PROLOGUE: AN OUTSTRETCHED HAND

   It is the shoulder, in reality, which bears the tension of the entire arm, but the movement begins at the elbow. This, with the impulse which arrives of the blood pumped by the heart and in accordance with the orders issued by the brain, which sometimes makes that kind of shenanigans, transmits its force to the forearm, which rises about 30 degrees -sexagesimal system - and generates a magnetism almost telluric that electrifies the basilic vein to the wrist; and the hand opens. The thumb is leaning against the bottom phalange of the forefinger and the other four fingers humiliate before the palm. Hand is made a basin; there are new lines that nobody knows what fortune or fate foretell. It ages. The knuckles can’t be seen but they are there, challenging. After a couple of hours, the entire arm hurts. On a day of cold, watery eyes, rags just covering a miserable body, eternal hunger, the fingertips increasingly insensitive, the pain almost becomes flesh. To get here, shame should be domesticated.  We must learn to endure the judgment of others. It is intended to move to the commotion... or compassion. To get here! Not all the roads that lead to the street have the same threshold, but lead to the same point: the outstretched hand, the yearning plea, the solicitous flush. It craves something that is lacking and that other more blessed can give you. And at the end it comes to be the currency falling on the hand. The hand!... It is obvious that the word “beg” originally comes from manus, and mendicare means to reach out to ask. For those who thus earn a living there have been many given names: poor, paupers, vagabonds, homeless, nomadic, poverty-stricken, ragged...; and others less benevolent: rogues, losers, unemployed, miserable, thieves, rabble... beggars! But there are many types of begging.

   Bone ulna, the well oiled link in a chain, like the wheel of fortune from the Tarot cards, now spins. Once flexed the elbow, forearm rises slightly. Hand pointing toward the Earth about thirty degrees - sexagesimal system - thumb and index wants to hug in an obscene way, but they don't get to touch. There is a slight breath of air between the two: a narrow tunnel that seems to beg out a pen. And the holder of those bones, all that flesh and blood -  we must start with blood-, needs one to go from west to east, following the windings of the letters, the parchment, on the desktop. To get here shame should be domesticated. We must learn to endure the judgment of others. It is intended to move to the commotion... or compassion? It craves something that is lacking and that other more blessed can give you. And in the end it comes to be the currency that falls into the hand:  A reader is needed who lends an ear, who leaves the heart in the story; It is required to connect the own moods and blood flows with a similar; project in another thought the intimate ghosts, miseries or greatness, surrender to the beauty. In short, you need a lover - or several-, "and may God pay you".

   If this is to be a fable about beggars, we should start begging. And thus, the outstretched hand, as they did, with humility; and entrusting me to Tot - that of ibis head-, pray strength to not falter. And if it is to be on those that I had contact with, they who explained me their lives with the vocation of storytellers, it must be added that their important secrets often were stripped naked and exposed when they were not, rarely, veiled by shame. The facts that are told here were related by their traitors: themselves almost always, forced by the need (many types of need, also that of being understood). But they had other traitors; that’s why the narrator is almost omniscient.

   If this is to be the story of the eight beggars I knew - eight as the gifts from the universe-, I have to try to bleed the pen so that it faithfully testifies about their lives and it does not misuse them or betray them; so, converted into a brush, can enhance without splash, in the foreground of the picture drawn, their greatness, their dignity and their beauty, without hiding their penury or necessity, but seen in the background, in perspective. Maybe if they lacked everything, or had it all or maybe two things at the same time, remains to be seen. Them, who devoured starry nights with voracity of vampires, if there was no food; who chased cold away with stories, when the wet wood or no wood prevented  to feed a bonfire; them, in short, had to reinvent themselves every day, every evening, with their own codes and myths, changing laws, rectifying the universe, until they became symbolic. Perhaps for this reason the book of their lives is complex and has many interpretations. Perhaps therefore they turned the unlikely into credible, because - it could not be otherwise - their experiences are understood when, as they all did, for each of the stages of their different paths the chronological order is followed, an order that they respected as sacred. But it is difficult to follow it because in every fable narrative threads intersect and are sewn or comes undone whenever a character, in chronological order, enters the plot. Perhaps that is the reason why all stories should be told twice at least: someone who knew it should tell it to a second person and that person to a third; and perhaps on occasions it is narrated with the knots of the skein clear and tidy. But I'm losing the thread. I don't know if I'll be able to tell it.

