Chronicler Of The Winds Page 10

  She walked away without giving him a thing.

  Senhor Castigo hid in the shadows. Every time anyone stopped and began searching in his pockets to give Nelio a banknote, Senhor Castigo would walk past at exactly that moment, and then go back to the shadows from which he had come.

  It wasn't until later that Nelio understood what was going on. In the middle of the day, when the heat was overwhelming, and Nelio was wobbly with fatigue and lack of water, Senhor Castigo said that they should leave and take a rest. They walked down to the harbour area, which Nelio had seen from a distance the day before. In the wall of a building hung a curtain made of white plastic streamers, which Senhor Castigo swept aside. Inside, the room was dark. Nelio had trouble seeing since his eyes still smarted. A woman who was toothless and filthy and smelled of sour wine appeared with a bottle of beer and a plate of food for Senhor Castigo. He told her to bring Nelio a scrap of bread and some water. When he was ready to pay, he took a wallet out of his pocket and smiled.

  'Do you remember the man with the blue hat who didn't want to give you anything?' he said.

  Nelio nodded. When he saw the wallet he began to suspect something although he still didn't fully understand. Senhor Castigo drank so much with his meal that now he was drunk. Nelio felt a growing uneasiness about being in his company. Even if he didn't know what he was going to do, he knew he didn't want to beg. He couldn't understand how it could be the most respectable profession a person could have. Why had everybody in the burned village talked about beggars with either contempt or pity? It was often hard to distinguish the two feelings.

  Senhor Castigo pulled another wallet out of his pocket, and then another, this time a red coin purse that belonged to a woman. Nelio realised, without comprehending how his fingers had done it, that the man with the painted shoes was a pickpocket. That was why he had approached the people who stopped to give Nelio money and then slunk away. Nelio decided at once to run away from Senhor Castigo. There must be some other way for him to survive in the city. But the man on the other side of the table seemed to read his mind. He leaned over the table, grabbed Nelio by the throat with one hand, and looked at him with glazed eyes.

  'Don't even think about it,' he said. 'Don't even think of running away. No matter what you do, I'll find you. Every policeman in this city is a friend of mine. If I tell them to look for you, they'll do it.'

  He released his grip and then gave his full attention to drinking more beer and to emptying the contents of the wallets. The toothless woman appeared and stood at his side, watching. Now and then she would try to snatch a few of the banknotes, but Senhor Castigo was ever on the alert and slapped her hand. It was a brutal game they were playing. Nelio had slid his chair back, as far into the shadows as he could get. He could not understand how a thief could be such good friends with the police. He wondered if maybe that was the way things were in the city – the opposite of everywhere else. But even so, he was convinced that Senhor Castigo had said what he did only to frighten him. If Nelio didn't escape now, things were bound to get much worse. He would soon be blind from all the onion rubbed into his eyes.

  His chance came when Senhor Castigo fell asleep on the other side of the table. His head fell back against the wall, and he started to snore with his mouth open. The toothless woman had disappeared into a back room. The smell of burning grease was coming from there. Nelio cautiously got up from his chair and retreated backwards towards the door. Carefully he pushed aside the plastic curtain. A ray of sunlight swept quickly over Senhor Castigo's face without waking him. As soon as Nelio was out on the street, he started running. He expected at any moment to feel Senhor Castigo's hand striking the back of his neck. Or the man with the squinty eyes, who had returned from the world of the dead to take revenge. Or the man with no teeth. Not until he was far away, swallowed up by the mass of people who were swarming outside the big marketplace, did Nelio stop to catch his breath. He drank some water from one of the crumbling fountains, catching in his mouth the spray of water that shot out of the ornamental fish, and then he rinsed the sweat from his face. The whole time he tried to make himself invisible. He kept an eye on all directions, thinking that Senhor Castigo would surely come after him. There were also a good many policemen outside the marketplace. Nelio noticed that they carried the same type of gun he had seen the bandits carry. The kind of gun he had held in his hands when he was supposed to shoot Tiko. How could it be that the police and the bandits had the same type of guns? Could it be true that the policemen were the pickpocket's friends? When the police came close to the fountain, Nelio ran off. In his pocket he had the banknotes he had begged. When he counted them, he saw that he had a quarter of the amount that Yabu Bata had given him to buy a pair of trousers. It was enough for food for two days if he ate as little as possible. For two days he would live like a beggar. Then he would have to decide what he was going to do to survive.

  He walked down one of the long streets which followed the shoreline out of the city. It was lined with palm trees and decrepit benches. But there was a cool breeze from the sea and the palms provided shade. Nelio saw a stairway leading to the water. There he sat down and dipped his blistered feet in the sea. But he didn't dare stay for long. If Senhor Castigo found him, he would be lost. Then his only alternative would be to throw himself into the sea.

