by E. J. Swift
After Paola and Camilo burned up with the fever, Ramona’s rambles became more protracted. She sidled around the two graves at the front of the shack. She went further away, down the mountain, as far as the sliding city. At first the empty buildings frightened her; she imagined them to be full of watchful eyes, or raiders, or Paola’s tripping footsteps in the shadows. She had to be careful, too. Animals hid in dark holes. But none of the animals attacked Ramona. She sensed that none ever would. Already her luck lay upon her, an invisible cloak but palpable to these creatures whose sixth sense was strong. It was Ramona’s luck that kept rats away and venomous snakes coiled, wary and suspicious in their retreats.
She began to enjoy tiptoeing through the deserted buildings, looking at the things that were left. The sliding city had once been full of glass. She found the pane of a rotating door, webbed with hairline cracks but intact. The glass was clear and frail as an insect’s wing. She stood gazing at it, awestruck by her own glimmering reflection and the murky world beyond.
The houses were full of droppings, beetles and bird nests, vines pushing through the walls and floors. Underneath these colonists were other interesting objects. Tarnished metal devices. Rows of plastic bottles, their contents long evaporated. Fragments of cloth attached to hangers in wardrobes overrun by ants. Creamy bones and staring skulls. Once an entire skeleton on a mattress, rags clinging to the supine figure spun pale with cobwebs whose spiders sat patiently waiting.
Ramona was sifting through a pile of junk in one of the lower districts when she found the jewellery. It was a piece not quite square in shape, and when she wiped the muck away she saw that it was broken. What remained was a flat medallion a few centimetres across. The medallion was green, the colour of dark waxy leaves, covered with an intricate network of tiny gold ridges and grooves. Ramona took the jewellery outside to admire it properly, tilting it from side to side so it made the sun flash. She bored a hole in the medallion and took to wearing it on a cord under her clothes. Sometimes she put it in her hair, like a comb.
Her mother was less impressed by the jewellery.
‘What do you want with that old bit of robotics?’
‘Robotics?’
Inés gave her a dark look and said it violated the teachings of the Nazca. She said it was all told in the tale of the astronaut and the dog. Had she taught Ramona nothing?
The sliding city became familiar. She knew the sounds of its caving walls and lurking animals. The sounds of human emptiness. She flitted from building to building. Paola – what was left of Paola – jumped the shadows with her, a little skip of the light. Ramona made herself like the dust: always there, never noticed.
She avoided the highest quarter, where a small community had made a village of the old houses. There was an idea in her head that she was the bearer of a terrible curse; if she spoke to these people, they would drop dead like Paola and Camilo. There was the other thing too: she did not know what to say. For months she had not spoken to anyone but Inés, and Inés barely spoke. Instead Ramona spied from afar. If the people in the sliding city were real, then the city in the south must be too.
She watched the inhabitants hanging their sheets to air, high above the dusty streets; she watched the kids kicking an empty can between themselves; they built things out of stones and broken bricks and kicked them back into pieces; she watched them shout, cry, and yell at one another; she marvelled at the names that flew between them; she watched the pedlars arrive on their motorbikes and the adults haggle over the price of potatoes and peas. She studied the men, wondering if any of them might be her father.
One afternoon she was concealed in her usual spot at the end of their street, where the boys were playing with the tin. She felt it in the ground first. The sudden, familiar tremor, like the loosening of some vital foundation.
Ramona stepped away from the walls and out into the street, not knowing which way to run, too scared to make a commitment in either direction.
The others had paused too. For a second they all stood, petrified.
Further up the street, a house began to shake. Ramona dropped into a ball and wrapped her arms around her head. Dust plumed around her. She screwed up her eyes and held her breath. She could hear the rubble streaming downwards. She risked a peek. The boys, dim shapes, leaped out of the way. All except one. He was caught in the flow and carried forwards as if on a wave. She saw him, a vague outline through the dust.
And then suddenly, he wasn’t there.
