“Do you remember this building?”
“I remember our father telling stories about it. It’s built on a trash heap, isn’t it?”
“Yeah. Several generations’ worth.”
“Why here?”
“What do you mean?”
“Why this building? Why did you bring them here?”
“Look at the size of it. The location. We can see for miles.”
“See your enemies coming.”
“And it was empty.”
“Who are all these people? Are they all damnificados? Drunks and junkies?”
“I don’t know. They just needed somewhere to live. I brought the Chinaman with me, and the twins. And some others I knew before. We’re always on the brink of chaos.”
Emil smiles. They are sitting against the sacks. A pool of water has gathered under Emil, dripping off his clothes and his skin.
“You want to get changed? I can find you some dry clothes.”
“Do you have rules? Laws?”
“We live by a code.”
“What does that mean?”
“Each floor has a leader or a group of leaders. They organize everyone so the place gets cleaned, and they keep out the malandros, settle disputes, make sure no one starves. We have schoolrooms. Shops. A bakery.”
“How do they make money?”
“Some of them work. They’re cleaners, maids, caretakers. Others sell trinkets or bottled water, candy, that kind of thing. Some of them beg.”
“How do you keep the gangs out?”
“Look at the inhabitants of this place,” says Nacho. “They aren’t gang material. We’re all misfits. Ex-addicts. Ex-drunks. Mental cases. Indigents. Cripples. That’s us. The gangs haven’t come for us and I don’t know if they will.”
“They’ll come for the building, not the inhabitants. You’re sitting on a piece of prime real estate.”
“What can I do? We have lookouts, a few weapons. The Chinaman. Anyway, why don’t you tell me about you?”
“The Chinaman? What, he can deflect a bullet?”
“No one’s come shooting at us yet.”
“He’s good for lifting a sack of flour. But if someone wants to invade, the Chinaman won’t stop them.”
“What can I do? Why don’t I find you some dry clothes? You’re dripping all over the place.”
Nacho gives Emil a towel and makes a call for dry clothes. Maria, the hairdresser, has been lurking glamorously nearby in full makeup and red summer dress, six-inch heels, hair tied back.
“I can get him some clothes,” she says. “We have some in the back of the store.” And she skips up the steps.
Emil strips off and dries himself and asks Nacho, “How are you going to divide the food?”
“We’ll do it by floor. Each floor gets its ration. The leaders divide it up.”
“You’re building Utopia, brother.”
“Have to start somewhere. Where did you get the boat?”
“I built it. Got all the pieces from a scrapyard in Balaal. I was finishing it when the rains came. Knew it would come in handy. I rescued a bunch of hookers from a flooded whorehouse last week. They were screaming from the windows. Waving their knickers. They offered to pay me on the boat. All at the same time. I said someone has to steer. Took them to a safe house in Sanguinosa. They promised me a lifetime of free love.”
“You’ve already had a lifetime of free love.”
“The following day I found a family on a roof in Fellahin. They were sheltering under tarpaulin. Four kids and a parrot in a cage. They were shouting at me in Arabic. I couldn’t understand a word, but I let them onto the boat. They kept shouting, all four of them. At me, at each other, at the rain. We passed a body bloated in the water and they went silent. Then the parrot started talking. It knew five languages. Didn’t make sense in any. I dropped them off in Slomljena Ruka, found a makeshift bridge that led to a mosque. They wouldn’t get off the boat. I had to wave my machete at them. The father said ‘shukran’ but the mother spat at me.”
Maria knocks on the door.
“Come in,” says Nacho.
Emil has the towel wrapped around him. Maria walks in like a princess.
“I brought you some dry clothes. I’m Maria, from the sixth floor. Marias Beautty and Hare Salon?”
“Ah,” says Emil. “Thank you, ma’am.”
“We’re always open if you need a haircut.”
“Thank you. I’ll bear that in mind. I appreciate the clothes. I’ll return them to you just as soon as mine dry out.”
“Be seeing you.”
She exits. Slowly. A little wave of four ringed fingers.
Outside, the rain comes lashing down, strips of mercury battering the land.
