Faces in the Crowd (10 page)

*

Moby existed. But he wasn’t called Moby. His name was Bobby. When I found out—Dakota told me—I was shaken by a fit of giggles, and then tears. But Bobby’s not important, because he perhaps doesn’t exist any longer.

The boy and the baby exist. A house exists, the creaking of the old floorboards, the internal shuddering of the things we own, the palimpsestic windows that hold the impressions of hands and lips. My husband and I exist, though our existence is increasingly separate, and the neighbors, the neighborhood, and the cockroaches that pass silently by also exist.

*

You’re a liar, he says.

Why?

You’re a liar.

So are you.

*

Follow the line of a story, like the line of the ass of an Ecuadorian child who was later a detective in Harlem. Crack heads with everyone, fight everything, the past, the present, so long as the story moves on. Never stray from the line. Close your eyes, put the bucket over your head, and sing, just to imagine that flat, firm, dark culito.

*

I gave away my furniture and shared all the plants—except for the dead tree—among my acquaintances. I caught the train to Philadelphia. I wanted to leave the dead tree in the cemetery there. Laura and Enea took me, they didn’t ask questions: they’re the kind of people who know how to respect others, not to ask for explanations. We went to the cemetery but never found Owen’s grave. They offered to keep the plant. We’re still watering it even though we know it’s dead, they tell me now, when we speak on the phone. The pot is by their front door. Their neighbors, born-again Christians, ask about the dead plant. They have gardenias in the entrance. They’re born-again people who ask for explanations and have gardenias. That’s what Laura and Enea tell me when we speak on the phone and I ask how the plant is doing: The neighbors hate it, you know, they’re newborn Christians, they have gardenias perpetually in flower on the porch.

*

My husband is going to Philadelphia tomorrow. He’s in the kitchen making dinner for us all. The boy sits down at the kitchen table to draw. I can hear them from the living room:

Look, Papa, I’ve made a house to live in.

Uhuh.

Do you know what happened to my house?

What?

A gyranium wind came and gobbled it up.

You don’t say gyranium, you say twister.

A twister wind came and gobbled it up.

Not twister wind, just twister.

I like gyrawind twister.

*

The day I bought a plane ticket out of New York, I tried to speak to White on the telephone. Almost a month had gone by since the last time I’d seen him, and I at least wanted to say I was leaving the city for good. Minni answered: He says he can’t talk to you now, but not to worry, I don’t know what he meant, you know how he is, but he told me to tell you not to worry. He says you might want to read the next issue of the
NYRB
.

*

My husband went to Philadelphia today. I suppose it was to be expected. Months and years had piled one on top of the other for this moment to arrive. First, the mutual persecution. Hounding one another until neither has a centimeter of air. Conceiving an infinite hatred of the other. Not so much boredom (that would have been to remain at his side for twenty years and end up sleeping in separate beds). Not so much the contempt (the inadequate size of his hands, the smell of his sleeping body, the taste of his sex). But the hatred. Breaking him, emotionally decimating him again and again. Allowing oneself to be broken. Writing this is coarse. But reality is even more so. Later, the moral accusations. The list of the defects of the accused, always accompanied by the tacit list of the virtues of the accuser. Our final hours together were predictable: the temperature of the arguments rising, the almost comic melodrama of the play beginning. Faces, masks. One shouting, the other crying; and then, change masks. For one, two, three, six hours, until the world finally falls apart: tomorrow, this Sunday, next Wednesday, Christmas. But in the end, a strange peace, gathered from who knows what rotten gut. It was a single gesture that broke me—that finished breaking me: his cry of joy when he had closed the front door.

*

Dakota wanted to organize a going-away party for me. We decided to hold it in the empty apartment. Her ex-boyfriend came, and some of the rotating members of the band. Pajarote came with Fani. We didn’t invite Moby alias Bobby. Baldy turned up with his ex-wife—a slightly silly Mexican criolla who had put herself through a master’s at
NYU
only to end up teaching Spanish in a Brooklyn secondary school; and she brought her new partner, another Mexican criolla who repeatedly quoted lyrics by Joaquín Sabina. And that was all.

