Francisc Nona's Word Epidemic

The Epidemic. Case THREE HUNDRED SIXTY FOUR

2010-08-13T11:26:00.000+12:00

The woman with enormous nipples

The woman with enormous nipples chases after her dog, pointing at it with a newspaper rolled into the shape of a physical threat. The newspaper is a weapon which kills by taming the animal spirit into submission. Only subjecting this particular animal is not an easy task. The little white poodle goes on unflinchingly towards its unspecified target. The rough words uttered by the woman with enormous nipples don’t bother it in the slightest. It looks over its shoulder after every other step taken towards the fragile promise of freedom. The tall figure is always there, towering over the tiny stature of the wide-eyed animal like an Egyptian obelisk. The woman with enormous nipples is, indeed, a tall woman. Had the sun managed today to pull aside the curtain of these nasty clouds, her shadow would have definitely caught the little rebel which is causing so much trouble. The woman with enormous nipples can put up with an impressive number of things. She can put up with the mailman’s late delivery; she can put up with the horrible taste of today’s breakfast cereals; she can put up with the exaggerated media coverage give to the Steven Slater event; she can even put up with this adamant little dog which always misbehaves when its tantrums are less needed. But she just cannot put up with the chill of this morning wind, which has had the better of her, making the two excrescences on her breasts rise up audaciously, poking through the thin fabric of her top like two nosy poodles reduced to scale. Her enormous nipples look like two handles, and I am not going to draw any conclusion out of this matter of fact. Suffice it to say that they are eye-catching (or I should say eye-poking), although not at all able to persuade the white poodle that it should return home, where it could sort out its temper quietly.

The Epidemic. Case THREE HUNDRED SIXTY THREE

2010-08-12T22:53:00.001+12:00

The oxymoron

I see now how beauty and ugliness can live as one in a second of a second or in a fraction of the infinite time. I see how they can make sense together, in spite of the oxymoron of their being together. The story is simple. It is also inciting here and there. Out of an anonymous yard come two young women. They have both dressed themselves hastily, with black tights that display the rotund consistency of their calves, the length of their legs, the admirable impudence of their buttocks. The upper part of their bodies reveals just as much as the lower part, as minuscule t-shirts stretch with a groan on their copious breasts and the soft nests of their bellies. The enormous smiles slashed across their faces seem to be just other garments in this their compendious wardrobe. They both have black hair and are tall and beautiful, dissidents of troubled lives, happy to be of their own age, full of sap, exuding good humours and joy. They’re straining their bodies to push and pull an old sofa out of the yard. The object is a pathetic derelict. The cushions are musty and black in places, their insides eaten by an unknown disease of which old things customarily die. The stomach of the sofa has thrown up some disgusting discharges onto the red fabric of its former beauty. In normal conditions, one would turn one’s face away from such spectacle, spitting in the dust with evocative repugnance. But not now (and not I). By some kind of incredible magic, the ruin of the deceased furniture brings light upon those cheerful faces, illuminating them from below. It looks as though a strange aura has grown around these two young women, wrapping them in light of their own shape. I believe that this light comes from the sofa, I do: this ill object which has reached beyond the limits of its life but which still transforms reality to its heart’s content. I hate the fact that this image has survived for an upsettingly short time, after which it disappeared even from the mirror of my slow-moving car. Or maybe I should praise the chance I’ve had to see it! Allow me to choose the latter.

The Epidemic. Case THREE HUNDRED SIXTY TWO

2010-08-11T22:33:00.002+12:00

Left behind

They get out of the car together, almost at the same time. There are things about them which are similar: the tall stature, the short hair revealing strong foreheads, the small round eyes. They seem to have been interrupted from a conversation which wouldn’t make sense outside the car. But then, no sooner have their feet touched the ground than they become separated. The father is quick to notice the presence of an acquaintance. This is a man of his own shape who’s just parked his car in front of the same gym where they are going too, with a bag in his hand and an attitude of an iron-bending warrior. The approach of the acquaintance sparks inside the father’s mind the light of recognition. He sees how deeply he belongs in this society of strong physical men. The son is no longer his equal. The son is very thin. In spite of his tall stature, he looks fragile, breakable, delicate. He isn’t made of the fabric of which heroes are made, like his father. He isn’t swollen up with muscles, nor has his pectorals puffed up in pride. His walk isn’t full of self-assurance. He isn’t comfortable with the gym bag on his shoulder, going to a place where he doesn’t seem to be going willingly. The teenager tries to hide this burdensome feeling of isolation. The big, masculine laughter of his father, and that of his father’s friend, are far too much for his flimsy construction. He chooses to bury his face in the screen of his mobile phone, texting or maybe just simulating it, stooped over the gadget as if in it had been deposited his entire treasury of optimism, his hope that the blooming roses of embarrassment won’t stay for too on his cheeks. He has this awkward limp as well: not a permanent defect, but a physiognomic peculiarity that highlights the differences between him and his father. The distance grows longer and longer, as the boy slows his pace almost to a halt, while glancing at the adults from underneath his thick eyebrows. The two at the front don’t mind. They haven’t noticed anything. There is no place in their chit chat for words about the young one. Let him be their follower, in every sense of the word.

