Damnificados

by JJ Amaworo Wilson

  “What are you doing?” asks his father.

  “Building a robot.”

  When Nacho is thirteen, he and Emil take a bus to the river. The sun is glowing and they pull off their shoes and dip their feet in the water. Emil wanders over to a pile of twigs and reeds by the shore and begins nosing around, picking up small branches. They walk again and find a pileup of junk at the edge of the water, scrap wood and board jammed together on a bed of filthy brown foam. Nacho sits on a boulder, rolls up his pants and catches the sun, his withered leg dangling off the side. Emil begins to build a raft, pulling the sticks together and roping them with bits of twine. He floats it into the water but it sinks till just a scrap of rag that was the sail is visible. Then that too goes down in a silent descent, leaving rings in the water.

  They will go back many times to this river, build many boats that list and shake and finally sink. And Emil will go on building boats that will one day save the masses and lead him to the love of his life.

  CHAPTER 5

  Rain—Flood refugees enter the tower—Broken psychologist—Susana—The image of Jesus

  THE RAINS COME LATE. BUT WHEN THEY COME THEY HIT THE HILLSIDE SHANTYTOWNS OF Agua Suja and Oameni Morti hard, sending the walls of lean-tos and shebeens sliding down the mud. Agua Suja’s makeshift roads turn to streams, and a car slaloms drunkenly, driverless, down the hill, as if on skates. The water gathers pace and picks up debris. Bicycles come skidding down, rocks, chunks of concrete, wooden crates, tires, a canary in a cage, shrubs ripped from their roots. A dead, bloated sheep bounces down the hill like a punctured ball. A river of mud, upending everything in its wake, cleaving a trough between houses. A boy clings to a roof. A dog is sent tumbling a hundred feet and somehow survives by gripping the slats of a disintegrating barrel. Whole houses are wiped out.

  In Oameni Morti alone, there are another six hundred homeless. A third of them head for the nearest city and find, in Favelada, the tower they have heard about. Torre de Torres. Where a cripple reigns and a giant Chinaman keeps order. Bedraggled and broken, they come in groups, still drenched. The rain is knifing down, angling in on the hot wind. The damnificados of Oameni Morti cross the road and one calls Nacho’s name, but his voice is drowned out by the beating of the rain. Nacho appears at the door and beckons them into the atrium. He has seen these faces before. And these rags. And these children in dirty T-shirts and knee-length shorts.

  “We’re sending for food now,” he says. “You can stay on the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth floors. There’s nothing there, but we’re working on it. And the rooms are clean.”

  Without a word, the new damnificados make their way up the stairs. Some lie down immediately and drift into sleep on the concrete floors. Others sit by the window openings looking out into the dark where the rain catches strips of light from the neon city, floods the roads, and makes a swamp of the old wasteland around the tower.

  Minutes later another hundred arrive from Agua Suja.

  “Es gibt zu viele,” says Hans, looking down from his balcony on the fifteenth floor. Dieter smiles.

  “Too many? Können wir nicht wegschicken.”

  “You’re right. Nacho would never send them away. What is it the lady says about her dog?”

  “What lady?”

  “Wheelbarrow.”

  “They are us.”

  “They are us. Dogs are us. And these people, too. Willkommen.”

  Fifteen floors down, Nacho says to the priest, “These floods are just the beginning.”

  And the priest replies, “Build an ark. For a thousand people.”

  Nacho looks at the sky and at the priest. “We’re already in it.”

  What they don’t know is that the rain will soon become a flood, an inundation unseen here for a hundred years.

  The Agua Suja crowd brings treasures: two qualified teachers, a mechanic, a psychologist, and a woman who smiles with her eyes at Nacho. Her name is Susana.

  The teachers are young, and unlike Nacho, they both teach children. He installs them on the fifteenth and the twenty-fifth floors and sends the Chinaman up with huge rolls of paper, blackboards, and armfuls of stolen pens. He hears term is ending at one of the regular schools in the area and the twins go to raid the dumpster. They bring home a truckload of dog-eared, torn books which are still readable: a class set of a poetry anthology, twenty-five history books published three decades earlier, a box of assorted novels with scrawls in the margins, ABC books, mathematics primers, and two mold-damp encyclopedias from a set of five: A–E and K–N. The rest of the alphabet they would live without.

