
* * *
WE UNDERSTAND WHY YOU WOULDN’T WANT TO LOOK THROUGH THAT WINDOW. Now and then the narrator looks out the window. The day is waning, the streets are filled with people leaving work and coming out of shops. The gas lamps are being lit as dusk begins to fall, bodies and faces stand out in unnatural relief beneath the yellow glare as in a parade of figures drawn by Daumier. All classes of people, all characters, occupations, and types of dress mingle confusedly as night descends and the gaslight grows brighter. “The rays of the gas-lamps … threw over every thing a fitful and garish luster. All was dark yet splendid.” The intensity of Poe’s writing arises in part from the strain to which language had to be subjected to depict new sights. The faces of the crowd spread and multiply in the gaslight as hideously as in De Quincey’s hallucinations. One particular face among them, for no clear reason, awakens in the narrator the urge to go out on the street and begin a pursuit. It belongs to a little old man, a figure who once again seems strikingly like the ghost or double of De Quincey: “a decrepit old man, some sixty-five or seventy years of age,” “short in stature, very thin, and apparently very feeble,” “in filthy, ragged clothes.” Something in the stranger suggests “the ideas of vast mental power, of caution, of penuriousness, of avarice, of coolness, of malice, of blood-thirstiness, of triumph, of merriment, of excessive terror, of intense—of supreme despair.”
* * *
WE’RE WAITING FOR YOU. There is a pressing urge to keep the stranger in view, to know more about him, about the wild history “written within that bosom.” For twenty-four hours the Man of the Crowd and his pursuer devote themselves to an episode in the ceaseless wandering motion that defines their century: “roaming far and wide until a late hour, seeking, amid the wild lights and shadows of the populous city, that infinity of mental excitement which quiet observation can afford.” For an instant the narrator catches a glimpse “both of a diamond and of a dagger” in the dark folds of the man’s old coat. But nothing more is said, no answer is given at the end of the search, and they shine on as pure, inscrutable mysteries. Just the flash of a dagger, the glint of a diamond in the gaslight.
* * *
AN ÉMINENCE GRISE. Poe’s other city is Paris. As a young man he liked to recount trips he had never taken. He claimed to have been to St. Petersburg and China. He had never been to Paris but he read about its crime-ridden slums in cheap French feuilletons that were translated and pirated in American newspapers. He was familiar as well with De Quincey’s ghoulish narratives, attempting on occasion and with little success to imitate the gallows humor of “On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts.” Newspapers are a cheap mass product for quick consumption, without the least concern for the truth. They print lavishly illustrated stories about gruesome crimes, premature burials, resurrections by electric current, balloon flights to the moon, mesmeric trances carried out on agonizing men who continue to speak at the hypnotist’s command when they are already dead. American publishers are not interested in books by American authors because they can earn much more by pirating popular English novels. A writer must make a living. Poe will never stop writing and he will never come out of poverty. A girl named Mary Rogers had been murdered and thrown into the Hudson from the New Jersey shore, probably to erase all traces of a failed abortion. For Poe, remoteness is a necessary ingredient of literature. He writes a story in which Mary Rogers becomes Marie Rogêt, substituting Paris for Jersey City and the Seine for the Hudson. The murder of Marie Rogêt will be investigated by amateur detective C. Auguste Dupin, who also solved the murders of the Rue Morgue.
THE ALLURE OF YOUR AGE. For as long as I have known her she has always been the right age for me. Now I can hardly believe that when we first held each other she was twenty-eight and I was thirty-four. Neither one of us realized how young we were. As the years passed she went through new stages of her beauty, like phases of the moon that were never exactly alike. She remained youthful but she attained new forms of plenitude that only time could bring. Life continued to shape her to my taste. She shaped herself, carefully attentive to her person, an exact observer without the least self-indulgence. She changed and she became someone else by remaining herself. She was and she was not the same person she had been a day, or two months, or two years before. One could witness these changes in photographs. She got a short haircut once that gave an adolescent glow to her smile. She thought of dyeing her hair a platinum blond but never did. She would put her hair up in a bun, which made her seem taller and emphasized the flowing grace of her walk. For a while she had two identical linen dresses, simple, short, tight-fitting, one red and one yellow. The bright colors and the cut gave her a sixties air, like the bun in her hair. She would ask me to hold her lipstick when we went out so she didn’t have to carry a bag or anything else. She liked to go out entirely unburdened, and could do so, in that time prior to cell phones. She would not say pintalabios, lipstick, just pinta. That clipped word held for me all the excitement of the way people talked in Madrid and of the new life we were sharing together.