The Epidemic. Case THREE HUNDRED SIXTY ONE

2010-08-10T13:09:00.002+12:00

An impossible story

It looks like the train on the other side of the station is minutes away from swiping the platform clean, taking the commuters along with it. Most of those who wait there are kids prepared for a damned day at school. But in the mass of uniforms and giggles I can distinguish the shape of a man who looks different. He stands by the information panel, propped against one of the wet poles, indifferent to the fact that he may get wet too. Worn-out sports shoes, the kind that must be incredibly smelly and awfully impossible to get rid of, contain his feet like a pair of mini coffins, real burial places. He’s wearing trousers that seem, from a distance, to be white jeans, but because they are so dirty and so tattered, I cannot tell their true nature. Baldness has made him wear a tall forehead too, empty and smooth like a piece of glass. It contrasts greatly with the rest of his face, which is covered in a forest-like beard. From under the brow, his eyes frown through, looking at the world with disgust. To stress that, he’s knitted his arms across his chest. They suggest contempt; they call for the world to answer important questions. And to be sure that what’s exterior to him deserves being hated or frowned upon, the speakers of the train station blare the message all passengers dread to hear: the train going his way has been cancelled, due to an engine fault. Frankly speaking, I’m expecting him to explode, to start punching the widow that covers the information panel, to start swearing towards the skies and yelling at the other commuters. But that is now how he reacts. In fact, he has no reaction at all. He doesn’t even untangle his arms from across his chest. He doesn’t even deepen his frown. He doesn’t even start pacing around to show distress or anger or violent feelings of any sort. He chooses to remain where he is, in the same state of indifference mixed with scorn. He may be disappointed, but he doesn’t show it. Admirable, indeed, but he doesn’t help me get a good story.

The Epidemic. Case THREE HUNDRED SIXTY

2010-08-09T21:47:00.000+12:00

Dissident in McDonald’s Land

It’s the destiny of dissidents to be dispelled from the table of the well-fed. There’s no better place than McDonald’s to prove the truth of this. A young, seemingly innocent, definitely unintended woman in her mid-twenties has placed her order and a pair of professional hands handed to her the customary brown tray, three or four different objects arranged upon its surface with no apparent design in mind. What she’s got there is pure madness in this land of serious eaters. It’s dinner time, when people crowd McDonald’s with armies of children crying by their hands and asking for impossibly unique combinations. I’ve seen a car at the entrance, with a sticker on its rear window which was pure McDonald’s philosophy: ‘If they don’t have chocolate in heaven I’m not going there.’ In this land, where you don’t exist unless you can eat half the weight of your body at one sitting, the small and slim young woman is painful nonsense. She has a bagel on her tray, a teapot, a cup, and possibly another item of which I’m not quite sure. It doesn’t matter anyway, because I strongly believe that it is a napkin. She walks slowly to a table where she sits herself delicately, afraid that her appearance may disturb the order of the world. Around her, people munch in big batches. Everybody’s serious about eating here. There are large, family-size boxes with fries and patties flowing out and enormous drinks sweating lavishly in frozen droplets. The bagel-eater-tea-drinker realizes very quickly that this is not her territory. And when she sees the discrepancy between the timid tea pot on her tray and the mastodons eviscerated onto the trays of the others, she packs her belongings with a look of a haunted animal on her face, the head buried pointlessly between the shoulders. Dissidence is no easy task when you run into it by pure accident. Luckily enough, she finds a place away from the eyes of the others, and while the diners devour their supersized Angus-the-Thirds with eyes exuding flames of criminal hunger, she can enjoy what’s left of the pleasure of her late, meaningless tea. Poor little rebel, what has become of her dissidence, and in how short a time.

The Epidemic. Case THREE HUNDRED FIFTY NINE

2010-08-08T22:06:00.001+12:00

Caught in the trap

The sky is pretty low today. The pressure in the atmosphere is lying heavily upon every corner of the city, and most of the people I see are either staring at the road from behind a steering wheel or sticking their noses from the other side of some bus window. There’s only one pedestrian animating the atmosphere: an Indian woman dressed in a red sari, walking down the street slowly, at a very carefully measured pace. She looks somewhat inappropriate in the deserted, humid surroundings. Hoards of road workers have been turning the pathways upside down throughout the week and their work has now acquired the semblance of a disaster. Deep ditches dug on the sides of the road, mud oozing everywhere, a big chunk of the area fenced as if with the frenzy of paranoia. The sari hangs loose around her body, inflated by the strong wind, which makes the woman resemble a bird with very long wings. As she walks, shy and discrete, along one of the metal fences, an impolite piece of invisible wire grabs hold of one of those flaps and pulls the woman black with a violent jerk. She now resembles a pigeon caught in the claws of killer kite, wriggling to get rid of the lethal clutch, with nobody around to lend her a hand, left all to herself to fight the demon. The battle takes a while. The jinni isn’t willing to give in easily. The woman pulls at the end of her sari, fidgets and gets her fingers working rapidly. The wind blows on, and her hair is now rising to the skies, like the flame of a candle (a black flame burning incessantly). When she finally finishes the struggle and the sari is back to its expected form, the woman moves away from the fence like a small field animal which has just escaped from the clutch of a foothold trap, looking with increased suspicion at every moving object around. Her desperate fight hasn’t changed the nature of the surroundings. The sky is still low, still cold, and still inhospitable. What a day!

