Photo by Jarda Cervenka

Beggars

by Jarda Cervenka

"Proletariat of the world will unite!" Vladimir Ilyich Lenin proclaimed. The syphilitic murderer might as well have called on beggars to unite. While soliciting similar coins, the beggars of the world are very disparate, as a civet is different from a tiger, though both are cats. I have been thinking about these things since an episode that occurred when I stopped at a red light on Lyndale Avenue by the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. There an American Indian approached my car...


Bogotá was waking up. It was cool for a tropical city, the hill with the funicular shrouded in mist, still, and the dew just falling, taking the dust with it, cleaning the air. The city was waking up slowly, the traffic moderate. I stood in front of Hotel Emerald deciding where to get my morning cafecito pequeno. And then they appeared from nowhere, as an eruption from the cobblestones-gamines.

Gamines are children of the street, homeless kids of different ages, who are often collected by the army in small towns and dumped into the big city, where they might have a better chance of survival. In Bogotá there are hundreds, organized loosely in familias.

One approached me. In baggy shorts, ubiquitous t-shirt and flip-flops, he extended his hand, palm up. He raised his eyes, looked through me, a pasty-faced automaton without expression. I was surprised by his speed, apprehensive a little, but I realized quickly I was no more alive to him than a hydrant; his detachment was complete. When I did not respond he moved away with the fluidity a slow-dancer, not a trace of disappointment on his face.

With some admiration I observed his companions, his family. They did not run, did not walk, they flowed between the parked cars, centimeters from speeding cars, across the vehicular stream as a school of parrot fish would gush in a tidal stream between the sharp corrals, not touching one. They were meandering between the unconcerned pedestrians as if the walkers were just inanimate parts of the gamines' natural landscape, their landscape, in which they had evolved.


Lepers—they are here in the oven of midday and in rain, which, in this place of violence, is a mass of violently descending water. In a punning way, lep-rosy isn't rosy, it is a sure shortcut to beggary, to total paupery. They take a stand past the outskirts of Onitcha, on the bend of the road to Lagos, before the bridge over the Niger. Five, six of them, in rags, hair matted or shaved, with noses destroyed, a few with lips deformed by nodules, their stumps outstretched, some with fingers still left.

Their preservation instincts are replaced by aggression, as they approach the speeding car less than a foot from the window. They gesticulate wildly; their rugged and demolished faces (as if sculpted by an animator for a scary movie) flaunt emotion in exaggerated ways. No car stops-but (some) lepers live.


Bohemia was released from the communists' yoke only two decades ago, so both, the winners and losers in the newfound capitalism, take to their unexpected roles with rather primitive attitudes, still. Winners accelerate in fast Lamborghinis, flattening poultry; they have fast fashion models for concubines and cheetahs for pets. Losers beg in uncommon ways. In Prague, on the promenade near Charles Bridge, a beggar has a place on the sidewalk, which I tend to avoid. He kneels, chest pushed to the ground, arms stretched forward with his face between them, kissing the limestone pavement. His is the prostration ultimate, the supplicant's incontestable position.

But other beggars, in tourist areas of the city, are mostly a cheerful bunch, often with large dogs who look meek, are fed as well as their hirsute masters and are bathed in ornate baroque fontanas, basins of art-nouveau geysers-to the amazement of orderly Germans. Since Czechs have been fabled to be "a nation of musicians," the accordion supplicant on Narodni Boulevard squeezes intermittently his squeezebox, to the accompaniment of automotive rumble.


The children followed me everywhere, smiling, and some laughing, amused by a white face. They were dark Tamils, Dravidians of Tamil Nadu, South India. I liked their bright exuberance but I was puzzled by their gestures. All, without exception, moved their right hand to their lips-and away, and again. Fast, like a pendulum of a clock running amok, their fingers bunched touching with the tips (as if one would pinch a dash of salt) to their lips-and away. Repeating the motion the children followed, and followed everywhere, in Chidamburam, to Anamalainagar, in the hamlet under Kunda Hill. It took me a few days to understand their pantomime-after I observed the atavistic, simian Indian custom of eating with hands, bunching fingers around the sticky rice, balling it up, dipping the ball into a sauce, and shoving it into the mouth, in and out again. So I learned the kids were not sending air-kisses to a decrepit white man but asking for food; they wanted to eat, their ebullience nourished by hope.


