“I
have travelled a good deal in Inyo County.” Amazingly, I’ve only read parts of
Thoreau’s seminal book but have often thus paraphrased his humorously ironic
line from Walden, which captures perfectly the contrast
between my exhaustive exploration of the most remote parts of Eastern
California and surprising dearth of far-flung travels. Despite having spent
almost my entire life in the lower half of this state I’ve never been to
Mexico. Nor Canada. In fact, during my fifty-four years, I’ve only left the USA
one time: in 1993 my girlfriend, Elizabeth, went to Brazil on a small grant to learn
Portuguese—a requirement for obtaining her Spanish Language degree—and studied
for six months in Rio de Janiero at an institute for American students. She invited
me to join her for the seven weeks before my seasonal ranger job commenced. Of
course, I jumped at the opportunity. I wrote this story right after my return
and the ten-thousand impressions were still alive and kicking. But, twenty years
later I can still vividly smell the air, still see his strikingly handsome face
looking down into mine….He must be dead by now and had no idea what a lasting
gift he gave me, a stranger—a man he never even spoke to.
Anyone in Rio, of any age, would
instantly spot me for a tourist. It wasn’t just my shaggy blond hair or little
round glasses or my springy ranger-stride. I soon learned to change my walking
style, stopped wearing socks and untucked my shirt. I tried to look
world-weary, resisting my natural inclination to meet strangers’ eyes as an
offer of a friendly gesture. Only occasionally would I allow myself to stand on
streetcorners and openly gaze up at the tall buildings flanked by cliffs or
watch frigatebirds sailing across the narrow strips of sky overhead. Still,
even in this most-cosmopolitan of cities, something in the sharp glances from
people on the street told how plainly I stood out.
I’d come to Brazil to be with my
girl, Elizabeth, and finally check out a foreign country. She was sharing an
apartment in a swank establishment with three other Americans, all in their
early twenties. (Me, an old man of thirty-four.) I was largely on my own; the
girls, who’d been there for two months already, were in school together and
studying hard. I did most of the shopping, cooked and kept house, and during
the days would walk the streets or ride the bus just for unbeatable
people-watching but spent a large part of my time on our gorgeous beach which
was only minutes away. I learned enough Portuguese to buy things and order food
in restaurants, say hello and thank-you, but never tried to engage with the
culture; was never more than an observer. When we went out, Elizabeth was
already fluent enough to talk with the locals. So I found myself, isolated and
adrift, living in a city for the first time. And not just any city.
Ipanema
is one of the poshest parts of Rio—an upper-class island surrounded by the
Atlantic, those spectacular dome-shaped mountains of granite sheathed in jungle-green,
and a big lagoon with Copacabana right next door. Several of the most affluent parts
of town are bordered by the shabbiest favelas.
As with other developing countries, for decades there’s been a steady
migration of the poor and jobless from hinterlands to coastal cities. The
jungle-covered mountainsides here (state-owned) are apparently settled without
interference by any squatters who can muster a load of cheap bricks, a few
sacks of cement, and some corrugated tin. These slums are small cities in their
own right; thousands of little shacks mortared together and built on top of
each other in terraces often accessible only by foot. The government must provide some services but I have no idea how the people manage to get water
or where their waste goes. Not to mention electricity…but from one window of
our apartment on RuaVisconde de Pirajá I would look out at night towards
Corcovado and see the clearly-illuminated statue of Christ atop the broad band
of mountains all black behind city glow except for discreet patches of dim lights,
reaching upwards and revealing the contours of ridiculously steep slopes. Every
day the people who lived beneath those twinkling lights came down from an
entirely other world (where I could
never, ever go) to try and make a living. There’s money down there and ways to
get some of it…if only a little.
Our apartment was on the top
(eighth) floor of a building whose title consisted in part of the word edificia, with a portado to open the door for you at any hour. To one side of the
entrance was a crowded post office; on the other a very chic women’s clothing
boutique. Just beyond that, on both corners of the street, were big-time jewelry
stores. Across the way was an exchange house where we converted travellers’ checks
into Cruzieros. Brazil’s
inflation-rate was skyrocketing at the time and we watched our dollars’ value
grow in absurd leaps. (My share of the rent for those seven weeks came to $225.
