The crazy man
Created | Updated Aug 23, 2005
The crazy man crossed the street running, as he usually does. How it is that he had not had an accident, or caused one, nobody knows. A car nearly brushed him. He reached the sidewalk though, turned and glared angrily at the car speeding away. The crazy man started murmuring things I could not understand and he was till throwing curses after the car as another man reached the sidewalk and stopped. This man thought the crazy man was swearing at him and got angry. The crazy man walked away as fast as he could out of harm’s way. The other man said to me and the general public “I’ll slit his throat if he gets funny!”
The crazy man was tall and slim. His clothes, that is, shirt and trousers, were always the same dirty grey-brown color. I think he slept and walked in them until they fell off him and then someone gave him new ones which he immediately must have dipped into red mud because their color never varied. He was barefoot, his feet leathery and black and he walked all day long. I have met him at all hours and places. He faded into the neighbourhood as just another house or tree.
He looked strange. His eyes were fierce when he looked at you. But he rarely looked at you. He usually averted his gaze and put a hand in front of his face when he met another person on the same sidewalk and has had no time to cross to the other side.
He wore a scraggly beard of the kind one sees on old Chinese men. The color of his skin was the same as his clothes and he went from garbage bin to garbage bin, looking for food and newspapers. People hung up food for him in plastic bags on trees and gates but he only took it if no one was looking. He did not mind people seeing him when he took food out of garbage bins to eat it standing there, gulping it.
He collected the newspapers and hugged them furtively under his shirt close to his chest. When he had a load of them he sat down on a sidewalk, took off his shirt, folded it carefully, put it down next to him, stretched out his legs in front of him like a rag doll and opened each page of the newspapers very carefully, flattening them out with his hands. He got so absorbed in his task that he never looked up. When the pages were nicely flattened out on the ground, he started rolling up a certain number of them to make uniform bundles. He made the bundles the thickness of a closed fist and the length of his forearm. He folded them in at the extremities, took them all up in his arms and, carefully looking around again, walked away with hurried steps.
At the first sewage hole he came to, he stopped, put down his bundles, selected one and lay down on the sidewalk with his head towards the road so he could look into the hole at the curb. He selected a bundle and stuck it into the hole. His arm went far inside to make sure the bundle could not be seen anymore. Then he got up, looked around again, took up his other bundles and scurried away. He repeated the same ceremony again and again until all his bundles were disposed of.
During the rainy season the sewage holes never absorbed the rushing rain water running along the gutters and the city department had to come by regularly to take out all the sand, tins, plastic bags and the bundles which clogged up the holes. What was absolutely amazing was the amount of newspaper bundles the crazy man managed to stuff into the drains. He nade them so tight that not even the rain undid them und they were taken out nearly intact.
I heard a story about the crazy man. He was supposed to have had two sisters and a brother who were crazy too and lived together in the same house. All of them were supposed to be dead by now and only this one remained. Poor, hunted man.
Recently I saw him stuffing empty coconuts down the sewage drain at the corner of our street.
