Slowly Nacho walks around the giant heads. The damnificados call out to him in greeting, offer him whisky and cigarettes. He declines. The acrid smell of smoke drifting on the night air. The music from a mile away has ended, and now the only sounds are the distant rumblings of faraway buses and the buzz of insects.
A commotion. The people sitting around their fires stop and stare. Seventy or eighty damnificados from the street party are heading toward the gates of the city. Again Nacho is reminded of his own little army that took the tower, but there’s something different about the revelers. Shouts go up. They are carrying hammers and spray cans. They are high on adrenaline. At the front is a black man in his thirties, six and a half feet tall, hair shaven to the skull. He is wearing a necklace of snake’s teeth and a wild look in his eye. Nacho has seen him before, knows him as a graffiti artist.
“They’re coming to destroy these heads. They’ll either smash them or spray them,” Nacho says to the priest. “This is the after-party.”
But as the mob comes closer, something in their demeanor changes. The black man’s expression turns quizzical. They slow down. The spray cans are lowered. Like Nacho, the mob is awed. Some of them crouch. Others sit. Yet others make a slow circle around the heads, like visitors to an art gallery. They are wordless, and the violence, the pent-up smashing and hammering that was in their hearts just moments before, is gone. What do they see? Religious symbols? Things that were crafted for them? Gifts? An act of retaliation for all the oppression they and their ancestors have faced, every invasion, every massacre, pogrom, bloodbath, assassination? Their villages have been ransacked, their homes burned down, and then floods come to drown out their cries. So what is this at the gates of the city? Five giant heads, watching out for them, warning the government that the people will prevail. In the unknowable mystery of the heads, the damnificados see defiance.
The black man says, “Come on. Let’s go find a drink.” And he leads his gang away, spray cans pocketed, hammers slipped into belts.
Nacho stays in shadow, the Chinaman and the priest beside him.
“What would we have done?” asks Don Felipe. “They were going to destroy everything here.”
“I don’t know,” says Nacho. “But some day we may need those men. And their weapons.”
CHAPTER 9
Red dress—The passion of Maria—The Second Trash War and the Tale of Naboo Lalloo—Two pigs—Conversation with Don Felipe—Untouchables—Warriors
SLOWLY LIFE RETURNS TO NORMAL IN THE TOWER. THE DAMNIFICADOS FIND PROVISIONS AT the outer reaches of the city, close to the farmlands. Many are employed cleaning up the city, and head off every morning on the yellow buses that hiss black fumes and roar through red lights, piped salsa blasting all day. Nacho uses his contacts to get running water back, and three days later, electricity. The bakery reopens. Maria’s salon, too, and her old clients return.
As for Maria herself, she takes on the role of scorned lover, but sheds no tears. Every day she dresses majestically. Not a morning passes when she doesn’t expect to see Emil’s handsome head at her door, his hair drenched, his hands bearing coffee or rice or a pocketful of gold, and she needs to be ready to seduce him once again. She commissions a seamstress to make her a red dress, as hot as embers, and wears it like a second skin. She becomes magnificent, a teenager again, her face glowing from oils and ointments made of Palestinian beeswax, Egyptian kelp, arnica and althaea, capsicum and myrrh. She dyes her hair jet black and lets it hang below her shoulders and orders fresh flowers daily to put behind her ear—a zinnia, a rose, a lotus, an iris.
In her private room she puts up wall hangings from the holy city of Kairouan, keeps vanilla-scented candles burning and lavender water in jars. She floats petals from her flowers over the bedspread every evening and sleeps in their aroma, dreaming of Emil. Before sunset she stares out of her window on the sixth floor, expecting to see him shirtless riding toward her on a painted elephant. For she remembers him as heroic and exotic and barely of this befouled Earth.