A local working at minimum-wage would need something like eight months to make
that much money.) In the eyes of our friendly portado, who held the tall glass door open for me—and everyone else
on the street—I was an obscenely rich tourist from the wealthiest nation on Earth and was forced, from
the moment I got off that jet and entered my new world, to assume an attitude
towards the ever-present poverty. I’d looked forward to this confrontation: all
my life I’d seen photographs in magazines and newspapers of starving, impoverished
people…stared long into emaciated children’s haunted eyes on glossy paper or
newsprint. I’ve avoided some dissipated panhandlers in Berkeley and the Bronx
but had never yet seen almost-naked children sleeping on sidewalks or had a toothless
crone who could barely walk tug insistently on my sleeve with a look never seen
even in pictures. My imagination of what their lives are like had buffered the
encounter but, like everyone else in this position, I had to spin a protective
caccoon for insulation and face my trembling worldview. Options are few and
painfully obvious: you can continuously dole out coins to the endless parade of
hungry beggars, momentarily assuaging that Guilty American Conscience. You
could join some sort of relief-mission, which would effectively be a
meaningless (though noble) gesture. Or look the other way pretending not to
see—the only real option. When faced
with true poverty what you feel inside is always your own problem.
Walking toward Copacabana from our
building it took maybe two minutes to reach the first intersection. The entire
next block on one side was a City Park; I visited it only a couple of times but
walked past almost daily. There were well-tended shrubs and flowerbeds (no
grass) and plenty of wooden benches, a tall bronze statue of some military hero
spattered with bird-lime plus a bone-dry water-fountain. Broad-crowned shade trees—that
fill the older parks in Copacabana, making them so much more inviting—instead were
just surrounding much of this one’s perimeter inside a tall fence of spike-topped
iron bars. Ungated entrances at either end were each tended by terminally bored,
uniformed guards (employed, I suspect, mostly to prevent peasants from moving
in). There were always people with newspapers sitting on benches that were in shade,
nannies pushing baby carriages or with their charges in hand. On Tuesdays a
travelling farmers market filled that whole section of street and sidewalk on
the park side and toward the corner at the far end was a temporary nursery: tall
indoor shrubs in big pots, flowering plants for windowsills and tables in small
ones, bunches of roses—very pleasing to stroll through. Street merchants, with
their wares on little folding tables or spread out right on the sidewalk, sold
candy and toiletries, used books and clothes, cheap kitchen utensils. (I bought
a pair of finely-crafted leather sandals there—with rubber soles made of used
tire tread—for the equivalent of $8.)
Aside from days of rain or when the
farmers market was happening, a sort of extended family lived on the corner of
the park nearest our place. No telling how long they’d been there, but none of them
likely ever went inside the park except at night when they could finally sneak
into the thick bushes. But they were actually living on the broad, busy sidewalk of paved brick under shady trees,
right on the corner.
It was clearly more than a
biological family—there were several small children, a couple of
adolescent boys and two girls in their
teens, one of them very pregnant and the other with a months-old baby. The
matron was an immense, always-busy woman stuffed into her faded sarong. There
were no men in this clan; she was obviously the glue that held it together and
seemed to do all the chores herself. Walking past them daily, at all hours with
traffic flowing by ceaselessly, I tried to see as much as possible—the
situation made me intensely curious about how they managed—but their hands were
always out. Had I ever made the
mistake of giving any one of them something I’d have been targeted forever
after. But their world was laid out there on the sidewalk for anyone to see who
cared to look:
“Beds” were lined up lengthwise along
the base of the iron fence: pieces of cloth laid over cardboard or weathered
pieces of foam. Big metal cans for cooking and plastic buckets for
clothes-washing stacked by the curb with various plastic bags and wooden fruit
crates. On laundry days there was a
strong smell of bleach in the air; tattered clothes were hung on the fence to
dry. Every evening the matron—always talking and harried—stirred a big square
tin full of rice or beans cooking over a charcoal fire while kids played
together with nothing but imagination. Midday, in the stifling humidity, they’d
be sprawled on their cardboard pallets napping or the little kids and their dog
would just curl up in the middle of the sidewalk. The teenage mother would be leaning
against the wall in some shade, crooning and talking to the baby in her lap
while she picked lice from its hair. They were always half-watching all us busy
people stream by and when the likes of me walked by one open hand after another
would shoot out. In the evening after the farmers market there’d be broken
crates piled with smashed and over-ripe produce. They’d sit and talk in groups with
others of their status or silently watch the endlessly-shifting drama wearing
expressionless faces. There was a strong smell of urine following any rain. On
a busiest streetcorner in one of the richest districts of Rio de Janeiro, this
was Home….