  Nacho invites the psychologist, Dewald, to his bare room. He needs men and women to help him lead. He is about to offer the man a drink when he realizes this is the last thing Dewald needs. Nacho sees the man has left his life at the bottom of a bottle, sees a tan mark where a wedding ring once was. Watches Dewald’s tired eyes, underhung by sagging pouches, the skin almost blue. The shaggy beard flecked with gray. Here is a man, he thinks, who has probably seen too much, though Nacho senses that Dewald is little older than himself, perhaps forty, perhaps forty-five. They talk awhile about Agua Suja and then Nacho feigns tiredness and bids the man goodnight.

  The woman is different. He smiles at her and she returns his gaze. When he examines himself in the mirror, which he rarely does, he sees a careworn face with the boyishness gone, hair like a tornado, half his body withered, the other half wiry. The only remnant is the mole under his eye, a perfect dark brown circle. He’s all skin and bone and cords of thick green veins running up his arms, over his forehead. He has never expected to know the feel of a woman, her smell, her aura. Has never been close to one in adulthood. Yet he is not without desire. In his life before the damnificados he has seen beautiful women, talked to them on occasion in many languages. He once made a woman laugh and saw her close her eyes and throw her head back, and it is an image that has always stuck with him.

  It was Emil who had made women swoon or totter away to unknown pleasures. Emil with his dash, his quick wit, his fearlessness. Emil who had once cracked a big joke while sitting with a circle of friends around a bonfire. Before the laughter had died down he got up, walked ten meters and sprung to the top of a high wall in one leap to watch the sun rise. He landed, without using his hands, flush on the narrow wall. Nacho sat quietly in the glow of the flame and looked on as every girl in the group watched his brother silhouetted against the rising sun.

  But at least he has exchanged glances with Susana. From afar it is impossible to tell her age. Once, he sees her washing clothes with a group of the other women and he comes closer with the pretense of asking if the pump is working. From behind and then from the side he guesses that she is older than him by maybe ten years and his heart sinks a little, but she is a handsome woman. Small with high cheekbones, a brown complexion, and always clean. He asks his question and another of the women answers yes, the pump is fine, and he turns away quickly and walks back to the tower’s interior.

  A few days after the arrival of the men and women from Agua Suja, a commotion comes from upstairs. Whooping and the sound of bells rising above the rat-tat-tat of the rain. Someone singing a hymn in an a cappella baritone, and doing it again louder the second time. Nacho wakes up, staggers off his pallet, rubs his eyes, and pulls on a pair of brown pants. He closes the belt and throws on a T-shirt. Grabs his muletas leaning against the wall. The noise has turned to a hum of people. He negotiates three flights of stairs, and sees a line of people on the stairwell, hunched against the rain.

  “It’s a miracle,” says a woman in a red dress.

  “God visited us,” says a hunchback in pajamas.

  Nacho sees Raincoat in the line.

  “What happened?” he asks.

  “The image of Jesus appeared on a loaf of bread. Sounds like a scam to me. I’ve heard this bullshit before. But thought I’d see for myself. The fuckers are charging one libro per minute. Fifty corazons for kids. Babies get in free.”


  The line buzzes with children, dogs, old women, drunks, ex-miners, the bereaved, the battered. Damnificados one and all.

  Nacho wanders forward, sees a makeshift sign on the bakery door: “Imige of ‘Jesus Christ’ 1 libro 1 minute Under 12 50 crzn Baby’s free.”

  A Brazilian farmworker recognizes him and says, “Entra, Nachinho. Pode entrar. Voce nao precisa ‘sperar com’ a gente.”

  Nacho thanks him and says he’ll wait in line like everyone else. He wanders to the back of the queue. A family comes next, the children bright-eyed, one of them carrying a plastic doll that she talks to in French. Then a straggle of loners, a man with a spider’s web tattooed on his face, a junkie with the jitters, a middle-aged woman propped up on a stick. Nacho thinks, I don’t know these people. Reach a certain number, a certain mass, and you lose connection.