As the sun gives way to darkness, she closes her shutters and reclines on a chaise longue rescued from a tip in Sanguinosa and feeds herself tiny scraps to maintain her figure. Then she goes to her mirror to check that her backside bulges to just the right proportion, to see that her breasts are full and round. She examines her thirty-five-year-old skin and vows never to smile again for she sees crows’ feet fanning from the corners of her eyes. She sees creases in her neck and says, “I will wear scarves from now on, whatever the weather” and goes hunting for chiffon and cotton, linen and silk.
“Where is he?” she says to Nacho. They are outside, at the foot of the tower. The sun beats down.
“I have no idea, Maria. I wish I could tell you.”
“It’s been two weeks. The rain has stopped. Why isn’t he here?”
“He left when it was still torrential. Remember? He was looking for food for us. He probably had to go far away because everything was under water here. Then who knows what happened? It’s dangerous out there. People are desperate. No food, no water. I don’t know.”
“What are you hiding from me?”
“He’s my brother, Maria. I’ve known him all my life. You knew him two weeks. There’s no one who wants to see him more than I do.”
“You’re wrong. And I will see him again, whatever you think of me. I’m not like all the others. I was never a drunk or an addict. I can read and write. My father spoke out against the corrupt politicos and he was killed for it and we were cast out. My mother died of grief soon after and I had to fend for myself, but I’m not a vagabond like these people.”
Nacho looks at her, says nothing. He has spent much of his life defending and protecting ‘these people.’ Maria goes on.
“I employ eight women in my salon. They are nothing without me. People visit from all over and spend their money. I put it back into the community, if that’s what you want to call it, this shithole of a tower. I make …”
“OK, enough!” says Nacho. “I know who you are. I see you every day. I don’t know where my brother is. If he returns, he returns. If he doesn’t, then we’ll find him.”
He hobbles away on his muletas, leaving Maria fuming and radiant in the sun, Cleopatra in a red dress. She walks to the shade of the tower, chiffon scarf fluttering in the breeze.
The Second Trash War was altogether more brutal than the first. It involved a massive catapult on wheels, pellets of trash recycled into bombs, and a sixty-foot dragon made of iron and asbestos that shot fireballs from its gut.
It was Naboo Lalloo, father of the very same Lalloo who could fix electrics with his silver hand and who knew everything about wires and springs and volts and hinges, who reinvented the art of war. On cold days the father would sit in his shed dreaming up new ways to massacre and maim. His wife would bring him plates of spiced kofta and falafel in that shed while he scribbled diagrams on yellow pages torn from a notebook. In his gallibaya of white linen, he would sit motionless until with a casual cock of the head he would begin sketching a plan. He took his inspiration from nature. It was nothing to him to watch a bee stinging his hand in order to learn how the penetration occurred, how the creature hovered and honed in, driving home the lancets and the stylus. He watched curiously as a mantis in the wilds of Fellahin ensnared a lizard, gripping it at the thorax in its spiked forelegs, and bit off the head.
But it was technology he loved. Naboo Lalloo read up on medieval catapults, nzappa zaps of wood and iron, cannons of all kinds, guns. He used the materials around him and conjured up ballistics with an added twist: a bomb might disseminate poison gas, a grenade could spray an acid shower, a bullet would explode. With the softest of smiles for his loving wife and his three children, his mind would roam the horrors of the past and invent the horrors of the future. But for him it was all an exercise, a mind game, for Naboo Lalloo lived in a dream world in which others did the doing and he did the imagining. He had never fired a weapon. Never seen a corpse. Never drawn bl
ood. In truth, he had never killed a living creature, nor even struck one. For a man ensconced in a land of endless trash, this was a rare thing. He relied on the flying cockroaches to kill the mosquitoes. For the cockroaches he relied on lizards. For the lizards he relied on rats. For the rats he gathered a troupe of sharp-toothed Bengal cats. “Let nature do its work,” he said to his girls and to little Lalloo, already a dreamer, too, at five.
The leaders of the Trash-bringers soon learned of his skills: the simple tradesman, a maker of household tools, who could also devise weapons. They visited his house. His wife pointed to the shed and they trooped in and shook his hand and looked over his designs. The military leader, a fat paisano called Torres, marched in, grinning, and slapped Naboo Lalloo in the face.