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EXPRESS YOUR STYLE FREELY. She used to wear a pair of very graceful shoes that I had given her, black and white, with a leopard print and heels that were not too high. She would glance sideways at her reflection in a shop window in a way that was both coquettish and critically discerning. Since she and I are always moving through time together, we barely notice its passing, just as someone drifting in a balloon in a faint current of air will be unaware of its motion. When she was forty I was turned on by the fact that she was so attractive as to look ten years younger. I look at her past fifty and I can’t imagine anyone more desirable. All the more so because of her age. She is enriched by the treasure of time. Her skin is so soft that the slightest brush is a caress. Time has shaped us separately and it has shaped us together in our ceaseless contact. We are who we were when we were born, and when we met, and as we have become in being together. We are the air that the other one breathes. When she is gone I like to open her closet and breathe her presence in her clothes. When I sleep alone I never take her side of the bed. I remember her reading me some lines by Donald Hall about his wife, Jane Kenyon, who is herself a wonderful poet: “She came into her beauty like into an inheritance.”
MADE TO FIT YOUR HAND. He found an interesting sheet of paper in a box full of old typewritten forms that someone left by the side of a garbage bin. It has the dimensions of a shoebox lid and it is thick, though not stiff, and spotless white despite lying among old papers and all kinds of waste. He wishes, as so many times before, that he had the least bit of talent for drawing. The piece of paper is of the right size and shape to draw something precise and austere, like a Juan Gris sketch for a still life or one of Giacometti’s lonely human figures. He tucks it away in his great omnivorous satchel without first looking around to see if anyone is watching. As he walks down the street he is aware of the beautiful and secret possibility that he carries with him. He enters a drab café that is quite crowded. The empty tables are littered with trays and leftovers that those who just had breakfast didn’t bother to remove. But there is one table, just one, that is clean, and it happens to be by the window, a miracle that he must take advantage of before it disappears. He sits down at the table without ordering anything and pulls out the sheet of paper. For a moment he searches his pockets uneasily for a pencil, worried that he might have lost it. The smaller a pencil stub gets, the more cleverly it will conceal itself. A fold in his clothing or the depth of a pocket provides it with a perfect burrow. Just as he suspected, the sheet of paper has the perfect texture, smooth enough to write on swiftly without being slick. He licks the sharpened tip of the pencil, and only when it touches the paper do the words begin to emerge.
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BE READY FOR WHATEVER COMES YOUR WAY. “All artistic work,” he writes, “however literary or speculative it may be, must in part be a physical task, involving effort and labor and requiring the use of one’s hands. Emily Dickinson would make a clean copy of her poems when she was done writing them and stitch them into little notebooks in which she sometimes also pasted the leaves of trees. Or she would carefully fold the sheet of paper and place inside a pressed flower that often has some relation to the poem. Her room was a comfortable cell for contemplation but she never stayed inside for too many hours at a time. She walked in her garden, tending to it with a farmer’s vitality and skill. The same quick hands that wrote her poems wielded the hoe and the pruning hook, put seeds in the ground and crushed clumps of black earth. Dickinson took part in all domestic chores and was an assiduous cook. Confined to her house by her own volition, she displayed a practical activism similar to St. Teresa of Avila’s though fortunately free of any asceticism, or even of any desire for transcendence. Paradise is here, just like the family house, its garden, its cupboards, the view of the fields from a window and the natural life of plants, birds, insects, and farm animals, the entire world, a roofless Noah’s ark. The human brain becomes deformed and atrophied when the mind is too exclusively concerned with work requiring no physical activity, manual skill, or strong sensory stimuli. To make a drawing you need the resistance of the sheet of paper as well as your determination to overcome the clumsiness of your hand. This encounter with materiality produces setbacks and chance revelations that are more fruitful to the future work than any prior intentions. Words have no material substance but their resistance is just as stubborn as that of wood, clay, or stone. One can force their fixed sounds and meanings only to a certain point. Syntax offers as powerful a resistance as gravity or as the physical composition of matter. Besides, words are used up, mistreated, spoiled by toxic residues just as the bodies of marine animals are poisoned by chemical spills or by the antibiotics and antidepressants that people expel in their urine or simply flush down the toilet.”
