Faces in the Crowd (7 page)

Is this your first visit here? Yes.

Have you got a pain in your chest? Yes, it’s really bad.

Are you unemployed? Yes.

What ethnic group do you belong to? Caucasian.

Do you belong to a church? Yes.

Which? Anglican.

Is there a history of cancer in your family? No.

What is your Social Security number? 12345.

*

Today was our neighbor’s birthday: he didn’t invite us to his party in the end.

*

The postman came by this morning. He hands me a postcard and I give him five pesos. It’s from a woman in Philadelphia. It’s for my husband. I read it. Perhaps, a few years ago, we’d have read it and laughed together; we’d have analyzed the exaggerated syntax of those who are selling some form of bygone happiness, then we’d have gotten drunk and made love in the kitchen, pretending for one night that we had no past. But we always choose—in some way it is our choice—to rehearse the beginnings of the end: beforesshocks, pretremblings.

*

When I got back from Philadelphia I immediately went to see White at the office. He wasn’t there, but I found a long note stuck to my computer: “You win. We’ll publish a few poems in a magazine first. You can write an introductory note saying they’re most probably by Z. But you still need to work on a lot of the poems. They’re sloppy. When you’re finished and the time’s ripe, we’ll bring out a book of the complete translations of O. Yours, White—
P.S.
Did you go to the cemetery in Philadelphia? I did some research and found out that Owen was buried there.”

*

Note (Postcard from Owen to Josefina Procopio, Philadelphia, 1950):
“Robin Hood Dell
. There’s never before been an auditorium so completely open to the other world. The ghosts from Laurel Hill Cemetery, just behind the Dell, come to give concerts that other ghosts, from the great cemetery named Philadelphia, applaud. When it seems the Dell is full, they take a photograph and everything comes out empty because the film isn’t sensitive to ghosts. I’m the shadow marked with an X.”

*

I suppose it’s normal. The day comes when your husband’s former lovers look at their legs, shed a few tears, put on fishnet stockings, and write a postcard to their first love. Some nights, when their own husband and children are sleeping, they put on an old record. Get modestly drunk. They write messages with overly complex, desperate grammar: discontinuous lines like varicose veins. The next morning they go to yoga classes and dye their hair bright red. Maybe, one day, they get a spider tattoo on their stomach. What’s more likely is that this first love has been corresponding sporadically with them for years, so they feel free to write or call whenever and however they please and demand their share of lost youth, their drop-by-drop, prescribed dose of happiness. The men, if they’re unhappy with their wife, will reply. The women, if they aren’t yet ashamed of their body, will invite them to a hotel. Perhaps a hotel in Philadelphia.

*

I made an appointment with Detective Matias and went to see him at the police station. I haven’t come to talk about the case, I said as I sat down in front of his desk—I’d been to see him so often that he no longer received me in the interrogation room. I’ve got a question for you, that’s all. He listened.

What happens if someone publishes something, pretending someone else wrote it?

Like a literary ghostwriter?

More or less.

I don’t know. I don’t read much. But last Christmas my daughter gave me
The Maltese Falcon
. Have you read it?

*

My husband and I have been asked to a dinner party with old friends. I go into the bathroom to do my face before leaving. I put on eyeliner, mascara, and brush my teeth. I’ve got dark shadows under my eyes. We turn off the gas, shut the windows and doors overlooking the inner patio. We switch off all the lights, except the one in the hall. We say good-night to the children and the babysitter. I take his arm when we’re outside and he tells me that, before we left, he killed a Madagascar cockroach by the baby’s crib. Then he quickly says: I may have to go to Philadelphia to oversee the construction. I drop his arm and say I have to check the baby one more time, that the cockroach thing terrifies me. I go inside and turn on the lights. My husband follows me. I open the gas tap and the door to the inner patio. I don’t want to go out, don’t want to go to a dinner party. I go into the children’s room and the creak of the door wakes the baby. She cries, I have to pick her up. I can’t go with you, I say, you go alone.

