Valeria Luiselli - Faces in the Crowd

So do you really not believe I see my future ghosts in the subway, you Spañolet jerk, I asked Federico on the way home. We were walking south along Broadway, dodging its giant-silver-coin puddles, our weary bodies silhouetted against the almost always sad dawn sky.

I believe you now, Gilberto, Mexicanito, now I do: today we saw my ghost dancing.

A little drunk and with that particularly Latin sentimentality that comes with too much alcohol, I embraced him and said I truly loved him and I hoped that one day we too would be ghosts in the subway, so we could at least wave to each other from one carriage to another for the rest of eternity. God forbid, he replied.

*

Or a horizontal novel, told vertically. A horizontal vertigo.

*

Perhaps the last thing a man loses is his vigor. Later, when that too has gone, a man becomes a depository for bones and resentment. In another time, I was a person full of vigor, capable of grabbing a Norwegian prostitute by the hand and running along a Harlem street, taking her up to my roof, pulling up her skirt. Iselin also had to be seen from below. Sometimes, I’d ask her to stand on the bed and I would lie beneath her, just looking.

*

I understand that stuff about recalling the future now, Homer.

Congratulations, Owen.

A few months ago I met a prostitute, and the other day we were on my roof terrace in amorous mode and I was stroking her hair until the sun came up.

Double congratulations, sleeping with a prostitute.

In some way, I knew that in a future I’d remember that instant and I’d know it was the only thing that would justify all my stories of love, and that all the other women would be an attempt to return to that roof, with that woman.

I don’t think you’ve understood the first thing I said.

*

As a form of reciprocity, I suppose, Federico summoned Z and I to the same place to listen to some lines he’d been polishing around that time. I imagined that it would be a simultaneously elaborated and simplified version of another fragment that Z had read about the streets of Manhattan. Up till then, Federico had been writing childish poems about loneliness in the Columbia University neighborhood and his slightly condescending admiration for the blacks. He used to ask me to do quick-fire translations. I would obey, a little ashamed, or perhaps slightly heartened by the idea of pulling down the Spañolet’s pants and baring the mechanism of his poetry, which, to my way of thinking, would always be less rich than Z’s. But this time Federico read a brutal, beautiful, prophetic poem about a Viennese waltz. There was a museum of wintry frost, a room with a thousand windows, a forest of dust-dry doves. I don’t remember much more. “Photographs and white lilies,” ended a line I would’ve liked to have written myself.

*

A few months before leaving Manhattan, I sent Novo my “Self-subway-portrait,” which I’d spent months cutting and editing, as if Pound and Z and Federico were looking over my shoulder:

Wind nothing more but redirected in

flute channels

with the sin of naming burning me son in a hanging

thread of my eyes

good-bye tall flower without fear or stain

condemned to Geography

and to a coastline with sex your pure

inhuman vertical

good-bye Manhattan abstraction gnawed by time

and my irremediable haste to fall

night-darkened ghost of that dreamed river

found in a single channel

return in the fallen night at the rise and fall of

the Niagara

let David throw the air stone and hide

the sling

and there is no forehead at the fore that justifies us

inhabitants of an echo in dreams

but a sleepwalking watchmaker angel who wakes us

at the exact station

good-bye sensual dream sensual Theology

to the south of the dream

there are things, Ay! that it pains us to know

without the senses.

*

An invitation arrived at the consulate. José Limón and his company are to perform the ballet The Moor’s Pavane, with music by Purcell. The performance is to take place in the Robin Hood Dell auditorium in Philadelphia. In my capacity as some type of representative of Mexico, it is expected that I go to such events, even though I’m blinder than a locust. I remembered the Limón kid well, how he had so masterfully flopped in a New York apartment, then disappeared for so many years, and who now turned out to be the star of modern dance. And if truth be told, I was very pleased.

We were sent two tickets, so I was accompanied by the consulate’s secretary: a plump woman from Oaxaca with a tongue that was never idle. The lights went down and a single spotlight came on, a luminous point in the exact center of the stage. My companion began to narrate the action in my ear (her mouth smelled slightly of rotting lettuce): Now the four dancers are on the stage with their hands linked, two men and two women, the four circling around in a single body. The two men raise one leg really high and then the women. Lovely.

I interrupted her: You don’t have to describe every single thing, Chela, just tell me the most important bits and, if you want, I’ll imagine the rest.

All right, sir. They’ve just taken out a really pretty handkerchief and are passing it around between them. I’ll tell you when something else happens.

They’re raising their legs really high again. Ay, no, sorry, better you imagine that on your own.

It’s like they’re flirting, first one couple, then another, but it’s hard to tell who’s whose partner.

After a longer silence, Chela continued: This is important because you’re not going to be able to imagine it: the two men have just fallen to the ground but they didn’t make a sound, as if they were light as feathers. Impressive.

The four figures who alternated at front stage were, from what I could infer, characters from Othello . The four spectral figures, it seemed to me, were much more like me than the consulate secretaries, than the owner of the supermarket where I did my weekly shop, the guards on the trains, the postmen, the barbers, than my children and their mother in some city in Europe. I suppose, in some way, I’d spent my life dancing around a handkerchief.

The function was a success. As I was leaving the theater, a reporter took a photo of Limón, the two male dancers, and myself. I linked arms with the Limón kid and put on my best smile. The secretary also snuck in, planting herself between the two dancers, and said, Whiskeeey.

*

Romantic endings are never epic. Nobody dies, nobody disappears for good, nothing ever finishes finishing. But I really am dying and people do disappear. The end of my love story with the Norwegian prostitute goes like this: on October 29, 1929, Iselin and I woke up in the Hotel Astor in the Bowery and turned on the radio. Guty Cárdenas was singing “Peregrino de Amor,” which had been released in the summer and was still playing on the radio in New York. I lit a cigarette and said to Iselin: Guty Cárdenas must surely be from Sinaloa. Iselin didn’t even know where Mexico was. She wanted to listen to the news. For some days the bulletins had been obsessed with the stock market and its imminent crash. I wanted to cry in peace: for Guty Cárdenas, for whatever. They were going to transfer me to Detroit, and I didn’t even know where that was on the map of the United Estates. Iselin remained firm. We turned the knob until we found a reporter. A few blocks from the hotel, according the incorporeal voice, the end was beginning. Enough, Iselin, I said, and tried to retune to the Spanish music station. But Iselin always won: Come on, let’s go see what’s happening outside, Gilberto.

The streets of the Bowery were empty. We walked a long way, and as we approached the Financial District, we began to hear a desperate buzzing, like hundreds of furious bees. There were people hurrying along, as normal, but now they all seemed like those shadows of people I saw every so often in the guts of the city.