Open City Read Online Free PDF

moved from car to car. He adjusted his voice to a reedier tone to make his body seem more frail. I disliked his act and refused to give him money. A few minutes later, when I got on the platform, I saw a blind man. His long white stickended in a tennis ball, and he swept it in a limited arc in front of him and to his side, and when he came close to falling (so it seemed to me) off the edge of the platform, I went up to him and asked if I could help. Oh no, he said, oh no, I’m just waiting for my train, thank you. I left him and walked the length of the platform, toward the exit. I was confused to see, just at that moment, another blind man, who also carried a long white stick with a tennis ball at its end, and who, ahead of me, climbed the stairs out into the light.
    I got the idea that some of the things I was seeing around me were under the aegis of Obatala, the demiurge charged by Olodumare with the formation of humans from clay. Obatala did well at the task until he started drinking. As he drank more and more, he became inebriated, and began to fashion damaged human beings. The Yoruba believe that in this drunken state he made dwarfs, cripples, people missing limbs, and those burdened with debilitating illness. Olodumare had to reclaim the role he had delegated and finish the creation of humankind himself and, as a result, people who suffer from physical infirmities identify themselves as worshippers of Obatala. This is an interesting relationship with a god, one not of affection or praise but of antagonism. They worship Obatala in accusation; it is he who has made them as they are. They wear white, which is his color, and the color of the palm wine he got drunk on.
    It had been months since I had last been to a movie. At around ten, I entered a bookshop, one of the famous chains, to kill some time before the film began, and as I went in I remembered a book I had wanted to look at for a long time: a book of historical biography by one of my patients. I found it quickly—
The Monster of New Amsterdam
—and settled in among the quieter stacks to read it. V., an assistant professor at New York University and a member of the Delaware tribe, had based the book on her doctoral dissertation at Columbia. It was the first comprehensive study of Cornelis Van Tienhoven. Van Tienhoven had been notorious as a seventeenth-century
schout
of New Amsterdam, officially empowered to enforcethe law among the Dutch colonists of Manhattan Island. He had arrived in 1633, as a secretary for the Dutch East India Company, but as he climbed up the social ladder, he became known for his many brutal acts, notable among them a raid he led to murder Canarsie Indians on Long Island, after which he had brought back the victims’ heads on pikes. In another raid, Van Tienhoven had been at the head of a party of men that murdered over a hundred innocent members of the Hackensack tribe. V.’s book made for grim reading. It was full of violent events, and in the endnotes were reprinted the relevant seventeenth-century records. These were written in calm and pious language that presented mass murder as little more than the regrettable side effect of colonizing the land. In its patient recounting of these crimes,
The Monster of New Amsterdam
was like those biographies of Pol Pot, Hitler, or Stalin that almost always did well on the bestseller lists. A sticker on the cover of the copy I was holding indicated that it had been nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award. The blurbs on the flyleaf, written by leading American historians, were fulsome, praising the book for shedding light on a forgotten chapter in colonial history. From time to time during the previous couple of years, reading the newspaper, I had seen some aspect of this critical acclaim, and for this reason, I had heard V.’s name and had some sense of her professional success before she ever became my patient.
    When I began treating her for depression at the beginning of last year,