The Great Man's Gait

 

The photo-op with the Great Man was scheduled for the steps of the Palace of State.  Journalists were gathered on steps rising to the building’s vast marble and bronze portico.  Sometimes, the Great Man answered a few questions shouted at him by the reporters and, perhaps, he would say something newsworthy today.  A few big cranes tilted their giraffe-necks over the former Palace.  Everyone knew that the place was being remodeled – the great reception halls had been subdivided into sheet-rock cells and information kiosks were installed in the formal lobby with its towering mirrors and porphyry pilasters.  In a few months, the Palace would be a hospital, serving the poor but with teams of physicians so accomplished that it was thought that, even, the wealthy would clamor to be admitted.

The sun was bright and high overhead so that the journalists and photographers stood on the hems of their own abbreviated shadows.  Panel trucks and pickups were coming and going at the service entry to the Palace and crews of sheet-rock workers with buckets of mud and aluminum stilts swarmed into the building hurrying like industrious ants.  From inside, we heard the faint report of pneumatic nail guns and sanders sanding and heavy panels booming as they were dropped into place by hydraulic hoists.  The General directing the construction work stood flanked by men in dress uniform and white, spotless gloves.  The General was heavy-set and wearing camouflage fatigues and his wrists and fingers were bare so that he could shake the Great Man’s hand.

The motorcade approached slowly.  Behind the barricades, people surged and pushed.  The big car with the dark windows and flags on its hood stopped next to the roadblock where a row of soldiers stood.  The door opened and the Great Man emerged, slipping his sunglasses over his eyes.  Then, he approached the group of dignitaries at the bottom of the steps rising to the Palace.  I had never seen him before in person, but he looked like his pictures: his head was large and handsome with the ruin of his broken nose between high cheek-bones; his shoulders were broad as condor’s wings.  It was curious that he didn’t seem to walk in a straight line, but, instead, shuffled to his right and left, limping a bit, and, sometimes, taking tiny steps, at other times, lunging forward to plant his big feet decisively on the sidewalk under him.  There was something unhealthy and hobbled, it seemed, about the way that he walked.  His great, famous head was turned downward, sweeping back and forth as he surveyed the concrete ahead of him and under the soles of his boots.

The Great Man approached the General who was supervising the hospital and shook his hand for the cameras.  The photographers jostled one another and their digital devices whirred and hissed softly.   Questions were shouted, filling the air.  Then, the Great Man gestured for silence and it became very still.  He made a few comments about transforming the Palace of State into a charity hospital.  Then, he shook the hand of the General again.  Journalists shouted more questions, myself included, but the Great Man merely bowed slightly, turned with face downcast, and made his way back to the motorcade a hundred feet away, beyond the orange saw-horse shaped barriers.  Again, he stepped sideways, then, forward, striking his boots hard on the pavement, zigzagging over the pavement.  

I turned to the cameraman from my paper.  

“Why does he walk that way?”

The cameraman shrugged.

“Maybe, it’s from the torture,” everyone knew that the Great Man had been tortured for years by regime.  His political enemies had kept him in solitary confinement for a decade and he had been imprisoned for almost a quarter of a century in the harshest conditions.  Perhaps, torture had ruined his legs and caused him to walk crookedly.

“It must be because of torture during the Resistance,” I said.

“No,” the cameraman told me.  He had covered the Great Man for several years and knew about his habits.  

“Do you see the insects, there, on the sidewalk?”  

I looked down and, at first, saw nothing.  But, then, when my eyes adjusted, I saw ants here and there, darting across the concrete.  A beetle with green iridescent wings scuttled along a crack in the cement.  One ant seemed misshapen but I looked more closely and saw that the creature was carrying the tiny corpse of a fruit-fly.  

“I suppose he doesn’t want to step on them,” I said.  The Great Man’s reverence for life was well-known.  Everyone had read about his pet mouse in his prison cell and the spider in the corner for whom he had tenderly cared.  

“No, it’s weird,” the cameraman whispered.  “It’s the opposite.”

“What?”

“When he walks down the street, he slips from side to side so that he can crush as many ants as he sees under his feet.  He’s zigzagging to step on them.” 

I looked at the Great Man. It seemed that he was doing a strange dance on the concrete, tapping his feet to one side and, then, the other.

An attache opened the door to the limousine and he stooped to slide inside.  The windows were tinted so that we couldn’t see within them.  The car rolled forward, then, turned in a sharp circle.  I saw a couple of small butterflies like tiny forlorn pennants caught in the limousine’s grill.  Then, the big dark car, towing its motorcade behind it, sailed down the boulevard of the Revolution.