Valeria Luiselli - Sidewalks

Sometimes the doorman and I light a second cigarette.

We’d learn to reach deeper into ourselves, he continues, by looking at our reflections now and again in the mirror of someone else’s bathroom, washing our hair with their shampoo, or laying our head — some nights — on another person’s pillow. We should all participate in a certain amount of housing polygamy if we want to be true to the millenarian edict: Know thyself.

How do you mean?

Didn’t you study philosophy? he asks me.

More or less, I answer.

One

The residential buildings in this neighborhood are pseudo-modernized piles dating from the beginning of the twentieth century, with fake wood or iron cornices imitating stone, heavy, slow-moving glass doors, brick facades redundantly painted brick-color: the first triumph of property speculation and the last whimper of the age of ornamental architecture. The apartments are fitted with fluorescent lighting to cut costs and create a favorable environment for the residents’ varying states of depression. In the ready-furnished interiors like mine, there isn’t much. The official inventory lists: folding dining table, folding chair, four-shelf bookcase, armchair upholstered in green, single bed, fridge, stove.

Two

The windows don’t appear on the inventory. They don’t count. None of them are wide or transparent enough to fulfil the purpose of a window: allowing space to come in. What’s the use of living on the seventh floor if you have to lean out and crane your neck to be able to see — there in the distance — the horizon, or — way above — the sky. (Not once have I seen a bird, though, mysteriously, I once saw a fly, its tiny legs glued to the other side of the windowpane.)

During the daytime, other people’s walls and windows — their possible solitudes — dominate the view that the glass rectangles offer. Neither do the windows behave like windows when it gets dark. At night, when I switch on the lights in the living room, the windows reflect the interior of my own apartment instead of revealing the exterior. There’s no way out, just mirrors: the windows force you to see yourself reflected in them every time you leave the desk to go to the bathroom or make another coffee. This would be fortunate, if only these words by either Walter Benjamin or Friedrich Nietzsche — I never know which — were true: “To be happy is to become aware of oneself without fright.” But no one ever achieves that. I see myself cross from the living room to the kitchen — from the kitchen to the living room — my skinny body, languid, lacking aplomb, intermittently reflected in each window.

The fact that you see yourself mirrored in the windows at night and almost never see the outside world is most probably an architectural strategy for creating an illusion of privacy in a city where the view is a constant invitation to peek into other lives. And this has to do with the balance between the dose of happiness and unhappiness a person can be granted. Leaning out, peering into other windows is an invitation to speculate about other people’s possessions, their better lives, happier existences — and it’s a fact that the happiness of others is, by a simple act of comparison, the main reason for our personal unhappiness.

Despite the praiseworthy achievements of architectural reformers, it’s easy to cheat privacy in these buildings. If my neighbors have their lights on and I don’t, they can only make out their own reflection and don’t see me watching them, so as soon as I turn out the lights in my apartment, the mute spectacle of my neighbors’ lives switches on. Lately, I’ve been spending a few hours each night spying on them. Yet, for all my laudable hacking of their privacy, I’ve been sad to discover that my neighbors’ lives are as unexciting as mine. Like me, like everyone else in the city, they all possess personal computers, so nothing ever happens in the windows opposite.

It’s clear that the personal computer is the great modern attack on good old-fashioned voyeurism. From the moment these machines were installed in our homes, the irreversible process of the degeneration of character began and ruled out the possibility of anyone doing anything interesting for the delight of their voyeuristic neighbor. Impossible, since the advent of Facebook and Twitter, for anyone to commit a spectacular crime in his living room or to conduct a good affair (dirty, delectable, and detectable). Indiscreet rear windows to other lives no longer exist because everything happens inside those smaller, more circumspect Windows on our computer screens.

Three

On the streets of this part of the city — a pluperfect grid — everyone is in rectilinear transit and no one converges on a single point. There’s almost nowhere suitable for an out-of-hours get-together or meeting — except, maybe, the laundry rooms in the basements of buildings, where the washing machines are located. But these Dantesque infernos of cyclical hygienic tortures are almost always empty, and even when I come across a neighbor there, I go out of my way to avoid conversation since the topic will inevitably dry up more quickly than the laundry and I’ll be forced to start saying things I really don’t want to.

There’s nothing to talk about with the people who live in this building. Gilberto Owen, the Mexican poet who resided in this very same area over eighty years ago, knew why: the worst defect of neighbors here is their incapacity for properly bad-mouthing each other. Not only is that fundamentally true — but the current reality is worse still. Today our neighbors are always happy, always excited about something, always doing great, really great, never openly disillusioned, never ever unsuccessful, properly depressed, or decently full of spite.

So, I’ve found that if I want to live in harmony with the world, the best thing is to scarcely cross glances with the Neo-Manhattoes of this neighborhood, not to exchange a single word, still less a telephone number or e-mail address in the supermarket aisle. If I’m forced to share an elevator, I give, at most, a cordial nod. If I go to the laundry room, I stick to the silent ceremony of the soap powder. And outside in the street, nothing beats carrying an umbrella, under whose sheltering arch I can hide from the gazes of others.

Four

It’s often said that modernity began with the erosion of the frontiers between the private and the public and the consequent leap into the abyss of ubiquitous intimacy. Could be. But nowadays, to be true to the Delphic exhortation my night doorman regularly evokes — Know thyself — it’s no longer appropriate to retreat into the interior. Even in our private spaces, we’re increasingly engulfed by the expansionist empire of Google and spied on by the phantasmagorical armies of all our close and distant acquaintances. There’s nowhere to go — and the windows give no shelter, the screens no relief.

Five

Ishmael, the sailor, knew that he should set out to sea when he began to feel the irresistible urge to systematically remove the hats of passersby with the tip of his umbrella. I know I should leave my house when Moby-Dick takes on a more robust existence than my own: “[et] le monde bat de l’autre côté de ma porte”—“and the world beats on the other side of my door.”

Sometimes I go out into the street just for the sake of it.

But even there you can’t be with yourself. In spite of Edgar Allan Poe’s early and wise dictum — we are always alone when we are a man in a crowd — every time I go out on my own, I have to discover all over again that being alone is not equivalent to being with myself. Or worse, that my own company is not necessarily the best company.