   If this is to be a story about poverty, it will not be, however, an allegory about pain, about the rottenness of the human heart. It will be what their lives are, without unnecessary stridency. Never, like the heroes of literature - heartless thousand times with their favorites-, symbolized the tragedy. Their years are so full of troubles such as fruitful in episodes of love and loyalty. As their flesh and bones, accustomed to sharp knives of the compassionate gaze of the alms givers; of the cruel efforts to pretend that you don't see them; or progressively everyday brutality of the rabble, they also served to be touched by tenderness; and with it pain only grazed them.

   If this is to be a story that displays events from each of their paths, their respective and individual street encounters and their mutual coexistence of later, but letting be seen the imprint of their characters, we shall have to establish commitment to portray them in a reliable way to be loyal to them. Thus, it is imperative to add that they don’t lack some spirituality, but the way of the heathen. They revered as the supreme gods the Universe and the Earth. They were suckled by the breasts of the great celestial goddess - because, as we know, the Universe is a woman- and from that breastfeeding, of the same colostrum of cosmic matter, they absorbed elixirs of eternity. Meanwhile, father Earth - male, as it is manifest - dropped his seed of wisdom on the ground, preparing them so that their organs were tuned to receiving his calls, sometimes issued with the deafening voice of urgency. But in its Olympus fit also a number of minor deities, most condescending and inconsistent, less subject to dogma. Thus, they built altars to goddesses and gods like waters, trees and the stars; and they had winds as demons. And they rejected God-Fate, as they called it; and the Devil (the other side of the same coin), relentless in their judgments, jealous in the observance of their strict laws, fickle and changeable in the affection towards their creatures. To God-Fate or the devil they always thought first of the laws of the universe, as these act on the edge of the abyss and will rectify when they want if they wish one of their creatures to be saved, and the universe shrinks: and you know what kind of events bode. They also disapproved of the monotheistic religions, who despise the beauty of the world. Because this is only explained as useless and deformed, a gateway to a possible eternity which in addition shall not be granted to all mortals without severe pre-selection; and before this contingency the beggar deviates from that path, prefers to settle into a bend and discern in no rush all the beauty that the horizon gives him. Beholding this splendor, they discover perfection or the sense that lies even in dirt, hunger, disease or poverty. It is not uncommon that in their frequent gatherings in the light of a dead flame, surrounded by cold and darkness, magnificent phrases escaped them and so I could hear from them how "religions have made us believe that life is the price to pay for beauty.  But as the face that the moon hides us, have prevented us from seeing the other side: that there is beauty in every price we pay for life".


 

   My hand, trembling before the newly launched task; so hot that it almost becomes igneous; sweaty, febrile, throbbing veins and nerves in boiling, hesitates to follow me along the path we must travel together - my hand and I - in the days that come. It holds hesitant, in the slight wind tunnel between thumbs and forefingers, the pen that must become a tool of creation of the heroes (or perhaps antiheros) of my narration. It wrinkles before the difficulty of shaping their stories and doesn't know the challenge is prophecy, fate, determination or logos; nothing will stop me, if my hand is not torn, in the work begun. And from nails to the wrist, all its machinery gets underway for the impossible task to tell the stages of eight lives with their avatars, their glory, their pettiness...


 

   All these things are shown in the tale, if with the wind in favour and the eternal time of mother Universe at my disposal I know to make good use of them. If I succeed, I will pick up my hat from the floor with the satisfaction that is the currency that is received when you are not already expected to eat; when you have been all one afternoon, in the indefatigable spirit of the mendicant, waiting in uncertainty. If I don't get it, I will turn away as a beggar deviates in a place where he is not let it: humbly, without asking for explanations by the exclusion, willing to beg in another street.

   But something else will have to be told of me. It is my natural modesty which made me hesitate on suitable or not to let myself known, but as I don't want my writing to be apocryphal, I have overcome the temptation of anonymity and it will be signed.  It is not only true that I met the eight beggars and their history, but that I also form a part of it: I am one of the characters in the book; and as such I will enter the story without stridency, without false modesty or false pride; I will enter the plot when it is necessary to respect a certain chronological order. And meanwhile I will allow three of the beggars also to narrate us their gospels; as if this is to be a story about them, they have to have a voice in this story; and it has to respect their words, tones, their way of understanding their own experiences. I will be the chorus that accompanies them, and my words will bring the sound of the third person, when they are silent; I will appear between paragraphs and descriptions, between symbols and stars; and I will choose at what point of the story the character will reveal its status as a narrator and will be visible, as the sun is visible to go along, apparently, a linear path through the constellations. So far, although I may already have been seen more than once but perhaps you might not recognize me, I will be only a nebula, whose condensation will give birth to this tremulous, shy star. Let the sun and planets follow its course along the ecliptic, escorted by the Zodiac; let lines expand like wrinkles by this white sheet; let the story be written alone. I know... let’s follow the star Regulus.