//far flung//
Fall 2012
Georgi
Eric Shapiro
When you spend too much time in a city, especially a foreign city, you grow mysteriously desensitized to life as it progresses around you. The majesty of the metropolis–any metropolis–is eaten away steadily, slyly, by the humdrum cadence of daily living. Suddenly what were once thrilling views and sounds become an inert backdrop to commonality. With each cobblestone tread under foot, hoards bumping apologetically all around, you’re thrust coolly into your pod of solitude: each man an eternity unto himself, another errant cell the urban universe. Ironically, there is nothing lonelier in this world than millions of people.
In my mind I’m followed by the memory of a casual day, walking home along Paseo del Prado, enjoying canary streetlamps lighting up old bonnets pushing grocery carts, picture-takers, young girls hanging onto their dinner dates. There’s a spring in my step, with each foot forward letting the beat of my melancholic monologue fill my headspace with cool. I look at my watch and note that I’ll be drunk in about two hours–did I mention I’m in Madrid?–and oh, goodness, there’s nothing wrong in life right now, not in my world. Amidst the tourist shops and cafeterias, the smudgy windows betraying casual espresso-sippers who fall in love with letting the world go by, head bobbing in time with an invisible rhythm, I hear a timid voice, a timid paw shaking timid coins covered with city soot, a pathetic plea for money. I pat down my right thigh to find some change: Monopoly money to me in this foreign land. Keys, phone…mierda, I think in my faux-bilingualism, me faltan monedas. My rhythm’s broken but I persist ahead in brokenness. I’m too ashamed to look the man in the eye, to smile, to shake his hand if mine is outstretched but empty.
Better to keep walking, my instinct tells me, though I feel each step shaming me further, further.
I guess it’s the accidental eye contact. Knowing he’s watching me, I grow guilty; in my guilt I remember my ethics. I take a few more steps and turn around, hoping he doesn’t notice that my most basic reaction was to ignore him. His face, clothes, and hair are plastered with grime, and his beard is an almost fashionable two-day-salt-and-pepper. He’s embarrassingly new to mendicancy. I stand there, feeling the air rush past in the wake of all those indifferent to our critical mass of humanness, we unhappy two, solitary obstacles keeping pedestrians from Nowhere.
“Que tal caballero–no tengo dinero pero le quiero comprar unos comestibles, ¿que quiere?” I ask the man as best as my halting Spanish allows if I can buy him something to eat. He fumbled his way back, and I assumed he was one of those picky ones, the trash-covered mendigos who claim to have just eaten and would prefer the pocket money for some reason. “¿Bocadillo?” Curious looks, few words. His eyes belie his fear of me, as if I might try to hurt him, to steal the 23 cents out of his coffee cup. It takes a while for me to realize that he cannot understand what I am asking him: he did not notice when I called him caballero, a gentleman, nor that I offered my practical sympathy in his plight. Abandoning my disguise as a native, I annunciate now and drop my feigned madrileño accent. More words, more mutual incomprehension, eventually: “pan y leche.” A simple task.
I entreat the man to stay put for five minutes. It’s getting dark, I think, and while I certainly don’t want to purchase unnecessary bread and milk for myself, I suppose I am most concerned with reassuring this man that I will be back, that he won’t have to be hungry tonight. I put my hand over my chest and feel paternalistic, trying to indicate to him, as if to a child, that I won’t abandon him. I’ll be back, I say, te prometo. I promise you.
Against the tide of aimless strollers, I hang a left onto Calle Atocha in search of a Chino (something akin to a bodega, a pejorative name for the Asian immigrant families who own them). And I’m struck suddenly by the spectacle there. I find myself at the epicenter of an unusual storm of human traffic on this otherwise ordinary weeknight. Loud drums erupt in catchy bursts, forming a danceable rhythm. Everyone seems to be staring at something; the same mass of mannequins as before, now arranged in some oblong elliptical stasis. The street’s blocked off, with tough-guy policia looking perpetually suspicious. Intrigued, I venture my way around this constellation, and as I near the center I am overtaken by a positive energy that makes me want to smile in public, and grow ashamed. People dancing, getting into the open-air rhythm. Whatever this display is, it is elaborate, amusing, paralyzing. I venture further into its orbit to investigate.
