Damnificados

by JJ Amaworo Wilson

  “Now what?” said the lady.

  “Thank you!” said Nacho.

  The monolith succumbs to The Chattering. Families gather around the TV, the children sitting cross-legged on the floor. But on day three of the flood, the building seems to groan and suddenly all the power shuts out. The lamps flicker and die and the televisions crackle briefly before turning to black. Nacho immediately hauls himself upstairs to the bakery. The six brothers are crouched or stood in front of their oven. A layer of half-baked bread lies inside. They turn and look as Nacho enters the room.

  Harry says: “No power, no bread.”

  Nacho hollers to the twins.

  “How many gas burners are in the building?”

  Hans shrugs his shoulders, turns to Dieter. “Ich weiss nicht.”

  Dieter: “Warum stellt er solche Fragen? Is it a quiz? Ask us an easier one.”

  Nacho: “We have no power. I want you to ask the leaders how many gas burners are on each floor so we have something to cook with.”

  “Ah, OK.”

  Back in his room he turns on the faucet and a brackish ooze comes out. He sits down on one of the crates. The static hiss of the rain is unceasing. He hobbles to the window. All he can see is a lake of water, fifteen feet below the first floor and rising fast. The bodegas are almost all gone, either washed away or underwater; the huts and hovels, too. The current leads past the tower, carrying lumps of debris, and a lone electricity pylon freelancing down the deluge, turning and turning in the slow confusion.

  Nacho puts his head in his hands, scratches at his mop of hair. He thinks, ‘First the electricity goes, then the water, then the sanitation. How long can we hold out?’ The words of an old woman come back to him. “That animal is a sign from God. We can’t go in.” ‘But we went in,’ he thinks, ‘and now we can’t get out.’

  He remembers the House of Flowers. A butterfly the size of a book, floating past his face. Yellow wings. Nights lying awake, reading by the light of the moon, the same moon that’s all but blotted out, a smudge of white wax.

  There is a knock on Nacho’s door. A small boy.

  “My father wants to know if there’s school today.”

  “Oh! Yes! I’m late!”

  He gets up to the fifth floor in the dark and can at first make out nothing, but then as his eyes adjust to the candlelight he sees that the room is packed with men, women, and children. Some stand at the back, others sit on the chairs at the center, on the floor between the chairs, and around the walls.

  “Well well well,” he says. “The rains arrive, the electricity dies, the water goes off, and everyone comes to school.”

  No sound. They wait. Nacho makes his way to the front of the class. Right in front of him, seated on the floor, is Susana, the woman who looks at him in a way he cannot read—admiration or affection or just respect for the leader, the teacher. He scratches at his hair, drags himself onto a chair in front of everyone, and clears his throat.

  “Truth be told, with all the rain I kind of forgot about school today. Stupid of me as I should have known you would be here. But I can tell you a few things about rain.”

  He pauses again, looks around, tries not to catch Susana’s eye.

  “Throughout history Man has lived in fear of floods. They’re as ancient as any story ever told. The Epic of Gilgamesh was written on stone tablets. Tells the story of a flood that drowned everything. Or almost everything. Of course there was a hero and his name was Utnapishtim. And he was commanded in a dream by one of the gods, who said to him, ‘O man of Shurrupak, son of Ubar-Tutu, tear down your house. Build a ship. Abandon wealth. Abjure possessions. Save your life.’ And that’s what he did. He built a ship six floors high and brought his family on board and as many animals as he could find. And when the flood came, he was ready. And he sailed for six days and six nights. Then he released a dove, a swallow, and a raven, and sailed to dry land, which he found on top of a mountain. Of course, this is like the story of Noah, who built the ark. And some say the stories are one and the same, although the epic of Gilgamesh came a lot earlier, before man had invented paper.”

  He stops again. Thinks, ‘I am my father.’ Telling stories to understand the world, and to while away the time.

  The rain is coming down in massive diagonals, wiping across the sky like vines, the droplets riddling the walls of the monolith. Bulbous clouds hang in the air, big puffers, gray blowfish. Nacho watches for a moment and all he can think of is hunger, disease, darkness, eight hundred people in an upright ark that does not move, no land to stand on. He turns back to his class. People shuffle. A child yawns.

