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.
Now the knuckles are fighting again, the action is approaching its denouement, the kids are shouting, some mimicking the glorious French language, and then there is one more blast from the water barrel of heaven and just as suddenly a hot sun reappears in the sky, and the whole sudden gathering takes flight, rising as on wings, and flying, flying, away and away, the story left there perfectly unfinished, the way God Itself leaves things, sometimes …