Faces in the Crowd (11 page)

*

Federico had one or two virtues. During my first months in Manhattan we used to see each other every week in a diner over on 108th Street. We met because Emilio Amero, who could never manage to stick one idea to another, had asked us both to collaborate with him on the script of his next film. I don’t know what Federico’s motivation was, but I accepted because it was a way to speak Spanish with someone from outside the consulate once a week. It was an unfilmable script about voyages to the moon. I wanted endless journeys in an elevator filling up with eyes; Federico, deeply resentful, rewrote sequences by Buñuel and Dalí in a soft-boiled New York style. And in that way we began to become friends.

“We ended up having so little to talk about that Federico decided to invite another poet to join us, in order to criticize him afterwards. To be honest, that’s how we began to be close friends. We Hispanics have always been good at that. Spanish is a language that lends itself to fault-finding and for that reason we are bad critics and good enemies of our friends. The poet was a thoroughly decent Yankee called Joshua. But we addressed him by his surname: Zvorsky. And, between ourselves, when he wasn’t there, he was simply “Z.” He had a nose as long and phallic as the island of Manhattan and huge egg-shaped spectacles, which made his face look exactly like the sexual organs of a colt. He was beginning a long poem, as long as Ezra Pound’s
Cantos,
he explained. Federico didn’t understand a single word of what Z said, since he spoke English as if he were saying mass in Yiddish, so I used to translate for them. Not that I understood much. The poem will be called
That,
explained the poet, because a little boy, when he’s learning how to talk and enumerate the world, always says:
“That
dog,”
“That
lollipop” and so on and so forth. He says his book is going to be called
That,
I explained to Federico, because a little boy always says “That perro” “That paleta” or some such thing.

Federico’s second-greatest virtue was that he always got excited when he grasped a new idea. But then straightaway he’d be filled with disillusion: that was his greatest virtue. When the Yankee poet had gone, we talked about Gide and Valéry. However differently we spoke the language, as Spanish speakers, our close ties with Latin and Greek gave us a sense of superiority: we were the heirs to a noble linguistic past. English, in contrast, was the barbaric bastard son of Latin, constantly gloating over its discoveries: the demiurgic function of articles, inventing the world by enunciating it. The only ones worth the effort are Eliot and Joyce, I used to say. And Williams, Pound, and Dickinson too. Federico liked Langston Hughes and had just discovered Nella Larsen. Our friend Z was a dog and a lollipop but he was also one of the best poets around.

*

Do you think I could have seen Pound in the subway? I asked Federico on the way home after a session at the diner.

How do you mean?

The poet, Ezra Pound.

But he’s in Italy or Paris or I don’t know where.

He’s in Italy, I said, but what does that matter?

Ah, now I understand. Definitely not, it’s impossible for someone like you to have seen him.

Someone like me?

*

Homer believed me when I told him I’d seen Ezra Pound in the subway and that there was a woman I kept seeing on another train. What’s happening, he said, is that you can remember the future too.

But I had not only seen Ezra Pound. I realized one day, during my comings and goings from the consulate, that for some time I’d been seeing a series of people in the subway, and that they weren’t, as you might say, ordinary people, but echoes of people who had perhaps lived in the city above and now only traveled through its overgrown whale’s gut. Among these people was a woman with a brown face and dark shadows under her eyes, whom I saw repeatedly: sometimes on the platform, waiting, at others onboard the train, but always a different one from mine. The woman appeared to me most often in those moments when two trains on parallel tracks are traveling at almost the same speed for a few instants and you can see the other people go past as if you were watching the frames of a celluloid reel.

I wrote a letter to Novo and told him about that woman, who was always wearing a red coat. I told him about her head resting gently against the carriage window, reading, or sometimes just looking into the darkness of the tunnels from the platform, sitting on a wooden chair. I told him about Pound too, and all those people who were and were not in the carriages of the subway, a bit like me. He replied that I was a “subwanker” and that instead of going around looking for ghosts where there weren’t any, I should send him a poem about the subway or something that would fill the pages of the magazine
Contemporáneos
. And I took note and wrote a poem of over four hundred lines, because I always took note of what Salvador said. But the brown-skinned woman with sad eyes continued appearing to me up to my last day on the island of subwankers.

