In Memoriam Susan Sontag

Accompanying it with a strange little hand gesture, Susan said yesterday evening, suddenly halting by the wall of the prison in Mosonyi Road, that "this System" (though she didn't say it out loud, she didn't say capitalism, she didn't say democracy, but the one in which the two of us are now living, the shared one, which is what the inclusive gesture of the hand referred to) "is a good deal cruder and more violent than what you experience here" (again she didn't say it out loud but made another little gesture of the hand)—"it tramples on everything." I was so surprised that I couldn't utter a word of protest.

On one brilliantly snowy morning of the icy winter of 1982, not far from the Port Authority Bus Terminal in New York, on the sunny side of 42nd Street, like a dark block in the surging crowds, a black woman, naked as the day she was born, was cleaning herself at the edge of the sidewalk. She was no longer young. Incredible folds and rolls of fat, flesh, and skin, the tangle in her lap almost like a beard. Her belongings lay scattered about the sidewalk on snow that scrunched loudly underfoot. Among other things was a roll of toilet paper, from which she would time and again unwind a length, tear it off and wet this at a finely dripping, icicled street hydrant, though not too much. Just enough so she should be able to wipe the various creases and crevices of her body without them being left soaking wet. It was evident her method was tried and tested. She carefully took each flexure in turn. Into the backside, the base of the breasts, the wrinkles overhanging her belly, the vulva. The brilliant sunshine undoubtedly had some warmth in that screaming, bitter cold, in which people hurried by with turned-up collars and scarves covering their mouths, pretending they had seen nothing.

Then, some fifteen years later, on a gray, cold morning in December 1998, not far from Macy's on 34th Street, another black person naked as the day s/he was born, though s/he had a black plastic trash bag in order to cover at least the torso. The bag was pulled together under the breast with a length of twine. The figure was young, smooth, with long limbs, but it was impossible to tell whether it was male or female. Veritably capering. As if performing a dance that had no beginning and no end. Touching the smallest possible surface of the frozen asphalt for the briefest possible time—that was the essence of the ritual. The palm of the hand was in a begging, imploring gesture, and the figure bellowed at the top of its voice. Even on being given something it did not stop. The figure would place the coin in the other hand to leave the begging hand free, and would bellow and caper.