'Where's Deolinda?' Nelio said with a quavering voice.
'I don't know,' replied Nascimento. 'I was asleep.'
'But not before you did xogo-xogo with her!' Nelio screamed. And she didn't want to. I wasn't here. But she came to me in my dreams and told me what happened.'
'She wanted to do it,' Nascimento said.
'Then why did she scratch up your face? You're lying, Nascimento.'
Nelio let him go and began tearing the blankets off the others, who cowered before his fury.
'Nobody is going to sleep any more tonight]' he shrieked. 'Go out and look for her. Don't come back until you've found her. She's one of us. Nascimento has done something very bad to her. Did anybody see which way she went?'
Picado pointed towards the harbour.
'Get going!' Nelio shouted. 'Go and find her. But not you, Nascimento. You stay here and guard the others' blankets. Get back in your box, and don't come out unless I say so. The rest of you get moving! Don't come back without her!'
They searched all night for Deolinda. They kept on looking for her the next day, but she was gone. They asked other boys who lived on the streets whether they had seen her, but she had vanished without trace.
After four days Nelio realised that it wasn't worth it any longer. There was great unrest in the group, and he decided to call off the search. During all this time Nascimento was confined to his box behind the petrol station as if it were a jail. Nelio had worried about how to punish Nascimento for his attack. But it had been in vain. He couldn't decide what to do. Finally he gave up. He gathered them together and said that they would no longer search for Deolinda.
'She's run off, and she probably won't come back. We don't know where she is. When you don't know where to search any more, you have to give up. She left because Nascimento did something to her that he shouldn't have done. What we should really do is beat him every day for weeks on end and keep him locked up in his box for a whole year. But I don't think it was Nascimento who did the thing that made Deolinda leave. I think it was the monsters inside Nascimento's head that did it. That's why we're not going to beat him. And he doesn't have to stay in his box either. But what happened wasn't right.'
Nelio looked around. He wondered whether they understood what he was trying to say. The only one who seemed pleased was Nascimento. Nelio thought that the next time anyone attacked Nascimento, he wouldn't intervene. Nascimento did have monsters inside his head, but not everything could be blamed on them.
Secretly Nelio continued to search for Deolinda. He missed her, and he worried about what she might have done to herself. Sometimes he thought that she was right next to him, walking at his side with her woven bag slung over her shoulder. Nelio knew that an albino could be alive and dead at the same time. Maybe she had chosen to leave this world and move on to the next world where no one could see her, but where she could see everything she wanted to see.
One day Nascimento stumbled and fell to the ground, opening a big gash in his forehead. Afterwards Nelio went over and examined the spot where he fell. There was nothing there that could have made Nascimento stumble. The explanation had to be that Deolinda had stuck out her invisible leg.
She was somewhere close by. But she would not be coming back.
During that time Nelio spent long hours in the shade of his tree, studying the tattered atlas of the world that Tristeza had found in a rubbish bin and given to him as a present. The Indian photographer Abu Cassamo, whose dimly lit shop was next door to the theatre and the bakery, had told him the names of the various oceans and countries. He told Nelio what the big mountain ranges looked like, where the deserts were, and where the kilometre-high ice sheets reigned. Abu Cassamo, in whose shop there were hardly ever any customers, had a melancholy face, and he never spoke to anyone unless spoken to first. He was exceedingly polite and bowed even to Nelio when he came to the shop and stepped inside the murky room where the photograph lamps were turned off, the cameras were covered with black cloths, and the smell of curry was overwhelming. Through Abu Cassamo, who talked in a low and lilting voice, the world was explained to Nelio.
Nelio leafed through the stained pages of the atlas, thinking that he was living in an evil world. Where were people supposed to get enough strength and joy to endure? He was living in a world where bandits burned villages, where people were constantly fleeing, where the roads were lined with all the dead and all the bombed and burned wrecks of cars and buses and carts. He was living in a world where the dead were not allowed to be dead. They were chased out of their graves or out of their trees; they were in flight just like those who were still alive. And the living – they were so poor that they were forced to send their children to live on the streets like rats. But even the rats were better off, because at least they had their fur coats when the nights were cold.
Occasionally Nelio would glance up from his maps and look at the people who rushed past without seeing him. Were they alive or were they already dead? Sometimes he would go down to the wharf at the harbour and look for the sharks that could sometimes be seen beyond the mouth of the river. Were the breakers rolling towards the beach dead too? Where was there life in these evil times? Where could they get the strength and the joy that they needed to endure?
He pored over his maps. At night he lay sleepless in the horse's belly, and in the afternoon he stood looking out across the sea, immersed in thought. He had the feeling that no matter where he stood, he was in the centre of the world and its evil. That had to be true because he thought the same thing no matter where he was. If Deolinda had still been there, he might have talked to her about everything he was brooding about. The others wouldn't understand. They would just get worried and then run off and find him another dog.