  “Vishnu was a Hindu god with four arms and a thousand names. His body was blue because he existed when water was everywhere, before the universe was created. Now one day a devout citizen named Manu was washing his hands in a river. Vishnu appeared to Manu as a tiny fish. And Vishnu asked Manu to save him from the roiling water, and Manu did, and he put the fish in a jar. But the little fish kept growing and growing until he was bigger than any whale, and eventually he revealed himself as the god Vishnu. And because of Manu’s kindness in rescuing him, Vishnu warned Manu of a great flood that was coming. And he told him to build a boat big enough for the animals of the world. And the deluge came and the boat swirled around and was thrown from sea to sea for seven days and nights until eventually it bumped against the very tip of the Malaya Mountains, where there was dry land, and Manu’s friends and family were saved. And they began again. They planted the seeds and released the animals into the wild and built homes. And Manu, the savior of the earth, became a great king.”

  A child’s voice: “Are we going to build a boat?”

  In the following days, Nacho meets again with the leaders on each floor and tells them they need to ration out their food and keep one another alive in case the waters don’t recede. He tells them to make an inventory of all the food that is on their floor and to work out how to get families to share. He asks for gas cookers so the bakers can bake bread because the electricity hasn’t come back. He tells them to put together a supply of candles, matches, lighters, torches, and batteries.

  But the days and nights are hard. The rain begins to make pools on some of the exposed floors where no boarding has been put over the windows. Food runs short on some floors, and on others, where alcoholics or junkies live, things begin to get desperate. Banging on doors. Rolling on floors. Fights break out between families.

  On the sixth day of the rains, a plague of mosquitoes arrives and the damnificados are struck by a mystery virus. Their eyeballs go blue and they begin to shake. Six hundred of them sweat and tremble and take to their beds, and Nacho cancels school and all other gatherings because of the fear of contagion.

  “It’s borne on the wind,” says a windbag.

  “There’s no hope,” says a no-hoper.

  “We’re all doomed,” says a doom-monger.

  With everyone shaking, the crash of broken crockery rings out from all floors followed by ‘shit!’, ‘mierda!’, ‘Scheisse!’, ‘merde!’ ‘kak!’ People go unbuttoned for days, zips hang open, no one dares shave. Marias Beautty & Hare Salon closes down until further notice as Maria cannot hold a hairbrush let alone a pair of tongs or tweezers.

  Among all the shaking, however, the junkies and alcoholics turn out to be the exception. Those who have spent their lives trembling, going cold turkey, fighting off the jitters, find that once infected by the mosquitoes they cease to shake altogether. They are steady as the great rocks of Balaal. In wonder, they come together and hold up their hands on a miraculous horizontal and do imaginary card tricks, juggle imaginary knives, play imaginary piano sonatas, do imaginary scientific experiments involving test tubes and microscopes and lethal doses of arsenic.

  Meanwhile, the mosquitoes take up residence in the pools on the walkways of the tower, in the stairwells and on the roof. They lay their larvae, which writhe and squirm and grow fat on the blood of the damnificados. And in the incessant rain and heat, the creat
ures mutate and a new übermosquito is born with two-inch legs and seven senses, that can squeeze itself through the tiniest of holes and move silently at twice the speed of other mosquitoes. It attacks at all times of day, lying in wait on boards and walls, feeding on the living. It has a serrated three-pronged proboscis so sharp that a human cannot feel its prick. Its antennae contain receptors that detect carbon dioxide in a breath from one mile away, and its brain is able to calculate who that breath belongs to—young or old, healthy or sick, man or woman.

  Some of the damnificados put up mosquito nets, but the new species flies right through them, puncturing the cotton mesh as if it were air. The men and women try polyethylene, polyester, nylon, and ask the nonshakers to stitch clothes together and hang them fast against the window openings, but the predators find a way in. The damnificados burn candles and incense, but the übermosquitoes wait it out, watching the smoke dwindle from their perch, and swoop down when the air clears.

  Whole families get the shakes and sweat like dogs. The whites of their eyes cloud over and their skin is marked by tiny red blotches where the mosquitoes bit.

  Then, mysteriously, the mosquito attacks stop. At first, the damnificados say it was their doing.