The Epidemic. Case THREE HUNDRED FIFTY EIGHT

2010-08-08T22:04:00.000+12:00

Three on a bench

The three teenagers are seated on the bench in the waiting room like three sparrows perched on an electric wire, taking a rest after a long flight. They are so close, their bodies touch each other. They have to squeeze their shoulders in order to find enough room. The one in the middle, seemingly the oldest one of the trio, skims through an auto magazine. He has something to say about almost every photograph. There’s an emphasis in the tone of his voice. He speaks Chinese so I can’t understand a word. I can, however, follow his gestures, his thin fingers, the bones showing through the translucent skin. The eyebrows ascend every now and then, whenever he comes across a problem. He sorts the problem quickly and buries it in another avalanche of words. The teenager at his left, a bespectacled young man with a bush of hair flowing into his eyes, listens attentively to the wisely articulated sentences. He seems so absorbed that he gets lost in a mist of veneration. He only has enough energy left in his body to poke his left ear, extract a modicum of wax from it, roll it into a tiny ball and dismiss it with an expert flick of his forefinger. The boy in the middle keeps going about his explanations, without noticing this rapid performance. The third one, isolated to his right, is utterly absent from the show. It’s improbable that anything impress him in any way. His hands woven across his chest, the legs stretched well beyond his required space, the eyes languid and lost in a contemplation that seems otherworldly. The words uttered at the centre of the trio have no connotation for this adolescent, possibly the youngest one. I conclude from his complexion and his apathy that he must be the sick one, waiting for the doctor to come and call his name. Taken over by his state of desolation, he exists in himself and to himself. His friend, the one who has something to say about everything, has nothing to say to him. The beauty and vigour of those cars in the magazine have thrust the ill one out of the scheme. It always happens, doesn’t it? The sick is always pushed to the margins.

The Epidemic. Case THREE HUNDRED FIFTY SEVEN

2010-08-06T22:08:00.000+12:00

Very, very, very old

Is there love when time has closed a cycle? Can there still be a love story when love itself seems impudent and offensive? The tiny car parked in the underground lot appears to be lifeless. There are two hardly distinguishable figures inside, a man and a woman, both of them outrageously old, synonymous to eternity. They are reduced to outlines; there is so little body in them that the spirit must be overwhelmingly large, disproportionate. They are both on the front seats, their heads touching one other, and I’m not sure if they do this because they want to feel each other’s spirit or if they just cannot keep their bodies erect. The woman is holding an envelope in her hand. The man is following her gestures only with the corner of his left eye. The envelope is shaking with this terrible shake of the old, desiccated hand. The tremulous white surface of the envelope makes it look like the wing that keeps flapping although the bird has long been dead. The two stay head-to-head a long time. They seem to feel so good in that position, connected like two Siamese twins, made inseparable, forever tied to each other, impossible to tell apart. They say that people who live long together end up resembling each other. That means that eternity could make them incredibly hard to distinguish. That explains why the first impression I got when I first saw them in the car was that they were two women. Old age, I suppose, distorts external attributes. Gender or beauty, the colour of skin and the firmness of flesh, they all turn out to have been ridiculous illusions. The man and the woman in the car look so much like each other that they make age become the confirmation of that universal suspicion that if we look deep inside our souls we can see how identical we are. The envelope is still flapping hopelessly in the bony hand. I don’t think they are going to open it. They seem to need this fragile thing between them, an object that’s more delicate than their forsaken bodies.

The Epidemic. Case THREE HUNDRED FIFTY SIX

2010-08-05T15:21:00.001+12:00

No parking

The cafe rustles with the clinks of coffee cups and of forks scratching the surface of plates. It's lunch time and the place is full. It smells of meat pies and curries of all sorts. A woman with Caucasian features walks in, accompanied by two Asian men who smile imperceptibly behind her like two naughty kids. The woman walks to the counter and talks to one of the employees. It is clear from her gestures that she's not here to order food. She would like to talk to the owner, please. The owner comes out of the kitchen with an expression of deep spleen. He's got a voluminous belly under the apron and a moustache that expresses limitless self-satisfaction. The first couple of sentences he speaks through the employee, as if she were a translator he absolutely needed. The woman on the other side of the counter would like to know if parking was possible in front of the cafe, for the length of the entire day. She is confused by the fact that the owner of the place where she's come for a day's training couldn't provide proper parking. She came here to sort it out with the cafe owner. After listening for a while to the talk between the woman and the interpreter, the owner decides to take matters in his own hands, and he starts talking himself. He wouldn't allow the woman to park her car in front of the cafe, because her car would take the room for the cars of his customers. Frankly speaking, that's not really the case. I take a look out the window and I can see no vehicle parked there. The woman cannot understand the reluctance, so she tries again and again. To no avail. The owner is adamant. His rounded belly adds authority to the injury of his words. The woman finally leaves, followed by the two Asian men who keep smiling without understanding what's going on. The owner stays put. He now repeats his words for the ears of his employees, so that they could understand where his decision has come from. The employees stare at his moustache as if the owner were the winner of a historical battle. They show him respect.

The Epidemic. Case THREE HUNDRED FIFTY FIVE

2010-08-04T21:48:00.001+12:00

A lucky escape

F is walking at a sluggish pace. Right in front of him, a woman who seems somewhere in the late forties. She's wearing black trousers that touch the ground a little, stressing the length of her legs. Her hair is cut at shoulder level and from where F is F cannot quite make the colour of her locks. Is it grey indeed, as it looks to him, or is it just a sorry trick the dimming light is playing on her? She walks almost unnoticed for a while, looking nowhere but ahead, detached from the lavish surroundings of the public park, indifferent to the landscape. Then she suddenly extracts from the bag perched upon her left shoulder a packet of cigarettes. She's one of those who like smoking while walking, F concludes after a quick glance, while a bitter taste is taken over his palate. F tries to look somewhere else for distraction. He knows what's going to follow. The park is humid after the rain. That's the first thing F notices. F and U and C and K, F whispers to himself. The smoke released by the woman invades his nostrils and it hurts. F is not the only one for whom the smoke is a threat. F watches a young man coming from behind. It doesn't take long for his fresh mind to spot the danger. Maybe his nostrils are hurt too, F conjectures. The young man takes up a fast pace, one that grows faster and faster with every step. He's almost running around the woman, making sure he gets to safety before it's too late. When he has reached in front of the woman, the young man takes a deep breath of relief. He has survived, thanks god. He can now slow down, if he wants; the danger is behind him. Not behind F, though. Pleased with herself, the woman makes the smoke rise far above her head, like clouds for little amoretti to rest upon at the hour of their childish leisure. But then the mirage is quickly dispelled and the soft clouds fall back like grenades. F can only watch the young man increasing the distance, becoming smaller and smaller, rejoicing perhaps at the thought of his near miss. Ah, lucky bastard!

