Damnificados

by JJ Amaworo Wilson

  “Susana thinks it’s too late.”

  “She’s a cleaning woman. What does she know? Find a surgeon. And don’t take three days over it this time.”

  “How do we know we need to remove the bullet?”

  “You want to leave a slug of lead inside him?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Emil says, “Does he have any family?”

  “No. They’re all dead. Look, there are fifteen hundred people in this tower. Someone must have a medical background.”

  “We’re damnificados,” says Maria, almost snorting. “We’re the lowest of the low, remember? There aren’t many doctors among us.”

  “We only need one.”

  “We don’t have one. You need to go and find somebody.”

  “Have you tried?”

  “I’m a hairdresser. And besides, when they shot the Chinaman, the first thing we did was lock down the tower. We closed the doors and got the weapons ready. We didn’t know if they were about to start shooting everyone. We’ve been hiding out all day. They could still come back.”

  “If it was Torres, they will come back.”

  “It was Torres. One of the soldiers said Torres wanted to speak to you.”

  “Did you hear him?”

  “No. The twins did. The man said Torres. And that he was looking for you, Nacho Morales. When the Chinaman blocked his path, he shot him.”

  “Torres. He didn’t say what he wanted?”

  “He wanted you. Now go and find a doctor.”

  But it’s too late. Susana calls to Nacho, who goes back inside, alone. The Chinaman’s eyes are open and he gestures with his hand for Nacho to come closer. Nacho shuffles to the bedside on his muletas, sits in the chair and leans toward the Chinaman. The giant turns his bear-like head a little, beads of sweat carving runnels in his waxy face, and squints hard in concentration.

  “My name is Sato Kazunari Maeda. I am not Chinese. I am from Koizin Prefecture in Japan. My father was Hidetoshi Kazunari Maeda, greatest sumo wrestler of his generation. My mother was Kaori Kazue Maeda, most beautiful woman in province. Open drawer. Yes. There.”

  Nacho pulls open the drawer by the bedside and finds a black-and-white photo, warped and brown with age, of the Chinaman’s mother and father, full-length, standing together, unsmiling. He is a head taller than her and the same build as the Chinaman, which is to say he looks as if he could pick her up in one hand. She has a flat, perfect face, painted white, large eyes, delicate features.

  “When I was five years old, I was exiled from province because my father refuse to lose wrestling bout. It all fixed, you see. Gamblers make a lot money. When he refuse, he insult yakuza warlord. His punishment was to never see me again. I grew up orphan. Always alone. Now I don’t want die alone. So I tell you my story.”

  “Why did you stay silent all your life? I’ve never heard you say more than three words.”

  “Silence suit me. Fools talk a lot. I live quietly. Work for you. You are good man, Nacho. Good man.”

  With that, Sato Kazunari Maeda’s breathing quickens, then slows again. He closes his eyes and dies, his hand falling open. From the small, high window above his bed—the only window in the room—Nacho sees the last glow of the sun fading to deep orange, and hears the snarl of an evening bus as it turns a corner through the grim-gray streets of Favelada.

  A day and a half later the cortege begins. They transport the body on a specially made catafalque, a platform of wood and steel which Lalloo rigged up with shining lights and electric horns. It rolls slowly through the streets on wheels purloined from a farmer’s wagon in Gudsland, dragged by two Clydesdale draft horses called Samson and Goliath. The mares are shaggy-maned and heavy-boned, their wide, proud muzzles streaked with white.

  The crowd is a salmagundi of every street dog that ever raised its nose and sniffed the wind: the shoeshine boys, the hookers, the addicted and the lame. They come in rags, burqas, combat pants, in patchwork suits and miniskirts. Stetsons, pork pie hats, bowlers, beanies, turbans, pakols and patkas, sweating through the midmorning sun, their shadows prefiguring them like prophecies. Past the sleek skyscrapers they roll, picking up onlookers and sympathizers, blocking the traffic on Kaijustrasse, where a street urchin shouts, “The Chinaman! The Chinaman!”

  On Perek Avenue, six hookers climb out the windows in fishnets and heels and fancy hats and join the throng, cooling themselves with Chinese fans of bamboo and silk, commissioned specially for the occasion.

