Things I didn´t know

So something that I didn´t know when I bought my dungeon apartment (that´s how it feels sometimes, up at the top of the sanatorium) is that there is some shady business going on in the building right across the street. Well, how else can I explain the white truck that backs into the dark back entrance in a very tight 90 degree-angle, every night around 11 o´clock, with much roaring, trucky sound, such loud, loud roaring and spitting that it interrupts any kind of thought I may be trying to have. And then this midnight white horse reappears mysteriously, sometimes at several other odd hours of the night (like 1 or 2 am). What exactly is deposited or loaded onto that iconic white truck?

At first I thought it was obviously the rubbish and refuse produced by the gigantic 300-people-seating Japanese restaurant next door. Then I concluded that there was no reason to load the truck with garbage SEVERAL times each night. So now I think that there is a little factory in the hidden guts of that 50s grey building, there is presumably some kind of merchandise that gets loaded and sent somewhere else in the country. The weird thing is that one cannot help but think of sweat shops, as this is the oriental quarter, isn´t it? I´ve been thinking this but it´s absurd, of course there are no sweatshops around here... Do people come all the way from China just to work packed like sardines in a Brazilian Niemeyer basement?

Lately, the night has been marked by even stranger sounds. Saturday and Sunday, in the dead of the night (like 3.30 in the morning), somebody started messing about with the pavement. It´s that distinctly familiar sound of somebody clawing at the sidewalk stone tiles with a hammer or something. I´d think somebody was indeed repairing a faulty sidewalk if it weren´t for the terribly late hour. The only thing that occured to me was that some (possibly homeless) lunatic was getting his frustrations out (I even pictured him trying to bury a dead body). I don´t know why, I couldn´t rid myself of the image of a Beckett-like clown-beggar, hammering the sidewalk on his knees with a huge tool, endlessly, waiting, waiting, waiting for something...

There are actually a couple of town crazies around here. I saw one on the day I moved in. I had just come out of a sushi restaurant with the kind friends who had transported my many boxes. First this twitching, nervous, trembling man asked for money. I mistook him for an alcoholic beggar, and feeling generous, gave him a few coins. Within a few moments, this Japanese man sporting dress pants, a buttoned-up shirt and a dirty American cap, started stopping the cars in the street, but instead of sticking his hand out for coins, he was holding his two hands together in the shape of a pistol. Then he leaped into the middle of a street crossing, right in the middle of the bustling midnight traffic, and held everyone at gunpoint with his imaginary gun. Then he went truly crazy in authentic Japanese yakuza movie style, and started spinning round and round, crazed eyes bulging out, his mouth sputtering machine-gun sounds... I´ve seen him out and about since, in a pretty calm state actually, entering the famed shady building and genuflexing devoutly to the God trapped in his 50s highrise shrine, I presume. And the guy is really a neighborhood fixture, I´ve seen bar waiters greeting him with a jolly handwave.

But anyway, back to those midnight sounds. There is definitely a midnight marauder around, who aside from hammering the sidewalk has also started scraping some ground and laying cement (or so I imagine because of the sounds, but I´m usually so dog-tired that I dare not rise and walk to the window to observe the sinister goings-on across the street). But I think that this little construction activity is also occuring somewhere in the vicinity of the suspicious building.

Also, I should mention that a little dog has started randomly yapping in the middle of the night too, a desperate yap coming from the street it seems. Perhaps a companion to the sidewalk-clawing looney?

Of course, I haven´t mentioned yet the distant chants reverberating from the hidden karaoke in the building next to my neighbouring Chinese hotel. I heard a very faint (and very poor) rendition of a U2 song the other night. Usually it´s Japaneses pop, so Japanese I cannot recognize a single note.

Soon I will start writing about the SMELLS I didn´t know about when I bought the apartment.