*

Leave a life. Blow everything up. No, not everything: blow up the square meter you occupy among people. Or better still: leave empty chairs at the tables you once shared with friends, not metaphorically, but really, leave a chair, become a gap for your friends, allow the circle of silence around you to swell and fill with speculation. What few people understand is that you leave one life to start another.

*

Note: From 1928 to 1929, Owen had an unimportant job in the Mexican consulate in New York. During that time, he wrote an article entitled “Production-line system for shelling, cleaning and grading peanuts.”

*

The boy talks to the ghost in our house. He tells me so while we’re bathing the baby together. He pours water on her head with a sponge while I clean her whole body with neutral soap. We know we’re handling something very fragile. Folds and folds of delicate flesh.

D’you know what?

What?

Without doesn’t scare me anymore.

That’s good.

Don’t you worry, Mama, Without’s going to look after us when Papa goes to Philadelphia.

Why do you think Papa’s going to Philadelphia?

But where is Philadelphia?

*

A selection of the forged poems was published in a small but prestigious magazine and afterwards, thanks to the kudos conferred by the name of Zvorsky, came the shower of mentions an author needs to find a place in the market: reviews. First on obscure internet sites specializing in third-world authors, translations, and minority writers in general (ethnic, racial, sexual, et cetera). Later, articles appeared in academic journals, attesting to the authenticity of the “manuscript containing translations by the poet Zvorsky of the great Mexican poet Gilberto Owen, found in the Casa Hispánica of Columbia University.” The Department of Hispanic Literature at the University of Austin opened an “Owen Archive”; the articles Owen had written for
El Tiempo
in Bogotá in the 1930s and 1940s appeared, edited by a university professor and issued by a well-known publishing house in Mexico City, and were immediately translated for Harvard University Press. A hail of apocryphal manuscripts, all related to Owen’s sojourn in New York, appeared. A “lost” issue of the magazine
Exile,
edited by Ezra Pound, came to light, with extracts from
Línea,
the collection of poems Owen published around 1930. Our plans were going well. I’d keep working on the rest of the poems and we would have a book ready in a few months.

*

The design for the Philadelphia house is, finally, almost finished. My husband left the plans on his desk and now it’s me who’s looking for something. I rummage. On some of the plans there are two figures, a man and a woman roughly sketched in pencil, who live in that house. They’re eating in the kitchen, taking a bath together in an enormous tub, sleeping in a room with a huge window.

I log on to his computer to see if I can find another clue there. The program he uses is called AutoCAD. I open it, press keys, more and more windows open, a whole house, in three dimensions, spacey, with white wooden doors. There are labels where there will eventually be chairs, bookshelves, plants, and pictures. But I do not find him there, or her.

*

Dakota moved to her new house at the beginning of summer. It was an apartment in Queens, near a cemetery. The day they handed over the keys we went out to buy three cans of paint. She wanted her whole house to look like Juliet Berto’s cobalt-blue bathroom in
Céline et Julie vont en bâteau. We
opened all the windows and stripped down to our panties. We painted the bathroom, the kitchen, but only half of the bedroom because we ran out of paint. We painted each other’s nipples cobalt blue. When we’d finished we lay face up on the bedroom floor and lit a cigarette apiece. Dakota suggested we swap panties.

*

Note (Owen to Salvador Novo, Philadelphia, 1949): “Here, in summer, women develop miniature Mount Etnas they call breasts; they’re very unsettling things that sometimes turn out to be what are called ‘cheaters,’ which can be bought in any women’s fashion store.”

*

For the last few days there have been workmen in the house across the street. They’re taking up the old floorboards and replacing them with parquet. They listen to the radio the whole day. That’s how I find out what’s happening in the outside world. There was an earthquake in Asia; sham elections in Nepal; the Mexican army found a mass grave in Tamaulipas with the bodies of seventy-two undocumented Central American migrants. The workmen have sussed out what time I breastfeed the baby, in a rocking chair by the window. They watch me from the roof, lined up like recruits, candidates for a feast to which they won’t be invited. I close the blinds and unbutton my blouse.