  That night he slept in a broken-down car on a street on the outskirts of town. When he was sure that no one else was inside, he crawled into what was left of the back seat and tried to make it as comfortable as possible. Rats rustled around him. He slept fitfully; dreams groped over him like insolent fingers. He saw his father in his dreams, and the village when it was not burned down. His mother was also somewhere nearby, although he couldn't see her. It was one of those clear and cloudless days. But something was wrong; he felt a chill gust of wind in his dream. He didn't know at first what it was. Then he realised that the sun had disappeared. He looked up at the sky. The light was glaring, but it had no source. Someone had rubbed out the sun, removed it from the sky. But where was the light coming from? Then he realised that it was night-time and the bandits had come; they were all around him, and he was trying to escape.

  Nelio woke up because he had banged his knee. He saw a stray dog standing by the car, staring at him. In the distance he heard someone laughing and a radio blaring. It must be the middle of the night. His dream had made him sad. He thought that the hardest thing of all was loneliness. There had to be a way for him to find something to eat so that he could survive. But how would he cure his loneliness? He left the car at dawn without having found an answer.

  That very day he discovered the statue that would be his home during the time he lived in the city. While he was wandering aimlessly, fleeing from the menacing shadow of Senhor Castigo and in search of a remedy for his loneliness, he came to a section in the centre of the city that he hadn't yet seen. Squeezed in among the tall buildings he found a small open plaza, an almost circular marketplace. In the middle stood a tall equestrian statue. Nelio had never before seen a statue or a horse. At first he thought it was a donkey. But when he ventured to ask one of the old men sitting at the base of the statue, in the shadow of the mighty animal, whether such enormous donkeys really existed, all the men laughed at him.

  'The biggest donkey is the one who asks such questions,' they told him, chuckling with satisfaction at their own inventive wit. Nelio realised that he had asked a thoughtless question. He knew from experience that old men took great pleasure in accusing the young of stupidity. One of the old men, who had a cane and a hacking cough, nevertheless explained to him that it was a horse, an Arab cavalo, and that the man riding the horse was a famous conqueror who was one of the forefathers of the notorious Governor Dom Joaquim. Nelio also learned that a few oversights had occurred in the young revolutionaries' campaign to tear down and remove those statues, which they thought were an unpleasant reminder of the era that was now over.

  'But you can't eradicate statues,' said the old man p
ensively. 'You can't eradicate a statue the way you stamp on an insect. You can cart them away, melt them down. But you can't eradicate them.'

  Nelio was told that the statue had been overlooked. A fierce debate had then broken out over who was to blame, and the debate was still raging. In the meantime, the statue had been allowed to stay. Nelio walked around it, again and again. The man sitting on the horse was wearing a helmet and holding a sword, which he pointed at the Indian shop selling cloth on the far side of the plaza. Nelio sat down at the base of the statue, at a suitable distance from the old men, and thought to himself that here, by this forgotten statue, was where he would stay. At this little marketplace, where people for a while stopped running and their pace was slow and dignified, where there were few cars and the sounds of the city were muffled by the tall buildings surrounding the plaza; this was where he would stay. It was like the calm space behind one of the sand dunes near the sea where he had slept during his long journey to the city. Or like a glade in one of the groves of black trees in the forest near his village. All afternoon he sat at the base of the statue, moving along with the old men whenever the shadows shifted, and watched what was going on in the plaza. He saw the Indian shopkeepers and their women with veils draped over their heads and shoulders, standing motionless in the doorways to their dimly lit shops, waiting for customers. In the shade of the tall acacias, women sat on their reed mats. They had piled up little pyramids of fruit, vegetables and cassava roots, which they sold. Around them crawled their children. Whenever any of the women fell asleep in the heat, one of the other women would at once take on the supervision of her child. Usually they sat in silence, occasionally they would sing, now and then they would get into a violent argument, which ended as quickly as it had begun. Nelio couldn't make out everything they said; their language was not like his own. But from the contemptuous comments of the old men, Nelio understood that the women were true to their nature and were arguing about everything that was of little consequence. The old men then began arguing with each other over this, about what could be considered of value in life.

  On the other side of the plaza there was a small church where a black-clad priest would from time to time peer out of the gate, as if he expected the church to receive an unannounced visit from restless souls in need of consolation. But no one came, and he would slam the gate shut, only to peer out again a little while later. The priest was a white man, bearded but with no hair at all on his head.

  People lived in the other buildings surrounding the plaza, lots of people. Washed clothes hung everywhere; children screamed and played on the pavements. Whenever they got too loud, the old men would shake their fists at them, but the children hardly took any notice. Several times Nelio felt a burning desire to run over to them and take part in their games. But he knew that he could no longer do that. When he arrived in the city he left his childhood, his actual age, behind, like an invisible shell on the beach where he slept on the last night before he was swallowed up by the streets. The fact that he was sitting in the shadow of the equestrian statue alongside the old men was a sign of the great transformation that had occurred on the night the bandits burned his village down. Here in the open plaza Nelio felt for the first time that he could master the anxiety that filled him. It was as if he had found a village in the middle of the city.

