Chronicler Of The Winds (12 page)

It took them a year to prepare for their visit to the President's bedroom. During that time they continued their restless, uneasy life on the streets. They fought with the other groups over territory; they waged a constant battle with the Indian shopkeepers, with the police, and with themselves. They washed and guarded cars, scavenged for food in the rubbish bins, and refined Alfredo Bomba's begging techniques. Once in a while they would be accosted by the outside world, most often in the shape of white people who spoke their language very badly. Apparently they wanted to take the group of kids with them to some place they described as a big house where there was food and bathtubs and a god. Cosmos used to assign Mandioca to go along and investigate what it was all about. But Mandioca would usually be back the next day, saying that it was just another institution where they wanted to change the kids and rob them of their right to live on the streets.

Sometimes people would arrive wearing visored caps, carrying big cameras and wanting them to pose. Cosmos would immediately demand payment, whereupon the men with the cameras and the skinny women with pens in their hands would usually leave with disgruntled looks. If the men with the cameras were prepared to pay, the kids would gladly pose. They would show off with expressions of hunger, pain, yearning, filth, vulgarity, larceny and innocent joy. Cosmos gave the instructions, and each of them had his assignment. They used the money to buy food, usually chicken, which they would grill down by the decaying wharf. The days with the cameramen and the skinny, pen-wielding women were sated days. Afterwards they would lie in the shade of the palm trees and talk. Cosmos let Nelio lie next to him while the others kept a respectful distance. Cosmos would look out over the ocean, gnawing on the last chicken leg, and talk of everything except himself. Cosmos's origins were something that Nelio often pondered. But he knew that Cosmos would never answer if he asked him any questions. Nelio sometimes thought that Cosmos had always been a ready-made person. He was born the way he was and he would never change. That could also be the reason why he never spoke of his past. He didn't talk about it because it didn't exist.

The sated days sometimes led Cosmos into a philosophical and dreamy reverie.

'If you ask Tristeza or Alfredo or any of the others what they want most in life, what do you think they will say?'

Nelio thought for a moment. 'Various things,' he said.

'I'm not so sure about that,' said Cosmos. 'Isn't there something that is greater than everything else? Greater than mothers and full stomachs and distant villages and clothes and cars and money?'

They lay there in silence while Nelio considered. An ID card,' he said at last. 'A document with a photo that says that you are who you are and nobody else.'

'I knew you would think of it,' said Cosmos. 'That's what we dream about. ID cards. But not so that we'll know who we are. We already know that. But so that we'll have a document proving that we have the right to be who we are.'

'I've never had an ID card,' Nelio said pensively.

'We should get ourselves some,' said Cosmos. 'After we've visited the President's bedroom we'll get some ID cards.'

'What happens if they catch us?' asked Nelio. 'What happens if the President wakes up?'

'He'll probably yell for help,' replied Cosmos. 'He'll be like Nascimento. He'll think he's dreaming about monsters.'

'If I was our President,' Nelio said, 'what would I do?'

'Eat your fill every day.'

'Eat my fill every day. And then what?'

'Rebuild the village that the bandits burned down. Go in search of your mother and father and your sisters and brothers. Try to find Yabu Bata. Throw the man with no teeth into jail. You'd have a lot to do.'

Cosmos yawned. 'If I was our President, I would resign,' he said, turning on to his side to go to sleep. 'How would the leader of a band of street kids have time to be President?'

Usually they finished off the sated days by paying a visit to the fairgrounds, which were in a fenced-off area between the harbour and the crowded alleys where the bars did not close until the sun came up. Even if the kids had had money, it was a repugnant thought to pay an entrance fee. They had their own entryway behind one of the smoky restaurant kitchens where the grease burned on stovetops that were never cleaned. They would crawl through a hole in the wall which they had made themselves and then covered up with clumps of earth. They knew the enormous Adelaida who stood there holding her spatula while the sweat ran down her face. She was a mulatto and weighed close to 150 kilos. When she started as cook in the restaurant ten years earlier, the owner had been forced to enlarge the kitchen to make enough room for her. She danced and sang while she cooked. The food she made was nothing extraordinary, but a rumour had spread that what she served had a magic effect on the desires and prowess of both men and women. This meant the restaurant was always full. Adelaida was paid a high salary, since she was aware of her value, and she was happy to keep watch on the secret entrance that the street kids used.