“This is so you’ll always remember whose side you’re on.”
He slapped him again.
“And this is in case you’d forgotten already. We’ll take these now.”
And he picked up Naboo Lalloo’s beloved designs, folded them into quarters and put them in his breast pocket below the quintet of shiny medals he had awarded himself six months earlier.
Within two weeks Naboo Lalloo’s designs were built. And just days later, his fifty-foot catapult came rolling down the hillside toward the wastelands of Favelada, with its missiles, pellets of packed trash, cooked and hardened as rock. His spinning leg-chopper was hitched up to an armored truck, and his exploding spears were poised on the back of a wagon, lined up on a diagonal like the bristles of a hedgehog.
But the key weapon was the dragon.
They’d trussed up a munitions truck. For the dragon’s body, a painted canopy was attached to an iron exoskeleton. They hired a sculptor to carve a dragon’s head, and cast it in iron and asbestos. They hung green rubber legs in front of the wheels. Then they positioned a flamethrower on a hinge so that the flames would shoot from the dragon’s mouth, operated by a pair of soldiers sweltering in the dragon’s ribcage.
It was only later, much later, when Naboo Lalloo was taken to the fields that he saw the carnage his inventions had wrought. Scores of bodies lay strewn on the wastelands as pockets of smoke drifted up from the embers. The wounded, too, sprawled out across the landscape, groaning and retching, their limbs akimbo like dolls left in the rain. The blood mingled with the garbage, dark globules of spray-spatter from the hand-to-hand hackings, and coated the mounds of molding cardboard and paper. His catapult had softened them up, blasting down the barricades where the wretched army of damnificados had taken refuge. The spinning leg-chopper had then mown down the first line of resistance, shredding a phalanx of retreating soldiers.
An Alsatian dog, handsome as a lion, had had its foreleg severed but the creature had managed to scramble into a ditch. There it was rescued by a small girl, who put it in a wheelbarrow, ran home bumping on the uneven ground, and using all the courage she could muster, saved the animal with a linen tourniquet.
When Naboo Lalloo’s exploding spears then decimated the shelters where the damnificados lived, the girl ran, pushing the dog in the wheelbarrow. Her mother shouted at her to leave it behind, but she wouldn’t. They made it to the trees and vanished into the woods.
At night, the final resisters had been nursing the wounded and gathering themselves for another day when the dragon reared out of the darkness, breathing fire. It climbed over the trash mounds, swaying like a drunk, righted itself, and let out another burst of flame that massed yellow in the night sky. The heat could be felt from three hundred yards away. The remaining damnificados turned and ran, for they knew finally that—home or no home—this place was cursed.
In the aftermath of the battle, Torres—khaki-clad and sweating in the heat—snarled at Naboo Lalloo, “See what we did with your toys?” And Naboo Lalloo returned to his shed and drank himself to oblivion. His wife took over the running of the house and ushered the children around, avoiding their father where possible. The man became morose, grew old before his time. Whisperings were heard all over Favelada: “What has happened to Naboo Lalloo?”
He built a waist-high pyre and burned what remained of the designs in his shed. Then he burned down the shed. A small crowd came out to witness the scene. Naboo Lalloo, tradesman turned madman, hair thinning and gray, eyes encircled by black rings, moved about his yard, hurling paraffin from a can and talking to himself in Arabic and Persian. As the flame took, with a whoosh!, gangs of street urchins came running, hands gripping the chain-link fence that enclosed Naboo Lalloo’s property. His wife and the children had long since fled to Balaal to stay with an uncle, but word reached them of the spectacle.
When months later they returned, they found Naboo Lalloo sitting alone in a chair in the middle of the bare living room, reading by candlelight a book about pig farming. The ceiling was hung with a canopy of cobwebs and the shutters were jammed closed so that even in daytime it was dark. Naboo Lalloo was dressed in a filthy gallibaya and had not eaten for days. He turned as he heard the door open, and saw his children but did not recognize them, or his wife. So he carried on reading while they walked toward him through the layer of dust and mouse droppings that coated the floor. In the corner of the room lay a dozen empty whisky bottles with the labels still on, and one standing, half-full.
