From one of Mexico’s most exciting young writers, a cosmopolitan and candid essay collection exploring life in cities across the world and reflecting on the transformative importance of literature in understanding ourselves
In ten intimate essays, Daniel Saldaña París explores the cities he has lived in, each one home to a new iteration of himself. In Mexico City, he’s a young poet eager to prove himself. In Montreal, an opioid addict desperate for relief. In Madrid, a lonely student seeking pleasure in grotesque extremes. These now diverging, now coalescing selves raise questions: Where can we find authenticity? How do we construct the stories that define us? What if our formative memories are closer to fiction than truth?
Saldaña París turns to literature and film, poetry and philosophy for answers. The result is a hybrid of memoir and criticism, “a sensory work, full of soundscapes, filth, planes, closed spaces, open vastness” (El País).
Notes on the Fetishization of Silence
Until just lately, I was living in another city—to the north, far north, too far north. For half the year, the windows of my apartment remained closed twenty-four seven: it was an old building and the ice used to jam the mechanism for opening them. The subzero temperatures, the hail and snow from November to April—sometimes even May—made any form of spatial communion impossible: outside, the frozen waste; inside, the refuge. The frontier between them was doing its level best to be impassable: steamed up or frosted double-glazing. It was, then, a muffled home with wooden flooring.
For six months, without interruption, the only sounds were the creaking of the floorboards, the scuttling of the mice inside the walls, water filling the central heating radiators—ancient, painted metal monstrosities standing by the walls. Sound was something that happened indoors. Like when you submerge your head in a bathtub and hear only your own movements, the flow of blood, the dark viscera pulsing in their slow but steady jog toward the tomb.
In such conditions, house and body perform a species of mirrored dance. The rumbling of the pipes stretching as they woke would make me focus my hearing on my digestive system—slow as a lazy mule, made sluggish by the quietness of everything. The rat-a-tat of the frozen rain—neither hail nor snow: a midpoint between the two—would set my nerves on edge: sharp, pointy nerves like the icicles on the church across the street. The scratching of the rodents’ feet sounded like something murky living inside me and trying to find a way out. And so it was with everything. You might say that an unsettling harmony reigned there.
Once a day, I’d force myself to leave the house to walk for a while. The sidewalks, bordered by snow on either side, became rough country lanes. The gaunt faces of pedestrians, swathed to the eyeballs in winter clothing, passed like ghosts: the footsteps of others made no noise; only my own, crunch-crunching the ice, forming cold footprints that a flurry of snow would soon blur. And the bequilted children pulled on sledges along those wintery paths like miniature despots of a very civil tundra—timid Mongols whispering orders to their horses, courteous Huns on snow-white roads—rarely cried.
So, every afternoon I’d walk to my regular haunt, a café archetypically called Club Social, where my hearing would be quickly restored by the Romance hubbub of the Italians, a dearly longed-for sound, vaguely familiar but also strange: words deformed by centuries and migrations; Latin cackles allied to Anglo howls; orders for cappuccinos yelled in macaronic French, with vowels tripping over themselves—vowels muffled by the leaden weight of the damned snow. There in the Club Social on Rue Saint-Viateur, I’d sit for a while to warm up, surrounded by a very particular, even slightly predictable buzz—but at least a noise—that to some extent replaced the non-existent late December sun.
Later, on my way back home—that incredible, almost soundproof shell—I’d stop in at the bakery frequented by the Hasidic Jews, who would continue grumbling in Yiddish on their cell phones while ordering a dozen rugelach from the Chinese assistant behind the counter.
At night, the sound of the gigantic snowplows would sometimes interrupt my sleep, passing through the double glazing like a dim but still recognizable memory: whistles, motors, crash crash, metal shovels hitting the cold asphalt.
Spring wasn’t the rush of joy you see in cartoons, but a constant flow of liquids, a slow drip-dripping: life connected to the saline pack of the thaw. On the roof, walled-in rivers reemerged, drains that suddenly sprang to life and channeled the water from the highest tiles to the barren earth. The icicles hanging from the church, ping ping, gradually losing their shape to become dirty puddles from which drank the first squirrels to appear on the sidewalks.
In some sense, conversation also unfroze; in the street, polyglot profanities could be heard, and the splashing of car tires through the blackish, watery mud that goes by the onomatopoeic name of slush.
Returning to live in Mexico City has involved, above all else, returning to a noise that, however familiar, still jars. The transition hasn’t been simple. On the first nights, I woke every half hour, startled by the howling of the neighbor’s dog, a helicopter passing overhead, two people chatting by the elevator of my building. Punctually, at 3 a.m., a series of descending planes would rouse me. At times, resigned to the interruption of my dreams, I’d go to my seventh-floor balcony and listen to the distant motors of the trucks on the Eje, the sirens, a party refusing to die down two floors below. The constant din, impossible to shut out, was driving me crazy.
