There is a face, or a movement. Perhaps a piece of clothing. I remember them.
There is a thin elder woman that walks the Amsterdamstraatweg, always dressed as in spring. Around the center of the city there is an old man always smiling and always carrying a leica, in a crumpled white silk summer suit. And of course, there is the big black man that begs for an euro to sleep in the homeless shelter, the big black man that seems to be always angry, and is scary. And there is the elder mediterranean-looking man, walking up and down the amsterdamstraatweg, always alone, always smiling.
The bones under the spring dress, the silk and the leica, the anger, that anger that has become milder with the years, but is still there. The smile.
I don’t like to write this page of today, because I do not want to make objects of people. But I have already made them objects, to me they are (somehow-flat) references of my city. I will never know their tales, their stories. I exchange smiles with the leica guy, and bow to the lady in the spring dress. Now and then she notices me. The others seems to be beyond my reach. Perhaps is not even my reach, but their reach. We can’t reach each other. In every other idiom that I know there is a fixed expression for the town’s fool, that person that in one or another way seems to be organic part of all of us, and is beyond us too. So Utrecht also have her fools, her people outside the borders of normality.
But what are those borders, actually?
I know that the black guy is homeless and the smiling one is likely to be jobless. But perhaps he owns a couple of properties and walks around them. Is the leica dude a professional street photographer? Could the lady simply be a grandmother that likes to walk and has a taste for floral patterns and short skirts? Why not?
I do see something else in ther faces and their eyes. I believe that they are beyond most of us. But perhaps that is the thing. They are beyond most of us. So what? why shouldn’t they? I wonder, then, if that very old tradition of keeping, or supporting, the town’s fool, is nothing else than a reference, a measurement of strangeness to reckon with. As if we all are supporting some persons that are more extreme than most, so that we all remember what is normal and acceptable, and what is too weird.
Perhaps those persons are the bars of the cages that we have build for ourselves.