The woman with gray hair walks along, dragging her feet.
But no one notices.
She’s fat. She’s old. Arthritis has left her hips misshapen, every step is pure torture. The thunderclaps echo, the crowds hurry down the street. Not her. Haste is for those who know where they’re going, for people who have a smile to share with someone, somewhere. The woman with gray hair has no more smiles, hasn’t had for a long time.
She has a plastic bag in one hand, the woman with gray hair. She bought herself a couple of tomatoes, a box of individual cheese portions, and an apple. The grocer, without her having to ask, tossed in a sprig of basil and a tangerine. She didn’t even notice.
She’s wearing a heavy woolen jacket; the color is by now indefinable but it might once have been gray, like her hair; it’s stained down the front. A shapeless dress covers a slip, which also serves as a nightdress and which she never takes off. She wears a necklace with a metal cross. Her hair is filthy, and for lack of a hairbrush, it has tangled into tiny insoluble knots.
She wears two men’s socks, and a pair of slippers, tattered, with holes in the soles.
The woman with gray hair heads down the stairway of the subway, taking it one step at a time; she brings one foot down and places it next to the other, then repeats the motion. She braces herself on the railing, a tiny grimace of pain with every step.
No one sees her, as if she didn’t exist.
On the escalator, a boy slams into her furiously; she almost drops her bag, but she manages to regain her balance just moments before tumbling to the ground.
The boy doesn’t notice; no one notices.
The woman with gray hair doesn’t change her expression. Her eyes remain glued to the floor.
The woman with gray hair lives alone, in a two-room apartment where she once lived with her mother. She stopped paying rent two months ago because her social security payments barely suffice to cover her one daily meal and the medications she needs to survive. In a day or ten or twenty, someone will come along to evict her, and then she won’t know where to turn.
The woman with gray hair lacks the strength to cry, or even to complain. She has no phone numbers to call to ask for help, no friends who can assist her, no relatives to ask for shelter or a hot meal.
She doesn’t even have the wherewithal to suffer, the woman with gray hair. She’s lost all will, even the desire to see the sun come up in the morning. She goes on living because she doesn’t know what else to do, and because she assumes that Someone Else’s will counts more than her own.
In the midst of the crowd, she tries to win herself an advantageous position from which to board the train. Her aching hips, her weight, her years all conspire to make her the slowest animal in the jungle: unless she wants to be left behind, she’ll have to push herself forward, very close to where the doors will open.
School has just let out. The worst time of day. Little bands of teenagers swarm the streets shouting, laughing, and shoving, indifferent to anyone around them.
A boy a few yards away performs a vulgar imitation of someone and the other kids all burst into laughter, playfully slapping and elbowing each other; a girl accidentally shoves the woman with gray hair, making her wobble frighteningly. The girl turns around, sees the woman with gray hair, and laughs right in her face; then she turns back to her friends, holding her nose and pantomiming the urge to vomit. They all laugh. This is the only time that anyone notices her.
The woman with gray hair doesn’t lift her gaze from the small dark pit occupied by the subway’s tracks.
Seen from behind, the woman with gray hair is the very picture of despair. Her slumped shoulders, her head, which hangs low, the filthy locks of hair that hang from her head like dead leaves. Who knows what memories pass through her mind. Who knows what thoughts.
Now the woman with gray hair sets her bag with its few items of food on the ground. Even though it weighs almost nothing, her fingers, pitiless, are radiating pain. The woman with gray hair lets out a faint moan.
But no one notices.
Pity, the woman with gray hair thinks as the tunnel fills with the buffeting wind of the oncoming train. What pity?
The kids laugh again, loudly, their young hair fluttering in the currents of air. The crowd braces for the arrival of the subway.
A shadow slides up behind the woman with gray hair.
No one notices.
The kids laugh at nothing in particular: they don’t notice.
The two people in love, gazing into each other’s eyes: they don’t notice.
The young mother, arranging the blankets in her baby carriage: she doesn’t notice.
The office worker, hurrying to finish the article in the free newspaper, so he can toss it in the trash before boarding the train: he doesn’t notice.
The night watchman, struggling to keep his eyes open, fighting off exhaustion from the shift he’s just finished: he doesn’t notice.
The pickpocket, carefully monitoring the crowd for purses left open or wallets in back pockets: he doesn’t notice.
The high school teacher, staring, hypnotized, at a female student’s ass, sheathed in a pair of jeans so tight it’s like a second skin: he doesn’t notice.
The two nuns, chattering away in who knows what language about which of the two of them is going to be sent on a mission to Asia: they don’t notice.
The ticket checkers, talking about soccer while waiting for someone with a friendly expression to accost, knowing that the ones most likely to lack a valid ticket are the ones with scowls on their faces, but knowing also that they’re also the ones most likely to put up a fight: they don’t notice.
The woman on her way back from grocery shopping, struggling not to drop any of the bags and parcels she’s carrying: she doesn’t notice.
Just before the train pulls into the station, just as the woman with gray hair is asking Whoever sits on high in heaven to please give her the strength, a hand touches her gently in the middle of the back and gives her a small shove.
The woman with gray hair falls without a peep into the small abyss of the tracks, at the very instant the train pulls in.
No one notices.
The one who does notice, with a scream, is a young woman just rushing down the stairs in a last-ditch attempt to catch the train; she misses the train but what she does arrive in time to see is the sad spectacle of all that’s left of the woman with gray hair.
A gentle hand slips a note into the plastic bag still sitting on the platform.
With a farewell to the world that the woman with gray hair lacked the strength to utter.
But no one notices.