In the winter of 1852, the Alta California newspaper reported that “there has never been so deplorable an exhibition of mendicancy in our streets as may be witnessed daily at this time ...”

There was no need. The shower is obligatory only for unclean mendicants. Simone Pau had never taken it.

the mute eloquence of a mendicant's eyes

the reader, reduced to something like mendicant vulnerability by its more nerve-wrenching moments