Most people—true to their reputation as inattentive bystanders—would tell you,
some with real conviction,
that the man was walking east.
And to be fair, he wore sunglasses in the morning,
a cap at noon,
and by evening, spun a parasol lazily over his bare shoulder.
Still, it would take an extraordinary stroke of luck
to come across one of the very few people who knew the truth.
In fact, of the six billion or so drifting souls on this earth,
only three ever truly knew where the man was headed.
And of those three,
only the girl at the bakery remembers.
The old woman, for instance,
who rose in the night to get a glass of water
and caught sight—albeit through a dense fog—
of the man’s departure,
chalked it up to the dream she’d been having,
in which Valéry Giscard d’Estaing
was trying to teach her the basics of private investigation.
Naturally, she dismissed it by morning.
The third witness,
an ageless man passing through that vague place at a hesitant hour
for reasons known only to himself,
spared the event no more than a cursory glance.
He was busy unraveling problems far too obscure to be rendered in words.
And within a few steps,
he had forgotten everything.
But the girl at the bakery—
she missed nothing.
She drank in the moment with the thirst of someone
who hadn’t realized she’d been waiting for it all her life.
She let the first batch of baguettes turn to charcoal
without the faintest regret.
A few hours later,
lying on her single bed in puffed shorts,
she called me.
And for two hours,
she told me how she had fallen head over heels
for this man.
This stranger.
That grey figure who, before her eyes,
had made a decision
and begun his journey—
with determination,
and nonchalance.
And so, quite innocently,
without grasping the outrageous weight of her testimony,
the girl at the bakery gave humanity
the legend of the man who,
with no particular ambition,
walked straight ahead.