  “They couldn’t get past my underpants on the window!”

  “I told you I killed two of them yesterday!”

  “I burned camphor. That’s what did it!”

  But what happened was this: the übermosquitoes began to eat the mosquitoes. The mosquitoes then defended themselves by operating in gangs. A war ensued. The übermosquitoes won. But while the war was raging, an army of dragonflies came in from Fellahin and attacked the übermosquitoes. Even with their seventh sense telling them they were in danger, the übermosquitoes, wounded and weakened from their war, were easy prey. And thus were they wiped out.

  Within twenty-four hours the eyeballs of the infected damnificados, previously dark blue at the height of their sickness, turn white again. The shakers wake up to find they are no longer shaking. With wide eyes, they fasten the buttons on their clothes, pick up cups of steaming coffee, touch their loved ones with a steady hand.

  The junkies and alcoholics suddenly begin to shake again. While in the middle of imaginary harpsichord recitals or defusing imaginary bombs, they look down and see their digits trembling in a blur.

  The rain keeps falling. Nacho looks out of his window and sees the walkway is covered. He knows he must move to a higher floor. But he also knows he is close to despair. Every day he tries to listen to the news and weather reports on the radio. But the reception is bad and the reports turn to a crackle. He fiddles with the radio knobs but gets a channel of Azerbaijani folk songs, a coffee ad in Swahili, a tennis commentary in Gujarati, a sketch show in Icelandic.

  In his desperation he consults a medium on the forty-fifth floor, the Chinaman heaving him onto his shoulders before clambering up the sodden stairs. The woman, dressed in a dirty pink nightgown, opens the door and says, “Excuse my clothes. I wasn’t expecting anyone.” She invites them in, looks at Nacho’s palm and says, “You will live a long and happy life,” and he replies, “Thanks, but I need a weather report.” She stirs some tea leaves in a mug of water, looks into them and says, “rain.”

  The Chinaman takes Nacho up the final fifteen floors to the roof and Nacho looks out over the surrounding waterscape. The rain has turned into a thick drizzle, a gray veil that blocks out the sky. He can just about make out a handful of other towers and skyscrapers in the city, still standing.

  He says, “We have to get a message out. We need help. Food. Water. But how? We are nonpeople. Damnificados. No one will help us because we don’t exist.”

  The Chinaman, standing next to Nacho and looking down into the abyss, seems to move his eyelids in acknowledgement. Nacho, the rain conjuring translucent beads in his hair, suddenly turns to his friend. He has an idea.

  “We need carrier pigeons.”

  A survey of the building finds that of the sixteen pigeons kept by the damnificados, ten have been eaten, two haven’t been the same since the übermosquitoes bit them and gave them the shakes, one dropped dead of natural causes, and three have escaped. Nacho abandons his idea and instead commandeers a dozen white sheets.

  “What the fuck is this—a ghost party?” says Raincoat as his finest rayon sheet gets whisked away by Hans, while Dieter puts the foam mattress back in place.

  “Woooooooooooooooooo!” says Hans in Raincoat’s face.

  “Verpiss dich,” says Raincoat. “Hear me?”

  “He speaks German!” says Dieter to Hans.

  “Yeah, and I want my sheet back tonight or I’ll kick you two scrawny Krauts into next week. Verstehst du?”

  “Ja, mein Herr!” says Dieter, feet already hitting the outside steps.

  After stitching the sheets together so there are four large rectangles, Nacho paints ‘Help!’ in eight languages on each sheet and hangs them, one on every side of the building, thirty floors up. The rain lashes the sheets, soaks them until the words turn to soup, and Nacho takes them down and starts again. This he does six times in a week. But he knows the city is blind. He has not seen a soul outside the tower in twelve days. He has watched cars floating down the street, pylons, a cinchona tree, mosquitoes and dragonflies dueling in the broken light, but no one from the outside world.

  And what’s this?

  In the mass of turbid water, under the spears of gray rain, a shape is moving across the city, advancing on the tower, small, resolute. Nacho makes it out. It slaloms between the roofs of the few remaining bodegas, the tops of still-standing pylons, the floating garbage. Grows bigger and bigger as it approaches, though no more than a few feet high.

