Damnificados

by JJ Amaworo Wilson

  And gradually the children of the damnificados begin to appear.

  CHAPTER 3

  Nacho—Baby at the river—Rescued by Samuel—Schooldays—The Chinaman—The storyteller—Emil—Big hair

  NACHO MORALES. CRIPPLE. WITHERED LEFT SIDE. ARM AND LEG. GAMMY SINCE BIRTH. Mole under his right eye. Abandoned on a riverbank, swaddled in rags. His parents saying, “He’ll die soon enough.” The river stinks of human excrement, runs through Agua Suja shanty-town. The mother herself a child of twelve. The father sixteen, pushing dope. A year after he leaves Nacho to die, he hears of a deal with imported heroin, gets himself a gun and a bandana which he wraps around his mouth. Thinks he’s Billy the Kid. Jumps from a scaffold. Steals from his own gang, the gun as big as his arm. Pockets the money. Realizes he forgot a getaway plan. Runs as far as the river where he abandoned his son. The gang following. Guns him down. Retrieves the money. Rolls him into the river. Floats down to Blutig. The longest journey he ever took. Bloated and stinking like a fish by the time a hook pulls him ashore.

  And Nacho too, a year earlier, is hauled in by a stranger’s hook. Samuel, a wanderer from Favelada, a teacher by day.

  “What have we here?” he says and picks up the bundle. “Hello, small fry.”

  Squinty face, scrunched features, little pink tadpole. Samuel looks around. Surveys his options. Put child back, child dies. Vultures peck out his eyes. Take child to police, child goes straight onto trash pile. Take child home. No choice.

  Catches a bus. Buys one ticket. Newborn wretches go free. The bus whines and lurches. The baby sleeps. A fat paisano woman sitting next to him, smelling of goats and chickens. Peers into the bundle. Thinks of cooing. Changes her mind.

  Samuel, back seat of the bus, barely thirty, watching the streets go by, his unlined face as flat as cardboard in the window. Across the city, past Fellahin with its streets that smell of boiled sausage and falafel. A sheep crossing the road. An electronics workshop where everything is the color of oil. The back end of a protest march echoing down a side street, a white banner glimpsed from behind. Cramped shops squeezed together, clothes hanging out the upstairs windows, gyrating in the breeze. Schoolchildren in uniforms, loose gangs with stragglers breaking off, walking homeward, bent over by backpacks jammed with books. Then the long fence parallel to the road, tagged with hieroglyphs and runes and end-of-the-world messages.

  Now the landscape opens out. Past Minhas, its great gashes in the ground and piles of black refuse, tiny workers in the distance. And here, groups of them caked in filth, waiting at bus stops, lighting smokes, slapping backs. Vendors with trays hanging from their necks, mingling in the traffic. And does the child just for a moment open its tiny eyes, see the blurred masses and their broken lives from out of that window? Does it harness its sixth sense and know it’s being rescued from a riverbank to enter a world of endless suffering? Rescued by the teacher, Samuel, who was visiting his sick cousin in Agua Suja. Brought a cake. Strolled alone under trees, found himself following the river. Ignored the smell. Saw the bundle. Bent down. Reached out. The story of his life.

  They live in the House of Flowers. It is tiny, cramped, made of reclaimed bricks, and the wind in winter slips through the cracks. But there are painted flowers in yellow and red on the outer walls and this makes the house stand out from all the others in Favelada. And there are many.

  When he gets home he takes off the rags to bathe the child and sees the withered arm and leg. Two pale sticks attached to a body. Anna, his wife, walks in. Misses a breath, raises her hand to her mouth.

  “This baby was by the river. Agua Suja. Abandoned. I brought him home.”

  Their son, Emil, comes in to look at the news. Glee. Poke and prod. Samuel lifts the child out of reach. Which is what he does for three years. With Anna, he keeps the child alive by warding off stray hands.

  Nacho is a smudge. A hobo. A frog on the shore. His childhood is a blur of sickness: rashes, fevers, agues, poxes, sudden breakouts of nodules, bumps, pustules, pus.

  He learns to speak. Quiet voice. At his father’s side all evening every evening, and unable to run, walk, jump, swim, fight, he reads early and well.

