Lost City Radio

by Daniel Alarcón

  NINE

  MANAU ARRIVED in the city and inhaled. Its odor was enough: that potent mix of metal and smoke. He was home. Adela’s boy held his hand, and Manau felt keenly the possibility of forgetting: her taste, her body, her caresses. He shut his eyes.

  The boy looked up at him: “What will we do?”

  Manau squeezed his hand and pulled him along. He carried both their bags over his shoulder. The street outside the bus station was full of people, spilling off the sidewalks, scrambling between the cars. The boy had said almost nothing the last hour of the bus ride. Even this simple question—what will we do?—had to be viewed as progress. He gazed at everything with wide, fearful eyes. The boy was not home: he was in hell. And the city was a terrible place, to be sure, but the world was made up of terrible places. Maybe Victor was too young to take solace in that fact. And there were other facts: Adela was dead, and now they were both alone. Manau tried, as he had for the previous four days, to clear his mind, but still he was pursued by the urge to weep. Ten days before, he had made love to Adela on a mat of reeds. It had been a moonless night. Around them, above them, in the near distance of the forest, birds had made their bright and inscrutable music. A pang of desire shot through him at the memory: he and Adela had scratched one another and pushed, they had rolled clumsily off the mat and onto the ground. The moist earth had stuck to their bodies. Later, the rains came to clean them: a sky split by lightning, curtains of purple water crashing loudly over the trees.

  In the city, the sky and its clouds glowed white. It was a year since he’d seen this shade of color above.

  “Is it going to rain?” Victor asked. “Is that what you’re looking at?”

  Manau managed a smile. “I don’t think so.” He didn’t say that they were in the coastal desert now, that as long as he stayed in the city, Victor would not see anything recognizable as rain. Always cloudy, this city, always humid. It’s a trick, Manau wanted to say. “Are you hungry?” he asked instead, and the boy nodded.

  An Indian woman squatted on the sidewalk, selling bread from a covered basket balanced on a crate. She puffed on the stub of a hand-rolled cigar and did not smile. Manau took two rolls of bread and paid her with a handful of coins. The woman held them in her palm for a second, then frowned. She took one between her molars and twisted it. The metal coin bent in her teeth.

  “It’s fake,” she said, handing it back. “Don’t give me this jungle money.”

  Her mountain accent was thick with masticated vowels. Jungle money? Manau mumbled an apology and fished a bill from his pocket. The boy watched the proceedings without comment. He had already eaten half of his roll. The woman scowled. “Pay first, then eat, boy.” She held Manau’s bill up, inspecting it. “Where do you come from?” she asked.

  “From 1797,” Manau said. He tried a joke: “The money’s good, madam. I made it myself.”

  She released a mouthful of smoke. Not even a smile. “You people have ruined this place.” She handed Manau his change and turned to serve another customer.

  Manau felt his blood rising. The city was impregnated with the smell of ruin: it swirled in the sodden air and stuck to you, wherever you went. It followed me all the way to the jungle, Manau thought, and now he stood accused of bringing it home again. He looked at the woman, at the boy. In the neighborhood where he was raised, there was an Indian woman who shined shoes and sharpened knives. She walked the streets, chatting with the women who knew her, offering candy to the children. She lived beneath the bridge at the end of the street, and she always smiled and never complained, not even when the war got bad and half her customers moved away—that’s how they were supposed to be: these mountain people, these desperate poor.

  Manau spat on the sidewalk in front of the woman.

  “Move on!” she hissed.

  Then he had done it, not for himself but for the boy: with a swift kick, Manau upended the woman’s basket of bread, knocking it off the crate. There was a shout. Bread spilled everywhere on the dirty sidewalk, rolled into the gutter. In an instant, the woman was up, her face hot, her fists clenched. She would have attacked and certainly hurt him—but there was no time: the passersby had turned on her, had swarmed her, they were stealing her bread. The woman scurried behind them, swatting at hands, but it was no use. Her bread disappeared into the hands of men in work clothes, and mothers in housedresses, and ratty street kids with matted hair. “Thieves!” the woman yelled, red to bursting, her face a livid, unnatural color. Something animal had been unleashed in her, and she waved her cigar in frantic, menacing loops. She attacked a man who had snatched a roll and, for a brief and shocking instant, it seemed she might bite him.

