The Expelled (4 page)

Someone (who?) said that Cash was a saint and that he had died for our sins and the arguments that were taking place on the bus, and that we had to think about him and his lesson. And then Severio who was sitting in front of me to my left asked how they could know if he was a saint if nobody knew him. “Death has made him a saint”, said his travel neighbor, Ofelia.

Or maybe that wasn’t her name ... I don't know, the truth is I have a very bad memory for names, but I remember faces or eyes, sometimes phone numbers. And then I may have fallen asleep for a while, I was very tired and I wanted to sleep but it wasn't easy, maybe I just dozed off. I heard someone mention that he was traveling to the other sea, and that he was traveling to look for his father, because after his father died, that's how he told the story, after his father died, his mother told him that this man was not his father. His father was some other man. That never knew about him and that only she knew. That she had been raped by a man in Morocco, just after the independence and that he was a friend of her husband or a business partner, the man came to the house looking for her husband because they had an appointment.

“What kind of appointment?” a woman's voice asked.

“What do I know, a business appointment with my father!”

“But then is he your father or is he not your father?”

“I don't know, he is and he's not, anyway, then she asked him if he wanted to drink something.”

“To whom?”

“My mother to my father.”

“But didn't you say that your father wasn't there?”

“Well, the one they call biological father, and I have no idea what I'm doing here. Anyway, she doesn't remember, my mother, whatever she asked, but the man came in and drank a lemonade, that much she remembers. And there, they talked for a while and he declared his love, his eternal love, and that she should get a divorce and they should run away together. Nobody gets a divorce here, well, not in my town, there are no divorces, never, well, unless someone beats you up or abuses you or has an affair, or something very serious, something like that, not for love. And he got all turned on and my mother told him to leave, he had crossed the limit, and then he raped her.”

“Yeah well, that's all bullshit.”

“Not one bit, what happened next is that she went to her mother and my grandmother told her not to tell anyone, and less to my father, well, her husband, and the best thing she could do was to sleep with him that same night and the following, just in case she was pregnant, and I was born that year, and I am an only child. My mother says that my father was sterile. And now I don't know why I am going to meet that man, my father. Well, that is if he is still alive and still lives in the same city.”

“And what's his name?”

“Who?”

“And what do you care what he's called?”

“I don't.”

“He's called Yusuf Bentato.”

I do remember that name. The son of Bentato was going from one sea to another. The woman didn't have much to tell.

“Your story comes straight from a movie, but I'm just going to my village, in the mountains, I'm on my way back from a visit to my sister who went to work in another country and now she's not doing very good, she has breast cancer.”

“Her too!”

“Yes, but why her "too"?”

“It's just that that's all you hear about, that this person has breast cancer, and that other one had it, and half of them are secrets that were told, and what happens with the ones you don't know about. It must be an outbreak.”

At that moment, Queta got up and said there was an outbreak on the bus, and that's why we had to exit the freeway and turn right. If anyone doesn't agree they should raise their hand. Nobody did it and the driver turned right and entered a road that nobody knew. What was very strange is that there were no ads and no signs of nearby cities or towns, and it was an almost deserted road.

Then the bus stopped, the reason was that we had to pray for Cash, the saint of the bus. The front people got off the bus and the back people remained inside. We prayed for Cash's soul and asked him to help us reach the other sea. Cash, help us in your death to be worthy of our fate, to get from the big sea to the small one, from water to water and wind to wind.

When we returned some back people were complaining that they didn't let them pray for Cash and he was one of them. Cash was always a good back person, worthy of that name and a good man. And above all, he could sing, said another voice and in another language. But the front people accused the back people of killing Cash, and they said that because they killed him, it was better not to pray for him.

“Although, there is freedom of worship here, and everyone can pray what they want and to whomever they want, as long as they leave the can free.”

“We will pray to saint Cash,” said a back guy, the one who was closest to the can. Oizoa, number 38. Oizoa considered himself the leader of the back people, because he was closest to the can and sometimes he said that the front people were better by law and the back ones had to accept that these were the laws of nature and the world, but most of them didn't listen or pay attention or understand the language he spoke.