On weekends, fifty yards further up
the sidewalk, an old man sat on an upended wooden box in amongst the potted shrubs
of “the nursery.” He always wore a limp brown suit with clean white shirt and
sat erectly with his arms pressed to his sides staring straight ahead across
the sidewalk at the iron park fence. Just as I’d walk up to him his gaze would
shift and he’d half look at me with his good eye—the other a grotesque, bluish
mass bulging horribly from its socket—and his open hand would slowly come
forward. I’d look into his face every time trying to not look at that eye. He
wore the perpetual, abject frown of a bitter and defeated man. I could feel him
holding tightly to his suffering vestiges of dignity; begging didn’t come
naturally to him like it did to members of “the family.” But I never gave him
more than my open face—again, if I’d ever
given anyone money it would’ve been
all over….
There was only one of the local beggars
who truly aroused my compassion; I called him “Skateboard-man.” The day after
arriving I saw both him and “the family” for the first time while going out to
lunch with my girl and new housemates. He was sitting on his skateboard talking
animatedly with two fellow street-people near the corner of the park by the nursery.
Stunned, I couldn’t resist staring that first time and even slowed down. Glancing
up from his lively conversation, laughing, we briefly made solid eye contact.
He had a very handsome, open face that radiated virile charm. I felt it instantly.
His features were classically masculine; a broad smile, curly brown hair and
short beard… sun-baked olive complexion. He wasn’t exactly a dwarf—his face and
head were of normal adult proportions—but he wouldn’t have stood more than three
feet tall even if he could stand on the
tiny, shrivelled legs that were awkwardly folded under him in a tangle. Those
useless appendages appeared to have stopped developing shortly after infancy. He
wore only a rakish cap and cheap nylon shorts made to fit a child. His hairy
chest bulged out with ribs protruding…two bony shoulders, much higher than the
base of his neck…skinny arms covered by dense, dark hair… spidery fingers with
ragged nails. He looked to be in his mid-thirties; it was hard to tell. As we
walked past I turned and stared; I’d never seen anyone out in public, on their
own, so grossly malformed. Still laughing, he turned from one man who was standing astride a bicycle to face the other,
maneuvering his board by pushing off the pavement with a foam-rubber sandal he
“wore” on his hand. This man was calm, self-assured, and clearly had both a
sense of humor and an air of intelligence. He was filthy.
I saw him at least a dozen times,
usually in the general area, often talking with people who appeared to be
friends or at least acquaintences, often smoking a bummed cigarette. He had no
backpack, no anything. Sometimes he was parked out of the way, gazing off
vacantly with sad face. Twice I saw him “at work,” begging from drivers stopped
at the busy intersection near our building and adjacent to the beach. Cripples
of all stripes seemed to take turns on this particular grass-covered median
strip. I watched him scoot down the line of idling cars that were waiting for
the light to change, pause at each to look up at the driver’s window, and several
times saw arms extend to offer bills (probably the almost worthless ones…) that
he accepted with his vibrant smile and the ubiquitous Brazilian thumb-up
gesture. Otherwise, I never saw him ask for handouts.
