Afterwards, when Tristeza too had fallen asleep, Nelio lay awake in the shade of his tree. He tried to imagine Tristeza in ten years, in twenty, as a grown man. He grew sad at the thought that Tristeza probably wouldn't live that long. The world wasn't made for slow-witted street kids.
*
One morning Alfredo Bomba came over to Nelio, who was absent-mindedly scraping dirt off his feet with a dull, broken knife blade. He told Nelio that during the night he had dreamed that the next day was his birthday.
'But you don't know what day you were born,' said Nelio.
'I dreamed that I knew,' replied Alfredo Bomba. 'Why would I dream something that wasn't true?'
Nelio looked at him thoughtfully. Then he clapped his hands and stood up.
'You're right,' he said. 'Of course it's your birthday tomorrow, and we're going to celebrate it. Leave me alone now so I can think about your birthday in peace.'
Whenever Nelio had to solve a problem or think something through until there was nothing more to think about it, he always wanted to be left alone. He couldn't think when the others were jabbering all around him. He would sit in the scorched-brown grass behind the petrol station where his only companions were a few scrawny goats. That was where he went now to think about Alfredo Bomba's birthday. After an hour he knew what they would do. He called the group together for a conference. Nascimento arrived carrying a box of half-rotten tomatoes that had fallen off the roof of an overloaded bus. With quick and practised hands they tore off the parts of the tomatoes that were rotten and gobbled down the rest. Nelio waited until the box was all but empty before he began to speak.
'Tomorrow is a great day. It's Alfredo Bomba's birthday. That's what he dreamed, and so it has to be true. I assume he's going to be nine or ten or maybe eleven. But that's not important. Nothing is preventing Alfredo Bomba from being as old as he wants to be. And tomorrow we're going to celebrate Alfredo Bomba's birthday.'
Nelio pointed to a house a short distance from the petrol station. In Dom Joaquim's day it had belonged to a wealthy plantation owner who had vast fields of tea in the remote western provinces. After the arrival of the young revolutionaries, the house stood empty for a long time and fell into disrepair. But during recent years various whites had lived there who had come to this country to offer assistance – people who were called cooperantes. Right now a man was living there who had bright yellow hair and who came from a country that no one had heard of. Nelio had once overheard that the man was a marques, without understanding what that meant.
Nelio had often wondered about these cooperantes. They wore shorts and sandals and carried small pouches of money in belts around their waists. Nelio thought this might be their uniform. They had big cars, and they were almost always friendly to the street kids and gave them too much money for guarding their cars. They liked getting red in the face from the sun and always tried to show that they weren't afraid of all the blacks who always wanted money from them – although Nelio had, of course, perceived that they were actually terrified.
Nelio pointed at the house.
'Tomorrow is Saturday. That means the marques will pack up his car with mattresses and chairs and food boxes. He won't be back until the following day, on Sunday. His empregada has the day off, and the nightwatchman always sleeps soundly. Nascimento can also try to get hold of a bottle of wine to give him. Then he'll sleep even more soundly. Since the man who lives there is a marques and cooperante, he's here to help the poor people of our country. We are poor. And he can help us by celebrating Alfredo Bomba's birthday. We'll hold the celebration in his house.'
He encountered a storm of protest. Nelio knew that everyone thought his idea was excellent, and they were trying to help by pointing out anything that might be a problem.
'We can't break into the house,' said Mandioca. 'The police will come. We'll have to have the birthday party in jail. They'll beat us badly. Especially Alfredo Bomba, since his birthday is to blame for it all.'
'We're not going to break in,' Nelio said. 'I'll explain later.'
'Since it's not our house, we'll have to be quiet,' said Nascimento. 'But we can't be quiet. We've never been able to do that. How can we celebrate a birthday without making a racket?'
'We won't open the windows,' Nelio said. 'And we won't break anything.'
'We can't turn on the lights,' said Pecado. 'Are we going to walk around in the dark in a strange house? A lot of things will get broken, whether we like it or not.'
'The marques always leaves the lights on when he's away,' said Nelio, 'so that no robbers will break in.'
He countered all their objections and then explained how they would get inside the house.
'Mandioca is the one who can do two things better than anyone else. First, he can look more pitiful and starving than the rest of us. Second, he can keep quiet and sit still for a long time. That's why, Mandioca, you will go up to the house and ring the bell. The cooperante will open the door. Then you will faint and collapse just inside the threshold. The cooperante will get worried; he'll bring you water to drink. After a while you'll start feeling better. You ask to use the toilet. When you're alone in there, you unlatch the window. Do it so no one will notice. Then you thank the cooperante for everything he has done for you. He'll probably give you some money, since you're so hungry. And then you come back here to us.'