The mother guided the children out of the room and told them to wait. She went back in and called his name. Nothing registered. She walked around to face him. He had put the book down onto his lap, but his eyes were full of nothingness. Truth be told, all he could see were the bodies of the dead that littered the trashlands of Favelada.
The monolith gleams in the sunlight. Its eastern side is in deepest shadow, a blackness that always seems deeper when the sun is shining on its western face. The place is abuzz with activity. On the ground floor, the men and women are still removing debris left by the flood. Nervously they prod at pieces of wood, half expecting a crocodile to slide out from underneath and muscle its way across the stone floor.
Built on a base of compacted trash, long ago concreted and planted over, the tower is never far from an unholy stench. The older damnificados remember the days when the wind was up and the smell would travel as far as Blutig and Oameni Morti. Now, the dregs of the flood carry their own stench. During the last days of the cataclysm the sanitation had failed; rotten food and excrement had washed up in the deluge; dead bodies were floating down the streets.
Those who had lived there for years said you got used to the smell. But the newcomers—even those from other shantytowns with no refuse service—cover their faces, burn candles, gasp and splutter. They wear masks of cotton and gauze and scurry away from the monolith to their places of work. At Nacho’s suggestion, the twins bring two live pigs on the bed of their father’s truck. These they borrowed from a Nista Zivote farmer drunk and dozing in his slippers. The beasts spend a day nosing around the atrium and the entrance, rootling in the muck and gobbling up refuse. But it soon becomes clear that their shit smells as bad as the trash they are eating and that pigs are not, after all, a first-class cleaning device made by nature. Nacho tells the twins to return the pigs. They drive off in a gust of fumes. They dump the pigs and on their way out, the farmer’s wife stands in the middle of the road and unleashes a volley of buckshot at the departing truck. Hans hits the floor and Dieter accelerates as the figure in the rear mirror, wild-haired and stumpy as a barrel, vanishes out of sight, shotgun jumping at her shoulder.
The priest’s services throughout the flood attracted the largest congregations since he arrived. But when the flood ends, the numbers dwindle.
“These are a godless people,” he says to Nacho, perched on a crate in the cripple’s room. “They only attended because they were trapped and needed salvation. As soon as the rain stops, they disappear. Until the next crisis. Now they’re all at the city gates worshipping idols of stone.”
“Isn’t it always this way?” says Nacho. “Some are devout. Others come and go.”
“No, it isn’t. When I was in Hajja Xejn, I saw the sa
me faces every week for two years. They gave alms. They lived righteous lives. No matter what happened in the outside world, they came every Sunday and prayed to God. The people here don’t care about anything except their next meal.”
“Yes. They need to feed their children.”
“What about their souls?”
“I don’t know, father. But I can tell you this much. At the schools the attendance grows week on week. We now have nearly as many literates as illiterates among the adults. They can read signs on the streets. They get better jobs because they can read instructions. It took time, but it’s working.”
“Reading and writing are important. I have to read the Bible to them like children. But you know where literacy leads.”
“What do you mean?”
“They’ll read books. They’ll read the constitution. They’ll read their rights. They’ll learn they have been exploited throughout history. And then there’ll be only one end.” The priest lowered his head, but didn’t take his eyes off Nacho.
“Which is?”
“Revolution. More bloodshed. More slaughtering. That’s if the government doesn’t come for us first. And they will. They’ll come to shut us down. You, your schools, the tower. They know we’re here.”
Nacho strikes a match to light a candle. The sun has dipped below the blurred horizon.
“Yes. My brother said the same thing. They’ll come for us.”
“And then what?” says the priest.
“We begin again.”
“Find another tower?”
“Find another tower. Or a piece of land. Build a commune.”
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