  A voice singing in a smooth baritone, slightly out of tune: “Row row row your boat gently down the stream! Merrily merrily merrily merrily, life is but a dream!”

  The voice is muffled in the downpour but repeats its refrain.

  A boat comes into view. A haggard rust-jug made of tin and balsa wood, with a sheet of corrugated plastic for a roof. Tires slung to the sides, held by binding rope. A limp flag atop the roof, a patchwork of rags in yellow, black, and green. At the front of the boat a dapper pirate, impervious to the rain, decked out with bandanna and two weeks’ beard, one foot on a box as he steers with his hands. The boat is weighed down with sacks, crates, polythene bags. He’s almost at the tower’s entrance.

  “Row row row your boat gently down the stream! Merrily merrily merrily merrily, life is but a dream!”

  Nacho shouts, “Emil! Emil!”

  Other faces come to the windows of the north side. They begin to cheer. At that moment, Maria the hairdresser looks out and falls in love.

  CHAPTER 7

  Return of the prodigal—Seven sacks of rice—Hero—Maria brings food—The wanderer—Work at Ferrido—Shipbuilding—Return to Favelada—The laundry basket—The Chinaman’s escape—Burial

  EMIL THROWS A ROPE. HANS, SENT DOWN BY NACHO, GRABS IT, TIES IT TO AN IRON BANNISTER on the first floor stairwell, and hauls in Emil’s boat so it bumps gently against the west wall of the tower.

  “Thank you, my friend,” Emil calls out above the roaring of the rain. He stands a moment and gazes up at the height of the tower, squinting against the downpour. He cannot see the top floors. They merge with the sky in a sweep of gray, an impressionist’s daub. He is soaked through, barefoot and wild as a wolf, his white shirt clinging to his chest, his jeans darkened and rolled up to the knees. He climbs out the front of the boat, places two hands on the stairwell, and pulls himself up. A welcoming party has gathered—Nacho, the priest, the Chinaman, the twins. Nacho lets his muletas fall and embraces his brother.

  “Dammit, Emil. Another mouth to feed.”

  “Heard you were trapped.”

  “Aren’t I always?”

  They stand back, look at each other.

  Nacho says, “You need a shave.”

  “You need a haircut. I’m bringing gifts,” says Emil.

&nb
sp; He turns to the boat and jumps back in, lands like a cat, two feet, knees bent. Picks up a sack, brings it to the front of the boat.

  “Rice! Seven sacks.”

  He turns and bends over, pulls up a large bag.

  “Coffee!”

  Keeps going. Beans! Corn! Biscuits! Sugar! Water! Wine! Kale! Bananas!

  He shouts to Nacho, “Can your men help me carry this stuff in?”

  “What?!”

  “Can your men … ach. Hey you!”

  He gestures and the twins climb aboard and the Chinaman stands at the stairs and takes the sacks in one hand and moves them on.

  “Who’s the big guy?” says Emil to Dieter.

  “The Chinaman.”

  “Kidding me. I knew him years ago, when he was the size of a baby elephant.”

  “Don’t tell us—he’s grown.”

  “He’s grown.”

  “Who are you?” asked Dieter.

  “Nacho’s brother. You mean he doesn’t talk about me every day?”

  “Never mentioned you.”

  “And who are you two? There are two of you, right? It’s not just one of you moving extremely fast.”

  “I can’t hear you.”

  “I said, take this sack.”

  The sacks go to the floor of Nacho’s room. They pile up until there is no more floor space. Sweat from the lifting mingles with the rainwater on the twins’ foreheads and makes damp blond swipes of their hair.

  Emil and Nacho sit on the floor, surrounded by sacks.

  “So, brother, where did you get all this food? And how did you find me?” asks Nacho.

  “News travels fast. Everyone knows you took over the Torres building. Word is out. The police, the army, the malandro bastard traficantes, everyone knows. You can’t hide a thousand damnificados. As for the food, I trawled everywhere. There were stocks in a warehouse in Oameni Morti. They put them there for the rich. A Turkish importer in Bordello let me have the coffee for a pittance—his storehouse was flooded and he needed to offload everything. I found the sugar in an abandoned pantry in Balaal. Eight sacks of it. When the rains came I knew you’d be trapped.”