  A traveling band strikes up a rhythm, banging on lids from garbage cans, ice cream tubs, tambourines of seashells, Nepalese Damphus, pots and pans, and hardwood djembes with goatskin heads, and a voodoo queen with a live python around her neck begins to dance, arms upraised, her long black skirts splaying out. As they pass Molotov Road, the street cleaners sling their mops over their shoulders and take up the walk and a man hanging off a garbage truck removes his hat and does a military salute.

  The throng of walkers is a cortege and a party and a protest. A local artist drew a portrait of the Chinaman’s face in bold strokes and they printed it up and made placards with the word “asesinado” underneath the image, and now they march to lift up the man from the long history of the corpses of the poor left lying in the dirt and to howl against his murder.

  Leading the procession are Nacho on his muletas, Emil and Maria, Susana, and Don Felipe, all dressed in black, and squinting into the glare that bounces off the windows of the boutiques and the high-rises. Past perfumed Bamberlax Avenue they walk, and across the swell of Shiguru with its street cafés and sushi bars, and heads turn and faces appear in windows, and now a trumpeter is picking out a tune above the percussion, laying a high treble that peels into the air, the note as pure as gold.

  They stop the traffic on Zalosti Mrtvhi Street. Motorbikes with families of four squashed together, a bicycle cart loaded ten feet high with rolls of wallpaper and cloth, growling cars regurgitating great billows of smoke, trucks with their beds packed full of standing, hollow-eyed damnificado workers—all stop as the cortege moves past. `

  The noise gathers on Moribondo Avenue, where they pass street merchants sitting on sheets laid out in the road, flogging their wares: bananas, candy, knock-off watches, designer bags, alarm clocks, shoes. Dogs with open sores lie in the street, and the cars and the walkers swerve around them in shallow arcs. The cortege passes a mission and a flophouse and a series of cheap hotels with flickering fluorescent lights. And then the telltale nests of blankets, cardboard boxes, dogs curled up, a bird in a cage—homes of the homeless.

  Through all this, Nacho contains his fury, focusing his energy on the long walk. How can it be that a man goes to a tower in broad daylight and kills an innocent? And no one gives chase? The sentries on the high floors see nothing, do nothing. How can it be that his friend is dead and no one pursues justice?

  They turn a corner and pass a slum, the land slick with grease and sewage. The horses whinny at the stink of rotten food and the smoky tang of burning plastic.

  “Where are we?” asks Don Felipe.

  “We haven’t left Favelada,” says Nacho.

  “Is it safe here?”

  “Safer than the tower right now.”

  The huge wagon jiggles on its wooden wheels, now past the riverbank of the slum. Washerwomen emerge from the water, one with a plastic bucket on her head. Squat, dark figures, their pants rolled up to the knees, they stop and stare, taking in the line of mourners and the two leviathan mares that lead them.

  Now the wagon crushes stones and kicks up a nimbus of dust on a tree-lined street. Emil hears Nacho’s breathing and says, “You OK?”

  “Yeah.”

  And he is, because the music and the surge of the people drive him onward even in the heat.

  Maria, in dark glasses and black dress, hair down, stops and pulls off her high-heels and resumes walking in bare feet.

  Even the sun has come to pay homage. It glows brighter than ever on the hottest day of the year, paying
its respects to the Chinaman who wasn’t Chinese, pouring its beams down on the black sarcophagus.

  Across the shantytowns of Oameni Morti, Agua Suja, Dieux Morts, Sanguinosa, and Favelada, the people whisper in awe.

  “His name will live on.”

  “He’s a legend.”

  “Biggest man I ever saw.”

  “I once served him stew. He ate the whole pot.”

  “Saw him strangle an ox.”

  “I saw him lift a car.”

  “He uprooted a tree in Maialino.”

  “I was there when he broke down the door of the Torres tower.”

  “He was a gentle soul.”

  “Never said a word.”

  They pick up a trio of bongo players, Afro-Cuban boys in bright white shirts and leather sandals, denizens of the mojito bars in outer Favelada, and the drumming escalates as the procession turns to a copse on the edge of Favelada, in blessed relief to be in the shade.

  Suddenly the music stops. Emil halts the horses and Nacho is hoisted onto a tall stump between the trees. He tousles his hair and wipes a trail of sweat from his cheek. The mourners crowd around, packed in the hundreds.

  Nacho says, “The Chinaman. May he rest in peace.”

