'Yes,' she said. 'I know how to mix dough.'
And she did. I just had to tell her how many portions of dough we needed to make each night and what Dona Esmeralda's special wishes were. Maria nodded, and I never had to remind her again.
She was so beautiful that several times I forgot all about Nelio. It wasn't until I let her go home around midnight that he once again entered my consciousness, although not until I had gone out into the street to see whether some man was waiting for Maria. But she went off alone into the night. At that moment I married her in my mind.
It was not until I was on my way up the winding stairs to the roof that I remembered where I was going and why. I immediately felt guilty. A human being was dying on the roof, and I had only my new dough mixer Maria on my mind. I forced myself to feel ashamed, though it was difficult, and then I rushed up to the roof.
Nelio was awake when I got there. Earlier in the evening, before Maria arrived, I had borrowed an old tattered blanket from the nightwatchman outside the Indian photographer's shop. I gave him a loaf of bread and a matchbox filled with tea leaves in return for the loan of the blanket. I had spread it over Nelio to protect him from the cool winds blowing over the city. I had given him some of Senhora Muwulene's herbs and sat beside him while he had one of his attacks of fever. The cool air seemed to have done him good. He smiled now when he caught sight of me.
At that moment he was a ten-year-old boy. The next moment he could once again be a very old man. He switched back and forth all the time. I never knew which one I would find before me. The only thing that was certain was that he had been lying on the roof for five days and five nights; it was now the sixth night, and the wounds in his chest were getting darker and darker.
Maybe it was meeting Maria that had influenced me – I don't know. But when I changed the bandage and saw that Nelio now showed the unmistakable signs of blood poisoning, I could no longer refrain from speaking my mind.
'You're going to die if you stay here on the roof
'I'm not afraid to die,' he said.
'You don't have to die. Not if you let me take you away from here. To a hospital. The bullets in your body have to come out.'
'I'll tell you when,' he said, as he had so many times before.
'Now it's my turn to say when,' I replied. 'I have to move you now. Otherwise you will die.'
'No,' he said. 'I'm not going to die.'
What was it that made me believe him? How could I allow myself to go along with something that I knew wasn't right?
The answer is that I don't know. But Nelio's power was so great that I yielded to him.
That night he told me about the time after Cosmos crept on board a ship and disappeared into the dawn. Towards daybreak, when Nelio began to grow tired, I could feel that the cool air had once again vanished. When I stood up to leave him and looked at the ocean, I could not see any icebergs.
On the morning when Cosmos left, when Nelio told the others that from now on he would be the leader of the group, everything had proceeded quite calmly. A transfer of leadership might be accompanied by unrest and murky feelings of resistance seeping to the surface. But Nelio told them the truth – that some day Cosmos would come back and then everything would revert to the way it was. He had no intention of changing anything – what he knew about being a leader he had learned from Cosmos.
But this was not entirely true. During the night, when he lay in the horse's belly and sleeplessly waited for dawn and the ranting morning prayers of the maniacally laughing priest, Nelio thought that he would be exactly like Cosmos, but even more so. He would be a little more patient with Tristeza; he would laugh a little more at the endless stories that Alfredo Bomba told. In this way Nelio hoped to be able to exercise the authority that Cosmos had established in the group.
The only one to challenge him during those first days was Nascimento.
'You know where Cosmos is,' he might suddenly say in the evening as Nelio was dividing up the money they had earned during the day by watching over and washing cars.
Tension would instantly spring up among the others. Nelio knew that he had to accept the challenge and once and for all make clear to Nascimento why Cosmos had chosen him as his successor.
'He appointed me as leader because he knew that I was the only one who wouldn't tell where he was going,' Nelio said. And then he continued, unperturbed, to divide up the money.
Nascimento pondered what this answer actually meant. That night he said nothing more.
'We can't have a leader who doesn't sleep with the rest of us,' he said on another evening.
Nelio was prepared for this. He had suspected that Nascimento would make use of the differences between him and Cosmos. And he had come to the conclusion that there were two significant differences between them. One, that Nelio lived separately, and two, that he was not several years older than the others.
'Everything will be the same as it was under Cosmos,' Nelio said. 'That's why I will continue to sleep wherever I like.'
A leader should be older,' said Nascimento.
'That's something you will have to discuss with Cosmos,' replied Nelio. 'I'm sure he'll be able to give you an answer that will satisfy you.'
Nascimento soon stopped challenging Nelio. He realised that it was getting him nowhere. The group was content with the fact that a change had occurred without anything threatening to split them up. Before long the other street kids in the city knew that Nelio, despite his young age, had taken over leadership from Cosmos, who had set off on a mysterious journey.