*

In the mornings, my husband continues to read what I’ve written the night before. It’s all fiction, I tell him, but he doesn’t believe me.

Weren’t you writing a novel about Owen?

Yes, I say, it’s a book about Gilberto Owen’s ghost.

*

Note (Owen to Josefina Procopio, Philadelphia, 1948): “As this month the fourth was a Sunday, logically tomorrow will be Tuesday the thirteenth and I’m to die on a Tuesday the thirteenth. But if tomorrow isn’t the day, Death will wait for me, or I for her, the appointment won’t be this year. Let’s see what happens.”

*

In
One Thousand and One Nights
the narrator strings together a series of tales to put off the day of her death. Perhaps a similar but reverse mechanism would work for this story, this death. The narrator discovers that while she is stringing the tale, the mesh of her immediate reality wears thin and breaks. The fiber of fiction begins to modify reality and not vice versa, as it should be. Neither of the two can be sacrificed. The only remedy, the only way to save all the planes of the story, is to close one curtain and open another: lower one blind so you can unbutton your blouse; unwrite a story in one file and construct a different plot in another. Change the characters’ names, remember that everything is or should be fiction. Write what really did happen and what did not. At the end of each day’s work, separate the paragraphs, copy, paste, save; leave only one of the files open so the husband reads it and sates his curiosity to the full. The novel, the other one, is called
Philadelphia
.

*

This is how it starts: it all happened in another city and another life. It was the summer of 1928. I was working as a clerk in the Mexican consulate in New York, writing official reports on the price of Mexican peanuts on the u.s. market, which was about to crash. Almost twenty-five years have gone by since then; even if I wanted to, I couldn’t write this story as if I still lived there and were that thin young man, full of enthusiasm, translating Dickinson and Williams, wrapped in a gray bathrobe.

(I would have liked to start the way Fitzgerald’s
The Crack-Up
begins.)

*

My husband has a future life in Philadelphia I know nothing about. A story that perhaps unfolds on the back of his plans. I don’t want to know anything more about it. I’m tortured, irremediably, a priori, by pieces of a life already traced out but not lived, in which there’s a woman, in a house without children, a self-confident criolla, who moans when she fucks. My husband sketches it all out and believes I don’t know.

*

The children live with my ex-wife in New York. I have an apartment and a grave in Philadelphia. She’s a criolla who vamps criollos. Fair-skinned, wealthy. She comes from an old, established Colombian family. I never belonged in that world. My father was an Irish miner who didn’t bequeath me his red hair but did pass on his sense of class resentment and a talent for debauchery. We met in Bogotá, and married there. We had two morganatic children and were, like almost everyone else, unhappy—“largely unhappy,” as the Yankees would elegantly put it. A few years ago we both did a “criollazo.” I lost everything in a Bogotá gaming house. She went off to Manhattan to start a career as a resentful poet. I came to Philadelphia, though I’m not quite sure what I intended to start.

Criollazo: the act of leaving one’s husband in one’s prime, before hitting forty, to dedicate oneself to other women’s husbands. Criollazo: the act of leaving one’s wife, on the threshold of fifty, to dedicate oneself to women without husbands.

*

The problem with criollos, and even more so with criollas, is that they’re convinced they deserve a better life than the one they have. (Note how often a criolla uses the word
deserve
in any conversation with another criolla.) They firmly believe that inside their head is a diamond someone should discover, polish, and put on a red cushion, so that everyone can be amazed, marvel, understand what they have been missing.

*

I’ve been living in Philadelphia for three years. After a bit of string-pulling in the Foreign Ministry, which I’d prefer not to linger on, I managed to be appointed honorary consul here. It was the only way I had of living near the children. But none of that matters now: I’m going blind, I’m fat, so fat I’ve got tits, sometimes I tremble, perhaps stutter. I’ve got three cats and I’m going to die.