Damnificados

by JJ Amaworo Wilson

  “All of us,” says Nacho. “The tower itself. What do you know about the history of this building?”

  “What do you know about the history of hairdressing?”

  “The tower used to belong to a man called Torres. He’s a psychopath. Now he wants it back, and he’s threatening to kill us all if we’re not out in a week.”

  “He can’t do that. Can he?”

  “What, kill us all?”

  “Kick us out.”

  “Not legally. But he’s in with the government. His family owns the government. I don’t know what to do.”

  “So you come to me? You want me to offer to do his nails? Or I could give him a discount on one of the girls from Fellahin. Maybe he’ll drop dead of syphilis.”

  “We need help, but I don’t know where to look.”

  “Look here.”

  “Here?”

  “Not in my salon, you fool. In the building. There are ex-soldiers, those men from the forest. Some of the others have guns. Organize resistance. What’s Torres going to do—blow up his own tower? We fight him.”

  “We fight him? He has two hundred professional soldiers. They’re armed to the teeth, probably have tanks,” says Nacho.

  “Well, can’t you call in some favors? You seem to know everyone. How did you get electricity and water into this place? Make some calls. Bang some heads together.”

  “If it comes to banging heads, we’re going to lose. Torres is the number one head-banger in the city. His family invented head-banging. The bureaucrats are either in his pocket or in his family. But I don’t see how we can fight.”

  “What’s the choice?”

  “Leave and go somewhere else.”

  “Then how will Emil find me?”

  “He’ll find you or we’ll find him. And that’s not my main concern at the moment.”

  “You know we can’t go somewhere else. The tower is ours. We have the rule of law here, schools, businesses. Some people spent their lives trying to find a home, and now they have one. We lived through floods and disease and goddamned monsters in the entranceway. We’ve half starved in this building. And now you want to leave.”

  “But then we’ll all die. The building is just bricks and mortar.”

  “No it isn’t. We have to fight. Build an army. Use that big Chinaman.”

  Nacho leans back on the sofa and closes his eyes.

  Maria says, “You can sleep on the sofa if you like. It’s a long way down.”

  “No, I’ll make it. Thank you. I’ll talk to the leaders on each floor tomorrow.”

  He gets up to leave and says, “Good night.”

  “Good night. Tell your brother I’m waiting.”

  Nacho smiles, lets himself out, and waves with the back of his hand. “Yeah. Where is that brother of mine?”

  Nacho curls up on his bed and dreams of something wrapping itself around him. At first he squirms. He is being crushed by an anaconda, the colossal body squeezing his chest until he cannot breathe. The pressure slackens until he feels nothing but an embrace, two huge arms comforting him. He turns and sees the face of Samuel, his adoptive father, as large as the stone heads at the gates of the city. The enormous eyes open and his father says, “You’ll be OK. Everything will be OK.”

  CHAPTER 11

  Emil returns—Provisions—The big sleep—White Andalusian—The misadventures of Emil Morales—Preparations for war—Return of the horse

  THE NEXT MORNING EMIL RIDES IN ON A WHITE HORSE.

  With a slow trot, the saddled Andalusian is pulling a cart on which lie fifteen sacks made of thick burlap. It is early. The sun is playing peekaboo behind the city’s towers and minarets and the traffic has not yet reached its morning crescendo. But still the horse and cart slow down the flow and incite the drivers to honk their horns and shout abuse through their wound-down windows.

  Emil barely hears a word. He hasn’t slept for seventy-six hours. He sags in the saddle, eyes drooping, black matted hair pasted to his forehead. His feet, shod in boots two sizes too big, keep slipping out of the stirrups and it is all he can do to keep his grip on the reins.

  The horse trots reluctantly. Big and hefty as the beast is, it’s struggling with its load and its flanks are coated in a sheen of sweat. Emil talks to the animal, leaning in to its ear, pats its neck, and slumps again. They negotiate the rubble of the road leading to the entrance of the monolith and come to a stop twenty feet away. By now the Chinaman has heard the hoofbeats and the two spoked iron wheels of the cart scratching and creaking, and in moments he is up and dressed. By the time he gets to the entrance Emil has disappeared. The horse stands there like a megalith, only its tail moving, swishing at a cluster of flies. The Chinaman looks into the bed of the cart. There he sees Emil lying flat out on the burlap sacks in his boots of Spanish leather, snoring like a bear.

