Once his name was Ricardo. Some people used to call him Ric. Now it’s just Dick: Deadbeat Dick.

It’s sharp, it’s direct, it’s spot on. Pure as an uncut diamond. A nickname that says a lot. And symptomatic at the same time. It’s neater. And it fits him better. Meaning it corresponds more with his current state. He’s not young. But not old either. You get the strange impression that his biological clock has stopped somewhere along the way. Time’s wear and tear doesn’t really seem to have affected him. His stoicism is unequaled in this world of triumphant facileness. He is destitute with the destitution of the righteous. Crowned with the halo of a creature whose physical envelope is so thin that there remains nothing more than the afterglow of heaven in him. He doesn’t have. He is. He doesn’t reflect the light, his humanity shines from beneath his rags and cast-offs. He isn’t the moon, he’s the sun, diffusing that human light through the darkness.            

Did he once have a wife? Most likely. Kids? Maybe. Relatives, brothers, sisters? Definitely. So what was his life like before things fell apart? All possibilities are allowed. All possibilities are welcome. Some say he was the son of an important chief from one of the northern tribes but was disowned because of too much windsurfing. Others say that his wife went off with the children when he got himself sacked from his job for assaulting his boss. Yet others say that overindulgence in cannabis totally scrambled his brain. That’s why he’s been reduced to sleeping in the streets with his dog.

But Deadbeat Dick pays scant regard to such trivial ups and downs in his life. He goes forward. He moves about the city as one truly free.

In one day he can do the circuit of the Place des Cocotiers ten times. Walking up and down. And then crossways, like a spider toiling away at its web. Like a wild creature marking out its territory. Besides, it’s a fitting thing to do as he totally blends in with this dreary Baudelairean landscape where Ennui reigns supreme. He is El Desdichado, the wretched one. The man of gloom. The outcast. One of Patrick Declerck’s washed-up wrecks. Beckett would name him Vladimir. Then Estragon. A pair of brothers sharing the same desolation. And the same meaningless waiting. A meaninglessness that had to be. An inexhaustible source of inspiration! A character embodying every imaginable contradiction. His own novel, ever ongoing, never ended, one that keeps on writing itself century after century. A poem infused with biblical tones, with the evocative power of the Book of Revelation. The great poets sing of his luminous despair. Even Tonton David and Pierpoljak pay homage to him in their reggae hits. He is greatness in person. Incarnating the intransigence of humanity in his daily urban appearances. That is why, like Apollinaire, he is poorly loved today.

He walks like he breathes. He breathes like he walks. For him, walking is breathing. And breathing is walking. They are exactly the same thing. So he should have been called Walker. That fits. Appropriate too. He is the man of great philosophical ambulation. The totality of his daily activity throughout the whole year is captured in the verb to walk. Following once and for always the same path. So there’s nothing to tell about him, is there? Walking = being a deadbeat. Period. Ite missa est. The tale is over. Except that walking encompasses a dizzying set of synonyms. Trudging. Hobbling. Limping . . . Striding, tramping, marching. Walking. Let’s strip the layers off this creature. Like in an anatomy class. You will see that behind those seven letters there is a whole world. A world of dreams. Of stories. Of weaknesses. Of hopes. A universe of possibilities. Of potentialities. And of achievements. Walking covers everything. It is being in the world. Walking is everything. In this verb there is all. The beginning. The ongoing. The end. In other words: Birth. Life. And death. To be truly human is to walk. It is the measure of man. The history of the world is summed up in this verb. The capitalist system and its opposite are synthesized in it. The verb walk conceals hidden rhymes. Like talk. Talking means walking across human solitude. But also like stalk. Stalking evokes a walking threat lurking within that solitude. Metamorphoses lying unperceived within a banal everyday verb.

Walker or Deadbeat, it’s all the same. Perfectly symmetrical. He dislikes everything that is low in man. Pettiness. Submissiveness. Avarice. Gluttony. Meanness. Cowardice.

