The Wind That Lays Waste

by Selva Almada

  “It isn’t enough to be good in this world, José. We have to use our goodness to serve Christ. Only he can keep us from evil. If we welcome Christ into our hearts, we will never be alone again. Maybe you don’t know this because nobody has told you yet, but dark days are coming … bad days, I mean, terrible days, like you can’t imagine. Although Christ’s power is infinite, the Devil is very strong too. Not as strong as Jesus, praise him … but the Devil does battle day and night. That’s why we have to join Christ’s ranks, José. To build up a big, strong army, to banish the Devil from this world for good. The final war is coming, José. On the day when the archangels sound their clarions, only those who have given themselves to Christ will be able to hear. On the Day of Judgment, those who hear the clarions will be saved; they will enter the Kingdom of Heaven.”

  Tapioca listened attentively. His eyes had stopped trying to slip away from the Reverend’s gaze; they were fixed on him now. He was still afraid. But not of the Reverend, who was coming to seem like a friend or something more: a father, a guide. He was afraid of what the Reverend was talking about. He was afraid of not being ready when all those terrible things began to happen. The Gringo can’t have known about it, or he would have told him already. Up to that moment, Brauer had been the wisest person Tapioca knew. But there was clearly a limit to the wisdom of his boss.

  “And the Gringo?” he asked.

  “What will happen to Mr. Brauer?”

  “Is he going to go with us, where you said, to heaven?”

  “Of course. Mr. Brauer will enter the Kingdom of the Just along with you, José. If you join Christ’s Army, you’ll be able to take along all the people in your heart. Mr. Brauer looked after you when you were a child and you couldn’t take care of yourself. He fed you, he cared for you when you were sick, he taught you lots of things, didn’t he?”

  Tapioca nodded.

  “Good. Now you’re the one who’s going to look after him and show him how to love Jesus. That’s the most beautiful gift you can give Mr. Brauer.”

  Tapioca smiled. The fear was still there like a weasel in its burrow; he could see the little eyes shining in the darkness. But he was also beginning to feel something new, a kind of fire in his gut that was filling him with courage. And yet something was still bothering him.

  “And the dogs? Can I take them too?”

  Pearson almost laughed, but he controlled himself.

  “Of course. The Kingdom of Heaven is a big place, and Christ loves animals.

  The dogs can come too. Of course! Why not?”

  The Reverend opened his mouth and breathed in. His mouth was dry.

  “Could you bring me a glass of water, José?”

  Sometimes, much to his regret, he felt that it was hopeless, that whatever he did, he and others like him, they would always arrive too late: the Devil was always a step ahead. A step ahead of Christ himself, he sometimes thought, God forgive him. Finding a boy like Tapioca filled him with faith and hope. A pure soul. Still a little rough around the edges, admittedly, but that’s what the Reverend was there for. He would sculpt that soul with Christ’s chisels and turn it into a beautiful work to offer up to God.

  Thinking about it gave him strength and reaffirmed his purpose. Once again, he felt that he was an arrow burning with the flame of Christ. And the bow that is drawn to shoot that arrow as far as possible, straight to the spot where the flame will ignite a raging fire. And the wind that spreads the fire that will lay waste to the world with the love of Jesus.

  9

  Drinking the water, the Reverend remembered going down the bluff as a child, holding his mother’s hand. She strode ahead, pulling hard on his little arm. The slope was steep and he had to dig his heels in among the weed-covered clods to stop himself from falling. They were both out of breath from the walk.

  His mother’s skirt moved in front of him like a curtain revealing and hiding the landscape as the cloth blew about in the wind.

  He didn’t know where they were going, but before they set out, his mother had told him that it would be a day to remember. She dressed him in his best clothes and took care with hers as well. They left the house after lunch and took the bus to the center of town. There they caught another bus with a sign on the front saying Beach. They were the only passengers who went all the way to the end. The driver switched off the engine on a dirt road at the top of the bluff and pointed the way down to the shore.