I peel my way through tired onlookers and encounter now a population holding posters. Their artistry is minimal, yet the images were all too familiar to me, the five-month observer in this nation of recurrent grievances. I didn’t care to take too seriously the trite pictorial cries of disenfranchisement, the self-diagnoses of the notoriously moribund Spanish workforce. Looking around, I glean repetitions of labor, desigualdad, and other buzzwords of popular economic angst. My attitude reveals how callous I am to the chic and happy plight of these Spanish youth in their hour of discontent. In Spain, they are called Ni Nis: a generation of young people who neither study nor work, aimlessly abiding their country’s economic misfortunes. I think of a t-shirt slogan I’d seen back in the states that read “Occupy All Streets” and laugh—the consequence of ubiquity is impotency. On this night, and on so many others, my Spanish peers seem to celebrate their economic hopelessness more than they despise it.
I watch for half a minute or so before I come to and remember my nameless friend, the man with the cracked cheeks and the childlike look of struggle in his eyes. I hope he doesn’t leave or—worse—become disheartened at my tardiness. I ate well today. He will not sleep tonight.
The scene’s celebratory character invites my saturnine judgment, but I resolve to tarry not in contemplation and redouble my commitment to my friend. With jubilant moral certainty, and emboldened by something near to anger, I maneuver with abandon through the throngs in search of an open store. El Rincon: closed. Fuck. I need to know my own area better. Eventually I find something still open. I grab a generic loaf of bread off a floor-level shelf. Milk. Cashier. Street. I’m met again with the sight of the masses, surrounding a drumline now performing a choreographed routine. This is pathetic. While they practice protesting like a holiday parade, trash and grown men lie on the streets tonight. Their spectacle raises issues these boys and girls don’t understand.
I hurry back to my friend to find with sober joy that we have not abandoned each other. He is prostrated, as before, on a scrap of moist cardboard near the curb. Couples and families entering and exiting the cafes and stores—I watch as every last one of the endless crowd overlooks the beggar. He rests his forehead on the ground in complete humility; he doesn’t yet know I’m back. Ignored, helpless, bereft of all dignity; this man has real struggles, none of which can be solved by public demonstrations and musical performances.
I tap his shoulder, and he raises up his face. The streetlamp behind me that catches a nascent sort of tear in his eye. I’m not your angel, I want to tell him. I hand him the black bodega bag. He clearly hadn’t expected me to return. He rises from his supplicating position and grabs at the handshake I’m offering. He pulls me in for a hug; never mind the poor, greasy stench of his body, or the roughness of his hands. I know this is a moment I will come to cherish. In broken Spanish, he returns a few biographical tidbits. His name is Georgi; he is an immigrant from Romania. He lives with his wife and son in Burgos, a city in the north of Spain. The boy and woman had been arrested—unlawfully, he protests—and he came to Madrid seeking legal advice. I wouldn’t have bought the story from another’s lips; but on occasions like these, you simply know, and don’t bother with narrow-minded suspicions. Georgi has been on this corner for two days, and had come up with a total just north of a few Euros. He needs money to go home, hasn’t eaten since his arrival, and anticipates being in Madrid for another week at the rate of his earnings. He thanks me for the food, but told me the real gift was my presence. In the whole city, he has not spoken to anyone else in two days.
In his grateful stupor he begins to instruct me in the workings of the universe, but his Spanish is bad, far worse than mine. He has trouble trying to thank me. But he frequently pointed reverently to the sky, and then to me, and muttered about Dios and Jesus as he took my right hand between both of his. Unworthy of the role he seemed to feel I was playing, I simply nodded, and conceded to this man his religious experience as he forgot his cup, his change, and even the bread I had just bought, and relished the sheer fulfillment of our interaction. We talked some more as he cried and blessed me, and I smiled even as his greasy palm patted my cheek.
As I take my leave, I ask him where he will sleep tonight. “Todavia no sé; hay solo un autobus que va a mi hogar cada dia; no tengo suficiente para ello,” he tells me, there’s only one bus to his home, and he can’t afford the ticket. I want to think that I’ve done enough, having now invested nearly half an hour in the entirety of the affair. But it seems to me the weaker choice. “¿Cuanto cuesta el billete?” I ask. How much is a ticket?
“20 euros.”
