She doesn’t wear the sadness of Eleanor Rigby, maybe she no longer shares that sense of loneliness. The fixed smile she offers to passers-by makes me think more of The Fool on the Hill. Like the character in the Beatles song, she is almost always motionless, but instead of watching the dying sun, she’s perpetually facing East, as if waiting for the next sunrise, the next tomorrow. From the strange spot she’s chosen as her home, she too, like the fool on the hill, watches the world spin, with her two anatomical eyes, and with the third one, the invisible eye of the mind.The hill she’s laid upon isn’t lush English turf, but a heap of rags, cardboard, cloths, and plastic bags. Then, boxes of black metal, odds and ends, more rags and cloths.
Early in the morning, when I take my daughters to school, she’s already awake.Even today she’s completely bundled up in that enormous coat that manages to cover her whole body.
At first, I thought she was an old fat woman whom age and hardship had immobilized, so much did that fabric shell mummify her from head to toe, masking her appearance. But one day, passing by earlier than usual, I saw her without the coat, sorting her belongings—and I discovered three surprising truths: she can move; she’s a thin and agile woman; she’s not very old, perhaps even my age.
Our car slows down, maneuvering through the chaotic traffic to exit the main road and enter a side street. She lives there, on the curb that separates the lanes of one of Addis Ababa’s busy ring roads.She’s not the only one using the ring road not to ‘go’ but to ‘stay’. In this city, I’ve seen the concrete median used as a clothesline or as a bed for a quick cigarette break or a moment of reflection; as a place for emergency meetings; as a partition to allow a hidden card game, safe from sudden police beatings.
She sits and lives on the cement backbone that divides four lanes. With her rags, she’s built an impregnable fortress. The only motionless island—and for that reason, invisible—amidst the urban ocean constantly in motion around her.
At this hour, she makes coffee—or something similar—boiling in an iron-blackened kettle, darkened more by exhaust fumes than fire. I’ve never seen her eat.Everything about her is the color of coal. Except for her eyes, which shine like gems. She always turns her face and body toward us. Always. She looks at the eucalyptus trees of Mount Yekka, talks to the hawks that fly above, talks to herself, to God. She smiles. Always.
Sometimes she rests, her torso lying on its side, her head on her rags, her legs dangling.
Enormous, on the other side of the road, right in front of her, two well-fed young people recline like Etruscan spouses on a shared bed, advertising a soft drink from Ambo on a billboard. With their relaxed pose and confident smile, they seem to counterpoint her. The slogan commands: “Life Perfection.”
Other times, she’s not there. Then she leaves a bundle of rags in her place, covered with a cloth and carefully tied with a frayed rope. She locks up her home.She doesn’t beg, doesn’t bother passers-by, doesn’t hail at drivers. One day I gave her my daughters’ leftover snacks. She thanked me distantly, as if hunger, thirst, and the sun’s rays beating down on her no longer belonged to her world.Perhaps she’s already in the Cosmos, darting among Stars and Galaxies, more agile than the hawks of Mount Yekka. Perhaps that jacket is incubating a chrysalis that one day will break free from its shell to open its wings and reach the green peaks of the eucalyptus trees.
From my car, I’ve caught her gaze a couple of times. With her smiling eyes, she told me: “You pass by every morning and always look at me, may God be with you”… or something like that.The tangle of roads around her, the weight on her shoulders, the four curls of smoke from her kettle... she seems to embody it all. Like in Ungaretti’s “Natale” (Christmas). With a mystical smile, she seems to say to passers-by, buses, cars, donkeys, oxen, schoolchildren, traffic cops, and bewildered foreigners:
“Let me be like this/ like something/left in a/corner/and forgotten/Here/you feel/nothing/but the good warmth…”
I don’t feel like
diving
into a tangle
of streets
I carry so much
tiredness
on my shoulders
Let me be like this
like something
left
in a
corner
and forgotten
Here
you feel
nothing
but the good warmth
I stay
with the four
curls of smoke
from the hearth
(Giuseppe Ungaretti, Naples, December 26, 1916)
