Damnificados

by JJ Amaworo Wilson

  Past Milarepa Street, with its bare stone walls and narrow roads, the convoy curves. Here and there an infantryman adjusts to pull out a water bottle or wipe away a bead of sweat. Footsteps echo where the sound gets caught between two high buildings and then the echo stops as the road opens out to the gardens abreast of the Buddhist temple, whose walls are flaking and whose roof is spattered with birdshit and feathers where the pigeons roost.

  Down Baldado Street, which is little more than an alley, a collection of shadows and misshapen apartment blocks that lean at angles like drunken sentries, the convoy rolls. Torres waves blindly, at no one, keeping up his actor’s grin, and plants a fat cigar in his mouth.

  They leave the shadows behind and enter Hollowman Road up a short hill, and the foot soldiers pant and heave and slow down to a walk.

  “Get moving there!” shouts a sergeant from his armored car.

  The infantrymen make a big show of resuming a jog. The tanks fan out, forming a phalanx three or four wide. By now, the sun has burned through the morning mist and the sky is a bright, bright blue, cloudless and vast.

  The tower suddenly looms into view.

  And from the tower, the convoy can be seen in all its mass, its impossible heft.

  “There!” shouts a lookout on the sixtieth floor. “There!”

  Word spreads rapidly down the tower, and the lookouts calculate the numbers.

  “Looks like seventy tanks.”

  “It’s at least eighty.”

  “I make it a hundred.”

  “How many soldiers? I count a thousand.”

  “Maybe two thousand! Maybe more!”

  On the tenth floor, in a room abandoned by a family just days earlier, Nacho sits calmly at the window, hand under chin.

  The Fifth Trash War is a misnomer. No one with his head screwed on straight would possibly call it a war, yet word of mouth has designated it just that, despite the protestations of historians and journalists. For how could it be a war? When seventy armored cars and fifty tanks come rumbling through the streets and find themselves faced with a bunch of scaredy-cat damnificados armed with sticks and stones and cowering under their beds, war surely cannot be the right word.

  And yet … and yet … there are those calling for a new tapestry to augment the famous Zeffekat, to depict every movement of that extraordinary day. There are those who say that this Trash War, and not the third, was the war to end all wars because from now onward until eternity no one would ever forget the sight, the sound, the stench, as if the world itself were coming to an end.

  And it all began with a rat.

  It isn’t the pounding of the soldiers’ feet. It isn’t the tires of the armored cars. It isn’t even the giant tracks of the tanks crowding into the plaza of the Torre de Torres that scare the rat. It is something else entirely, something known only to animals, who have a sixth sense when it comes to imminent disaster. In any case, this rat does something strange. Rather than running away from the largest, heaviest army ever assembled in the streets of Favelada, the rat runs through the ranks. It hurtles helter-skelter around the feet of the six hundred soldiers, sidesteps and feints its way past the now stationary armored cars, and jinks past the tanks. Torres sees it and laughs, a deep belly-laugh.

  “They’ve sent a rat to eliminate me!” he yells, and his men begin to chuckle.

  The laughter spreads forward to his tank commanders, who have also seen the rat, then his armored car drivers join in the mirthless mirth, and finally a few infantrymen catch the gist of the joke and laugh themselves silly.

  “What the fuck are they laughing at?” says Raincoat, trembling on the thirtieth floor, his eyes peeking out the window.

  “God knows,” says one of the baker brothers.

  Twenty floors further down, Emil says to Nacho, “If you’re going to go, go now. Go and talk to him. It’s hard to murder someone when you’re laughing. Go out and share the joke.”

  Nacho doesn’t move.

  All over the tower, men and women are looking out of windows. The ex-soldier, carrying a rifle in one hand and a bottle of malt whisky in the other, tries to count the soldiers but his eyes keep seeing double so he loses track. He sees the tanks’ guns trained on the building and starts shaking.

  Down below, on the plaza, the infantrymen who aren’t laughing are panting. Some have put their guns down and collapsed. One has gone into full calisthenics mode, touching his toes, doing a warm-down. Others are bent double, hands on knees, retching. One is heard saying, “I’m a mercenary, not a freakin’ marathon runner.”

