Los territorios ausentes Missing Territories by Uriel Quesada

Author:Uriel Quesada
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Arte Público Press
Published: 2021-05-15T00:00:00+00:00

The city, looking seemingly endless, at some point ran into the sea. I took several buses, not just any buses but those that would take me to the west. According to what I had been told, in that area I would find the parks where homeless people slept. These parks had wide swaths of land full of palm trees, with cement walkways lined with shrubs. The indigent men and women made it all look shabby; they destroyed the lawns, spoiled the water fountains and the public restrooms, where they also left walls filled with messages addressed to no one specifically: protests, invitations and announcements to whoever might want to read them; obscene doodles, scribblings without any apparent meaning—names, many, many names . . . Those beggar zones were lawless territories. The police would only come in when there were incidents, although at night there was always a patrol car that kept watch from a certain distance. Every once in a while, a bright beam of light would illuminate the bushes, the cardboard boxes folded like caskets over the benches, the hidden bulges between the plants. Either way, those men and women were invisible. Under the light of day, neither the officers, nor the people on their way to the beach, nor those strolling by or exercising on the boulevards were able to see them. They only existed for a few churches, whose volunteers arrived in the afternoons with food and messages of salvation. We homeless people also became a part of the mobile landscape for those who needed us as objects of study, primarily researchers from the universities. They came in groups with their students, going inside the park to find someone who might answer a few questions in exchange for money, or who would allow them to take samples of their blood or do a physical exam on them, the results of which we never knew. Objects of science or simply objects, that’s all we were. There, in the park facing the sea, I was able to set up camp while I got my bearings in order to find the friend of my friend.

I had to compete with other panhandlers. There was a long pedestrian walkway where we went to work to ask for a handout. Some people played the guitar, some made small paper figures, while others made a plea for compassion like good actors. I plopped myself down on the ground with a clumsy sign, No Talents, virtually hanging off my hands. And perhaps because the message was so simple, or because I seemed more invisible than the rest, or I feigned sincerity better, people gave me a bit of money, enough to scrape by in the park and call my mother every Saturday at ten o’clock. “You are where?” she asked, incredulous. To her it was not far-fetched that I would have disappeared. I used to do it sometimes for a night or two; in other occasions I would not return for weeks, having taken off simply by impulse to explore my own possibilities, or to follow the trail of a man’s scent.

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