The rocks had overwhelmed him.
The air began to clear. The house was flattened and there was only a mound of rubble where the boy had been.
Without thinking, she darted forwards and began with several other pairs of hands to pull the fallen stones away.
The work was panicked, scared, yet orderly. Hands collided, disengaged, returned.
‘There he is!’
An arm could be seen, folded over the head. The boy had crouched himself into a ball, the way Ramona had dropped to earth only a minute before. They worked quickly. The boy’s head was clear, bleeding. He blinked dazedly. Finally his legs were free.
He emerged clutching his arm. His shoulder looked odd; it wasn’t hanging right. There was a collective gathering of breath as he staggered, woozily, to his feet, and a great expulsion of it as he took a few steps forwards.
The first noises were those of joy, congratulations. Dry sobs. ‘Right out the socket,’ said another boy. A woman wiped the boy’s cheeks with the sleeve of her shirt. Then someone else called out, deliberately raising their voice.
‘That’s the girl that’s always hanging around, watching us. I’ve seen her.’
Others chimed in.
‘So’ve I.’
‘She’s here all the time.’
‘What does she want, spying on us?’
Ramona froze. But it was too late. She was visible. The faces around her, which moments ago were open with relief, tautened into hostility. As though the collapsed house was Ramona’s fault. She took a step backwards, ready to run.
And then the boy who had been next to Ramona when they pulled away the rocks gave everyone else a hard glance.
‘It doesn’t matter. She helped. She can do what she likes.’
It was the most important day of Ramona’s life since she had buried Paola and Camilo. Firstly, it was the day that Félix saved her. And secondly, it was the day she realized that there was another part of being invisible of which she knew nothing. Inés had not taught it to her, because Inés had no need. But if Ramona was going to find the city in the south, then she needed to learn this other thing – a way of blending into people as well as the landscape, fitting in with their faces and their speech. She needed to learn stories and how to tell them.
She began to spend time with Félix, who knew plenty of stories, especially ones about the ocean, although he had never seen it before. They exchanged discoveries. Ramona granted him the privilege of seeing the jewellery she had found.
Félix studied the medallion with the expert eye of a fellow scavenger.
‘We need the pedlars for this. It might be valuable. Do you want to sell it?’
Ramona shook her head.
‘I want to know what it is.’
Ramona had only ever watched the pedlars from a distance before. This time, when they arrived, she was in the thick of it. The whining motorcycles wound right the way up the mountain, their side-carts carefully packed with provisions: cloth and soap; spices, coffee and sugar. Félix’s people had an entire day to indulge in their favourite activity of bartering.
Félix acted as an intermediary for Ramona. There was a man he knew from previous transactions. He took the pedlar aside. Ramona took the medallion from around her neck and held it out.
‘Can you tell us what this is?’
The pedlar glanced at the jewellery for a bare second.
‘Bit of old robotics. Worthless.’
Félix turned to Ramona in sudden agitation.
‘Throw it away, Ramona!
You can’t keep it.’
‘Ah, it’s long dead,’ said the pedlar. ‘Can’t hurt no one now.’
Félix pushed at Ramona’s arm, encouraging her to drop the medallion. She stared at them both in puzzlement.
‘What is robotics?’
‘It’s what the Neons had,’ said Félix. ‘It’s evil.’
The pedlar’s gaze settled upon Ramona. His eyes were shrewd, gold-tinted irises, layered with the knowledge of many years of travelling. She could read the stories of the universe in those eyes. When he spoke his voice was dry and croaky with dust but edged with that same, round goldenness.
‘Robotics was the old system of the world. The Neons used it for everything. Robotics told people what to do. Maths and magic and minds. That’s what it was.’
‘But what does this do?’ Ramona pressed.
‘What does it do? You’ve got the wrong question, girlie. Better to ask – what does it tell you? There could be anything on there. You should see what they have in the university at Cataveiro. Visions and dreams. Augmented things that make you see and hear and taste.’
