“Wait,” says Nacho. “I’ve seen this place in books. This is where the Fourth Trash War started. It’s on the Zeffekat tapestry.”
“So what?” says Emil. “Let’s go in.”
“This is where the child soldiers shot up Reuben the Cowboy’s men.”
They push the door ajar and go in. The first thing they see is a catastrophe of broken crystal, a shattered chandelier on the worn-away carpet. They walk around it, seeing ancient bloodstains now turned black on the walls and floor. Animal droppings everywhere. A tree slanting on a diagonal has burst through the wall, grown so strong and thick that it pierces the roof.
They make their way to the refinery at the back of the building. The big smelters have long ago been taken for scrap but their imprints—scratches on the floor where they stood for years—still remain, and the glass from broken beakers and funnels lies where it fell all those years ago.
Emil tries the stairs to the second floor. They creak. He makes it to the landing but feels the floor under him giving way and scampers back down. A pair of birds suddenly takes wing from their nest on top of a wardrobe.
“This whole building is infested with birds,” says Emil.
“And it’s haunted.”
“How do you know?”
“Reuben Senior just walked in behind you. He disturbed those birds.”
Emil spins around, feels a gust of air.
“Who’s Reuben Senior?”
“Gold dealer. He died fifty years ago.”
They catch a bus to Mundanzas.
They get off beside an abandoned nightclub called “the llama’s head,” an old haven for jazz singers and artists, but all the letters except four are worn away and now the sign says he ll. They look through the broken windows and see it has been strip-mined for everything including the floorboards and the roof, and in any case it isn’t big enough for hundreds of damnificados.
In Fellahin Emil kicks open the door to a derelict tower, a tip-off from Torres the younger, and it reminds Nacho of the day the Chinaman broke down the entrance to the monolith. This time no wolves but a pack of feral cats bare their teeth, at least until Emil charges them and they scatter and he takes the steps two at a time, pushing open doors, checking for wildlife and residents and the smell of gas. The floors are coated in some kind of toxic gunk, a black residue oozing from the walls. He goes further up, and further still, to the roof, where bird bones litter the concrete and an assortment of objects—single boots discolored in the sun, rusted beer cans, newspapers drenched to a pulp—lie discarded.
“Ten floors,” he says, bounding down to Nacho. The cats have disappeared.
“I can count that from here.”
“Something rotten about the place. Bad smell.”
“Gas?”
“No. Something else.”
“Utilities?”
“What?”
“Does it have water? And sockets for electricity?”
“Yeah. I turned a faucet. Some black stuff trickled out. It’s a possibility, but ten floors isn’t sixty.”
“No,” says Nacho. “Not even close.”
By now, the sun is dipping below the hills in the distance. They hear the honking of far-off horns, the constant whine of rubber on tarmac and snarling engines, and walk toward the sun. They catch a bus to Favelada and a rickshaw to the tower.
The following day, Nacho meets with the leaders on each floor. He instructs them to tell the residents they are expecting an attack in ten days, and anyone who wants to leave can leave and anyone who wants to stay and fight can stay and fight, and those in between will have to take the consequences of Torres Junior’s wrath and whatever the gods may bring. He spends the rest of his day sheltering from the heat and translating a book of essays by a French statesman. He wonders if he will live to finish it.
A day later Nacho sees the first signs of an exodus. Early in the morning, before the heat gathers and the air closes in, he peers out of his window and sees a family of five hauling their possessions to the bus stop across from the plaza. The children, laden with blankets and furry toys, drag their feet.
At coffee time, Nacho sees others: a young man of fighting age with a rucksack on his back and a battered suitcase in his hand. Later a family of four loads up a truck, the mother carrying pots and pans on her head, walking like a dancer, and the elder of two girls holding a dog in her arms and placing it in the cab of the truck while the younger runs in circles, on an adventure inside her head. An old man walks away in the morning dragging a burlap bag but comes back an hour later via the same path. He does this all day, taking off in different directions and returning, finding no other place to call home. Back and forth he walks until Nacho calls out to him, “Come in, out of the heat, my friend! Try again tomorrow!”