The Epidemic. Case THREE HUNDRED FIFTY FOUR

2010-08-03T23:23:00.002+12:00

In the city before slumber

The time is ripe for some dusk observations. With interior lights turned on them, characters inside downtown stores look so exposed, so unprotected. It's a delight to watch them unaware of being spied upon, mere lambs at the mercy of an urban voyeur who pries on their ignorance. There's the security man at the Gucci, who's trying desperately to remove a nasty thing from behind the glass door. His stretched leg makes long attempts to dispose of the innocuous but irritating thing, which may be nothing but a figment of his tired imagination. He tries to persuade that thing that it's presence there, behind the closed door, is not appropriate and certainly not welcome. A few meters further down, at Rolex, two employees are about to close. They're frantically removing various shiny and odiously expensive wrist watches and placing them into specially designed sacks. They both wear black gloves and move fast, as if afraid of being caught in the exercise of their jobs. They look like thieves, their eyes rolling like the eyes of two mad convicts: the woman at the front throwing hurried glances through the window to the indifferent passers-by, the man at the back stuffing his bag with that devilish look on his face. At a local tailor whose name escapes my unreliable recollections, a large mirror is covering the entire surface of a lateral wall. The shop is ridiculously small and yet it manages to accommodate two people. The absentmindedness of the woman, who is checking the records of the day, brings nothing noteworthy into the picture. The man, standing in front of the large mirror, is making silly faces which the looking glass is reflecting faithfully. He stretches his facial muscles, reveals his teeth and checks their whiteness, bulges out his eyes a couple of times, looking for something that's not quite clear when analyzed from a distance. He seems bored, painfully bored. The day is closing in but the process is taking forever. The shop people offer this funny spectacle of a city about to fall asleep. If it weren't for those lights.

The Epidemic. Case THREE HUNDRED FIFTY THREE

2010-08-02T22:38:00.002+12:00

Oh, so delicate

The blushes in her cheeks are a perfect chromatic match for the unusual scarlet-red of her stockings. The leopard pattern doesn’t seem to go very well with the scarlet, but it is there, and it draws attention. She has long slender legs and a skirt with a mid-thigh hemline that allows her knees to stay in sight. Her bony hands search frantically through her shoulder bag, trying to find things that are too willing to stay together. Her search is accompanied by a quick frown but in the end she gets what she’s been looking for: a packet of mints. She extracts one with two stick-like fingers and places it between the lips where it stays for a second like communion bread. The mint is white like her teeth and it disappears behind the lips, where it is rotated a couple of times, then sucked at with imperceptible movements of the mouth. The low heeled shoes she’s wearing, black and unpretentious, emphasize the length of her legs which, when crossed, resemble two patch-coloured snakes. The one on top swings indifferently, like a pendulum, or rather like a metronome. It seems to be keeping the rhythm of an inner string of thoughts. The hands, thin like her legs, are now holding a hard-cover book. She immerses into the reading quite easily and never raises her eyes from those pages. Absorption has taken her over, and now her body is an entire collection of detailed movements that stem out of the unconscious. The leg swings, the foot rotates around its own axis, the lips purse and relax a number of times, the eyes follow the lines in the book, the head tilts now to the left, now to the right. When the book alights upon her knee, the hand follows in almost apologetically. It rests on the open pages with a delicacy that reminds me of the hands of saints in Italian Renaissance paintings, where fingers never really touch the objects; instead, they caress those objects’ invisible aura, the palm full of that curious energy that renders everything around diaphanous and almost breakable, like the transparency of glass or the quiet, promising rustling of silk.

The Epidemic. Case THREE HUNDRED FIFTY TWO

2010-08-01T19:33:00.002+12:00

Deceit

Appearances deceive. That’s a truth often confirmed by first-hand experience. Yesterday’s description was a case in point. Today’s is just another. Here’s this old looking woman on the other side of the road, approaching at a slow pace the pedestrian crossing. She’s pushing a four-wheel pram. Isn’t she a lovely granny taking the little offspring for an invigorating stroll through the neighbourhood! She takes one step onto the crossing and cars stop one by one greeting her reverently with their luminous noses almost touching the ground. Drivers wait patiently for the old woman to take her time with the crossing, and she does so, making sure the little one doesn’t grow anxious and start crying. But hold on a second. Something’s wrong about this picture. The thick comforter that’s supposed to cover the small body snuggled inside the pram is pulled to an extent which should be utterly uncomfortable for the baby. It looks like the hurried granny has pulled the thing over the baby’s head. Oh no, the little one could get suffocated. I’ve got to stop this woman and point out to her the terrible mistake she’s made. But by the time she’s on my side of the road the picture changes entirely. She doesn’t look as old as I first thought her to be. Her face is wrinkled alright, and her skin is dry and burnt by long exposure to open sun; but let’s be frank: she must be only in her early fifties. Not quite a granny yet, unless the timing for birth-giving has been stretched between three generations to the maximum of probability. But what’s more important, the thing in the pram is not a baby. What the woman has been carrying all along, deceiving drivers and well-intended passers-by, is a carton case of twelve wine bottles, which rattle rhythmically when touching each other. There seems to be at least one more such case in the pram, behind the visible one. The thick comforter that comes on top is just a disguise. I don’t know what caused this need for a cover-up, but the deceit has been bloody effective. It fooled me, for one. Not to mention the well-mannered drivers who’ve given way to an illusion unknowingly.

