Tuesday 21 April 2009

 

Marathon

Miriam Makeba's Pata Pata echoes all over the square, rustling up the crowd, driving the rhythm right into their feet and meaty butts. The sunday folk press groaning against the barriers, pushing cameras into the faces of the runners. Sometimes they shout or clap or blow their whistles, sometimes they bang red inflatable sticks together, issued by Number Four Telecom Company that also makes an Indian in a turban drive around the milling spectators in a red rickshaw for marketing purposes.

The runners take the last meters in large, gulping strides. Sweat streaks their bodies, everything but the last few calories, the last jerks of the muscles, the last shreds of determination drained out of them. There is no lying in those last couple of meters. You run the only way you still can. Every flaw in your motions, every pebble in your shoe, every desperate thought and ache of glory in your eyes is stark against the glare of the too hot sun.
Sometimes one of the runners lifts his arms in a last sweaty triumph: Cheer for me! and the crowd shouts and cheers and sucks in his moment with wide open mouths. Now he belongs to them. Everyone is a winner now, everyone passes the finishing line, the runners once, the cheerers again and again and again.

In the wind shadow of a taller man, one man runs crooked. His spine is arched backwards, paroxysm-like, his fists are clenched, his face screwed, pushed upwards by a trembling chin. He moves tightly, wrongly, left side, right side, left side, like a tin puppet wound up too hard.
They have seen him before. Every year they say, "how can anyone keep that up for 42 kilometers?" and "you'll see, in a couple of years his body is fucked." They don't cheer, he makes their joints ache in unwilling sympathy, he is ugly. He runs every year and never opens his eyes as he passes the finishing line.

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