Valeria Luiselli - Faces in the Crowd

During a break in the applause at the end of the first set, Federico put his mouth close to my ear and said: Don’t turn around, Ezra Pound’s behind you. I rose from my chair so quickly that I almost upset the table. All the glasses fell over, the ashtrays spilled their contents, ice cubes jumped into the air. García Maroto woke up with a start and averted the cataclysm by slamming down his hand, which landed on our friend Z’s spectacles, which, in turn, broke. Tiny shards of glass went flying, something like fragments of a child’s world: that chair, that man, that poet, that sad, that broken; that sad, broken poet man. Federico cracked up and Z was on all fours looking for the pieces of his spectacles. Fooled you, Mexicanito. What made you think Pound could be here? said Federico between snorts of laughter (his tongue was small, red, and rough, like a cat’s, and he stuck it out, possibly too far, when he laughed). We made such a scene that a big beefy guy, clearly not overburdened with brains, came up with two other toughs and booted us out. I believe that that night, instead of whisky, they served us hair lotion, because we were all in a frankly hallucinatory state. It’s possible that as I was leaving the bar someone stabbed me and stole my shoes and all my money, because the following morning I woke up unshod and without a dime in a hospital in Harlem. That had to be the second time I died.

*

Note (Owen to Araceli Otero): “I’m not dying so often now. I seem to myself chaste and already modestly strong. I eat very well and am an inconjugatable tense, the future pluperfect. I’m interested in my temperature, but what most interests me about it is what I lose by it, measured in year-pounds. I weigh 124 months. New York is blue, gray, green, gray, white, blue, gray, gray, white, etc. Sometimes it’s also gray. (Only at night it’s not black.) (But gray.) And you?”

*

My husband reads the children an improving, moralistic book they bought at the zoo about a baby dolphin who loses his family in the sea because he doesn’t listen to his mama and papa.

Perhaps a blind shark’s going to eat him, speculates the boy. Their voices reach me as if from far off, as if I were beneath the water and they out there, I always inside and they always outside. Or vice versa.

“Baby dolphin starts to cry. He gives a very high-pitched whistle that cuts through the water like an arrow,” continues my husband.

Can arrows cut through water? interrupts the boy. “The voice of each dolphin is unique,” my husband continues reading, “like fingerprints.” The boy makes noises like arrows cutting through a body of water.

Pay attention, his father scolds. We’re almost finished.

I think about his question.

My husband goes on: “Mama dolphin hears her baby from very far off. She swims the whole sea in search of him.”

Does she find him? asks the boy.

Yes, look, here on the last page you can see how she finds him.

*

When the children were smaller and we were still living in Calle 70 in Bogotá, we used to play hide-and-seek. I’d hide behind the slender branches of a young jacaranda tree. Where’s Papa? I’d ask them. The two would run to me and grab a leg apiece. Here! my little girl shouted. We’ve found you! said the boy. No, I’m a tree, I’d reply, and lift them up into the air, one on each of my branches.

*

Homer, the blind man, had one eye bigger than the other. One of them, the small one, was permanently turned toward his lachrymal gland, immobile. The larger one rolled in its violet socket like a demented white bird — it was like one of those doves trapped inside a church or railway station, beating its wings against a high, closed window. I enjoyed watching that erratic eye, which didn’t see me. Homer would be waiting for me every Sunday with a chocolate ice cream in each hand, at 10:00 a.m. on the dot. If I arrived two or three minutes late, my ice cream would be half melted, running down his fist.

You’re a ghost, Mr. Owen, isn’t that so? (He pronounced my name the way my ancestors must have done.)

Why do you say that, Mr. Collyer?

Well, because I can actually see you.

And couldn’t it be that you’re getting your sight back from eating so much cocaine ice cream?

No, sir, that’s not it. You’ve got the face of an American Indian but the build of a Jap. And you have the air of a German aristocrat. Today you’re wearing a hat, perhaps gray, and a jacket that doesn’t suit you one bit.

Don’t you like my jacket?

You’d look good in tweed. Next Sunday I’m going to lend you one of my brother Langley’s tweed jackets. I’ll have to find it and clean it first. My brother’s got a lot of things in there.

I never went inside the Collyer residence, although later, when the brothers died and every paper in the city was talking about them, I learned that the house had been slowly filling up with rubbish over the years. Langley had, for some time, been collecting all the papers published in the city and piling them in towers and rows that served as a retaining wall to stop Homer bumping into all the Victorian furniture in the mansion. But Langley, apparently, amassed not only city newspapers but also typewriters, strollers, wheel hubs, bicycles, toys, milk bottles, tables, spoons, lamps. Homer never spoke to me about his brother’s zeal for collecting, but now I can imagine that it was not gratuitous. Perhaps he thought that by bringing examples of everyday objects to the house, his blind brother would be able to hold onto a notion of the things that foolishly supported the world: a fork, a radio, a rag doll. Maybe the successive addition of shadows would end by shoring up the thing-in-itself and Homer would be saved from the void that was gradually making its way through his head.

*

Z was a major poet. On one occasion he summoned Federico and me to read us some extracts from That . We met on a bench on College Walk, in the center of the Columbia University campus. Federico arrived late, with his habitual star-on-the-verge-of-discovery arrogance. I was with Nella Larsen, he explained, as if to say that he’d been frolicking with the King of France. Federico was like a Narcissus who’d read Freud but, instead of being horrified, had been moved.

Z launched directly into his reading, as do the thoroughly self-confident or those all too unsure of everything. Listening to him read was like witnessing an Abyssinian religious ceremony. I hardly understood anything, even though my English had improved considerably. Some of the poems were riddled with Marxist, Cabetist, Spinozist theories, theories in general, and this allied them to the prophets who used to stand on corners of the Financial District foretelling the end of the capitalist world, of the world as we know it. But beyond the theories there was a plasticity in his poetry that I hadn’t heard in any of my Yankee peers (who, moreover, never even suspected I was their peer). Certain lines about how time changes us were etched in my mind. I’ve never been completely able to understand them, but they return to me from time to time, and they roll me around like a sow in the detritus of her discontent.

*

Perhaps if I put a bar of soap in their saucer or a bit of shaving lotion, these blessed cats will die and leave me in peace.

*

We play hide-and-seek in this enormous house. It’s a different version of the game. I hide and the others have to find me. Sometimes hours go by. I shut myself up in the closet and write long, long paragraphs about another life, a life that is mine but not mine. Until someone remembers that I’m hiding and they find me and the boy shouts: Found!

*

This Saturday I have to go to Manhattan to see the children. Their mother goes away for weekends — to the luxury beachside houses on the Long Island coast — and I stay in the rich-girl’s apartment in the high numbers of Park Avenue.