To Walk Alone in the Crowd Read online

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  LIVE YOUR DAY WITHOUT LIMITS. In fact he has no father or mother, despite being young. He is a lawyer with significant credentials, and holds a position of considerable responsibility at a legal publishing house. Our perception of our age may be an illusion, but that does not eliminate the risk of condescension. In a little while the others will arrive and our conversation will be forgotten. It will even be as if it had never happened. But right now he is speaking and I am listening. The supreme authority of pain does away with the privilege that my years might have conferred on me.

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  NOW YOU MUST LEARN EVERYTHING. “I was thirteen,” he says. “We’d gone to Mallorca on vacation, my parents, my siblings, and I. We boarded our car into a ferry in Valencia and spent the night at sea. I kept leaning over the handrail, it all felt like a movie. That day my brother and I were playing on the beach, away from our parents and our older siblings. My mother was a very good swimmer, but she never got her hair wet, never let her head dip in the water. That was how women swam back then. She didn’t like to get her hair wet. My younger brother and I were making sand castles and tunnels and stomping them with our feet. We never got tired of it. Then we saw people running on the beach and gathering into a large group at a little distance. They said someone had drowned, or had nearly drowned but had been rescued by the lifeguard. People speak with such authority of things they know nothing about. I saw my father in the group of people. He was always easy to spot because he was so tall, even if it can be hard to recognize people at the beach. My brother and I left our ruined castles and our pretend fighting and broke into a run. People were standing in a semicircle around a drowned woman. I couldn’t quite believe it was my mother, because at first I did not recognize her. Not because her face was a different color, but because I’d never seen her hair wet.”

  THE WAY YOU MOVE REFLECTS WHO YOU ARE. That silhouette coming down Oxford Street now that all the windows are dark, and the stores are shut, and no one is out—no carts, no carriages or horses on the road—is Thomas De Quincey. From a distance he looks like a child, one of the many children roaming the streets, begging, then huddling together against the cold at night under the eaves of buildings. He is small and stunted and he has a creased and childish face that is also the face of an old man. When he walked endlessly through these same streets in his early youth he already seemed aged and shriveled by misery. As he grows older, his features, his gestures, and his always rather alarming figure become at once childish and decrepit. As a boy there was a gleam of ancient malice in his eyes. As an old man, the wicked, canny glint that lingers in his glance produces an incongruous air of mischief that is heightened by his crazy clothes: old hats that come down to his eyebrows, outsize coats that drag along the ground, outfits that could equally belong to a beggar or to an eccentric old man.

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  A FIREFLY IN THE FOG. He walks in place, as on a moving walkway, while at his back the city is projected on a screen like a still from one of those old films that were shot entirely inside a studio. He walks at a steady pace that never seems to flag. The pictures change behind him, compressing time and space in a series of juxtaposed shots. An early-morning light begins to spread behind him as he walks, a din of open shops, of vendors’ cries and people hurrying by, of carts and carriages and horses, a rising, endless racket. The light begins to change, from morning to afternoon, and the street is different too. Greek Street, Oxford Street, a wide avenue, an alleyway, then Soho Square. It begins to grow dark and the lamplighters lift their poles to the oil lamps. The far reaches of Oxford Street, out beyond the last lamp on the last corner, are nothing but dark fields. Time is compressed by the walk and the projected image of the city into a single sequence. Sometimes De Quincey is accompanied by a female figure who is slightly taller than him. It’s hard to tell if it’s a girl, a teenager, or a grown woman who is already quite run-down. Her appearance alters in the changing light or as she steps in and out of the shadows. She is fifteen or sixteen, a prostitute. There are many in the neighborhood, heavily made-up, brazen, dressed in rags, their tangled hair infested with lice.

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  YOU’RE SO MUCH MORE THAN ANYONE EXPECTS. The projected image changes, now De Quincey is alone and it is no longer the buildings of London but the masts of Liverpool that rise behind him. De Quincey moves very frequently from city to city. Sometimes he is not sure anymore where he is, or whether he’s awake or dreaming, or if the city around him is really there or just a memory or a fantasy implanted in his starving, sleepless brain by a dose of opium. He walks in order to stay awake but falls asleep even as he continues to put one foot in front of the other. He takes shelter at night in the hollow of a doorway or outside a church but hunger and cold will not let him sleep. He and the girl huddle together for warmth, covered in rags. They are young and pale, like those homeless kids begging on the freezing sidewalks of New York, trying to stay warm in their sleeping bags and whatever old clothes they can find in the trash, their fingers and their blackened, broken fingernails poking out of frayed woolen gloves. Some of them read tattered books that they must have also picked up while rummaging about. Some write in spiral notebooks or on mangled pads, urgently, with a pencil stub, or gnawing at the cracked end of a ballpoint pen. In the fall and winter of 1803, De Quincey was seventeen and living on the streets of London, always near the same places, Oxford Street, Soho Square. London is the largest, most populous city in the world and De Quincey doesn’t know a single soul in it except for Ann, a teenage prostitute who keeps him company and gives him a little warmth at night. Sometimes he finds shelter in a big, empty house whose only other occupant is a ten-year-old girl that has no name. Either she doesn’t know it or she forgot it or she never had one. They sleep on the bare floorboards covered by an old blanket they found in the attic. The girl clings to him and trembles thinking that the house is full of ghosts. When they grow still they can hear the scurrying and squeaking of rats.

