Every Person I Interviewed Remembers a Different City

The building was a former feed store on a side street in El Paso, converted sometime in the early nineties into a coffee shop that still smelled faintly of grain dust when the afternoon heat bore down on the walls. The menu was laminated, the tablecloths were checked vinyl, and there was a framed photograph of a bullfight behind the counter that no one had hung there on purpose — it had simply always been there, the way certain objects in border cities outlast every tenant and every lease. Talese noticed it immediately. He stood in the doorway for a full minute, studying the image, before he sat down and said, “That matador is dead. I know the photograph. That’s Ordóñez. The son.”

Solnit arrived from a walk. She had been walking since six that morning, she said, from the hotel down to the river and along it, then back through the neighborhoods south of the railroad, and she carried the walk with her the way some people carry weather — it was in her rhythm, her slightly flushed face, the way she sat down as if her body were still in motion even while stationary.

I had chosen El Paso because the piece I was writing demanded it. A journalist returns to a border city to cover the demolition of its last newspaper building. The newspaper folded years ago, but the building persisted — abandoned, then a storage facility, then abandoned again — and now it was coming down for a parking structure. The journalist had worked at that paper early in her career. She’d written a story there that made her reputation. She later discovered, or came to believe, that the story was wrong.

“Wrong how?” Talese said. He said it the way a tailor says it when you describe a suit that doesn’t fit — not with alarm but with professional interest in where the construction had failed.

“Wrong in the way journalism is usually wrong,” I said. “Not fabricated. Not dishonest. But shaped. She interviewed twelve people about a cross-border smuggling operation, and the story she wrote reflected a particular arrangement of those twelve accounts, and the arrangement produced a narrative that was clean and legible and, she now suspects, not what actually happened.”

“That is not wrong,” Talese said. “That is journalism.”

Solnit laughed. It was not a dismissive laugh — it had warmth in it, recognition. “That’s the most honest thing anyone has ever said about the profession. And it’s also the reason I never trusted it.”

“You don’t trust journalism?”

“I don’t trust the form. The conventions. The pyramid, the nut graf, the pretense of objectivity that is really a pretense of omniscience. I trust journalists sometimes. Some of them. The ones who know they’re telling a story and not transcribing reality.”

Talese was quiet for a moment. He was wearing a suit — of course he was wearing a suit, in El Paso, in the heat — and he straightened his cuffs before he spoke, which I came to understand was a gesture he performed when he was considering whether to be generous or precise, and usually chose precise.

“I spent years inside other people’s lives,” he said. “I lived with them. I ate with them. I watched Frank Sinatra not sing. I watched a bridge builder not die. The convention you dismiss — the immersive reported scene, the journalist disappearing into the world he describes — is not a pretense of omniscience. It is a discipline of attention. You sit in the room long enough that the room forgets you are there, and then the room shows you what it actually looks like.”

“And you write it down and select which parts to include and call the result the truth.”

“I call it a story. I have always called it a story. The title of my book is not ‘The Truth About Thy Neighbor.’ It is a story, told with the techniques of the novel, about people whose lives I entered with their consent and left having taken something from them. I know what I took. I have never pretended otherwise.”

This was the nerve I had been hoping they would find — the question of what the journalist takes, and whether consent covers it. Because the piece I was writing was fundamentally about a woman who returns to a city she reported on and discovers that the story she took from it did not match what the city remembers. Not because she lied, but because reporting is a kind of demolition too — you disassemble a situation into quotes and scenes and chronology, and what you build from the materials is yours, not theirs.

“Janet Malcolm,” Solnit said. “You’re writing about Janet Malcolm.”

“I’m writing about a journalist in El Paso.”

“You’re writing about what Malcolm wrote about. The moral problem at the center of every journalist-subject relationship. The journalist who befriends the source and then uses what the friendship reveals. Malcolm called it a kind of confidence game. She was right. She was also describing herself, which is what made the book devastating — the critic performing the crime she names.”

“Malcolm was not performing a crime,” Talese said. “Malcolm was describing a condition. The condition of telling someone else’s story. There is no clean way to do it. There is only the attempt to do it well, and the willingness to know what it costs.”

“Costs whom?”

“Everyone. The subject, who gives more than they intended. The journalist, who carries what she took. The reader, who receives a version and mistakes it for the whole.”

Solnit leaned back. She had ordered black coffee and was holding the cup with both hands, the way you hold something when you want to feel its heat. “I’m interested in the building,” she said. “The newspaper building. You keep talking about the journalist and the sources and the story she got wrong, but I want to talk about the building. Because a building is an argument. A building says: this institution exists, this institution is permanent, this institution has a physical presence in this city that you have to walk around. And when you demolish it, you are not just removing a structure. You are removing a claim.”

“What claim?”

“The claim that the city was observed. That someone was paying attention. A newspaper building in a border city says: what happens here is recorded, what happens here matters enough to write down. When the building comes down, that claim comes down with it. The parking structure that replaces it makes a different claim entirely — that this space is worth more as a place to leave your car than as a place where the city was watched.”