  School beckons. Samuel fashions a pair of crutches for Nacho, working on them at night, carving the wood with a chisel by the light of the moon till they are shaped and strong. Nacho tucks them under his arms and half-hobbles, half-vaults across the room. Wooden wings fit for angels.

  He is too weak to make a good target so the bullies treat him as a freak. He plays dumb to avoid attention. Makes deliberate mistakes when he writes. Pretends he’s a halfwit, till a teacher who is a friend of Samuel’s keeps him behind after school.

  “I know you’re bright,” she says. “Your father told me. Play stupid if you like but I’m giving you extra homework, extra reading. Book reports, some poetry, the philosophers. Write a journal. Write me stories. I’ll read them, and we’ll keep it a secret.”

  He nods.

  When he’s ten, a playground malandro stalks him, gets him in a headlock. Nacho begins choking. Suddenly there is a shudder and the arm around his scrawny neck goes limp. The thug crumples to the floor. Looming over him is a massive boy. Black hair. Slanted eyes. Turns and wanders away. The Chinaman.

  The Chinaman is an island, a fortress no one can enter. They say he is mute or doesn’t speak the language. He has a round, soft face and hands the size of frying pans. At ten he weighs two hundred pounds. At fifteen he will weigh three hundred. The school hires a carpenter to build a reinforced chair. It cracks first time. They give him a plank of wood between two concrete blocks. Sits in silence. Frowns.

  Samuel walks Emil and Nacho to school every day. As they stride through the heart of Favelada, Nacho swinging big on his crutches to keep up, Samuel tells stories.

  “This is where Odewoyo’s Last Stand took place. Nigerian gangster. All his lieutenants dead. He came out blasting. Fifty police gunned him down. He was more holes than man. They put his gun in a museum. Look up. That’s the balcony where Eugenia the Beautiful threw flowers to the masses. Gave her final speech. Look there. The bullring. Seems like wasteland, doesn’t it? It was the place of the matadors, Guerrero, Zubayda, Hernandez, Ochoa, Davidovsky.”

  “What happened to it?” asks Emil, two years older and a head taller than Nacho.

  “What happened to it? What happens to everything? Turns to dust. What birds are those? There! There! Keep your eyes open. You never know when you’ll need them.”

  And this is how Nacho learns everything, sees everything. Wasted body, singing mind.

  At first he sleeps on a mat in Anna and Samuel’s room. They lie awake to check his breathing. When he turns six, he goes in with Emil in a bed fashioned from a broken table, the legs sawn down. Emil, at eight, runs wild, knows every corner of Favelada, every street. Takes Nacho to the butcher, the baker, the barber. Shows him off. Skims stones in the river while Nacho counts the bounces. They get chased out of the market for stealing apples. Nacho, as always, innocent, shuffling on his muletas.

  One day Emil climbs up the wall of the whorehouse in Roppus Street, hangs on a window ledge and sees the butcher’s fat ass bumping away on the bed, a woman called Lulu beneath him. Giggles. The butcher turns around in midgrind, hauls himself off Lulu, strides to the window, face red and puffed like a ham, erect penis leading him on. Emil scrambles down, laughing, as a shoe flies out the window, missing his head by inches. Joins Nacho, and off they walk, the butcher’s invective following them down the street. Nacho doesn’t know it now, but he will one day call upon a favor, ask the butcher for meat in the dead of night to feed a wolf pack, and the butcher will remember him because he knew his father and will say yes, and once again naked he will drag himself downstairs and pull out hunks of raw steak still wet with blood.

  Emil sleeps long and deep every night, worn out by his daytime excursions. But Nacho is a nonsleeper. He reads where a strip of light pours through the window. Reads and reads into the small hours. By eight he kn
ows the poets, Norse mythology, dinosaur etymology, biographies of queens and statesmen, the names of plant species, can follow a manual on engine building, nineteenth-century Russian sagas, theories of dead philosophers, art criticism, polemics, Marx and Freud, Dickens and Poe.

  A friend of Anna’s sometimes stops by and speaks to him in Spanish. Another in French. An aunt three times removed comes over and rattles away in Italian. The languages stick to him like mud to a boy’s knee.