So
he intrigued me right from the start. Of course we never spoke but did look
into each others’ faces a few times. Whenever our paths crossed I tried to see
what was shining so brightly from his
twisted form. I felt…not pity, but compassion
mixed with admiration. It’s doubtful that Skateboard-man could read or write
and he’d never known any of the simple pleasures continuously taken for granted
by those of us whose legs work. In a certain sense Skateboard-man might be as
contented as me or anyone I know. He may or may not have had family but probably
knew love; he obviously had friends, was strong inside, capable, and superbly fit for an unchosen niche. There could
be a mathematician or poet or statesman latent inside him. Not to romanticize
his life (which was filled with miseries) but he did get around—under his own power—and was a Free Man in some ways many
might envy and that money can’t buy.
I
last saw him two days before leaving Brazil. Elizabeth and I’d spent the day in
the old City Center, a formerly-thriving place that’s an endless maze of
narrow, cobbled streets lined with shabby houses and shops selling cheap
merchandise. Wall-to-wall humanity. I was shocked by how very different it was
from Ipanema, how much poorer, and it made me realize what a skewed view of the
city I’d been harboring all along. We were on the long ride home, tired and
sweating and hanging on as our bus careened around corners. The open windows
served mostly to fan us with methanol-exhaust—so much a part of Rio’s aroma.
This bus wasn’t very crowded and at one stop an oldish man, fairly drunk, got
on and slumped into the empty seat in front of ours. He was pretty limp and
muttered to himself quietly. After a bit he turned to earnestly look us both in
the eye before speaking, at length, and with vehemence. We both looked away. He
disembarked soon and lurched off. As the bus pulled back into heavy traffic he was looking up and giving us
a thumb-up, smiling broadly, like we were all best of friends. “Well…what was that all about?” Elizabeth replied that
the gist of his speech had been, It sure
is hot! A few blocks later the bus pulled hard to the curb. A bunch of
people were waiting to get on and there with them was Skateboard-man.
We
were sitting just three seats back from the front door. People generally
enter buses at the rear then pay their
fare as they exit from the front. But public transportation is free for kids
wearing school uniforms, the elderly, the halt and lame. They enter from the front and I was very curious how he’d manage getting
on the bus but wasn’t able to see. A healthy young man climbed on holding the skateboard.
A well-dressed elderly woman, sitting in the single seat just behind the door,
looked down without a trace of any emotion in her face and got up to take another
seat. A simian arm covered with black hair but skinny as a child’s grabbed the
rail and Skateboard-man hoisted himself into the seat, looking up with a smile,
and thanked the old woman, Obrigado! The
young guy handed him his board (Obrigado!)
and took a seat nearby. Our driver patiently looked on and others watched with
mild interest; he was a colorful local fixture and no doubt—even in a jaded
town that had seen it all—aroused curiosity, scooting along the sidewalks on
his board (which, by the way, was the only one I saw while in Brazil). But this
incident took place without any expression
of emotion by participants or witnesses; instead I felt an aura of collective
compassion for “one of our own.” It was very civil.
After
we heaved back out into the traffic and hot, smoggy air I had ten minutes or so
to study his face and attempt to fathom his character—my first opportunity, really.
We’d picked him up in a pretty rough neighborhood where a big favela came sprawling down a
mountainside, almost to the edge of this major thoroughfare. It finally dawned
on me that he was truly mobile, could go almost anywhere in this huge city for
free. It was late and he was headed back toward Ipanema (where I’d always seen
him before) but, for a moment, thought he might actually live in the favela. Then I realized he couldn’t live
up there because it’d be impossible to
negotiate the steep lanes and stairways with his four-wheeled vehicle.
Like
the rest of us on the bus he was clearly tired and hot and ready to get off.
His right elbow was propped on the open window’s sill and his left hand held
onto its frame so he wouldn’t fly out of the seat going around corners. He kept
moving his arms and shifting his grip on the frame. His hands were gnarled and
knobby; surprisingly delicate fingers had a pronounced backwards flare from
years of pressing down from their tips in order to hitch himself around. Thick
hair covered his entire upper body, shoulders, arms and even backs of fingers.
With disproportionately long arms and strangely formed hands, along with the
bony shoulders, I was struck by how much his body was built and looked like a
chimpanzee’s. That dense hair—which could as easily be called “sparse fur”(with
skin showing through)—heightened the impression. (He could’ve easily ended up
in a sleazy circus freak-show, billed as “The Human Ape” or “Monkey-man.”