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  LIKE WALKING DOWN A DREAM. By the summer of 1804 De Quincey has managed to earn a little money and finds himself in Liverpool. He goes on endless walks and keeps a diary, making quick notes about his activities, what he sees, what he reads. The diary seems written at the pace of a hectic walk. He is in ceaseless motion, standing on a moving platform from which he never gets off. Liverpool is pulsing with international commerce and the vast wealth it extracts from pillage and the slave trade. Cotton, tea, coffee, sugar, whale oil for lighting homes and streets, big factories working through the night, coal to feed the steam engines, opium to put children to sleep and to soothe the pain, the melancholy and the brutal fatigue of all those men and women trapped in workhouses and coalmines. De Quincey writes everything down in his diary. He seems to be simultaneously writing and living what he recounts. He writes about the taverns and the coffee houses, what he eats and drinks, the various kinds of people from all over the world that he encounters on the narrow streets near the harbor, the bookstores that he visits, the books he buys. He sleeps with a prostitute and instantly records the price he paid, the services rendered, their quality, and his degree of satisfaction. He has not seen his friend Ann again. He said goodbye to her when he had to leave London for a few days in the hope of finding some relief from his misery. They planned to see each other when he returned, agreeing to meet at a certain corner, by a clock tower, at a given time of day. If one of them failed to appear the other would come back to their meeting place the next day and continue to wait. It took a few more days than he expected to get back to London. He went immediately to the place they agreed upon and waited for hours. He went back the next day and the one after, but Ann never came. He wanted to look for her but realized he didn’t know her last name. He left for Liverpool shortly after.

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  DRIVE TOWARD THE UNEXPECTED. The silhouette is still walking at the same urgent pace. It seems to draw near but in fact remains at the same distance, outlined in black against the screen behind it.
De Quincey is always moving from place to place. He arrives as quickly as he can with the sole intention of leaving as soon as possible. From London he goes to Liverpool. He settles down in Edinburgh, but soon after is living in Glasgow. The city in the background changes at every moment. In a village in the north of England, his wife and his young children are waiting for him. He is gone for months at a time and they have no idea where he is, nor do they receive any money to live or to pay off the debts he left behind. He reads and writes, hoarding books and newspapers as well as tall piles of his own manuscripts, all those pages written in tiny rooms where he works until there’s no more space to move around, even for him who is so small. When the chaos of those jumbled piles reaches a certain point De Quincey leaves it all behind and takes up somewhere else. Sometimes he comes back after a while or after a few years. Some rooms he never returns to, and so escapes being hounded for past rent. He stays up writing late into the night but gets distracted and his hair is singed when his head gets too close to the candle. Sometimes his papers catch fire. He pours water on the burning pages or he throws them on the floor and stomps on them, which makes the whole disaster even worse.

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  BENEATH THE SKIN YOU SEE. The walking figure can be seen more clearly now because the background is much brighter. It emerges from what he calls London’s powerful labyrinths. It is night, and the rows of lights on Oxford Street are now much brighter, no longer weak oil-burning lamps scattered through vast areas of darkness, but gaslights. In the autumn of 1821 De Quincey spends his days writing in a garret over a gloomy courtyard and his nights wandering down the same streets that he roamed in the fall of 1803. He has come back to London on his own, leaving his wife and children in the rural house in the north of England. Solitude contributes to the trancelike state in which he writes during the day and walks by night, unable at times to tell the two activities apart, just as when he wandered through those streets as a young man without quite knowing if he was awake or dreaming. Memories gain an even greater hold on him because writing fosters remembrance, and also because the things that come back to him occurred in the same places he now wanders through.

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  REGRESSIONS TO PAST LIVES. Suddenly, no time has passed. Time and space distend as in an opium dream. Fantastical views of oriental cities spread before him as he walks, floating domes and minarets that sometimes shift and turn into a claustrophobic maze of battlements and crypts and pyramids. The dreadful thought occurs to him that nothing can truly be forgotten: the pictures that he gazed at as a child in a volume of The Thousand and One Nights, the plates by Piranesi that he glimpsed one afternoon at an antiquarian’s shop come back to him now as visions in the spell of opium. Darkness and exhaustion make the city grow and swell around him, lit by the technological wonder of gaslight. What began as an essay of reasonable length on opium eating begins to spill and overflow onto the page, turning into an immoral confession. Matter encroaches upon form and transforms it into itself. His account of the pleasures of opium and of its torments and hallucinations acquires the very texture of delirium. De Quincey is thirty-six, but looking at the faces he meets in the crowd he sometimes thinks that he can see himself among the wandering children and teenagers of Oxford Street. He dreams the city even as he walks through its streets or as he writes about walking. He gazes at the strange new glow of gaslight in the houses and shops. When he walks past the house on Greek Street where he sometimes slept in the arms of a nameless little girl, all the windows are lit. He looks into a parlor and sees a joyful family gathering. In every woman’s face he searches for Ann’s unforgotten features. He thinks he sees her, walking up ahead, and rushes to catch up with her so he can look at her face. The thousands of strange faces he has seen in London, Liverpool, and Edinburgh appear again in his hallucinations, floating side by side with eyes wide open, swaying in dark ocean waves. De Quincey takes opium in the form of laudanum, a tincture dissolved in cognac or wine. Laudanum has a bittersweet taste and is the color of rubies. He sees something on the street with extraordinary precision and there is a slight change, a ripple that makes him realize he is no longer walking through reality but within a dream. In these visions he searches for Ann as obstinately as in his waking life. One day he finally sees her approach and it makes him tremble with a wondrous, weakening feeling. A moment later he realizes, with bewilderment, with grief, that if he can see her it must be because he’s dreaming.

