'No,' Nascimento said.
Nelio could hear that he was lying. But there was nothing he could do if Nascimento decided to leave.
It took a long time before Nelio began to understand what had driven Deolinda to the streets. Whenever he asked her about it, she would only snarl that it was nobody's business. It wasn't until Nelio opened her raffia bag while she was asleep and found inside a photograph of a man and a woman that he began to have some inkling of what some of the reasons might be. The man's face had been obliterated. The facial features had been scraped away with a nail or a stone. Nelio put the photograph back, ashamed that he had looked in her bag. No one should ever be forced to reveal a secret; and no one had the right to obtain information by stealth to satisfy his curiosity.
Nelio recalled something his mother had once said: No one is allowed to break his way into another's person's heart like a thief in the night.
Nelio soon noticed that Deolinda and Mandioca had become friends. They often squatted on the street, whispering to each other until they burst into laughter. If Nascimento was nearby he would angrily prowl around them without daring to interrupt their camaraderie. But they didn't seem to pay any attention to him.
One evening when Nelio was on his way home to his statue, he noticed that Deolinda was following him. His first thought was to stop and tell her to go back to the others. Then he realised that he might have a chance to find out what had driven her on to the streets. When he reached the small plaza, which was now deserted except for the sleeping nightwatchmen and the man who sold chicken thighs from his coal-fired drum, Nelio sat down at the foot of the statue. Deolinda had stopped at the street corner and was trying to hide in the shadows. But he called out that he had seen her. He thought she might be embarrassed at being caught.
'Who gave you permission to follow me?'
'I wanted to see where you live,' she replied, looking him straight in the eye.
'You can follow me for the rest of your life, but you'll never find out where I live.'
'Why not?'
'Because I just disappear.'
'I'd like to see that.'
Nelio nodded. 'If I manage to disappear without you noticing, what will you give me in return?'
She took a step back. 'I won't do xogo-xogo.'
Nelio was embarrassed. He knew what xogo-xogo was, but he had never done it. He knew that he wasn't old enough yet even to want to do it. 'I just want to know where you're from. Nothing else.'
'Why do you want to know that?'
'You can't go on being part of the group if I don't know where you're from. What did you do on the day before you sat down in my place in the shade of the tree? Why did you sit there? I have lots of questions.'
She was thinking about this. Then she nodded. 'You won't be able to disappear without me noticing. So I agree to answer your questions.'
'Turn round and close your eyes. Cover your ears. Count to ten. Can you count?'
'I can do everything. I can count and read and write.'
'Where did you learn all that?'
She didn't answer.
'Turn round,' he repeated. 'Close your eyes and count out loud to ten. And cover your ears too. If you cheat, you'll be struck blind.'
Nelio saw that she shuddered. She had heard about his supernatural powers.
She turned, shut her eyes and started counting. Nelio opened the hatch and quickly crawled inside the horse. He could see her through a hole next to the horse's mane. She finished counting and turned round. The plaza was deserted, there was no place he could have hidden, and he wouldn't have had time to run to the corner and disappear.
Nelio tried to decipher Deolinda's thoughts from her expression. She was confronted with something she hadn't expected.
Then she walked away. Nelio waited until he was sure that she had left the plaza. Then he crept out of the hatch and dashed through the night-empty streets, taking the shortest route he knew, until he was back at the Ministry of Justice building where the rest of the group was already asleep. He sat near his tree and waited. When he saw Deolinda coming, Nelio stood up and walked towards her. She gave a start when she caught sight of him.
'I disappeared and I came back,' he said. Then he stretched out his hand to her. 'Touch my hand. It's warm. I'm not a shadow or a phantom standing here.'
She touched his hand with her fingertips.
'People sleep too much,' Nelio said. 'Let's use the night to talk.'
He took her to the botanical gardens, up on the hill near the hospital. The gates were locked with heavy chains and padlocks, but Nelio knew of a hole in the fence. That's where they crawled through, and he led Deolinda over to a bench that was still sturdy enough to sit on. Next to the botanical gardens was a hotel, and its sign lit up the area around the bench.
Deolinda's face was stark white.
Nelio looked at her ragged dress and thought that soon they would have to get some money together so that she could buy a new one.
He didn't have to ask a single question. She started talking about her life of her own accord. He sensed that it was a relief for her, and he listened attentively.
