I had just finished eating and pushed my plate aside when Albano, who is big and fat and always stinks of home-made aftershave, sat down on the bench across from me, wiping the sweat from his brow with his grubby apron.
'The police have been here,' he said.
I held my breath. 'Why is that?'
Albano threw out his hands. 'Why do the police ever come?' he said. 'To ask questions, to snoop around, to kill time.'
I knew what he meant. Nobody had any faith in the police. They rarely solved a crime; their percentage of solved cases must have been almost zero. On the other hand, they eagerly accepted bribes, and everyone knew that they often allied themselves with thieves and took a share of the impounded goods before regretfully informing the robbery victims that, unfortunately, nothing had been recovered.
'Questions about what?' I said.
'Somebody heard shots in the night,' Albano said. 'Coming from here. From the bakery or the theatre. Did you hear anything?'
Albano is a friend. I like him, and not just because of the food he cooks. I could have told him the truth. I would have been grateful for somebody to share Nelio with. But I said nothing. I'm still not sure why. But I think it was because I sensed that Nelio wouldn't have wanted me to. When I carried him up to the roof, he talked about the silence and the peace, and I took that to mean that he wanted to be alone with his pain and those thoughts that only he knew.
'No, nothing,' I said. 'If anyone had fired a shot, I would have heard it.'
'That's what we told them, too,' Albano said.
'Did they believe you?'
'Who knows what the police believe? And who cares, anyway?'
To change the subject, I asked him to pack up a little of the leftover rice and vegetables in a piece of newspaper, so I would have something to eat during the night. I didn't know whether Nelio would be able to eat anything, but I thought that rice and vegetables would be better than bread. Albano did as I asked, and I left the bakery as the girls who sold bread were mopping the floor and wiping the shelves while the last customers bought the remaining loaves. I got things ready for the night and spoke to Julio, the boy who was my dough mixer, telling him how much flour to bring from the storeroom. Several hours later we were alone, and just before midnight Julio went home. I did the first baking. After I had put the baking pans into the ovens, I hurried up the winding staircase to the roof. Nelio was awake when I arrived.
It was on the second night that he began to tell his story.
Somewhere down on the street, behind a dilapidated building right next to the theatre, a woman was standing outside in the dark, pounding corn for the next day. As she pounded the grain with a heavy wooden pole, she sang. I sat next to Nelio, and we listened to her song and the sound of the pole, thudding regularly and tirelessly like a heart.
'Whenever I hear a pole pounding corn, I think about my mother,' Nelio said, and his voice sounded unexpectedly strong. 'I think about her and I wonder whether she's still alive.'
Then he told me about where he grew up and the gruesome events that had cast him out into a world he knew nothing about. He told me about the first time he ever saw the ocean, and about how he finally came to the city. He didn't tell me everything straight through. Now and then he would grow too tired, the fever would return, and he would sink down into darkness. But he always came back. It was as if he dived into the sea and vanished, eventually coming up to the surface again, but in a completely different place.
Just before dawn he managed to eat the rice and vegetables I had brought from Albano. Each time he lapsed into the fever I would go back to the ovens. Nelio seemed to have an agreement with the fire, because his periods of silence and fever always came when I needed to take out the baked bread and put new pans into the ovens.
That night he started telling me about his life – although I didn't yet realise how his story was going to change my own life.
He grew up in a village far beyond the great plains, in a long valley right below the high mountains which mark the border to the regions where the people speak different and to us incomprehensible languages, and where they also have strange customs. The village was not a big one. The huts were built of sun-dried clay with a pole in the middle to hold up the roof, which was made from woven reeds gathered in the river nearby, where crocodiles lurked below the surface and hippos bellowed in the night. He grew up with many brothers and sisters, with his mother Solange and his father Hermenegildo. That was a happy time; he couldn't remember that he ever had to go hungry to the mat where he slept at night and shared his blanket with several of his siblings. They always had corn or sorghum, and with his brothers and sisters he had learned where the bees hid their honey.
His father was gone for long periods of time. Nelio knew that Hermenegildo worked in the mines in a country far away, but he didn't know what mines were except that they were hollow pits stretching deep into the earth. Inside were glittering stones that white people paid his father to bring up. When he came home, he brought them presents and he always bought himself a new hat. For Nelio, his father's hat was the first sign that a world outside existed in which everything was different. He tried to imagine that he would some day experience the amazing moment of putting a hat on his head, a hat with a wide brim and a leather sweatband inside the crown.
