Faces in the Crowd (12 page)

Well I never, you’re blind?

Homer took off the dark glasses he was wearing and smiled at me—he had teeth like a horse’s: big, rounded, and yellow.

*

I enjoyed long tertulias during which I could unfold my ideas slowly, cast scorn on my fellow writers, feel that the world fell short of my standards. Amero used to arrange to meet us in a bar. The owner liked to be called “Mexico” (he was a very yankee Yankee, who had fought on the side of Pancho Villa in the Mexican Revolution and for that reason alone believed himself to be a metonym for the country). I rarely went to these things, but when I did, I was in for the long haul. The regulars were Emilio Amero, Gabriel García Maroto, and Federico, who almost always brought Nella Larsen. Sometimes I joined them, as did our friend Z, who, between whiskies, talked about objectivism, a word Federico was incapable of pronouncing. He’d say something like “ohetivicio” and then turn to me, seeking complicity.

One night we all drank like ladies and got drunk as skunks. I think Nella Larsen was a bit ashamed of us right from the start, because she changed tables before the floor show began. In one corner of the bar, the famous Duke Ellington, who I had never seen perform before, took the stage. Federico stood up and pulled up his socks. He had short, plump little legs, covered in wiry hair, and the poor guy insisted on wearing Bermuda shorts (a European thing, bloody bunch of fairies). The Spañolet applauded so euphorically that, before sitting down at the piano, the musician tipped his hat and personally thanked him. Federico turned to me as if to say, See? The Duke and I are big buddies. Ellington sat down and began. Z took off his spectacles and left them on the table, among the glasses. García Maroto, possibly the most boring person in the world, listened to the whole thing with his eyes shut, or perhaps he just fell asleep.

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.

I arrive a little late and the doorman lets me up to the apartment. I know that there is, though now I have a problem seeing it, a marble table in the hall with a vase of fresh flowers; there’s a long table and a room for entertaining guests. There’s a canteen of cutlery and the crockery from which I ate many meals, a wall covered in family portraits among which I do not figure—except in the scar made by a nail. There’s a piano and its illegible sheet music, trays, a uniformed maid, a bed as vast and bitter yellow as the sea at Mazatlán. There’s a cabinet full of all-important spirits.

My ex-wife has had the delicacy not to be there to greet me. She leaves me a note with instructions the maid reads out to me: the boy mustn’t eat sugar, for now; the little girl has her bath at eight o’clock. As if I didn’t know.

It’s a bright, splendid afternoon. I put the note in my pocket, grab a bottle of Colombian hard liquor, and take the children for a walk in my old neighborhood.

We want to go to the fair, Papa.

Can’t be done, kids, there’s no money.

We take the subway to the low hundreds and walk across the city from east to west. On a corner, we buy a watermelon and sodas. When we get to Morningside Park, we sit under an American sycamore, over fifteen meters high, its shadow tangled, like black people’s hair. We break the watermelon open with our hands, a stone, a stick, and our teeth; I make them eat the whole thing, sitting on our sweaters, because we’ve forgotten the special rugs their mother keeps for picnics.

We can’t eat any more watermelon, Papa, we’ll explode, they plead.

Keep eating, nothing comes free.

Nothing except the Colombian liquor, which goes down a treat. There’s something miraculous about alcohol for a man in my condition: it unshackles something, relaxes the nerves on the other side of the eyeballs, and allows what for a long time has been hidden behind the cataracts to become visible.

I make out a family a few yards away from us. They’ve got tablecloths, music, drinks, children with baseball mitts. With my slightly drunk Dutch courage, I approach the group and strike up a friendship with the head of the family. He offers me rum. My hard liquor has all gone, so I accept. I call my children, who hesitate a little before the new clan. One of the younger kids, a sturdy, cheerful girl, introduces herself: I’m Dolores, but you can call me Do. Pleased to meet you. My boy finally agrees to put on the mitt and his sister follows his example. The children play baseball in Morningside: it’s a bit like happiness.

I sit down on the edge of a stone from which I can see the window of my old room, in number 63 of the street bordering the park. I can’t actually see the window, of course, but it’s a scene I know well and can easily reconstruct. Moreover, with every swig of alcohol, a new color reappears, the lost contours of things become sharper. The reconstruction is interrupted, intermittently, by the great breasts of the wife of my new friend. I used to sit at that window writing letters to Clementina Otero; I asked her to marry me again and again. The woman’s enormous breasts dance, she dances and eats the last piece of watermelon—our only contribution to the party. My son’s made a home run, the head of the family reports to me, and we all applaud from afar. This was where I used to study English obsessively, underlining phrases in the issues of the
NewYorker
the landlady had put in a bookcase together with various editions of the Bible, always the New Testament. The woman bites into the watermelon and looks at me. Hey Mexican poet, she says. Everything slips and slides, and she has a black seed stuck in her cleavage. I can see the seed perfectly and my hook eye fastens on it, something tangible in my planet of shadows. I used to masturbate, I was young, looking at my naked reflection in that very window. The children throw themselves on my son and form a small mountain on top of him: Papa, he shouts from afar, Papa, they’re hitting me. She dances, she dances me. The cleavage, the seed, my present-day body leaning toward her, my swollen arms making a grab for her waist, her slaps, You madafaka, my tongue pounces on the seed, follows the soft line of the cleavage, Papa, there was a Spanish poet better than me, he was called Federico, They’re hitting me, Papa, the woman tastes of lotion, and there was a very good American poet, his name was Z, a sharp blow on the back of my neck, the paterfamilias hits me again and again with an empty bottle, You madafaka, there’s glass everywhere, thousands of tiny shards embedded in my head, everything disappears. The children play baseball and leaves of grass tickle my right ear.