And so it was, in less than a few hours, Cash was the saint and they no longer prayed for him, but to him. The front people had the right to kneel in their place and now they came to sit beside me, the ones waiting for their turn to go to the john. The can was the bus's sacred place, and they all wanted to piss or shit nonstop. Uceda went away and a woman came to sit next to me, she told me that she was coming from Cazarzen, that's how she called the city from where she was escaping, a city I had never heard of.

“I’m running away from the terror and from death,” she said, “so all this seems like a picnic to me. If I tell you all that I have lived through you wouldn't believe it.”

“You could try.”

I wasn't very interested in listening to the stories of each one of them, but I was sitting just above the can, next to the seat that was on top of it, and that gradually brought to my side all the passengers on the bus. Some told me their lives, others remained silent, but everyone did it with such a strange serenity.

“At first,” she said, “we worked in a shoe factory, but they stopped buying and suddenly in the center of the city they opened an ultramodern transplant hospital, it gave good jobs and good wages to part of the population and the city began to flourish, and the housing prices rose, and other transplant hospitals were opened, before I took refuge in the forest there were five, but I think there are eight now. People from all over the world came to our city to get all kinds of transplants, the most difficult ones, but half the people in the city, or more than half, lost their jobs and sometimes their home, these poor people began selling their kidneys to be able to deal with the expenses of their families, but they always needed more and more donors, and the poor people were not enough, and they began evacuating families from their homes and they established a law, that those who lived in the forest were natural donors, those were the words, and then they began hunting those in the forest, sometimes they took out a kidney and released them back in the forest and sometimes they needed a heart and so they killed them, they took my kidney, here's the scar...”

“And we have never heard of that around here. What did you say the name of the city was?” I really didn't want to see the scar and so I changed the topic.”

“It was called Cazarzen, and every time they needed more transplants, they threw more people out of their homes so they would become natural donors. You see, they killed my husband and later in the forest we ate his remains, because if we didn't the wolves would eat them, so it was better to feed ourselves, the meat was hot. My two sons, children were preferred donors, you see, even old people's corneas or a pregnant woman's gallbladder. I don't know or understand how I escaped, but here I am... Well, it was my turn.”

I think that put me off eating for a while. We kept going on the same road and we couldn't see anyone, it was like a dream. Many times I wondered if I was dreaming. I wasn't.

We stopped near a lake surrounded by grass that looked artificial. There was nothing alive around there, not even flies. That didn't bother anyone. The back people sat together and the front people sat closer to the lake. We ate what we had, some had sandwiches and others cereal bars. Suddenly we saw a lonely lamb walking a few feet away from us. Severio took out his gun and shot it, I don't even believe he thought about whether to do it or not.

“Here we go, that's lunch.”

“Look, and I have here everything we need for a barbecue.”

I believe it was Santos who went to the bus and grabbed a bag that had all the necessary tools to eat lamb. Nobody really knew how to prepare the lamb until the Tadeuz mother came and joined us. It wasn't a very simple task, she requested a knife and we didn't know what to do then.

“She's a back woman and it can be dangerous.”

“Yeah, but she has two children who are front people. A son and a daughter.”

The Tadeuz were the only family on the bus, they were called Tadeuz son, Tadeuz daughter, Tadeuz father and Tadeuz mother. The children were front people and the parents back people.

“I don't think she'll do anything, we'll give her a piece of meat.”

It was a slow process and despite the hunger, it took almost an hour to skin the animal and empty it of its blood, meanwhile Caro prepared the fire with some plants and tree branches that he found half a mile away from the lake.

The driver came to me and told me something was wrong, that the road was a bit strange, and mainly that he drove many miles but never saw the amount of gas lowering.

“It must be the saint's doing,” he said.

“What?”

“Saint Cash.”

