Slate

The road is cobbled and winding, the flophouses, clinics, spas, mini-marts and brothels looming into it like drunks, their facades a riot of powder blue and butter yellow. Most of them are two stories tall, or at least have one window set crookedly above the other. Uniting them are their roofs of scuffed slate; front doors looted from an institution of some kind, the glass painted over; pockmarks and stains from the broken gutters; a frozen waterfall of weeds drooping from a fissure. The scene is not charming, or even coherent. There is a patchwork of mending and decay, of fixes made seemingly at random. A new door-knocker on a house subsiding into two unbalanced halves. What you are seeing isn’t the bare arithmetic of poverty, nor the freewheeling demands of mad obsession. Where you meet people, crouching in the road or laying their heads out of open windows, they meet your gaze steadily, without challenge; this is not a place that has been waiting for you, the gaze seems to say. You will walk up this cobbled road to the main square with it’s penny-scarred fountain and you will shake your head as if waking from a dream, dispelling us, relegating the stretch to a smeared edge of the tableau. And that’s fine by us.