Damnificados
Page 25
Nacho walks out of the door and down twenty flights of stairs to his room. He tries to call the twins but they are sleeping off an almighty hangover and in any case their father’s truck is nowhere to be seen. Nacho resigns himself to abandoning his books, his furniture, everything that cannot be carried in the back of a spindly rickshaw.
“Ferrido,” says Emil.
“Bon voyage,” says Nacho.
And he’s gone with a roar and a shower of dust, Maria hanging onto his back as the rusty motorbike peels away, the head of her tiny dog protruding from a rucksack over her shoulders. She didn’t even say goodbye. No looking back. Abandoned her salon. Took trinkets and heirlooms only, and a piece of Nacho’s heart.
“I’ll see you again, brother,” says Nacho to himself. “And you, too, Maria.”
Wheelbarrow stands behind him. She looks old now and a little broken, but she has told herself she will follow him till the end.
The baker brothers decide to stay in the monolith, but with most of the people gone and others too scared to enter the building, their bakery soon goes bankrupt and they are reduced to carrying loaves on trays in the street. Within a month they leave.
As for Don Felipe, the priest, it’s true he went to Torres, but his reasons were misunderstood. He went on a mission to convert the tyrant to Christianity. Torres laughed in his face, tied him up and threw him in a cell, interrogating him for information about Nacho, threatening tortures that would have made even Shivarov the Cripple Maker pause. The priest was discovered after Torres’s death, half starved and delirious in his cell. On returning to his room in the tower, he found that his possessions had been stolen. Shuffling out of the monolith for the last time, with nothing but the rags on his back, he said to himself, “I’ve made it. Finally, I too am become a damnificado.”
The others? They disperse. They slink back into the shadows where damnificados have always lived. They find digs in Fellahin or a hovel in Agua Suja, an abandoned cinema in Blutig or a flophouse in Oameni Morti. They live out their days doing odd jobs, fighting their addictions, looking for a place to call home.
Lalloo finds refuge in Spazzatura, the final resting place of his father. He is greeted like a returning son and put to work in the fields. He invents nothing, nor does he need to.
The twins bound across the regions, working in construction, on farms, in factories, inured from the world by their twin-hood and their wiry strength which pulls them clear of a thousand scrapes and fracases, lets them dodge bullets and dragons.
As for Nacho, he moves into a disused school in Mundanzas and takes twenty families with him. By day he teaches and translates; by night he walks for hours at a breathtaking pace, as if to make up for all those years hobbling on his muletas. And sometimes he is recognized or half-recognized on the streets and those that see him say, “He looks like the hero Nacho Morales, but Nacho had a gammy leg. It can’t be him.”
Susana lives in the school, too, but remains loyal to the memory of Sato Kazunari Maeda for the rest of her days. Eventually she returns to Favelada to be closer to his grave. Nacho thinks of her sometimes and wonders what might have been, but eventually his memory of her fades and she becomes just another figure in a fairy tale. And anyway, it was the Chinaman she loved.
Emil and Maria find a place in Ferrido with four apple trees and a view of the sea. In three years they have two girls and a boy, miniadventurers, wild-haired, running helter-skelter along the docks. The port grows and businesses thrive. Maria opens a hairdresser’s. And then another. And another. Emil builds boats. Nacho visits when he can, and Emil takes him out on trips along the coast and they talk about the old days, the House of Flowers, the Torres brothers, the wolf.
And some of the damnificados are changed. They are no longer people of the street. And as time goes by, their memories of the tower become hazy. Were they really holed up in the third-tallest building in the city? The one with the incredible views. Free water and electricity. Education. Dignity. Did it really happen that they defeated a wolf pack to get in and were then trapped by a flood so they couldn’t get out? Or was it just a story? And did the wolves really return to rout Torres the Elder? And the little man? The cripple? Was he or was he not their leader? He seemed to make all the decisions, but he had a brother who looked more the part.
