hanging from lace

Walking home I saw a man clinging to the upper part of a set of ornate window bars, gazing intently upward. At first I thought he was doing parkour. Then I wondered was he maybe housebreaking, aiming to climb onto the balcony on the first floor. Then I saw four hands reaching from within, scooping motions, like some kind of performance dance piece. He was repairing the long window, which had stuck, with two helpers crouched on the turning staircase inside, one of them higher, one lower. Coming round the corner into the square where the man with his telescope busks for the stars and I learned the moons of Jupiter in Spanish (Io… Ganymede… Callisto…) there was as usual a clot of thirty teenagers just hanging round together, chattering and laughing. I had earlier seen a hundred people in a large circle, watching a series of fantastic show-offs demonstrate their circus skills with a soccer ball. Other people sat more singly or in smaller groups having divided their tribe from the everyone-who’s-like-me mêlée, having rather perhaps pain and disappointingly discovered those who are most like me and can tolerate all of me number a handful at very utter best. A family sat perched and hunched on two concrete bollards, one of the girls scrolling her phone disconsolately. I discovered the identity, kind of, of cardboard collection man, whom I’d photographed out of the window of a genial Thai restaurant upstairs a week back: towing his ship of folded boxes stowed in boxes he appeared from the dense shopping strip, and swept his cardboard pirate ship into the shadow alcoves of the huge Theater Real, the royal opera, where a companion greeted him and he went back to a large bag at the glass doors and fetched himself something of his own. Around town you can see the possessions and the bedding of homeless people stashed in between the close-spaced columns of the enormous quiet churches which are frantic with gold inside; you can see the grubbied slabs of cardboard leaning up under the bridge all ready to make bedding for another night. Yesterday I came off Plaza Mayor which is the centrepoint of Spain and a long row of people were sleeping down the medieval alleyway, some of them in small palaces of one large cardboard carton telescoped into another; a man who was concealed in one of these pushed back the lid and sat up, startlingly, gazing at the afternoon like Count Dracula.