She was born in one of the poorest suburbs of the city; a collection of shacks and hovels surrounding the city's swamplike rubbish dump. She was born and she was albino. Her father refused to look at her. He accused her mother of conceiving the child with a dead man that she had secretly met in a cemetery at night. Then he had chased her out of his house. Deolinda later learned that this was the time of her mothers greatest despair. But she would never have killed her daughter, she would never have strangled her and buried her in the rubbish so that she could return to her husband. She took her daughter to a town that was many days' walk from the city. There she had a sister, and there they would be able to live. Her three other children remained with their father, and she grieved for them so fiercely that for long periods of time she was close to death. One day, many months later, a message arrived from her husband, telling her that she didn't need to come back; he had found a new woman who would never give birth to an albino. The children would stay with him, and he cursed the dishonour she had brought upon him by being unfaithful to him with a ghost in a cemetery.
'I was born with a ghost for a father,' Deolinda said, and it sounded as if she were spitting out the words. 'Today, now that I'm grown up and smart, I realise that it's true. My father is a ghost, even if he's alive.'
'How old are you?'
She shrugged. 'Eleven. Or fifteen. Or ninety.'
'I think you're twelve,' Nelio said.
'If I'm twelve, then I'll stay twelve for the rest of my life,' she said. 'Why do we always have to exchange one age for another?'
'I've had the same thought,' Nelio said. 'I think I'll go on being ten until I get tired of it. Then I'll be ninety-three.'
Frogs were croaking in the pond of the botanical gardens. Deolinda had several half-rotten bananas in her woven bag which they shared.
After she learned to walk and already had four rainy seasons behind her, Deolinda became aware that she was different. Then, at the very time when she must have needed her more than ever, Deolinda's mother was struck by madness, which not even the renowned curandeiro, sent for from another village, was able to cure. She stopped eating altogether, she refused to braid her hair, and she started wandering around the village with no clothes on. Finally her sister locked her up in a hut and nailed the door shut. They gave her water through the slits in the wall. That was also where she died one night, after having poked out her eyes with a splinter from one of the bamboo poles supporting the roof. The last memory Deolinda had of her mother was of her hands sticking out of the slits in the wall of the hut. As if that was all that was left of her – two empty hands, ceaselessly wringing.
After Deolinda's mother died, her aunt changed. She blamed Deolinda for her sister's death, she frequently beat her, and sometimes she even refused to give her food. Deolinda tried to find out why she had changed, but no one could give
her an answer. And so she started to believe that she actually deserved all the blame people placed on her. In her the ancestors had gathered all their misdeeds; they had chosen her to bear them. Deolinda realised that she couldn't stay in the village, and the only person she could think of who might help her was her father. She left the village one night when everyone was asleep, and she never went back. When she arrived in the city and found her father's house near the stinking rubbish dump, he chased her off with a stick and warned her never to come back. After that, the streets of the city were all that remained for her. Many times the nuns took her to an orphanage. But she never stayed more than a few Jays. On the city streets there were others who were as white as she was. Some of them even had cars. They had jobs, and they lived in proper houses. She had discovered, above all, that they also had black children. On the streets of the city she was not alone in being different.
'I'm going to stay alive so that I can have children,' she said. I'm going to have thousands of children, and they're all going to be black. Then, when I can't have any more children, I'm going to kill my father.'
'That's probably not a good idea,' Nelio said. 'If you absolutely have to have him dead, it would be wiser if you asked someone else to do it. I don't think it's good to sit in jail.'
'I want you to teach me how to disappear,' Deolinda said.
'I can't do that,' he said. 'I don't know how I do it myself. Tell me instead why you want to stay with us.'
For a long time she sat in silence. Nelio closed his eyes and dozed on the bench while he waited.
He woke up with a start when Deolinda touched his shoulder.
'You're asleep,' she said.
'I don't like waiting for anything,' Nelio said. 'Instead of waiting, I do something else. Just now I was sleeping.'
'Cosmos is my brother.'
He was astounded. He thought about what she had told him for a while. Could it really be truer?
'He saw the way my father chased me off with a stick. He was still living at home then. Our father started beating him too. He came to the city. He became the leader of the kids sleeping over there on the steps. We would sometimes meet in secret. He said that I could come here after he had set off on his journey. He was the one who taught me to read and write and count.'
'But how could he know that I would take you in?'
'He thought that you would.'
Nelio kept thinking about this strange piece of news.
'Was that why Cosmos set off on his journey?' he asked. 'So that you could come to us?'.
'Maybe.'
'Cosmos ought to be hung on the wall of a church,' Nelio said. 'Not Cosmos himself but his picture. His face carved out of wood, like a saint.'
