B007P4V3G4 EBOK

by Richard Huijing

  The rag-wearers try the doors. 'Locked,' the man says softly. He laughs nervously and shivers. They are too frightened or too weak or too lonely to break open the car or to smash such an armoured glass window with the great force of iron bars. 'Not a heroic people, no.' The men press themselves up against the windows again. A primitive life-form, the man thinks. A barely viable variant of shit, dung and garbage creepers and gorgers, of dumpgroundshuffling rustlers, that has raised itself up on its hind legs. The only solution, even so, would be, never mind the politics: wire netting round the plain and set the flame throwers on them.

  The narrow, grey mouths of the life-form in the sand and dustcovered faces form the words 'limosna, patron; propina': 'alms, please, boss; a tip'. With a heart beating more rapidly with the excitement that has something so enchanting about it, the man winds down the window a touch. That hurts: he has strained a muscle 'at golf'. A narrow slit appears, no wider than that of those tight-pinched collection boxes designed for cosily folded banknotes the man recalls from the churches of the latitudinarian protestants in the country of his birth; boxes with a pinched stripe of a slit with which latitudinarian little boys also would try to indicate something situated down there in the wife of the preacher or the deacon.

  The man in off-white forces his loose change through the slit. Outside the car it drops into the garbage: a stream of ever devaluing coins, greedily picked up from the filth, for the total value of which, the man thinks to himself, one might be able, somewhere on the opposite side of one of the oceans, to buy half a bar of chocolate of an unknown brand, second-hand. 'And without a wrapper,' the man mutters, smiling. 'Loose, in a strip of newspaper, should one ask for it politely.'

  He has gone and sat a little closer to the window again. His forehead rests against the glass while he watches how the soiled life-form outside bends down laboriously in the dust, with probably arthritic limbs, and languidly tries to push one another away from the coins that have dropped into the waste, coins the man in off white slips into the slit above his head. 'Just like an action slotmachine,' the man says, and he shivers for a moment. 'But then in slow-motion.' It reminds him of the train between Cuzno and Puno. There he - and tourists too - always holds out bananas from the window when the train stops somewhere, or biscuits, sweets or a little coin. Men, women, children and the elderly will then jump up high against the train together, at the goodies or the coin. His wife has taken highly amusing photos of this.

  The coins have gone and the man again slides away from the window a little. Then the man in off-white in the posh car makes the slit close. Slowly. In order not to anger or frighten the men. Maybe these life-forms enjoy solidarity among one another, all of them, there on the tip. And yonder, life-forms with more developed muscles are crawling about, too. Ah well, it's a case of starting the engine, accelerating and off we go. The thought of danger, whether imagined or not, from the putrefaction of the dumping ground, flickeringly lit by fires, stimulates him in a pleasing manner: things are getting light in his underbelly. They stand there, impotent, after all. 'Impotent and indolent,' the man says quietly. 'He who does not work, neither shall he eat. Thus spake the Almighty. As revealed to us by a reliable Spokesman.'

  The life-form outside the car presses itself up against the windows again. 'Limosna, patron, propina.' The man laughs while he pants slightly. This makes a curious, squeaking sound. Then, in the dark, slowly and emphatically, he gravely shakes his head at the men. Likewise, too, he wags the raised index-finger, slowly and in a contrary direction to the head. 'Party's over.' He is reminded of his father for a moment, dead immediately after he had moved with Mother into the house in the suburbs Mother had lived her whole life towards achieving. Fifty-eight: still young. Worn-out, the doctor had said, and he had muttered something that he ought not to have moved, not from his house on a canal. But had he lived, he would have been the age of these men outside. A strange jump in his thinking suddenly. Father would have been proud. Proud of his son. Waste

  The man in off-white shakes his head. The men retreat, warily it seems, and their silhouettes dissolve in the darkness of the plain of filth. Now and then they are lit up a moment when something explodes spontaneously in the rubbish and, just like New Year's Eve and its fireworks, is slung up high into the air: thousands of sparks falling back in a languid arch to earth's reality: the dumping ground, the tip. Dogs bolt, howling, or are those people there, on all fours? Spread across the entire plain, a province, fires bum, giving off greasy smoke.