The Epidemic. Case THREE HUNDRED FIFTY ONE

2010-08-01T19:26:00.002+12:00

The stag

When the semaphore goes green, a sea of pedestrians gushes into the intersection, invading it like a threatening army. Their minds busy with the prospects of the day, these pedestrians form a pretty unitary mass of hurried individuals. It takes an outstanding figure to give the scene an interesting turn. I’ve got this figure in my sight right now. It’s the tall stature of a jogger in shorts and singlet. I watch him and it takes a while before I can tell what’s so special about him. Maybe his long hair? Maybe the white cords of his earphones which, seen from behind, resemble plastic bangles? Maybe his slender body? Maybe his height? I find myself forced to reject all these possibilities one by one. But then I see that the unusual lies in his velocity. Because of the speed of his exercise, this morning jogger resembles a wild stag. I’ve noticed in several wild-life documentaries that running stags always seem to move in slow motion. Frightened by cameras and by intrusive human presence, they try run for their lives like only wild animals can. Yet there’s something in their gait that makes one feel that the image shown on the tv screen is shot in slow motion. I think I know what it is. It’s the heavy burden of the crown of antlers. The pair of palm-like ornaments stretching over a surface that equals the surface of the animal’s body makes a counter-balancing appearance which gives this strange visual illusion that the stag is actually moving at a snail’s pace, when in fact even predators can seldom catch up with their rapid run. I get the same illusion from the tall man I’m watching now jogging his way up Queen Street. He obviously doesn’t have the antlers of a stag, but he has an unusually long curly hair, tied into a pony tail that descends to the level of his buttocks. When he runs, the pony tail swings with incredible slowness across his back, which creates this false impression of slow motion. In reality, it takes the man a mere ten seconds to disappear from sight, propelled by his bodily speed, while the pedestrians have not yet deserted the intersection, and the traffic lights are still minutes away from turning red.

The Epidemic. Case THREE HUNDRED FIFTY

2010-07-30T22:01:00.002+12:00

The seagull

A tall stone wall in the university campus looming metres above the heads of human actors is covering most of the background. It is grey and imposing: a piece of outdoor architecture whose intended role may have been from the beginning to stress the difference between man and stone. Right at the bottom of this wall there’s a bench and beside the bench a mid-aged woman is trying to hide the fact that she’s eating. She takes minuscule bites from a tiny piece of something of petite size: a quarter of a sandwich or a small piece of cake. Every bite is accompanied by a bashful covering of her mouth. She places her open palm across the lips and keeps the finger there for the entire length of mastication. Every chew becomes, unknowingly, a kiss she’s delivering to her own finger tips. The way she does these things (the covering of the mouth and the hiding of the lips) makes her resemble an apologetic person who would gladly implode into her own body so that her image could not be seen by others. Unfortunately this privilege cannot be allowed her, so the woman continues indefinitely with the palm slapped across her mouth, turning to one side, where she believes fewer people can see her, eating with tiny little mouthfuls the size of baby food portions. Generally speaking, the passers-by ignore her en masse. And there aren’t many of them anyway. But there’s a white seagull mere metres away from her feet who stares at the woman with an enervating insistence. The bird just doesn’t take its eyes off the eating creature standing tall above it. The yellow beak contrasting with its milk-white feathers stands out like a true organ of engorgement. If Hitchcock’s The Birds ever needed a real-life embodiment of the aviary threat, this seagull is the perfect specimen. Its intense stare is so incendiary, I am inclined to believe that the bird is the actual reason for the woman’s shyness. Under such close scrutiny, no wonder she feels embarrassed. And there are many more bites before she finishes this damned never-ending sandwich. What an ordeal!

The Epidemic. Case THREE HUNDRED FORTY NINE

2010-07-29T21:04:00.000+12:00

I've been misled

The gliding door at the Hyatt Hotel in downtown Auckland opens with a gape of awe and out comes a trendily dressed man in an impeccable black suit, white shirt and dizzyingly shiny shoes. He’s full of importance. The place and time are perfect. A silent morning unfolds in front of his eyes and he moves his pupils slowly from one side to the other to capture the traffic frenzy that’s just pilling up at a gradual pace. He feels good in his own shoes, as they say. The nostrils open up like two pipes and he breathes in the polluted-yet-so-sweet air of the urban environment and breathes out the nonchalance that comes with his stature and gait. If I were to label him I’d say he’s a lawyer. There are so many law-related buildings around that my guess is almost a non-guess. But I don’t have to be impertinent and draw such conclusions from an exterior fact. There are plenty of clues in the man’s actual appearance that could very easily lead me to this inference. The tie he’s wearing, for instance. It is so perfectly knotted and so elegantly worn that I can see how used he is to wearing such items which I confess I hate with my entire soul. It takes a lawyer, I say to myself, to feel good in a tie and to wear it with this utter distinction. Then there’s his suit: perfectly ironed, spotless, not a single fold defacing its beauty. When he walks, the fabric of his trousers falls in a gentle cascade, rearranging itself instantaneously. The jacket outlines his shoulders and makes them just a little wider than they must be in reality. With all this grand attire and the lofty air, the man stands to burst out with pride and superiority. He stops for a while to make sure that his presence has been thoroughly appropriated by the surrounding cityscape. Then he walks slowly to a taxi parked close to the hotel’s entrance, his elegance accompanying him like an aura. But wait. What’s going on here? Instead of taking the passenger’s seat he goes straight behind the steering wheel. Oh no, I’ve been deceived. The man is not a lawyer. He’s a taxi driver. Well, so much for my deductive skills.