  A day’s worth of bread vanished in fifteen seconds.

  It happened so fast that he couldn’t be sure why he had done it, only that he did not regret it. Not at all. Manau tossed some change at the upturned basket, took Victor’s hand, and backed away. He looked down the avenue. In the distance was the radio’s spire, a woven metal phallus pointing skywards, adorned with blinking red lights. “Let’s go,” Manau said to the boy, and they went toward it, first walking, then racing, as if someone or something were chasing them.

  IT WAS only ten days before, as they drank palm wine and waited hopefully for a breeze, that Zahir had invited Manau to touch his stumps. “Be kind to an old man,” he said, though Manau did not think of his landlord and friend as old. “I’m sad today.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Of course I’m sure. It’s about time you did. You stare.”

  Manau blushed and began to protest, but Zahir interrupted him. “It’s all right,” he said. “Everyone does.”

  The sun had sunk behind the trees, and the sky dimmed toward a lacquered blue-black. It was the edge of night in the jungle: a nimbus of mosquitoes buzzed around the kerosene lantern. Manau sipped his wine from a gourd. Nico had been gone for months now, and no one had heard from him. That night and every night, Manau was careful not to mention Zahir’s son. When the wine loosened his tongue, Manau felt he might confess, but then he was unsure what to say, and so said nothing. Nearly half a year had passed this way. A harvest had come and gone.

  In a few hours, the night breezes would blow, Manau would excuse himself, and wander off to look for Adela, forgetting Nico and his unfortunate father for another day. If the moon was out, or even if it wasn’t, he would invite her to swim.

  Now Zahir was waiting, eyes shut tight, holding his arms out for inspection. Manau took another sip from his gourd and set it on the floor. He placed a hand over each stump, felt the rough skin against his palms. He held Zahir’s right arm by the wrist, and went over the wound with his thumb. Where it had scarred, the flesh turned in on itself, like a sinkhole or a crevasse or the dry and jagged bed of a stream.

  “It’s been seven years,” Zahir said, opening his eyes. “Seven years today.”

  Manau let go. He had come to think of his landlord’s stumps as a cruel birth defect, a trial Zahir had always borne. Of course, this wasn’t true. He knew it wasn’t. Still, it was startling: seven years ago yesterday, Zahir could scratch his temple, light his own cigarette. He could love his wife with ten more possibilities. Manau looked down at his own hands, and they seemed like miracles. He cracked his knuckles; they gave off a satisfying pop. He wiggled his fingers, then caught Zahir watching him.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “You get used to it. Really. Do you believe me?”

  Manau made a point of looking Zahir in the eye. “Of course,” he said.

  The dark began just a few feet beyond the steps of Zahir’s raised hut. The towns people shuffled by, nearly invisible, now and then calling a greeting. Manau felt unable to speak. In a little more than a week, he would leave this village, and all the stories he’d heard here would seem burdensome and foreign, woeful tales foisted upon him: his crippled friend, the dozens of missing, the town and its never-ending battle against the encroaching forest. Flood, neglect, war. Manau would look at the boy�
��his fellow traveler—and be reminded of this day and others, when Zahir told him of 1797 and its history. He would feel disappointed in himself, that he had allowed it, that he had accepted these memories that were not his. At the time, it had seemed painless, even pleasant: the crepuscular light, the lulling haze of the wine, the stories that always ended badly. He had very nearly belonged. He might have made a home there, if Adela hadn’t died.

  Zahir said, “The IL came and asked for food. We told them the war was over. They accused us of lying. We told them there was no food to spare. They said someone must have stolen the food if there was none to give. There was a thief in town, they said. So they took the boy and did tadek.”