The fairgrounds were a labyrinth of restaurants and bars, cramped stalls where you could have your fortune told or get a tattoo from small, dark and mysterious men from the remote islands of the Indian Ocean. In the middle of an open plaza there was a Ferris wheel which no one had dared to ride for the past twenty years because the chains of the caged seats had rusted through. The owner, Senhor Rodrigues, who had imported the huge wheel more than sixty years before during the time of Dom Joaquim, was still to be found at his position each evening. As if it were a wishing well, people would buy tickets from him without taking a ride, and then wish for a long life. Senhor Rodrigues, who had a fierce smoker's cough and lived on raisins, sat in his little ticket booth and played chess with himself. During all the years he had spent at the fairgrounds, he had developed a great proficiency at losing to himself. He knew that he was a bad chess player, but inside him there was a secret genius who was an unbeatable master.

Next to the Ferris wheel were several lottery stands and a track for small electric racing cars. The big carousel, whose motor had stopped functioning several years before the young revolutionaries seized power, was now driven by hand. The owners had fled in terror, thinking that all whites would be decapitated by the new rulers. They had drained off all the motor oil and let the carousel break down. They did it one night when they were alone at the fairgrounds; they drank great quantities of wine and rode on their carousel until the motor ground to a halt. The next day they were gone. They had chopped the heads off the wooden horses, as vengeance against the new era which would not allow them to continue to lead their comfortable colonial lives. No one ever found the chopped-off heads, and no one ever replaced them with new ones either. That's why the carousel horses were still missing their heads. Cosmos ordered everyone except Alfredo to push. Alone in his kingdom of headless horses, Alfredo sat on the lead horse and rode around and around the world. For that moment of happiness he was prepared to beg on the others' behalf for as long as he lived. They roamed the fairgrounds and looked at everything that was going on. They were keen observers of the fights that erupted and just as quickly died out; they studied with interest the half-naked women looking for customers, and they discussed the women's physical attributes so loudly that they were usually chased off. The sated days were days when time stood still, when life was something more than mere survival.

At the beginning of the second year in which Nelio lived with the group led by Cosmos, they made their night-time visit to the President. They slipped into the walled and heavily guarded palace by crawling into the big laundry baskets, which once a month were delivered to the palace from the government laundry. They waited in one of the cellar rooms until it was night, and then they made their furtive way through the silent building. Over a long period prior to that night, they had asked innocent questions of various people who worked in the presidential palace and found out how the building looked and where the stairs and the guards were located; they also knew in which room the President slept. Sometimes he visited his wife, who had her own bedroom, but he always returned to his own bed. As they were on their way up to the upper floor of the palace, they heard a door open and close somewhere overhead. They crouched in the darkness of the stairs. Then they saw the President approaching in the moonlight, and he was naked. Soundlessly he passed above them on his way back to his own bedroom. That was a moment none of them would forget. Cosmos threatened to give them a beating every day for three months if they ever revealed what they had seen. No one needed to know that their President had shown himself naked before some of his subjects.

They waited on the stairs until Cosmos thought the President must be asleep. Cautiously they approached and opened his door. In the light from the window they saw the shadow of the black man in his bed, and they heard his calm breathing. They stood around him, holding their breath. Then Alfredo Bomba placed the dead lizard on the bedside table, and they left the room.

What they never found out was that a moment later the President had woken up. He was dreaming that something smelled bad – it was the foul smell of poverty. When he opened his eyes in the dark, the smell was in the room, as if it had followed him out of his sleep. He lay there for a long time, wondering what the dream was trying to tell him. That he did too little to alleviate the poverty that seemed to be spreading like an epidemic through the country? Anxiously he looked for an answer without finding one until he fell into an uneasy slumber shortly before dawn.

But he did not see the lizard on his bedside table. In the morning, when the President had bathed and then dressed with bleary eyes, he still hadn't noticed it.

A horrified servant called for the man in charge of the President's security department, who in turn, and under the greatest secrecy, summoned the head of the security police. After a number of highly confidential meetings, it was decided not to inform the President. But they did, again in secrecy, increase threefold the guard on the Presidents palace.

A short time after this, his final triumph, Cosmos was struck by a melancholy that came as a great surprise to everyone, even to himself. One evening when Nelio was about to leave for his statue, Cosmos pulled him aside and told him that from the next day Nelio would be in charge of the group. Cosmos would be gone by then, and he was making Nelio responsible until he came back. There was a freighter in the harbour that would set sail for the East at sunrise. Cosmos was going to sneak on board and set off on a journey
which he
saw as the only way to regain his good spirits.

