A Horse to Water Part II

This is the second part of a two-part entry.

I wrote the first part at Christmas-time, before I went to visit my father's family in France. The night before I wrote it, I was sitting outside the coffee shop next door to my apartment reading Alessandro Baricco's "An Iliad" and waiting for some friends to pick me up to go to a party when an old man asked me for some change. He had a pinched face, his features loose and dry, like a lemon squeezed of all its juice. Gray stubble covered his cheeks and chin. He was thin, with longish hair, and wore a sweatshirt and a knit cap. He looked old, but could have been anywhere from 45 to 75. I gave him a dollar; it was Christmas Eve. He walked away and I continued reading. It was dark out but not cold. Greek soldiers fell to their glorious deaths across the pages in front of me.

A few minutes later, the man came back and sat down at my table. He was now holding a large paper cup full of orange soda. He started to tell me about his life: in and out of rehab, getting by on the streets, adding whiskey to his soda to keep from shaking too much, the disability checks he survived on. I nodded and asked a few questions every now and then when he went silent. I wasn't the one of us who needed to talk.

Much of what he said, I couldn't understand or even hear. The irony of someone opening up only for their words to get lost in the brisk air pained me. I wondered if there were a placebo effect that would make up for it, a release that came just from talking and not necessarily from being heard, as well.

Eventually my friends arrived and I left, wishing him a Merry Christmas.

What distances can be bridged by conversation? The liberal humanist answer is that, given patience, openness, and warmth, any. We are all humans and humans converse, discourse, reach out to and reach each other through words. But what must be in place for such an exchange to function?

When I sat down to write the next day, it was not just Baricco's text that had me occupied with questions of translation, but also the experience of sitting next to someone and not being sure if anything either of us said ever made it across.