The man who raged at the sky

I watched from the flat today as an old man in a tattered trilby and long coat lay flat on his back across a bench and started shouting at the sky.

Was he raging at himself? At life? At his God? I couldn't follow his tirade. The tourists just pretended he wasn't there, carried on strolling the wet cobbles, snapping the vast baroque frontage of the church behind him.

He lay there for full minutes, shouting, at the top of his voice, disturbed, gutteral, hoarse, his right arm raised, forefinger jabbing upwards into the mizzly air that had sucked all colour from the city. The bench must have been wet.

Then, as suddenly as he started, he stopped. His arm flopped down acoss his chest, and he lay there in silence.
Slowly he pulled himself up, swungs his legs to the floor and leaned forward, clasping his hands between his knees.

He walked tall when he got up; ignored the woman begging a few feet away from him - all big skirts, patched jacket, shawl and headscarf, with her paper cup. He paid a call at the pissoir at the side of the church then walked around the corner and disappeared from view.
And it was as if he was never there.

I think he was one of this city's lost souls. One of the wraiths who live and die on these streets as we go about our business.

On the way to the No 38 bus stop just near the flat and post office there is a kind of nook where a nail bar meets the back of the BNP Paribas bank.
Actually, to call it a nook suggests a prettiness it doesn't deserve. It's a concrete corner all ugly angles, stained pavements and bad smells.

In there, barely sheltered from the wet, saturated morning, was a man, abed, fast asleep. His dirty double duvet and once-pink cellular blanket were opened out to their fullest, his form all lumps and bumps beneath it, his head on a stained roll-mat, his nose and whiskers the only flesh visible between duvet and pulled-low woollen hat. Was his back on bare concrete?

His presence was a shock. Like some crude, Emin-type art installation. It was the blatantness of his pitch, the amount of space he'd taken. He must have know when he laid down that he would get in the way, and known as well that we'd all circumnavigate him. Almost step over him.
Everyone pretended he wasn't there.

The vagrancy here is so obvious, so unashamed, the begging so....polite. The women in church doorways with their paper cups pour blessings as you walk inside and as you exit; the man who gets on your tube carriage, spends several minutes politely explaining to you that he's hungry, homeless, jobless and will now sing to you on your journey.
And he does, he sings, and I don't know what courage or desperation it has taken for him to do this.

Then afterwards he walks down the carriage, holding his paper cup, and we all look down, away, those with the escape of headphones close their eyes to fake concentration on music or we gaze out of the dirty windows finding interest in the blackness of the tunnel. Anything rather than meet the desperation in his eye. We feel a mix of shame, anger, irritation that he has dared to intrude on our journey. We'd all just rather he went away. It's embarrassing.

On another day this happens, only it's worse. A mother and her two chldren. An eastern European family, I think. The mother's age impossible to tell, but she is young. The children impossible to ignore: beautiful, upright, unaware, unafraid. They got on at the far end of our relatively empty carriage and the mother spoke earnestly, proudly.

And then her little daughter started to sing loudly. A folk song, tuneful, painful, singing in that way children do when they are trying to impress, the words interspersed with quick gasps of breath.

The boy made his way through the carriage with paper cup. And the carriage silently cringed and convulsed as we sat, locked in, as the girl sang and the boy looked accusingly into our eyes and we, especially we mothers, smiled and shook our heads at the boy and felt useless and helpless, enraged that a mother should put her children up to this and horrified that she felt she should have no option but to do so. Or had someone else forced her into it?

The couple opposite, elderly, start a quiet argument after the man pops a couple of cents into the boy's cup. The woman chastises him. She thinks it will merely encourage them. He lifts his palms upwards from his knees and shrugs his shoulders in that universal 'what can you do?' gesture.

How do you choose? Who do you choose?

Do you look at the smiling, jolly man playing Boccherini on the violin near the European Parliament and think, 'Well, at least you're doing something, at least your earning it, making an effort!'....and then ignore the weary, bleary, dishevelled chap near the butcher's with his crutches, his long hair and his paper cup because he's just sitting there...?? Is he not trying hard enough?

What about the couple who stand outside the Delhaize supermarket on Anspach, as if they have been posted there on guard, watching you as you walk in, watching you as you walk out, watching as you guiltily hurry past, laden.

What about the men who lie pathetically in an almost comatose state surrounded by beer cans at the entrance to the Carrefour?

What about the pile of bodies huddled together for warmth, motionless, sleeping a few hundred yards from the great cruciform that is the European Commission.

Every city knows this shame. This misery.

And those rushing from here to there, those with work to get to, a job to do, another sight to see, an errand to run learn to side-step, to ignore, to watch the pavement.......learn the shame of turning the other cheek.


Links:

http://www.euronews.net/2012/02/03/brussels-homeless-battle-big-freeze/

http://www.servethecity.be/brussels/