  He rubbed his face with the end of his arm. On feast days, after he drank, Zahir let his wife tie tassels to his arms. Red and white. Manau had seen him, had seen the whole process. When she reached his stumps, she slowed, massaging the rough skin there, gently, adoringly. Surely she missed his hands too, but the way she lavished attention on his stumps, you would never guess it. She tied thick blooms to them. Then, when the music began in earnest, Zahir danced to the drum and the flute, waving his arms like a bird.

  “And Victor picked you?” Manau asked.

  “Because he knew me, I suppose. He was Nico’s friend, you understand. They were always good friends. He could have picked anyone. It’s a miracle he didn’t go to his mother.”

  Adela without her hands—Manau was seized with terror, imagining it.

  “Victor doesn’t remember it,” Zahir said, “and that’s for the best. What good would it do?”

  None, thought Manau. But did Nico remember it? What good would that do? Or what evil had it already done? Manau fumbled for his glass. His wine was warm, but it went down easily. The breezes would begin soon.

  “Do you want to know something else?” Zahir said. “I deserved it. The boy was right.”

  “No one deserves that.”

  “I did.”

  Manau waited for his friend to go on, but Zahir didn’t. The silence lasted a minute or more, and Manau didn’t ask for explanations. He didn’t dare. They listened to the forest. When Zahir spoke again, it was in another tone of voice.

  “But that was the second time the IL came,” said Zahir. “The first time they came to shoot the priest.”

  “There was a priest?” Manau asked.

  Then, a woman’s voice from the darkness: “Oh, yes, there was a priest.”

  It was Adela. She had snuck up on them. She stepped into the orange lamp light, and Manau felt something warm in his chest: he wouldn’t have to look for her later. She was right here; maybe she’d been looking for him.

  “You found us,” he said.

  Her hair was braided loosely; a few strands fell just above her eyes. She very nearly glistened. Adela held her hand out, and Manau obliged with a kiss.

  “Don Zahir,” Adela said, with the slightest bow.

  He received her with a nod.

  Manau offered Adela his chair, but she sat at the top of the stair instead. She pulled her skirt above her knees. He noticed her bare feet, her ankles. “Is there wine?” she asked.

  “For you, my dear, there is always wine,” Zahir said, and Manau stood without waiting to be told. He went inside and came back with a gourd. He poured carefully. A full cup. She took a sip.

  “Zahir,” Adela said, “you were telling a story.”

  “The priest and his fate. These are old tales.”

  “Tell it,” she said.

  Zahir sighed. She was irresistible, and not just to Manau.

  The beginning of the war: a sun-drunk group of fighters stumbled into town. They were young, Zahir said. They stank of youth, and for this reason, many people forgave them. Also, if truth be told, the victim was not a man universally liked. The priest had come from abroad some thirty years before and, at the time of his death, still clung stubbornly to his accent. He refused to learn any of the old language, and did not contribute to the upkeep of the communal plot. He looked down on the Indians who came to trade medicinal plants and wild birds for cornmeal and razor blades and bullets. They didn’t know God, he said. And so the IL waved their weapons and bound his hands, and no one protested. The rebels kept their faces covered. They ordered the entire village, some hundred and twenty families in those days, to gather to watch the execution. The shooter was a young woman. She was very pale.

  Zahir took a deep breath, then drank from his gourd. He asked for a cigarette. Manau lit one and held it to Zahir’s lips while the old man smoked. Manau took a few puffs as well, held the cool smoke in his lungs. It was that last detail that seemed so strange to him: a woman! They were bad people, these IL, but he couldn’t help being intrigued. This jungle wine did strange things to the brain: he had to touch Adela right then. He stretched his leg out; his right toe could just graze her elbow if he nearly slid off his chair. The night had come swiftly, and the breezes were beginning.

  She turned to Manau and smiled. She swatted his foot away and pinched her nose.

  When the cigarette had burned down, Zahir announced he had come to the interesting part of the story. “Isn’t it so, Adela?” he asked.

  “If I remember correctly, Don Zahir.”

  “Of course you do,” said the cripple.

