Watcher
17 Feb 2020
Tehran, 22/12/2019
To observe Tehran, as if I were behind a window: disguise as myself: absent amongs the city’s entropy.
A breadmaker has his mind away from us, he is not aware he’s being spyed on. Dressed as an unripped thinker who can’t ever take off his pijama, he lays down the dough on the hot rock of the oven. Behind us only the cold night, the closed walls of the other shops, the curb of the street.
Another night will end in Tehran: like a smoked sigarrete in a furtive alley.
My watch was stolen in the hosel: I discover myself orphan of the present time.
Without a compass I begin my stroll to the greyness of a city covered by the perfume of gas and covered by the smog. Every alley is a dose of bewilderment: women are a phantasmagoric presence: they dissapear. And it is all an unison: motorcycles: errant men: workers: who have a precise idea of their place in the labyrinth I am crossing.
It is cold, the Bazar is still far, I have not eaten, nor drinked, I have the mood of the one who has been deprived of love, of memories, of the sense of time.
Everyone stands alone on the heart of Tehran: who, like ant pulls and push carts full of good, and bounces from one side of the road to the other; who, like the poorest children has nothing else but the remains of the jobs the adults throw at them; who, like the covered women knock their heels on the great bazar’s asphalt; who like the spices sellers have stopped to sneeze, or the tea sellers: all extravagant, the infinite textile shops that in any dream could cover the ugly buildings of the city three times a day every day of the year; who like the eternal elderly whom don’t belong to our present and stick to the suffering of severe penalties to gain their lives on the earth.
And the Bazar transforms into an neverending well filled with faces coming from the extremities of the worl: turkmenians, tagikians, kazakian, pashtum, beluchi, arabs, beduins, armenian, turks and other peoples of pronounced and poetical faces.
There seems to not be a way out, and the sun of the sky appears like a literary reference: is a ditch, it is not in hell but almost. The sensation is that the rythm of the story of men at the bazar is timeless, like the poverty.
The jewelers are encrusted at the end of the backstreet, novelty merchants are bored like the toys hanged from the ceiling, hanged to the walls.
And there is not end to the ants and their carts: I follow one and find other ruins, I follow others and discover the way out.
Expelled from the guts of the well, I sit down and observe the kids who polish shoes and ask for money: one is eating some pistacchios with the peel: he must close the whole in his stomach.
Further down the road some youngster are starting a fist fight, others are gravitating around them, limping, more kids without anything but themselves, new faces that do not smile, silence plus clacson noises.
