The Colors of Infamy

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The human multitude meandering at the nonchalant pace of summer along the ancient city of Al Qahira’s torn-up sidewalks seemed to be dealing serenely, even somewhat cynically, with the steady, irreversible decay of their surroundings. It was as if all these people, stoically strolling beneath the molten sun’s incandescent avalanche, were, in their tireless wanderings, benignly colluding with some invisible enemy eating away at the foundations of the erstwhile resplendent capital. Immune to drama and devastation, this crowd swept along a remarkable variety of characters lulled by their idleness: workmen without jobs; intellectuals disillusioned with fame; civil servants forced from their offices for want of chairs; craftsmen without customers; university graduates sagging beneath the weight of their futile knowledge; and finally those inveterate scoffers — philosophers in love with their tranquility and shade, who believed that the city’s spectacular deterioration had been expressly created to hone their critical faculties. Hordes of migrants had come from every province with preposterous illusions about that hive of activity, the prosperous capital, and they had latched on to the local population, forming an appallingly picturesque pack of urban nomads. In this riotous atmosphere, cars sped by, heedless of traffic lights, like machines without drivers, transforming any vague notion a pedestrian might harbor of crossing the street into an act of suicide. Along the neglected thoroughfares stood apartment buildings doomed to imminent collapse (the landlords had long banished from their minds any pride of ownership) and from balconies and terraces converted into makeshift lodgings flew the multihued rags of destitution like flags of victory.

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