“I’m warming up.”
“Are you like this with all your clients?”
“You aren’t a client. You’re my husband’s brother.”
“Husband? Is there something I don’t know?”
“Shut up. I’m thinking.”
He waits. Looks at her enormous eyelashes.
Her manicured hands finally touch his hair. It’s the first time a woman has touched him in a decade. She begins cutting from the back. She frowns as she works and Nacho sees a deep vertical crease between her eyes that he’d never noticed before, and he thinks, ‘She’s my age or maybe Emil’s. She’s lost the flush of youth. She’s still beautiful, but beauty never lasts, and hers won’t either.’
Gradually he drifts into a reverie, allowing his mind to wander the paths of Bieb ta ‘Niket, the shebeens of Zerbera—his lucky place, even the nooks in the House of Flowers where the cockroaches crawled and the sun never shone. Then he runs through chess openings, sending queens on lone sallies and bishops flying diagonally into enemy territory.
Maria takes bunches of Nacho’s hair between her fingers and cuts slowly, methodically. The hair drops onto the shoulders of the bib Nacho is wearing. He thinks he looks like a monk in a cowl. All he needs is the hood over his head and he could take himself off to Solitario, go live in a cave, and eat berries for the rest of his days.
“Who’s the newcomer?” asks Maria.
“Who?”
“The Chinaman’s room. There’s somebody there.”
“How did you know that?”
“News travels fast.”
And Nacho thinks, ‘She’s right. We live in a tower. A story can get from the ground floor to the sixtieth in about two minutes.’
“Says he’s a doctor. His house burned down.”
“You believe him?”
“He was covered in soot. And he wasn’t a miner, that’s for sure. Wouldn’t last five seconds in a mine the way he was breathing. So maybe he’s a doctor, maybe he isn’t.”
“I heard he was creepy looking. Like a spider. But it was Layla’s kid told me that, and everything’s creepy to her.”
“How’s business?”
“You mean here? If I wasn’t cutting your hair now, you’d have to wait two weeks. It’s been like that for four months. We’re doing well. I want to expand but there’s nowhere to expand to.”
Her eyes sweep across the room, the emporium. Six swiveling chairs, one desk for transactions, glass fronted cupboards full of beauty products and a hundred baubles on the shelves. She is a collector of clay pots, tiny vases, figurines, tiles, vintage posters. On the wall there’s a framed photo of her as a twenty-year-old, posing in a beauty competition, full length, harsh light flooding from above.
Nacho watches his gradual transformation in a state of curiosity. He has never been in front of his own image for such a long period of time, and, not having a mirror in his room, he sometimes forgets what he looks like.
When she is finished, Maria stands back, admiring her handiwork. She whips off Nacho’s bib and hangs it on a hook.
“There,” she says. “You look good. Now go and find yourself a wife.”
There is a commotion downstairs. For a moment, as Nacho walks out of Maria’s salon, he thinks it may be an attack on the tower. He tries to hurry down the five flights of stairs, but his muletas don’t allow him to, and the stairways are busy with people heading to work.
As he arrives on the ground floor, the sight stops him dead. In the plaza, a gang of men and women are carrying a large wooden cage toward the road, holding it by two long struts the length of small trees. A crowd has gathered, jeering and shouting and waving their fists. In the cage is a man stripped naked. He turns and turns in raw fear, gripping the bars. His body is filthy with soot.
“Dimitri Abramov,” Nacho says to himself.
Shivarov is screaming now, in Russian, Hungarian, and English, his manic, terrified face a snag-toothed rictus of fear. But his voice is all but drowned out by the baying of the damnificados. Children throw stones and handfuls of dust, and a woman hurls a tomato which bursts against the bars of the cage, pips flying.
Nacho catches sight of Don Felipe walking behind the crowd.
“Don Felipe!”
The priest doesn’t hear him.
“Don Felipe!!”
He turns around, his blank face resigned, and pauses to let Nacho catch up.
“What’s going on?” asks Nacho.
“Shivarov.”
A moment passes. The pink clouds have dispersed and now the sun is beaming down.
“Impossible,” says Nacho. “He’s a myth.”