  This time there is no celebration. No gifts or gestures of gratitude. He brings them rice, sugar, coffee, raisins, almonds, salt, beans, dried meat, and flour. But among the damnificados, the whisperers grouch and whine.

  “Where was he when we were starving?”

  “Shacked up with the hussy.”

  “It took him two weeks to bring groceries.”

  “Look at him riding in on a donkey. Thinks he’s Jesus.”

  “He brought the same stuff as last time. But less of it.”

  “One measly cart. And there are more mouths to feed.”

  “That food will be gone in hours. And so will he.”

  “And good riddance.”

  “He’s a fornicating pirate.”

  “He’s a piratical fornicator.”

  “He’s a hobo.”

  “He’s a drifter.”

  “Comes and goes as he pleases.”

  “Doesn’t wash behind his ears.”

  “Mistreats his horse.”

  “Look at those boots. Disgraceful.”

  Maria puts on her red dress and fishnets, six-inch heels, a smear of cobalt eye shadow and two lines of mascara; pouts in the mirror and applies lipstick. She is ready for this moment. She hitches a ride with one of the motorboys down the six floors and prances to the cart, ignoring the magnificent horse. And in full view of the inhabitants of the monolith she climbs up on this farmers’ cart with its lingering stench of hay and manure, straddles Emil, and attempts to slap him awake.

  “Stronzo!” she shouts, in her mother’s Italian. “You keep me waiting two weeks without a word, then you show up asleep! You come stinking of animal shit and wearing peasants’ rags. Stronzo di merda!”

  Emil snores his way through her tirade, arms spread wide, face to the sky like a dead man, and Maria asks the Chinaman to carry Emil to her room. He does so without a word, heaving him over his shoulder like a sack of wheat. Emil’s head sways and bounces as the Chinaman climbs each step, but nothing at this moment can wake him. Not the sirens that scream through the city or, later, the midmorning call to prayer that echoes, amplified from the minaret.

  Nacho finds a group of volunteers to unload the sacks, and once again they are stored in his room, to be shared out and distributed by the leaders on each floor. Nacho goes up to the salon. Maria is seated, watching over Emil, who lies on her bed, his boots removed and placed neatly at the door, revealing a pair of flat flippery feet encrusted in filth.

  “You knew, didn’t you?” she says. “Knew he was coming back today.”

  “No,” says Nacho. “I had no idea.”

  “Where has he been?”

  “You’ll have to ask him when he wakes up. He’s an epic sleeper. Always was. As a kid he would run and run and leap off walls and go wherever his feet took him always at a hundred miles an hour until finally the batteries would run out and he’d sleep so long and deep you thought he’d never wake up. Treat him gently when he does.”

  “Why? He should never have left.”

  “He’s been through something,” says Nacho.

  “What do you mean?”

  “There’s blood on his han
ds. He has a cut under his chin that wasn’t there before. However he got all that food, he paid for it one way or another.”

  “I can see all that,” says Maria.

  “And as for that horse. It’s an Andalusian. I just hope he didn’t take it from one of the Iberian cartels, because if he did they’ll be coming after him. As if one psychopath on our tail isn’t enough.”

  Maria gets to her feet.

  “I need to open up the salon,” she says.

  “And I should go, too. We have to divide the food. Let me know when Emil wakes up. I need to speak to him.”

  There is no motorboy in sight, so Nacho begins the slow descent down six floors on his muletas. As he negotiates the stairs, he bumps into Susana, the woman who has smiled at him ever since she arrived from Agua Suja. Nacho mutters, “Good morning.” She nods and smiles. And disappears.

  On the first night, Maria climbs into bed with Emil and lies on her stomach, hands under her chin, regarding him like a curiosity. She tries to undress him, expecting him to wake up ready for love, but he is so inert, so damned heavy in his sleep, she cannot take off his pants and she only gets his shirt off by rolling him onto his front and unbuttoning it. She drapes a smooth brown leg over his flanks and strokes his thighs through his rough jeans. He doesn’t stir. She grips him from behind, first in an embrace, then after ten minutes of his snoring she digs in her lacquered fingernails wondering how long it would take to draw blood. He sleeps on.

