Valeria Luiselli - Faces in the Crowd

These gimcrack paintings are mine.

Who do all the feet belong to?

My ex-wives.

Sorry.

No pro. . Do you have a card?

(That’s what he said: “pro.”)

No.

The young lady has no card!

(He was one of those people who speak with exclamation marks.)

Here’s mine. . If you’ll let me. . I’ll paint you something. .

(He was one of those people who speak with dot-dot-dots.)

Thanks.

What’s your name? he asked.

Owen.

Isn’t that a man’s name?

Could be.

I’d like to see your feet. .

My what?

Baldy invited me to his own loft (upper-class Mexicans pronounce it laaaft ). I’m an artist, he said, I live right here in Brooklyn — as if saying artist and Brooklyn in the same breath was to create a self-sustainable world. We took a cab for which he, naturally, paid. Before leaving, I said good-night to Pajarote, ashamed, beaten, humiliated, and feeling that in some way it was his fault that I was going home with a trustafarian. I got into the cab, took off my shoes, and settled my bare feet in Baldy’s crotch.

*

I think that when I was young I was weighed down by a constant sense of social inadequacy — I was never the most popular nor the most eloquent at a table; never the best read nor the best writer; not the most successful nor the most talented; definitely not the most handsome nor the one who had most luck with women. At the same time, I harbored the secret hope, or rather, the secret certainty, that one day I would finally turn into myself; into the image of myself I’d been elaborating for years. But when I now reread the notes or poems I wrote then, or when I recall the conversations with other members of my generation, and the ideas we so boldly expounded, I realize that the truth is I’ve been getting more imbecilic by the day. I’ve spent too many years sleeping, dozing. I don’t know at what moment an inversion began to occur in the process that I imagined as linear and ascending, and which, in the end, turned out to be a sort of pitiless boomerang that flies back and knocks out your teeth, your enthusiasm, and your balls.

*

The boy asks:

Do you know what’s under the house?

What?

Little balls.

And what else?

Little dots, about fifty-six little dots.

And on top of the house?

On top there’s a man having a little sleep.

*

When I was in other people’s beds, I slept deeply and got up early the next morning. I’d dress quickly, steal the odd personal item — my favorites were towels, which smelled good, or white singlets — and depart in a good mood. I’d buy a coffee to go, a newspaper, and sit in some very public space, in full sunlight, to read. What I most liked about sleeping in other people’s beds was precisely that, waking up early, rushing out, buying a real newspaper, and reading in the sun.

*

My husband stands behind me as I write. He massages my shoulders, too hard, and reads what’s on the screen.

Is it him saying that or you?

Him — she barely speaks now.

And what about you, how many men have you slept with?

Only four, or perhaps five.

And now?

No one else. What about you?

*

Note (Owen to Villaurrutia): “I’m not in love. She’s Swedish. And I had her as a virgin, a mystical experience I can recommend. She’s got a cold passion. She throws herself at me like a Hindu woman onto the pyre on which the body of her prince consort burns. And as she gets up before me, I’m never sure if I didn’t go to bed with an ice sculpture that has melted.”

*

I spent four days and three nights hiding, I don’t know from whom or from what, in Baldy’s house. The first night he couldn’t get it up. The second day, he went out before I woke up and didn’t return that night. I called Pajarote to see how things had gone with Fani, the hostess, but no one answered the phone. When it was clear that the owner of the apartment wasn’t coming back that day, I rang Dakota and invited her to spend the night with me. She came around at about ten and we watched Pet Sematary projected onto an enormous white wall. We ate cans of smoked oysters and had a bath together in a tub filled with cartoon characters of the 1990s: there was Ursula the octopus woman, the hyena from The Lion King, Aladdin, one of the fat fairy godmothers from Sleeping Beauty, and a philosophical Smurf. Dakota sang all the bits of the songs she could remember. When I could, I helped out with the backing vocals. When we got out of the bathtub, wrinkly, we dried each other using immense towels with Baldy’s initials embroidered in gold thread, and Dakota asked me to put cream on her back. We anointed each other and put on a DVD of a television series starring a blond guy who invariably saved the world.

The third day, Baldy turned up in stud mode with a box of oil paints, assorted bottles of liquor, condoms, and hard drugs. Dakota and I were comfortably ensconced on his leather sofa, watching the blond guy’s courageous efforts to save New York from a germ bomb. He offered us a martini; we accepted on the condition that we could finish watching the whole DVD. He gave us a lecture on the episodic nature of series and their relationship to the structure of Don Quijote . He was an intelligent but complicated man. Owen would have said that he spoke with spelling mistakes. He offered us Colombian cocaine, and took five hundred photos of our feet with a digital camera while the blond guy was torturing three Muslims with one hand.

By the time the DVD finished, the sun was already coming up. Dakota and Baldy had moved to the bed. I rushed out. I got a coffee in the street, bought a newspaper, and started walking to the subway — I had an appointment with White the next day.

Dakota kept Baldy, as she had kept Moby, and all my other leftovers. She was like a lobster; and I, like the filth that accumulates on the seabed.

In the subway, on my way home, I saw Owen for the last time. I believe he waved to me. But by then it didn’t matter, I’d lost my enthusiasm. Something had broken. The ghost, it was obvious, was me.

*

I suppose that the difference between being young and being old is the degree of frivolity in our relationship with death. When I was young, my disdain for life was such that I was constantly imagining ever more extravagant deaths. It’s Sod’s Law that now, when I’d prefer to be simply alive and spend time with my kids, I’m suffering a slow, humiliating, boring death, through no fault but my own. My deaths in Manhattan were quick and had external causes: a subway train cracked my skull open; a man buried a knife in my chest when I was leaving a bar; my appendix burst at midnight; I allowed myself to fall to the ground from the top floor of a Financial District building. But death in Philadelphia is approaching like a bedraggled cat: it rubs its dirty ass up against my lower leg, licks my hands, scratches my face, asks me for food; and I feed it.

*

I called Pajarote late on Sunday night. I told him about White and Owen, said that I was going to see White the following day. I told him about Baldy and Dakota. He listened.

Imagine a series of men, he said. The first of them has a full head of hair and the last is completely bald. Each successive member of the series has a single hair less than the one before. It would appear that the three following statements are true:

1. The first man in the series is not bald.

2. If a man is not bald, a single hair less will not make him bald.

3. The last man in the series is bald.

And so what?

That’s the sorites paradox.

What?

The paradox is that, although those three statements appear to be true, in conjunction they involve a contradiction.