'They'll never accept me as their leader,' said Nelio. 'They'll say that I killed you.'

'They'll miss me,' said Cosmos. 'That's why you are the only possible leader, since you're the one who is closest to me.'

Nelio tried to object.

'Say no more,' replied Cosmos. 'I think it's important for people to go away once in a while. I'll be fine.'

Then he pulled a dead lizard from his pocket and smiled.

The next day he was gone. No one ever heard from him again. He had vanished with the ship that had sailed into the sunrise.

At the very moment that Nelio was telling me about the disappearance of Cosmos, the sun rose over the horizon. The African sun, red like silk, spread its rays across the city, which was starting to awaken. I could see from Nelio's face that he was tired. As I was about to leave him, he began to cough. When I turned, I saw blood running from his mouth. It occurred to me that it was over now. Nelio was going to die. Then he raised his hand and gave a dismissive wave.

'It looks worse than it is,' he said wearily. 'I'm not going to die without you knowing it.'

A moment later the bleeding stopped. I asked him whether he wanted anything.

'Just water,' he said. 'Then I will sleep.'

I stayed on the roof until he fell asleep. Then I went down to the bakery. Dona Esmeralda had already arrived, and I told her about the useless dough mixer I worked with during the night.

I listened to my own voice, to the words I uttered. They sounded alien and unreal, as if I were about to be devoured by the dying Nelio and his story, but Dona Esmeralda didn't seem to notice. She got up from her stool, tied the hat ribbons under her chin, and said that she would immediately replace the incompetent dough mixer with a better person.

Then I went into the city. Some distance away I turned and looked up at the roof of the theatre.

The evening and the night were still far off.

That day a cold wind suddenly swept in over the city. During the hottest time of the year this was not uncommon, but even though people knew this, it always took everyone by surprise. One time, long ago, when the city consisted of nothing more than several low buildings along the unspoiled estuary, rumour had it that icebergs could be seen at just about that spot where sharks now prowl with their fins barely visible above the surface. For several days the estuary froze solid, and people were able to cross the mouth of the river by walking on water. Even if this tale is in all likelihood a fiction, today whenever the cold winds sweep across the land from the sea, you still see people – especially old people – standing by the city docks, scanning the horizon to see whether the icebergs are about to return after all these years. Then the truth would be revealed: what had happened in the past was not just a fable.

I fell asleep in the shade of a tree down at the wharf where the rusty ferry that shuttles back and forth across the river puts in. I woke up suddenly because I was cold. It was already late in the afternoon, and I hurried back to the bakery. I was just on my way up to the roof to see whether Nelio was still asleep when I heard someone calling me. It was one of the girls from the bread counter, who said that Dona Esmeralda had been asking for me. I was supposed to go and speak to her at once, even though she was now over in the theatre rehearsing a new play with the actors.

I was instantly nervous. It was extremely rare for Dona Esmeralda to want to be disturbed when she was in the theatre. I asked the woman – I now remember that it was Rosa, who was big and fat and who passionately loved a tailor who had left her more than fifteen years before – what it was that Dona Esmeralda wanted.

'Who knows what she wants?' Rosa said. 'But I think you'd better hurry. She's been waiting a long time.'

I thought Dona Esmeralda must have discovered that Nelio was on the roof. She would know that I was the one who had taken him there. Now she was going to fire me because I had been hiding something from her.

I stepped cautiously inside the dim theatre, full of evil forebodings. Onstage, in the same spotlight where I had found Nelio lying in his blood, I saw the actors performing. They were stuffed into strange grey suits that seemed to be pumped full of air. From their faces hung long pipe-like objects that looked like lengths of rough rope, making it hard for them to move. I stopped inside the doorway, entranced by the balloon-shaped creatures onstage who were tripping over their long noses.

It took a while before I realised that they were supposed to be elephants. I could see Dona Esmeralda's back. She always sat in the same place, in about the middle of the house, when she was directing rehearsals. Since the rehearsal was under way, I waited to approach to her. I had a hard time working out what the play was about since the actors' words were impossible to hear from behind the long trunks hanging in front of their faces. But it seemed to me that they sounded annoyed. They kicked irritably at their trunks, moving awkwardly and ponderously in the balloon-like suits, which must have been quite hot.