The Epidemic. Case THREE HUNDRED FORTY EIGHT

2010-07-28T22:33:00.000+12:00

Soliloquy

Gimme a one, man. Whoohoo that’s my boy. Yeah, gimme a two. A two! You got it, mate, that’s the two I wanted. Gimme a three now, okay? A three, a three. Let me see your best three. Got it. Sweeeet. Now see what I’ve got here? A pretty face is what I’ve got. Just check this out: left cheek, smooth, freshly shaven, pink, niiiice; right cheeck, nothing less than the left one. Have a look, aye? Left cheek, right cheek. Left and right. Beauuuutiful. Now gimme a five. Five, man. That’s it. Five is precisely this: the jacket. Isn’t it cool? Take a good look at it and tell me. Nice and thick. Not a bloody fart of wind can go through it, if you know what I mean. I can keep it on if I want, or I can take it off, just like this. Just keep an eye on me. Here I am. Hoopla hop. I’m taking it off right now. See what I can do? I can take the jacket off whenever I want, because I can. Now take a look at me again. Ain’t I a thing? Ain’t I an admirable male figure? Tall and sturdy, the chest put forth like a double packet of stale bread. And man, I look so confident. It makes me smile, you know? This confidence in me is a jewel I can wear right on my forehead. How could I not smile when I’m such a fine fellah! Look what I’m doing now. After I’ve taken my jacket off (‘cause I can, remember?) I can check my teeth. Hah? White like a row of pearls, that’s what they say about teeth like mine. I love ‘em. They make me look healthy, yes they do. Hmmm. Where do you think you can find another one like me? Hah? Where else apart from this window? I like how they made this window to reflect like mirrors, so that one could check out one’s hansom figure and say yeah. Yeah, baby, yeah. That’s how I like it. Nice and shiny, reflecting me like a picture. Yeah.

The Epidemic. Case THREE HUNDRED FORTY SEVEN

2010-07-27T23:31:00.002+12:00

Pale serenity

The side-moves of the train are barely putting her body in motion. She’s anchored herself very well, the palm of her right hand placed firmly onto the couch. She’s got this pensive look, apparent in the languid way she stares through the window, and in the chin prompted by the fist of her left hand, whose elbow is resting on the window sill (another point of support, just to be sure). She’s outrageously pregnant. The big round belly is resting in her lap as if she had hidden a beach ball under the garments. She seems quite young and at the first pregnancy, I’d venture to guess. Soft hands, almost translucent. I can see the veins through their thin skin. And also the pale colour of her cheeks, and the freshness in her wide eyes, and the pupils sliding along with the backward-running landscape. She’s opened the zipper of her top so that her long white neck is generously revealed. Her body is plump and juicy, monochromatic like a nicely sculpted piece of marble, the legs thickened by the accumulation of adipose resources, utterly symptomatic of her state. She looks very patient. The thought of the actual birth has not yet crossed her mind in the anxious way of ready-to-deliver mothers. But I gather she’s not far from it, and she knows the real deal will come to visit her in a not-so-distant future. Maybe that’s what is generating the pensiveness in her eyes. But let’s be frank: she’s also somewhat joyful, and this feeling gives her that I-don’t-know-what. The thin lips, discoloured to a pale pinkness, are slightly stretched across the face, in something that looks like a restrained smile. At times, she thrusts her thumb between the perfectly straight and white rows of teeth, and she falls into sucking the finger tip as if receded into the small pleasures of childhood. The nostrils are also a little dilated. Is there a proper smile blooming up on her face? It may be. Her thoughts, whatever they are, seem to bring to her a world she is fond of. So serene, so pale, so quiet.

The Epidemic. Case THREE HUNDRED FORTY SIX

2010-07-26T20:32:00.000+12:00

Infuriated dogs

We haven’t had a warm morning in weeks. The weather, so far only intent on showing off, has now cracked down into a mellow state of solar slumber in which the trees are shaking off their excess water and birds are willing to clear their throats for a quick concerto. On the opposite sidewalk a woman dressed in an irritating green jumper is doing her power walk at an incredible speed. The threshold between walking and running may be apparent only to her. To me it is not so clear. She’s got the attitude right, and also the proper pace. The white hat she’s wearing, with its wide brims that fall upon her eyes and ears like the flaps of a withering mushroom, move up and down with the exact rhythm resembling the ears of an English hound. Her hands, two pendulums propelled by an invisible inner motion, swing widely to match the large opening of her legs in forward motion. The street is empty and apart from a small number of cars nothing disturbs her morning exercise in any conceivable way. Nothing, that is, apart from the dogs that attack at the bottom of wooden fences, barking violently and trying to bite at her fast moving shadow, or maybe at the green light her jumper sends through the boards like semaphore signals allowing traffic to go mad. The infuriated dogs conduct this current barks from one fence to the next. They all join into this universal attack, and the repetitive, pleonastic noise they make follow the woman along her route like a trail of noise progressing in the rhythm of her power walk. The tension in her muscles is reflected in this canine craziness unfolding at her feet, but there’s nothing she would subdue to, apart from the will to move forth, completing the exercise for which she’s dragged herself out of the house in the first place. The dogs must be even more infuriated by her indifference, and so their continuous howls grow louder and louder, as other dogs join in, willing to put an end to this green fury that excites their senses. And so the woman disappears in the open horizon followed by the animal yells and yelps and barks and howls. The concerto is growing dimmer and dimmer as she fades away in the heat of this pleasant morning, but it continues in the distance with the same intensity, dragging more dogs into play, driving them mad, gluing their wet noses to the vertical fences.

