The crowd pulls them along slowly.
She is quite stout with greasy hair,
dressed with the bad taste that’s cheap from necessity.
He wears an old jacket, crumpled and dirty.
Sitting in front of her he takes her hand
and keeps kissing it. Abstracted and tired,
the girl gazes past the man’s head
and uses her whole body to push the wheelchair.
There are griefs that cruelly change one’s life,
and there are those which themselves are life.
Best not to talk about these
because the one who does not suffer them
lives on the other side of an invisible moat
and will not understand your joys.
Translated from the Catalan by Anna Crowe