Jot It Down

“Literature takes a habit of mind that has disappeared. It requires silence, some form of isolation, and sustained concentration in the presence of an enigmatic thing.”

― Philip Roth

November 19, 2013

The soccer match on TV today is like a cricket match in India, a sort of social cushion marked by hysterical movements and shouts. The momentary trance or joy. But there is banging from my next door, the room of the old Muslim guy seemingly in his sixties. It’s 9.30pm now. There are those like three of them with the young guy, the nosiest one, who lives on the other wing of the oblong five storey building with the demarcating flights of steps in the middle just from the glass-door entrance. I always find the old guy in the same light checked shirt and dark trousers seemingly stuck over his medium height figure. I only had several angle views of his face puffy and pockmarked and his hair curly. As from the tucked up sleeves of his shirt up to the elbows I saw his sallow hands skinny, limp and with those embossed lines of veins. His thick fingers bear the proof of hard labors before being a recluse here. So I learn I am one of those hermits. So I did learn about the same at Hayange. He coughs a lot as he drinks and gets drunk sometimes. His French is terribly blurry like his Arabic in loud trembling voice. But his young mate’s voice is rather compressed shrill of the type that can be identified from an earshot distance. I saw him only once below on the front yard from the window of my room on fourth floor. He, too, is of medium built with dark coarse complexion. I saw him in a track jacket and dark jeans. His hair was cropped that accentuated his round small face and deep-set eyes. It is him who is shouting hysterically while banging on the table or any with the palms of his hands. It can be known from the raised voices of the commentator and the drones of the spectators that a goal has been bagged by their team. The drama is just like how it’s in India, how game is fanned with such physical displays.

I have been reading a book. I can’t get on. So I get up and start writing it instead as to carry on in my own way while they enjoy the match.

I can hear the guy in the other room just opposite me is behaving in the same way but rather mildly alone. He, the chubby guy with the heavy dangling paunch, is the first person here who came to me to introduce himself when I first came here on 9 August. He was bit tipsy then. As soon as I had just put down my baggage with the help of my friend he appeared near the door. After some French he learned my French and began to speak in English. His English is okay. I at once smelt he reeked mildly. He led me along the narrow corridor that has to be lighted even during the day time. He showed me the kitchen and bathroom like the official in charge (director) had shown me beforehand. The kitchen was small yet cleaner than what I have found before at other places. There is the other door that leads inside the proper dining room with the locker of six box sets (one box for each head to keep their personal kitchen wares). There is the table pressed against one corner of the wall. And those plates set on an old plastic rack. He showed me those plates first.

‘They are clean. See? You know you should always clean after dining. It’s the rule. Okay?’ He instructed like he was starved of getting someone docile enough as me to be instructed thus.

His bleary eyes roamed side to side. His front bald just above his back-sloping forehead made him appear with long abnormal bright face.

‘Oh, are these yours?’ I asked.

‘Yes, but they are clean. You see?’ He laid the stress on their cleanliness.

As he wished we sat down on the old blue painted plywood bottomed chairs. He seemed to be interested in new comers or after learning that I am a Tibetan. He seemed to be so tight that he acted like he couldn't bear his heavy head that fell this or that way like troubling his thick neck with bright limp skin. He blurted out some French now and thereafter spoke in English like getting to himself after repeated drifts. Yes, he knew about Tibet and its problems. But he wasn't the one who would say there aren't human rights in Tibet. Through his switching mode between French and English but more in the former I learned what he said again and again.

‘Tibet should be independent. Tibet should gain independence,’ said he while pouting his lower lip with a farting sound again and again.

As I sat and listened with a gathered interest as not to hurt his sentiment, he at last wept that I first found as his usual mannerism. But, no, he was weeping like a child. I was moved. Yes, he had introduced himself as from Algeria, an alien citizen here.

As I have found out at Hayange, those elderly and aged inmates of mine here are mostly retired ones, those with minimum mental pains as of social or family strains that have driven them here as recluses. So boozing, as I have found, is their first remedy after viewing such match with two or more others (if not mysteriously locking themselves inside). The chubby Algerian guy has a visiting woman and a boy, a slender woman with short hair and a small boy who I saw from back only, as his sister or wife. Whenever they come, there would be a moment fuss in his cluttered room (I can just guess so from his appearances), especially marked by the boy’s playful voice like asking him to do this and that. Then his languid compressed voice would be followed reciprocally playful now and tiresomely deterring thereafter when the woman would intervene to tame the boy. Our doors face each other with only a step gap between.

