Mario's birth and body — "there was almost nobody at E.T.A…"
there was almost nobody at E.T.A. or its Enfield-Brighton environs who did not treat Mario M. Incandenza with the casual gentility of somebody who doesn’t pity you or admire you so much as just vaguely prefer it when you’re around. And Mario—despite rectilinear feet and cumbersome police lock the most prodigious walker-and-recorder in three districts—hit the unsheltered area streets daily at a very slow pace, a halting constitutional, sometimes w/ head-mounted Bolex and sometimes not, and took citizens’ kindness and cruelty the same way, with a kind of extra-inclined half-bow that mocked his own canted posture without pity or cringe.
Context
The anti-U.H.I.D. proof text. Where the Union's answer to the gaze is concealment, Mario walks "the unsheltered area streets daily," takes kindness and cruelty identically, and answers both with a half-bow that mocks his own posture "without pity or cringe" — shamelessness not as obliviousness but as achieved grace. The half-bow reappears at the legate scene (spine).