  The winter he turns ten he breaks out in pustules and takes to his bed. Anna feeds him watery potato soup, brings library books to his room. After three days he gets weaker. They move Emil out of the room, put Nacho on a pallet on their floor, and call a healer. Her name is Haloubeyah. She sweeps into the room in a black kaftan, smiles, asks his name. Looks him in the eye, touches him once on his good arm, and boils a poultice in the tiny kitchen. Foul smelling broth. Sings as she works. Emil stares till his mother kicks him out of the room. Haloubeyah gives Nacho a root to chew on. Minutes later he is asleep and she applies the poultice.

  The next day Nacho recovers. And his hair begins to grow like a madman’s.

  CHAPTER 4

  The First Trash War—The House of Flowers—Alberto Torres—A raft in the river

  DECADES EARLIER, BEFORE NACHO WAS FOUND LIKE MOSES IN THE BULRUSHES, PEOPLE began to pour in from the countryside in search of work, and Favelada suddenly had four thousand damnificados with nowhere to live. So they found pieces of land and built on them using whatever was at hand: stones, bricks, wood, mud, iron. The houses began to spring up. Patchwork cubes with a hole in the roof for a chimney. A damnificado called Lalloo showed them how to steal electricity from the pylons to get light and heat, and some of the families found old television sets abandoned in the dumps or on the sidewalks and took them home and hooked them up, banged them around until they got a channel working. Thus did lives begin and end to a constant babble, a twenty-four-hour cycle of game shows and soccer and news and assassinations and telenovelas and white noise, parrot chatter, jibber-jabber, canned laughter.

  The towns spread, but no governments recognized the new areas. Sanguinosa, Fellahin, Blutig, nonplaces for nonpeople. No roads were built, for why would you build a road to nowhere? Mountains of garbage appeared—rotting food, plastic, paper, broken glass—until the smell insinuated itself into the hems of the damnificados’ clothes, the nooks of their rooms, their dreams. And one day the damnificados of Favelada rounded up their donkeys and carts, loaded up the trash with pitchforks and shovels, and took it to the wastelands. Some months later a group of men who had found work pooled their money and bought a truck. Every Saturday they would fill the bed of the truck and drive ten minutes south. They dug massive holes in the ground, threw in the garbage, and after some months covered the pile with soil.

  But then other damnificados began to live in the wastelands. A small community of addicts, escaped convicts, and vagrants appeared. After a while they saw the truck was bringing piles of trash, so they moved the trash back, dumped it in the dead of night on the very doorsteps of the houses of Favelada. In retaliation, the truck brought more trash. And then an incident occurred. One day the driver of the truck and his crew unloaded the trash, as normal. On their return to the cab, they found a beheaded doll on the seat and in the doll’s hollow plastic body, goat’s blood still warm. A sign.

  And this is how the Trash Wars began.

  The truck from Favelada roared into the wasteland the following Saturday, its bed piled high with garbage. The place seemed deserted. Suddenly a woman’s voice rang out:

  “Kami ay labanan sa dulo!”

  The truck driver applied the brakes but left the engine running. All around them, makeshift houses. In front of them, one woman, tiny, ancient, skin and bone, hair tied in a scarf. Her fierce eyes widened and she screamed it again, higher, almost ululating:

  “Kami ay labanan sa dulo!”

  The driver turned to the parrot on his shoulder.

  “What the hell is that?”

  “Filipino.”

  “I don’t give a fuck what language it is. What does it mean?”

  “‘I will fight you to the end.’”

  The driver smiled, turned the key, killed the engine. Suddenly, figures emerged from the wasteland as from hell. Dirt-smeared rag-men waving sharpened sticks and tomahawks. Youths with helmets made of chicken bones and wire. Madwomen in filth-encrusted aprons, yelling in Arabic, Latvian, Tagalog, French. A swamp pirate, lank hair down to his hips, open waistcoat revealing a necklace of six blackened human ears on a string.

  The driver, an ex-farmer with a vicious streak, opened his door, got down, reached back into the cab, and pulled from the floor a metal chain.

  “Kami ay labanan sa dulo!”

  “Be my guest, little lady,” said the driver, and suddenly the mound of trash on the bed of the truck flew up in piles. Twenty men burst out of the junk, stinking like the devil’s latrine, vaulting the side of the truck, armed to the teeth with chains, belts, bottles, whips, clubs.

  There on that desolate plain, damnificado slaughtered damnificado. Hand-to-hand thrashings, medieval batterings, skulls pulverized, ribs smithereened, arms lopped off. The groans lasted long and loud till a freak storm exploded through the clouds and drenched the battlefield, damping down the dust, tamping the blood, ringing a tattoo on the tin roofs of the houses.