*

On the windowsill of the room I used to rent in the building opposite Morningside Park, there was a plant pot that looked like a lamp. The pot had oval-shaped green flames and there was an orange tree growing in it. Under the meager shadow of that small tree, I used to write love letters to Clementina Otero, the Gorostiza brothers, Salvador, and Villaurrutia. I told them about my life in the metropolis, again and again, as if to make it my own, conscious, maybe, that happiness also depends on syntax: Dear X, I live at 63 Morningside Ave., again and again, to each of my invisible correspondents.

*

It’s Saturday, my day for seeing the kids. I arrive at my ex-wife’s building on Park Avenue and wave to the doorman from the street. He immediately calls up for the children and comes out to smoke in silence with me until they arrive, full of stupid enthusiasm for life. They tell me that their mother has acquired a new radiogram, that she gave them who knows how many new toys, that they watched a war movie in an enormous cinema, and that the following weekend they’re going to the coast. I take them, one by each hand, to walk in Central Park.

It’s time to go to see the ducks, kids.

We always go to see the ducks, Papa.

So far, I’ve managed to cover up the problem with my sight. When the sun goes down and things start to hide from me, I say to my little girl: Captain, tell me the English names of everything you can see, and she begins: a duck, a lake, a big tree, a little tree. She pronounces the English words with an exaggerated Yankee accent, as high-class Latin American children typically do. She says: that’s a dahk, that’s a layk, that’s a beeg twee, and that’s a lidel twee. And to the older boy, when we’re paying for ice creams at the end of the walk, I say: Soldier, count out the coins and give the ice cream vendor the exact change.

When we’re saying good-bye again at the foot of the steps to the building, I give them each a kiss on the forehead with my eyes closed, so they won’t give me away—I imagine my eyes like two raisins, grayish, wrinkled, small, rotten. Then I take the train back to Philadelphia. In the carriage, I lean my head against the seat and touch my closed lids to see if my eyes are still there. There they are, brimming with water, with the memory of my children like wounded effigies imprinted on them.

*

It’s Sunday and my husband will take the children to the zoo. They’ll take a long walk in Chapultepec Park and the boy will come back, still sweaty and overexcited, to tell me about the elephants, who can never go to bed because they wouldn’t be able to get up again. Afterwards he’ll get a little sad and ask me why: Why can’t the animals leave the zoo or you leave the house, Mama?

*

God and people come out in solidarity with victims. Not just any victim, but victims who successfully victimize themselves. My ex-wife, for example. When we got divorced, the criolla turned herself into a poet and a victim; the prophetess of divorced poet-victims.

She’s just published a small book of deeply embittered prose poems, self-edited and bilingual, with a so-called publishing house owned by her mentor, a French-American poet who runs a writing workshop called
SDML
(Spiritual Daughters of Mina Loy). I don’t think Mina Loy knows about them. My ex-wife has had the discourtesy to invite me to the launch, which is to be celebrated in her own apartment. I know I have to stay in her good books, because if I don’t, she’ll never let me near the children, so I have the courtesy to go to New York to see her.

A butler opens the door to me. I ask after the children; they’re asleep. The apartment smells of a mixture of uptown perfumery, makeup, newly ironed clothes, and asparagus. The butler offers me a martini and, of course, a plate of boiled asparagus. My sight might betray me, but I’m still a hound dog when it comes to sniffing out a coven of witches gathered around their bitterness and a plate of expensive appetizers. I hang my jacket up near the door, among handbags and women’s coats of every possible size and texture; I accept just the martini and make my way to the salon.

I can’t see the women very well, but from the noise and stench they give off there must be over twenty, over thirty of them, sitting in concentric semicircles around my ex-wife and two other speakers—the three witches of
Macbeth,
but more vulgar and angrier with life. Standing facing the room, my balls suddenly shrink. Two peanuts. Perhaps they completely disappear. I stand there behind the last row of seats, as close as possible to the butler, terrified.