Through gradually becoming familiar with the disinterested embraces of his feet, light as those of Rimbaud in the film about his life, the sidewalks of Nouméa logically ended up effacing his presence. Totally! His ragged clothing? A third skin. The magma of multiple layers of dust and trickling sweat? His second skin. He doesn’t need to go on board a ship to feel seasick. For he is Rimbaud’s Bateau ivre on the bitumen. He doesn’t need to sail on the sea like Baudelaire to experience the nausea brought on by the eternally rolling swells. With each gust the fresh tang of the sea breeze accentuates the wavelike pantomime of his shuffling footsteps. Unsteady footsteps. Seeing him you would think you were watching a poorly rigged schooner caught in a gale. But he seldom falls. While everything around him is a tomb. A crypt. Other people in the street?  Sarcophagi of digestive juices. The high-rises with their offices. Their one-room flats. Their apartments: one, two, three bedrooms, etc. Nothing but vertical burial towers constantly seeking to desecrate the heavens like multiple Towers of Babel soaring up to assault the wandering clouds. The only things stirring Meursault’s love in Camus’s L’Étranger. The freedom of clouds! Free with that unmeasurable freedom so sought after by alienated humans. Suffering humans. Clutching their discomfort to their bosom like Molière’s Harpagon, a Scrooge obsessively worshipping his money more than any woman. A pecuniary adulation that was the primary source of all his current misery. And his misery to come. The thousands of motorized steel boxes passing to and fro? Mobile coffins devouring their occupants. Their black blood wells up from the earth. In Africa. In South America or elsewhere. Their blood is the sap of the earth. An earth today pierced everywhere by javelins. It bleeds and bleeds. Openly. Before the stupid impotence of humans separated from themselves. Cut off from nature. Unrooted. Jaded consumers who have lost the taste of what connected them to the earth. Obese monomaniacs addicted to junk food.

The planes that Dick sometimes hears passing overhead? So many flying mass graveyards permanently scorning the blessings of heaven. The cruise ships that dock three times a week are floating coffins that will one day end up in the abyssal depths of the Pacific Ocean. That’s crazy! This world where modern man seems only ever to feel OK in a grave. How stupid is that? For modern man is already dead. What you see moving is the shadow of himself. His shadow has become more real than he is. Inverted inversions. Deadbeat Dick the poorly-loved has no illusions about all this. He knows he’s already in a gutter. He’s in the city. But the city is the signposted place of death. The theater for the blossoming of death. Not a death that is swift. Accidental. Sudden. But a slow death of strangulations progressively tightened. So all together now! Let’s get out of Sodom and Gomorrah! But it’s ex-treme-ly difficult to run away. From Harar in Ethiopia, Rimbaud stared at the world’s catastrophe. The exiled angel has turned back. And looks down in grief from the height of his triumph. Billions of pillars of salt. Rooted to the spot by too great an attachment to the material possessions they have left behind. In a druglike trance, chained eternally to their worldly goods. Immobilized by weakness. And by too great a reification! A profound thingification. No recovery for this poor bastard. The phenomenon is irreversible.

Deadbeat Dick arouses feelings of shame in everyone. Sometimes he manages to awaken a touch of humanity in those passing by in such a hurry. Now and again. You might see someone stop to give him a few coins. Sometimes. You might see some young people talking with him. The young have still kept a little bit of human spontaneity. Which the alienated adults have lost through their servile obedience to the civilization of material goods.