His earliest memory was of his father lifting him high into the air to let him greet the sun. Whenever Hermenegildo was home, time would stand still and the world was complete. After he had set off again on one of the paths that wound along the river, off towards the high mountains where there was a road and maybe even a bus that would take him back to the mines, life would revert to the way it was before. So Nelio remembered his first years using two different measurements of time: a time and a life when his father was home, and an entirely different time when he was alone with his mother and siblings. When Nelio was five years old, he began tending the goats with the other boys; he had learned to shoot birds with a slingshot and to handle the complex stick-fighting duels that all boys in the village had to master. One time a leopard had appeared near the village, another time a lion was heard roaring in the distance. Every morning he woke to the sound of his mother standing outside the hut pounding corn with a pole that was so heavy he couldn't lift it. And she would sing as if she were taking strength from the tones that issued from her throat.
The catastrophe came like an invisible predator in the night.
He was asleep. It was during the hottest season of the year, and he could still remember that he was lying naked on his reed mat. He had thrown off the blanket, his body was wet with sweat, and his dreams were uneasy from the stifling heat.
Suddenly the world exploded. A sharp white light yanked him awake; someone screamed – maybe it was one of his siblings, maybe his mother. In the desperate chaos that erupted he was trampled underfoot. He still didn't understand what was happening and he couldn't find his trousers. He was flung naked into the catastrophe, and at last he realised that it was bandits who had come sneaking up in the dark; they had come to burn and pillage and kill. The attack kept on into the dawn, but the huts burned with such a powerful glare that no one noticed the sun coming up. Suddenly it was simply there. By then the village had been burned to the ground and many people had been killed – slashed by machetes, stabbed by sharpened steel pipes or smashed by wooden clubs.
Afterwards it was so quiet. Nelio still couldn't find his trousers, and he was squatting behind a basket where his mother had stored the corn they had harvested several weeks before. The scorched stench of the burned huts was overpowering; it was a smell he would never forget. That's the way the world smelled when it came to an end in smoke and fire and chaos. That was the stench that came when people were hurled out of their dreams to meet death. It arrived with the ragged bandits, drunk on tontonto, drugged with soruma. It was very quiet. The bandits had herded together those still alive – maybe half of the villagers, men, women and children – in the open area in the middle of
the huts where they would dance and drum whenever they had celebrations.
Nelio fell silent, as if the words had become too difficult for him. Then he looked at me and continued his story.
'It felt as if the spirits of our ancestors had gathered there too; they hovered uneasily, as if they had been chased as brutally as we were out of their invisible resting places. I stayed squatting behind the woven basket. I understood what was happening, but I was still more afraid of being caught without my trousers if one of the bandits suddenly noticed me and dragged me into the open. I tried to make myself invisible, using my terror as my cloak, and waited to see what would happen. There were maybe fifteen bandits. I didn't know how to count in those days. But there were about twice as many bandits as the goats in one of the flocks that I watched, which usually had seven or eight. The bandits were filthy and dressed in worse clothes than the ones we wore. Some of them had heavy military boots with no laces; the others were barefoot. Some of them had guns and cartridge belts; others carried long knives, axes, machetes and clubs. They were young, some of them not much older than me, and the youngest ones stood in the background, holding their weapons tight. But even the young ones had blood on their clothes; their faces were bloody too, and their hands and feet.
'There was a leader, a man who was older than the others, and he was the only one wearing a uniform jacket, which was stained, and a torn cap. When he opened his mouth I could see that he was missing a lot of teeth, maybe he had no teeth at all. He was drunk like the others, but he seemed to be drunk with the power he had over us in the village, now that all our houses had been burned, many were already dead, and those still alive were filled with terror. From time to time he would swat at the air, as if the restless spirits were bothering him. Then he began to talk, in a shrill voice, almost like one of the birds that would hover above the river where the women went to get water. He spoke the same language that we did, although he had a slight accent, which told me that he came from a region closer to the high mountains. He said they had come to liberate us. They had come to liberate us from the party and the government that now ruled us, the young revolutionaries' party. If we refused to be liberated, he would kill us all.
'They had burned our village and killed many people to show us they were serious in their struggle to liberate us and to help us have a better life. Now they wanted food and they would need help in transporting it from the village. I thought in panic about the basket that I was hiding behind. That was where the corn was. When they lifted the basket, they would find me. I tried to make myself even more invisible. With tears in my eyes, I started burrowing at the sand, as if I still had time to make a hole I could disappear into. At the same time I tried to see my father among those who had been herded like cattle in the open area, in the celebration area which was now like a graveyard, encircled by the ragged men with their bleary eyes and all those bloody weapons. I didn't see him, and I thought that he might be hiding, the same way I was, maybe behind one of the burned huts. The man who was the leader of the bandits was still talking. He said they had not only come to liberate us, but some of us would also have the opportunity to accompany them on their continuing journey, to other villages that would be liberated too. At those words, all of the people who stood anxiously huddled together began to moan and cry.