The Epidemic. Case THREE HUNDRED FORTY FIVE

2010-07-25T22:16:00.001+12:00

Of a modern hunter-gatherer (in the past tense, for accuracy)

Past dusk, when spirits prepare themselves to melt in the slumber of the fast-approaching night, a man in a track suit made his way towards a finely drawn line of cars parked along the alley like horses at the entrance to a saloon in the Wild West. His steps were soft and inaudible, camouflaged by the springy soles of his sports shoes. The few lamp post that had already turned their cyclopean eyes into surrogate suns threw supple beams towards his head, where a whitish bald spot reflected them back in adamant refusal. The man, let us not forget, was wearing this tracking suit, a uniform of sorts. In spite of the darkness conquering the surroundings, the sparse light could make out quite distinctly the colours of this suit. It was dark blue and had white strips flowing down the laterals of his arms and legs, as if to render the man visible in the night to come. Dressed to be swift in motion, he slid across the pathway looking with eager eye for the only car in the row which was his own. His arms were burdened with a promising feast. Four square boxes bearing the logo Pizza Hut were placed uniformly one upon another, corner matching corner, a miniature tower, a statement in architecture. This was the prey of the day, the promised feast he was going to take to his tribe, and for which the tribe was going to cheer and scan his name a thousand times in perfect dithyrambs. A white plastic bag was hanging from the joint of his elbow. Inside it, two sweating bottles of soft drink were kissing each other passionately. When the man took a step, the plastic bag would swing like a pendulum in full action. The man had to stop a couple of times to allow the wide swing to calm down and turn the bag into a properly tamed thing. Finding his car in the end, the hunter-gatherer deposited the whole burden onto the roof, and then rummaged through the pockets searching for the key. He had this happy look on his face: the satisfaction of a job well done, and maybe the thought of the happiness he was going to give the hungry tribe, who had put the dishwasher to rest for the night.

The Epidemic. Case THREE HUNDRED FORTY FOUR

2010-07-25T22:14:00.003+12:00

An admirable spectacle

I’m about to take the turn to the right when I see the head of a young woman looming unnaturally high above the wooden fences on the side street. When I make the move to the right the mystery becomes clear as day light. She’s standing tall in the open boot of a car, gesturing vividly towards a house in which nobody seems to be reacting yet to her presence. There are boxes in the boot, tidily packed and mask-taped with brown crosses. She may be just moving to this new location. She’s tall and slim, the jeans very tightly stretched over her long legs, barely holding the round buttocks from exploding in carnal delights. The black t-shirt covering her upper body is also tiny and stretched to the maximum of its capability. The nipping chill of the morning has caused her nipples to bud under the t-shirt, like two ripe raspberries ready for the crop. Playful and yet well aware of the effect of her own presence, the young woman is standing there as if she were a beautiful thing in a limited-edition photograph magazine, showing off the curves of her body, the perfectly erect position of her spine, the proportions of her bodily composition. Inside the car, seemingly oblivious to her presence, a young man is staring into the void, probably listening to some mind-blowing music, and his absence from the spectacle unfolding in the boot of the car puts a lot more emphasis on the young woman. Her long black hair running down between the shoulder blades, to the point where it meets with the curves of her waist; her rosy cheeks of which the morning has made its feast of blood and flesh leaving the skin faintly coloured; the slender fingers waving to the house in the background. There is a lot more to say about this woman, but who could take the task of doing it in every detail? I, for one, wouldn’t dare. In fact, a tinge of mystery is just the thing for her, I believe.

The Epidemic. Case THREE HUNDRED FORTY THREE

2010-07-23T23:43:00.002+12:00

You can’t be too careful when it comes to your car

Slowly and carefully, like an excuse, that’s how the car comes along the curb and stops right beside the pay and display machine. The driver, a tiny Chinese woman who looks like she’s just turned fifteen, opens her eyes wide to check the surroundings. She removes the safety belt circumspectly, as if she were performing an interdicted action, all this time the eyes continuing the rolling motion that scans the environs. Then she suddenly disappears under the dash board. Has she been pulled down by some obscure force which no mortal eye can see? It takes forever to have her again in sight, emerging with her hair in disorder. After further indecision she finally comes out of the car and goes round and round the place a couple of times, searching for what should probably be scratches on the smoothly painted tin surface of her vehicle. There’s nothing to that effect, so she goes on with the rest of the ritual. The little gadget in her hand is activated by an invisible push of the thumb and the parking lights flash in the eyes of the car three times, like three perfect winks accompanied by an equal number of beeps. The car is nicely locked now. The driver moves to the pay and display machine, inches away from the vehicle, and produces a fistful of embarrassingly small change. Copper coins of ten cents are fed one by one into the machine, which swallows them like sunflower seeds. The process is tedious but the young woman is full of patience. She could do this for ages without a stop, and not even ask for a sip of water. Then finally it’s all over: the machine pokes out a tongue-like ticket. She goes back to the car, the ticket held delicately between the thumb and forefinger. The car is made to flash and beep again, and when the ticket has been nicely placed on the dash board the trick is repeated for the third time. Now the vehicle needs to rest after the long winks and toots. The woman agrees with it completely, and so she retires slowly, tiptoeing to the corner of the street, somewhat scared of the consequences of her actions. Is this really her car, I wonder?

