“Enjoying the party?”
“No. Let’s go home and make love,” says Maria.
“We just finished making love!”
“Let’s do it again.”
“My shoulder’s killing me. And we’ve only been here two minutes. I want to celebrate a little. Where’s Nacho?”
“Nacho this, Nacho that. What about me?”
“He’s my little brother.”
They walk closer to the fire and feel its crackling heat in their faces. The woman with a dog in a wheelbarrow, now sitting in front of the fire, reaches up and grabs Emil’s hand.
“Thank you for bringing food again,” she says. “You saved my dog.”
“You’re welcome,” says Emil, with a grin. Somebody noticed. Somebody remembered.
They walk a little further, overtaking Nacho on his muletas, and stop to watch as a woman invents a pagan wolf-dance. She gets onto all fours, wiggles her behind and opens her jaws wide; turns to growling; then leaps. Her friend joins her and they begin a dance of wolf and soldier, call and response.
Not twenty feet away, a man is carving a plank of cedar wood into a two-headed wolf. He concentrates furiously, chiseling away with a bowie knife, the plank laid out on his lap.
At the foot of one of the stone heads, a musician is devising a song—The Song of the Wolves—to commemorate the battle. He carries an ancient lute.
At a drinks stall close by, the owner invents The Wolf—a shot of whisky and soda with sugar and a twist of lime. He then invents The Two-Headed Wolf, which is the same thing except with two shots of whisky.
The owner of a food stall devises the Wolf Burger, a slab of barely cooked steak wedged between two slices of flax seed bread with pickles and dill.
And the people too are become wolfish. Only Nacho sees it. He sees their snouts grow and sharpen to the apex of the wet black nose; their mouths turn muzzle-like and their jaws grow low and powerful. He sees under their collars thick manes dappled with gray. Women laugh and Nacho sees their canines protruding like nuggets of white zinc. As the night unfolds, he sees some of the damnificados slink off in hungry packs. Others stay to howl at the moon. All have turned into wolves, and he wonders if he himself has become one. He looks at his hands, sees they are unchanged, but knows that humans are the last things on Earth to recognize what they have become.
Following the floods and the attack by Torres, the inhabitants—returned from their state of wolf-hood—begin to see themselves as the rightful owners of the tower. Once they have overcome the fear that the wolves will come back and attack them, they believe peace and prosperity is theirs, for the first time in their lives.
Many of the adults can now read, and many more work in regular jobs. Some of them begin to state their address with pride. They are the lucky few who live in the tower which was once thought cursed but now seems blessed. They have functioning schools, water and electricity, a famous beauty salon and a bakery where the image of Jesus appeared on a loaf of bread. “What other towers in this city have been visited by Jesus?” they ask. “We are protected by wolves and by a great leader, Nacho, el pequeño lisiado.” “An army came to destroy us and left in pieces.”
Occasional fights still break out, but fewer and fewer, and the citizens begin to police themselves.
Nacho gets more translating work, hiding himself in his room for hours on end. The work comes as a balm to him, a chance to interact with the outside world without lives being at stake. In the afternoons he props himself up on his muletas and walks the perimeter of the tower, admiring the little plots of land the women are reclaiming, and asking what they are growing.
“Tomatoes, potatoes, mint. Parsley and green beans.”
He walks across the plaza and over the road and sees the little businesses springing up in the flood’s aftermath: small bode-gas reopening under different names, food stalls with grills where the proprietor will roast you a chicken or a cob of corn while you talk about the weather or the new mall in Fellahin or the factory opening in Oameni Morti. They seldom make him pay for anything, and even when he insists, they give him discounts.
Some evenings he plays chess with Don Felipe, running rings around the priest, picking off the old man’s pieces one by one, administering slow deaths.
Five floors up from Nacho’s quiet life, Emil too is living a quiet life. For six weeks, he does nothing but sleep, eat, tend to his wounded shoulder, and make love to Maria. At first, she takes hourly breaks from the salon to visit him. Whatever he is doing—sitting at table, lying in a bath reclaimed from a tip in Sanguinosa, dozing in bed—she kisses him, hoists up her skirt, and sits on top of him until he is ready. She washes rapidly and is back tending to hair and nails within minutes, smiling at her clients, flashing her dark eyes.