  The crowd begins to cheer and the cheer turns into a roar and for a moment Nacho thinks he can hear an animal in the roaring, a wolf or a lion or a bear, but then he looks down at the faces and sees only damnificados. They wait for him to say more but he doesn’t because the Chinaman was a man of few words and his funeral will be the same.

  The twins help Nacho down from the dais and some of the drummers strike up a rhythm. A group of teenagers start to dance, and three women in white begin to ululate. Nacho thinks this rhythm and this wailing will take them all the way to the five stone heads at the gates of the city for the Chinaman’s final farewell. But first they have to bury the body. Emil clicks Samson and Goliath into motion and the procession moves on toward the burial ground.

  “You remember the way to the cemetery?” says Nacho.

  “Of course. That’s like going home. I hope the road holds out.”

  A minute later they pass the House of Flowers and Nacho and Emil stare as they walk by.

  They arrive at the cemetery and the caretaker, head to toe in black, comes out to meet them. His eyes are watery with drink and he has the face of someone who lives next to the dead.

  “We’re here to bury the Chinaman,” says Nacho.

  “You’re too late,” says the man.

  “What do you mean? We spoke to you yesterday.”

  “The last three plots have been sold. Just now. Someone bought them, paid cash.”

  “Then where do we bury the Chinaman?”

  “Find another place. There’s no space here.”

  “There is no other place,” says Nacho. “This is where he’ll be buried.”

  “I sold the last plots.”

  “Then dig new ones.”

  “Where? There’s no space.”

  Nacho turns to the cortege and says to Don Felipe, “Please wait here.”

  Then he beckons Emil over and says, “Walk with me. This idiot just sold the last plots. The people here will kill him. What do we do?”

  “Who bought the last plots?”

  Nacho turns to the caretaker and asks the same question.

  “Someone sent by the … the Torres family, I think the name was. I can look it up in the book.”

  “No need.”

  Nacho and Emil walk through the cemetery in the full heat of the day, looking for a space—a large space—for the Chinaman. The graves are jammed tight together. Some headstones are little more than blocks of wood with scrawled names and dates; others are carved granite or sandstone with messages etched out and chiseled angel wings, crossed swords, a dove, a torch, a cherub, a star.

  On the edge of the cemetery is stony ground, sandy-colored and rutted with the tracks of carts. Now Nacho and Emil walk the perimeter. They pass the graves of their parents, see the inscription and a small pile of dead flowers disintegrating, and keep walking. They are close to giving up when Emil sees a pile of trash in a hole.

  “Hey!” he calls out to the caretaker, who has been following them at a distance. “How deep is this?”

  “That hole? That’s full of trash.”

  “How deep is it?”

  “I don’t know. It’s been there since the massacre about twenty years ago. But it was never finished and now it’s just for trash.”

  “Where are your gravediggers?” says Emil.

  “They aren’t here.”

  “Then give me a shovel.”

  The caretaker goes to his hut and brings out a shovel. Emil balances down the side of the slope, poking with the shovel at the pile of soggy cardboard, paper, and plastic. He thrusts the shovel in deeper, feeling for where it hits the bottom, and lowers himself, kicking at the trash to check for rats. He starts to shovel out the garbage, making a small pile at the caretaker’s feet.

  “Hey,” he says. “You work here, right? Then get some more shovels. Nacho, call the twins.”

  Emil and the twins take off their jackets and deepen the hole. The trash is bound fast to the soil, encasing the hole in a layer of mulch that has been there for two decades, but they channel it out and hurl it onto the heap above. They assume a manic pace, throw off their shirts, and dig like fury while the mourners in the cortege stand dumb and watch.

  And there, in the same hole he had been digging twenty years earlier, before the gunshots of murderous soldiers sent him running for cover, the Chinaman is buried. The woman with a dog in a wheelbarrow looks on from her place near the head of the cortege, and remembers. Quietly, she says to herself, “I saw him digging that hole a long time ago. He was just a boy.”

  The casket is lowered on four thick ropes held by twelve of the tower’s strongest men, who pause a moment before letting it drop its final inches, and Emil and the twins shovel the dirt back onto the box, and keep shoveling until it is drowned in mud and tiny stones and out of sight.

