Emil is covered in sweat. He clambers back into position on the bed, gets ready to fire.
“You broke your shoulder?” says Nacho.
“I have two of them.”
He fires again, rubs his shoulder, turns to Nacho.
“Goddamn it. We have to shoot back. What are the others doing?”
They look around the room. Everyone is cowering on the floor.
The voice of Torres from the plaza: “Nachiiiiiiiiiiito! Come on out and I’ll spare you all!”
Then voices from the tower.
“Go, Nacho!”
“Tell him we surrender!”
“We give up!”
What happens next, thinks Nacho an hour later, is a scene that will go down in history. Of all the blood-soaked episodes, the litany of destruction here on the plains of Favelada that have seen dragons, limb-choppers, warriors dredged up from air and fire, none could possibly be stranger. No man alive could have predicted it and no man alive will ever understand it, and whatever gods walk this Earth, they too are struck dumb by what happens. And after it happens, Nacho says to his brother, “They will sing of this for a thousand years.” Neither the miracle-makers of Hajja Xejn nor the bruja of Estrellas Negras have ever seen or heard of such a thing. Even the shamans who walk the ice fields of Zaledenom Jezeru are stunned into silence when they learn what takes place here on this warm Favelada night.
And what happens is this:
On the sixtieth floor, the lookout peers down, but the thing that catches his eye is not the soldiers reloading. Instead, with the sun dipping low and the sky a saffron orange, he sees a pack of animals hurtling toward the tower. At first he cannot make them out, cannot identify the shapes haring in the semidark through broken streets and stalled traffic.
And as Nacho unlocks the door to the entrance and prepares himself to die in a hail of bullets or beg a deal from Torres, he too catches a glimpse of the blur of movement heading from the city center.
From behind the soldiers the animals approach at full speed. Torres’s eyes and the eyes of his men are on the door opening slowly in front of them and so they see their attackers too late and by the time they turn around the wolves are upon them, led by a massive two-headed beast, leaping into their faces and gnashing at their arms. The pack has grown. They are eighty strong, rippling and sleek like tigers, and they rip into the soldiers, tearing at their limbs, mangling and mauling sinew and bone. The drivers of the military trucks see what is happening and most in an instant turn yellow, igniting their engines and accelerating away into the gloom, chased by their own soldiers, who have abandoned their weapons.
Torres, standing to the side, looks on, transfixed by the massacre, mouth open in a gape of incomprehension. He does not even try to flee. The call to prayer having finished, there are now just the sounds of gnashing and the screams of the soldiers.
From the door, Nacho watches. Like Torres, he stands dumb, his face a mask of white like a figure in a Greek tragedy.
On the fifth floor, Emil says, “Look.”
Harry and his brothers and Raincoat remain prone on the floor.
“Look!” Emil shouts it this time, barely believing his eyes.
Harry and the others get to their feet and peer out the window.
On the higher floors, men and women stand and stare in disbelief at the rout below them. At first they cannot read the scene. This is nothing like the wars of legend or on the chattering box. They shield the eyes of their children and no one cheers.
Torres eventually comes to his senses, fully understands what is happening to his men, and begins to back away. The two-headed wolf turns toward him, its mouths covered in blood. At this sight, Torres runs. He runs through Ubijanje Street, and Carneficina Avenue, sprints under a bridge at Mortus Creek, wades across the garbage-clogged river at Basura, never looking back, bounds up Lixo Hill, runs into Fellahin, finds a church, bangs on the door until a priest lets him in, slams the door shut, bolts it, runs up the aisle to a statue of Jesus, kneels down, panting and trembling, and begins to pray.
He repents all of his sins and will now fly to the bosom of the Lord. He tells the Lord he will gladly sit on a hill in the wilderness for the rest of his life, cross-legged, in meditation, eat nothing but leaves and bugs, crave no worldly things IF THE LORD WILL KEEP THE GODDAMNED—oops, sorry, Lord—WOLVES AWAY FROM HIM.