Talese nodded, slowly. “That is true. But the building is also a building. It has a boiler and a roof and stairwells and desks that were bolted to the floor. I am always suspicious of arguments that start with metaphor. Tell me about the physical building first. What did it smell like? How many floors? Where did the reporters sit?”

“Gay,” Solnit said, with a patience that was not quite patience, “I am not dismissing the physical. I am saying the physical is the argument. The boiler is the argument. The stairwell is the argument. When you describe a physical space with that much precision — and you do it better than almost anyone — you are not avoiding metaphor. You are building it from real materials. The metaphor is not incidental to the boiler. The boiler is the metaphor. It’s the thing that kept the building warm, and now it will be rubble, and nobody kept the city warm after that.”

I wrote that down. The boiler is the metaphor. It was the kind of sentence that sounds too neat when you write it in a notebook but that might, if I could find the right context for it, crack open the whole piece.

“Here is what worries me about this story,” Talese said. He poured water from a plastic pitcher the waitress had left. He poured it carefully, as if the pouring were a skill. “The journalist returns and discovers she was wrong. That is a confession narrative. Confession narratives are inherently self-regarding. The writer says: I failed, and the reader is meant to admire the courage of the admission. But courage is not the point. The point is the failure. What did the failure do? Who was affected? A confession that does not follow the consequences of the failure into other people’s lives is not journalism. It is therapy.”

“I agree with half of that,” I said. “She can’t just confess. She has to report the consequences. But — ”

“But the consequences are that every person she interviews remembers a different city,” Solnit said. “That’s what you told me. Twelve people, twelve versions. The newspaper published one. And now the building that housed the one version is coming down, and the twelve versions are still out there, in twelve different memories, and none of them match, and the essay is about the gap between the published version and the remembered versions and the actual city, which is a fourth thing entirely, which no one has access to.”

“There is no fourth thing,” Talese said. “There is only the reporting. You go back. You interview the twelve people again. You see what they say now and how it differs from what they said then. You document the discrepancies. You do not interpret the discrepancies — you present them, and you let the reader sit with the discomfort of twelve truths that cannot all be true.”

“But that’s exactly the move that produced the problem in the first place,” Solnit said. “Going back, interviewing people, selecting quotes, arranging them. You’re asking her to use the instrument that failed to investigate the failure. That is not a solution. That is a repetition.”

“All journalism is repetition. You go back. You ask again. You write it down again. The repetition is not a flaw. It is the method.”

“The method is the flaw. That’s what Malcolm was saying. The method — the going back, the asking, the intimacy of the interview, the betrayal of the publication — is both the tool and the wound. You cannot separate them.”

Talese’s face did something complicated. I thought for a moment he was angry, but it was closer to the expression of a man recognizing something he had known for decades and preferred not to articulate. “Malcolm was not wrong,” he said, finally. “She was not wrong about the condition. But she wrote about it from the position of the journalist, and I think your piece needs to be written from the position of the city. The city is the one that was reported on, and misreported, and then abandoned when the newspaper closed, and is now watching the building come down. What does the city remember? Not what do the twelve people remember — what does the city itself know?”

“Cities don’t know things,” Solnit said. “But they hold things. Streets hold the routes that people walked on them. Buildings hold the arguments that were made inside them. The river holds — well, the river holds the border, which is the most contested thing a body of water can hold. If you walk through El Paso right now, the city is holding a hundred years of crossings and deportations and families and commerce and violence and ordinary Tuesday afternoons, all at once, layered on top of each other like geological strata. The newspaper building is one layer. When you remove it, you don’t erase the layer. You expose the one underneath.”

“What’s underneath?” I asked.

“That’s what the essay has to find out.”

I told them about the detail that haunted me — the journalist, on her first day back in the city, going to the site of the building and finding that she cannot remember which side of the street it was on. She has been there hundreds of times. She wrote her first significant story in that building. And she cannot, standing on the sidewalk in the sun, remember if it was on the left or the right.

Talese’s eyes changed. Something focused. “That is the opening,” he said. “That is where you begin. A woman standing on a street she knows, unable to locate a building she worked in. Do not explain it. Do not interpret it. Describe her standing there. Describe the sun. Describe the traffic. Let the reader feel the vertigo before the reader knows why it matters.”

“That’s a novelistic instinct,” Solnit said. “And it’s a good one. But I’d start walking. I’d put her in motion. She arrives at the airport, she rents a car, she drives through the city, and the city is both familiar and wrong — the same streets but different businesses, the same light but something has shifted, and the essay is the walk through that wrongness, trying to locate what has moved.”

“The city didn’t move. She moved.”

“They both moved. That’s what happens when you leave a place and come back. You carry one version. The place carried on becoming another. The dissonance between them is not a failure of memory. It is evidence that time passed.”

“Time always passes,” Talese said. “That is not interesting. What is interesting is what is built and what is torn down and who decided. The demolition of the building is a decision. Someone signed a permit. Someone hired a crew. The essay should find that person. The essay should sit in that person’s office and describe the desk and the permits and the coffee cup and the photograph on the wall, and through those objects the reader should understand what it means to authorize the destruction of the place where a city was watched.”

“You want the bureaucrat,” I said.

