Faces in the Crowd Read Online Free PDF Page B

brought liqueurs in tiny glasses. When we’d polished off the drinks, I put the glasses in my bag. They were very pretty glasses. Pajarote looked at me quizzically. It’s my birthday, he said, please don’t steal today. I’ll buy you the glasses. And he called the waiter over and bought them for me.
    *
    The baby laughs out loud for the first time. She makes a noise like a whale and her voice immediately breaks into four abrupt, light, resonant gusts of laughter.
    *
    White wasn’t impressed by my first report on Owen. He left a note stuck on the screen of my computer: “Bring me something that really can be translated into English and return the wooden chair you stole from the bathroom, then we’ll talk about what we might be able to do with your Owen. Yours, W.”
    Unlike the majority of gringo publishers, White was not monolingual. And in contrast to the majority of gringos who speak Spanish and have spent some time in Latin America and think that gives them a kind of international third-world experience that confers on them the intellectual and moral qualifications for—I don’t quite know what—White really did understand the fucked-up mechanisms of Latin American literary history. Faced with his reluctance, the most natural thing for me to do would have been to take note and leave Owen alone.
    *
    The boy to his father:
    Do octopuses have little mobydicks?
    I’m working.
    And shrimps? And sea sponges?
    The boy’s father thinks for a moment and then:
    Shrimps are little-dicks.
    *
    When the doctor told me my second pregnancy was “high risk,” I stopped just about everything: smoking, drinking, walking, writing, breathing. I was afraid the baby wouldn’t be fully developed: the spine incomplete, crooked; the nervous system disconnected; I was afraid of mental retardation, delayed learning, blindness, sudden infant death syndrome. I’m not religious, but one day when I was in the street I had a panic attack—my sister Laura explained later that that was what it was—and I had to stop in a church. I went in to pray. That is, I went in to ask for something. I prayed for the unformed baby, for the love of its father and brother, for my fear. Something in the silence convinced me that there was a heart in my belly, a heart with an aorta, full of blood; a sponge, a beating organ.
    *
    A dense, porous novel. Like a baby’s heart.
    *
    In the copy of Owen’s Obras I borrowed from the library there was a section with photographs, placed more or less at random among the pages of Novela como nube . One of the photos caught my eye. Two-thirds of Owen’s profile occupied almost the whole space. The wide forehead and a strand of wavy hair. A thin nose, practically a beak. The eyebrow shading an almost nonexistent eyelid, the soft, sleepy eye. Scarcely a trace of upper lip. All the rest, black. An almost faceless man. I carefully tore out the photo and placed it on one of the branches of the dead tree, next to my writing desk—anyway, I had no intention of returning the book to the library.
    *
    My husband and I watch a film with the children. It’s called Raining Hamburgers . It’s a ridiculous story. The baby, who is the most sensible of the four, falls asleep after a few minutes; the boy stays awake only a little longer. We carry them to their crib and bed respectively, and watch them sleep. In some way, we love each other in them, through them. Perhaps more through them than through ourselves—as if since their arrival the empty space that brought us together and separated us had been filled with something, something that was neither him nor me, that now seemed essential to our self-justification. We kiss their foreheads, close the door of their room. We lie on our bed and finish watching the film, unable to sleep.
    *
    I sometimes slept in an armchair on the tenth floor of my building because there was too little air and too much noise in my apartment. There was always someone or something else there: Moby taking a