He vows never to go near the tower again, never to sin again. He will mingle with the poor and wretched of the Earth, feel their sorrows, devote his life to good deeds. And he goes on praying alone, his military garb dripping in sweat mingled with the mudwater from his dash across the river, the blood of the soldiers staining his boots.
Back on the battlefield, at some invisible signal the wolves cease their attack. Only the two-headed beast pauses and turns to face Nacho, who stands at the entranceway, the spot where the wolf stood when the damnificados took the tower. The beast stares. Nacho looks back. Two guardians. Suddenly the animal lets out an unworldly howl from its two mouths and the wolfpack turns and hurtles through the city center and into the outskirts and all the way to the forest from where it came.
Slowly the inhabitants of the tower come down until there are hundreds of them at the entrance and on the land where the massacre occurred. The last rays of sun wash the plaza in sepulchral light. The damnificados are dazed, unsure of whether to cheer or weep.
Nacho organizes the cleanup, the gathering of the weapons left on the killing field. As a hose is brought out, the twins arrive in their father’s truck and get out of the cab and stretch. Nacho is stood in front of them.
“Hi!” shouts Hans. “We were delayed, but we dropped off the horse. Hey, did something happen here today?”
CHAPTER 13
Pawns—The interpreter—Zerbera and the foretelling—A negress called Lucille—The shebeen disappears and Lucille with it
NACHO PONDERING IN HIS ROOM. THE LAST REMNANTS OF THE FOOD BROUGHT BY EMILARE scattered about the place—coffee beans staining the stone floor, grains of rice, a tiny pile of sugar morphing into an ant colony behind the door. We’re like the first men, holed up in caves, he thinks. Pawns in a game. We can’t explain anything: where our thoughts come from, how we became what we are, the origins of the beasts and the plants and the mountains that surround us. We know nothing. We’re helpless as newborns.
The Little Cripple, twice orphaned, lame in one leg and one arm, with a head of hair like an electric shock, and nothing but his wits to lean on, sits against a box of books, exhausted from the day’s exertions, and keeps pondering.
He remembers a statesman telling him, in an off-guard, off-the-record moment, “Your enemies are like an onion. One layer peels off only to reveal another thicker, stronger layer beneath. Your enemies grow from the inside. Don’t ever think you are safe.”
He was at a conference in Gao Deng years before, interpreting for this same statesman. In the evening they would go their separate ways, Nacho to a room in a hotel, the statesman to some informal gathering or party. But one evening the statesman called Nacho late at night and told him to go to the bar of the hotel. He found the statesman drunk and in need of company, an ear for his ramblings. So Nacho listened, for once not needing to translate the man’s views.
It was then the statesman had told him about enemies and onions. Cursing his luck, almost spitting out the names of his rivals, the man once thumped the table, and the bourbon glass jumped, and the barman stared. But Nacho simply nodded and listened.
He had always been a listener. From his schooldays spent pretending to be a halfwit, he had cultivated the art of sitting still, not reacting, simply taking in with all his senses what was occurring around him. As others chattered and prattled, he sat in silence, occasionally nodding, deliberately fighting the urge to interrupt, to talk, to disagree, to become a participant in the game.
Interpreting suited him. The interpreter, he thought, gave nothing of himself, simply transposed the message into a different code. It didn’t
matter to him whether the speaker was arguing over the price of beans or advocating genocide; Nacho was just a conduit, a mindless machine, invisible, neutral, colorless as water.
His grasp of languages, of idiom and nuance, was treasured by the statesmen and politicos. But more treasured was his ability to stay in the background, to be invisible. He was tiny, and although his muletas and unruly hair meant people saw him, he retained a quality of irrelevance, as if one so strange-looking could never move mountains in their world. The other reason they liked him was because they sensed he never meddled with their words. He gave straight translations. He appeared free from ideology and belief and even character, and this they loved.
For years, he worked as much as he wanted, traveling to distant lands and gatherings of politicos, men and women of wealth and power. When he wasn’t traveling, they sent him speeches and documents to translate, and he did so with a cold, dispassionate eye.