I do some quick math. Four euros got me bread, milk, and a brief moment of that cosmic sort of joy that renews your faith in things. I pull a 20 out of my wallet and hand it to him. He gleefully thanks and hugs me; I smile and watch as he grabs his plastic bags and runs as fast as his starved, tired legs can carry him towards the bus station.
In my mind I’m followed by the memory of a casual day, walking home along Paseo del Prado, enjoying canary streetlamps lighting up old bonnets pushing grocery carts, picture-takers, young girls hanging onto their dinner dates. There’s a spring in my step, with each foot forward letting the beat of my melancholic monologue fill my headspace with cool. I look at my watch and note that I’ll be drunk in about two hours–did I mention I’m in Madrid?–and oh, goodness, there’s nothing wrong in life right now, not in my world. Amidst the tourist shops and cafeterias, the smudgy windows betraying casual espresso-sippers who fall in love with letting the world go by, head bobbing in time with an invisible rhythm, I hear a timid voice, a timid paw shaking timid coins covered with city soot, a pathetic plea for money. I pat down my right thigh to find some change: Monopoly money to me in this foreign land. Keys, phone…mierda, I think in my faux-bilingualism, me faltan monedas. My rhythm’s broken but I persist ahead in brokenness. I’m too ashamed to look the man in the eye, to smile, to shake his hand if mine is outstretched but empty.
Better to keep walking, my instinct tells me, though I feel each step shaming me further, further.
I guess it’s the accidental eye contact. Knowing he’s watching me, I grow guilty; in my guilt I remember my ethics. I take a few more steps and turn around, hoping he doesn’t notice that my most basic reaction was to ignore him. His face, clothes, and hair are plastered with grime, and his beard is an almost fashionable two-day-salt-and-pepper. He’s embarrassingly new to mendicancy. I stand there, feeling the air rush past in the wake of all those indifferent to our critical mass of humanness, we unhappy two, solitary obstacles keeping pedestrians from Nowhere.
“Que tal caballero–no tengo dinero pero le quiero comprar unos comestibles, ¿que quiere?” I ask the man as best as my halting Spanish allows if I can buy him something to eat. He fumbled his way back, and I assumed he was one of those picky ones, the trash-covered mendigos who claim to have just eaten and would prefer the pocket money for some reason. “¿Bocadillo?” Curious looks, few words. His eyes belie his fear of me, as if I might try to hurt him, to steal the 23 cents out of his coffee cup. It takes a while for me to realize that he cannot understand what I am asking him: he did not notice when I called him caballero, a gentleman, nor that I offered my practical sympathy in his plight. Abandoning my disguise as a native, I annunciate now and drop my feigned madrileño accent. More words, more mutual incomprehension, eventually: “pan y leche.” A simple task.
I entreat the man to stay put for five minutes. It’s getting dark, I think, and while I certainly don’t want to purchase unnecessary bread and milk for myself, I suppose I am most concerned with reassuring this man that I will be back, that he won’t have to be hungry tonight. I put my hand over my chest and feel paternalistic, trying to indicate to him, as if to a child, that I won’t abandon him. I’ll be back, I say, te prometo. I promise you.
Against the tide of aimless strollers, I hang a left onto Calle Atocha in search of a Chino (something akin to a bodega, a pejorative name for the Asian immigrant families who own them). And I’m struck suddenly by the spectacle there. I find myself at the epicenter of an unusual storm of human traffic on this otherwise ordinary weeknight. Loud drums erupt in catchy bursts, forming a danceable rhythm. Everyone seems to be staring at something; the same mass of mannequins as before, now arranged in some oblong elliptical stasis. The street’s blocked off, with tough-guy policia looking perpetually suspicious. Intrigued, I venture my way around this constellation, and as I near the center I am overtaken by a positive energy that makes me want to smile in public, and grow ashamed. People dancing, getting into the open-air rhythm. Whatever this display is, it is elaborate, amusing, paralyzing. I venture further into its orbit to investigate.