  The people busy here on the tip, the man knows, are not the first in the chain of filth-sifters. The domestic waste daily filling the streets in open boxes, tins, bags and oil drums, first gets sifted by the ones operating the streets, before the waste is collected by the 'City Cleansing Department', frequently in open trucks which the waste is then dumped into, loose, thus forming little mobile garbage tips in which shaking people scrabble about. The garbage trucks, in the end, dump the waste of the metropolis, having been sorted by staff, on to ever fresh dumping grounds around which new shanty towns then arise, for Lima continues to grow explosively. Lima, with paupers on the one side and wealthy entrepreneurs on the other. With precious waste,' the man in off-white mumbles. 'And that way everyone is happy and satisfied as long as the life-form casts its vote for the right man. How could it ever be capable of casting its vote independently? The vote must be prescribed, firmly.'

  Intently, he peers at the silhouettes on the tip. Curious people, he thinks. But they make beautiful music. The Serranos in particular, the mountain Indians. So beautifully tragic. He is in regular contact with relatives and friends on the other side of the Atlantic, where - in cassette cases in the cassette caddy with the tuner and the tapedeck on top - the professionally performed music of the South American underworld piles up relentlessly; mountains like spermiform, nourishing-skincream-packaged cries of despair of the Criollos and the Serranos, the Cholos, the Indians. Of the Indians, especially the Huanas and the Huaylas, whose cries in primal form once resounded in the thin air between the slopes and precipitous rock faces of the high Andes and which now, distorted in deepest despair, are being absorbed into the rubble and the reeking garbage of the dumping ground, with the shrill, high-wailing, shouted singing of the women. At times, many will sing along, with broken voices, in those unbelievably high voices of the women who once lived in the healthy air of the Cordilleros de los Andes - a distressed, screeching a-cappella choir of lost, dying garbage grubbers, rooting in the poison gas, the heat: at their wits' end and capable of anything. 'Beast-man', as all are called in the healthily inhabitable parts of Lima, all who do not live up against the mountains where breathing is done freely; and they keep themselves firmly apart and fear, one day, a 'unification in attack' by beast-man. One knows the army to be on one's side, however.

  Again, an interesting country, is the man-in-off-white's opinion. Fine climate, too, in every respect. Intently he regards the ragged crap-creepers. Some are professionally equipped with gloves or have bars to turn over the filth, again others wield pitch-forks, rakes, children, shovels, and plastic bags and newspapers to wrap something up in, and here and there people are even busy with a wheelbarrow. 'Small businessmen,' the man mutters, smiling again. He shivers, and he grabs and rummages, flirtatious, at his crotch.

  The Indians and Creoles and whatever else there might be of bastardised races that make the man puke, vary in all ages; often entire families scuttle about, touched by the soft wind which, shroud-like, wraps them slowly but surely in the clouds of smoke and gas from the spontaneously combusted fires and smouldering spots. Regularly, enormously tall fires flare up: fed by nourishing waste or waste gas, yellowy-orange flames wheel up high to heaven. And taken by surprise, the silhouettes then stumble off, away. Occasionally, such an explosion will come about in a place where they are busy: hands, sticks or bars providing oxygen to something below the tip; then their rags, too, catch fire, which they attempt to quench by rolling themselves in the filth, thus frequ
ently causing fresh fires from which they then must take to their heels again. It's exciting, according to the man in off-white and, fascinated, he follows it all. Regularly the fist of the hammer bangs in the car on the wing-case of one of the smaller excrement-creepers.

  In the dim light of a suddenly flaring fire, the man discovers an almost naked Cholo girl, still Indian, primarily. She is sitting, legs wide, in the filth and stares motionless at the thousands of people busy around her, most of them searching resignedly in the night in the garbage. From a velvet case the man takes out a pair of opera glasses on an extendible handle. The girl is little more than thirteen, fourteen years of age. She has small breasts and a wondrously fine figure. Splendid legs, too, he thinks. He takes the handle of the opera glasses in his left hand and, having undone his trousers, he allows his right hand to disappear inside these. He hears shuffling round the car. Furtively, he looks around him. Nothing. Probably the mild wind is playing tag with the garbage. He grasps himself with his right hand and begins to give himself relief, now staring through the glasses at the girl, then at the rooting paupers and quickly back to the girl again, postponing the climax each time. He pants and pushes his trousers down further. Ah, so what: nobody can see him anyway. Like a small, pale fish the colour of his suit, his member sticks out at the steering wheel. Cucarachas are now crawling into his trousers, attaching themselves to his jerking, bare legs, but he doesn't notice.