He leaves a mark upon the city. But not just a harmless scrawl. Something clean, inoffensive, aesthetic. On the artificial canvas that is Nouméa. No. For the right-thinking well-to-do, thoroughly sterilized, he is an ordure. Something demeaning. A blot on the landscape. Moreover they do all they can to not cross his path. In their big tanklike SUVs they are safe. No chance of coming face-to-face with this repugnant individual. So why does he disgust the wealthy so much? Their money? Well, come on, they’ve worked for that! No question of casting doubt on the legitimacy of their possessions. Those others just have to go get a job. Instead of waiting for a handout all day long. But hold on. Why really do the fat cats dislike him so much? We can’t give any precise answers to this. On the other hand we could quite easily get ourselves lost in endless conjecture. Because he’s a street person. A  dirty thing. That stinks. They stink up the air because they shit themselves. And piss on themselves like animals. Because they’re deadbeats. Lazy. Alcoholics. Slobs. Beggars. They’re spontaneous. Unpredictable. Human. Too human, even. There, that’s his scourge. That’s his curse. He’s human. Outrageously human right down to the apocalyptic depths of humanity. A lowlife crossed with a beggar. And God how he keeps on begging! No confidence. No flair. No dignity. No honor, either. And no buying power. Nothing. Nada. Nix. It’s being poor beyond belief. How can that be in a country that’s so rich? To be a man—or a woman—today—means having buying power. The more buying power you have the more human you are. Ha! What a cretinous joke. And people believe it as well! All right, let’s keep within the accepted limits of free speech. Because street people are only good for wandering about. They’ve got all day to rot their teeth. And the more this guy smokes, the more he scrambles his brain. Let’s not get too involved in this, he’s a hopeless case. He’s not programmed to succeed in society. On the other hand, he’ll do great in prison. In the past he would’ve been the social scapegoat. Marked out for the scaffold. Hypotheses piled on top of suggestions. It seems to us however that the true reason he inspires such repulsion lies elsewhere. For other people, the street-dweller is a mirror. A fearsome mirror. One that flings back in the face of those others the ugliness they’ve hidden beneath a thick layer of face paint. The degradation that passing time will meticulously and expertly unmask. And reveal them in all their dizzying nakedness.

No way you should give him a few coins to buy something to eat. Anyway, all he does when he’s got some cash is, that’s right, he goes and buys himself some poppers. Or some booze. Some Vino Tinto Cruzares. Some Romero. Or some Baron d’Arignac. So we don’t want to push him toward the bottle either, do we? Now that’s what you could call killing two birds with one stone. We’re not encouraging him to drink. And it shows what good philanthropists we are. We save money too. What a fantastic world, where everything is laid on so the rich can get ever richer. And the poor get ever poorer. Hell, it’s a back-to-front world ain’t it? Selfish charity. Destitute generosity. Though it’s a bit odd all right, because the richer you are the less you give. But on the other hand the poorer you are the easier it is to share. So where’s the problem? With the rich or the poor? Neither, in fact. It’s this capitalist system that keeps on dividing to conquer. The rich guy thinks he’s intelligent for stupidly absorbing all the fake categories of capital. And for downloading wholesale into his brain the mental mechanism of the system. The poor guy is beaten from the outset, but he can see things clearly.

Despite the enormous amount of dirt that he carries around with him, you get the impression that he won’t ever go under, Deadbeat Dick. He’s just always there. You can be away from Nouméa for a few years. When you come back you’ll still see him there. Still that endless walking. Amazing! He’s one of the last people who still recognize the virtues of walking. Today, wherever commerce-man circulates he does it sitting down. In vehicles. In offices. On planes. On boats. In schools, in churches, in lectures. Everywhere. Everywhere. Modern man sits. Rimbaud was so right with his poem called “Les Assis,” “The Seated.” The seated obese. The seated cardiac cases. Was he still writing in those years when he wandered across Europe? Rimbaud is a tramp in the same way that the tramp is a great poet. They are brothers in their shared love of walking. And in their assumed irreverence. They look the unsullied cowards straight in the eye and goad the fearful conformists. The culpability of the benevolent. Charity that’s sick.

The grime that coats him protects him from the sun. Keeps his skin healthy. And provides him with a blanket on freezing nights. This layer of dirt may also serve him as a possible seedling bed. Ha! Well, chuck a few seeds at him then. And they’ll grow. I know, it’s nasty to say that.  But it’s quite likely. Given the number of days he’s gone without being able to wash. His only showers are when it rains. A pluvial bathing. There’s nothing better. But in Nouméa it rarely rains. I’ll leave it to you to count of the number of showers he has annually. His scalp crawling with lice is a metonym for the destiny of the planet. His scalp is the world. The nits that drive him to distraction while sucking him dry. That’s what we humans are. Mold that’s only good for polluting the planet. And destroying it. But him on the other hand. Having no material possessions, he’s innocent. He doesn’t pollute anything at all. Nothing except himself. He’s the righteous one. The immaculate. The miraculous exception within the great universal mea culpa. He’s a lot purer than those worthies who point the finger every time he drinks more than usual. So is Deadbeat on the outer? Well definitely, because he’s in the same shit as the rest of us. But not as much as us. All us “right-thinking” folks. Who are bleached clean. Domesticated. So constipated we can’t manage to shit out the toxins that are poisoning our stomachs. In the frozen desert of our shared neuroses.