I peel my way through tired onlookers and encounter now a population holding posters. Their artistry is minimal, yet the images were all too familiar to me, the five-month observer in this nation of recurrent grievances. I didn’t care to take too seriously the trite pictorial cries of disenfranchisement, the self-diagnoses of the notoriously moribund Spanish workforce. Looking around, I glean repetitions of labor, desigualdad, and other buzzwords of popular economic angst. My attitude reveals how callous I am to the chic and happy plight of these Spanish youth in their hour of discontent. In Spain, they are called Ni Nis: a generation of young people who neither study nor work, aimlessly abiding their country’s economic misfortunes. I think of a t-shirt slogan I’d seen back in the states that read “Occupy All Streets” and laugh—the consequence of ubiquity is impotency. On this night, and on so many others, my Spanish peers seem to celebrate their economic hopelessness more than they despise it.
I watch for half a minute or so before I come to and remember my nameless friend, the man with the cracked cheeks and the childlike look of struggle in his eyes. I hope he doesn’t leave or—worse—become disheartened at my tardiness. I ate well today. He will not sleep tonight.
The scene’s celebratory character invites my saturnine judgment, but I resolve to tarry not in contemplation and redouble my commitment to my friend. With jubilant moral certainty, and emboldened by something near to anger, I maneuver with abandon through the throngs in search of an open store. El Rincon: closed. Fuck. I need to know my own area better. Eventually I find something still open. I grab a generic loaf of bread off a floor-level shelf. Milk. Cashier. Street. I’m met again with the sight of the masses, surrounding a drumline now performing a choreographed routine. This is pathetic. While they practice protesting like a holiday parade, trash and grown men lie on the streets tonight. Their spectacle raises issues these boys and girls don’t understand.
I hurry back to my friend to find with sober joy that we have not abandoned each other. He is prostrated, as before, on a scrap of moist cardboard near the curb. Couples and families entering and exiting the cafes and stores—I watch as every last one of the endless crowd overlooks the beggar. He rests his forehead on the ground in complete humility; he doesn’t yet know I’m back. Ignored, helpless, bereft of all dignity; this man has real struggles, none of which can be solved by public demonstrations and musical performances.
I tap his shoulder, and he raises up his face. The streetlamp behind me that catches a nascent sort of tear in his eye. I’m not your angel, I want to tell him. I hand him the black bodega bag. He clearly hadn’t expected me to return. He rises from his supplicating position and grabs at the handshake I’m offering. He pulls me in for a hug; never mind the poor, greasy stench of his body, or the roughness of his hands. I know this is a moment I will come to cherish. In broken Spanish, he returns a few biographical tidbits. His name is Georgi; he is an immigrant from Romania. He lives with his wife and son in Burgos, a city in the north of Spain. The boy and woman had been arrested—unlawfully, he protests—and he came to Madrid seeking legal advice. I wouldn’t have bought the story from another’s lips; but on occasions like these, you simply know, and don’t bother with narrow-minded suspicions. Georgi has been on this corner for two days, and had come up with a total just north of a few Euros. He needs money to go home, hasn’t eaten since his arrival, and anticipates being in Madrid for another week at the rate of his earnings. He thanks me for the food, but told me the real gift was my presence. In the whole city, he has not spoken to anyone else in two days.
In his grateful stupor he begins to instruct me in the workings of the universe, but his Spanish is bad, far worse than mine. He has trouble trying to thank me. But he frequently pointed reverently to the sky, and then to me, and muttered about Dios and Jesus as he took my right hand between both of his. Unworthy of the role he seemed to feel I was playing, I simply nodded, and conceded to this man his religious experience as he forgot his cup, his change, and even the bread I had just bought, and relished the sheer fulfillment of our interaction. We talked some more as he cried and blessed me, and I smiled even as his greasy palm patted my cheek.
As I take my leave, I ask him where he will sleep tonight. “Todavia no sé; hay solo un autobus que va a mi hogar cada dia; no tengo suficiente para ello,” he tells me, there’s only one bus to his home, and he can’t afford the ticket. I want to think that I’ve done enough, having now invested nearly half an hour in the entirety of the affair. But it seems to me the weaker choice. “¿Cuanto cuesta el billete?” I ask. How much is a ticket?
“20 euros.”
I do some quick math. Four euros got me bread, milk, and a brief moment of that cosmic sort of joy that renews your faith in things. I pull a 20 out of my wallet and hand it to him. He gleefully thanks and hugs me; I smile and watch as he grabs his plastic bags and runs as fast as his starved, tired legs can carry him towards the bus station.