At five in the afternoon, a troubadour arrives at the tower. He is wearing a cloth cap, a white smock four sizes too large and pants like a clown’s, held up by string suspenders. He carries a sack over his shoulder and a guitar on his back and his pockets are stuffed with paper and vegetables and coins and shells. He looks up and laughs and says, “La tour! La tour!” and the sentries eye him and raise their guns but at that moment Nacho is coming down the stairs and he welcomes the man, tells him to sit in the atrium and play him a song.
The troubadour sings in French and Spanish, and Nacho applauds before telling him he can come and stay in the tower but in nine days they are expecting an attack to end all attacks, and if he wishes to travel the open roads and bless them with his songs, it will be safer for him. The troubadour takes a room vacated that morning and sleeps on the floor for three days and three nights, his guitar by his side, and doesn’t see the sun making great wedges of light that move across the room in slow motion as he snores.
That same evening a wailing is heard ten floors either way and the woman with the dog in a wheelbarrow emerges, bumping her way down the stairs, the dog limp and bouncing on every step. She borrows a shovel from the twins and walks until she finds a plot of unclaimed land behind a school. She buries the dog then and there, digging a hole through her tears, through the waning heat of the evening. Then she fixes a tiny wooden cross in the land, and walks back to the tower. It is midnight by the time she returns.
The following day, Nacho prowls the cavernous municipal library, goes to the section called Military History. Tells himself he must read about warfare and battles and heroes of the past. He sits at a desk and gathers a pile of books, but gets caught up in the tales of Hannibal marching over the Alps and the Pyrenees with a retinue of elephants and forty thousand soldiers, and imagines a herd of elephants with bazookas strapped to their backs defending the monolith.
On his return to the tower, he immerses himself in the French essays, forgetting again the guillotine hanging over the heads of the damnificados, and prepares for his class.
He knocks on Don Felipe’s door. Again, no answer. Later he finds the twins and asks them to force open the door.
“Das ist einfach. Easy work,” says Hans.
“You do it then,” says Dieter.
“No problem. Stand back. Wait. I need to limber up.”
“Du kannst es nicht! You’re stalling. You’ve never broken down a door!” laughs Dieter.
“Course I have.”
Nacho gets bored of their clowning and turns the handle. To his surprise, the door opens.
“I forgot,” says Nacho. “The priest never locks it.”
The twins ascend the stairs arguing and laughing, and Nacho sees immediately that Don Felipe has gone, leaving not a wrack behind, save some old newspapers and a half-empty water bottle. ‘Betrayed,’ thinks Nacho. ‘He sold me out for a pocketful of silver.’
The following day, he arranges a visit with his friend Cesare Baldini, the ex-ambassador, this time at the man’s home. Nacho comes to a villa on the outskirts of the city, a walled perimeter, Tuscan cypress trees beside the gate. A courteous guard lets him in and he walks a pathway lined with Greek urns. The main h
ouse is in front of him, all pastel colors, a two-story chateau that looks like something out of a fairy tale. He turns to ascend the shallow steps of an ornate pavilion of wood and stone, where the old man sits picking at a plate of pasta. His shirt is open at the neck, revealing a thatch of gray hair sprouting from his chest, and his once mighty shoulders sag with the weight of all he has seen and done and eaten and drunk.
“Ahhhh,” says Baldini, feasting upon a piece of ravioli in tomato sauce. “Hand-rolled. An old Ligurian recipe. La mia bella signora ha fatto! My old lady. She cooks like a goddess. Used to look like one, too. Sit down. She’ll bring you a plate. Amore, portare un piatto!”
An elegant signora in a blue dress comes out of the house minutes later carrying a tray with food on a plate. Nacho thanks her in Italian and places a napkin on his lap. They eat awhile to the sound of birdsong, and then finally Baldini says, “Now. How can I help you?”
Nacho explains the situation and the ambassador’s face twists and turns as if someone is prodding him with a tiny dagger in the great rolls of fat under his chin.
“Non c’è niente da fare,” he says. “Get out of there. Run, run, run! Run like the wind.”
