Read Online Faces in the Crowd by Valeria Luiselli - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Valeria Luiselli
Tags: Fiction, Literary Fiction
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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
*
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
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