The Twilight of the Bums (3 page)

One day the two old friends were sitting on a river bank lost in thought in the muddy flow. Friend One was thinking about the water rushing so playfully before him.
Plötzlich
he turned to Friend Two and said: Isn't it interesting how one can dip a pail in the river just anywhere and it will always come up full of the same water and yet each time the nature of the water is different according to the circumstance of the moment?

Two gazed at his old
Kumpel
, considered him up and down minutely, as a tailor measures one for a suit, then
plötzlich
, with no warning, he tossed One in the river, clothes and all, shoes and all, and started shouting obscure slogans by a Marxist philosopher. Whereupon,
plötzlich
, Two grabbed One's ankle and flipped him into the drink, shouting antisemitic curses he learned in school as part of his cultural heritage.

1.     Friendship knows no gender.

2.     One can go fucking with a friend, but friends do not fuck.

3.     One cannot fuck a friend, but one can fuck around with a friend.

4.     Marriages are established on the basis of similarities, friendships on the basis of differences.

5.     Love dies; friendship begins.

6.     On sait jamais, say the French, but two do.

7.     Friends never tango together.

8.     Absence, the mother of most inventions, preserves friendship also.

9.     Thirteen? The lucky number of friendship.

10.   A friend will put you out of your misery.

11.   A friend will remind you that
you said that yesterday
.

12.   Friends do not wait.

A scorpion wanted to get to the other side of a river. He asked a big crocodile to take him across on his back. The crocodile said to the scorpion, if I take you across on my back how do I know you will not sting me to death? I will not, said the scorpion, because then both of us would sink and drown. The crocodile understood the logic of the scorpion, and so he told the scorpion to climb on his back. While the crocodile swam across the river with the scorpion piggyback, the scorpion stung him. As the crocodile began to sink he asked, why did you do that? Now we're both going to drown and die. I could not help it, replied the scorpion, you see, my friend, it is in my nature to sting, and besides, we are in the Middle East, here life is cheap.

The bums often tell each other symbolic stories. This one was told to Bum One by Bum Two to illustrate a point he was trying to make about friendship and co-existence.

The two old friends have lost everything except a golf club, a pitching wedge they both use on approach shots, everything else is gone, houses, wives, kids, possessions, golf shoes, golf bag, poof, and since they have only one ball left they take turns shooting. One ball, one club, two men.

Each of these old guys knows that the other likes the approach shot best of all the shots in the game, so there they are staring down at the little ball nicely set up on a nest of strong palmerized fairway special Kentucky mix grass, the ball all white except for the crude red stripe indicating you know what.

One of the friends hands the club to the other saying, Go ahead, you're better at the pitching shot than I am, but his friend shakes his head and says, No, you are, you go ahead, and so friend number one takes the pitching wedge and addresses the ball, but suddenly he gets nervous, he who is known as one of the best pitchers in the county, he is tense because he doesn't want to fuck up the shot and disappoint his friend, so he concentrates on the ball, takes a slow deliberate back swing, but on the way down he shanks the shot, and the ball hops to the right, into the little pond next to the green, plop, and is lost forever.

The old guys are bored silly. Let's go live in the hills! So they rent huts in a favela high above the city. Not too close to each other. Not too far from that great outstretched artifact of Xtian imperialism which dominates the landscape. A well between them. One day they both spot a young woman at the well, they rush thitherward with their buckets. Historically, both men are on record as being against all things Xtian and so they know the enemy better than the enemy knows itself, and thus know the text of the parable of the woman at the well quite well. Nonetheless, they scramble down the hill with their buckets. When they are almost at the well, the woman turns around and says to the two puffing sweating old guys: Don't rush, slow down, you'll get a heart attack, and besides, as the old saying goes, when one pail goes down to be filled the other comes up to be emptied. Then she places her bucket on her head and walks away from the two old guys, her hips swaying on the horizon, her hips swaying on the horizon.

A sudden unannounced rush of water from the heavens has driven the occupants of this section of the city park into the shelter, a roof fixed over a few picnic tables. The torrential water is delighting everyone of all ages and all social mix, a veritable babble of folk. Including our two friends, who happen to be in the park tossing a frisbee (underemployment being a serious feature of life among the elderly).

So here is the whole city packed tight by a ferocious rain, a rain from God Itself, and, therefore, as everyone surely knows, to be short-lived.

The rain is so intense, of such ferocity, of such impersonal magnitude (like the idea of God for many of us), that even the most pained or sorrowed members of this sudden group feel free and uninhibited, even playful.

One of the bums is entertaining a bunch of wet kids. He has drawn faces on the knuckles of both hands, and he is playing a little cloak-and-dagger drama with them, which the kids are enjoying immensely, screeching with delight as they watch the knuckle-faces jump up and down confronting each other in a duel to the death, one being the face of the villain, the other that of the hero.

Added to this is the pleasure of the narration, which the bum is uttering in French, in the pure classic French of the Comédie Française, with just the right amount of eloquence and pomposity. Taking on a baritone voice the narrator declaims:
Attention, attention, les enfants, regardez bien, le gentil Petit Poucet va maintenant faire disparaître le méchant Diable
. And suddenly the bum's fingers collapse and make the face of the villain disappear.
Et voila, muscade, disparu
, proclaims the bum. Then changing his voice into that of a soprano, while the Petit Poucet dances proudly before the children, he recites those famous lines spoken by Rodrigue in
LE CID
of Corneille:
Je suis jeune, il est vrai, mais aux âmes bien nées, la valeur n'attend pas le nombre des années
.

No one seems to know this language, but it doesn't matter. In fact, it seems to add to the pleasure as more and more of the fold of the sudden city refocuses toward the bum's knuckles which have made the face of the villain reappear for the second act of this tragedy. (No one knows God too well either, which satisfies all parties, it seems).

The other bum (obviously the one who is not performing) has audienced (what an ugly word) himself to the show, feeling only a slight twinge of envy that it isn't his fingers entertaining the whole city under the big flat umbrella.