Nazaré, page 22
With the ocean receded, Hormigonera poked her head out of the lighthouse window, saw nothing but dry land, and walked across the seabed. It was covered in shells and sea wrack. Her limbs were thin as ever and now her formerly distended belly was shrunken too, from days of hunger. She made it to the harbor at nightfall, where the fishing boats lay aground like disused toys. In the dark, she smelled children sleeping in the shipping containers. Starving as she was, she passed them by. She didn’t look back, not once, at her abandoned kingdom, the island of the lighthouse, where she’d been imprisoned. She took the shadows when she could and limped to the port, her gammy leg trailing.
She walked and walked under cover of darkness till finally she wandered into the city and got lost among all the other godforsaken citizens of Balaal with their parched throats and cracked skin.
*
The people resorted to their old methods to ward off the weather. In Sklonište, a lamb was sacrificed, and its entrails placed in a bowl that was taken to the Altar of the Three Marias. There, the priest delivered an incantation to summon the weather gods.
The alchemists mixed mercury and the venom of a rare scorpion into a gold cauldron and saw in the mixture all the chaos of the world. Shamans whispered in the temples. Someone tried to find the Bruja of Laghouat, but she had transformed herself into a breath of wind passing through the high boughs of trees.
A team of thaumaturgists from Kandisha tried to build a weather machine using springs, levers, pulleys, and a guitar string. A Voodoo priest blew mapacho smoke into the sky and made a spell in archaic tongues.
Thousands across the land began praying to rocks and stones, bowing before tree trunks, and burying talismans: shards of bone, petals, cowrie shells. They implored the gods as their crops failed and begged their children to stop shriveling even as the children’s eyes turned hollow with hunger. Some blamed Kin, for such suffering had never occurred under the Matanzas.
Only the Bujigangans were able to combat the drought. They built windmills from junk and constructed solar panels, which were unheard of in Balaal. With these sources of power they diverted underground water and used irrigation techniques learned from their ancestors to keep Bujiganga from extinction. Their engineers then traveled around Balaal advising on how to recycle smithereened materials and access the hidden water.
Meanwhile, the nuns arranged for a fleet of trucks to take water from the mountain lakes all the way down to the towns in the valleys and to the city center. Where there were no roads, they used the Freedum balloon to take water and tools to the city’s outposts.
“This is God’s own work,” said Iquique, and she remembered her first love, the one painted on the church walls, the one on the cross.
Kin was by now in the palace in the heart of the city. There, he met daily with Iquique, Lambu, The Professor, and the nuns. He oversaw his tasks so obsessively he forgot to sleep. Days and nights passed and he never grew tired. No village or pueblo was left untended. Those who saw him at work began whispering.
“He never sleeps.”
“He’s a hero.”
“He’s a brujo.”
“He’s a shaman.”
“He’s a whale whisperer.”
The nuns themselves were too busy to gossip. Ten months flew by in a blur of labor. With Fundogu gone, they were the guiding lights showing Kin the way. He commandeered a group of ex-soldiers to cement over the cracks in Balaal’s roads so the trucks could transport water, and he worked with the mad geniuses in Bujiganga to spread their irrigation techniques. Remembering his lessons from los barbudos in the mountain village, he taught others how to divine water.
Through it all, he tried to remember Fundogu’s words: find out how Amador died, go to the island, bury your enemies, look in the warehouse. And when fatigue began to overcome him, he remembered other words, the words he’d heard in the cave: I am the ocean. I am the four winds. I am the stars that guide the living. I am the memory of the dead.
CHAPTER 29
Bashir on the move—metamorphoses—theater—The Place Where the Four Roads Converge 2—raindrop
IT WAS DURING THE TIME OF THE DROUGHT THAT BASHIR, KING OF THE RATS LAUNCHED A coup.
He gathered his follower-scavengers from Sklonište and told them, “That boy is no more legitimate than the Matanza family. He’s on the throne because an old, dead priest said he should be.”
