Gehenna. Something keeps pulling me back. Is it what the French call “le goût de la fange,” literally “a taste for muck,” that sudden and inexplicable craving to forfeit all civility and refinement, to leap headfirst into a pit of filth and depravity where humankind’s most repulsive down-and-outers congregate?
Or is it something else, perhaps the urge to gawk at humanity in its most dismal state? The compulsion to touch it and be smeared in the process? Is it morbid pity or gruesome voyeurism? Do I revisit Gehenna to survey it or to cohere? Am I an intruder or the prodigal son reconnecting with his roots? Haven’t I seen enough shit and degradation and misery and despair when I ventured into the monster’s entrails during my years as a reporter? Having since confessed to a waning passion for humanitarian causes, what repulsive addiction entices me still?
But I keep going back, anticipating the putrefaction and the decadence and the apathy and the endless struggles that crush the outcasts, the unwanted, the unloved. In the bleak and malodorous pit of despair that is Gehenna, when love and hatred are gone, all I stumble on is indifference.
*
My friend, the novelist William Lewis once wrote, “Children are like stars. They are lost in the flesh of the night; but they can be found because they shine. It is when they become the blackness that we cannot see them, that they cease to be children, that they are lost.”
What I found in the eyes of a boy I chanced upon in Gehenna was blackness, the kind of burning ebony that exuded from my cousin Amos’ eyes as he lay dying. His star may be larger than life but its radiance is fading like that of an exhausted supernova. He will not be reborn from its embers.
“Things could be worse,” the boy tells me with apocalyptic intensity. “Life could be forever.” Such blighted hope is inexplicable in someone so young. His cynicism is finely tuned, deeply felt. He has seen the dark side, endured the vulgarity of survival, faced the demons.
He’s 12.
By day the boy’s world is the carbon copy of a hundred Gehennas chanced upon in my endless peregrinations: Sweltering heat, a canvas of squalor and misery, teeming masses of world-weary, cynical, tired creatures trapped and swept by some unstoppable momentum. There is an unkempt shoreline and scum-covered canals in which float, half-submerged, the cadavers of apathy -- trash, human waste, broken-down appliances. Grubby side streets are lined with sleazy bars where locals sip warm beer and engage garishly painted harlots, darkened pool halls where drug deals are made, and fast-sex bordellos.
Gehenna continues to spread, fatigued and imperiled, without a plan, without a vision, compromised by the elements, ravaged by age, neglect, apathy. Buildings are cracked, teetering on the brink of collapse. A few eventually crumble in heaps of worn brick and mortar, raising storms of acrid dust in their final agony.
An incessant stream of Diesel-fueled vehicles emit lung-crunching fumes and produce a dissonance of intolerable pitch that assault the ear, grind nerves. Dodging each other, motorcycles, Lilliputian taxis and overloaded carts pulled by underfed mules jockey for space on crowded, unregulated thoroughfares. The frenetic pace only heightens the feeling of weariness and adds to the exhaustion that such momentum creates. It’s a place driven by reflex, surviving on hidden reserves of energy akin to frenzy -- or exasperation.
It’s also a place that begs to be forgiven, for some of its people have endearing traits; but it also elicits impatience and revulsion. Small squares where young lovers meet to steal kisses are littered. Benches are encrusted with generations of baked-in guano. Loitering aimlessly, spitting dejectedly, old men wait for the passage of time, as if time were a destination instead of a conveyance. A pervasive smell of decay, excrement and death wafts on the wings of intermittent breezes.
At night, after the sun’s copper disk has set the sea on fire, Gehenna turns into a den of depravity of Gomorrhan dimensions. No lust, however vile, remains unquenched for very long. Here, demand feeds supply. Human flesh is the commodity of choice, and purveyors abound.
The boy knows all that. Deserted by his parents when he was six, addicted to Resistol, he succumbed to the vile commerce, to survive, to cheat reality. There is no shame and degradation when hunger beckons and hopelessness warps all reason. But he is paying the ultimate price for clinging so passionately to life. He is dying of AIDS, the same ravenous, diabolical scourge that claimed my cousin Amos.
Illiteracy, poverty, alcoholism, irresponsible paternity are all at work in Gehenna. Some families have not a gram of conscience when it comes to procreation. Use of Resistol among the kids is widespread. It’s sold freely everywhere. Pimps and sex tourists often pay the children with cans of the deadly shoe glue. It’s a case of turpitude further debased by criminal negligence.
In the hovel where he is cared for, the boy drifts between excruciating awareness and merciful stupor. Eternal night draws near. He will soon be free. Outside, mumbling incoherently, a madwoman, bedraggled, froth caking the corners of her mouth, exchanges stones and insults with vagrants who taunt her. Hoping to squeeze the last traces of pity from a parade of self-absorbed passers-by, an armless, legless man wriggles his way toward some unknown destination like a grub on a sizzling sidewalk. Crying with studied constancy and resonance, a beggar exposes a newborn at her naked left breast.
Feral dogs, traumatized by hunger, rejection and loneliness, respond to a friendly whistle or the offer of a caress with sidelong glances filled with sadness, mistrust, fear. Head low, tail tucked between their legs, panting, they have surrendered to forces heretofore unimagined, now braved with stoic resignation. They do not have the energy to bark.
In the distance, standing legs wide apart for maximum balance in the shade of a big old tree, a policeman stares catatonically in the void to stay cool, conserve energy, perhaps to guard against the incongruity that surrounds him.
On the street corner, near the Ashmodai Hotel where I spent the night, a man beckons. “Anything you want, man: Dope? Girls? Young kids? Name your pleasure.”
I describe him to the policeman but the officer, dressed like a Gilbert and Sullivan admiral, stares at me blankly, his eyes-half shut. He waves me off as if he were shooing away a fly. It’s nearly lunch-time. In the noonday heat even duty takes a siesta.