'If I'm supposed to look hungry, I'll have to be full,' said Mandioca. 'If I'm really hungry when I'm supposed to look hungry, I'll just look crazy.'
Nelio pointed to the box of tomatoes.
'The rest of the tomatoes are Mandioca's,' he said. 'There's just one thing you should remember when you're inside the house. If you have to pee when you're in the bathroom, pee into the chair with the lid. Don't pee in the bowl with the taps. Do you understand?'
'I won't pee,' Mandioca said. 'What kind of bowl?'
'You'll see when you get there,' said Nelio. 'Now we'll wait here until the cooperante comes home.'
'What happens if he doesn't leave tomorrow?' asked Nascimento.
'All the cooperantes lie on the beach and turn red on Saturday and Sunday,' said Mandioca. 'Nelio's right.'
'I've never had a birthday party,' said Alfredo Bomba. 'What do you do?'
'You eat and dance and sing,' said Nelio. And that's exactly what we're going to do. And we'll get cleaned up and sleep in beds and have a roof over our heads. We can look at the pictures on his TV.'
'Maybe he doesn't have a TV,' Nascimento said.
'All cooperantes have a TV,' said Nelio. 'They have yellow hair and they have TVs. You have to learn that once and for all.'
Mandioca fainted on the threshold of the marques's house, unlatched the window in the bathroom, and was given 20,000 when he had revived and was able to leave the house. The next day they stood in the street and waved to the yellow-haired man as he left in his car. Late in the afternoon Nascimento managed to get hold of a wine bottle that was half full. By eight in the evening the nightwatchman was asleep, and they crept into the garden at the back of the house. By climbing up on Mandioca's shoulders, Tristeza reached the window and slithered inside. A few minutes later he opened the outer door as Nelio had instructed. They hid in the shadows and waited for a couple of policemen to pass by on the street. Then they slipped swiftly out of the shadows and disappeared through the door. Nelio told them sternly to stand still and not touch anything until he checked to see that all the curtains were drawn. Then he gathered them around him in the hall.
'Now everybody will go and get cleaned up. It's especially important that you all have clean feet.'
Since he mistrusted their desire to wash properly, he locked them in the bathroom and said that he would let them out, one by one, after he had personally checked to see that they were clean enough. Then he walked through the house, opened the two refrigerators, decided where they would sleep, turned on the TV, and finally put away two porcelain vases that might easily fall to the floor and break.
Nascimento had
to wash his feet three times before Nelio was satisfied. Then he gathered everyone in the kitchen.
'Cooperantes always have a lot of food in the refrigerator,' he said. 'I'm convinced that the man who lives here will be pleased that we're celebrating Alfredo Bomba's birthday with a proper meal. So let's cook.'
Nelio went into action as if he were organising an invasion. He put Mandioca in charge of the vegetables, while he told Pecado and Nascimento to cook the rice. Alfredo Bomba and Tristeza helped the others while Nelio cut up a big piece of meat into small pieces and started to fry them. When the food was ready, they sat down at the big table. They had found some juice in the pantry, and they looked at Nelio and waited for his permission to begin.
'Today might well be Alfredo Bomba's birthday,' he said. At least he dreamed that it was. So let's eat.'
Several times during the meal Nelio had to intervene when fights threatened to break out over the meat. When Nascimento started getting loud without being aware of it, Nelio sniffed at his glass and realised that Nascimento had mixed his juice with alcohol. Without his noticing, Nelio exchanged Nascimento's glass with his own, and later poured it into the sink. Afterwards, when they had also found two big cartons of ice cream in the huge freezer, they started dancing to a radio that Nelio brought in from the enormous living room. He thought it best if they stayed in the kitchen, where there were no carpets to get dirty; the floor was tiled and easy to wash. At first Nelio sat off to one side and watched the dance. Deep inside his head he seemed to hear the sounds of a timbila and the drums in the village that the bandits had burned. Suddenly they were all around him in the marques's kitchen: the spirits that were looking for him, all of the dead and all of those who might be dead or might still be living. He could feel that he was about to become so sad that he might disrupt Alfredo Bomba's party with his mournful face. He got up from his chair and joined the dance. He danced as if in a trance until the sweat ran down his forehead. They kept on dancing late into the night; they danced until they didn't have a single dance step left in their legs or hips.
By then Alfredo Bomba had already fallen asleep under the big table. Nelio showed them where they should sleep – some in the marques's bed, others on the sofas. When it was quiet in the house, Nelio went back to the kitchen and cleaned up. By daybreak, no one could have said that anyone had been there as long as they didn't look into the refrigerators or the freezer. Nelio walked through the silent rooms and looked at the group of kids as they slept.