“I want the scene. The bureaucrat is in the scene. The scene is what makes the abstract real. You can write ten thousand words about the death of local journalism and it will read like an op-ed. Or you can describe a man signing a piece of paper in an office with fluorescent lights, and the reader will feel in their stomach what the death of local journalism actually is.”

Solnit shook her head — not in disagreement, I thought, but in the way a person shakes their head when someone has said something correct that is also, from a certain angle, insufficient. “The scene is powerful. I don’t deny it. But the essay also needs to move. It needs to walk. It needs to follow the journalist through the city as she discovers that every interview she conducts produces a different city — that the cross-border smuggling story she wrote in 1998 is remembered by one source as a story about corruption, by another as a story about survival, by a third as a story about a woman named Dolores who is not mentioned in the published piece at all. The discrepancies are not errors. They are the actual city, the one that exists underneath the version the newspaper printed.”

“The woman named Dolores,” I said. “Who is she?”

“I don’t know. She’s the person the journalism left out. Every story has a Dolores — the figure who was there, who mattered, who didn’t make it into the final draft because she complicated the narrative. The essay should find her. Or find her absence. Find the hole in the original story where she should have been.”

Talese poured more water. The afternoon had shifted. The light through the feed-store windows was lower now, amber, and the bullfight photograph behind the counter looked different in this light — less like a trophy and more like a document, evidence of something that happened to a man and an animal in a ring somewhere in Spain, recorded by a camera and transported by accident to a coffee shop in El Paso where it meant nothing and everything, depending on who looked at it.

“The piece you are describing,” Talese said, “is about a journalist who discovers that she is not the protagonist of the story she wrote. She thought she was the observer. She was the instrument. The city was the subject. And the city has been living without her version for twenty years and has not missed it.”

“That’s cruel,” I said.

“It is true. And truth in journalism is often cruel. The city does not need the journalist. The journalist needs the city. That asymmetry is the moral center of the piece, and if you flinch from it, the piece will be dishonest.”

Solnit finished her coffee. She set the cup down and looked out the window, at the street, at the cars moving slowly in the heat, at the particular quality of light that border cities have — a brightness that feels borrowed from two countries at once.

“I think the piece ends at the demolition,” she said. “I think she goes. I think she stands there and watches them take the building apart, and I think the essay describes the demolition the way Gay would describe it — every machine, every sound, every piece of debris — and while the building comes down, she is holding all twelve versions of the city that her sources gave her, and none of them match the building that is falling, and none of them match each other, and the essay does not reconcile them. It simply holds them. Twelve versions and a demolition. That is what journalism is. That is what journalism has always been.”

“You cannot end on the demolition,” Talese said. “You end on the detail after the demolition. The dust settling. A bird landing where the roof was. A man walking past the site without looking at it. Something small and specific that tells the reader: the city will continue, and it will continue without this building, and the story that was written inside this building is now in the same category as the stories that were never written — it is a version, one of many, and the city does not privilege it.”

“A bird,” Solnit said, skeptically.

“A bird, a car horn, a child on a bicycle. Something real. Something you observed with your own eyes that you did not have to invent or interpret. The last line of a piece of journalism should be something the writer saw, not something the writer thought.”

Solnit opened her mouth to argue this, and then closed it, and I could see her turning the idea over, testing it against her instinct to follow the thought rather than the image, and I could see that she was not convinced but was not entirely unconvinced either, and the silence between them had the quality of two people who have arrived at the edge of what a conversation can accomplish and are choosing, each for their own reasons, not to push further.

The waitress brought the check on a plastic tray. Talese picked it up, examined the total with the attention he would give a census record, and placed a folded bill on top of it without comment. Solnit was already standing, already reaching for her bag, already, I suspected, beginning the next walk in her mind — the route through the city that would take her past the building site, the river, the bridge, the places where versions of the city layered on top of each other like paint on a wall that no one had scraped in years.

“One more thing,” I said. “The title. I’ve been thinking of calling it ‘Sixty Versions of Juárez.’ Because by the time she’s done interviewing, she’ll have that many. Sixty versions of the same city. None of them the real one.”

“There is no real one,” Talese said. “There is only the one you choose to publish.”

Solnit was at the door. She turned back. “There is no real one,” she said. “That is not a failure. That is what a city is.”

They did not look at each other when she said it, but they had said the same thing, and they both knew it, and neither of them would have put it the way the other one did, and I sat at the table alone with the checked vinyl and the bullfight photograph and my notebook full of sentences I was not sure I could use, knowing that the piece would have to live inside that doubled agreement — no real version, only chosen ones — without collapsing it into a thesis, because the whole point was that the city resists the thesis, the city exceeds the version, the building comes down and the versions persist and the journalist stands in the dust holding a notebook that contains a fraction of a fraction, and calls it a story, and sends it out into the world, and the world receives it and mistakes it for the truth, the way the world always does, the way the world must, because the alternative — sixty versions, unreconciled, without a building to hold them — is not something a newspaper can print, or a reader can bear, or a city can survive, though the city does survive it, has always survived it, is surviving it right now, on both sides of the river, in the heat.