  What looked like a dark blotch from up there, or perhaps an uneven patch of ground, turned out to be, as they came closer, a small multitude. A hundred people standing, facing the river, and singing. Now that they were almost down on the beach, they could hear the song, carried by the wind. It wasn’t a song the child had heard before, on the radio or anywhere else. It seemed fairly cheerful, but as they approached, a feeling of deep sadness overtook him. Perhaps because of the overcast sky, and the trash that people had dropped and the river had gathered and dumped on that beach, where the local authorities left it to rot. Perhaps he had hoped that his mother was taking him somewhere else, to the movies or an amusement park.

  They stopped to catch their breath, and his mother let go of his hand to tidy up her bun. Then she combed his hair with her fingers, smoothed down his clothes, and tied one of his shoelaces.

  “Come on,” she said, and took his hand again. She pushed her way through the crowd. People frowned at her while continuing to sing, but she kept going as if she hadn’t noticed. She moved her mouth as if singing or apologizing, although she was doing neither.

  They made their way to the front row, where the beach was mud and slime. He could feel his shoes sinking into the sogginess. His best shoes. He looked anxiously at his mother. But she was ignoring him. Like the others, she was watching the dark river ruffled by the wind.

  Why were they there with that bunch of singing weirdos, instead of on the square, dipping their fingers in cotton candy, filling their mouths with sickly sweet foam?

  What was so interesting about all that water?

  Then the unexpected happened. The song stopped. A man’s head emerged, long hair plastered to his skull. He broke the surface of the river and rose up, torso bare and arms outstretched. He began to walk toward the shore, a gentle wake lapping about his ankles.

  Someone, a man or a woman, the boy couldn’t tell, began to chant in the most beautiful voice he had ever heard.

  Without a second thought, his mother grabbed him under the arms and threw him to the river man, who caught him in an icy, wet embrace.

  Whenever he remembers that day, which was to determine the rest of his life, the Reverend is overcome by emotion. Whenever he feels himself weakening, he summons that memory: the day of his baptism, the afternoon when the river man plunged him in the filthy waters of the Paraná to lift him out again, purified, and give him back into God’s care. Thinking about it strengthens him, reaffirms his sense of mission.

  He once asked his mother why she had taken him to the river that afternoon. She had never been a believer.

  “I just thought I would,” she told him. “I heard on the radio that the Preacher was coming, and I thought I’d go and see what it was about. Just out of curiosity. There’d been so much talk about him, all week. I don’t know why I thought he could help us. And when I got there and saw all those people, I thought: We have to be in the front row.” His mother laughed as if remembering a prank. “And when we were in the front row, I thought: He has to hold the boy. I knew that if the Preacher took you in his arms, if I could just get his attention, something good was bound to come of it.”

  His mother bent over her needlework again. That was when he was twenty years old and starting to build up a reputation. She no longer had to work to pay the bills. A few years earlier they had left Paraná and gone to live in Rosario, where they were fed and housed by the church. Her son was a young pastor with a bright future. All through the region people were starting to recognize his talent for preaching.

  She went on doing embroi
dery because it was something she enjoyed, and out of habit, to keep herself busy. Even when the Preacher had taken them in and given them his protection, she showed no interest in religion. For her, it was as if her son had become a doctor or a lawyer. As if she had given him a university education, or set him up in a profession that provided a decent living.

  He was grateful to his mother for having thrown him into the Preacher’s arms, and into the new life that was opening before him. But deep down he found her indifference galling.

  Every time he came down from the pulpit, she was the first to rush up and hug him.

  “You really knocked them out,” she would say with a wink.

  She thought he was putting it on; she regarded her son as a consummate con man: thanks to his rare gift for eloquence, they would always have food on the table and a roof over their heads.

  And she was not the only one who had a stake in his gift. His superiors, even the Preacher himself—he soon came to realize—also believed that they had found the goose that laid the golden eggs. With every word that came out of his mouth, coins rained into the coffers of the temple.