  “Me too,” says a comrade. “I signed up to kill people, not go jogging.”

  “Yeah,” says a third soldier. “We get here and what? Nothing. An empty tower block and a rat!”

  Meanwhile, Torres wipes his eyes and his sweating forehead with a flowery handkerchief. Then he thinks of another one.

  “The rat leaving the sinking ship!”

  And his tank commanders howl with laughter again, snorting into the air, slapping their hands onto the turrets, and the armored car drivers can be seen bug-eyed chortling behind their windscreens. This war! What a lark! The rat leaving the sinking ship!

  Torres pulls a megaphone from the tank’s interior, ready to order the attack, but before he can raise it to his mouth, something strange happens. It turns out there is more than one rat escaping. The one they saw was a pioneer, and it is followed by dozens more, slinking out of holes in the hot concrete or cracks in the walls of the tower and shooting across the plaza. Some of the infantrymen jump, others stamp, and others take swipes with their bayonets, but the rats are too quick.

  And then something else happens. A posse of stray cats hiding out around the tower also takes off, skittering past the lines of soldiers and armored cars and tanks. And following them, a few normally somnolent dogs rise abruptly from their slumbers and bound away into the streets of Favelada. Up on the sixth floor Maria’s dog starts yelping and every other dog in the building does the same till it’s a cacophony of growls and barks.

  Torres’s eyes dart left and right. No one moves. Torres looks up. Blue sky. He looks in front. Four hundred thousand tons of heavy equipment packed into the square, and so far nothing but rats and cats and dogs.

  In the tower, too, no one moves.

  Zugzwang.

  Suddenly, there is a rumbling.

  “What is that?” says Torres. And those are the last words he utters.

  In front of him, all around him, and under him, the ground caves in. It isn’t a gradual crumbling of the surface, nor even a crack or a gash as in an earthquake. No. Instead, the very earth drops away, swallowing up everyone and everything in the plaza, sucking them down into one hundred years’ worth of compacted, buried trash, and as the tanks and the armored cars and the soldiers drop into the abyss, cries go up like never heard before in Favelada: screams and screeches and hollering as the tanks topple like toys crashing one upon the other, their tracks twisting, wheels flying like Frisbees, whole turrets prized off their rings like the shells of crabs, and the armored cars come apart in a smashing of glass and a rending of metal, and guns twist and snap, and bodies go cartwheeling like clowns, the final cries of the soldiers echoing into the sinkhole until they disappear or are drowned out by the tanks’ metal plates clanging and gnashing, and there at the bottom of the sinkhole, one hundred feet down, the bodies and the vehicles of war come to rest, settling in a heap, and the scene is so black, so subterranean, that nothing can be seen by the human eye even with the light of the sun from above, and so no one, not the soldiers breathing their last, nor the few who survive in the tanks, shielded by walls of iron, sees the two enormous crocodiles that seem to come from nowhere to feast on the dismembered limbs and gorge on the pools of blood that lie at the bottom of the abyss, swinging their tails in fat walloping arcs, ramping open their great wedges of jaw lined with iron-hard teeth, those same beasts chased and teased by Hans and Dieter all those months ago, which emerged from the rains and
submerged into the dark, feeding on God-knows-what, living in a fetor so foul that it brews gases redolent of the ancient days when the earth was young, and the stench is now augmented by the smells of blood, engine grease, crushed metal and gasoline, and these mingle with the older smells that have bubbled and fomented underground: the odors of mold and rot and decomposing animals, and from the edge of the sinkhole there comes a voice screaming kami ay labanan sa dulo! again and again and it’s the ghosted lady of the First Trash War, who in life was tiny and curled like a crustacean but has now grown wings and stands eight feet tall and flew from the roof of the tower and dove to the rim of the abyss like an angel of vengeance wreaking her own brand of havoc in recompense for a hundred years of iniquity and suffering and now with her last wail can fly into the ether, which she does, above the roofs and the tenements and the valleys and the hills overlooking all the broken lives, the ransacked dreams of the damnificados, and from the tower, speechless, eyes agape, these damnificados look on, watching the square they have traversed every day disappear before their eyes into a black rectangle that has buried their enemies so fast and so wholly that the onlookers blink in disbelief and gawp and wonder if they have lost their minds and fallen prey to mass hysteria begetting an illusion of destruction beyond all imagining, and they turn to one another and their mouths open but no words come out because there are no words to utter when hell opens up before your eyes and so they stay silent and one or two stand up and put down their guns and their catapults and their homemade grenades, and look on in homage or horror at the miracle that has unfolded before them to rout their enemies, and finally down there when the last scream has been lost to the wind and the last heartbeat thumped in the last chest and the last reshuffle of the last moving tank parts—glacis plates, periscopes, fume extractors, gun mantlets, all sinking into position for posterity—only then does Nacho scramble to his feet, ruffle his hair and announce to the six people in the room the line that will live on long after he is gone:

  “We won.”

  CHAPTER 28

  Aftermath—Credit—The damnificados celebrate—Evacuation—The damnificados disperse—Memory

  THE LITTLE CRIPPLE WHO IS NO LONGER A CRIPPLE IS LAUDED FROM THE MOUNTAINS OF Zaurituak to the mines of Hajja Xejn, from the ice fields of Zaledenom Jezeru to the wastelands of Izoztu. He is the new David, the Goliath-slayer, who used the very strength of his enemy—the sheer weight of their vehicles, the mass of their weaponry—to destroy them, to rid the world of a butcher and a tyrant. The historians construct elaborate hypotheses about how he did it, how he booby-trapped the ground so it would swallow up an army, and the newspapers print detailed diagrams and quote well-respected geologists and anthropologists showing how it’s possible to build a sinkhole, a trap that a hunter would be proud of, even in the middle of a city.

  And like all stories, this one grows and grows, warps out of shape till it’s only half-recognizable: eyewitnesses report that thousands of wild animals were seen evacuating before the Great Drop occurred, and others give interviews claiming they helped to set the trap, digging below the surface of the land and covering it up with just enough soil and stone to prevent the ruse from being discovered. Some even produce the tools used to dig the hole, showing off the shovels they held, the hoes, pick axes and augers they carried night after night to lay the trap that slew the monster.

  In the provinces, the name of Nacho Morales becomes synonymous with heroism and ingenuity. He receives notes and telegrams and messages of congratulations and an honorary doctorate from a university in Gudsland. A local bigwig suggests putting Nacho’s face on a stamp, and a hack approaches him to write a biography. Outside a museum in Favelada, a statue of Nacho goes up, idealized, with his hair all wrong and his muletas nowhere in sight, so he looks like a Spartan warrior. A chef invents a soufflé that sags in the middle and names it the Grand Nacho.

  A movie goes into production, then a children’s cartoon to be serialized, and an action figure with crutches that turn into guns or fold out to become wings.

  But in the immediate aftermath of the Great Drop, stunned silence reigns. No one is taking credit for anything. Nacho and Emil go outside. Minutes earlier they were facing an army. Now there’s nothing but a black cavity six hundred feet by four hundred, a yawning, gaping void where the square used to be. Gone is the mural, the children’s playground; gone are the benches where the old men gathered, the tidy lawns and vegetable garden. From the hole in the land, ghostly strings of vapor rise and curl and dissipate in the sunlight.

  Emil starts to walk toward the perimeter of the abyss, but Nacho tells him, “Don’t get too close. We don’t know if it’s stable.” And Emil pulls back, stays just outside the entrance to the tower and looks on at the scene where the earth has swallowed an army.

  “It’s like something out of the Bible,” he says.

  Suddenly they hear shouts going up in the tower, and these signify the realization that the damnificados have won, that the enemy lies buried one hundred feet down, in a mass grave. Nacho and Emil look up at the tower and see people waving in triumph and couples hugging and a woman erecting a flag on the roof. Groups of children begin to cheer, their trebles and sopranos piercing the air. A klaxon sounds and then drums and wild singing.