Next, he went to recruit the Fanatics of Bouazizi. Their fighting cocks had escaped in a storm and now the men huddled against the weather in the run-down church, bored and hungry. Worse still, their painted saint wasn’t talking to them, which meant he was in a huff. Bashir bashed on the door and ascended the pulpit.
“We’re taking the palace. There are pantries full of food. More fighting cocks than you’ve ever seen. The city is ours. Who’s coming?”
They’d won the insurgency of 98. They’d helped kick out Matanza at the legendary Battle of Matanza Square. Now they’d take the city with Bashir, because anything was better than drowsing in the musty pews of that church.
*
The following morning, Bashir’s ragtag army marched down the streets of Balaal. The Bruja of Laghouat, in the form of a dragonfly, saw them and thought of all the dead warriors who walked upside down beneath the surface of the land, the soles of their feet touching the soles of the feet of the living rat-men from Sklonište and the bedraggled Bouazizi.
The guns and knives they now carried were barely updated versions of the guns and knives carried by those soldiers from earlier times, when battle had been waged with Chinese fire lances made of paper and bamboo, ribaldis and flintlocks. Now the weapons of war hanging from shoulder straps poked above the line of men like minarets in a cityscape.
They were driven on by songs and chants of “We are the Boo!” and they ignored the spectacular stench, a mix of sweat, gut rot, and moldy feet. At their head was the lumbering ox Bashir, his face shrouded in a fog of cigar smoke. He limped because he had a quarter-inch piece of shrapnel lodged in his thigh, courtesy of the Battle of Matanza Square, but he was indomitable, or so he told himself.
The new regime had dismantled Matanza’s system of spies and the Tonto Macoute, but there were few secrets in Balaal, and sure enough, up above, the pilot of the balloon called Freedum soared and saw them. Street hawkers hawked and gawked at them. Ex-spies espied them. Idlers eyed them. And word spread rapidly: Bashir was on the move.
On they ploughed through the heat of the day. With each passing minute the marchers grew weary, lips cracked, skin scorched, legs heavy as trees, because there was no drinking water and the city was parched. But worse than the heat, during the drought Balaal had once again begun to change shape. A road that had led to the palace melted away. Steep streets rose and rose and never descended. Avenues turned into labyrinths from which there was no exit. An area of woodland on the outskirts of the city expanded despite the absence of rain and swallowed up a neighborhood. It pushed its roots deep below the surface of the earth and began drawing on an underground lake that had been there for forty million years.
Where once roads had led to other roads, now they ended abruptly, terminating in mounds of impassable rock or vegetation so thick no light shone through.
Balaal’s metamorphosis disoriented Bashir. He went left instead of right. Up instead of down. He crossed a bridge and turned around and recrossed it. He marched by accident into a doughnut factory. He assailed a rundown stable. He inadvertently invaded an ice rink. The street signs were no use. Matanza Square was now called Liberators Plaza. Matanza Boulevard was Camel Walk. Matanza Park was Madrugada Meadow.
Several times Bashir stopped to ask directions.
“Where’s the palace?” he said to a street hawker.
“That way. As the crow flies.”
But the crow wasn’t flying and that way led nowhere. The city was crooked as a camel’s teeth.
With the troops flagging, a soldier suggested they send a reconnaissance party to find the way. Bashir agreed. Three of his fastest, smartest rat-men ventured ahead while the others waited in a shady grove. But the three men got lost. They took six wrong turns, climbed two wrong hills, crossed three wrong dried-up rivers, hitched a ride going the wrong way, and soon found themselves in a different city entirely, where no one spoke their language. They were discovered dressed as monks wandering a highway several years later, still looking for the palace.
Worse, the shady grove where Bashir was waiting with his army turned out to be bewitched. Within the hour his soldiers were asleep and transmogrified. Some grew monkey’s tails. Some grew fins. Some turned lizard-like with scaly skin. Some grew wing stubs. Some grew fur. Some barked in their sleep and some would purr. Bashir himself turned into a whale with a blow-hole where his eye patch should have been.
As the spell wore off, the men resumed their former shapes and one by one awoke to the smell of the poppies and chamomile which had induced this strange sleep. They recounted outlandish dreams as they staggered to their feet and tried to remember what they were doing in this shady grove.
