ESSAYS
Sans Domicile Fixe: My Neighbors in the ColdIOWA CITY, IOWA 26 December 2006 |
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During the first years that I lived here there was a woman named Eveline who slept with the men on the corner.
The men are still there and often, in the mornings, I see them stumbling down the sidewalk, looking bewildered, talking to themselves, asking for cigarettes or money.
Across the boulevard there’s a dignified woman who sits knitting on a step next to the bank. Her white hair is cut close. She has a very beautiful, deeply lined and tired face. I never talk to her but from time to time I see her speaking to wealthy looking women from the neighborhood.
Mostly, though, she sits alone and erect with a look of seriousness and purpose that is striking. I’ve never seen her head bowed between her knees or look pleadingly at passersby.
In the early morning there’s a young man, maybe twenty-five, with dark brown skin and black hair who sits next to an exclusive patisserie. He smiles at me whenever I pass and he whispers, “please.”
When I give him money he nods over and over again as if he’s confirming something important.
There’s an effeminate man with long thin hair who stands outside the grocery store around the corner. He’s an eccentric dresser and favors headbands and blousy shirts. Sometimes he seems to be wearing eye makeup and lipstick. He’s always alone and the expression on his face is so profoundly childlike and sad that I find it difficult to look at him.
Standing outside the store asking for money he seems broken and desperate. The last time I gave him some change he seemed to want to talk. I hesitated but neither of us said anything and I walked on.
The other day I was eating my lunch in the park and I saw him sitting across from me. He was conservatively dressed in corduroy pants and a black wool jacket. He was reading a book.
The man Eveline used to wander the neighborhood with is still there on the grate. He’s barely alive. His face is drawn and depleted. When I see him I think of the photographs I’ve seen from Auschwitz. He can barely walk and when he’s passed out on the sidewalk, his body twisted, I think he may be dead.
Eveline was worse. In the summer she wore an old dress too big for her. In it she looked both ancient and like a young girl playing dress up. Away from the grate she staggered through the neighborhood clutching a bottle of cheap rosé. At night she was squeezed in between the men on the corner. Sometimes she’d disappear for a few days and then return looking healthier with a bit of make-up on her face.
Often she wore nothing beneath her dress and when she was lying unconscious on the sidewalk you could see her fragile legs with their cuts and bruises.
Returning home one day I saw Eveline standing in the middle of the street. She stood there shakily and then squatted down and began to urinate. I heard a woman to my left draw in her breath. It was a disturbing thing to see. Because it was broad daylight, because it was so deliberate, it was impossible to ignore: a dying, destroyed woman in bare feet squatting on the hot asphalt.
I wanted it to be an act of defiance, some well-considered statement, an outrageous fuck you to St. Germain-des-Pres, to Paris and its codified, hypocritical social laws, to the world itself, a statement, a revenge, a political scream. Which to me is what it was, although I know that Eveline, half-dead from her brutal life and, delirious, simply found herself in the middle of the street needing to pee.
That winter she drank herself into unconsciousness and collapsed on the sidewalk where she froze to death.
In the days after she died, I’d see the man I’d come to think of as her partner wandering the streets. I imagined that he was heartbroken, that his face reflected a new, deeper misery.
I don’t know.
Last week in front of St. Eustache, the Paris collective, Les Morts de la Rue held a small ceremony. Members of the collective read aloud the names of those who had died on the streets over the last six months.
And then the details, “beaten to death, alcohol poisoning, from exposure at twenty-eight years old, murdered, burned alive, of epilepsy, thrown from a bridge, of exhaustion . . . in the park, in a square, in a parking garage, in a cellar, at gare de l’Est.”
Thrown from a bridge.
Burned alive.
Coming home late last night, I passed two homeless men fighting over a torn foil emergency blanket. I glanced away and made eye contact with another man watching the scene. He held my gaze for a moment, shook his head disgustedly, muttered what amounted to “pathetic assholes” and walked on.
As winter descends cold upon the city I think of Eveline and the years I watched her die; years, before I had a second heater, when it was so cold at night in my apartment that I could see my own breath when I often thought about getting out of bed and bringing her a blanket, an old jacket and some food.
I never did.
I think of the disgusted man I passed on the street last night and all the sad moralists in the world pacing around in their airless little cages preaching one kind of righteousness or another. Those people who lie awake at night gnashing their teeth, angry at the way other people live their lives. Those people sure they’ve been slighted, betrayed and put upon, those who invoke god or country or philosophy to justify their cruelty, their ignorance and their ambivalence. Those people whose lives are consumed by disapproval, who can numb their own unhappiness only with their own disgust at others.
Walking through this city, Christmas lights brilliant in the night, chocolates in the windows, roasting chestnuts on the corner, I think of myself and how the best I do is give a few coins to my neighbors dying in the cold.
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