Also known as: jiji with a little j (his signature), Moș Jiji, Mo’Jiji, Jiji Yamamoto (my contribution), the hobo with the pricey footwear (the newsroom’s)
Occupation: None that appears on any document. He has no documents. He goes wherever his feet carry him; for a long time, that was Casa Presei.
First appears: Chapter 019
Status: A bum, an aging hipster or a wandering saint. I keep changing my mind.
Usually seen with: Black on black on black, a pair of Air Max he should not be able to afford, and a wooden spoon.
His philosophy of life, as far as I could reconstruct it
Mo’Jiji believes the world is not reversed but upturned: a mirage, a reflection with a meaning hidden inside it. The deviation, he says, can be calculated and corrected, by healing the diseases of the soul. Whoever considers himself to be nothing knows himself best. He practices this with alarming thoroughness. Asked to write his name on a police statement, he wrote it with a little j. “Because I’m nothing, pops!”
What I think he thinks of me
He calls me “pops”. I call him “gramps”. Neither of us has explained. He looks at me with a gentleness I cannot fathom, as if my mouth told the truth even when my mind did not know it. He says some things cannot be understood when you hear them; they have to be laid up in the heart, from where they will emerge at the right time. He told me this at two in the morning, in room 6 of Precinct 10, shortly after I had tried to throttle him. I am still waiting for the right time.
What I think of him
For a year I watched him wander around Casa Presei in five-hundred-dollar sneakers, and I felt no compassion for him. Give money to a man on the street and you finance his failure. Then, when I lunged at him and cracked my head against the wall, he caught me by the lapel and lowered me gently onto his own chair. At three in the morning, over a lentil soup, he made the sign of the cross over both our bowls, and I understood that he was not a bum, a beggar or a moocher. He was Alexius the Man of God. Or George the Pilgrim. Mo’Jiji is more a friend to things than to people. I have not yet worked out which he considers me.
Things he told me, which I filed under madness
“A man’s feet are holy, dear boy!”
“Nothing’s wrong with my hands. Only you can’t walk on them.”
“It doesn’t show when they get dirty, pops!”
“Not reversed. Upturned! And that’s the beginning of a science you’ll find in no textbook.”
“The world’s astigmatism is anger. Its myopia is pride, its farsightedness appetite. Total blindness is hubris, the beginning of all the rest.”
“So the eyes aren’t the mirror of the soul after all. The soul is the mirror into which our eyes look.”
“Kindness! It’s miraculous, isn’t it?”
Andrei’s footnote: I told him that lying is what’s miraculous. He did not argue. That is the most worrying thing about him.