After a few days, I bought a packet of earplugs that at least allowed me to sleep more deeply. In the metrobus, I got into the habit of wearing headphones at all times—even if nothing was coming through them—to partially drown out the din of the city, which attained seriously harmful levels of sonic interference. In the café where I used to sit and work, I took to listening to white noise via an app I downloaded on my phone to block out the bachata music coming from the speakers and the conversation of other customers.
Those early days after landing in Mexico City were followed by others, when I experimented with a wide variety of possibilities. I began to follow a podcast about urban sonic environments that had an episode dedicated to different cities, so that one day I found myself crossing Parque Hundido while listening to the street cries of New Delhi. The fissure that opened between the sound of one city and the vision of another later allowed me to recover a certain form of surprise at the music of the Mexican capital.
“Last night, the big gray cat of my childhood came to me. I told him that noise stalks and harries me,” writes Antonio di Benedetto in The Silentiary. After an hour spent listening to a program on the sonic landscape of Copenhagen, the distant whistle of the camotero with his cartload of sweet potatoes seemed to me—how can I put it?—exotic, and only through that exoticization was I able to bear the harassment that Di Benedetto refers to.
Maybe there’s nothing for it but to accept the noise, welcome it, resign yourself to it, or seek out its unsuspected characteristics, like when you learn to stroke an animal on the part of its flank that it likes best.
I can’t say that the reconciliation has been complete, but there is a tacit recognition that living cities speak, they howl, they shatter the whole night in a crashing of glass. We, their inhabitants, can shudder with impotent rage, buy ever more sophisticated earplugs, or create a level of silence in our beds by putting a pillow over our heads, or closing our eyes in the shower, or in the darkness of a room, or standing at a window only to discover that others are looking at us from identical windows across the street.
In The Soundscape, the book that coined that term “sonic environment,” Murray Schafer speaks of the need to view silence positively: “If we have a hope of improving the acoustic design of the world, it will be realizable only after the recovery of silence as a positive state in our lives. Still the noise in the mind: that is the first task—then everything else will follow in time.”
The Norwegian explorer Erling Kagge (the first human to reach the South Pole, the North Pole, and the summit of Everest, and whom I met one afternoon in the clammy heat of the airport in Medellín), in Silence: In the Age of Noise, describes an experiment carried out in the universities of Harvard and Virginia: a group of people were offered the choice of sitting silently in an empty room with no distractions or receiving painful electric shocks. Almost half the participants chose the electric shock over passing a short while in silence.
I wonder if I’d have formed part of that masochistic group who chose the electric shock or been one of the silent meditators. A few months ago, during the long northern winter, I would, without a moment’s hesitation, have plumped for the silence. Nowadays, I’m not so certain.
All meditation techniques speak of the importance of breathing in the attempt to “still the noise in the mind.” The problem is that one breathes differently in different places. I was born in this noisy city and didn’t immediately learn to breathe well. They put me in an incubator, and after a few hours of observation, the doctors decided I’d be able to learn on my own and sent me home. But I didn’t learn. At school, I used to forget to breathe correctly. Asthma sent me to another, warmer city at a lower altitude and, in those days—and perhaps still—less noisy. In each of the cities I’ve inhabited—whether the bustle of Madrid or the silence of the northern city mentioned earlier—I’ve had to learn anew how to breathe. But in Mexico City I’m constantly learning. I retain air for a whole minute and then exhale in puffs, I take three or four large gulps and then pause, unconsciously holding my breath again. I’m a little like someone who knows how to swim, but only out of the water.
The labored rhythm of my respiration has a sound of its own that I’m unaware of. At times, while I’m reading, my wife says, “You’re breathing really heavily,” and then I realize that I’m making a lot of noise, breathing like a dog having a nightmare or a pig someone is trying to push along. It isn’t a smooth, even breathing that, in the hypnosis of reading, becomes a hum, but a hurried respiration that trips over itself, gets jammed, and generates a broken form of music.
It’s the music of me being alive.
In the northern city, that city that is too far north, I used to breathe differently, as if everything were going to reach me without my having to do anything—as if, ah, there would never be a lack of air, not even in that vacuum-packed apartment. My respiration was a well-oiled mechanism, remote, like the constellations. I used to move from place to place like a smart car. Here, by contrast, it’s as if I’m driving a lawnmower, a dirty machine with awkward blades that might cut off your arm if you’re not careful.
My silence is a bubble in the interior of that machine (the ghost in it); a bubble that miraculously floats and endures, always in danger of being burst by the rusty metal.
Translated by Christina MacSweeney
Planes Flying over a Monster is out now from Catapult.