  The line moves forward slowly, one turn per minute. Nacho sees the clouds gathering, readying themselves for the day’s storm. There in the iron light they wait, a fresco of the damned, shuffling onward to behold their salvation. As he nears the door, Nacho gets to see the visitors exit after their one minute. A fat black woman walks by, crossing herself. A drunk follows her a minute later, telling everyone, “It’s Jesus! It’s Jesus!” before he breaks into a coughing fit.

  Nacho can now see the entrance to the bakery. The doorway is covered by a black veil in front of which sits one of the bakers on a stool. His brother stands next to him, a large paint can in his hand. The can is full of money. They see Nacho.

  “You don’t have to pay. Come in.”

  The line parts as they let him forward.

  They pull open the veil and Nacho enters. He has been here a hundred times. The familiar smell of baked bread, the shelves honed from milk crates, the counter of linoleum and glass. He is ushered into the back area where the oven takes up half the wall space. Two other brothers still in their white aprons beckon him forward. Nacho stops at a table, leans over and sees a large light brown oval loaf placed on paper. Imprinted on it a darker shade of brown is the exact shape of Christ on the cross, arms diagonal, knees bent, head tilted. The cross stretches the length of the loaf.

  “We baked it this morning,” says one of the brothers. “Came out like this. I saw it immediately. Called Harry here.”

  “He woke me up,” says Harry.

  “Had to check it wasn’t just me seeing things.”

  “Bastard woke me up, says Jesus is on the bread.”

  “Woke him up I did. He looks at it.”

  “I looks at it.”

  “Says it’s Jesus on the cross. I finished baking the other loaves. People still have to eat, Jesus or no Jesus.”

  “I rings a bell, starts singing, tells everyone I see.”

  “That was Harry singing. Got a voice on ’im. Dad says make a sign, charge people.”

  “I makes a sign.”

  Nacho says, “What are you going to do with the bread?”

  Harry and the other man look at each other.

  Harry: “We don’t know. We haven’t got that far. We’s put it in a museum maybe?”

  The other man: “Put a frame on it. Put it on one of them platforms.”

  Nacho: “A pedestal. It’ll go moldy.”

  Harry: “Maybe it won’t, see. It’s a miracle loaf.”

  Harry nods at his own observation. “Miracle loaf.”

  There was to be no frame or pedestal. No museum.

  Five minutes after Nacho leaves, a madman pays his libro, picks up the loaf and takes a huge bite out of Jesus’s head. The brothers pin him to the floor and Harry half-strangles him before two of his other brothers—the minders at the door—hear the noise, go in, and restrain him. A whisper goes around the crowd waiting outside.

  “He fuckin’ ate it,” says a ten-year-old.

  “He ate Jesus?” says a drunk stewing against the bakery wall.

  “He bit off his head,” says a cleaner from Agua Suja.

  “He killed the Lord,” says a hooker, her bottom lip trembling.

  “He’s a devil worshipper,” says a devil worshipper from Fellahin.

  Inside the bakery, Harry is wrestling to get free of his brothers. He turns to the madman. “You’re gonna pay for this!”

  “I already did,” says the bread-biter. “One. Fucking. Libro.” He swallows the doughy remains of Jesus and walks out the door into the spearing rain.

  Susana spends her time with another woman of a similar build and look. Nacho thinks they may be sisters, but he doesn’t ask. They live together on the sixteenth floor in a room divided by hardwood walls. Every morning he sees them leave the tower together to go to work cleaning the houses of the rich over on Cadenza Street. It’s a long walk, but they go by foot, even in the rain, to save on bus fare. Sometimes Nacho watches them from his window opening until they turn out of sight on Rottweiler Avenue.

  Once, Susana turns around and looks back at the tower and Nacho moves as fast as he can from the window bracket and regrets it immediately, feeling like a child caught in midfelony. Then he reasons with himself: this tower has six hundred windows. She could have been looking at any one of about a hundred and fifty in her sight. And she probably can’t see anything anyway because there’s a sheet of rain blurring everything. And even if she saw me, I’m just a man looking out the window. It doesn’t mean I’m spying on her.

  In any case, Nacho soon has bigger things to worry about—a gathering storm and a swarm coming out of the sky to make wrecks of them all.