As the rehearsal continued without interruption, I thought that I shouldn't wait any longer, so I walked tentatively down the middle aisle towards where Dona Esmeralda was sitting. She had taken off her hat and laid it on the floor near her chair. She was totally still. When I got close, I saw that she had fallen asleep. But she was sitting erect; her chin had not sunk towards her chest. The actors onstage shouldn't notice that she was asleep. I was about to retreat when she woke with a start and looked at me. She gestured with one hand that I was to sit down beside her. Carefully I moved the bottle of cognac from next to her chair and sat down. All the while the elephants were bellowing incomprehensibly at each other on the stage. Then Dona Esmeralda leaned towards me and whispered in my ear.

'What do you think of our new play?'

'It looks good,' I whispered back.

'It's about a herd of elephants that is afflicted by religious problems,' she said. 'It's a reminder of those evil days when my father still ruled this country. Towards the end of the play he appears onstage himself, with a drawn sword. If I can find anyone to play him, that is. The elephants are actually revolutionary soldiers.'

I have to admit that I had no idea what she was talking about. Since the actors up onstage seemed annoyed, I assumed that they didn't understand what the play was about either. But I didn't dare to venture any remark except to repeat what I had already said, that it looked good. Dona Esmeralda nodded contentedly and then seemed to forget I was there. She was following the rehearsal with a rapt expression of childish delight. I watched her surreptitiously, thinking that it was exactly this child's sense of joy that was keeping her alive, despite the fact that she was at least ninety or maybe even a hundred years old.

I thought she had forgotten that I was sitting there at her side when she suddenly looked at me again.

'I fired the dough mixer,' she said. 'What was his name?'

'Julio.'

'I told him to get himself an instrument and try to be a musician. I think he'd be good at it.'

Even though Dona Esmeralda always went to great lengths to avoid firing the people she employed, it could not be totally avoided. And she never let anyone go without recommending what type of work they ought to take up in the future. I knew that she was nearly always right. I tried to imagine what instrument would suit Julio, but I couldn't come up with anything.

Dona Esmeralda interrupted my thoughts. 'A new dough mixer is coming tonight. That's why I wanted to see you. I've hired a woman.'

A woman? But the flour sacks are heavy!'

'Maria is very strong. She's as strong as she is beautiful.'

The conversation was over. Dona Esmeralda signalled to me that I could go. I left the dark theatre, thankful that she had not sent for me to talk about Nelio.

She had said that Maria was as strong as she was beautiful. And God knows, she was right! When I went into the bakery late that night to start my work, there stood the most beautiful woman I had ever seen. I fell instantly in love with her. At that moment no one else existed but her. We shook hands.

'My name is Maria,' she said.

'I love you,' I thought of saying. But of course I didn't. I simply told her my name.

'My name is also Maria,' I said. 'José Antonio Maria. The flour sacks are very heavy.'

I placed a sack – a white one with blue-and-red stripes – right next to her feet. She leaned forward, bent her knees and lifted it high over her head.

How could a woman be so strong? How could a woman be so strong and yet so beautiful?

'Have you worked in a bakery before?' I asked.

'Yes,' she said. 'I know how to mix dough.'

And she did. I just had to tell her how many portions of dough we needed to make each night and what Dona Esmeralda's special wishes were. Maria nodded, and I never had to remind her again.

She was so beautiful that several times I forgot all about Nelio. It wasn't until I let her go home around midnight that he once again entered my consciousness, although not until I had gone out into the street to see whether some man was waiting for Maria. But she went off alone into the night. At that moment I married her in my mind.

It was not until I was on my way up the winding stairs to the roof that I remembered where I was going and why. I immediately felt guilty. A human being was dying on the roof, and I had only my new dough mixer Maria on my mind. I forced myself to feel ashamed, though it was difficult, and then I rushed up to the roof.

Nelio was awake when I got there. Earlier in the evening, before Maria arrived, I had borrowed an old tattered blanket from the nightwatchman outside the Indian photographer's shop. I gave him a loaf of bread and a matchbox filled with tea leaves in return for the loan of the blanket. I had spread it over Nelio to protect him from the cool winds blowing over the city. I had given him some of Senhora Muwulene's herbs and sat beside him while he had one of his attacks of fever. The cool air seemed to have done him good. He smiled now when he caught sight of me.

At that moment he was a ten-year-old boy. The next moment he could once again be a very old man. He switched back and forth all the time. I never knew which one I would find before me. The only thing that was certain was that he had been lying on the roof for five days and five nights; it was now the sixth night, and the wounds in his chest were getting darker and darker.

Maybe it was meeting Maria that had influenced me – I don't know. But when I changed the bandage and saw that Nelio now showed the unmistakable signs of blood poisoning, I could no longer refrain from speaking my mind.