The pedlar held up a single pea pod.
‘You see a pea, you eat a pea. Except you don’t actually eat a pea. You see?’
Ramona didn’t, and she could tell from Félix’s look of intense concentration, her friend’s cover-up for confusion, that neither did he.
‘How could this jewellery make you taste?’
‘Jewellery, she calls it? Ha! What an age … People had all sorts of bits and pieces stuck in them those days. You could call it jewellery, I suppose. Some of them were so wired-up they were more robotics than human.’
‘What do you mean, “in them”?’ Félix was appalled.
‘I mean, inside them.’ The pedlar grabbed Félix’s wrist and poked at the suntanned back of his hand so that the bones wobbled. ‘Under their skin. Inside their brains. Some people say the Boreals do it even now.’
‘That’s disgusting,’ said Ramona. She felt sick.
The pedlar shrugged. ‘It’s not the thing you should be afraid of. It’s how the thing is used. They still use a little robotics, in the south, and no one’s dead, not when I looked last. Young man, your face is a picture, a picture I say. Careful or the sun will burn those frown lines into your forehead, like mine. See mine? I’ve got maps in my old face. Anyway, it makes no odds what this might tell you, because it’s broke, see?’ The pedlar pointed to the sheared edge of the medallion. ‘It wouldn’t work anyway.’
The pedlar’s answer was intriguing, but all it told Ramona was how much she did not know. The realization was growing: she could not stay here. The south beckoned. But even as her future shone clearer, she found ways to evade it. There was Félix now, her ally exploring the precarious roofs and multi-storeys of the sliding city. There was Inés to protect from the raiders. There were the motorcycles of the pedlars to admire, and if she told them enough stories, they would open up the engines to show her the insides of their fantastic steeds and tell her the names of the parts. Summer whittled away in this fashion, blighted – though not ruined – by drought.
The next time the traders came, Ramona had a specific request.
‘I need a map,’ she told the pedlar.
‘What kind of a map?’
‘A map that shows the way to the city in the south.’
‘What city is that?’
She saw again the golden flecks in his eyes. She could not tell if he was mocking her or not. ‘There is only one,’ she said confidently.
‘Ha!’ he said. ‘Only one, she says. Well, you may be right. There is only one now, which they call Cataveiro, and it was named after a woman. Cat Aveiro her name was. She had hair as long as grasses and rode a motorcycle like this one all over the continent, warning people that the apocalypse was coming, so if they had a gram of god inside them they’d better gather in one place to save their souls. They had more of a chance that way, you see – the multiplication of a soul being greater than the soul alone. And gather they did. But the apocalypse did not come, and they worried and fretted. Aveiro rode about the country until she was murdered horribly by Born Again Mayans, who said her words perverted their beliefs. The people who had gathered to wait for the world to end fretted some more, because her corpse was a most distressing sight, and in the end they named the place of gathering after her martyred body. This made everyone so happy they forgot about the end of the world, and a city was born. And let us thank the stars for that, is what I say.’
‘Why do you thank the stars?’ Félix butted in, while Ramona wondered for which part of the story the pedlar was thankful.
The pedlar cast a significant look up at the searing blue sky.
‘’Tis the stars that guide us. If you know your destination, the stars will show you your way, even if you have no compass or map. Some say they have mystical properties, but that is not why I thank them.’
He paused, regarding them.
‘A map is rare and very expensive. Too many peso for you, I think.’
‘You only have one?’ Ramona asked.
‘Only one that will be any use to you. A good map, a true guide, that’s almost impossible to discover. Rare as African cells, they are. We pedlars, we know the routes because we’ve travelled them for many years. But you, my young friends – you would be babies in the desert. Without a good map, you’ll be gobbled up like the caiman of old. And I could tell you about the caiman, what’s left of him.’
‘Sell us a look at the map, then,’ said Félix, who was good at improvisation.
