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Updated: May 22, 2025
Silent and asleep the old man sat with his thin face to the sun and his hair moved. Vermin swarmed through it, creeping, crawling, tiny and infinitesimal. Every strand was palpitating, shuddering under their mysterious energy. At first Moisse could hardly make them out, but his eyes gradually grew accustomed to the sight.
"A beggar," thought Moisse, "asleep, oblivious. Dead. All day he sits in the sun like a saint, immobile. Like one of the old Alexandrian ascetics, like a delicately carved image. He is awake in himself but dead to others. The waves cannot touch him. His thoughts, oh to know his thoughts and his dreams?" Suddenly the eyes of the young dramatist widened.
His thin face was raised and the sun beat down on it, but his eyes were closed. "Asleep," mused Moisse. He moved closer to him. The man's head was covered with long silky white hair that hung down to his neck and hid his ears. It was uncombed. His face in the sun looked like the face of an ascetic, thin, finely veined.
Some ventured down over the white ascetic face, crawling in every direction, traveling around the lips and over the closed eyes, emerging suddenly in thick streams from behind the covered ears and losing themselves under the ever moving beard. And Moisse, his senses strained, thought he heard a noise a faint crunching noise. He listened. The noise seemed to grow louder.
They moved in and out, from no place to no place, but always moving, frantic and frenzied. An old woman passed and with a shake of her head dropped two pennies into the upturned hat. Moisse hardly saw her. He saw only the palpitating swarms that were now facing, easily visible, through the gray white hair.
"The tread of the processional surviving in Halsted Street," thought Moisse, the young dramatist who was moving with the crowd. Children sprawled in the refuse-laden alleys. One of them ragged and clotted with dirt stood half-dressed on the curbing and urinated into the street. Wagons rumbled, filled with fruits and iron and rags and vegetables.
He was looking at the beggar's long hair that hung to his neck. "It's moving," he whispered half aloud. He came closer and stood over the old man and gazed intently at the top of his head. The hair was swaying faintly, each separate fiber moving alone.... It shifted, rose imperceptibly and fell. It quivered and glided.... "Lice," murmured Moisse. He watched.
Human voices babbled above the noises of the traffic. Moisse watched the lively scene. "Every day it's the same," he thought; "the same smells, the same noise and people swarming over the pavements. I am the only one in the street whose soul is awake. There's a pretty girl looking at me. She suspects the condition of my soul. Her fingers are dirty. Why doesn't she buy different shoes?
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