It’s clear that the personal computer is the great modern attack on good old-fashioned voyeurism. From the moment these machines were installed in our homes, the irreversible process of the degeneration of character began and ruled out the possibility of anyone doing anything interesting for the delight of their voyeuristic neighbor. Impossible, since the advent of Facebook and Twitter, for anyone to commit a spectacular crime in his living room or to conduct a good affair (dirty, delectable, and detectable). Indiscreet rear windows to other lives no longer exist because everything happens inside those smaller, more circumspect Windows on our computer screens.
Three
On the streets of this part of the city — a pluperfect grid — everyone is in rectilinear transit and no one converges on a single point. There’s almost nowhere suitable for an out-of-hours get-together or meeting — except, maybe, the laundry rooms in the basements of buildings, where the washing machines are located. But these Dantesque infernos of cyclical hygienic tortures are almost always empty, and even when I come across a neighbor there, I go out of my way to avoid conversation since the topic will inevitably dry up more quickly than the laundry and I’ll be forced to start saying things I really don’t want to.
There’s nothing to talk about with the people who live in this building. Gilberto Owen, the Mexican poet who resided in this very same area over eighty years ago, knew why: the worst defect of neighbors here is their incapacity for properly bad-mouthing each other. Not only is that fundamentally true — but the current reality is worse still. Today our neighbors are always happy, always excited about something, always doing great, really great, never openly disillusioned, never ever unsuccessful, properly depressed, or decently full of spite.
So, I’ve found that if I want to live in harmony with the world, the best thing is to scarcely cross glances with the Neo-Manhattoes of this neighborhood, not to exchange a single word, still less a telephone number or e-mail address in the supermarket aisle. If I’m forced to share an elevator, I give, at most, a cordial nod. If I go to the laundry room, I stick to the silent ceremony of the soap powder. And outside in the street, nothing beats carrying an umbrella, under whose sheltering arch I can hide from the gazes of others.
Four
It’s often said that modernity began with the erosion of the frontiers between the private and the public and the consequent leap into the abyss of ubiquitous intimacy. Could be. But nowadays, to be true to the Delphic exhortation my night doorman regularly evokes — Know thyself — it’s no longer appropriate to retreat into the interior. Even in our private spaces, we’re increasingly engulfed by the expansionist empire of Google and spied on by the phantasmagorical armies of all our close and distant acquaintances. There’s nowhere to go — and the windows give no shelter, the screens no relief.
Five
Ishmael, the sailor, knew that he should set out to sea when he began to feel the irresistible urge to systematically remove the hats of passersby with the tip of his umbrella. I know I should leave my house when Moby-Dick takes on a more robust existence than my own: “[et] le monde bat de l’autre côté de ma porte”—“and the world beats on the other side of my door.”
Sometimes I go out into the street just for the sake of it.
But even there you can’t be with yourself. In spite of Edgar Allan Poe’s early and wise dictum — we are always alone when we are a man in a crowd — every time I go out on my own, I have to discover all over again that being alone is not equivalent to being with myself. Or worse, that my own company is not necessarily the best company.
We live in a world in which there has been a complete inversion of the status of the street as the public space and the house as the ultimate private space. In this redistribution of the private — public categories it’s difficult to know when we’re really inside and when out. I say this without the least hint of nostalgia. In the street we can no longer commune with solitude, and even in our own homes, we can’t be with ourselves without the windows of computers claiming our already deficient attention or the neighbors installing themselves in the backyard of our brains: there’s the Chinese guy opposite opening his fridge, and there he goes to sit in front of his rectangular, electronic furnace. So our only option is to construct small, fleeting intimacies in other spaces. My doorman is right.
Six
A doorman is the owner of the only privileged space in this city. Standing proud and upright, smoking in front of the facade of his building or leaning back in a chair in the lobby, the doorman is the guardian, the modern Cerberus, who watches over the imprecise limits between the public world and the private.
If there still exists a gaze blessed with liminal wisdom, it is the gaze of night-shift doormen. They are the only true freethinkers — generous men capable of conversing intelligently at midnight; empathetic accomplices, offering the consolation of a companionship replete with the same reprehensible vices you yourself have and defend. In contrast to all the other people in my building, the night-shift doorman smokes, doesn’t have a computer, complains about all sorts of things, and bad-mouths the neighbors to anybody willing to listen. The latter being worth its weight in gold: we never learn more about ourselves than when listening to one person bad-mouthing another.
Only in that liminal space, under the umbrella of his company, do I feel safe from the claustrophobic categories of outside and inside. And although I still don’t fully understand why my doorman, who doesn’t even sleep at night, urges me to borrow bedrooms and rent hotel rooms far from my home, I suspect that he’s absolutely right.
I’ve often thought about taking his advice: You’ve got to build a life in other rooms, I repeat to myself. You have to look at yourself in the mirrors of other bathrooms more often, he reminds me. And when the two of us have stubbed out our cigarettes and gone inside, he poses like a sphinx at the reception desk and I, who should, at that very moment, take the subway to any other place and sleep in any other room, call the elevator and press seven.
PERMANENT RESIDENCE
The first time I fell madly in love with Venice; now
I believe I am always in love with her, but were I to marry her,
it would be a marriage of convenience.
Ezra Pound (1885–1972)
“I am resolved not to die,” wrote Miguel de Unamuno. Although there are people who find some form of salvation in the last and happy turn of the screw — the postscript to an existence that has borne rich fruit — the rest of us should take care that the little we leave behind doesn’t turn against us. If not, we’ll go on uttering metaphysical vagaries two meters underground, like Unamuno: “I neither want to die nor do I want to want to die; I want to live for ever and ever and ever.”
None of this would worry me if it were not that some days ago, while I was wandering aimlessly around the center of Mexico City, passing the time before a doctor’s appointment, I ended up going into what I thought was a garden and turned out to be a small cemetery. Not just any cemetery, but San Fernando, the very graveyard that houses the tombs of Mexico’s national heroes and founding fathers: Juárez, Miramón, Comonfort, Guerrero, and Zaragoza. I had a book with me and all I wanted was to sit and read in a silent space until the hour of my appointment arrived. The guard at the entrance, like all those who stand vigil at the doors of official precincts in this city, barred my way and interrogated me. I’m not looking for anything or anyone in particular, I told him, I just want to sit here and read. He replied that the San Fernando wasn’t a library, but that if I wanted to go in to see the tomb of the Father of the Americas — Benito Juárez — I should put my name, the date, time of entry, and signature in the small book he held out to me. And while you’re at it, he said, put the exit time here.