“Then there were the pirates,” Emil goes on. “Gangs of Somalis in stripped-down shikaras. They were rescuing people for a thousand libros a head, and pillaging everything they could find. I saw them slit an old man’s throat ’cause they wanted his shoes.”
“Where have you been in this boat of yours?”
“All over the region. Oameni Morti, Sanguinosa, Dieux Morts, Agua Suja. It’s all under water. I must have seen a hundred corpses floating down the streets. I went as far as Blutig. I was collecting provisions all along and hiding them in the hull. When I had too much to hide, I came straight here. I’d already had to evade the pirates and the police boats. They go out at night, cover up the police sign, wear masks, rob everything in sight. I paid a bribe in Fellahin. They wanted my papers. I told them it was my boat and they put a gun in my face. So I gave them four hundred libros, said it was all I had. They kicked my boat into a spin and shot a hole in the flag. But they let me go. I don’t know why.”
Nacho nods, surveys his room, the worm-shredded furniture, the handful of books, the surfaces covered with sacks.
“Things are desperate here,” says Nacho. “We’re almost out of food. The water pipes clogged up a week ago and the electricity flickers on and off. Families are cooped up in one room, tearing each other to pieces. We try to get them to come to the school or the church, but it’s hard. The walkways are turning into pools. We had an infestation of mosquitoes. God knows what’s under the water down there.” Nacho gestures with his head to the outside world.
“Under the water?” says Emil. “Death. Dead rats, people, dogs, dead everything. This tower has saved a lot of lives, brother. That’s another reason they’ll come for you.”
The provisions are shared among the inhabitants of the building. Emil is a hero. Moves into the tower. Takes a room. Sleeps for forty-eight hours on a bed of newspapers, covered by an old bear-skin blanket he brought from Sanguinosa. Likes the feel of it on his skin. Wakes once only to eat. Opens his eyes and sees Maria with a bowl of soup and plates of bread and rice. Doesn’t stop to wonder how long she’s been there. Eats. Sleeps again, curled fetus. Watery dreams.
Nacho comes in. Stays at the doorway. Remembers Emil sleeping in the House of Flowers. His snuffled snore. His turning and turning.
When Emil wakes, he sits up, dazed. Evening. The sun going down, a blur on the horizon. Stands at his window watching the rain. Looks down at the flooded streets, debris sliding in the brown eddy that swallows the world.
Maria comes again with food. Then guests bringing gifts. Children’s drawings, a wax figurine of a naked woman, a dish with painted flowers. Sees his room has gained furniture. A borrowed chair. A small chest of drawers.
After two days Maria invites him over. Emil declines. Says he needs to be alone. Feels awry. Goes to check on his boat. Hears the roof peppered with rain. Cleans gunk from the transom. Bails out water with a bucket. Sits at the tiller and looks out as far as he can see, the boat in the giant shadow of the monolith.
Remembers.
After he left home, with a departing grin for his adopted brother and a wave and a kiss for Samuel and Anna, Emil wandered. He wandered on foot, on horseback, by bicycle, on cargo trains, sometimes squeezed between crates, sleeping on his fe
et. One train took him all over the land. From a tiny slit of a window, he saw green fields and mountains and rivers go by. Later he climbed on top of a carriage and lay flat on the roof and felt the spray of a waterfall in Cascavel. His hair turned yellow, bleached by the sun, grew lank and stringy. He scavenged food at stations, walked into cornfields and ate his fill, once stole a chicken, slaughtered it in the night and cooked it on an open fire, eating, living like an animal.
He hid out in a scrap-wood boxcar that trundled across the countryside. Took refuge in an abandoned rail station in Hoffnungslos, where the weeds had burst through the floor and a colony of bats dangled from the rafters. In Lixo he met a hobo blackened with rail soot, hair down to her thighs. She wore dungarees and a wild look in her eye. Spoke to him in a language he didn’t understand. He made love to her on the floor of a forest, and afterward they skewered scarabs and goliath beetles with a stick and ate them over a fire.