It was also during this period that Nelio began to speculate more and more about why the world looked the way it did. Before him he saw life teeming in the streets of the city. One day, when he was an old man and about to eat his last meal, would he have to dig that too out of the rubbish bins the way he did now? Was life really nothing more? Was that all? He remembered the words that the white dwarf, Yabu Bata, had spoken before they parted. 'There are two roads. One will lead you in the right direction, the other is the path of foolishness and will lead a person straight to ruin.' Which road had he chosen when he entered the city on that morning? Should he have continued to follow the endless shoreline instead? Nelio had only one mission in life: to survive. When he understood this, he grew uneasy. I have to do more than that, he thought. I have to do more than simply survive.
During that period he also acquired some habits which contributed to creating the image of him as a remarkable person. But he was never aware of the rumours circulating about him.
Every morning when he woke up he would ask himself whether he wanted to spend another day under the name Nelio. On those days when his name felt like a burden, he would choose another. He used to ask one of the boys playing by the equestrian statue what his name was and then take that name for the day. So far no one had discovered that he had turned the statue into his home. He always opened the hatch with caution when Manuel Oliveira began laughing outside his empty church, and he would slip out as quickly as possible. Then he would hurry through the city to the stairwell at the Ministry of Justice, where the others had begun to wake up at about the same time. They didn't want to be caught sleeping there when the guards arrived to open the doors or they would be brutally driven off and their cardboard boxes might be kicked to shreds.
The days of the street kids were always much the same without ever repeating themselves. Something would always happen that no one could have foreseen. But Nelio kept more and more to himself, and he would grow annoyed if the others didn't leave him in peace. His thoughts were often interrupted by Nascimento starting a fight with Pecado or someone in another band of street kids. Then Nelio would be forced to intervene to restore order and stop the strife from spreading.
When he stepped between the two combatants, silence would fall at once. No one had ever lifted a hand against Nelio, not even Nascimento. And no one could understand why he always managed to avoid being drawn into a fight. The rumour began to circulate that his fathe
r was some unknown feticheiro with exceptional powers which he had passed on to his son. Where the rumour stemmed from, where it had started, no one could say. But suddenly one day, a shadow fell across Nelio as he sat leaning against a tree right next to Dona Esmeralda's bakery, studying the torn and stained atlas of Africa that Alfredo Bomba had found in a rubbish bin the day before. When Nelio glanced up, a young woman holding a child was standing before him.
'My daughter is ill,' said the woman plaintively.
'Then she ought to be given medicine,' replied Nelio. 'But I have no medicine to give you.'
Nelio sank back into his thoughts. The woman did not move. Time passed. After more than an hour Nelio looked up at her again.
'I have no medicine,' he repeated. 'If your child was sick an hour ago, she must be even worse now.'
The woman had the child bound to her breast. Now she undid the wrappings, knelt down and held out the child towards Nelio. Many people had gathered around. Nelio felt ill at ease. He had great respect for the feticheiros and curandeiros who possessed the secret powers, who could talk to the restlessly hovering spirits, who could drive out the evil and liberate the good that every person has inside him. Nelio realised now that the woman who was holding out her child thought that he was a feticheiro. That scared him. Dead feticheiros would punish him severely if he pretended to be one of them.
'You're making a mistake,' he told the woman. 'Go to a curandeiro. I'll give you money, if you'll just go away.'
The woman didn't move. Nelio saw that Nascimento and the others were watching what was going on with interest. He had started to sweat.
'Go away,' he repeated. 'I can't help you. I'm only a boy.'
Suddenly the woman began to appeal to the circle of bystanders, which was getting bigger all the time.
'My child is sick,' she lamented. 'He refuses to help her.'
A murmur of displeasure erupted among those who stood there watching, and they immediately sided with the woman. Nelio saw that the only thing he could do was to take the child and hold her in his arms. He noticed that her lips were cracked and parched.
'Give the child boiled water with salt,' he told the woman, remembering what his mother had given him.
The woman took her child, smiled and placed a few crumpled banknotes at Nelio's feet. The crowd began to disperse.
'Not even Cosmos was a curandeiro,' said Pecado in amazement, 'Can you make the fleas stop sucking my blood?'
Several days later the woman with the sick child came back. Her daughter was now well. Nelio assumed it was the boiled water and salt that had had an effect. But from that moment on, the story spread that Nelio possessed the sacred, healing powers. Not wanting to be caught as a curandeiro who was not genuine, Nelio understood that all he could do was to spread another rumour. He gathered the group around him.