My ex-wife is reading in her international Bogotá accent. The poor woman has a very ugly voice—she moans the guttural consonants, elongates the open vowels, and squeaks the
i
’s like a badly tuned machine. She reads a poem about the practical utility of husbands. Her mouth always curved slightly downward when she was reading aloud; also when she was reproaching me for my infinite list of faults. I imagine the bitter grimace, now further emphasized by the furrows and bags of aging skin. From time to time, bursts of hyena-like laughter break out from the invitees. Maybe, when the ceremony is over, they’ll undress me, tie my hands and feet, lift my eyelids, and fill my eyes with gobs of spit. They’ll shit on me—years of intestinal retention.

She finishes reading the poem and the whole room reverberates with an ecstasy of applause. I reach out my hand to see if the butler is still beside me. There he is. I put my arm around his shoulder:

Don’t desert me, brother, stay here close by.

I’ll be here, sir, I’m not moving.

She reads another poem, and another. When she’s finished the final one, presumptuously dedicated to Mina Loy, the women give her a standing ovation. The chairs scrape against the floor. (Where can she have gotten so many chairs from?) My ex-wife, a spider in the center of her web, looks at me from the opposite corner of the room. I feel her stare. I’m a tiny fly trapped in her sticky universe. The butler removes my arm to attend to the ladies’ demands; I stay put, not knowing where to put my free hand; and the one holding the martini is now trembling slightly.

The international Bogotanian starts talking: poetry, the breakdown of identity, life in exile, and who knows how many more criollo clichés. She pauses, and to round off says: I’m grateful for the presence of my ex-husband, an unjustly obscure but highly capable poet. The little heads turn in my direction. What does she mean by “capable”? I get an urgent need to piss. Dozens of painted snouts smile—I can still make out white on black and know they’re smiling because the darkened room suddenly lights up like a startoothy sky. The olive throbs in my glass. My organs, in my suit, throb. The faces looking at me throb; out there, the city throbs: the persistent pumping of the blood, the temperature of humiliation. Speech! Speech! I wish for an instant death I am unable to bring about. Then I speak:

I came because I was invited.

(Silence.)

I came because I’ve always been a dedicated feminist. Viva Mina Loy! Viva!

(Silence.)

In fact, María, I came because I wanted to ask you to lend me just a few dollars to take the children to the fair next weekend.

(Silence.)

*

When I brush the boy’s teeth, we count to ten for the middle of the top row, ten for the bottom, fifteen on one side (top and bottom), fifteen on the other. He has tiny, pointy teeth, like a baby shark’s.

You’ve got teeth like a baby shark, I say to the boy.

Do baby sharks have teeth, Mama?

I don’t know, I guess so.

But sharks are blind, and I’m not.

I know, I said teeth, not eyes.

Yeah, but still.

Come on, off to bed.

*

I’ve only ever known a single blind man in my life. He was called Homer Collyer and in 1947, a little after his death and a year before my definitive, fatal return to the United Estates, he gained a fleeting celebrity. But long before that, when I arrived in Harlem in 1928, Homer was living with his brother Langley a few blocks from my apartment, in a mansion on the corner of 128th Street they had inherited from their parents.

Homer was licking an ice cream on the front steps and I went up to ask the way to a church where there was a special service that Sunday that the boys at
Contemporáneos
had asked me to write an article about. Excuse me, sir, where’s St. John? I asked. He pointed his walking stick toward the sky. I laughed discreetly, but honestly, and stood there like an idiot, waiting to see if, somehow or other, the joke would lead to terrestrial directions.

Did you know that chocolate ice cream is made from cocaine powder?

No, sir, I didn’t.

That’s what my brother Langley says. Met him?

Your brother? No, sir.

I sat down next to Homer on the step.

He’s a good man. A bit of a pig, but diligent in his own way. He says that if I sit in the sun for an hour every morning and eat enough cocaine ice cream, I’ll gradually get my sight back.