In Mordende he found work constructing a courthouse. They fed him well and the job was easy. He slept in a flophouse off the premises, fifteen other men snoring and grunting and stepping over bodies to piss outside. A passing harem of whores visited on the first Tuesday of every month. They wore bustiers and fishnet stockings and carried fans like eighteenth-century socialites, and the men blew their wages for fifteen minutes of pleasure in the half-built anterooms of the courthouse, returning sweaty and red-faced, grinning like children.
When the courthouse work was finished he boarded a train going south, clinging onto the outside of a freight wagon. Villages went by, one-horse towns, an abandoned fort on a hill, church steeples and ramshackle barns; farmhands chopping wood, suspended in midswing, and the sound of children’s cries in the distance. From afar he saw a twister rise from the earth, a gray cloud shaped like a funnel unspooling into the sky. He saw a man hanging lifeless from a tree, the noose around his neck as still as iron.
He didn’t know where he was going, nor did he care. He was alive and wandering, just as his father had wandered.
He made it to the coast and walked the sea-lashed docks at Ferrido, eyes wide at the giant ships. All of life teemed there. He saw a crew of sailors disembarking, square-jawed, hard-eyed. And a shirtless fisherman, lean as a paddle, dragging a net to the shore. In the seafront food stalls, he saw lobsters jostling in a tank, octopus tentacles dangling from hooks, and seal meat carved into sleek fillets. He asked around, lied about his past, found work on a trawler. Learned about winches and nets and cables from watching the other men. Kept his head down and didn’t flinch in a storm. Worked sixteen hours a day and slept with nine others in a cabin.
After a month they returned to shore for six days. He and a Ghanaian he had befriended went to the bars, spent every night with a girl from a different province—Sheol, Zerbera, Milarepa, Gudsland. Emil did another month on a trawler. This time the storms were larger, thirty-foot waves hammering the ship and keeping the men below deck for days at a time.
On his return to land, he met a fifty-year-old shipbuilder in a bar. The man was being held up against a wall by a tattooed Serb. Emil, drunk and bored, kicked the Serb in the back of the knees and broke his nose with a billiards cue. His reward was a job.
The shipbuilder, a ratty white Namibian with most of his teeth missing, let Emil sleep in the warehouse and apprenticed him in the art of making boats. There he learned about lofting and framing, about stems, sterns and keels, planking, epoxy and caulk. His body learned the positions, how to move in the making of the thing, so that within six months he had surpassed the Namibian. Soon he began sleeping in a battered Bermuda-rigged ketch the Namibian couldn’t sell. The swaying of the water rocked him to sleep and he learned to read the fluttering of the sails, to comprehend the wind just by listening.
One day a client was in the warehouse and asked Emil where he was from.
“Favelada,” he said.
“In the north? Oh my God.”
“What?”
“It’s all over the news. They’re burning it up.”
“Who?”
“The soldiers. Where have you been? They’re sending in troops, killing everyone. You have family still there?”
Emil took the first train home. With his savings, he bought a ticket and had a seat for the first time in his life. He couldn’t get comfortable so at Hilketa Station he climbed into a stock car and sat on the floor with a gaggle of chickens.
When he arrived, he saw plumes of smoke peeling into the sky. Chaos. Buildings flattened. He walked to the House of Flowers. It was still standing. The neighbor, a woman of sixty, intercepted him.
“Emil! You returned. I’m sorry.”
“What? What happened?”
“Your parents.”
“What happened?”
“No one told you? The soldiers came and they … that was it … they … we … we removed the bodies yesterday. I’m sorry.”
Emil stood still a moment.
“What are you saying?”
“The soldiers killed your parents. I thought you’d know. They came yesterday. They killed so many.”
“Where’s Nacho?”
“We don’t know. The house is empty.”
Emil burst in. The door was still ajar. He clambered over upturned furniture, papers, books. Went straight to the laundry basket in the corner of the room. Pulled off the lid. Nacho was curled inside, trembling. Emil picked him up, held him.
“You’re safe now.”
