Animalitos

All day long and late into the evening, the streets in the center of town are full of urchin peddlers.
They ward off the mountain chill in heartbreakingly dirty sweaters with frayed cuffs and they flop along in mis-sized sandals. They’re mostly boys, and all seem under the age of ten. Some are having a good time, some are anxious and hungry-looking, depending on the day. The luckier ones tote ancient shoeshine boxes (my shoes are real scuffed and I am a magnet for these shoe-shiners), or wear wooden trays of cigarettes and gum strapped to their little torsos. But most of the street kids carry baskets full of animalitos: little clay sculptures of whimsical beast-like forms, hand-painted in white, black and red patterns, fabricated who knows where. The fixed routine for the vendor of animalitos is to wander over to the table where you’re drinking your coffee and draw out the different animal sculptures one by one, setting them in a row on your table and pronouncing their names. It is cute and you enjoy the show the first time but you don’t need any animalitos.
“I don’t need them,” you say.
Now they must draw on their limited sales patter and their narrow but effective repertoire of pitiful gestures. They make bug-eyed moues.
“You need them,” they answer, with conviction borne of desperation. They are adepts of the hard sell. They’re poor street children, after all. With their baskets of animalitos, they scrape together whatever they can to help their families. Or are they merely foot soldiers in some unscrupulous con’s grand enterprise? I don’t know.
Someone told me the kids can sell forty animalitos on a good day, during the height of the tourist season. How many animalitos do we need?
They demonstrate to us how you can buy two, a jaguar and one that looks like a dog, and then you can make them fight. No, we still do not need any. They’re incredulous. It depresses you. Each one has his own markings and sculpted, bright little face: I have started to think of the urchins themselves, metonymically, as ‘animalitos’.
Then there are also a handful of beggars who make the rounds, wearing the iconic beggar dress of colorful rags cinched in odd places. These are very traditional beggars whose means and afflictions have changed little down the centuries: blind, deaf, halt, or simply snaggle-toothed and crazy, they croon a simple phrase and twitch their upturned palm plaintively, like personifications of human want and misery. They are eternally picturesque. They don’t bother me. It’s all the people in their twenties and thirties who are able-bodied and reduced to desperately shining shoes and desperately selling gum or hats that you feel for. There is some tragic air around the gum salesmen, who are always impeccably dressed and combed, like something out of Walker Evans.