'That was when I saw my mother. She was squeezed in with the other women. On her back she was carrying my sister, who had been born a few weeks before. Her face, normally so beautiful, was contorted with the same fear as was in the faces of the other women. Her eyes were searching frantically for something that she couldn't find. I realised that it was me she was looking for. At that moment I understood, beyond anything I had ever before experienced, what it means to have a mother, and I knew I was going to lose her, just as I might have already lost my father.
'The bandits suddenly grew restless. They started lashing out, kicking aside the old men and women, hitting some of the boys who were older than me across the back of the neck and screaming at them to round up the goats. Then they began lining everyone up in a long row; their fear and moaning increased, and I had started to cry too, even though I didn't notice it at first. Several of the young women were shoved off to the side; they tore at their clothes when they saw that they were going to be forced to accompany the bandits as prisoners when they left the village.
'At that moment something horrifying happened. One of the men who saw his wife being led away was brave enough to step out of line and say that he would not allow them to take his woman. I saw who it was: Alfredo, my father's cousin, a skilled fisherman who never said an unkind word about anyone. Now he showed a courage he didn't even know he possessed, stepping out of the line as if he had stepped out of another life and taking a stand to protect his panic-stricken wife. At that moment he was defending us all, not just his own honour or his wife's. It was as if he were attacking everyone's terror with his action. The leader of the bandits stared at him, uncomprehending. Then he gave an order to one of the youngest boys who was with him. Without hesitation the boy, who was maybe thirteen, stepped forward and chopped off Alfredo's head with an axe. His head tumbled into the sand, colouring it red, and his body toppled, blood gushing from his neck. It was all so fast that at first nobody took in what had happened.
'In the midst of the silence, the boy started laughing. He wiped his axe on his jacket. And he laughed. That was when I knew that he was scared too. An invisible axe rested at all times against the back of his own neck.
'A loud howling and moaning rose up from the horrified people who were my friends, my neighbours, my relatives. I saw my mother press her hands to her eyes, and I hated myself for being so little, for being so scared, and for not being able to help her. The bandits themselves were now growing uneasy, screaming and striking out at everyone around them. They scooped up whatever food they could find, but for some reason they didn't see the basket of corn that I was hiding behind. And then they started taking away some of the younger women. To my horror I saw that they had also begun tugging at my mother; she was still young and they wanted to take her too. She screamed and called my father's name. They struck her, but she kept on resisting.
'That's when I could no longer stay hidden behind the basket of corn. I was still not wearing any trousers. But I saw how they were trying to take my mother away from me, and that was something I could not let happen. I stood up, dashed naked across the sandy space where Alfredo's head was already covered by a swarm of green flies, and took a firm grip on my mother's capulana. The leader of the bandits, who seemed to take a special interest in my mother, looked at me in surprise. He saw that I was her son. Everyone used to say that we looked so much alike. He grabbed my little sister from my mother's back where she had been tied on in the same way I had once been. He went over to a big mortar that the women used to pound corn and stuffed my sister inside. Then he lifted up the heavy pole and handed it to my mother.
'"Tm hungry," he said. "Crush the corn and what's in the mortar so we can have some food."
'My mother tried to move towards the mortar. She screamed and fought, but he held her off. Finally he hit her and she fell to the ground, and then he grabbed me by one arm.
'"You have to choose," he shouted at my mother. When he yelled, his voice had a strange hissing sound, almost like an animal, because he didn't have any teeth in his mouth.
'"I'm going to chop off this chicken's head," he said. "I'm going to chop off his head if I don't get some food."
'My mother lay on the ground screaming. She tried to crawl over to the mortar that my sister was stuffed into. I could feel myself peeing from fear; the evil that was holding on to me was so big and so incomprehensible that I wanted to die. I wanted to die, I wanted my mother to die, and I wanted my sister to live. Someone would lift her up and tie her to their back. One of my aunts, who was also mother to my sister, would lead her back to life. No one should have to die crushed by a pole in a corn mortar. Such a sacrifice could not be worthy of d
eath.
'Suddenly the man with no teeth seemed to give up. He shouted a few brusque orders to his waiting men. They began herding together the goats and the women and the half-grown boys, who carried on their heads the food the bandits had found in the village. They also dragged along me and my mother, who at the last moment tried to tear herself away to get my sister, who had started to cry down in the mortar.
Chronicler Of The Winds Page 5