One day he found himself in Zerbera, a city ringed by endless hills. Sleepless as ever, he went for a late-night stroll. Although he couldn’t walk well, he had his father’s love of wandering, and on his crutches he could go a mile without strain, sometimes two if the elements and the street paving were in his favor. On this night, the moon was covered by clouds and the city had no streetlamps so he walked in near darkness. He heard the sounds of human revelry and found these sounds guiding his feet in their direction. He came upon a building with no sign or windows, but a door that was ajar, revealing a rectangle of light. He pushed it open and hobbled in on his crutches.
A shebeen, a drinking den. Five tables. Thirty or forty people crowded in, talking, laughing. On the walls were posters of old singers, Fauvist paintings on cork boards, and the skins of flayed cobras and crocs hanging by the nose. West African music was playing over a scratchy sound system, and in one corner a group of men squatting on the floor were engaged in a beetle race. They placed their bugs, fat as Egyptian dates, on the starting line and willed them to the finish, slapping down coins and notes, cheering and shouting.
On one table a woman was reading palms. She was dark-skinned, almost blue-black, and her hair was tied in a top-knot. She wore a black kaftan and strings of beads around her neck and huge hooped earrings of silver, and she looked like a lost princess transplanted to this liquor dive that smelled of whisky and cigars. She was surrounded by men and women listening and laughing as she foretold their fates.
When Nacho entered, she beckoned him over and told the others in Yoruba to make space and give him a chair. This they did, smiling and patting him on the back like a newfound friend. He was surrounded by black Africans speaking Yoruba, Swahili, Amharic, and Afrikaans. A hulking man with scars on his cheeks put a bottle of beer in front of Nacho and disappeared. The lost princess tried him out in a few languages and settled on a mix of French and English, asking him his name and where he was from. Then she took his hand, palm up, and spread his fingers on the table.
The woman peered at his hand for forty, maybe fifty seconds. All around them the others waited and waited until their patience began to collapse.
“Lucille, ni nini kusema?” one shouted in Swahili.
“Est-il un roi ou un pauvre? A king or a pauper?”
“Wat sê dit?” another said in Afrikaans.
Lucille, for that was her name, looked up slowly. Her eyes met Nacho’s eyes and broke into a smile, almost flirtatious.
“A special man,” she said, then repeated it in four languages. “An unusual man,” she said. “You are as rare as a falcon in a glass.”
“Come on!” they shouted. “Uliona nini? What did you see?”
“Qui est-il?”
She looked around at them. “Nacho will be a leader of men and women. He works with words now but soon he’ll deal in action. A man of action.”
She repeated this last phrase in four languages and some of her friends laughed.
“He’s lame! Hawezi kutembea!” one shouted.
“You’re wrong,” said Lucille. “He’s more powerful than the rest of you put together.”
“Que dites-vous, Lucille? Pouvez-vous traduire? Translate!”
And she said it again in four languages.
“I’m saying he will rise up and defeat armies. He will gather his own army and command men and women and lead them from the streets to a looming tower where he will trick Cerberus into letting him in.”
“Qui est Cerberus?”
“Wat sê jy?” said another, in Afrikaans.
“Cerberus is a guard dog,” she says. “This man will be a hero to many and an enemy of dictators and oppressors. An unusual man. And yet he doesn’t know himself.”
“Tell us more!”
“He doesn’t know his roots. He doesn’t know his parents. He lives in ignorance of himself and his true nature. So I will tell him.”
And she did. She told him of the people he would lead and of the tower and of Cerberus and he listened, as always, and let her release his hand, and smiled because he was in the company of strangers. She began to tell him about his parents when suddenly a fight broke out in the corner of the room. Two men began swinging great wide-arced haymakers, and a bottle flew through the air missing its target and smashing against the wall sending a shower of bubbly beer over the fighters. A table was overturned and somehow the scrap escalated into a full-scale brawl with men and women leaping onto tables and hurling chairs. Nacho ducked down and put his head in his hands. He scrambled out the door on his muletas into the cool of the night and hobbled around a corner, as the shebeen echoed with the sounds of glass breaking and lurid shouts and meaty punches thwacking skin. Lucille was nowhere to be seen.
