City of all cities

When I set my foot again into the city, she greeted me like she always had before: embracing me, grabbing me to take me out for a dance, pretending she could be mine for a moment or for a lifetime, whatever I chose it to be.

All the while I knew that she might spit me out at any moment. She would do the same to anybody no matter whether they had come for a moment in a pretentious quest for luck and glory, with the firm intention to stay and to find a better live through hard work and thrift and or whether they had called her home for generations. She would accept anyone, people of all colours, tongues and aspirations. Their desire to find their luck in her, through her, is all for what she asks. Her tolerance is matched only by her callousness towards all those who fail to keep up with her dizzying tempo and who, instead of luck and glory, can find only loneliness or a path strewn with unsurmountable hurdles. At times, she had given me energy with an intensity that I had never known before. At others she seemed to strip me of my last heartbeat.

As I was riding from her unadorned suburbs to her sprawling center she slowly lured me into her world. She gave me brief glimpses of the wealth of colours, origins and stories of her people, arranged almost like in a kaleidoscope, as she sent them on and off the train. On the other side of the aisle a Mexican father was sitting with a child on his knees and the same expression of stoicism I had seen many years before on the faces of bus passengers in his native land. Maybe his long voyage had failed to improve much on the hardship and humiliations of his life. Or maybe he simply could not be bothered to rid himself of an attitude that had carried him through them before.

A little later three girls, barely fourteen, in all shades of black and brown hopped on to the train to pose and perform dance steps to the music from their headphones. One of them was tall and beefy, dressed a bit like a punk queen with an impressive afro-hairstyle to round off her look. She was giving the impression that she might throw herself to the floor and start breakdancing at any minute. The second, with an air of maturity and a round and sensual figure, chewed her gum without saying a word, while she was being hugged in permanence by her anemic boyfriend from behind. The third was the beauty queen of the band, small, with silk-like long hair and full of self-confidence, dressed in a sexy attire and acting as if she expected to be discovered any minute as a popstar on the train to the city centre. As I observed them I wondered whether children their age would ever come back to wearing hairstyles with outlines that look as though they had been cut around a pot sitting on their head. Would striped pullovers come back one day along with corduroy trousers that are too short and do not match the colours?

As I was still contemplating my own childhood, next on stage was a man dressed in rags dragging a little waggon behind him that was filled with a pile of random basic commodities he eagerly tried to sell to the audience: trashy romance novels from the 1960s, plastic tea pots and other household appliances, toys for the sandbox and condoms. All the while he was playing music from a half-broken tape deck, shaking his greasy hair as best he could under his woollen hat and looking at us through his sunglasses. I marveled at the impassive subway passengers around me who barely seemed to notice this bizarre appearance. Suddenly a faint memory of Jenny sprang to my mind as she walked up to a doorman during an earlier visit to the city asking where she could catch a taxi to the Upper East Side . "Come on", the doorman hollered at us, " country girls like to walk!"

This it what makes me so uneasy in this city: it constantly seems to unmask me as a country girl.

By the time we reached our final destination for that day, Hervé's apartment in a quiet residential neighbourhood close to one of the city's universities, I felt as if I had never left town. As I walked through the streets amidst hurrying investment bankers in high heels - this time around probably worrying more about their jobs than about their next deal - Mexican streetsweepers, bartenders from the Midwest, artist-waiters from Argentina, Korean shopkeepers and doctors from Iran, I felt as though I was one of them. Submerged into this mass of people from everywhere I had suddenly become again a citizen of this city of all cities.

I remembered the Afghani doctor who had once told me at a christmas party in her Central Park West apartment with a view of the park and the skyscrapers: "The world meets in this city". Like nowhere else.