I land at five in the afternoon, local time. For me it’s eleven o’clock at night, and on the ride into the city – first the AirTrain to Jamaica Station, then the J train – New York slowly reveals itself. It appears among the tangle of elevated tracks that wind through Queens, between low roofs and sheet metal workshops. The golden afternoon light reverberates on the brick facades and dyes everything a warm, rusty color. As the train advances, the city condenses. On the horizon, the buildings of center They are cut like a row of teeth. Then, the Williamsburg Bridge: the train crosses suspended over the river and, on the other side, Manhattan suddenly appears, inevitable, definitive. In my other life, many years ago, I would have returned home. Now, returning to this city always means a visit, a certain strangeness.
Hanging out with him dysrhythmiain that fragile hour in which the body doesn’t know exactly which area it lives in, I enter a café identical to many others: measured light, piped music that doesn’t get in the way. I ask a expressed double to keep me up at night. When I go to pay the bartender shakes her head and I think I understand that the card doesn’t work. I’ll show you another one. She repeats the gesture, smiles: “I’ll give it to you. It’s nothing.” I remain motionless, without understanding. A coffee costs four dollars, so it’s not exactly nothing. I spend the next half hour trying to understand why, why. But it isn’t there. The girl, perhaps uncomfortable with my insistent looks, ends up asking me if I also want milk. Actually, what I want is an explanation.
I don’t understand even two days later, when I get lost in the bowels of the subway. I approach the information desk and explain my clumsiness to the man inside. He gets up, leaves the cubicle: could it be his break time and will he leave me there alone? – but, contrary to what my thoughts suggest, without saying a word, he opens the turnstile for me to stop paying and accompanies me, helping me with my suitcases to the corresponding platform. “It’s here,” he informs me. “In two minutes the train will pass.” I thank him and am left, once again, without knowing what to say. I look at him with the same perplexity as the bartender. I would have been less surprised if he had ignored me or if he had snorted at me with that kindness: that of a stranger who accompanies me just for the pure pleasure of accompanying me.
We are more accustomed to hostility, I suppose, because after all humans are dogmatic beings. In this regard, years ago, in a short and luminous book, My homeland was an apple seedby Nobel Prize winner Herta Müller, I read some passages that struck me. The book, a sort of memoir in which the Romanian writer converses with the journalist Angelika Klammer, reflects on her life and childhood and recounts the harshness with which her mother hit her throughout her childhood: with rags, with sticks, with her hands. The apology didn’t matter; They beat her every day, regardless of the reason. In that context, he explains, he would not have been able to interpret a caress, accustomed as he was to violence. “I think unexpected tenderness can be as scary as unexpected violence, if not more so.” The child who is beaten daily gets used to the pain, loses fear and the feeling of dignity is reversed; Then something appears like the desire to perceive himself in pain, to overcome the humiliation with a sort of haughty pride that proclaims that he is safe, that they can no longer harm him.
Perhaps this is why we live prepared for hostility, anticipating the negative, as if mistrust were a form of defense (and it is). However, I recently came across a phenomenon within the psychology of memory called enticementwhich describes how prior exposure to a stimulus (a word, image, sound, or experience) influences the response to subsequent stimuli. There is also something known as enticement of kindness: the idea that a kind gesture, such as receiving a coffee, can predispose us to see our surroundings in a kinder way and to act more generously.
Kindness, if given without calculation, has a chaining effect. He lives in gestures, in the apparently insignificant: in greeting, in saying good morning, in looking each other in the eyes. Some will say they are obvious, clichés, truisms. Maybe they’re right. But over the course of forty-eight hours, upon my arrival in that city I usually describe as hostile, two strangers reminded me that being kind costs just as much as not being kind. That kindness, when it occurs, is not meant to change the world, but sustains it for a moment. And perhaps that moment, amidst the noise, is the most discreet form of hope.
