Homelessness

MIAMI — At the time when everybody went home from work, the young black man stood in front of the people leaving the Metro. He wore a dark suit, his hair and beard were scraggly, and his eyes shone like those of a febrile preacher of the kind that speak only in gospel. He looked like he had never taken a shower. He looked around, cleared his throat and lifted his hands to the skies: “Miami, my city!”

His sermon dealt with the same issues that have been raised in all sermons, ever since the one given on the mountain: good and evil, the road to perfection, the imminent apocalypse, repent, I assure you, this time it’s for real, the end is near. Or are you blind?

More than blind, the passers-by seemed deaf. They were deep into their earphones, their cell phones, their Facebook messages, who was going to pay attention to another apocalyptic emissary? Anyway, if the world came to an end, debts would also disappear.

You will say that it’s not true, that the tropical heat makes me imagine things, that I shouldn’t smoke grass, but I can swear that I saw the same man, a few months ago, sitting astride a bench in Havana. He wore the same unmistakable dark jacket and his eyes looked through the fog of psychedelic drugs. That time he didn’t speak, he only wrote furiously his end-of-the-world sermon.

Down there, they probably didn’t allow him to stand at a pulpit because it wasn’t the right moment, the historical conditions had not been created, or the stars were not in the right alignment. Here, nobody listened to him because the Apocalypse no longer sells — in the past year, too many movies have been released with the same plot and it’s getting stale — and what doesn’t sell is of no interest to anyone, as you know.

So, like everyone else, I avoided becoming depressed by the fatalistic message and climbed on the Metro. The Metro here, unlike other cities, is not a subway and rides past enormous buildings with $6,000 a month apartments that are empty half the year. As I stepped down from the train, an old lady approached me, smiling through the few teeth she had left.

“Boy, do you have a spare old coat? It rained last night, and around this time of the year the streets downtown are cold.”

This was definitely a day for reunions. The woman looked identical to another one who, centuries ago, sat by my side on a bench in Havana and, without knowing me, told me the story of her grandson, who apparently looked very much like me. The boy went to the university and was planning to leave the island once he graduated.

She couldn’t remember the name of his profession. All she knew was that, ever since he was a child, he liked to take things apart, see the inside of clocks, toys and radios. Then she told me she was hungry, not in a pitiful manner but as an objective fact, the same way you talk about the weather or a back ache.

Today, her double in Miami told me that I look just like her grandson. Apparently, there is in me a mysterious quality that prompts old ladies, even the poorest, to adopt me. I then began a game that she could not possibly understand; I told her that I was still trying to figure out the mechanism of everything that came into my hands but that I would continue my journey until I could find a place where I might be allowed to disassemble clocks and souls in peace.

Then, against all logic, she told me that I was doing the right thing, gave me an uncomfortable hug and asked me again for a coat.

A little later, after climbing on the Metromover — an electric train smaller than the Metro, that travels only downtown — I heard a security guard explain to a girl who looked like a sexy receptionist why management had removed most of the seats: “What happens, you see, is that we had to remove them because many homeless people used them to sleep on.” She seemed incredulous, rolling up her carefully lined eyes.

“Think about it,” the guard added. “If I were a homeless, this would be the perfect place: free admission, air conditioned, comfortable seats and a socket for charging the telephone. What more could a homeless want?” And he stressed the noun.

Of the many words in the English language to describe indigent people — “indigent,” “vagrant,” “beggar” — people still prefer the word “homeless,” which has a soft sibilant sound, timid, tender, pleasing to the ear, politically correct. Homeless … someone missing something, just that, nothing that evokes the smell of dirty skin, failure, fear, uprootedness. Homeless … with a little imagination, it could be the name of an urban tribe.

Something similar occurs in Havana, where functionaries and some doctors avoid using words like “indigent” or “vagabond.”

“We prefer to call them ‘drifters,'” one of them explained to me, “which is a lot more precise and applies both to those who ask for money and those who, of their own free will, choose to live on the streets. Many of them we take to a shelter and a few days later they run away.”

Homeless. Drifters. Miami and Havana share euphemisms, in addition to guilt.

Outside the Metromover, walking through downtown, I was approached by a man who wore clothes that once were elegant but had turned dirty and shabby. He said he was an artist and could I help him with something.

“I’m almost the same as you, man, I just arrived here,” I answered.

“Seriously? You don’t look it.”

“It’s the truth. I arrived here only a few months ago.”

“Where do you hail from? Where are you sleeping? I’m sleeping at Camillus House right now, and when I get bored of it I’ll go to another shelter or wherever.”

I hesitated a couple of seconds before answering. For a moment, it seemed that he was taking me for one of them. Do I look like one? I didn’t care, but it was something I had never considered. Maybe I am just that — a homeless.

“I come from Cuba,” I said, “but I don’t belong anywhere. I feel like Hermann Hesse, the last pacifist amid the war.”

I don’t think he understood that, but he smiled courteously and shook my hand.

“Well, gotta continue the struggle,” although he never explained why or against whom he struggled.

I didn’t have time to ask. The man walked to the nearest traffic light and unfolded a cardboard sign that I hadn’t noticed. He ruffled his hair, looked sad, and raised the sign to his chest so that anyone standing nearby could read it. The sign said: “My family has been kidnapped by ninjas. I need money for karate lessons.”

[Photo of sleeping man on the bench was taken by the author, Abel Sanchez, in Havana.]