Perhaps there’d been offers of such employment.)
When
our bus had reached the western end of Copacabana I felt so enervated by the
humidity and exhaust fumes I suggested to Elizabeth that we get off and walk
home along the beach for the last mile to loosen our legs and lungs. She wanted
to head straight back and get in some studying but said, “You go…”so I decided to get off at the first stop after the tunnel
that separates Copacabana from Ipanema and started to make my way toward the
exit, hanging onto the overhead handrail. Several other people had already done
so and I fell in behind them.
Skateboard-man
was the only beggar I’d even considered giving money to. He’d shown me it’s
possible to live with class and find a degree of happiness even when you have
absolutely nothing—not even a sound body. I so admired the cheery verve he
applied in his quest to simply get by. But had I given him money I’d never want
to see him again. Here was my chance. A perfect opportunity had presented
itself; we’d never see each other again. Suddenly there were only seconds left to
choose: should I offer this man—who’d affected me in unexpected measure—a small
gesture of gratitude with the only currency I had to give? For some reason, I felt
torn…shy, self-conscious.
Moving
slowly toward the door I pulled out the money in my pocket while still hanging
on and managed to peel off a bunch of bills without looking to check their denominations.
Airbrakes squealed as the bus decelerated and pulled to the curb. We were filing
toward the exit and then only one passenger was in front of me with a few more
behind. I had my fare ready and, in the other hand, held a wad of bills that felt like lots of money—after all,
similar pieces of paper still have significant value back in the USA—but this
offering of some thousands of Cruzieros was
likely going to set me back somewhere between fifty cents and three dollars.
I
gave a fare-taker her due before starting down to the open exit’s landing,
right behind the last guy in front of me. Skateboard-man was holding onto the
window frame with one hand and his board with the other, staring vacantly at
his lap. Hoping to do this unobtrusively, I stood in the doorway and held up my
folded bills to catch his notice. I was completely rapt, intensely desiring something, but just as much wanted to be
far away. His eyes focused and he looked up, slowly and dramatically, to meet
the source of this unasked-for donation. Gazing at him from under the handrail,
doubtless with a fairly intense look, I saw that rich smile spread its wings. He
met my eye with a monumental expression, enigmatic yet familiar, that conveyed
many things. It froze me. I may flatter myself in thinking he recognized me (to
him, though, I might’ve been an interesting character…) but there was an
unexpected, friendly intimacy coming from those lively eyes as he fixed on
me—for a long, long moment—a look of utter gratitude. As if I were not just
another doner to his cause but a bringer of special gifts. (Later, I told
myself that it must have been the look bestowed on anyone who hands him money,
the effortless face of his innate charisma; I’d seen it before.) But, under its
surface, I felt empathy for our mutual plight as fellow travellers on The Long
Road; the cash had only brought me to his attention. As he reached for it I saw
a hint of humor in the wrinkles that fanned from his brown eyes—looking right into
mine—and kindness about the corners of that exceptionally broad mouth. This may
sound trite but what I felt above all the rest was something I can only think
to call forgiveness; as if he felt compassion for my need to feel
pity. But it took time to conceptualize these things…his face held so much.
I jumped off the bus in a sort of fog and,
dodging trucks and cars, somehow survived a sprint across many lanes of traffic.
This helped me return to myself after the precipitous escape and, walking back
to our apartment with heart still overflowing, I initiated a long process of trying
to fill in blanks. This went on for years. But I never could tell if he’d done
something to me or we’d done something to each other. The foremost question
that remains: what was it that Skateboard-man saw in my face?
“But every man is more than just
himself; he also represents the unique, the very special and always significant
and remarkable point at which the world’s phenomena intersect, only once in
this way and never again. That is why every man’s story is important, eternal,
sacred; that is why every man, as long as he lives and fulfills the will of
nature, is wondrous and worthy of every consideration. In each individual the
spirit has become flesh, in each man the creation suffers, within each one a
redeemer is nailed to the cross.”
—Hermann Hesse, from
the prologue to Demian
8
Jun 1993, 18 Feb 2013
© 2013 Tim
Forsell
All
rights reserved.
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