(Japan, 2004; Russia, 2005; Thailand, 2001)
The day before yesterday, wrote Montaigne, I saw a child that two men and a nurse, who said that they were the father, uncle, and aunt, were leading about to get a penny or so from showing him, on account of his strangeness. Four centuries and a decade later, in the reddish dirt and mud a few steps west of the Cambodian border, I met a girl whose face earned my pity and money. Her nose baffled three doctors to whom I showed her portrait; the nostrils were still there, but then the bridge of the nose spread out beneath her eyes like clay carelessly molded by some child; and indeed that was what I kept thinking when I saw her; the religions are correct; flesh is clay; she was not so much repulsive as simply unfinished, as if the potter who had made her simply needed one more moment to work her nose between his fingers, moisten it, and smooth it out to be as perfect as the rest of her—what was she? The center of her face was a sort of blur. And yet her smile was formed, her gaze distinctly her own. Were she my lover, I could very easily find her beautiful. But why would I even imagine loving her? I never knew who she was; and although she and I shared lunch, conversing through an interpreter, and met again on another day, all that I now remember of her is her appearance. Deformity is the other face of invisibility—or, if you prefer, the reification of unwantedness. The old Russian beggar-woman in Kazakhstan whose mouth is a black oval within a dead white oval of numbed face whose black eyeslits are less prominent than the black scab on the right cheek, around which, as in some astronomical diagram, smaller black scabs have frozen in mid-orbit—should I mention the black wool cap pulled low and specked with snowflakes, the coarse scarf wrapped around that poor, half-frozen old head?—when I gave her money and took her portrait for you, she seemed unremarkable because she stood shivering hopelessly in an icy doorway, ignored by all, with no money in her cup; she was invisible; but when I look at her image now, I’m appalled; her misery is monstrous. Poverty equals invisibility, except when poverty insists on itself, shouting out its loathsomeness. The dead are gone, invisible to us, but that’s because we bury them in the ground where we won’t have to smell them. —Why is an opened grave a fearful thing? For the same reason that visible poverty is.
Indeed, deformity is among other things the stench of unclean flesh, of poor people’s clothes dank with old sweat and rain, of badly healed wounds which would have returned to flawlessness upon a rich body. Deformity is the noisiness, the abusiveness, the sniveling or groveling abnormality through which so many beggars seek our help. One of Adam Smith’s minimal requirements for richness was the ability to appear in public without shame. The man out of line in the Osaka subway station fails to meet this standard; he is a shameful entity who gets tittered at by the ordinary rich.
That shame corrodes his belief in himself. I will never forget the old man in Tokyo, who sat on the sidewalk reading a comic book and stinking of urine.
Why do some people have more than others? I asked.
That is because the rich people and the poor people, he said, well, if you compare them, it depends on the ability of the individual. It would be happy if everybody could be rich.
Do you consider yourself poor?
He smiled, hesitated, affirmed the humiliating fact.
Why?
He threw his comic book on the ground and shouted: It’s my fault! Nobody else’s responsibility!
Why is it your fault?
Because I am living outdoors, and once you sleep outside, nobody will know you and you are stuck. I cannot get out of poverty …
The repulsiveness and outright eeriness of a deformed existence facilitates the isolation of rich and poor from each other. Excepting medieval saints, who cares to kiss a leper’s sores? It was on account of her deformity that Natalia, unlike the healthier Oksana, was placed under (or at least claimed to be under) legal constraint.
The police no longer allow me to be here every day, she said.* They allow me to beg every other day. A certain police captain who comes around is afraid of me when I have a seizure. He crosses himself and tells the others not to touch me …
But deformity is also, as Montaigne and I both observed on our separate occasions, a vendible commodity, both to those who are deformed because they are poor and to those who are poor because they are deformed. Consider the armless man who knelt beside the topmost step of a pedestrian overpass in Bangkok; day after day I saw him, using his teeth for hands, begging submissively. Should I have felt defrauded of the few baht I’d given him, when after a week I’d caught on to the clever way he’d contorted his arms behind his back? He leaned against the railing to disguise his enablement. Should I perhaps have admired him for putting on such a good show? I actually felt amused and annoyed, the former being a weak cousin of admiration, since in fact the show had not been so good, the latter deriving itself as follows: I thought he’d needed that money! —Immediately came the next thought: Of course he needs it! —Once that misunderstanding with myself had been cleared up (it lasted for less time than it took the man to rearrange his arms), I continued to pay his tithe, and with a cheerful heart.
* She added: “Also my boyfriend is worried about me and I don’t want to upset him by dying here in the park.”