“He’s in the cage. He has six fingers on each hand and a box of tools. It’s him. I tried to stop them. I think they’re going to burn him at the gates.”
“Why burn him? I know he was a Cripple Maker. But people paid him. It was his job.”
“It’s not what he did or didn’t do. It’s what he stands for. The people are afraid of him. What do we do with the things we fear? We kill them.”
Behind them appears the woman with the dog in a wheelbarrow, but this time she has left the dog behind. And the wheel-barrow.
She calls over their shoulders, “You don’t understand. Either of you.”
Nacho and the priest turn to face her, and she walks with them.
“He wasn’t just a Cripple Maker,” she goes on. “He was a government torturer during the Trash Wars. He mutilated people for profit.” Then she looks straight at Nacho. “You let the devil into our home.”
Traffic stops and the car drivers and the rickshaw boys and the truckers and the cyclists behold the terrible sight. Shivarov railing like a madman, hauled through the heart of the city in a wooden cage, an animal banging at its bars. A pack of wild dogs living on Roppus Street pick up the scent of scandal and lope after the procession.
As Don Felipe suggested, they go all the way to the five stone heads and there begin a mock trial. A tall black man named Jeremiah, with a necklace of snake’s teeth, leads the prosecution. The graffiti artist. Nacho has seen him many times, though the man doesn’t live in the tower.
The cage is lowered onto the street. Jeremiah climbs to the flat top of the stone head in the center. His voice is calm.
“Everythin’ what you heard about this man be true. He name Shivarov. He a torturer and a cripple maker. The sins this man perpetrated upon humanity be beyond compare. You all heard the stories. He cut people up. In the last war he gone sided with the soldiers and broke people bones. Sure, he sittin’ in front of us right now givin’ me the evil eye, but I ain’ ’fraid. I ain’ ’fraid o’ you no more ’cause we gone and proved you human just like the rest of us. You have a heart beatin’ in yo’ chest? Sure you have. You have a mind? Sure you have. The only thing you don’ have is a soul ’cause you gone sold that to the devil, know what I’m sayin’? Now I’m sure as a dog is a dog that there are those of you out there who know someone affected by this man’s work. Maybe a friend. Maybe a neighbor. Maybe it somebody you don’t even know, some innocent guy that you see lyin’ in the street. But Shivarov put his hand on him, and cut him up. For all that and mo’, Shivarov have to die.”
The crowd cheers and there are shouts of “Yeah” and one voice rings out loud and clear, “String ’im up!”
At his insistence, Don Felipe is helped up onto the central stone head and he tells the crowd that they themselves, damnificados and all, are not murderers. Instead, they should imprison Shivarov forever.
And then it’s Nacho’s turn.
“He did terrible things. We all know it. But for us to kill him for the things he did, that isn’t justice. Neither is putting him in prison. He’ll be murdered by the other inmates as soon as they know who he is. Instead, we should send him to Solitario. There he’ll spend the rest of his days pondering the things he’s done. He’ll do his penance alone and he’ll never return.”
“Why should we spare him?” someone shouts.
“Because we’re
merciful,” Nacho replies. “Cover him up! He isn’t an animal. He doesn’t belong in a cage, whatever he’s done.”
Someone passes a handful of rags between the wooden bars and Shivarov clothes himself.
“I’ve said my piece. You’ve heard Jeremiah and Don Felipe, too. Now make your decision.”
The crowd murmurs, whispers, converses in groups. The decision is put to a vote by a simple show of hands and to Nacho’s surprise, they agree to his idea. Jeremiah shakes Nacho’s hand and touches his shoulder with the other hand and walks away without a word, leaving Nacho to organize Shivarov’s departure.
Within twenty-four hours Shivarov is on his way to Solitario. He is clothed and washed and handcuffed. His tools are melted down and resold as scrap metal, and his wooden box is torched at the stone heads. As it burns, those who are present swear they see a thousand souls rising in the smoke—the spirits of those he maimed.
When Nacho returns to the tower his head is throbbing. At the foot of the tower, Don Felipe says, “I thought they would tie him to a stake and incinerate him.”