This the pedlar agreed to, in exchange for a tin full of tar and their assistance in patching up one of the side-carts. Then he unrolled the map on the ground in front of them.
From the moment her eyes fell upon the map, Ramona was enchanted. She had never seen a thing so exquisite. Here was the world, contained, but leaping from the ground to meet her. The colours were faded, the paper grubby with fingerprints and curling at the edges, but she felt the map beckoning. With its mysterious contours and curious names and suggestions of lands unknown, it was like looking into quicksand, knowing she was about to plummet headfirst into its depths.
The pedlar pointed.
‘This is where you are.’
‘Yes, yes, I can see!’
It made sense to her. Here was the sliding city at the foot of the highlands. Above it, the vast Amazon Desert opened like a shade. And below, very far to the south, before the continent tapered away into a collection of islands, was the city that the pedlar had called Cataveiro.
She looked for fifteen minutes, spellbound, memorizing the lines before her. Later, she would be able to recreate it with a bit of paper and a dye stick. When she looked up from the map the pedlar’s eyes were upon her. She knew that he knew of her discovery.
Félix did not understand the map. He turned his head to one side and then the other, rotating the paper, squinting at it.
The pedlar’s expression was now inscrutable.
‘It has been a pleasure doing business with you, Ramona Callejas.’
It was easy for Ramona and Félix to spend the months that followed making plans, arguing over the route to Cataveiro. Ramona practised making her own maps – first the sliding city, then further afield, exploring the mountain and the dusty red valley below. She carried with her a ball of string and a long stick to make measurements, drawing in the dirt, committing her findings to memory.
Another summer arrived. Ramona turned thirteen, and she knew that she was stalling.
The pedlars came and went again, and Ramona thought of Cat Aveiro, riding about the continent with her long hair flying in the wind. Autumn drew in. Cooler nights reprieved the baked grounds.
One night, Ramona and Félix were lying on the roof of an empty house, watching the stars come out.
‘One day I will make a map of the sky,’ Ramona told Félix.
‘You should.’
‘Do you ever try to count them?’
‘I use
d to. Then I stopped.’
‘Me too.’
There was a silence where each of them knew the other was, despite their claims, counting the silver specks. That was the nature of their friendship: silent knowledge. Unspoken loyalty.
‘You know I’m going to Cataveiro,’ said Ramona.
‘Yeah.’
‘Are you coming?’
‘I’m going to Tierra del Fuego. I’m going to find work on a ship. But I’ll come with you as far as Cataveiro. They say it’s dangerous when you don’t know anyone.’
‘I can look after myself.’
‘I know.’
‘Thanks, though.’
‘We should go soon. We can’t hang around here all our lives.’
‘No. You’re right.’
Félix rolled onto his side to look at her. His face was suddenly serious.
‘I know you’re worried about your ma. But you can’t protect her.’
Ramona hung in the doorway of the shack, hands gripping the upper frame, swinging gently. Inés sat outside on the veranda. She was sewing a patch into her trousers. The next time Ramona visited, grass would have conquered the pebble square until it was almost indistinguishable, but on that day, thanks to Ramona’s perpetual weeding, it still had the semblance of a veranda. Ramona watched as Inés lifted her needle to face-level and probed the thread through the eye.
‘Why are you lurking, Ramona? I don’t like lurking.’
Ramona stayed where she was.
‘Ma, I’ve been thinking about going away.’
Inés continued with her sewing.
‘I don’t mean for a short time. I mean for always.’ She paused. ‘Are you listening?’
Inés’s hands stopped. She turned around. In fact, she gave Ramona the most penetrating stare she had seen on her mother in years. Then she said, quite simply, ‘Yes, I expect you will. People will find out about you. You should go soon. Next week, perhaps.’
Ramona was so taken aback by this response, all the things she had previously planned to say fell out of her head.
‘You will go to Cataveiro, I expect,’ continued Inés. She gave the needle a violent tug and the thread snapped. Inés hissed through her teeth.