  “You have surpassed your master,” the Preacher used to say to him.

  By then, the thin man with feverish eyes who had risen from the river was long gone. He had grown fat and lost his hair; he no longer stood in the mud; and it had been many years since he had plunged faithless bodies into the water and lifted them out again, unharmed, their lungs pumped full of Christ’s glory.

  Give your best to God: that was the sentence he heard, repeated like a psalm, as the assistants moved among the faithful, holding tins for the collection. Give your best to God, and the coins poured down like a rain of toads. Give your best to God, and the notes glided silently into the tins.

  Give your best to God and You really knocked them out resounded in his head as he tried to recover, sweaty and still buzzing, in a corner of the temple.

  He couldn’t tell his mother how uncomfortable he felt, since she had been the first to misinterpret his intentions. So when she died, not long after the conversation about his baptism, he felt a great relief, God forgive him.

  His mother left this world content. Although her life had been full of frustrations—scared that she would be left on the shelf, she had yielded to the charms of an American adventurer and married him only to be abandoned while she was still pregnant—her son at least was in clover, as she liked to say, congratulating herself on having secured his future, thanks to the brilliant idea that had come to her one fine day as she sat peering at her needlework and listening to the radio.

  Pearson fervently believed in every word that came out of his mouth. He believed because those words were grounded in Jesus Christ. He was the doll through which the great ventriloquist of the universe spoke.

  It never mattered to the Reverend whether his stage was in a city temple—an old cinema, for example, with boxes, re-upholstered seats, a carpeted floor, and a red curtain that opened only when he was in place behind it—or a storehouse with whitewashed walls to keep the vermin out, a tin roof, and folding wooden chairs bought at a farm clearance sale. Given a choice, he always preferred a simple venue, without any special facilities: no air-conditioning, no sound system, no blinding lights.

  He rarely visited the big cities. He preferred the dusty roads abandoned by the Highway Authority, and the people abandoned by the government, like the recovered alcoholics who, thanks to the word of Christ, had become pastors in small communities: men who worked in construction, and went door to door in the evenings selling Bibles and religious magazines, and stood up on Sundays at the front of the hall, without the strength that drink used to give them, and spoke, with a certain awkwardness, perhaps, but fueled and sustained by Christ.

  10

  Leni woke up dazed. It took her a moment to remember where she was, and how she had ended up under that tree. She was all sweaty, and her body was stiff from sitting on the hard ground and leaning against that rough trunk. Like a cat, she wiped her face with her hands to remove the sleep from her eyes, and yawned. She saw her father on the porch, talking with Tapioca. She smiled. Reverend Pearson wouldn’t give up until he had converted that boy.

  She turned her head. Off in the distance, oblivious to his customer’s evangelical designs, Gringo Brauer was working on the car.

  Leni had conflicting feelings: she admired the Reverend deeply but disapproved of almost everything her father did. As if he were two different people. Earlier, she had told him to leave Tapioca alone, but if she had joined them on the porch now, she too would have been captivated by his words.

  Before the Reverend walks onto the stage to deliver a sermon, Leni always shines his shoes until they gleam. She brushes his suit, adjusts his black silk tie and the white handkerchief that peeps from his breast pocket like the ears of a little rabbit. She takes his glasses and puts them away in the case. The Reverend never wears glasses when he is addressing a congregation. His face must be bare; nothing must come between his eyes and those of the faithful. Pale as a mountain river, those eyes are part of his magnetism. Eyes that in the course of a sermon can mist over, darken, or flicker and burn.

  She takes a step back to check his overall appearance. If everything is in order, she smiles and gives him a thumbs-up.

  Although she has seen it over and over, for as long as she can remember, every time the Reverend walks onstage, Leni feels the same vibration in her body. Something wonderful is happening. Something she can’t explain in words.

  Sometimes she can’t help herself: she can’t stay there in the wings, where she should be in case he needs her; she has to go and join the faithful.