“We’re damnificados, not barbarians,” says Nacho. “Justice is everything.”
He bids Don Felipe farewell, and struggles up the stairs.
“Nacho,” Don Felipe calls out. “I hardly recognize you. Did something change?”
“Haircut. This morning.”
“Ahhh.”
“But it seems like weeks ago.”
“Shivarov?” says Emil. “You mean he’s real?”
Emil has returned from two days’ work in Zerbera.
“Oh yeah,” replies Nacho. “Like I said, he was in the tower for one night.”
“Were there horns on his head?”
“No, but he had six fingers on each hand.”
They are in a café close to the tower. A waitress brings them thick coffee in tiny glasses. Across from them, the snap and clack of a backgammon game—two men sucking on shisha pipes as they play, and a dozing dog tied to the table leg. A fan is whirring on the ceiling and a gang of flies are dancing in its slipstream. The whole place seems half-asleep.
Emil adds a pile of sugar that makes sediment at the bottom of the cup. Nacho puts his hand under his chin, takes in the nineteenth-century portraits on the walls and says, “Do you think Torres will attack?”
“Oh sure. You’re the one who knows history, but look at what his father did, and his grandfather and his brother. The whole family. They grab anything and everything they can. And they think the tower’s theirs. Some time soon he’ll pay us a visit. And then the only question is how long we have left in the tower.”
The dog tied to the table leg starts licking its nether parts. Its owner loses the game of backgammon and curses in Arabic. They reset and begin again, throwing the dice like Olympians, with a shake and a flourish.
“It’s not like a flood,” says Emil.
“I know. ‘No more water, but fire next time.’”
“What?”
“Ah, nothing. A song I heard in Zerbera once.”
“Can’t you use your connections to keep him away? You know some big shots, right?”
“The most I can do is get us free water. Power changes hands all the time. Always has done. One day I’m doing a translation for an ambassador, the next day he’s fired and living on a farm in the back end of nowhere. If I knew anyone who could stop Torres, I’d have asked them months ago. And I wouldn’t have gone to Solitario.”
The backgammon players break into an argument, full of gesticulation and threat. Meanwhile, the dog carries on licking itself, and Emil and Nacho pay up and leave. As they close the door, it makes a rusty clank like a cowbell with a bandaged thumb for a clapper.
CHAPTER 23
Insomniac—The chess days—Heat—The rationing of power
NACHO LIES IN BED AWAKE. THE GROWLING OF THE MOPED THAT TAKES PEOPLE UP AND down the steps of the tower is silenced. The twins, who came in drunk and singing in German, are long gone, passed into dreamland, mouths open and snoring. The only sound is the whirring of Nacho’s fan, a portable white thing that stands in the corner of the room. Like Nacho, it has only one good leg and is constantly threatening to fall.
When he can’t sleep, he turns to his translation work—the most boring he can find: a business contract, a technical manual. Once, in the early days, he turned to a book of poems he was being paid to translate, in the hope that it would cure his insomnia. As he started on the original French, he gradually found himself entranced by the poems and stayed up all night to finish the work. He went back to bed as the sun was rising and slept deeply until the first snarl of traffic, the first honking of horns, the first barks of distant dogs awoke him.
It’s almost 3:00 a.m. Giving up on sleep, he rises slowly, lopsided, and limps to his table without his crutches. The table is multipurpose—a place to eat, work, converse, entertain, and play chess on the rare occasions he can persuade Don Felipe to sit down and do battle with him.
“You play like a conqueror,” the old priest once said. “Always on the attack.”
“I learned in the street,” Nacho replied.
He had learned from watching the men—always men—in a park in the town of Ajedrez, two hundred miles north of Favelada. They would play with timers that they banged with the flat of the hand every time it was their turn. Each player had ten minutes in total and his timer would run down like a ticking bomb.
Nacho had been sent to Ajedrez to interpret at a business symposium. Because the work was exhausting, the interpreters were given long breaks, and so Nacho would wander into the sun-dappled parks, and it was there that he first saw the lines of men seated opposite one another, at tables, banging their clocks. Small crowds were gathered around the tables. The players seemed barely one step up from damnificados. They wore long greasy coats and fraying jackets in the height of summer, and their faces had the sun-crusted, lived-in look of street people. Their games were played at a slam-bam rhythm and Nacho loved the click of the pieces and then the thump of the hand on the clock.