In the seventh week, Emil visits his brother and they take a walk. The sun has already begun to drop so they aren’t assailed by the heat of the day and they find themselves retracing steps they took with Samuel many years ago, retelling his stories.
Moving in the opposite direction from the stone heads at the city gates, they come to streets they barely remember, and wonder if their memories are at fault or if everything has changed beyond recognition. Great skyscrapers loom where they remember low buildings of wood and tin. Next to a mosque where there used to be a grassy wasteland there now stands a bric-a-brac store. They peer into its windows and marvel at the random contents: Chinese dolls, Persian kites in the shape of an eagle, jars of olives, jeans.
Nacho feels strong and keeps walking, his muletas tapping on the sidewalks and where there are no sidewalks, on the baked mud and stone that make up the roads. Small parks appear, with acacia trees and birds flitting and rusty swings and slides for children. They reach the river and cross a wooden bridge where banyan plants are germinating on the underside. They pause to look down at the dry creek bed and notice a pair of crows springing from rock to rock. Beyond the bridge they come to an abandoned building site and see the watermarks from the flood way up high on a half-constructed wall.
Never in his life has Emil seen a street without wanting to walk down it. Never has he seen a bridge without feeling the need to cross it, a boat without wanting to sail it, a mountain without wanting to climb it. He says to Nacho:
“Brother, being out here reminds me.”
“Reminds you of what?”
“The old days. When I could come and go. I feel trapped in the tower, as if there’s some invisible chain holding me there.”
“It’s not so invisible. It’s gorgeous as a beauty queen and running the most successful salon in Favelada.”
“And I have to make some money. Maria likes having me at home. She says she earns enough to support us, but a man can’t live like that. At least I can’t.”
“Then get a job. You can’t stay at home all day. You never could.”
“But a city job? I want to sail the seas or go exploring.”
“Then you have to make a choice,” says Nacho.
“You don’t think Maria would want to come with me?”
“Why are you even asking me that? She’s the queen bee of the tower. Employs what? Ten people? Last time I saw, she had leather furnishings, Persian rugs on the floor.”
“You’ve been in her apartment?”
“I visited her once when you were gone. She was desperate to see you so I went and talked to her. She won’t leave for the life of a hobo. She wants a home, all those comforts. She told me herself, she wasn’t born a damnificado. She sure as hell doesn’t want to live like one. Or die like one.”
Suddenly they are on the edge of a slum. The smell hits them—that bitter tang of rotting fruit and human waste—before they even see the ramshackle housing. They turn a corner and come across the telltale signs: sewage running through the street, trash cans so overflowing you can no longer see the cans, houses built in no order to no pattern, climbing one on the other like rutting beasts, roofs overlapping, wiring tangled. They see people going about their evening
business—women emptying brightly colored buckets onto the ground, men lounging outside a shebeen, children kicking a ball.
“Where are we?” asks Nacho.
“Blutig. We must have walked for miles. Anyone you want to visit?”
“No. Let’s go home.”
They turn and start to walk when a man on a bicycle catches up with them. He is slender, sun-browned and unshaven, wearing stained clothes—all the badges of the damnificados. Nacho thinks the man must be in his sixties, but knows it’s impossible to say. The man hops off his bicycle and Nacho and Emil stop to greet him.
“El pequeño lisiado, no?”
“Si, soy yo,” says Nacho, and he shakes the man’s hand.
“Y quién es?”
“Eso es mi hermano, Emil.”
“Mucho gusto,” and the man shakes Emil’s hand.
“You are visiting us?” the man asks.
“No, we’re just walking,” says Nacho.
“We hear you make miracles. You tame the wolves and they fight Torres’s soldiers. Es verdad?”
“No, it’s not true.”
“You destroy his army and defeat him. Now he’s gone to the hills of Solitario. He … how you say? … does his penance.”