The city of Medellin in Colombia lives with a mixed reputation. When Pablo Escobar ruled his "Medellin Cartel" there were twenty-five murders recorded every week-it might have been a world record. I used to go there often in the Eighties and Nineties and liked the place because people so diligently cultivated their friendships, as it is done in hard times, and the food was excellent. The famous "comidas de Antioquia" were based on ten kinds of beans and potatoes, which were black, bright yellow, purple, speckled, and "carne", sliced quarter-inch thin, barbequed just for seconds and served with beer in the posadas above the town. Many beers. After such a feast I would walk through Parque Simon Bolivar, observing old-timers discussing soccer, killings and local politics, some playing cards, some dominos, one playing guitar and singing in an old man's voice.

Then I would approach the wide stairs of Catedral Metropolitana de Medellin, to be reminded there that many in the city live on a less celebratory diet than the one served in the posadas above. On the right side of the marble staircase my old acquaintance would sit on his usual stair. He was a young fellow, a natural beggar, affected by the congenital defect phocomelia. In Greeek phocos is a seal, melos is an extremity. Instead of arms he was born with something resembling flippers-and he waved one at me and smiled, as I greeted him with a nod. No Spanish was exchanged, since out relationship was ocular. I slipped a few pesos in his cigar box, discreetly, and moved upstairs, where I saw a newcomer. She was a kid of about ten years. She had beautiful big eyes, but the lower part of her face and lips were burned off, the scar giving her an indescribably sad mien. I emptied my pocket, tried a smile and ran. I refused, I did not want to believe that her burn was intentional, that she was so tortured by her bestial parents to increase her chance in begging. I ran through the gate into the cathedral where it is believed the god of Christians dwells. I was going to ask him if, indeed, he approved, if he allowed this to happen.


I have insufficiently spoken of the gloomy diversity of begging, but I think you, the reader, might have read enough. So on this note, and to a chorus of sighs of relief, I'll stop and will return home from my trip around the world. At the end of Lyndale Avenue by the Walker Art Center I stopped at the red light. My car was approached by a man in his fifties, perhaps. He appeared to amble in an uncertain gait. I cannot recall how was he dressed, if his head was covered, because his face fascinated me at the first sight and held my attention. Wide mouth, corners of his lips down turned, high, high cheekbones, strong nose and lower jaw of determination-he was not one of Algonquian tribes, not one of Minnesota's own Chippewa, Ojibwa. I guessed him to be of Dakota, of Sioux ancestry, and because of my romantic inclinations I thought him, instantly, of the same lineage as Sitting Bull... Only when he came closer could the effect of alcohol have been suspected in the translucency of his skin and some softness in his jowls.

I rolled down the window and handed him a dollar, grateful I could see him up close.

"Do you have another dollar, sir?" He surprised me with a routine mantra.

"No. But have a very nice day," I said, calling on my supply of small talk for help. It was a brief exchange and I felt uneasy. I liked the man. He bent closer to me.

"I am just a drunken Indian," he said in an even tone with heavy tongue, and dilated his nostrils in a little snort of amusement.

The next moment I saw him in the rear view mirror shuffling away, a tall Indian, bent forward. The green traffic light resolved the situation. A car was honking behind me.

I drove home on automatic pilot. For me, I thought, it was a brief encounter with our history, living history, at the red light on Lyndale Avenue.

Since this little episode, insignificant perhaps, I am thinking about the Sioux, often. Why did he say it? Why?

© 2009 by Jarda Cervenka.


Born in Prague, Jarda Cervenka received degrees in medicine and genetics. He immigrated to Minnesota in l968. Since then he has been employed by The University of Minnesota, lived in Kenya, Japan and Nigeria and traveled extensively and intensively on five continents. His stories have been collected most recently in Fausto’s Afternoon (Whistling Shade Press).