The older guy has his rather anomalous habit of getting awake like at 2am as driven by seemingly habitual hunger. Then the thuds followed by turning on micro oven to the single ring after a minute are what I can hear so clearly like he is doing it in my own room, so clearly for the thinness of the wall and stillness of the time. Then after filling followed by a belch, fart and going out to toilet he would go to bed again. His routine reminds me of the next door one at Hayange, a black guy in his fifties who was friendly the way he greeted me in French that could go farther than ‘bonjour’. His peculiarity was to stay up night long watching TV with someone, who came everyday at the fixed time past 8pm, by sleeping half day till 12 or 1pm. He was more troublesome by the way he talked on mobile phone sometimes at night in such loud voice like he could see the other side. He must be calling his wife or any family member back there in his native place. I found his voices always had the touch of closeness and benignity despite being loud—as the infatuation created by the distance.

And there at Hayange at the grand five storey building on its ground floor where I had a small room I found how those single aged ones of multi-racial origins lived on to the tune of an aged one’s manifestations between life-vigor and dread-grief—the despair for the fading former; the forced resignation, as may be happening sometimes, in the form of isolation and detachment.

Joseph was the closest one as for his liking to befriend with Tibetans. But I could be said the last one he came across from those more than 10 there and that at the end of my stay there. It happened as the closer ones of his had left somewhere else for jobs or with some higher hopes. He had a red old car (four seater) parked off the building on the roadside parking lot. It was one day he gave me a lift through a Tibetan, one of his close ones. As I happened to be standing on the landing on the ground floor, they were dismounting steps to go to the village town down. Even if the Tibetan guy confidently asked me to join them as I had got to go there as well, I was going to find later by studying Joseph’s gestures and the Tibetan guy’s making fun of him in his loud broken French. It meant he couldn't take me as his wasn't a free taxi. The Tibetan guy made fun of it by pretending to call by cupping his hands upwards the building as we were a few steps away from the sloping side part from the door with broken handle. He meant to call more for the ride. But Joseph was saying something back all the time but rather playfully. As I began to feel his unwillingness and lagged behind, he called me at last. And so there was the second time but accidentally called by another Tibetan with whom Joseph had closer friendship.

Joseph’s room was on the third floor. Through his close Tibetan friends I had learned he was bachelor that he took as his only regret. ‘Celibataire ca va pas,’ he would say. He was from Italy and he was proud to be Italian. He was said as coming to France when he was 9 with his parents and other siblings. As he was the oldest among the siblings (three sisters and a brother) he had had to work hard to help his parents. He said he was handsome with a playboy touch for having many girlfriends. But he hadn't been able to get on with one as a life partner till it was too late. It was his only regret. He said he had helped his parents and younger by working hard (menial jobs) as he was strong. He was 59 now, decrepit with swollen feet with sores. He would show the swollen feet to us. He would lament on them, curse them. His hair grizzled, well maintained, but not bald. He was always in a striped bright shirt and dark trousers. But with this regret of being single he still maintained this blunt vanity: he was obsessed with his hairstyle, the clothes he wore when going out, showy chivalry when meeting a young woman by greeting ‘Mademoiselle’ and complacent gestures thereafter.

Later when his closest one had left with only three of us for the time we became closer. I had had time to go to his room when I was at his closet, whose room was just next by on the opposite side over the corridor. But I hadn't had time to stay longer than the last one when I could see his clutters inside. He showed me his foot almost thrice. He asked me to find someone who would buy his old TV. I could sense the irony. He said the old TV placed on a stool next by the door was better than his new one before him on a wooden table. He said the old one had such good sound quality. There were those stacked (almost five) aiwa cassette tapes, black oblong with tuning switches before, on a low stool at one corner of the walls beside the new Samsung LCD TV. He said they were great stuffs now unavailable. There was a grass cutting hand-tool with long wooden handle leaned against the wall next by the door. It was new to me: the long curved blade like a big sickle and the horizontal wooden bar almost one foot long set into the handle at its mid-upper level. It was like a relic for him, a memento of his past hardships, to be cherished or less bright.

In the middle of our conversation covering global politics, as from the playing TV program (a news channel) with international news (the hype about Snowden in Russia and the controversy: if he is a whistle-blower or not), he happened to be struck with rather sudden irrelevant thought—like the impact of his being single was obsessing like a haunting nightmare. It carried on to his rating a girl to be loved. He was after color. I had to get much from his body languages. Even if I want to write his dialogues in direct speeches, I didn't get them with confidence. At one time he showed a white paper after a moment trouble of finding a visual example for me, he pointed at it by observing my gaze. Then he said he liked such skin. He pointed to it and gesticulated twice or thrice one after another by puckering his lips and the gathered fingers tips of his hand touching it lightly. Thereafter he released his puckered lips to opening his mouth in a slow motion and at the same time releasing his gathered fingers in the same motion down. And all the time his eyes were actively engaged like the prime sensor of the feelings besides casting observing glances at me.

A little later the Tibetan guy appeared in his room, who was his oldest friend as he had been here for more than a year. Yes, there were Tibetans, now left, who had been here for more than 2 years but they hadn't got on with. Now I had got chance to get out. I was feeling bit suffocated in his room, cluttered over being small. So like passing over the chain of his seamless talks over to the Tibetan guy I retired. I was leaving the place after a week, the lovely Hayange.