The lamb didn't taste very good, but in the end a woman took out a cake, it's for my daughter's birthday, but we won't make it, so we might as well eat it together. I didn't understand why she said she wasn't going to make it, were we doomed?

Back on the bus, there was another line to go to the can. Many came to see me, all the front people. They sat next to me, one after another, and I don't remember anymore who was who and who told what. This one was a woman, I think she was called Olvido. Yes, that must be it, do you have an Olvido on the list? Could she still be alive? She told me that she had cancer and that she was going to die.

“The doctors told me that I haven't got much time left, months, but months could mean many things. Two months? Ten months? Doctors only know how to say a few months, nothing else, and you stay with those months, it's your life, not mere statistics. I have decided to go to the sea, my sea, to die, the sea where I was born, my sea, you understand, I tried everything, vitamins, exercise, psychology, radiotherapy, chemotherapy, a new experimental vaccine. I went to the Mayo Clinic, you know, for this my brothers had money, to be healthy, but never before, to help me out or to buy a car, not even a used car, but when I got sick, ten years ago, my God, I got sick ten years ago, then they became good, very good, super-duper good brothers. They began calling me every day, checked if I needed anything, they set an appointment with the best specialist in Madrid, I didn't want the best specialist, but I couldn't say no, then at the Mayo Clinic in the US. Do you see what I was in? I found myself in the same situation of dependency. Before, it was because they didn't give me their money and after it was because they did. When I told them I wanted money to go to a natural medicine clinic in the UK, they said no, they didn't understand, but I went anyway, you know. I sold what little I had, an inherited land from a great-aunt and I went. They got very angry. Of course when they help you, one wonders if they are helping you or helping themselves, or if they want to have a clear conscience, but now you see, now I am going to the sea ... it's my turn.”

So now I wonder if that Olvido or whatever her name was survived, ironically the one who was going to die, things like that happen sometimes. What you least expect. Well, I see that in here I'm going to be talking alone and nobody is going to respond to anything.

I don't even know if you're listening, maybe you've fallen asleep, or there's just one of you, or you're recording this and then you'll listen to only parts of what I say.

“Yes, we are listening, although you are boring us.”

“Sorry.”

“We want to know what happened, not the digestive problems of each passenger.”

“But can you tell me who you are, are you the police, secret agents?”

“We want to know who the leader was.”

“I don't know that I don't know if there was a leader.”

“Who gave the order?”

“What order?”

“If you were or weren't abducted.”

“I believe I am in a democratic country, and I'm entitled to a lawyer.”

“Not in this case.”

“Why not...”

“Sometimes it’s like that.”

“It's not like I have anything to hide. I can tell you everything I remember, but...”

“We want to know when they started to eat passengers.”

“What?”

“To eat human flesh.”

“I don't remember that. I didn't eat the flesh of any passenger.”

“Of a back person, perhaps...”

“Not me.”

“Alright, go on, go on.”

“Am I being accused of something?”

“Go on with your testimony.”

“But am I being accused of something?”

“Not for the moment. You are not accused of anything.”

“What do you mean for the moment?”

“Continue your story and you will understand, maybe you will remember.”

“What is this? A movie? A novel?”

“Go on, continue we don't have all the time in the world.”

Ok, I’ll continue. So someone decided to change the course and turn around. The driver told us that he'd been driving in the same direction for three hours and saw nothing, not one house, not one tree, only an endless line of grass. “I haven't even seen this in Scotland”. And without really discussing it, he turned back the way we came. But I didn't see any cars on that way either. When he turned back, the scenery on the same road had changed, the grass suddenly turned into a forest full of trees. We all saw it, or at least that's what I think, and we all got scared, but nobody said anything about it for over an hour, until a bird jumped on the road, well, that wasn't a bird, it was bigger than the bus, it jumped on the road and continued flying. Not everyone saw it because the ones who were asleep woke up when the driver hit the brakes, but the bird was already gone. They all asked what it was, “what is it, what is it”, you could hear them say, but no one answered. After that we were silent for a long time, we were panicked, terrified.