The Epidemic. Case THREE HUNDRED FORTY TWO

2010-07-22T22:09:00.000+12:00

Captain Planet in action

It is all in the air. The city is expectant, with its bosom emptied of desires, the streets naked and open like big wide yawns. The radio station I’m listening to is broadcasting Bon Jovi’s Blaze of Glory, and I turned it up to let the sounds invade the interior of the car. Mister, catch me if you can, Jon yells in the speakers. The atmospheric pressure is quite high, as heavy clouds loom over the urban spleen threatening to let go of a new deluge. A police car is parked negligently in front of an unidentified house; with the law thus pulled over illicitness can go mad, ‘cause there’s nobody to sanction it. The cityscape is tired and bored. There’s no wind to blow the green hair of the nearby trees. The place needs something to stir its spirit, something to pump some life into this desolate scene. And here he comes as if from nowhere, mounted on an electric scooter, the champion of the day, equipped as if freshly descended from the silver screen where he’s performed the role of a superhero. He’s wearing this round helmet with a yellow stripe dividing the top into two equal hemispheres. A yellow visor comes down from the top of his forehead to the tip of his nose, screening away the usual dangers of scooter riding, but also completing the image of the superhero. Captain Planet, the invincible, his face visible only partially, but enough for the outlaws to see it and dread it. He’s got large, round, plump cheeks, pink like the buttocks of newly born piglets, pinched ever so slightly by the nipping chill brought along by the morning wind. His eyes stare forth with determination; his back is curved to give him the air of a street soldier ready to attack; his sausage-shaped fingers are grabbing the throttles as if trying to squeeze them to death. A round belly, greatly pleased with the kiss of the recent breakfast, rests upon his knees in peace, like a watermelon carried home from the local market. Chubby but alert, round but ready to start like a spring, the scooter-rider, the hero of the neighbourhood, the pillar of law and order. How admirable! How exciting!

The Epidemic. Case THREE HUNDRED FORTY ONE

2010-07-21T21:52:00.000+12:00

Playing with a muesli bar

The world is large and intrusive and hardened in bad feelings. You can’t just expose yourself; you can’t just show off the intimacies of your body or the subtleties of your daily happiness. Try to do it and you’ll see that the world will laugh at your most personal actions; it will mock your most precious gestures. If you’re in a train carriage, for instance, what do you do if you want to nibble at your muesli bar which, wretched thing, lays dormant within the belly of your backpack? There are hundreds of eyes staring at you right now from all corners, eyes tired of a day’s work and frustrated by the ignominious anonymity to which life has subjected them. They can’t wait, these eyes, to fix upon your image, to feast on the very fact of your existence, to have a bellyful of your sad presence. They can’t wait to laugh their heart off, these people, feeling avenged for their anonymity. So here they are, sorry commuters returning home to the only hope of a pizza delivered to their door and a string of pathetic soap operas which will attempt hopelessly to excite a little smile upon their faces. Of course they will feel victorious at the sight of your humble nibbling at the tiny muesli bar. What do you do now? How do you deal with this embarrassing situation? Okay, I can see your plan. You open the bag carefully, in slow motion, making sure the zipper makes no noise. You know full well that the slightest noise will attract the attention of this hungry pack of voyeurs. Then you take the little packet out and try to open it unnoticed. But the disreputable plastic thing rustles under your fingers and a couple of heads turn almost instantaneously towards you. You have to bury your hand inside the bag and wait patiently till the curious lose interest. When they do, you try again, and this time it works. You take the packet out and lower your head as much as the spine allows you to. You almost hope that you could get your head inside the bag, so that nobody could see your mouth chewing. When the bite is slithering along your palate and you feel the sweetness on your tongue you find yourself liberated. The whole ordeal was worth going through. The victory is yours.

The Epidemic. Case THREE HUNDRED FORTY

2010-07-20T21:11:00.005+12:00

The age of immaturity

These two boys are illustrations of their own typology. Barely grown out of childhood, newcomers in the realm of early maturity, they wear the brand of Auckland Grammar on their chests, across their hearts, the brand that is promising to groom them into reliable, law abiding citizens. One of them wears glasses. His tiny eyes and smooth skin suggest a boy in love with mathematics and with his twenty-odd geography teacher. His barren legs are almost girlish. Very uncharacteristic of boys, he keeps his knees turned towards each other. It seems that only the bag at his feet is what’s keeping the knees from getting stuck together. He covers his chest with his crossed arms as if he were a girl trying to protect her freshly grown breasts. The other boy, his friend, displays features that are more masculine in nature. His face is covered in pimples, the sign of a fast-approaching maturity, and a faint shade of grey down the sides of his face indicate that he is well accustomed with the workings of razor blades. Unlike his friends’, his legs are boney and covered in a thick forest of hair. When seated, he spreads his legs far apart, bringing forth a kind of self-confidence that the other one doesn’t have. He is, like all men, invasive. While his friend is hiding his feet under the bench, he thrusts them forth, taking up a lot of space, well beyond his immediate necessity. And also like men (some feminists I know would love to say) he displays a glaring immaturity by sucking with passion at a pink lollypop, which he pushes around the mouth with his tongue for an enervating length of time. While the girlish boy is staring into the carpet at his feet, shy and reluctant to raise his eyes, the pimpled man-in-the-making rolls his eyes from left to right, looking straight into other people’s eyes, willing to know, willing to acquaint himself with the colourful world around. Together, they make an interesting pair of adolescents.