Faces in the Crowd Read Online Free PDF

hoping that someone would soon come out of the building. My hands were blue, my lips chapped. Around nine in the morning—the sun was beginning to warm my back—a girl came out with a bicycle. I shouted down to her. The girl turned her head and waved. It was the same fat child with the green wax crayon I’d seen the day before. I begged, promised candy, crayons, and chicken legs in reward for her help. She left her bicycle propped up against the front steps and went back into the building. She took ages to come up, prolonging my agony. I imagined she would go to fetch her mother, her father, her grandparents, all the residents of the building would come up to lynch me and I would have to explain that—What would I say?—that I’d got lost, was sweeping the roof, that I was Mexican, a translator—Sorry, sir; Sorry, ma’am—or that perhaps there was nothing strange about my being up there on their roof on a Saturday morning.
    The rooftop door, a thin metal sheet, began to shake slightly and then burst open. The girl had come up alone. She stood there, gazing blankly at me, and asked:
    Are you the ghost that lives up here?
    No, I just came up to water my plant early this morning and got locked out.
    But are you a ghost?
    No, ghosts don’t exist. I’m Mexican.
    We’re from the Dominican Republic. My mom doesn’t let us come up here because of the ghost.
    She’s right.
    What are you going to do with that dead tree?
    I’m going to take it to the tree doctor.
    She turned and I followed her, carrying the pot. We went slowly downstairs. Outside, a bunch of fat kids were waiting for her. I put the pot down for a moment and we shook hands, rather awkwardly on my part.
    What’s your name? I asked.
    Dolores Preciado, but they call me Do.
    I picked up the pot again. The other children watched me pass, carrying the dead tree. They laughed, shamelessly made fun of me: the natural cruelty of children becomes more intense when they are fat. I crossed to the other side of the park and Do shouted to me:
    Tree doctors, they don’t exist either!
    When I got to my apartment, I put the plant pot next to the writing desk. Before taking a bath, before making coffee, before having a pee, I sat down to write a feverish report on Gilberto Owen’s Sindbad el varado . The Chinese student was drinking soup at his worktable.
    *
    Some evenings, my husband and I work together in the living room, spurred on by the whisky, the tobacco, and the promise of late-night sex. He says that we only work at night so we can smoke and drink in peace. We’ll get to the bed, after making a few additions to our respective documents, as excited as two strangers who have met for the first time and don’t tell each other anything or demand explanations. The tabula rasa of the pages and plans, the anonymity the multiple voices of the writing offer me, the freedom his empty spaces give to him.
    *
    In that apartment, there was nothing. There weren’t even ghosts. There were heaps of half-alive plants and a dead tree.
    *
    In this house we often run out of water. The boy says that it’s the ghost who uses up the reserves in the cistern. He says it’s a ghost who died of thirst and that’s why it drinks all the water in the house.
    *
    Pajarote invited me to dinner to celebrate his birthday. We went to a French place. I knew that, for the gringos, French means elegant, so I was well dressed and on my best behavior. I didn’t order much food, onion soup and clams; he had duck. I babbled on about the plant I’d taken from the roof of Owen’s old building, about the girl called Do who’d saved me, about Owen’s possible lives in 1920s Harlem, about the new writing desk and its chair, about Moby and the Japanese robes and how sad I’d felt making love on a mattress, next to a printing press, with a man with a big nose. Pajarote looked at me in silence.
    You’ve got a bit of burnt onion on your teeth, he said when I finally paused.
    We finished eating and were