  CHAPTER 6

  The waters rise—Eight hundred loaves—The Chattering—Power cut—Gilgamesh—Vishnu—Fighting in the tower—A plague of mosquitoes—The damnificados shake—Saved by dragonflies—A message to the outside world—Rescue

  THE RAIN POUNDS THE LAND. IT COMES DOWN IN SWEEPING SHEETS, EACH DROP DETONATING onto the walls of the monolith and the old wastelands now reclaimed. The roads are awash with skaggy water, mud-browned and pocked with the million droplets that pepper it. Stick figures run sloshing through the streets, holding covers of plastic or polythene above their heads. Cars get marooned, engines coughing like old men.

  Those first rains that flooded Agua Suja and Oameni Morti were an hors d’oeuvre, a little taster.

  Across Mundanzas, Sanguinosa, Blutig, where the cities border fertile lands and rainforest, massive leaves grow overnight. Plants shoot to the height of a man and flowers splay open with anthers of violet and yellow. All the animals are gone already, flown or leapt or galloped or crawled to higher ground. Two days before the rains came there were reports of snakes seen in dozens sliding up the creeks, wild pigs on the run, mules gnawing through their tethers and bolting to the hills.

  Just a few settlements remain in Gudsland and Balaal, where the water was once sweet, where you could grow anything: yams, corn, beans, rice. From behind the plastic sheeting of their wooden houses or under rain-drummed awnings of banana leaf, the faces of the damnificados peer out. They are far from anywhere. They see in the distance their roads washed away. The ground beneath their feet begins to move.

  On the edge of Favelada, the waters rise. The new door of the tower is already half under, and the Chinaman moves his reinforced chair to Nacho’s room on the first floor and looks down on the deluge. He hunches forward, squinting against the rain that lashes in through the window opening.

  Nacho is with the bakers upstairs.

  “Harry, how much dough do you have?”

  Harry is on his stool in the main part of the store, the oven in the back room behind him.

  “Why?”

  “The roads are gone. We may not be able to get out for days. That means we can’t get supplies. How much bread can you make?”

  “I’m a baker, me. I ain’t Jesus Christ. I don’t do miracles with bread.”

  “I didn’t ask for miracles. I asked you how much dough you have.”

  Harry shuffles his beefy body on the stool, scratches at his sideburns. “We ain’t got dough. We got flour, yeast, salt and water. That�
��s what you make bread with. You can live without the salt. We make two hundred and fifty loaves a day, three hundred if we’re up for it. We got about three days’ worth of ingredients in the pantry. Means I can do you about eight hundred loaves, and each one feeds a family. Take it or leave it.”

  “Eight hundred,” says Nacho. “We have about eight hundred people living here.”

  “You don’t say. Listen, it’s rainy season, right? Rains every year. Then it dries up, right? And everything goes back to normal.”

  “Look outside.”

  Harry glances out the window. Sees a car sailing by.

  The rain rages on. Nacho gets the leaders on each floor to do a head count.

  “Why bother?” says Raincoat. “Anyone not here is somewhere else. And what are we gonna do? Go out with a lifeboat? If you’re out there you’re either in someone’s house or you’re dead.”

  But he does it all the same. In the building there are thirty to forty missing, but some are itinerants who spend their lives missing. Another dozen clean hotels or malls and got caught, unable to return home.

  Nacho sits in his room. He has a bookcase that the carpenter made for him, a couple of crates for chairs, a desk. He reads while the rain blasts down. He lies on his wooden pallet. He has slept on pallets most of his life. Once, when he was in his twenties, he was put up in a hotel. It was an interpreting job for a group of businessmen. He lay down and felt as if he were sinking. With his good arm he tried to remove the culprit—a ridiculously fat mattress—but it was too heavy. He picked up the hotel phone and asked for help. Thirty minutes later a waiter arrived with an omelet. He called again and said he needed someone to help him with the bed. He waited ten minutes, heard a gentle rap on the door, opened it, and a prostitute walked in, six foot in her heels.

  “Will you help me move the mattress?” said Nacho.

  The woman obliged without batting a four-inch eyelash. Together they pulled the thing onto the floor revealing just the hardboard slats and a thin foam pad.