  That same evening he also found his home. One by one the old men had stood up and vanished into the darkness, heading towards the hovels where they spent their nights. The sun had set, the Indian shopkeepers had been reluctantly, almost remorsefully, forced to acknowledge that the last customers had gone, and they locked their doors, pulling the heavy wrought-iron gratings into place. In their stead appeared the black nightwatchmen, dressed in long ragged robes, who unpacked their blankets and greasy chicken legs. They lit their fires and began to make tea. Not until the Indian shopkeepers had left in their cars did they eat and then settle down to sleep. The children stopped playing, called inside by their mothers. The washing was taken down, and the smell of curry and piri-piri blended with the wind from the Indian Ocean. At last Nelio was all alone at the base of the statue. He had eaten a piece of chicken, which he bought from a man whose stove was an old, coal-fired oil drum. Nelio didn't want to leave the place he had found when he was fleeing from Senhor Castigo, and he thought about the fact that only in flight did you discover the world's secrets, which otherwise remained hidden.

  In the twilight, he suddenly discovered a hatch under the belly of the horse next to the raised foreleg. When he pulled on the rusty handle, the hatch opened, and he saw that the horse had no entrails; there was only an empty space. He climbed up inside the horse. Faint rays of light, as if from the stars, shone in through the horse's nostrils and the eyeholes of the helmeted swordsman. Nelio knew that he had found a home. The statue was so big that he could stand up straight inside. He felt a great joy at discovering this home. Above his head there would always be a man with a drawn sword to keep watch over him. Inside the horse his dreams could safely roam. Here he could become a grown-up, find a wife and watch his children grow. He was filled with thoughts that night. His anxiety gradually receded. When at last he fell asleep, his head was resting on the left hind leg of the horse, and the bent knee formed a pillow for his head.

  Nelio woke at dawn to the sound of a man laughing like a lunatic outside his statue. When he crept out of the hatch under the horse's belly, he saw that it was the black-clad priest, who was restlessly pacing back and forth near the gate outside the little church. He was flailing his arms and carrying on a mumbled conversation as if he were not alone but had an unseen companion at his side. He argued, threw his arms about in anger, and every so often he broke into maniacal laughter. Nelio thought he was arguing with evil spirits or lost souls that had assembled outside his church in the night. But later, when the old men had taken up their places again in the shade at the base of the statue, he learned that the old priest, whose name was Manuel Oliveira, had many years before lost his mind. When the young revolutionaries had seized power and marched into the city, the priest was struck by madness, whether from terror or from anger, no one could say for sure. He had preached such damning sermons against the young revolutionaries in his church that eventually none of his old parishioners dared to attend his masses, for fear that they would be seized by the security police, which the revolutionaries had immediately created and granted wide-ranging authority. The security police were supposed to watch for and arrest those who thought differently, particularly those who thought of the former colonial era as the good old days.

  But Manuel Oliveira had continued to preach his sermons, although he was speaking to empty pews. Occasionally someone from the security police would attend one of his lengthy masses, whereupon Manuel, roused by having someone to preach to, would increase the intensity of his violent attacks. At first the authorities had shown tolerance towards the old priest, a victim of age and insanity. They had contented themselves with issuing a general prohibition against attending the church, and they allowed him to preach to an empty room. But when the priest began to preach out of doors, standing by the church gate on a wooden box, they had had enough. Manuel Oliveira was sent to a correction camp for those who thought differently in the remote northern provinces. The authorities also threatened to shoot him on the steps of his church if he didn't stop his wild ranting against the new regime. Nothing helped. At last he was allowed to return to his church. They thought that eventually he would grow tired, and he did. Now he spent his days in silence inside the church, waiting in vain for his God to explain to him why his church was empty and what had happened. Only in the early-morning hours would vague remnants of his former insanity return. For the nightwatchmen, it was the daily signal for them to wake up in anticipation of the return of the Indian shopkeepers. They would confirm that everything was peaceful, and that they hadn't slept but had resolutely kept watch all night long. Later, at about the same time that Manuel Oliveira disappeared into the silence of his
empty church, the nightwatchmen would pack up their blankets and hurry off to the jobs they had during the daytime. All of this the old men told to Nelio, and no one seemed to have any inkling that he had found a home inside the statue which protected them from the sun. Nelio saw that one of the women from a building next to the church placed a plate of food outside the church gate, and it occurred to him again that this place was like his home in the village which the bandits had burned.

  In the days that followed, Nelio learned to survive in the city by keeping his eyes open. By chance he caught a glimpse of Senhor Castigo, very drunk, his suit stained and tattered. Nelio no longer feared him.

  He spent much of his time watching the children his own age who lived on the streets. From a distance he observed their labours: washing cars, begging, selling and stealing whatever they could find. He saw how the older boys ruled the younger ones, and he thought that it was among them that he belonged. During his wanderings through the city he also came upon a neighbourhood that was especially quiet, where the streets were not full of rubbish or potholes. Big white houses without cracks were nestled in wide expanses of garden, hidden behind tall wrought-iron fences. There were children there too, the same age as he was. But he quickly discovered that they didn't see him; their eyes looked right through him. It was among the other children that he belonged – among those who, like himself, were living in order to survive.