Emil took Nacho to a disused barn on the outskirts of Oameni Morti and there they camped out. Back in Favelada, the bodies were buried next to the trash, stones marking their names. There was no more land left. After the purge, so many were dead that corpses had littered the earth, blood tainted the river. Among the gravediggers was the Chinaman. He could dig a grave at twice the speed of the others and he worked without pause for twenty hours. One day, while he was digging, a shout went up. The soldiers had returned and were firing indiscriminately. The Chinaman threw down his shovel, the hole unfinished, and ran. Huge target though he was, the soldiers missed, and he took refuge with Emil and Nacho in the barn. Emil looked after them, scavenging food at night and warding off the wild dogs with a wave of a sharpened stick.
The grave the Chinaman had been digging soon filled up with rainwater and when the rainwater subsided, it became yet another trash pit in the heart of the city.
A few days after Emil, Nacho and the Chinaman had escaped to the barn, three of Samuel’s students snuck out at dusk and threw plastic roses on the graves of their old teacher and his wife. No funeral took place. Almost everyone who had known them was dead.
CHAPTER 8
Emil and Maria—Boat cleaning—Food run—Hailstones—Blue skies—Miracles under the water—Crocodiles—Aftermath of the flood—Stone heads—Cincocabezas—Party—A narrow escape
EMIL FINALLY SUCCUMBS TO MARIA AND TAKES HER TO HIS BOAT, WHERE THEY LIE TOGETHER listening to the rain drumming on the plastic roof. She climbs on top of him and they make love all day and night, pausing only to eat their meager rations side by side—bowls of rice, steaming potatoes, breadcrumbs.
Accustomed again to the rocking of the boat, its lapping on the floodwaters and the gentle bumps against the side of the tower, Emil abandons the building and takes to sleeping in the boat under the bearskin cover.
“I have a bed upstairs,” says Maria. “Sheets! The floor doesn’t move! Why are we sleeping here?”
“I can’t sleep if the floor doesn’t move.”
“Course you can! Stronzo! You’re just stubborn as a donkey.”
“Ah, baby. I like the boat. It sways when we make love.”
“Yeah and the rain gets in, and the water stinks. And look at my clothes. And are you sure no one can see through this plastic thing?”
“The roof? Oh, I’m sure. Watch out for that bucket behind you. Whoah.”
But the tower’s inhabitants soon turn against its new favorite son. They wonder why no more food is coming. Why the boat lies rocking aga
inst the wall while its navigator copulates with the local hairdresser, sleeps all day, fiddles with his engine while the people starve. The twins go down to talk to him, ask to borrow the boat to go in search of more food, but he refuses, saying the boat isn’t ready. The soothsayer says he’s a fake and Raincoat rails against his indolence. The priest makes barely veiled references to saviors in boats bringing loaves and fishes, while the congregation groans in hunger and assent.
Eventually Nacho sends Hans down to the boat with a message for Emil: ‘Come and see your little brother. He’ll be waiting in his room.’ Where else?
Emil has been digging away with a knife at a canker of mold between the boards of the boat. He wears a dirty white shirt and a bandanna, jeans rolled to the knees. His beard is now full and black as a pirate’s. He climbs onto the tower barefooted and knocks on Nacho’s door.
“No need to knock, brother. Haven’t seen you in days.”
“Maria just wants to make love all day. I can’t get anything done. I need to clean the boat.”
“That’s what I wanted to talk to you about.”
“Maria or the boat?”
“The boat. Can you go out again? Look for food?”
“I don’t know where else to look. I combed the area last time. I brought everything I could. That was weeks ago. Now there’ll be nothing left or whatever’s left will be moldy.”
“Emil, I have no right to ask this of you, but the people here need hope, something to latch onto. That’s how they keep going. There are families here who are starving. They’re ready to tear each other apart. If you go, at least they’ll have something to wait for. At least until the damned rain stops.”
“You want to send me out on a wild goose chase. So the damnificados can have some pipe dream that I’ll bring them a meal.”
“If you can’t do it, then let the twins borrow the boat.”
“No. The boat wasn’t built for them. They don’t fit in it.”
Damnificados Page 6