He had the feeling that he was wandering through many different times and worlds all at once. It was as if he could remember the little forest grove outside the village where he grew up, the village the bandits had come to burn.
They never burned the trees, he thought. The forest has been growing for hundreds of years. Each time a child is born, a tree is planted. You could see from his tree how old a person was. The tall and thick tree trunks, which gave the most shade, belonged to people who had already returned to the spirit world. But the trees of the living and the dead stood in the same grove, sought their nourishment from the same soil and the same rain. They stood there waiting for the children that were not yet born, the trees that had not yet been planted. In that way the forest would grow, and the age of the village would be visible for all time. No one could tell from a tree whether someone was dead, only that he had been born.
Nelio looked at the sleeping children and thought that he was wandering through a world that might not yet exist. In some future they would sleep in beds and on sofas, and they would dream the dreams that only people with full bellies can dream. Maybe the future would look like the marques's house.
He thought he could see something that the elders had talked about, as the greatest miracle that a person might be privileged to experience. To see what has been and what would come, all in the same moment.
He would never forget the night they spent in the marques's house. Alfredo Bomba would remember his birthday; Nelio would remember the feeling of floating freely through time. It's possible to fly without visible wings, he thought. The wings are inside us, if we're privileged to see them.
The first to wake was Tristeza. 'What should I think about today?' he asked.
'Think about how it feels to have clean feet,' Nelio said.
The others woke up and rubbed the sleep out of their eyes. First they looked around in amazement; then they remembered. It was still early dawn. By peeking through a curtain Nelio could see that the nightwatchman was still asleep.
'It's time to go,' he said. 'The same way we came.'
'How did you know there would be so much food in the cupboards that are cold?' Nascimento asked him.
'A man who comes home every day with big baskets of food can't be eating everything himself Nelio said. 'You've seen it for yourself. You could have answered that question without my help.'
They left the marques's house as stealthily as they had come.
'What will he say,' Alfredo Bomba said, worried, 'when he discovers all the food is gone?'
'I don't know,' Nelio said. 'Maybe like other whites who live in our world, he'll say that Africa and the blacks are inscrutable.'
'Are we?' asked Alfredo Bomba. Are we inscrutable?'
'No, we're not,' Nelio said. 'But the world we live in can sometimes be hard to understand.'
They went out on to the street, knowing that they shared a great secret. Nelio could see that they started rummaging through the rubbish bins and begging to guard cars with greater energy than usual so early in the morning.
He thought that what they had done was a good thing. That's why they would never do it again.
That morning Nelio was very tired. He said that he was going to sit in the shade of his tree and that he didn't want to be disturbed. They should also do their best not to fight or make a lot of noise around him.
But when he reached his tree he gave a start and stopped. Someone was sitting there. Someone he had never seen before. He was annoyed that his place beside the tree had not been respected. No one else was allowed to sit there.
He went over to the tree. It was a girl sitting there. And she was just as white, just as much an albino, as Yabu Bata.
I waited for more, but it never came. Nelio had cut short his story and slipped into his own thoughts. Then he looked up at me.
'I remember that I thought it had to mean something important,' he said. His voice was quite faint now, and I thought about the wounds that smelled bad and were growing darker under the bandage.
'First Yabu Bata showed me the way to the city,' he went on. 'And now a girl in ragged clothing was sitting in the shade under my tree. I thought it had to mean something. And it did.'
I thought about my own woman. The new dough mixer whom no one had escorted home in the night. I felt already a tense anticipation about seeing her again that evening.
'I see that you're thinking about something that makes you happy,' Nelio said. 'If I wasn't so tired, I would like to hear you talk about it.'
'You must rest,' I said. 'Then I will take you to the hospital.'
Nelio did not reply. He had already closed his eyes.
I stood up and left the roof.
The sixth night was over.
The Seventh Night
Can you hear from a man's footsteps that he's in love? If that's true, and I think it is, then Maria must have known that my heart was already burning for her when I entered the bakery on the second night that we were going to bake Dona Esmeralda's bread together. It was very hot, and she was wearing a thin dress through which the contours of her body were quite evident. She had started work by the time I came down from the roof, and she smiled when she caught sight of me.
Now, more than a year later, I can imagine that if everything had been different – if Nelio hadn't died and I hadn't left my job at Dona Esmeralda's and later reappeared as the Chronicler of the Winds – then maybe Maria and I would have become a couple. But we never did, and today it's no longer possible since she i
s bound to another man. I have seen her in the city, and she had a man quite close by her side. I think he was selling birds at one of the city's marketplaces, and her stomach was enormous. Even though our time together was so brief and even though I never found out whether my feelings for Maria were reciprocated, I hold on to my memory of her as the greatest joy of my life. A joy which also contained within it the seed of the greatest sorrow.