  Not far from the car, a young negro approaches. He is pushing a laden, sturdy, two-wheeled handcart. He is a large, agile and strong negro. He would have to be. Otherwise he wouldn't have been able to steal a handcart. The negro feels himself to be the king of the tip and he takes fire along with him: wherever he goes, small fires erupt in the stinking tip, oddly enough. The man, offwhite in part, is irked: something of his hardness disappears, from fear, and he stares quickly at the innumerable rooters and then at the Cholo girl, and moving rapidly with his hand, he makes himself rise again towards the gleaming steering wheel. The game of wind and filth around the car, coming to him like a kind of whispering and shuffling, banging softly against the bumpers and the wings, excites him; he sees the waste before him, raised up by the wind, half a metre off the ground, bumping softly, caressingly against his car, against him. His shirt and jacket become soaked with perspiration. For a moment, he lets go of himself and the glasses, tears his jacket off, his waistcoat, undoes his tie and quickly unbuttons his shirt, panting. Then he lets the back of his seat go back, grabs the opera glasses, aims, and then he grabs hold of himself again, firmly. Now he rises in front of the wheel, like a big compass-needle of firm, throbbing flesh. 'Garbage,' he mutters, and he smiles. Sweat runs down his face and body in rivulets. He slips about in all the sweat on the leather of his seat. He looks at the negro. The man senses danger in the air about him, danger, revulsion and garbage; he growls and groans softly, his mouth half-open, and he moves, rhythmically and more rapidly.

  That the negro is proud can be seen by his bearing, and he makes the two-wheeled cart with garbage bob rhythmically up and down with his relaxed, dancing gait. He grins, baring some snowwhite teeth in the night, but primarily black gaps, though. He is only wearing a pair of dirty shorts, very off-white. Near the beautiful, almost naked girl, still sitting wide-legged in the garbage, the negro stops. Their dark skin is lit by a bright-orange kind of Easter fire nearby, sicking up black soot like a kind of grim redemption. The negro tips up his cart and begins to dump his garbage, slowly. Over the girl. She laughs, abandonedly, all of a sudden a toothless old woman, and she puts up her hands to the stream of garbage.

  The man in the car groans and has to contain himself severely. It throbs and thuds and tenses and trembles against the smooth steering wheel. The girl catches a bottle in her hands, one that got overlooked. She wipes the dirt from it and clasps the smooth bottle between her breasts: suddenly she is fearful and grim-faced. A few pennies deposit. The cheerful, muscular negro tosses his cart aside and upside down with force, lets himself drop onto his belly and digs up arms full of waste which he tries to pile on top of the head and shoulders of the girl. After a cautious look at the negro, the girl sets the bottle down beside her and, now effusive again, clasps her arms round the negro. All of a sudden, the negro gets himself upright again and stretches. The girl pulls the last few remaining rags off her body and tugs down the negro's trousers. Proud, his sword rises up above the garbage; pointing in the stench and the flickering night the negro stands above the girl sitting on her knees. She takes the Creole into her mouth and the negro looks down on her, laughing. Then he lets himself drop on top of her and together they gambol about, round and round, like the squeaking, still turning wheels of the handcart lying upside down. 'It's the wind,' says the man in the cream-coloured shirt that hangs open, 'or me.' Dirt or whatever surges against the car which shakes gently and seems to rise up at times. 'It's starting to blow.'