  The IL gave the priest’s home to the poorest family in the village, the Hawas, and they had no choice but to accept. A great show was made of carrying their few possessions to the priest’s house. But when the IL left a few days later, Mr. Hawa moved his family back to their lean-to near the river. The village begged him to stay, but he wouldn’t listen to reason. His wife was heartbroken. She insisted on bringing with her a large bronze crucifix, and would have brought the priest’s iron stove as well, had her husband allowed it.

  “We were all very afraid for him. We told him, if the IL comes back and finds you have refused their gift, they’ll certainly kill all of you. But Hawa would not be convinced. He was a hunter. He spent most of his time on his canoe, deep in the forest, killing the animals he saw on the shores of the river: pythons, alligators, the spearfish you can only find three days’ walk from here. He said he had seen these IL. They were jokers, he said. He wasn’t afraid. I talked to him myself. What about the priest, I asked him. The priest had it coming, Hawa said.”

  “And what happened to Hawa?”

  “He left, with his two sons, for the war. Years ago. His wife stayed. And then she left too.” Zahir shrugged, as if to indicate the story was over.

  “You’ve left out the best part, Don Zahir.”

  “Have I?”

  Adela nodded. Manau could make out the sly contours of her smile. The evening’s breezes had begun.

  “What we did to the house.”

  Zahir grinned. “Well, yes. Of course. What else could we do? We burned it.”

  The empty house was a hazard. The IL were killers: what if they returned, and Hawa was away? They would kill someone else in the village just to make it right.

  On a warm February evening, in honor of Independence Day, the priest’s home was burned. They prepared it with axes and saws: disassembling the simple structure until it was just a pile of wood and paper and old, musty clothes. A bonfire. It burned cleanly, part of the last Independence Day that would be celebrated in 1797 until the end of the war. By the next year, the men had begun to leave, and then the boys, and the conflict could be ignored no longer. Manau knew the story. No one was sad to see them go, because they were expected to return.

  Zahir never left, and that must have been its own challenge. Almost every man his age went. Manau had heard him say it before, part apology, part denial: “I liked it here; why should I have left?”

  Now Zahir recalled playing his guitar while everyone sang, while the fire burned. He sang; he danced. It seemed impossible that he could have forgotten this part. “Was it a beautiful festival, Adela? He doesn’t know, you must tell him!”

  There was something not right with the story. Where did they bury the
priest? Manau wondered. He pushed the question from his mind, and focused on the scene: the party, the breezy night, the towns people when they were still optimistic. He reached for her again, and touched her. She pinched his foot this time. A breeze curled around them.

  “It was very beautiful,” Adela said.

  MANAU WALKED Victor to the station. Adela’s boy. Adela. He took him by the hand to the front desk, where a receptionist typed disinterestedly with two fingers. They stood before her, Victor just tall enough to peek over the edge. They waited. A half-minute passed before she made eye contact.

  “Yes?” the receptionist asked finally.

  “We need to see Norma,” Manau said. He was tired, a kind of exhaustion he’d never felt before. “Norma,” he said to the boy, “will take care of you.”

  The receptionist smiled. She had a round face and lipstick on her teeth, just a tiny red smudge of it, and Manau wondered if he should tell her. He didn’t.

  “I’m sorry, that’s not possible,” the receptionist said. She pointed upwards, to small speakers in the ceiling. “She’s on the air.”

  Of course she was. That was her voice filling the room, reading the news so sweetly. He hadn’t even noticed the sound before. It had registered in his mind as a lullaby.

  “What is this about?” the receptionist asked.

  “The boy,” Manau said. “He has a list for Lost City Radio.” He turned to Victor. “Show her. Show her the note.”

  Victor took it from his pocket and passed it to the receptionist. She read it quickly, running her index finger beneath the words as she did. Turning the page over, she glanced at the list of missing, and then instructed Manau and Victor to sit. To be patient. To wait. She handed the note back and picked up the phone. She spoke in a low voice. They dropped their bags and slumped into the cushions of the sofa, while Norma read the news without comment, even-toned. She was masterful. Manau could hardly concentrate on the words.