There's a man and his canvas briefcase. He will sit on the metro every morning and spend there around thirty of the earliest minutes of his day, either looking straight ahead, where I usually am, or reading a book. I should know nothing about him for we are strangers and, nevertheless, I know so many things.I know, for instance, that he can read. He can read, and reads, thus he understands and maybe gets intrigued too. And he focuses on that intrigue or understanding, though sometimes he doesn’t, and then he chooses not to read.
But when he does, he takes his glasses out of his briefcase, steams them up with his breath and rubs them with a lens cloth. He puts them on and, suddenly, the letters and I come into focus in his eyes.
Sometimes he chooses to look at me, or he doesn’t choose to and he just can’t help it, though he is very concerned about me not noticing. But the thing is I always notice everything.
I’ve noticed, for instance, that when he doesn’t read, he looks like any sad-faced fifty-odd year old man going to work, more aware of the way life has wreaked havoc on his face than of the world around him. He just sits on his seat, and grabs his briefcase firmly with both hands, as if it were the hips of a woman. Then I feel sorry for him because he looks as if he hasn’t been kissed for a long time.
On some occasions he wears a t-shirt that says “North Pole” and the potential connections between us just melt tragically. And I would like to ask him:“Have you ever been to the North Pole? Are you intending to?” And if he answered “No” I would tell him he must be careful with what is written on his clothes because it’s meaningful, evocative and should signify something for him, since he’s spreading those two words around the world.
In addition to those letters, on that t-shirt there’s an imprecise drawing of an arctic landscape, with the blurred silhouette of an igloo, and also something like the grid reference of the area, if my memory serves me right. And perhaps yes, perhaps he dreams about going there or he doesn’t dwell on the possibility seriously but he considers it a sort of Promised Land.
This I don’t know.
What I do know, however, is that he breathes and every two days shaves. I know that some days he must curse his luck and some other days he must feel joyful. I know that some things will make him smile, and some will make him cry a river. I know that once his hair was a colour other than grey, and his wrinkles didn’t stay in place when he changed his expression. And I know that North Pole t-shirt is, in fact, a resistance to what he is. Those exciting horizons claim freedom, courage, but his is just the kind of t-shirt that some people will buy, at some point, no matter what it says, without taking into account the contradictory message they’re sending to the rest of us. Their inner beauty sinks under the North Pole waters and only remains visible to those looking with an open heart.
If I could only sit next to him and suggest him:
“Let’s go to the North Pole. If you don’t go, that place will always be a metaphor for your lack of identity."
He would stare at me distrustfully, but then I would say:
If I wouldn’t, he would stay subjugated to the sad slavery of the letters on his t-shirt, totally unaware of the fact that his clothes are really important lessons about how we live our lives.
I mean his and mine.