  She turns him onto his back and straddles him. She is naked now and with the shutters closed, the heat of the windless night is upon them. She looks down on his bearded face and rests her hands on his shoulders.

  “Emil,” she whispers.

  Nothing.

  “Emil.” She says it louder.

  His dreams continue undisturbed.

  “Emil!” she snaps. “Emil! Wake up!”

  He snorts a moment and turns unstoppably, flipping her off the bed. She lands with a thud on the floor, managing to cushion herself with her hands, and rasps, “Goddamn it!”

  She climbs back into bed as noisily and violently as she can and turns her back on him. She changes her mind, turns around, and pulls the sheet from under him, yanks at it with both hands. He acquiesces, adjusting his position in his sleep, and she covers herself. Eventually she too drifts off to sleep as her haze of black-eyed fury dissipates.

  A new day dawns and Emil sleeps through it. Occasionally he grunts and lurches or curls up in fetal position, and when that burst of commotion is over he is back to the deepest of slumbers. He lets out a groan and Maria imagines him dreaming of the nights spent in some hell-hole without her. He stretches out a hairy hand and Maria puts it to her face, comforting him in his sleep. She has forgiven him his nighttime performance and she now throws rose petals onto the sheets. She relights the vanilla candles which have grown lumpy at their base. In front of the mirror she readies herself for the day, glancing back at Emil every few seconds, wanting him to see her.

  She works all day in the salon but returns to her bedroom every thirty minutes to check on him and she sees that he changes with the hours so that she can barely believe it is the same Emil by daylight, with the sun blaring across his jaw, as the Emil she sees at night, the dark hero in shadow, a swath of chiaroscuro shaping the nape of his neck.

  At midmorning, she wipes a patina of sweat from his brow using a cloth dipped in lavender water as the sunlight angles in. She tries to cover him, but he kicks off the sheets in a flurry of writhing before settling again, his breaths turning regular as the ticking of a clock. He opens his eyes, tells a joke, mumbles about the House of Flowers, and falls straight back to sleep.

  Nacho visits twice and sees his brother, conked out as a rock. He stops by the salon and reminds Maria to tell him when Emil wakes up and she says, “If he wakes up. He hasn’t moved for days. How did you wake him when he was younger—stick a bazooka down his throat? I’ll tell you when he wakes up all right. You’ll hear me shouting at him from Blutig.”

  In the evening she hand-rolls a dish of pasta and bakes it in a sauce of tomato, fennel, and almonds, lays out two plates and two wine glasses. She goes to the bedroom and attempts to stroke him awake. He sleeps through every touch.

  “Goddamn it. Wake up!”

  She eats alone and makes casual conversation to the empty chair.

  “How was your day, honey? Fantastic. I gave a couple of straight cuts, did a perm for an old lady from Sanguinosa, one manicure and three pedicures. How was yours? Fine. I brought a boatload of food for the rabble, killed a few despots, and rescued some babies from a fire. Oh and here’s a bunch of flowers for you, darling. A token of my undying love. How are our wedding plans going?”

  When Emil finally wakes up, he leaps out of bed in a blind panic. He’s alone.

  “Where’s the horse? Shit!”

  He looks around and sees dozens of candles, jars and vases, holy wall hangings, and a fluttering of rose petals settling on the bed.

  “Shit! Where am I? Have I died?”

  He sees his boots in the corner of the room with the socks hanging out like tongues and puts them on. Shirtless, he hurtles through the salon. Maria sees him but she has her hands full of hair. He arrives on the stairwell and bounds down the steps three at a time with the voice of Maria ringing in his ears: “Emil! Emil!”

  “I’ll be back in a minute!” he shouts, and then says to himself, “Where’s the horse? I lose that thing, they’ll string me up by the balls.”

  He sees the Chinaman at the entrance.