  Nacho says to Emil, “The rats and other animals that escaped—they knew what was coming. They always know before it happens.”

  Maria appears at the entrance of the tower, tight jeans and big hooped earrings, flushed, almost glowing in wonder. She catches Nacho’s eye.

  “Che cosa incredibile! You knew all along, didn’t you? Sapevi! You planned this!”

  “No,” says Nacho.

  “That’s why you were so calm, partying in Agua Suja. Drinking coffee. You knew it! How did you do it?”

  “I didn’t. We got lucky.”

  “Bullshit. You buried two Torres boys, one under ice, the other under earth. You’re a hero.”

  And in one sweeping gesture she grasps him by the neck and kisses his forehead, leaving a stain of red lipstick.

  The victory march goes as far as the stone heads at the gates of the city and for the first time in his life Nacho leads them with a fast walk, striding ahead while the damnificados do a double take and talk about the double miracle of the victory and their leader’s body restored, whole and unbroken. At the stone heads a party erupts, catching revelers returning and still decked out in white from the Great Cleansing at Agua Suja. The dancing goes on all night and into the following morning and some are so drunk by the time they return that they nearly trip into the abyss.

  Only when the new day glimmers into motion, clear and sun-soaked, does the truth dawn on Nacho—they need to evacuate.

  It isn’t the stench, though that is terrible. A smell can always be covered up if you bury something deep enough, and Nacho already has in mind filling the hole with sand and stones and debris from the areas around Favelada. The problem is the surrounding land, and that includes the land on which stands the monolith.

  “The tower could fall any day. Any minute,” says Nacho.

  “You’re saying we won the battle but we have to leave anyway,” says one of the floor leaders.

  “Yeah,” chimes in one of the baker brothers. “What the hell? I mean crikey, mate, we’ve won. Let’s stay here!”

  A few murmurs go around. Nacho is in his classroom. On the board he has drawn a geological diagram of how a sinkhole works, copied from a book he found in the library that morning. Patiently he has explained that nothing now is safe within a two-hundred-meter radius.

  “I’ve told you the facts,” he says. “It’s unstable land. We’re on a precipice. We’re living on the edge of a hole a hundred foot deep. The land around the hole is weak. One rain shower and it could all come down, including the tower. Everyone would die instantly. We saw what happened to Torres’s army.”

  “So where do we go?” says Wheelbarrow, who no longer wheels a wheelbarrow.

  “I don’t know ye
t,” says Nacho.

  Raincoat blurts out, “Last week you said there was a factory we could live in.”

  “Emil told us it was infested with bats,” says Wheelbarrow.

  “And something about a zoo.”

  “That’s right,” says Nacho. “There’s an abandoned zoo.”

  “Zoos are for animals,” says a man. “That’s not how we want to live.”

  “If we want to live,” says Nacho, “the first thing to do is get out of here. Then we find a place. Or places.”

  “But this is our home,” says Wheelbarrow.

  “I’m not forcing anyone to leave,” says Nacho. “But you stay at your own risk. And I ask those of you with children: do you really want to live next to this crater? Every time your children go outside you’ll worry they’ll fall in. Every ball they kick or toy on wheels will roll down the hill and into the abyss where, what, a thousand people died? It isn’t safe. I’ve done the research, looked at geological records, talked to land surveyors and risk assessors. They all say the same thing. Get out before it’s too late.”

  “Then why dya do it if ya knew?” says a voice from the back, a woman with a shaven head and a tattoo of an eye above her nose.

  “Do what?”

  “Plant bombs under the land so it be cavin’ in. That’s what they sayin’ you done.”

  “Who said I planted anything?”

  “Ever’body. Sayin’ y’all with your brother, whassisname, Emilio, done laid a trap.”

  “It isn’t true,” says Nacho, “and even if it were, it wouldn’t be relevant. We got lucky. Now our luck’s run out. We have to leave. I’m telling you what I know. I brought many of you here and now I’m telling you, those of you who want to listen, that it’s time to find somewhere else. I’m sorry it didn’t work out. We tried. There’ll be other towers and other places to call home. We just haven’t found them yet.”