In the kitchen, Dakota’s ex-boyfriend asked me why I was just up and leaving like that. I told him that I’d turned into a ghost; or maybe that I was the only living girl in a city of ghosts; that, in any case, I didn’t like dying all the time. He stroked my forehead. I didn’t know what to do. Spontaneous gestures paralyze me. Perhaps I could have touched his face; licked the naked scar that furrowed it into two possible faces. I could have told him that I was going because I was incapable of sustaining and inhabiting the worlds I myself had fabricated, that I also had a scar splitting my face in two. Perhaps I could have made love to him in the bathtub. Perhaps I did make love to him.

*

The rest isn’t important. My husband moved to another city. Let’s say, Philadelphia. He went out the front door with a single suitcase and a portfolio full of plans, and that was the last we heard of him. Maybe he found himself. Let’s say he met other women: casual mulattas, an elegant Japanese lady, neocolonialist gringas who soothed their first-world consciences by sleeping with third-world intellectuals, and even Mexican criollitas for whom life was a compendium of songs by Joaquín Sabina. Or maybe he just got fed up, locked himself in an apartment in Philadelphia, and allowed himself to slowly die.

*

I bought the
NYRB
at a newsstand and read White’s article, sitting on the floor of my empty apartment. White had decided not to reveal the whole story. He had written a long piece explaining that he had made a mistake, that the translations we had previously published with my introductory note were apocryphal, and that, caught up in our enthusiasm, we had fallen into the trap.

During the following months and years, as I learned much later from snippets of editorial news on the internet, the mistake White had taken responsibility for, knowing that it would mean the end of his reputation as a publisher (as, of course, it did), provoked an unusual interest in Owen. The translations were published by a large, mass-market publishing house under the name of Zvorsky and, to the extent that books of poetry can be, were a success. The obscure Mexican poet became, in time, the new Bolaño or, rather, a new Neruda. But that day, while I was reading the article in the
NYRB,
neither White nor I knew what would happen about Owen. I tried to call the office once more when I’d finished reading the article but nobody answered. I took a long hot bath.

*

The boy sings to the baby while we bathe her: Autumn leaves are falling down, falling down, falling down. Autumn leaves are falling down and Mama’s crying.

*

In that apartment there were no children, no cockroaches, no ghosts. It was on the seventh floor. There was only a bathtub.

*

Pajarote drove me to the airport the next day. We said our goodbyes outside. He wrapped a single arm around my shoulders and kissed my forehead. When he’d gotten back in his car, I went into the terminal, alone. I shed a few tears while the lady at the United Airlines check-in counter processed my boarding pass. Just a few. Or maybe lots.

*

I don’t know what to do with the three cats who appear to want to move in here permanently. A couple of nights ago I poured whisky into a saucer, thinking maybe that would make them renounce me as the lord and master of their three miserable little lives. But my gesture must have touched them, because the next morning the three woke up on different parts of my mattress and came to lick away my sleep at the stroke of six.

*

I lived a few blocks from Federico García Lorca, but he used to spend the whole day in a student hall at 2960 Broadway, writing his poems. I sometimes bumped into him on the way to the subway and we’d shake hands. He was a plump, pampered little Spaniard, with a tight little ass, who virtuously complained about his bohemian life in the big city: doves and swarms of coins, buildings under perpetual construction, vomiting multitudes, alienation, solitude. The problem with Federico’s poems was that they all ended up being Federiquized. The Spañolet (as Salvador Novo called him) overindulged in his strange metaphors: he converted them into one-way streets, unique systems of equivalence. He liked Harlem and the blacks, he didn’t speak English. His parents sent him a hundred dollars each month, which he frittered away in the city bars. I liked the Swedish and Yankee women, I studied English the whole damn day; I liked tertulias, café conversations à la Henry James, with generic Aryans—French, German, and the speechless, perpendicular, unsociable English, as James describes them.