  “Chinaman, where’s the horse? Big white thing. Andalusian.” The Chinaman points and Emil follows his fingers. At the back of the tower there is a small area of fenced-in pasture where they had planted vegetables before the flood. The horse now roams there, tied loosely to a fence pole.

  “Thank God for that,” says Emil. He strokes the horse’s neck, pats it on its flanks. “Good boy.”

  Emil is backed up against a cushion on Nacho’s floor.

  “I need to return the horse,” he says. “It’s a day’s ride away. And then I need to escape. If they catch me, I don’t know what’ll happen.”

  Nacho sips his coffee.

  “Don’t tell me you borrowed it from one of the cartels.”

  “I borrowed it from one of the cartels.”

  “What happened out there? You were gone two weeks.” “My boat got a leak. I tried bailing out the water but it was no use. I had to leave it there, tied to a shack. I was stranded. I hitched a ride with another guy in a boat, but he turned out to be a madman. The guy was looting everything in sight so I got off in Constantinides. It was waist-deep but I managed to find an attic in an abandoned house. It was full of boxes and chests. After two days in there my food ran out and I couldn’t escape because the water had risen. I managed to smash open one of the chests, hoping to find some canned food, but all I found was gold. Huge ingots and crucifixes and goblets. It was like pirates’ treasure. But you can’t eat gold.”

  “This sounds like one of Dad’s stories,” says Nacho.

  “So I put some of the gold in a sack, broke out of the skylight and made my way across the roofs of Constantinides. I made it to a tower where a bunch of hippies were sheltering and bought myself a ride on a raft built by an ex-sailor. He was making his way to Balaal, where the water was lower and there was food. He was good company until he realized what was in my sack. After that I couldn’t trust him. He kept reaching for his knife and I had to keep reaching for mine. If he’d had a gun I’d be dead now. Once the water was low enough I jumped off. I was starving. I soon realized we weren’t in Balaal. We were in Sangre Fría. The cartels had taken over the streets so I had to creep around in the shadows. The water was up to my knees by this point. I guess Sangre Fría’s on higher ground. But someone saw me and started shooting and that’s when I stole the horse. I rode all night to Uccidere and exchanged the last of my gold for the cart and provisions. I didn’t know how I would get back—it was st
ill raining. I was exhausted but I had so much food and provisions I couldn’t sleep and I was scared the cartels would catch me with their horse. I rode on to Puscagol, where I met a holy man who told me to surrender all my worldly goods. Then in Hjertesorg I met an unholy man who told me the same thing. Except he had a gun. I managed to disarm him and escaped with a few cuts and bruises. Before I left I chained the guy to a post. He’s probably still there. And I still have his gun. By then the rain had stopped so I rode all the way here.”

  “Why do you need to return the horse?”

  “They saw my face. One day they’ll find me. If I return the horse, they may forgive me. The cartels are like that. They have long memories.”

  “It’s not safe to go back to Sangre Fría. If they see you with the horse, they’ll kill you. You should sell it or something.”

  “No, Nacho. I know these people. To them, a horse is like a woman. She can be borrowed, but never stolen. That’s how it works. If I return the horse with an offering and then I leave, I may be OK. If I don’t, I’ll be looking over my shoulder for the rest of my life.”

  “There’s something I need to tell you,” says Nacho. “Torres was here.”

  “Which Torres?”

  “What does it matter? They’re all the same. He wants his tower back within a week. We have five days and then he’ll send in his army.”

  “What army?”

  “He has two colonels and two hundred trained killers. Maria says we should fight.”

  “What do the others say?”

  “What others?”

  “You mean you haven’t told anyone else?”

  “Like who? I didn’t know who to turn to.”

  “So you asked a hairdresser? There’s a soldier here somewhere, you told me. The Chinaman. Those German twins. They’re kind of handy. The priest. Those brothers who run the bakery. You need to get organized. See what weapons you have.”

  “We’ll be massacred. And the Trash Wars will start all over again, only they’ll be the Tower Wars, and everyone will die.”

  “What do you propose?”

  “We leave.”

  “You need to ask the people. Call a meeting. I can’t believe you haven’t done this already. Call the floor leaders. If they want to fight, then you fight. If they want to leave, then you leave.”