The tales they tell their children about the tower change according to the teller and the language. When the story is told in Italian it becomes florid, a tale of excess and color and light, and when it is told in Arabic it assumes a formal grace as if it is myth become real, and when told in Xhosa it becomes a poem sung by iimbongi. And the details change every time, the wolves becoming tigers or snakes, the Torres brothers assuming the shape of demons, horned and scaly.
And as the damnificados’ memories of the tower begin to fade, the tower itself begins to lose all memory of them. With its last occupants gone, the sounds are erased, the air stilled. The roof is once again taken over by pigeons, and a group of feral cats finds refuge in the tower’s lower floors. Clothes left hanging out to dry during the exodus turn into rags, rain-beaten and sun-bleached. Pots and pans suspended on nails or balanced one atop the other are discolored and then swallowed by rust. Abandoned books turn moldy, go brown and limp at the edges, and fall apart. Furniture begins to implode, wooden legs collapsing under the weight of damp leaves that fly in through the windows during storms, and chairs turn rickety in the humid air. Cupboards and wardrobes left standing in the sun blister and crack, and cardboard boxes turn to mulch.
And on the walls and the windows, the doors and the stairwells, nature begins to take over. At the building’s entrance, weeds punch their way through cracks in the floor and a dandelion sprouts like a miniature sun. Ivy begins to climb the east wall and it climbs and climbs until it’s pulling at the tower, gripping it in stringy hands with a million fingers, tugging at the pockmarked concrete and covering up the scrawls of graffiti.
The tower becomes invisible to passers-by. It is a mark, a stain on the city center, massive yet forgotten by those who walk by or drive past it on their way to elsewhere. A repository of old legends long gone. Occasionally a drunk or a group of partying teenagers wanders into the entrance, lights a fire on the ground floor, but the smell of the sinkhole and the presence of the cats soon drives them away. A rumor goes around that an animal has been seen there—an ancient wolf, its fur clumped and eyes dull as rain, and there was something strange about the creature when seen from a certain angle, as if there were two of them together—but no one can verify it.
And once again, with the glass all gone from the windows, and the doors left flapping and banging open and shut, the wind takes control of the tower, sending its gusts and squalls through the corridors, whistling up and down stairwells, playing arpeggios on the grills of abandoned radiators. On days when the raging rain comes in horizontal, the tower sways, swinging its hips, and the birds rise in unison on a perfect diagonal and fly till they are specks against the gray torrent.
In front of the tower, all the while, the abyss. Here and there, denizens of the wastelands take to throwing their garbage into the hole. Then they start to bring truckloads of it: cardboard, paper, rotting food, the corpses of animals. They come from Fellahin, Oameni Morti and Blutig, Agua Suja, Bordello, and Sanguinosa, and, slowly, slowly, over three decades the hole is gradually filled until once again at the heart of Favelada is a giant dump, a repository of trash covering the bones of the dead soldiers who all those years ago fell in and lost the war that wasn’t a war.
And where there is trash there are people reclaiming things, digging in the dirt for a gem, a watch, a doll, a trinket. And as the garbage sorters go about their work, one or two stop to look up at the tower and remember the old songs their parents used to sing—the one about the Chinaman, the one about the wolf.
At the gates of the city the stone heads stand. The authorities build around them, constructing wider, better roads, and all who pass beside the heads are reminded that a c
ity must look for its enemies outside and inside its walls. The rickshaw drivers remember hauling people to the parties there, and they remember the little cripple who ran the show, and they remember the fires and the lights and the singing and dancing, for, however much blood was spilt, commingling with the endless rain, and however long a shadow was cast by the Trash Wars, those were indeed magical times.
About the Author
JJ AMAWORO WILSON WAS BORN IN Germany, the son of a Nigerian mother and an English father, but grew up in the UK. He has also lived in Egypt, Colombia, Lesotho (where he ran a theatre and worked for the anti-apartheid movement), Italy—and most recently the U.S., where he is writer-in-residence at Western New Mexico University. His short fiction has been published by Penguin, Johns Hopkins University Press, and myriad literary magazines in England and the U.S.
“Hard-hitting … the kind of language that packs a serious punch!”
—The Times, London
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