Ignorance is Bliss

Returning home from work on one of the warmer afternoons last week, I saw a woman sweating her way towards me on the otherwise deserted path. She was still some distance off, but I could make out that she was carrying several bulging bags as well as the jacket she had divested, as she trudged heavily in my direction. When she came within a few metres of me, I realised she belonged to that category of people impossible to age: their youth prematurely truncated by an excess of food, drink and Life in Hungary; now careworn, obese and unkempt. Looking towards her again, my attention was caught by the English words emblazoned on her tightly stretched t-shirt. They read: Go on, admit it – you’ve got the hots for me. Little could have been more incongruous, and I felt certain she could have not the slightest inkling of the message she was broadcasting, on a garment she had most likely found in one of the numerous second-hand clothes shops that have sprung up in recent years.

Before 1989, anything which could be identified as having originated from kint, (abroad, and not socialist) was a status symbol, whether it was a pair of Levi jeans or merely a carrier bag bearing the name of a foreign shop. This was true to the extent that a friend persuaded me to part with two old Indian skirts in exchange for a fridge, and it also resulted in daily requests for me to sell a PVC shopping bag with the Cinzano label printed on it, when I made my shopping trips to the market on Garay tēr where we lived. Unconvincing imitations of foreign goods were also manufactured inside the country’s borders – unidentifiable from the genuine article to all but a small handful of people with a smattering of a foreign language – a real rarity – or those who had managed to travel abroad. Thus it was that one of the alcoholics who was as permanent a feature of the market as the flower-sellers, owned a sweatshirt purportedly from ‘Oxsford University.’

Yet this phenomenon was perpetuated into the 90s. Our elderly neighbours at that time had a son who had defected to America, and who every now and then would send a parcel for his elderly parents. Maybe he considered it of no consequence in a country where few knew English (including his parents) but the sweatshirt he sent his 70-year-old mother, and which she proudly wore for our weekly shopping trip to the local market, bore the sizeable inscription: Fuck You! It was as uncomfortable as it was unavoidable that I impart to her the meaning of the words on her new garment.

Today, it is more ambiguous as to the intention with which such clothes are worn. The attractive young woman selling hot dogs at the Palatinus swimming pool on the Margaret Island, may well have known the meaning on her t-shirt: Can you maintain me? Though whether the white-haired porter working at a small hospital for the elderly where I go regularly, knew the meaning of his, I doubt. As he wandered the corridors, pushing octo- and nonagenarians in their wheelchairs, and politely greeting their visiting relatives (for the most part, also elderly), he appeared sublimely ignorant of the message on display on the front of his t-shirt: Born 2 FXXK.
Ignorance is bliss….