His motto is this simple phrase that has stayed in his head from Sunday masses where he was thoroughly bored. Back when he was a kid. Still neat and tidy. And smelling nice from the scent of the mango trees in flower. You are dust. And to dust you shall return. He knows he’s already rotted matter. And to the earth he will return. Sparing of speech. Prodigal of silence. Enemy of sophistry. Of ubiquitous cant. And a friend of wisdom. What’s that? Yes, he is. He’s a philosopher in the style of Diogenes. A dog-philosopher. A cynic in the literal sense. Not because he derives pleasure from the suffering of others. But because the society in which he lives is cynical, a world of dogs. He bites others to mend their ways. Just like his ancestor, that other dog-philosopher. He’s a philosopher of a type no longer seen today.

There’s no doubt about that. Every word that comes out of his malodorous mouth is a pearl of wisdom. They don’t turn into snakes like in the fairy tale. They’re pure essence. The heart of the heart instilled with Orwell’s common decency. Deadbeat is a permanent obscenity flung at established order. But his insults are pearls heavy with meaning. “Dickhead. Wanker. Fuckwit.” It’s the spontaneity of his tortured gut crying out: His short, sharp utterances are thunderbolts of common sense in this world garotted to the point of suffocation by untruths. Yes, because it’s all fucked up. Fuckwittery and cowardice are everywhere. In today’s world. In these so-called civilized societies that never cease insulting man. Dragging him down slowly but surely until he has no dignity left. The whole world is vulgarly taking cover to hide from the incendiary thunder of the truth. Today misinformation is everywhere present. Everywhere promoted. And everywhere triumphant.

It’s the Feast of the Holy Family, just after Christmas. No family for Deadbeat Dick. Just his constant mate. A dog. A fleabag that’s there, barking noisily. The dog’s barks alerted the police that morning. Deadbeat Dick, now just Dead Dick, was buried unceremoniously by the cops the same day.

His fall is a victory. His absolute destitution a sacrament of spiritual wealth. His imperious contempt for material possessions sanctifies him. Transfigured by his extraordinary capacity to endure hunger. Transparent in his abject poverty. Transparent in this world of alienation, mired in the swamp of its abyssal lie. His sovereign renunciation of the goods of this world of lucre has something Christlike about it. But not the gentle Christ. Not the meek, the effeminate one. The one complicit with the Churches that have strayed from the paths of righteousness. No, it’s the revolutionary Christ of radical social transformations dedicated to reestablishing the radiance of Being. The Christ of explosive subversion of this sick world. Sick from its worship of the Golden Calf. Those that are first shall be last, and the last shall now be first. Today Deadbeat Dick is the last. The others are the first. But wait till tomorrow. He will be first. He was. He is. And he will be. He is the present in the past. The future in the present. And the present in the future. In times past he was a valiant warrior. Fighting wildly against the nascent tyranny of the world’s dialectic of alienation. Today. He’s an open wound staining the shimmering artifice of the city. Tomorrow. He’ll be the first to rise up. Tomorrow. He’ll be the first man to stand!

The sun comes up once more over Nouméa. A dismal sun. Exhausted perhaps from shedding its copious rays on these slaves. The humdrum daily existence of the wretched urban dwellers begins once more to wind out its unbearable litany of thankless tasks to be performed. Orders to be carried out. Contempt in the eyes of those who manage. Foul moods to be defused. Insults to be absorbed.

Dick has gone. Buried far away amid general indifference. The police thought they had buried a deadbeat. In reality they have sowed a seed in the earth. The seed of the revolution of the human race that will sprout, grow, and burst into life beneath the sun.