Only the painted saint, propped up against a tree, witnessed everything and nodded to himself.
“No good will come of this,” he said to the tree.
*
Kin, meanwhile, was ensconced in an anteroom off the palace, the playroom where Matanza’s dogs had once cavorted. He heard Bashir’s army before he was told about it. Sounds came to him now in the form of snatches of instrumental music. Hoots and thunderclaps, wails and booms. The army was marbles rolling on a snare drum. Bashir himself was the incessant honking of a bass clarinet, the most untrustworthy of instruments, the sound of the universe guffawing.
The betrayal was no surprise to Kin. Bashir reeked of ambition. The painted saint had warned Kin long ago, “Beware the one-eyed basher. He wants the crown.” Fundogu too had warned him. What is a king of rats? A rat himself. A fool leading fools. And which king doesn’t want a bigger kingdom?
Kin felt a pang of fear. He, The Professor, Iquique, and Jesa spent their days trying to send resources to Balaal’s poor. Mountain communities were forced to venture into the city for succor. Bears and lions were seen rummaging in city trash cans. With such blight wrought, what use did Balaal have for another conflict? But Kin felt it in his bones: another battle to wage, more blood to spill.
And he had no army. The soldiers from the Matanza regime, having survived the revolution, had deserted and melted away into their communities or found work at the ports or building roads and bridges. Kin would have to beg the Kakurega and the miners, los barbudos and the travelers to come again and fight.
*
Bashir turned around and stared at his men. They were drooping like wet leaves. Some sweated waterfalls. They barely had the strength to lift their feet off the ground let alone conquer a city.
“Damn it,” he said to one of the Bouazizi beside him. “We can’t attack today. Look at these idiots.”
Bashir stared at the sky. A few birds flitted. The sun was going down.
“We have to find a place for the night. We’ll attack tomorrow.”
A collective sigh went up as the news trickled down. Men leaned on walls. Sat in the shade. Wiped their brows. At Bashir’s command, a small group went ahead to find a place to sleep.
They came across a dilapidated factory with a large open floor, but it had been colonized by feral rabbits with the jaws of dogs. Next, they found a public park with trees for shade and dried up fountains. But this reminded them of the shady grove where they’d been bewitched, and one of them felt the presence of a bruja, so they moved on.
Next, they reached an old theatre and broke in through a side door. There was a stage and aisles in which the soldiers could stretch out. There were working toilets, exits and entrances, high ceilings which meant the air circulated. It was perfect. The only thing standing in their way was a janitor.
“Who are you?” asked the janitor. He was a negro in his seventies, leaning on a mop.
The three rat-men considered their options.
“I said, who are you?” the janitor repeated. “You can’t be in here.”
“We’re using this place tonight,” said one of the rat-men.
“Nobody told me,” said the janitor. “What are y’all, a vaudeville troupe? Classical? Shakespeare?”
“Yeah,” said the rat-man.
“Which?”
There was a pause. The janitor dipped his mop into a bucket and made a large circle in the dusty floor, then began mumbling to himself. “Ain’t nobody tell me nothin’,” he said. “Nobody say they a vaudeville troupe comin’. Nobody say we openin’ tonight. Nothin’. They’ll want me clean out them changin’ room. Nobody tell me nothin’.”
Gradually, the circle of water on the floor disappeared. And so did the janitor. He’d been dead for sixty years, but he still cleaned the theatre and went to the shows, standing at the back applauding loudly.
One of the rat-men was spooked by the janitor’s disappearance, but the other two shrugged. They’d seen too many dead men and brujas to be worried about a specter with a mop.
“This place will do,” they said, and laid down their weapons.
*
Bashir’s army wandered into the theatre and those that weren’t immediately flat on their backs and asleep began exploring the premises. They discovered a cache of stage makeup and wardrobes full of costumes. Soon the faces of the Bouazizi were painted like clowns or geisha girls, caked in grease paint, lips curved into bows of cadmium red. They dressed in nineteenth-century bustles or full evening dress with stick-on bow ties and shiny shoes. One became a monk and another a cowboy. Two wore tutus and ballerinas’ pumps. From the prop cupboard they pulled out hoses, rubber batons, replica revolvers, a plastic skull, Damascene swords, a dial-up telephone, and lanterns with handles and fake candle wicks. They lolled on the stage furniture, rearranged sofas, armchairs, coffee tables, cabinets. Someone was banging away on an organ, someone else thumping a drum.
