I
Leaning on a streetlamp of Puerta del Sol, amused, he watches people go by.
He's neither short nor tall, neither thin nor fat, neither blonde nor swarthy; he could be thirty years old, and he could also be fifty; he isn't well-dressed, but he isn't shabby either.
What is he doing? Is he watching something? Is he waiting for something? No, he waits for nothing. Occasionally, he smiles, but his smile isn't sarcastic and his glance isn't oblique.
He isn't some Montépin character. He lacks the unemotional eyes, mouth, and nose that betray the satanist.
Is he an employee? No. Is he a landlord? No. Is he an industrialist? Pshaw. Living without work is almost an industry.
Come on now, he's a bum. Yes, a bum. I can see the Catoes from the grocery stores fulminate against him, using the stupid prose of a third-rate paragrapher. For all these moralists, the bum is almost a criminal.
The one I'm talking about probably isn't; he has a profound stare, a teasing mouth, an indolent expression.
He watches like a man who expects nothing from anyone.
He's a spectator of life, not a singer. He's an intellectual.
A salesman approaches the streetlamp where the bum is leaning on and reclines on it. A streetlamp can support two backs.
II
A bum leaning on a streetlamp compels reflection. The streetlamp, science, rigidity, light; the bum, doubt, indecision, darkness.
Glorify the streetlamps! Hate not the bums!
Someone will say: "Whatever! Being a bum is way too easy." A mistake, a deep mistake; being a bum is almost being a philosopher; it's something more than being a nobody.
So you think we have an excess of them? If only! In the higher classes you have fops, clubmen, sportsmen—of varying degrees of elegance and snobbishness. All of them are brilliant atoms that form the idiotic atmosphere which covers this ridiculous planet we inhabit; but they are not bums. A look at them is enough: they stride away, as if there were anything in this life worth the hurry, and they always think of some horse, some woman, some dog, some friend, or something else without importance. In the remaining social classes there are employees, students, mendicants, stragglers, and countless other rabble; but they aren't perfect bums either, for they don't allow life to run its course; they misspend it in paltry things, in nonsense; they resist the far niente, unlike the bum, whose only little weakness is losing, in the flower of youth, the fondness for work.
The bum may be a bagatelle, but he's no scum. A bagatelle can be transcendent, and a transcendent thing can be petty. Inventing a toy demonstrates as much ingenuity as inventing a machine. I believe myself such a builder that I made in collaboration with a friend a cardboard electric tram that sometimes moves, as if I had made a real one.
Devising a cathedral is a great thing, but devising a paper branch isn't altogether contemptible.
III
The streetlamp bum and I know each other. We talk. He protects me. He's a man who greets no one. He must have few friends; perhaps he has none. A sign of intelligence. A great deal of friends marks the maximum in the dynamometer of stupidity. I think it's a quotation.
Intelligent? He's peerless. They talk to him of politics . . . , he smiles; they talk to him of literature . . . , he smiles; they talk to him of anything . . . , he smiles.
The other day, someone told me he took him for a fool. But that's to be expected in this insatiable society: it speaks ill of serious people, and it even speaks ill of bums.
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