On his way to the hotel he pondered what the woman had said. His father, Samuel, had been a good man, always serving others. That’s why they’d killed him. But Nacho felt no calling to lead men and women. As he finally lay down on the floor in his hotel room, the bed having proved way too soft for a night’s sleep, he dismissed it all. Lucille was a gifted linguist, too, but as he knew well, that didn’t mean she could tell the future. She was a princess all right, but of what? A rusty shebeen where people got drunk and cracked heads for fun. As he drifted off to sleep her face began to fade—her striking eyes, her skin as dark as the night-ocean—until in the morning it was gone, as distant as a dream. But he never forgot her words.
The following evening, he returned to the shebeen, retracing his steps by remembering the cracks in the paving and the exact sounds made by his muletas as he walked—how loudly they echoed, how muffled the tapping. Once again he found the door ajar. He pushed at it only to find the room empty. There was no bar. No tables. No chairs. No posters on the walls. No music. The place had been stripped, gutted, sent back to some kind of original state of grace. He stood at the door and called out.
“Hello? Lucille?”
When there was no answer, he went outside to check that he hadn’t made a mistake. Was this the wrong building? But he was sure it was the same. He looked again at the interior, taking in the spaces and reconstructing the layout of the room in his mind—where he had sat, where the crocodile skin had hung, where the fight had broken out—and left.
He made his way back to the hotel, catching a ride with a rickshaw driver who charged him half price, and as he paid up, he thought, ‘Zerbera—my lucky place.’
CHAPTER 14
Party at the stone heads—Harry takes credit—Wolf food, wolf songs, wolf people—Invincibility—Nacho returns to work—The quiet life—The brothers walk to Blutig—A rumor of Torres
AT THE GATES OF THE CITY, THE DAMNIFICADOS CELEBRATE THEIR VICTORY. IN THE SHADOWS OF the five stone heads, impromptu performances take place by the light of a bonfire constructed from trash. A fakir ascends a vertical rope suspended on nothing. The twins begin a breakdance routine while dozens surround them, clapping in unison. A man in a wolf mask balances on a monocycle while juggling three burning torches.
Groups of damnificados sit around in circles—Harry the baker and
his brothers, Raincoat, Dewald the psychologist, and Maria’s salon girls. They pass bottles of hooch and homemade wine from hand to hand, taking great gulps as the firelight flickers on their faces.
“Them dogs!” says Harry.
“Wolves!” says one of his brothers.
“Them dogs! Finished off them poor bastards, they did. Mind you, we’d have killed them soldiers anyway. Mark my words. We was well on top.”
“Course we would.”
“Would’ve licked ’em,” says Harry. “You don’t mess with me and my brothers!”
“Not if you want to keep your balls in one piece!”
“I shot two of ’em!” says one of the brothers.
“Me too,” says Raincoat. “I haven’t lost it. Used to be a sniper, me. Bang bang! Two drop dead. Right between the eyes.”
“The doggies just polished ’em off,” says Harry. “They was retreatin’ already. And did you see ’em runnin’ like babies?”
“We should get a medal for this,” says another brother.
“It were a massacre is what it were,” says Harry. “They come here all rough and ready. Big guns ’n’ all, but when it comes to the fightin’ they’re off! I’ve always said, haven’t I always said, it ain’t the dog in the fight, it’s the fight in the dog. Haven’t I always said that, lads?”
“You’ve always said it, Harry.”
“All it takes is a bit of ticker. That’s how you sort the men from the boys.”
He looks into the distance, massaging the memory of his heroism. A cry goes up as a belly dancer is pulled up to the top of the middle stone head, where she shakes and whirls to the sound of drummers below.
Emil and Maria walk arm in arm among the damnificados, Emil’s free arm in a sling.
“Look at them!” hisses Maria. “Claiming it’s their victory. Nacho told me they spent the battle hiding under the bed!”
“Having fun?” asks Emil.
“That’s men for you. Always ready to take the credit.”
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