  The truck driver lay dead in a shallow grave of rain-spattered plastic bags and fraying ropes, his arm sliced off at the elbow ten feet away, the hand at the end of it still gripping the key to the truck. One of the six survivors on the trash-bringers’ side now prized open the dead fingers, took the key, and ran through the rain. Jumping into the cab, he sparked the engine and sped home to Favelada, the driver’s parrot squawking in his ear.

  The House of Flowers sat on the edge of the township. Neighbors and near-neighbors sprang up overnight—half-built concrete walls, scavenged wooden boards, roofs of corrugated tin with slate lined on top. Palettes for beds. Plastic washing buckets for everything that could be washed—cutlery, clothes, faces, bodies. Nails driven into walls, from which hung towels, pots, pans. In the rainy season these makeshift houses sank slowly into rivers of mud. The leaks in the roofs turned to holes the size of plates, and buckets sat collecting the stream of rain that drummed down. Sometimes a house got washed away in a day or night, the family disappearing to higher ground.

  Up on the hills the lights of the shantytowns glowed at night like wary eyes. The ramshackle houses crowded together, climbing upon one another as if for comfort. The street snaking up the hill was cobbled and stank of crushed fruit, bloated vermin lying dead in puddles. Slicks of oily water conjured fragments of rainbows. The streets themselves were fetid, rotting, and sunbrowned children ran wild in oversized T-shirts, shoes with holes where laces should be, chasing madly after skeletal dogs.

  But here on the plain where the House of Flowers was found, no trash piles were visible. Order had long reigned in Favelada. Samuel and Anna and a thousand other migrants had brought the most precious things Favelada had ever seen: peace and family. And while the chattering of the televisions continued in the scratched up houses and The Bickering never left the vicinity for long, the days of destruction—the Trash Wars—seemed over. Yes, Favelada was poor, but there were teachers like Samuel. There was a library one mile away. A doctor from Zerbera and a dentist from Oameni Morti were building free clinics on the edge of town. Schools opened up.

  As for the wasteland where the residents of Favelada dumped their trash, it was taken over by a man named Alberto Torres. A businessman. He built housing nearby and moved the residents there, and in a fit of madness that lasted five years, built a tower sixty floors into the sky. Torre de Torres. The monolith. He lived there and so did his sons and daughters and the sons and daughters of his sons and daughters and his distant cousins twice removed and people called Torres who claimed ancestral kinship and people not called Torres who didn’t. And it was the son of
Alberto Torres, Alberto Torres II, also prone to bouts of syphilitic madness, who later pronounced himself mayor of the tower and watched as his cousin fifteen times removed, and crazy as a cuckoo in a jar, hurled himself from the fiftieth floor with a parachute that wouldn’t open.

  But that was long after the Trash Wars and long before the rise and rise of the shrimp called Nacho, squirming in his wooden bed, a book jammed close to his face, his hair all askitter, sprouting in clumps like weeds in a field. His mother takes to sitting him on her lap and combing it from behind, untangling the hairs that grow together and giving it a semblance of evenness, a pretense that these rogue outcrops are at least growing in one direction.

  At least they are growing. The rest of his body isn’t. At twelve he reaches five feet and that is where he will remain for the rest of his life, though on windy days his hair might take him to five feet five. It has its advantages. He wins at hide-and-seek, curling himself into a laundry basket in the corner of a room. And he masters the habit of going unseen, watching from the shadows, fitting himself into the cracks and crevices where no one looks. He has an indio complexion, a little browned, but Caucasian features—a straight, full nose, thin lips, blue-gray eyes. Though his body is curled and stunted, his face is cherubic. He will always look younger than his age. Only the cares of later life, facing down armies and despots and bureaucrats, will wear away his angelic countenance, bring him the lines and creases of manhood.

  Emil the tearaway has begun to take things apart and fix them. On his wanderings he finds an abandoned car half covered over with weeds. He climbs into the rusting body, then out again. He opens the hood and starts playing with the engine, trying to get something to spark.

  Another day he finds a broken radio in a skip and takes it home to fix. He pulls it apart on the family table, Samuel standing over him, and digs and twists and sticks nails where they don’t belong.