  IT MAY LOOK LIKE GARBAGE TO YOU. Anyone paying attention to him will notice that he picks things up off the street as he walks. He moves like a dignified pauper, furtive and alert, looking around for a moment before rummaging through a garbage can or peering into a trash container. He bends down quickly to pick something up off the ground, something he examines before putting it away in one of the loose, baggy pockets of his trousers or his jacket, which are always stuffed; or perhaps, instead, in one of those leather satchels that people used to carry before there were backpacks, the kind of briefcase a professor or a lawyer might own, but so battered and worn as to dispel any suggestion of affluence or even of practical sense despite its many buckles, side pockets, bottomless compartments that open and shut like the bellows of an accordion. He looks closely at the flyers placed under windshield wipers by people you never see. Colorful cards offering erotic encounters, leaflets for moving services or African fortune-tellers who can cure the evil eye or bring back a lost love, ads for cars, for silver and gold, for fast food or dental treatments. He always looks around him as he leans over the hood of the car, perhaps fearing that the owner will turn up and take him for a thief. He studies carefully each printed, xeroxed, or neatly handwritten sign that people tape at eye level on lampposts and streetlights. He notices the tiny stickers for locksmiths pasted all over the intercom panels on apartment buildings. But he also picks up the empty cigarette packs that lie crushed on the ground, and keeps them too, once he has looked at the horrible pictures of tumors and agonizing maladies and at the printed warnings and deterrents by which no one seems deterred: SMOKING KILLS, in big black letters on a white background, as in an old funeral notice.

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  THE PERFECT IMAGE AWAITS YOU. He seems to be searching for something he lost, or to be constantly finding unexpected things, or to suffer from some sort of mania, one of those disorders that afflict lonely people in big cities when they reach a certain age: a normal-looking, respectable man with that businesslike satchel under one arm, picking things up off the ground or taking eagerly, almost politely, the flyers being offered everywhere by dismal people no one else notices, stuffing his pockets for some reason with those printed or xeroxed cards that usually peddle erotic massages or some other kind of pleasure dispensed by sweet-faced Asian girls or by large Caribbean women in plunging leotards that show off their big asses and bulging breasts. Maybe at some point he’ll take out his wallet to pay for something at a store and all those compromising leaflets offering erotic services or cash payments for gold will flutter to the ground. When he gets home, or to the tiny office that he rents somewhere on the outskirts of the city so that he can spend hours undisturbed by visitors or by the ringing of the telephone, he empties his pockets one by one, his many pockets, and he also opens the accordion folds of the satchel to dump their contents on the table.

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  COME AND START LIVING. The gray metal table is made by the Roneo office supply company and so is the gray filing cabinet by the window, both salvaged from some decommissioned government building. Once he has emptied his pockets, still on his feet and perhaps, depending on the time of year, still wearing his raincoat, he stares at the table as if baffled or overwhelmed by such catastrophic abundance. He takes off his raincoat and puts it on a hanger. He sits on a reclining chair that belongs to an era of office furniture several decades older than that of the table and the filing cabinet. He rubs his hands gently, an ingrained habit that is entirely unnecessary since they tend to stay quite warm, which means he wears gloves only on the harshest
days of a northern winter. Then he gets to work, taking out of a drawer a three-ring binder with clear sheet protectors of the kind that were common in the equally vanished era of photo albums. From a second drawer he brings out a pair of sharp pointed scissors, some notebooks, some used envelopes bearing labels that he made himself, cutting and gluing them over the bank or company letterhead. Each label consists of a word or a short phrase that he found and cut out somewhere or other—an ad, a headline, a brochure for hearing aids or plastic surgery—and that he chose and affixed to the envelope entirely at random, just as he fills his blue binders at random with clippings, flyers, business cards, pieces of paper, drug names cut out of the boxes they came in, subway tickets, restaurant bills, a napkin from a bar or a café. If anyone were to stand outside the office door, pressing an ear to the panel of frosted glass, he or she would hear the sound of scissors carefully slicing through paper with a quick, efficacious, rhythmic sound. One might even hear, if equipped with a highly sensitive instrument, the rustle of a pencil moving ceaselessly over the stiff wide pages of a notebook.