“Not that easy for me.”
“Ah, scusate! Then fly!” He wipes his mouth with an expansive swipe of his napkin, and leans into Nacho’s orbit. “Torres is a psychopath. I mentioned this before, didn’t I? Under his sharp Italian suits there’s a big fat snake.”
“Do you have any contacts that can help us?”
“Help you with what? I know someone at the airlines. She can fly you anywhere you want to go. I have a reliable driver—he can take you to the train station. Been with me twenty years. You’d like him. Speaks six languages.”
Nacho cuts off Baldini.
“Not me. Us. Help us. Two thousand damnificados with nowhere to go.”
Baldini shows Nacho the palms of his hands, shrugs.
“If you want miracles, go to a church. I’m an old man living out my days under a veranda. My wife cooks well. I drink a little brandy. Still enjoy a cigar. There was a time when I could move a mountain. Fix an election. Bribe an official or two. It was a pleasant existence and it paid well. But now?”
Show his palms again. Hams it up, with a pregnant pause.
“Me? An old man in a dry month being fed by an old lady.”
Nacho finishes off his pasta with a clank as the fork hits the plate.
“Thank you for your time, Don Baldini. I’ll always remember your kindness.”
“Va bene. My driver is outside. Tell him where you want to go.”
“Grazie.”
Nacho retrieves his muletas from the low wall of the whitewashed pavilion, stops at the house to shout his thanks and farewell, and walks to the gate. Baldini’s chauffeur is nowhere to be seen, so Nacho hobbles a half mile and catches a bus home.
CHAPTER 26
Christ on the Cross—Resnaut—Nacho prays—Agua Suja—The Great Cleansing—Nacho eats like a king—Miracle
WITH ONE DAY TO GO BEFORE TORRES’S PLANNED INVASION OR DEMOLITION, NACHO TAKES a rickshaw to Christ on the Cross, a church in the suburbs of Agua Suja. The morning traffic is the usual honk-yell-skid as pedestrians make hell-for-leather dashes across wide boulevards and the hawkers wander invincibly in the thick of it all.
The rickshaw driver is a young man, maybe twenty, but he has been on a rickshaw for ten years. He has the face of a child and a skinny torso, but calves like a weightlifter’s. He keeps to the slow side of the road and waves and grins at pedestrians, water sellers, hookers, tramps, calling out their names or whistling through his teeth.
As they enter the suburbs, the streets thin out, some tree-lined, others looking out over expanses of wasteland. The smell of the river permeates everything. They arrive at the church and Nacho gives the boy a tip and pauses at the building, looks at the roof. Pigeons coo and twitch.
He pushes at the door, a massive wedge of burnished oak, and goes into the hush, the shade, the echo of footsteps on stone. It’s the largest church in the region, built by a monster called Resnaut, a gangster who saw the light late in life. The death of his beloved daughter—drowned in the filth of the river a year after his wife had died—turned him to God in his fifties. Resnaut repented of his murderous ways, returned much of the money he had extorted from terrified shopkeepers and families, and gave away his dandyish clothes to the beggars on the street. In order to atone for his sins, he visited church daily, where he would prostrate himself side by side with the damnificados and the indigent. One day he asked a beggarwoman there why she was sweating and could barely stand. She explained that the church they were in was miles away from the slum where the poor lived, and having no money for public transport, she had walked in the baking sun. It was at this point that he had a revelation: build a church on the edge of the slum, where the poor could worship.
Resnaut spent the last twenty years of his life raising money to build his church. It became an obsession. He poured his libros into the project until he had to sell his home and possessions. And even that didn’t stop him. He begged and borrowed from former acquaintances, gambled his last hundred libros on black in a casino in Salamurhaaja Street, won, and poured that money into the church. He ransacked his dead wife’s jewelry collection, sold everything, pawned her dresses by the yard, gambled again, this time on a vicious fighting dog called Yoyo, who won, and paid off the builders, the contractors, the architects, and the politicians who—he knew all too well—needed to be bribed so that he would get a permit.