  Then they wipe the sweat from their faces with the backs of their arms. Emil kicks a sheaf of mud from his boots, spits a pearl of saliva at his feet. He flings the shovel hard into the ground and it stands up, vibrates, and settles, erect as a crucifix. He pulls his shirt over his head and takes a final look into the Chinaman’s abyss. The land is level, the soil fresh.

  “Rest in peace,” he whispers.

  He picks up his jacket, slings it over his shoulder, and, all bandy legs and fancy boots, walks back with Nacho to the head of the cortege. In silence, the mourners move one by one to the grave, led by Susana, her head covered in a black veil. After her, the mourners toss in mementoes, trinkets to keep the dead man company on his journey, and harbingers of good fortune in the world to come: flowers, candy, coins, paper swans, gemstones, tiny pots of clay, and inch-high marble heads.

  As the cortege turns away, Maria mutters to Emil, “What the hell happened? You had to dig his grave here and now?”

  “Torres bought the last plots of land. He knew we were coming to bury the Chinaman. There was nowhere left.”

  “So you buried him in a pile of trash?”

  “We removed the trash. You saw us. Every last piece. I checked it for rats and snakes. There’s nothing there but worms and the man.”

  The party at the five stone heads stretches long into the night. There are go-go girls in feathered hats and tutus, a trio of break-dancers, and a man in a skeleton suit who pulls out a violin and plays a solo, a long twisting threnody eking its path through the city. Beside the stone heads, a line of chefs in aprons stand at their grills, flipping pieces of chicken and husks of corn, the smoke floating ghostlike, engulfing their faces. At midnight the crowd hoists a whirling dervish onto the middle head and the drummers hammer a rapid tattoo as he twists to a frenzy. They build fires in a rough circle, piling broken furniture from a Favelada warehouse, and in the light of the flames the damnificados dance, heroic in their adum
bral glow, their shadows dancing bigger and wilder behind them.

  But even as they celebrate him, the Chinaman’s visage has already begun to pass from their minds. They see his shape, his mass, but his face becomes a blur. Was he a handsome man? Surely he had a wide forehead, or was it narrow? His hair was always tied back from his face and bunched in a pigtail, wasn’t it? Or was it loose with a curled forelock dangling down?

  The placards are propped against a low wall, but some have fallen and are now face down on the street and his image is fading fast. If they ever knew, the damnificados, besides Nacho, begin to forget how he died.

  And even as they mourn him, what few possessions he had lie in a cardboard box and the first traces of mold begin their cancerous crawl. They burned his bloodstained shirt but the other clothes are badly folded and someone let his tea glass crack when they filled the box and another didn’t check his socks for damp and now they begin to fester in the pile. They left his door open to air the room because they said a dying man’s breath contains all the chemicals and the carbon dioxide and the argon of everything he ever swallowed and it gives off the stench of decomposition even when the man is still alive. But they let in the maggots and the ants and the insects, and the cockroaches paid a visit, too, fellow travelers on a bloody pilgrimage, and now the Chinaman’s room has the woebegone pallor of the dead. Where once wolves bristled and huddled against the cold and rain, and where the Chinaman followed them, reclining on his reinforced bed, sharpening wooden knives with metal ones, now only the lesser beasts flit and scurry and climb his cracked walls.

  The moon soars, almost expunged as the light of the new day fires. The last revelers are crumpled on the stone heads, spread-eagled like corpses, or sat with their backs to the city gates, sucking on a final bottle while the man in the skeleton suit plays a lone note on his violin which resolves into a folk song played at an adagio crawl that slows to larghissimo, as if the violin itself is drunk.

  Across the land, the day is pulsing into motion. At the heart of Favelada a symphony of car horns begins. An alarm in Oameni Morti emits its ceaseless electronic squeal. In Gudsland a cock crows and a hundred farmers roll out of bed and tug on their boots. At the sea of Kalashli, fishermen shout their greetings to one another across the water and their voices pass through the mist and bounce off the low waves that lap and kiss their barnacled tjotters. In Blutig six fighting bulldogs wake and bark and growl, and nuzzle at the bars of their cage. The sheen of ice that formed overnight in the wilds of Solitario begins to melt, and zigzagged cracks appear on the lake that inters Torres the Elder. In the dense woodlands of Sanguinosa four golden crested mynah birds twitter and babble their call and response and swivel their heads to look eastward at the rising sun.