'You're going to die if you stay here on the roof

'I'm not afraid to die,' he said.

'You don't have to die. Not if you let me take you away from here. To a hospital. The bullets in your body have to come out.'

'I'll tell you when,' he said, as he had so many times before.

'Now it's my turn to say when,' I replied. 'I have to move you now. Otherwise you will die.'

'No,' he said. 'I'm not going to die.'

What was it that made me believe him? How could I allow myself to go along with something that I knew wasn't right?

The answer is that I don't know. But Nelio's power was so great that I yielded to him.

That night he told me about the time after Cosmos crept on board a ship and disappeared into the dawn. Towards daybreak, when Nelio began to grow tired, I could feel that the cool air had once again vanished. When I stood up to leave him and looked at the ocean, I could not see any icebergs.

On the morning when Cosmos left, when Nelio told the others that from now on he would be the leader of the group, everything had proceeded quite calmly. A transfer of leadership might be accompanied by unrest and murky feelings of resistance seeping to the surface. But Nelio told them the truth – that some day Cosmos would come back and then everything would revert to the way it was. He had no intention of changing anything – what he knew about being a leader he had learned from Cosmos.

But this was not entirely true. During the night, when he lay in the horse's belly and sleeplessly waited for dawn and the ranting morning prayers of the maniacally laughing priest, Nelio thought that he would be exactly like Cosmos, but even more so. He would be a little more patient with Tristeza; he would laugh a little more at the endless stories that Alfredo Bomba told. In this way Nelio hoped to be able to exercise the authority that Cosmos had established in the group.

The only one to challenge him during those first days was Nascimento.

'You know where Cosmos is,' he might suddenly say in the evening as Nelio was dividing up the money they had earned during the day by watching over and washing cars.

Tension would instantly spring up among the others. Nelio knew that he had to accept the challenge and once and for all make clear to Nascimento why Cosmos had chosen him as his successor.

'He appointed me as leader because he knew that I was the only one who wouldn't tell where he was going,' Nelio said. And then he continued, unperturbed, to divide up the money.

Nascimento pondered what this answer actually meant. That night he said nothing more.

'We can't have a leader who doesn't sleep with the rest of us,' he said on another evening.

Nelio was prepared for this. He had suspected that Nascimento would make use of the differences between him and Cosmos. And he had come to the conclusion that there were two significant differences between them. One, that Nelio lived separately, and two, that he was not several years older than the others.

'Everything will be the same as it was under Cosmos,' Nelio said. 'That's why I will continue to sleep wherever I like.'

A leader should be older,' said Nascimento.

'That's something you will have to discuss with Cosmos,' replied Nelio. 'I'm sure he'll be able to give you an answer that will satisfy you.'

Nascimento soon stopped challenging Nelio. He realised that it was getting him nowhere. The group was content with the fact that a change had occurred without anything threatening to split them up. Before long the other street kids in the city knew that Nelio, despite his young age, had taken over leadership from Cosmos, who had set off on a mysterious journey.

It was also during this period that Nelio began to speculate more and more about why the world looked the way it did. Before him he saw life teeming in the streets of the city. One day, when he was an old man and about to eat his last meal, would he have to dig that too out of the rubbish bins the way he did now? Was life really nothing more? Was that all? He remembered the words that the white dwarf, Yabu Bata, had spoken before they parted. 'There are two roads. One will lead you in the right direction, the other is the path of foolishness and will lead a person straight to ruin.' Which road had he chosen when he entered the city on that morning? Should he have continued to follow the endless shoreline instead? Nelio had only one mission in life: to survive. When he understood this, he grew uneasy. I have to do more than that, he thought. I have to do more than simply survive.

During that period he also acquired some habits which contributed to creating the image of him as a remarkable person. But he was never aware of the rumours circulating about him.

Every morning when he woke up he would ask himself whether he wanted to spend another day under the name Nelio. On those days when his name felt like a burden, he would choose another. He used to ask one of the boys playing by the equestrian statue what his name was and then take that name for the day. So far no one had discovered that he had turned the statue into his home. He always opened the hatch with caution when Manuel Oliveira began laughing outside his empty church, and he would slip out as quickly as possible. Then he would hurry through the city to the stairwell at the Ministry of Justice, where the others had begun to wake up at about the same time. They didn't want to be caught sleeping there when the guards arrived to open the doors or they would be brutally driven off and their cardboard boxes might be kicked to shreds.