“I know nothing about that. Where did you say Torres is?”
“Solitario. Five days on horse from here. They say he walk there on his knees. He become a monk. Repent his sins. They say you change him. This is truly el milagro de los milagros. I thank you for your time.”
And with that, the man mounts his bicycle and does a wide, slow u-turn avoiding a yawning pothole in the road, and clink-clank-creaks his way to the center of Blutig. Nacho and Emil look at each other. Nacho says,
“Do you believe that?”
“Which part?”
“Torres repenting his sins, going off to be a monk.”
“I never met the man. But I’d say, with his family history, it’s unlikely. They’re the biggest bunch of corruptos the city has known. Killers, too.”
“I guess we’ll find out soon enough. Our enemies are like an onion. They grow from the inside. Don’t think you are ever safe.”
“What?”
“Something someone told me once.”
The sun has gone down so they make their way home in the dark, walking parallel streets to the ones they took on the way. By the time they get home, seen from above they have walked the shape of a long, sharp knife with the blade piercing the tower’s entrance.
CHAPTER 15
The Third Trash War—Prison break—Las Bestias de la Luz Perpetua—Settlement in Spazzatura—Shocked and awed—Rodrigo Hellibore meets his match—Konnichiwa—Truce
THE THIRD TRASH WAR WAS SAID TO BE THE WAR TO END ALL WARS. WHEN IT WAS DONE, the face of Favelada was changed; the trash pile was once again a mountain, inmates from an insane asylum mingled with escaped convicts to take over the running of the city, and a three-hundred-pound pig called Konnichiwa was installed as governor of one of Favelada’s provinces.
It all began in Oameni Morti. One drizzly Wednesday, two hundred prison inmates rioted. They hurled bombs made of cleaning products and gasoline at the guards, and set the prison on fire. While the authorities were trying to contain the riot, in another part of the building one hundred inmates bashed down a wall with tools smuggled from a building project, and escaped. By the time the guards realized the riot was a diversion, the countryside around Oameni Morti was littered with convicts tearing through the drenched cornfields.
They hid out in the woods. They survived the predations of wolves and bears by constantly keeping a flame burning, which is how they got the name given to them by the journalists: Las Bestias de la Luz Perpetua—the Beasts of the Perpetual Light. When the rainy season came, they went to the nearest settlement—Favelada—where they camped out in a bus station. They were criminals of the hardened variety: murderers, bandidos, shotgun specialists, heist gurus, and head-mashers of all kinds. In prison, they had been savage. Now, after months of hunting and gathering in the woods, they were feral.
Las Bestias eyed up a patch of wasteland called Spazzatura. There was a river nearby to provide water and a steady stream of boats to use for fishing and transportation. There was just one problem: the land was occupied already. The settlers, also escapees—from an insane asylum in far-off Mundanzas—had built a barrier of trash between themselves and the river, and constructed a settlement of timber and brick. They also built four towers, organized in the shape of a square. Into these towers, it was said, they sent miscreants to live alone for weeks on end.
One night Las Bestias raided Spazzatura. They carried knives, spears, clubs, and a few guns, but in truth they didn’t expect trouble. They had heard there were families there, little people living quietly by the river. They got the shock of their lives. Many of the ex-asylum dwellers were paranoid schizophrenics. They fully expected to be attacked at any moment, and when the raiders came, they were ready. The towers weren’t solitary confinement after all. They were lookout towers and places from which to shoot at invaders and fling grenades. As Las Bestias flooded in to Spazzatura they were met with a volley of gunfire that dropped ten men in five seconds.
To add to the ex-convicts’ confusion, there came a sound at eardrum-splitting volume of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony blasting out of loudspeakers from each tower, followed by a battery of fireworks that rent the sky like bombs and cracked like bullets. Las Bestias didn’t know whether it was a party or a war, and only the sight of their comrades bursting open and dying told them. The worst thing of all was that they couldn’t see their enemy. In their former lives as prisoners, they had seen their guards every day, given them nicknames, known every trick of speech and angle of gait. They knew who was coming down a blind alley by the sound of their shoes. In Spazzatura, it was as if an alien intelligence was working against them, something hidden and unknowable.
