A Long Time Ago, Somewhere Else In The World

After a time the beggars just sort of receded and became a peripheral blur in my daily routine, the traffic I had to navigate each day on my way to work. There were almost no cars in my part of town. A number of people had beat-up motor scooters or bicycles, but the narrow maze of dusty streets and terraces broken up by steep steps was largely impassable by automobile.

I don’t know how long it took me to get used to the beggars, or at least to learn to not really see them. Not long, to be appallingly honest. Even as on some level, of course, you never got entirely used to the daily swarm of children, old women, and various categories of broken men. But if you let their presence bother you as much as it should have bothered you, you wouldn’t have survived long in that place.

Whenever a group of foreign workers would get together we’d inevitably find ourselves talking about the beggars in ways that were shamefully abstract, as if they were pests –mosquitos, perhaps, or pigeons. Some nuisance you needed a strategy to cope with. This sort of strategic distance was necessary, I suppose, for practical, day-to-day survival in that country. Your compassion and mercy needed to be generalized and concentrated on the big picture, which was something that never really seemed to come into clear focus; if anything, in fact, it seemed to be continually receding to the horizon and growing smaller and more hopelessly fuzzed all the time. Still, we all agreed that it did us –or them– no good to give the beggars money or buy their useless trinkets.

I still remember one particular boy I would encounter every day, folded up like a large cricket on a dirty mat on the sidewalk, his emaciated legs bent behind him at impossible angles. “See me,” he would call out in a croaking, damaged tenor. “Look at me.”

I recall giving him what amounted to perhaps fifty cents one morning, and I was upbraided by one of my supervisors –a young Frenchwoman– all the way to the office.

It’s strange, I haven’t found myself thinking about those people for years now, and for quite a long time, I believe, I had succeeded in not thinking of them as people at all.