A woman, a boy, a chair

Driving along the narrow tracks of Barcelona this morning, I felt a little uncomfortable. I saw a woman in a white robe standing outside the open door of her bathroom. I say 'door'; it was a sheet of metal bent and nailed into the splotchy cement wall. I say 'bathroom'; it was a small square roughly the size of my desk about two metres high with a very ventilated roof. I say 'her' but it was a communal sheet of bent metal covering the entrance to a communal toilet. Not her sheet, not her toilet. So she's standing outside the door in this white robe and slip-slops, staring st something inside.

I saw a camping chair, only the one, sitting on a flattened sandy patch between two shacks. Further down the road there was a little boy holding a dustpan in his hands, not cleaning, just holding it. Standing languidly next to a gate, holding this dustpan and waiting maybe? So I'm driving past this woman and this chair and this boy with his dustpan and I'm feeling uncomfortable. I didn't come to see them, didn't come to look and observe and gaze. So why do I feel so intrusive? As though I've pried open the corrugated curtains framing their lives and peered into their privacy?

It might be the proximity. We are so close. There can't be more than a few metres between where I sit and where they stand. It forces an intimacy, an unwilling and transient intimacy. Intimacy can feel so heavy, so imposed. And I felt that weight as I drove slowly over the uneven dips and mounds of the gravel paths in Barcelona. That's the thing with suburbs and streets; there's space. There's something tangible that separates you from other people, that allows you to pass them without invading them. See, there's a vulnerability right, about being at home. And someone seeing you at home. When someone comes to your home, you can't hide anything, you can't choose what they see. They see everything. So you're standing there in your home and this stranger drives by and your life lies bare and unsheltered. Space, or a lack of it, makes the visitor a voyeur.

I have no problem being confronted by privilege and poverty, it's part of the South African experience. But when the objects and subjects of each don't have the agency to engage in that confrontation on their own terms, then it makes me uncomfortable. I wanted to pull my cap over my eyes, sink into my seat and remove myself from their space. Instead, I wonder what the woman was looking at, who the boy was waiting for, why that chair was sitting there alone.

"So we're in Barcelona?" the driver interrupts my thoughts.
"Ya," I said, "Barcelona."
"Not so much Spain."
"No." I answered. I looked around again, now looking for something: "I think we need to make a right where the road forks."
He slowed down as we crescendoed the light slope; the road forked into three. I don't remember three roads, one must have been added since my last visit. I look for a landmark that feels familiar.
"Ya, that one," I point. I crane my neck forward, looking for the white containers I hope will be to our right soon. I snap back into my seat as a woman in a fuchsia pink tracksuit walks into view. Then I smile at her and she smiles back. I breathe.
"Ok ya," I say, "ya keep driving."