Worse, the Bouazizi discovered a stash of liquor in a glass case. A collection of novelties. Ghanaian vodka, Indonesian crème de menthe, Slovakian aguardiente. The festivities began. Bashir came in, saw the pageant, and rolled his eye.
Then there was an omen. The King of the Rats reached into his breast pocket for a cigar and to his surprise discovered nothing but the soft flesh of his chest under his faux-military tunic. He was out of cigars. He limped through the city in search of a tobacconist.
*
By morning, Bashir was ready. His cigar stock was replenished and he’d slept a full night in the theater’s aisle. He ordered the men to take off their makeup and costumes and retrieve their weapons. They put on their boots, ditching the ballet shoes, high heels, Roman sandals, and tap dance brogues.
Bashir pushed open the entrance, his men behind him. They were met with a blast of sunlight and city noise. Guagua buses sped by, churning up black smoke. A truck snarled.
The previous day Bashir had consulted a map to plot his route to the palace and now he began again the triumphal march. Glorious days lay ahead, he said to himself, and visualized a banquet in the palace, a speech made from a balcony, a parade on Bashir Square.
*
Kin tried to raise an army. The Kakurega weren’t playing ball. They’d already helped rid Balaal of one dictator and lost four men in the process. Now the idiot with the eye patch was throwing his hat in the ring. They’d only returned home a few months ago, and the drought meant they had work to do, digging new wells to source underground streams or harvesting figs and tomatoes. When they weren’t doing that, they were in prayer.
Gatillo too said no. He was back in the mountains. They woke him up in the moonlit makeshift schoolyard where he slept on a banana leaf mat. He was in rags, had abjured all possessions and renounced violence. He didn’t even hunt rabbits any more, just ate whatever the land gave him.
“Soy el profesor,” he said. “No puedo quitar los estudiantes. Ésto es todo. Everything we fought for.”
He embraced The Professor and waved a book in his face. “Remember this? This is the weapon now. Son tus palabras, profe.”
They couldn’t find Cienfuegos and his brothers. The seven giants had gone deep into mining country, the wilds of Balaal. There they expropriated the mines, one by one. Many of the foremen had no idea the revolution had taken place. They were still whipping the miners and stealing their gold. Once Cienfuegos and his brothers brought news of the revolution, the foremen ran. Some begged. Some prayed. Some were beaten with the tools of their trade. Some took off to the wilderness, their houses burning behind them.
Suvaco and the travelers were in no state to help. They had lost two men during the revolution and now in the accursed heat their tiger had grown sick. The giant beast had turned rheumy and melancholic. Its eyes drooped and its face was freckled with flies. Besides the tiger, the travelers were trying to feed their children. At the fairground, food was scarce and the people had no energy for another war.
“Bashir, huh?” said Suvaco.
“Bashir,” said Kin.
“I knew he was trouble. Never trust a one-eyed man.”
The fighters in The Fishing Village with No Name also said no. They’d seen their homes ransacked time and again, defied the Matanzas at the courthouse-that-wasn’t-a-courthouse, and risked their lives at the Battle of Matanza Square. They’d transported cannons and an ancient turtle there and back, borrowed carts and horses from neighboring farmers. Now they just wanted to catch fish to sell in the market and live out their days in peace to the sound of the ocean.
Kin had Balaal’s lone radio station make a call for soldiers to fight Bashir. He used the Freedum balloon to drop fliers urging Balaalians to join him. But Balaal was asleep. The heat had driven the people into Lethe, a sea of mourning and forgetting. Those not out drilling or dowsing for water sat comatose in the sweltering shade dreaming of rain. Like the travelers, the fishermen, the Kakurega, and Gatillo, they had no stomach for another fight.
