Faces in the Crowd by Valeria Luiselli Read Free Book Online

landscape begins, with the double depth, or what they call the fourth dimension, of time.”
    *
    Dakota liked my dead tree. And I liked her liking it.
    It keeps me company and we talk about lots of things, she once said.
    And what does it say to you?
    It doesn’t say anything, it’s dead.
    She watered it while I was away on a work trip. Spring had arrived and flowers were blooming everywhere. The narcissi are always first, Dakota explained, that way they do some kind of poetic justice to their namesake’s eagerness to be seen. But the tree wasn’t budding. When I got back from my trip, Dakota had made me fish and spring greens. We drank a bottle of wine. She told me she wanted to leave her boyfriend, and asked if she could live with me for a while, until she found a place of her own.
    Why are you leaving him?
    I’m not sure.
    Dakota had beautiful features. She liked to say she had a ravaged face—she’d read Marguerite Duras in her early twenties and had got the idea that beauty was a French kind of thing. And perhaps that was true. Dakota looked a little like Anaïs Nin and had her hair cut short like Jean Seberg in À bout de souffle .
    *
    Moby wasn’t interested in the tree holding Owen’s future story. He used to hang his gloves on it when he came to the apartment, as if it were a hat stand.
    *
    I never unearthed anything important or revealing during my library searches, but I lied to White. I told him that, in the small, disorganized library of Columbia University’s Casa Hispánica, I had found an original, badly typed and barely legible, in which were a series of annotated translations of poems by Owen. The translations were almost certainly by Zvorsky, I said: They’re signed JZ&GO. It was the most unlikely of all possible lies about Owen, and White never believed it, but he decided to go along with me. I promised to bring him my own literal transcriptions of the text. I was hanging my hopes on the idea that, by making Owen sound like Zvorsky, I could convince White to publish him.
    *
    Dakota moved in with me. She turned up with a grass-green suitcase in one hand and a new bucket in the other. When I didn’t spend the night elsewhere, we both slept in my bed, though Dakota almost always got back very late from work. She would get into bed naked and put an arm around my equally bare waist. She had soft, heavy breasts; small nipples. She used to say she had philosophical nipples.
    *
    My husband has started reading some of these pages again. Did you use to sleep with women? he asks.
    *
    If you really want to get under a person’s skin, make an accusation about their moral hygiene. That’s what Salvatore used to say. He was an elderly biologist from Naples who lived on the tenth floor of my building. Salvatore and I met in the elevator. He had a tangle of white hair on his head, a hooked nose, enormous nostrils edged with crusts of snot. We were both going to the basement, where the washing machines and the trash cans were located. I was carrying a bag of dirty laundry; he his trash. He wasn’t carrying trash, he had junk in a gray suitcase. Stuff, he said when I asked him what he had in there. Standing by the trash cans, he took out his things, separated them into small piles, and slowly deposited them in the different containers. Standing by one of the machines, taking longer than usual to carry out my modest hygiene ritual, I watched him out of the corner of my eye. The last thing he took out was an old record player. I went over and asked if it worked. Yes, it did. He let me take it back with me. I’ll give you some records later, he said. He never kept his promise. But one day he invited me to dinner on the tenth floor.
    *
    But have you ever slept with a woman? my husband asks again. No, never, I reply. I wouldn’t know how.
    *
Note: Owen used to weigh himself every day before getting on the subway. There was a weighing machine in the 116th Street station that confirmed his belief that he was