  Suddenly he lets go of himself and the glasses again, takes the hammer and bangs away at random on the floor of the car which seems to be moving in itself because of the innumerable cucarachas scuttling over and across one another thus forming a kind of brownish blanket underneath which there is wild movement going on. He sees the creatures on his legs, on his thighs, his underbelly, but this only gets through to him obliquely. The sight of the creatures seems to intensify his excitement. He becomes very excited indeed and grasps hold of himself again. The opera glasses are trained on the negro and the Cholo girl. All of a sudden, he tears away his trousers and underpants from his ankles, over his shoes. The cayman no longer sleeps but moves, or is being moved, jerkily. The wind wails softly together with the men and women and children, writhing and singing in the filth. The Huaylas of the rubble, the waste, the stench, the gas, the heat, the threat, the excrement, of flight and despair.

  Flames, shooting up high, suddenly light up two silhouettes also nearby, ones the man in white had held to be bent and battered oil drums. They turn out to be two men in innumerable torn rags being worn one over the other. They are sitting not far from each other, their under-rags down, on their haunches in the dirt, relieving themselves. 'Where on earth did they get that idea from?' mutters the man in the cream-coloured shirt that hangs open. There is a sound of indignation in his voice. He allows the hand around his member to rest a moment. He directs the opera glasses and peers. Nothing doing with one of them. Or he has done it already and lingers a little longer in the aftermath, unhurried. But he is grabbing wildly around him, up to his elbows in the filth. The other man produces but a child's-finger-thick but uncommonly long, ochrecoloured trail. Some time is involved in this. The leering, almost naked man, covered only by the shirt hanging open and those numerous creatures, scuttling about or attaching themselves, pants and he moves his hand again, ever more wildly. When the trail has been completed, the man half gets up and languidly wipes his lower torso with some dirt. He straightens out further, slowly pulls up the rags and disappears, shaking in a sudden bout of coughing, into the dark across the tip.

  On the radio, the foreigner now rules with a polka; something from the Danube or the Moldau or a probing tributary. The other man sits motionless. He is eating something now which he holds to his lips in both hands like a mouth organ. The negro and the Indian girl have found one another satisfying. The man sees how they move ever more slowly and how, slowly, the negro frees himself from the girl. For a moment then they lie next to one another, motionless, their gleaming faces turned up to the dark sky, at one with the tip. Then the negro rises, agilely, and disappears rapidly into the dark, into a multitude of more and more shades moving about not far from the car.

  There's constant singing now: soft, shrill and sad. Furthermore, sounds are being formed by the wind, the crackle of spark-spitting fires, dull rumblings, deep inside the dumping ground at times, and by the explosions. And by the soft shuffling of humans and animals around and among these, and around the car. And, of course, by the rattling of the creatures with which the almost naked man now appear
s to be merging. Countless numbers of such creatures are now crawling over his perspiring body: in his armpits, on his sweating belly and chest, in his pubic hair, his neck, on his arms, on his hands, around his throbbing member. Through the glasses, the man keeps his gaze trained intently on the girl lying asleep, legs wide, in the filth. The fires conjure up a moving sheen on her body and then the man's body arches, jerkily. Off-white drips down the wheel, covers the cucarachas on his thighs, his right hand, and the heavily perspiring, sodden man leans back. In the car that stinks like the immense garbage tip.

  Slowly the car with the panting, somewhat dazed man begins to move, half driving, sliding, occasionally borne by a multitude of grey, dusty, scrubby shades: a barely viable life-form, but of a size in which the car is barely noticeable. At first the man with the cucarachas does not notice anything. Then he raises himself up with a jolt and looks around him, wildly. Suddenly it gets through to him that he is covered in those sticky waste and excrement eaters. He screams and then he sees the compact mass of dusty, soiled figures in front of all the windows.

  That the car has already been pushed, dragged, hoisted a good way up the tip, this he has not yet noticed. His view outside has been taken from him. He steps on the brake but this makes no difference. The heavy car moves from left to right like a sedan chair, banging down on the waste at times and then being lifted up again.

  All of a sudden, the man relaxes. 'Calm down,' he mutters, 'we've been in worse pickles: He laughs for a moment and then he draws himself further upright by the dripping steering wheel and he starts the engine. He accelerates, but the car has been lifted up, rear wheels and all, and the wheels spin in vain in the stinking gas and fetid air.