'If too many people start coming to ask me to make them well, then it will be impossible for me to continue to be your leader. That's why we're going to spread the news that I will only receive sick people when I'm sitting at the exact same spot where the woman found me. Only there. Nowhere else.'
From that day on, Nelio avoided sitting in the shade of that tree where he used to withdraw to ponder his many unanswered questions. Even though he never again held a sick child in his arms, he had acquired an invisible cloak over his shoulders, from which no one could free him. Nelio – he who was so young and yet had taken over as leader after Cosmos – was now a man with supernatural and magic powers. Nelio became a well-known figure in the city. Many started coming to him to ask advice. Nelio never tried to give a clever answer. He simply said what he thought. If he didn't understand a question, he would say so. If he had nothing to say, he would keep quiet. Rumours began to circulate that one day Nelio would perform a great miracle. Nobody knew what the miracle would be, but everyone expected it to be something magnificent, which would make their city famous around the world.
But Nelio had no intention of performing any magical or miraculous acts. He was striving only to do something that would make his life mean more than mere survival. At the same time, he took seriously his responsibilities as the successor of Cosmos. He was constantly trying to make sure that the kids in the group washed and didn't get sick. Several times he smashed half-empty wine bottles that Nascimento had found, determined to get drunk. During those brief times when they were not preoccupied with surviving, and they lounged on the pavement in a spot where they could find some shade, Nelio would listen to their dreams. He had discovered that the others' dreams were just as powerful as his own. He believed their dreams would always endure, no matter how hard their lives might be. Each and every one of them possessed a core that was as resilient and precious as a diamond. It was the dream of another day, a reunion, a bed to sleep in, a roof over their heads, an ID card.
Nelio decided that knowledge meant being able to see relationships between things. If anyone had asked him what was the fundamental need of every human being, he would have known the right answer at once: a roof and an ID card. That was what a person needed, in addition to food, water, a pair of trousers and a blanket. It was by having a roof over their heads and ID cards in their pockets that human beings differed from the animals. These were the first steps towards a decent life, an escape from poverty – building yourself a roof and obtaining an ID card. When the time was ripe, Nelio would see to it that the kids Cosmos had entrusted to his care would set off on that long journey away from the streets.
Nelio listened to their dreams, and he was often annoyed when they were both absurd and unrealistic. Even though he always tried to hide his irritation, there were times when he couldn't help putting his foot down. When Tristeza had disturbed their afternoon siesta over a long period of time with his endless pronouncements about how he would one day open his own bank, Nelio put his foot down. He woke up those who had managed to fall asleep and gave a lecture.
'Everybody is entitled to talk about their dreams. You dream when you're dreaming, and you keep on dreaming when you talk about what you have dreamed. That's fine. But what Tristeza is doing is not fine. It's not a good dream to believe that one day you will open a bank. Especially if you can't even count. It's idiotic. So from now on Tristeza will not talk about his bank. Especially when the rest of us want to nap.'
After that it was quiet. Everyone was happy to be allowed to sleep in peace. But Tristeza, who had a hard time understanding things and whose mind was sluggish, asked Nelio to repeat what he had said, and this time to say everything move slowly. Nelio was overcome with remorse when he saw how sad Tristeza felt when his dream was forbidden. He saw that he had to give him another dream at once so that he wouldn't lose his spirit.
'You must practise thinking faster,' Nelio said. 'That's what you should dream about. That one day you'll be able to think as fast as the rest of us. When you've learned to do that, we'll collect enough money for you to buy a pair of trainers.'
Tristeza gave him a look of disbelief.
'I mean it,' Nelio said. 'Do I usually make promises that I don't keep?'
Tristeza shook his head.
'You can go to the shop yourself and pick out whatever shoes you want,' Nelio said. 'Then you can take the money out of your pocket and pay for them yourself.'
'I'll never learn to think that fast,' Tristeza said.
'You'll get your shoes when you've learned to think just a little bit faster than now.'
'I don't know how to do that.'
'You think about too many things at once. That's why your head is always in such a muddle. Learn to think about only one thing and nothing else.'
'What should I think about?'
'Think about how hot it is,' Nelio said. 'Think about how soundly we're going to sleep and how seldom we'll be annoyed with you if you're not always talking about your bank. Think about that until you fall asleep. Later I'll give you something else to think about.'
'Trainers,' Tristeza said.
'Yes,' Nelio said. 'Trainers. Quiet n
ow! Think. And sleep.'