I do, however, remember the books I read during the years I lived there and the voracity and devotion with which I underlined certain sections of them — sometimes entire paragraphs were underscored twice, once in pencil and once in ink. I think it was Gertrude Stein who used to say that people become civilized before they turn twenty. I don’t know if I’d become civilized by then — or if I ever shall — but I did become a reader during those years and have never again read a book with the same sense of rapture. My world was shaped by books — not vice versa. A train journey — the chai vendors; the blue plastic seats that made your legs sweat; the impossibly large families picnicking on the floor of the carriages; the immense, beautiful, complex, fucked-up country out there — was a mirror to Duras’s Écrire, Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist, Orwell’s essays, Borges’s Ficciones. I used to sit on the steps of one of the open doors at the end of a carriage and light a cigarette, take out a pen and pencil for underlining, and read until my eyes burned.
Remembering, according to etymologists, is “bringing back to the heart.” The heart, however, is merely an absentminded organ that pumps blood. But rereading is not like remembering. It’s more like rewriting ourselves: the subtle alchemy of reinventing our past through the twice-underscored words written by others.
Flits and moves
The portrait of Duras between the pages of a notebook. The notebook on top of a box full of books, which serves as a table. And on top of the notebook, a half-empty coffee cup. I take out the portrait and study it once more. Today I look like Duras.
I go back to my own face: I see there the many faces that have formed me, the family tree of features, the genealogy of every facial expression and gesture. There’s a line drawn by my mother’s cheerfulness, shadows beneath my eyes as heavy as my father’s weariness, a pair of attentive lines on my brow that the two of them impressed on me. There’s a curve of the mouth, which some grandmother has slipped in; a look in my eyes that recalls the exiled loneliness of my grandfather; an expression that is the early-onset dementia of my aunt. But this face, my face, like all faces, is not only a collection of traces — it’s also the first draft of a future face. The mutable substance of the skin is always unfinished — its folds reveal a direction: an uncertain but already present future. Like the raw material of a sculptor, which, from the first moment, suggests the figure that will emerge after being worked, a face encloses its future faces. In my young face I instinctively read a first wrinkle of doubt, a first smile of indifference: lines of a story I’ll rewrite and understand on a future rereading.
OTHER ROOMS
There now is your insular city of the Manhattoes. .
Zero
W. G. Sebald says that the emigrant is that person who seeks out his own kind — wherever he goes. I seek out doormen, who are usually emigrants of some kind, metaphorically if not literally. The doormen of the buildings in this neighborhood — especially those on the night shift, the strangest of all — make me feel an urge for human contact I’m unable to restrain. In my permanent capacity as an alien nonresident in New York, I find solace in these men and women who guard the transition from night to day, the threshold between the street and the interiors.
The night-shift doorman of my building belongs to that endangered species of people who still smoke tobacco. In the ten-minute periods of beatific temporal suspension that make up the last cigarette of my working day and the first of his shift — the eternal return of his dark night of the soul — I’ve managed to strike up a friendship with him. What you have to do, he says when I get back, late and defeated, and we’re smoking a cigarette together — shivering on the steps of the building — is to get out of here as often as you can. That way you get to know yourself better. Only come back to have a bath and eat, never to sleep, because the more often you spend the night in different places — rooms, hostels, hotels, borrowed couches, other people’s beds — the better.
Sometimes the doorman and I light a second cigarette.
We’d learn to reach deeper into ourselves, he continues, by looking at our reflections now and again in the mirror of someone else’s bathroom, washing our hair with their shampoo, or laying our head — some nights — on another person’s pillow. We should all participate in a certain amount of housing polygamy if we want to be true to the millenarian edict: Know thyself.
How do you mean?
Didn’t you study philosophy? he asks me.
More or less, I answer.
One
The residential buildings in this neighborhood are pseudo-modernized piles dating from the beginning of the twentieth century, with fake wood or iron cornices imitating stone, heavy, slow-moving glass doors, brick facades redundantly painted brick-color: the first triumph of property speculation and the last whimper of the age of ornamental architecture. The apartments are fitted with fluorescent lighting to cut costs and create a favorable environment for the residents’ varying states of depression. In the ready-furnished interiors like mine, there isn’t much. The official inventory lists: folding dining table, folding chair, four-shelf bookcase, armchair upholstered in green, single bed, fridge, stove.
Two
The windows don’t appear on the inventory. They don’t count. None of them are wide or transparent enough to fulfil the purpose of a window: allowing space to come in. What’s the use of living on the seventh floor if you have to lean out and crane your neck to be able to see — there in the distance — the horizon, or — way above — the sky. (Not once have I seen a bird, though, mysteriously, I once saw a fly, its tiny legs glued to the other side of the windowpane.)
During the daytime, other people’s walls and windows — their possible solitudes — dominate the view that the glass rectangles offer. Neither do the windows behave like windows when it gets dark. At night, when I switch on the lights in the living room, the windows reflect the interior of my own apartment instead of revealing the exterior. There’s no way out, just mirrors: the windows force you to see yourself reflected in them every time you leave the desk to go to the bathroom or make another coffee. This would be fortunate, if only these words by either Walter Benjamin or Friedrich Nietzsche — I never know which — were true: “To be happy is to become aware of oneself without fright.” But no one ever achieves that. I see myself cross from the living room to the kitchen — from the kitchen to the living room — my skinny body, languid, lacking aplomb, intermittently reflected in each window.
The fact that you see yourself mirrored in the windows at night and almost never see the outside world is most probably an architectural strategy for creating an illusion of privacy in a city where the view is a constant invitation to peek into other lives. And this has to do with the balance between the dose of happiness and unhappiness a person can be granted. Leaning out, peering into other windows is an invitation to speculate about other people’s possessions, their better lives, happier existences — and it’s a fact that the happiness of others is, by a simple act of comparison, the main reason for our personal unhappiness.
Despite the praiseworthy achievements of architectural reformers, it’s easy to cheat privacy in these buildings. If my neighbors have their lights on and I don’t, they can only make out their own reflection and don’t see me watching them, so as soon as I turn out the lights in my apartment, the mute spectacle of my neighbors’ lives switches on. Lately, I’ve been spending a few hours each night spying on them. Yet, for all my laudable hacking of their privacy, I’ve been sad to discover that my neighbors’ lives are as unexciting as mine. Like me, like everyone else in the city, they all possess personal computers, so nothing ever happens in the windows opposite.