  She wonders if one day the Reverend will take her by the wrist and lead her up to the front, if he will bite her chest and tear out the black thing once and for all, the thing she can feel inside her at night, when she lies on the hotel bed, or during the day, in the car, when she’s traveling with her father.

  Leni stood up and lifted her arms, stretching them skyward to decompress her spine. Removing the barrette, she shook out her brown hair and combed it with her fingers, then drew it back into a ponytail. She took out the earphone and switched off the radio.

  It had taken months to convince her father to buy her that little portable player. She promised him that she would listen to Christian music, nothing else, and she always kept a cassette in it, just in case. But the only time the little wheels turned was when her father remembered to check. She used the Walkman to listen to FM radio. Music programs with people writing or calling in to request songs and send messages. Once, for the worldly pleasure of being on the radio, she snuck away to a telephone booth and called in to one of those programs. They took her message and broadcast it. But it turned out that they didn’t have her song. They apologized: Hey, sorry, Leni, we don’t have it, but you’re going to love this one. What they played was nothing like her request, but that didn’t matter. The fun was in having called, and knowing that her name had traveled on the airwaves, within a four-mile radius of that local radio station, which no doubt operated out of somebody’s kitchen.

  She decided to go for a walk to blow away the cobwebs. She set off in the opposite direction from the little house and the pile of scrap metal.

  The landscape was desolate: every so often a twisted black tree, with sparse leaves and a bird on a branch, so motionless it might have been stuffed.

  She walked until she came to the edge of the property, marked by a sagging wire fence. Beyond was a cotton field. It wasn’t yet harvest time, but the plants, with their rough, dark leaves, were showing their bolls. Some were already ripe and splitting, with bits of white fluff coming out. In a few weeks, the crop would be harvested and sent to the gins. There the fiber would be separated from the seed and packed into bales to be sold.

  Leni touched her sweaty shirt. She remembered her father once saying that her grandmother had been an embroiderer. She had nimble fingers, he had said. A vaguely nostalgic thought crossed
Leni’s mind: the cloth her grandmother had embroidered and the shirt she was wearing now had both originated in the solitude of a cotton field like that.

  11

  “Where were you, kid?” asked Brauer, wiping his hands on a rag.

  “Over there. Talking with the man.”

  “Since when are you such a big talker?”

  Tapioca turned away and pursed his lips.

  “You want to tell me what you were talking about?”

  “Jesus Christ.”

  “Jesus Christ. How about that?”

  “Yes, the man, he was telling me all this stuff I didn’t know,” Tapioca replied enthusiastically.

  “About Jesus Christ?”

  “And the end of the world. If you could see what it’s going to be like …”

  “And what’s it going to be like?” asked the Gringo, taking a cigarette from the pack and putting it in his mouth.

  “Terrible. Really terrible.”

  Tapioca shook his head as if trying to dislodge the dark thoughts that were filling it. Brauer lit his cigarette and blew out a jet of smoke.

  The boy looked up, smiling.

  “But we’ll go to the Kingdom of Heaven because we’re good.”

  “Ah, well, that’s reassuring,” said the Gringo ironically, although his assistant’s religious fervor was beginning to disturb him.

  “Us and the dogs. Because Christ likes dogs too. And … and …”

  “That’s enough, kid. Listen to me. We can talk about going to heaven later. You’ve got to help me here now. It’s worse than I thought. Go and make some maté and bring it over. The man can entertain himself. I need you to come back and give me a hand, okay?”

  Tapioca said yes, turned around, and headed for the house.

  “Don’t let the water boil and wash out my maté, eh?” the Gringo called after him.

  He leaned against the car and finished his cigarette, inhaling deeply. He had no time for lofty thoughts. Religion was for women and the weak. Good and evil were everyday things, things in the world you could reach out and touch. Religion, in his view, was just a way of ignoring responsibilities. Hiding behind God, waiting to be saved, or blaming the Devil for the bad things you do.