On one occasion I wrote a letter to Xavier Villaurrutia saying much the same thing, but he never got the joke, perhaps because prophetic jokes aren’t funny. The worst defect of the Yankee, I told him, is his incapacity for bad-mouthing people. In a certain sense, I was right. But then, in that life, I was unaware of the Yankee’s most incisive ability—I was living opposite Morningside Park, among blacks who ate watermelon and fried chicken every Sunday (like Mexicans), and an inordinate number of crickets, which made the United Estates sound like the main plaza of a town in Sinaloa. The Yankee’s greatest virtue—as I now know—is not saying anything; feeding the silence until the other person begins to dig himself a grave in the nearest cemetery, conscious of his inability to keep an appointment at five in the afternoon or to appreciate the joy of Sundays, to be a good sport at all times, and so on.

But Federico: the Spañolet and his beautiful asslet, as Salvador Novo used to say.

*

I was thin and lost weight at an incredible speed. I believed in poetry. I wanted to translate my favorite American poets: Pound, Dickinson, and William Carlos Williams. I didn’t really believe in anthologies, but I wrote to the great Alfonso Reyes, suggesting the idea of a collection of these three North American poets. I was disturbed by the idea that Pound had lived in a cage; that Williams was a gynecologist; and that Dickinson had never left her house. There was a strange correspondence between that constellation of poets, somehow determined by the cage, the house, the vaginas. I suppose that those are the kinds of reasons that matter. But I didn’t, of course, mention that in my letter to Reyes, just spoke of the importance of incorporating the voices of those three giants into our canon. When the maestro replied enthusiastically, I dashed off translations of over two hundred poems by Dickinson and posted them to an address in Brazil. They probably never even crossed the Hudson River.

I was thin and had long, strong legs, as he probably had. I believed in poetry, but not anthologies. They seemed to me a petty form of exercising editorial power. I just wanted to translate my favorite Spanish-language poets into English. I only once tried to publish my translations. It didn’t work out.

*

I printed out the last ten pages to read them aloud, cross out, rewrite. By accident, I left them on the kitchen table overnight. This morning I came down for breakfast and found my husband in the kitchen. While lighting the stove to make coffee, he asked:

Why have you banished me from the novel?

What?

You wrote that I’d gone to Philadelphia. Why?

So something happens.

But if I go, there’s no sense in writing two novels.

Then you stay.

Or perhaps it’s better that I go. Are you letting me go?

Or perhaps you die.

Or perhaps I already died.

*

In Manhattan I died every so often. I believe that the first time it happened I didn’t even realize. It was one of those summer days when it’s so hot that your brain goes into a bland, boggy state of lethargy that impedes the sprouting and consolidation of even the simplest idea. The brain just burbles. I had to attend to an affair the consul considered a top diplomatic priority. A pilot by the name of Emilio Carranza had attempted to fly nonstop from Mexico to New York and the poor man went and crashed into a small mountain in New Jersey. I was asked to write a report on the death of the pilot. It took me more than three hours to produce a paragraph.

When I’d finally finished, I left the consulate in a stupor, feeling terribly sad about the poor stranger who had been splattered that morning. I walked the usual blocks and started down the stairs at the entrance to the subway. That’s when it happened. Perhaps I tripped and cracked my head open on the edge of the steps. Afterwards, I must have gotten up, walked to the platform, stepped onto the train, and fallen asleep in the carriage, because I can’t remember anything about the journey. That watchmaker angel who wakes people up exactly at their stations woke me at the 116th Street stop.

The first thing I do remember is the face of Ezra Pound in the crowd waiting on the platform for the train. Of course it wasn’t really him. The doors opened and there he was on the platform, leaning against a pillar. We looked each other straight in the eye, as if in recognition, although he couldn’t possibly have heard anything about me, a young Irish Mexican, neither red haired nor good looking, more bastard than poet. I was transfixed—instead of getting off the train, I let the passengers leave and be replaced by others, identically ugly, overheated, and ordinary. Pound didn’t board the train. He was lost among the crowd of faces on the platform, faces like the wet petals of his poem.