Resnaut began to dress like a pauper. He started to smell of the street. His beard grew unruly, a tangle of weeds, and his skin began to shrivel. He lost thirty kilograms and most of his hair. Unable to pay his bills, he moved to a tiny apartment. When he failed to pay the rent for the third month running, the landlord pointed a shotgun in his face. Resnaut moved to a hovel in the Agua Suja slum, coming out daily to supervise the construction of the church. For two months this went on, until one day the residents of the slum recognized him as the thug who had made their life hell, and chased him down the rutted, sewage-filled street.
Resnaut moved to the only place he felt safe—the half-finished church. He slept in the portico. When the builders arrived every morning, he was up and awake. He pretended to be newly arrived at the site, carefully hiding all evidence that this was now his home.
After eating poor food and living rough for months on end, Resnaut became sick. He delivered the final payment anonymously and lived just long enough to see the completion of the church. The following day he was found dead, frozen to death under a statue of Jesus on the cross. Assuming he was a tramp, the authorities cremated his body. A woman who worked at the crematorium was given his ashes in a plastic bag, but the trashcans were full. Not knowing what to do with the bag of ashes, she decided to scatter them in what seemed a suitable place on her way home: the new church that had just been built on the outskirts of Agua Suja. There she opened the bag and, in a sweeping arc, threw the remains of Resnaut onto the side of his church. A freak rainstorm then plastered those ashes to the wall, ensuring that Resnaut would forever cling to his project.
And now Nacho looks up at its soaring vault, stops to examine the statues in their niches, and totters down the aisle on his muletas, heading for the altar. There, under a stone carving of the pietà, an emaciated Christ recumbent in his mother’s arms.
Nacho sits on a wooden bench and wonders why he has come. He has never been a religious man. He knows the stories and loves the language of the Bible, its grandeur and sweep, but has never felt God’s hand touching his shoulder. He is a secular beast. Just like his father, Samuel. Curious and questing, but always earthbound. Nacho believes there is an explanation for everything, that there is no Big Man in the sky dispensing His Magic.
But here and now, with no plan to save the tower, and trusting to dumb luck and blind fate, Nacho falls to his knees and asks for help.
“God give me strength to kn
ow what to do in my hour of need.”
He kneels there for ninety minutes. No one enters or leaves the church. His lame leg aches but he doesn’t move, soaks up the pain, eyes raised to the stone carving. He feels the barely perceptible wind of a breath on his neck, turns and sees no one, but feels the presence of his mother who isn’t his mother, wife of Samuel, daughter of Ezequiel and Martha, granddaughter of Zachariah and Jennifer and Antonio and Maria-Elena, and he hears the same message he heard the last time a Torres threatened the tower. “You’ll be OK. Everything will be OK.”
Only this time he doesn’t believe it.
Nacho rises from the floor of the church. But his gammy leg has gone numb, and he almost falls. He regains his balance and sits on the bench. He stretches out his legs, berating the left for its weakness, and rises slowly again. He picks up his muletas, takes a last look at the prone Christ, turns, and walks down the aisle.
Outside, he is met by a burst of sunlight so bright it hits him like an explosion and blinds him momentarily. But it isn’t just his sight. His ears prick up. Something in the air, a humming that he cannot immediately recognize. A murmur or a thrum. He follows the noise. Walking toward the slums, the sounds escalating to a hubbub. Rubble and patches of cracked earth. Harsh white light reflecting off the sun-seared land. Buildings lower now. Shebeens and lean-tos. Hardboard shacks cobbled together. Mangy dogs. Trash. All the detritus of the poor. And on he walks, drawn by the noise. Toward the river, where he was left as a baby. Agua Suja. Dirty water.
The babble of voices is everywhere now, mixed with strains of music, and he begins to see apparitions, only they aren’t. Men, women, children, walking to the river. He follows them, turns a corner, and sees thousands moving toward the sand-silt shore, all wearing white. On the flood plain, hundreds of tents, women balancing pots on their heads, fumes of food cooked in the street, people milling and talking. The troubadour too, also in white, leaning over his guitar, his music drowned in the thrum of the crowd.
Damnificados Page 22