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THREE DAYS OF QUANTUM ACTIVISM. “The nobility of the folk artist has always consisted in working with whatever happens to be at hand; cheap, accessible materials, wood if there was wood, stone if one could find it, clay if there was neither wood nor stone. In Africa there is a man who turns the plastic canisters in which the poor carry their water and gasoline into sculptures that resemble masks or idols. Emily Dickinson stitched together her books of poems with the same needle and thread that she employed for her domestic sewing. She also made her verses out of the simple rhythms and monotonous stanzas of the hymns they sang in church. As a teenager, she made an album containing every species of herb and flower in her garden and in nearby fields. She had studied chemistry and natural history. She pressed plant specimens with great care, making sure that their characteristic features were fully and clearly preserved, affixing the stem to a sheet of pasteboard with tiny strips of paper or fabric and writing the name underneath. Gary Snyder has written poems all his life and never stopped working with his hands, primarily with wood, and doing construction. When he was very young he wrote a poem about stoneworkers carving out steps on the side of a mountain: each verse was as solid and deliberate as a hewn step, tier upon tier to make the path firm. Manual work produces a healthy absorption, you focus on the task at hand and at the same time you forget yourself, your history, your identity, things float weightlessly around you like objects set free from gravity inside a space station. The task has a practical and verifiable aim, yet it produces at the same time a self-sufficing pleasure. The finished piece, whatever it may be, exists in a fully objective manner even if bound inseparably to the particular life and character of its maker. It seems anonymous, impersonal, standing squarely on its base and occupying a precise amount of space: a jug, a chair, a painting, a wooden box or one made out of cardboard. It was born from someone’s labor yet it has an emancipated existence. It can last for a few days or it can last for centuries or millennia. It can become as elemental as the enduring forms of nature, shaped and altered by time or by the hands of those who use it, like stone steps that are gradually smoothed and worn away by those who tread on them. The head of an Egyptian queen or goddess carved in basalt, its upper half gone. The radiant splendor of its ruin, a chin, half the oval of a face with a broken smile that is all the more beautiful because there are no eyes; halfway between a sculpture and a piece of rubble, between sensuous beauty and a sacred shudder.” A brusque voice makes him look up but it takes him a moment to realize it is addressing him. “You can’t sit here unless you order something.” He nods politely, puts away the sheet of paper in his satchel, slips his pencil in the inner pocket of his jacket so as not to lose it. But its sharp tip is already beginning to poke a little hole in the lining.
FILL YOUR LIFE WITH FLAVOR. He is a restless archeologist of the present, of the moment when what is valuable or pristine turns into debris, when the words and pictures of an advertisement pass from ubiquity to nonexistence. He is a scrupulous collector, asking for and gratefully receiving leaflets that everyone else immediately discards, taking them from overflowing garbage cans or from unemployed middle-aged men handing them out by the entrance to a shopping mall. Big Sale, Customize Your Mattress, Final Days, Tourist Menu Spanish Paella. Samantha Reincarnated Priestess and Sorceress of Love. He is an archivist, trying to rescue just a few things from the ceaseless flood of all that comes into existence only to be stuffed into the trash, a supermarket flyer with special offers, still smelling of fresh ink but already lying on the sidewalk. Things that belong to the present but are also premature relics that future archeologists will barely manage to recover, since nearly everything will have decayed, or vanished, or will lie buried away. He picks up the empty packs of cigarettes that people crush and throw away, like an envoy from the future or a foreign power sent to gather indiscriminate materials for other experts to classify and study. He collects the gruesome pictures of cancerous lungs, ravaged mouths, and dead men just as he collects the pictures of Asian and Latin girls offering massages with a happy ending. He thinks with a touch of commiseration about the person at the ad agency responsible for setting up the photo shoots, the white hospital lighting, the pale children who grew up sick because their parents were addicted to smoking. He thinks even more about the anonymous writer in charge of drafting the health warnings, sitting at a table looking at photographs that, instead of young people leaping joyfully into the air, show the gangrened feet, mouths, and bodies of dead smokers. Maybe he will even light a cigarette before beginning to write. For inspiration, like writers do in the movies.
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GET YOUR SMILE BACK WITH A 3D-PRINTED JAW. Smoking affects sperm health and can reduce fertility. Smoking causes fatal cancer of the lungs. Smoking causes heart attacks. Smoking during pregnancy stunts fetal growth. Tobacco is highly addictive. Tobacco smoke contains over seventy carcinogens. Smoking clogs your arteries. Smoking can cause erectile dysfunction. Your smoke is harmful to your family and friends. Smoking causes heart disease and stroke. Smoking ages your skin. Smoking reduces blood circulation and is a cause of impotence. Smoking takes away years of your life. Fumar mata. Smoking kills.
Copyright © 2018 by Antonio Muñoz Molina
Translation copyright © 2021 by Guillermo Bleichmar
