The Naked Flâneur of Lausanne
Last night I witnessed one of the strangest sights I’ve ever seen. The fact it happened here in Switzerland makes it all the more peculiar.
After a day indoors, I decided I needed a bit of fresh air and the sight and sound of other humans (a couple of hours per day is usually more than enough). I had a stroll around town, stopping in what I thought to be a Canadian bar, until corrected by Nadia later in the evening. It was in fact, just a plain old bar. After my faux-Canadian experience, I moved on to La Grenette for a swift half before heading home.
There is a lot about this bar I can’t quite get my head around. Situated just off the city’s Riponne main square (voted the worst designed in Europe, according to Nadia), the bar has all the usual trappings of a hipster haunt; leather chairs outdoors, overly attractive twenty and thirty somethings and ‘edgy’ hair cuts, piercings and tattoos. The bar also possesses an inexplicable sprinkler system, which on warms days sprays a mist of, what I can only hope is water, over the patrons gathered below. On the sunny day I experienced the sprinkler, I had to take cover under a parasol to avoid getting wet. There wasn’t a single cloud in the sky.
Another strange thing. There is a children’s creche right next to the bar, so the late afternoon drinker (ahem) faces intermittent raids by screaming youth into the bar area. This can sometimes include the driving of bulky toy vehicles, annoyingly susceptible to collisions with the assorted furniture. This does somewhat detract from the atmosphere of a place where grown ups congregate to talk about grown up things, with the assumption that, with intoxicants in close range, children would be barred. Speaking of intoxicants, the doobie smoke enjoyed by the Cool People, which wafts its way across the bar goes unremarked upon by the staff, making the close proximity of kiddy-winks even more troubling.
The bar is completely open from all sides, but the main walkway in and out is home to a gaggle of local vagrants and addicts. A regular rotation of beggars make brief forays into the bar’s inner sanctum. Whilst there with a friend recently, a young woman obviously worse for wear came up and asked us if she had blood on her face. One can only imagine what set of circumstances lead to her needing to ask us such a question. Whether she was expecting her own, or someone else’s vital fluid spattered across her face is a question we dared not ask.
What’s strange is how the bar and the local authorities accept the presence of these local ‘down and outs’. Bizarrely, the main congregation point for local vagrants (my terminology may seem harsh, but see Hi Def’s post for an explication of the thinking behind using this kind of phrasing) is slap bang in the middle of town on the main square, Place de la Riponne. As a tourist attraction and main ‘hub’ when crossing the city, it’s strange in a country so concerned with noise levels, cleanliness and general good order, that a group often bickering, fighting physically or dealing drugs are left to their own devices. In some ways, it’s a refreshing change to what you see in cities such as London, where vagrants are allowed not a single minute’s respite. In the big metropoles the authorities maintain a policy of constant ‘moving on’ and ludicrous threats of £50 fines if rough sleepers dare pitch up in certain places.
On finishing my £5 half pint, I made my way across the bar and out the entrance, where the waifs and strays congregate. One naturally puts up a slight guard on moving through this area as it’s normal to get comments, or shouts from the group. Yet this time, my brain latched onto something quite strange going on to my right as I walked. On double take, I noticed a middle-aged woman standing with the others, wearing only a pair of black heels on the bottom half of her body.
Shocked, I kept on moving, but couldn’t resist looking back on the scene, met by the sight of the woman beginning to make her way across the square, her ‘Wang-Chung’ in full view. She seemed utterly at ease as she sauntered across the cobbled paving, followed by what I thought at the time was a small woman, carrying some bags, but on closer inspection of the photographic evidence*, looks as though could be a man.
The inevitable jeers began to cut through the strangely febrile atmosphere as the woman slowly passed the square’s main congregation point for vagrants. Apart from one ‘substance user’ offering the woman a slap on the arse (which garnered almost no response from the woman), public reaction was surprisingly constrained, limited to the odd howl and shout. Middle class witnesses stopped to giggle and gawp, as the woman made her way to a road. A number of cars honked as they passed the naked flâneur as she stood resolute at a zebra crossing, continuing her passage past Cafe de Bruxelles, heaving with punters. With that, she and her downtrodden bag-carrier were gone.
A couple of people I have described the above to were convinced it must have been some kind of street performance. Yet having witnessed the scene myself, I can assure the reader that wasn’t the case. I don’t think any creative type would put themselves in the position where both verbal and physical assault from local vagrants and addicts were a likely outcome. Yet, if the woman was mentally ill (as is my theory), her comportment and (lack of) reactions strikes one as strange to say the least. If something happened to her clothing, whilst high on drink and drugs, or mentally unwell, she would have most likely reacted angrily, or with tears. Her lack of any outward emotional response was what made the whole thing more bizarre. I would both love and loathe further insight into the woman’s life. When you get past the, I believe natural, immediate reaction of amusement, the whole scene left me with a sense of discomfort and sadness.
Shortly after the woman had disappeared, intermittent fights broke out amongst the street dwellers on the square. One group chased another onto a higher path, which in the late summer evening light, resembled some kind of snaking, human murmuration. I had the feeling these people spending their days and nights together are neither friends nor enemies, merely lumped together by shared circumstances until forced to move on. One moment they could be offering a cigarette in a touching moment of human kindness, the next getting a slap in the face from the same person.
These were certainly the most bizarre scenes I have witnessed in my time here, all taking place 7pm on a Wednesday night.
*I know I’m likely to be pulled up for taking, let alone publishing, the picture of the naked flaneur. In my defence, I believe from given viewpoint, less of her body is on display than had she been wearing a swim-suit on the beach. Of course, that doesn’t make it acceptable to take a picture of a woman without her permission, but she was walking through the city naked, creating pretty exceptional circumstances. She cannot be identified from this angle and she was displaying the most intimate parts of her body to all and sundry. I am not the only person who was taking pictures (again, this doesn’t make it right), but I believe I probably took the most ‘delicate’ picture of the scene of those who snapped her.