They left the botanical gardens and crept out through the same hole they had used to get in.
'When I grow up, I'm going to sing for the whole world,' Deolinda said as they made their way through the empty streets.
'Can you sing?'
'Yes,' said Deolinda, 'I can sing. And my voice is very black.'
'Everybody's tongue is red,' Nelio said. 'Just like everybody's blood. There's so much to think about. So much that is strange.'
Deolinda wrapped herself in her blanket next to Mandioca. Tristeza and Mandioca lay on either side of Nascimento, who had crawled into his cardboard box and pulled down the lid. They lay there like two guards, ready if Nascimento should be attacked by the monsters that were always lurking in his dreams. Nelio stared thoughtfully at the ragged band. Then he went to his statue, thinking about what Deolinda had told him. On the way he passed a big hotel where festively dressed people were getting into their cars. He stopped for a moment and stared at all that wealth. Then he continued on his way.
But when he had crawled into the statue and rested his head on the left hind leg of the horse, he couldn't sleep, even though it was late. He started thinking back on the life he had lived in the past, before the bandits had come creeping out of the night and burned his village. He felt as if he were being drawn back in time by an invisible wind. Suddenly the horse's belly was filled with spirits scattering memories over him. He was overwhelmed by a great sorrow – so great that it was almost too heavy for his thin body to bear.
It's dawn. The dry earth is whirling outside the hut. His mother is pounding corn. And she is singing. He wakes up on the reed mat in the darkness of the hut. The smell of burning wood blows in through the opening of the hut. The smell of burning wood, which every morning reminds him that he will live another day. When he goes out into the strong sunlight, he can see that it's all true. His mother, who is pounding the heavy stick against the corn, his newborn sister, who is hanging on her back . . .
Inside the horse Nelio stood up straight, with his head inside the rider's ribcage. The horse seemed to be alive. He thought that soon he would have to return home. He had to find out what had happened, who was still alive, and who was dead.
The spirits hovering around him had no faces. The whole time he was afraid that he would suddenly recognise the presence of his father or his mother or his sisters and brothers. They would be dead, and it would be even harder for him to go on living life as he did now, which was only surviving.
Nelio would remember the days that followed as the time when he never danced and never smiled. He couldn't hide his gloomy mood, and he saw no reason to try. He was often annoyed at being disturbed all the time – by Nascimento who was always on his way from one fight to the next, and by Tristeza who came each day and asked what he should think about and when he was going to be allowed to buy his trainers. Nelio would lose his temper, and afterwards he would feel even gloomier at the thought that he had done something that was foreign to Cosmos. Deolinda, noticing that Nelio wanted to be left alone, tried to protect him. She chased off the others when she could, and she always saw to it that Nelio had something to eat without having to climb around on the rubbish heaps himself to search for scraps.
Nelio often thought about Cosmos as he sat in the shade of his tree. He wondered whether he was still alive, whether he had drowned at sea, or whether he had come so close to the sun that he caught fire and burned up. He wondered whether Yabu Bata had found the path he had spent more than nineteen years searching for.
When his thoughts grew too burdensome, he would leave the street and set off on long, solitary wanderings. The others would send someone to follow him, to see that he didn't walk straight into the sea and disappear. Of course, Nelio noticed that someone was following him at a distance. Ordinarily he would have turned round and said that he wanted to be left alone. But he didn't have the energy to do that. He walked and walked, sometimes so far that he reached the place where he had spent the night on the eve of his first entrance into the city. Often he would come back after it was already dark.
It was Mandioca who suggested that they should try to cheer him up by giving him a dog. They often sat and talked anxiously about Nelio's remoteness and melancholy.
'He thinks too much,' Nascimento said. 'Cosmos never had so many thoughts. He's sick in the head. His brain has swollen up from all the walking and brooding that he's doing.'
'What he needs is a dog,' Mandioca said. 'If you have a dog, you don't have time to think.'
'What do you know about dogs?' Deolinda said.
'I had a dog once,' said Mandioca sadly.
'What happened to him?' asked Deolinda.
'He ran away,' replied Mandioca. 'I look for him every day. Maybe he's looking for me.'
'He died a long time ago,' Nascimento said angrily. 'Dogs die taster than people.'
It looked as though a fight would break out between Mandioca and Nascimento. But Pecado stepped between them and said that they should be worrying about Nelio instead of fighting.
Chronicler Of The Winds Page 17