Las Bestias retreated, but vowed to return.
When they did, three nights later, they were doubly armed and ready for a battle. This time they decided to approach from the river. They stole a barge, tying the captain to the mast with a length of nichrome wire, and sailed downriver until they reached Spazzatura. They scaled the wall of trash on all fours, knives in their mouths and guns slung over their backs, but as soon as they reached the top, overlooking the cluster of buildings that formed Spazzatura, the opening notes of Tchaikovsky’s Fifth Symphony exploded over the loudspeakers and Las Bestias were met with a hail of arrows. They dived down but still eight men perished. They decided to fight back this time, and charged the towers. But as they did so, a dozen huge mirrors on springs suddenly jumped out of the trash so that Las Bestias saw themselves attacking, and in the dark became confused. They fired their weapons until the mirrors cracked, but then lost their sense of direction. Stranded, six more were cut down by arrows.
As they regained their equilibrium, three giant screens on pulleys suddenly bounced up out of the garbage, showing scenes from black-and-white films—a Hollywood caper, a Japanese epic, a Nigerian comedy. As Las Bestias paused to see what was happening, another volley of arrows reamed down on them like a rain shower and dropped another four men. On the biggest screen, a celluloid samurai braced himself for seppuku.
Who was orchestrating the Spazzatura forces? What higher power could devise such tactics? The answer, it turned out, was a pig. Along with a madman.
Although confused and disoriented, a group of Las Bestias managed to cut through the movie screens with their knives and shoot down the loudspeakers outside the towers, leaving an eerie silence. After regaining their senses, the invaders hunkered down in a disused brick outhouse from whose slit windows they shot at anything that moved. A small group then set about scaling the towers using crampons and lengths of rope. Once up the north tower they fired indiscriminately, killing the lookouts, and aimed a hail of bullets at the other towers. Meanwhile the men in the out-house discovered why it was disused. Four rattlesnakes that had been lurking in
the corners suddenly began to rattle and uncoil and sent the ex-cons haring to all parts. Exposed once again, another arrow shower picked off three of them.
And so it went on, with Las Bestias massacring the few people they could find while being ambushed by anonymous fire. One of the invaders, Rodrigo Hellibore, escaped from the out-house and found himself among the buildings. Following the arc of the arrows, guessing at their trajectory, he expected to see a line of archers. Instead, he saw a machine attached to a wooden floor. At the push of a button it automatically fired a batch of arrows and swiveled on a hinge to change direction. Hellibore knew this ingenious device could be the work of only one man. He saw a confusion of wires, like tangled spaghetti, controlling the device, and followed them until he came to the door of the largest building in Spazzatura. Made of brick and mortar, it had to be the center of operations. He shot away the lock with a handgun and kicked the door open. There in front of him was an old man, all skin and bone, in a patched-up gallibaya, a shock of white hair shooting in all directions: Naboo Lalloo, escaped inmate of Mundanzas Asylum for the Insane, a place he had called home for twenty years.
Naboo Lalloo showed no emotion. He simply sat, head cocked at an angle, eyeing the invader. The sight so astounded Hellibore that he forgot to kill the man and instead started a conversation.
“Chi sei?” he began. “Lalloo? Lalloo?”
Naboo Lalloo looked at him uncomprehendingly.
“Chi sei?” said Hellibore. “Quién es usted?”
Naboo Lalloo began chanting in Persian. Suddenly a pig trotted out of a side room and knocked Hellibore clean off his feet. This was Konnichiwa, Naboo Lalloo’s muse.
Hellibore’s gun skidded across the floor, and landed at Naboo Lalloo’s bare toes. He picked it up.
“You speak English?” asked Naboo Lalloo.
“Yes,” said Hellibore.
“Why you attack? We are few people. We don’t want fight.”
“OK. Can you put down the gun?”
“There is room here. Everyone can live in peace.”
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