Chess seemed to Nacho like some strange Eastern religion—its indecipherable rituals, the meditative lulls, the gradual assertions of power. And he loved yet again to be learning a new language, a language of riches such as zugzwang, trébuchet, queening, and patzer. It was only much later that one of the players he befriended told him that the game was feudal, a microcosm of the relations of dominance and oppression that still besmirched the world. The pawns were sent to die first. They were the expendable people, the stooges, the fall guys, with negligible mobility and no chance of glory. They were foot soldiers whose role was to protect the king and queen, the bishop and knight.
“Chess is a bloodless war,” said the player he’d befriended.
In that park Nacho once saw the equivalent of hara-kiri, when an obese Romanian raised his gargantuan hand and without a flicker of emotion, toppled his own king in a manner that said, ‘This is inevitable. I have reached the end. The king must die and his death shall be the shedding of a feather.’ He saw a sly Indian from Chandigarh put the evil eye on his Israeli opponent, who fell to pieces and began weeping. It was no scandal—the onlookers simply shuffled off to another table. He saw, too, a player rise like the furies, midgame, and unsheathe a khanjar, the curved dagger of the Omanis, and threaten to disembowel a spectator who had been shining the reflection from a drinking glass into his eyes.
Nacho thinks about these times, puts his chess set to one side, and fingers a pile of paper—the translations he needs to do: a business report in Italian, instructions for a washing machine in French, and a scientific paper in Spanish. He chooses the instructions. They are artless. There is no human voice in the writing of it—no irony, no curiosity or character—just a straight delineation of how to get a machine working. This suits his 3:00 a.m. mind perfectly. He gets to work and finishes it by hand at 3:45, types it up on his Hermes typewriter, slapping the platen with a thud and a jangle at the end of every line, and goes back to bed.<
br />
He dreams of chess.
Morning comes to the sound of drilling and traffic. They’re tearing up the road across from the monolith, making something new. The piercing rattle is punctuated with shouts from the laborers, a motley mob of swarthy grunts. For the most menial jobs, they form gangs on the corner of Haggalak Street at 4:00 a.m. and hope to be handpicked by the foreman, a gruff ex-damnificado with a snake tattoo slithering up his arm. They work mornings and evenings to avoid the full blast of the sun.
The weather has turned. Under the foggy sky, the heat hangs in the windless air, and in every room in the tower families install fans that are begged, borrowed or stolen from junkyards and dusty stores full of used goods. But when all the fans are on, with the TVs and lights bawling and glowing, and assorted machines burping and puffing, the power in the monolith cuts out. With no warning, the whirring that keeps the place alive turns blank in the blink of an eye and six hundred TV sets are suddenly expunged. Worse, the refrigerators lose their power. Even worse, Maria’s hair dryers shut down. She bellows at the tower, at her workers, at all Heaven and Earth.
Fortunately, Lalloo knows how to get the power back, and he does so. Nonetheless, Nacho decides to work out a system for reducing the outages. It involves even-numbered floors abstaining from using too much electricity at certain times of day, and odd-numbered floors doing the same at different times. The damnificados begin their complaining immediately.
“Why should we switch off the TV?”
“That’s when they show all the best telenovelas!”
“It’s a conspiracy!”
“It’s not fair! Why doesn’t his floor do without electricity?”
“They should fix the goddam power!”
“What next? No water?”
“More rules and regulations. Nacho’s the one with the power problem.”
“He’s a dictator!”
“He’s trying to cheat us!”
Nacho asks the leaders on each floor to explain patiently that on a rota system everyone wins and the power will never go off, that everyone can use their fans all the time and in any case they’re getting free electricity round the clock, and that once the heat wave dies down things will go back to normal. And still the complaints echo from the basement to the topmost floor until eventually everyone gets used to the system and forgets there was ever a blackout in the first place because Time has a way of dulling the memory.
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