But Deolinda reappeared in his dreams, and sometimes she had Cosmos with her. Nelio asked her where she had gone on that night when she was attacked by Nascimento's monsters. But her answer was unclear, and he understood that she didn't want anyone to look for her.
'I don't need any house,' she told him in one of his dreams. 'I've built myself a hiding place. There I have all the freedom I need.'
That's the way the world is, Nelio thought as Manuel Oliveira greeted the morning, waking him with his demented laughter outside the horse. People no longer build houses, they build hiding places.
Deolinda was gone. Violent storms swept in over the city. It rained steadily for eleven days and nights, and the poorly erected shacks perched along the slopes above the estuary were washed away, and the sharks tugged and tore at the dead bodies all the way to the beach. No one had ever seen anything like it, not even people who were so old it was questionable whether they were alive at all. It was a time of omens. The bandits had now come so close to the city that they sometimes broke into houses and burned and killed in the nearest suburbs. Nelio sometimes thought that if he died inside the horse's belly, his life would have been incomprehensible. How could he explain to his ancestors, when he met them, that he who had been born of good people in a village that was not a hiding place but a home where people lived, had in the end stopped breathing inside the belly of an equestrian statue hidden away in a forgotten plaza in the big city? They would think he was lying, that he was trying to deceive them, and they would chase him away; they would chase him back to life again, and there would be the bandits, waiting for him with their knives and their rifles and their unquenchable lust for killing anything alive and laying waste to the earth.
Often he looked at his hands, or looked at his reflection in the piece of a mirror that Pecado used to start fires. He searched for signs that he had already started to age. It was plain to him that a ten-year-old who had so many thoughts would grow old very quickly. He searched for wrinkles in his face, the first grey hairs, a sudden weakness or trembling in his legs. He was often struck by great fear that one morning he would wake up as a dazed old man with no teeth, who couldn't remember his own name, no matter how hard he tried. His thoughts were like a terrible illness he carr
ied within him, which might break out when he was least expecting it.
All this time it was the group that kept him alive. In their daily struggle to survive, he could find moments when his thoughts stopped pursuing him.
But the whole time he had a premonition that something was about to come to an end. Each morning he woke up with a feeling that something was going to happen and he should already be afraid of it.
The storms passed. The rain stopped, and the muddy streets began to dry out. The weather turned hot again. Each day they would seek out the shady plazas to take a siesta.
That was when Nelio discovered that something was wrong with Alfredo Bomba. When the siesta was over he always wanted to keep on sleeping. Nelio asked him if he was feeling all right. He complained that he was always tired, as if sleep were draining him of all his strength.
'Are you in pain?'
'A little,' replied Alfredo Bomba.
'Where?'
Alfredo pointed to one side of his belly.
'Stomach ache,' Nelio reassured him. 'It'll pass.'
Alfredo Bomba nodded. 'It only hurts a little.'
After a few days Nelio knew that Alfredo Bomba did not have a stomach ache. He was running a fever, he didn't want to eat and he was very pale.
'We have to get a pushchair or a wheelbarrow,' Nelio told the others. Alfredo Bomba is sick. We have to take him to the hospital.'
'We can borrow a xuva shita duma outside the marketplace,' said Pecado. 'But they'll want to be paid.'
'They'll get their money,' Nelio said. 'Give me whatever you have.'
A heap of crumpled thousand-escudo notes accumulated at his feet.
'That should be enough,' Nelio decided. 'Mandioca and Pecado will go and get the cart. But don't stand around talking to everybody you know.'
They took Alfredo Bomba to the hospital in a ragged procession. Many who saw them thought the pale boy in the cart was already dead. They would kneel down, make the sign of the cross, or turn away. When the boys reached the hospital, they carried Alfredo to the emergency room, which was full of sick and injured people.
'You'd better wait outside and watch the cart,' Nelio told Nascimento. 'Otherwise somebody might steal it.'
'It smells bad in here,' Nascimento said.
'Sick people never smell good. Now go! And don't fall asleep!'
Pale and in pain, Alfredo Bomba sat in a corner. An irritable nurse came over and asked him what was wrong.
'He's sick,' Nelio said. 'You're the ones who have to tell us what's wrong with him.'
Several hours passed before anyone else took an interest in Alfredo Bomba. Nelio had kept Pecado with him to help and then sent the others off in search of food.
It was evening when two nurses wheeled in a stretcher and lifted Alfredo Bomba on to it.
'Does he have any family?' one of the nurses asked.
'He has me,' Nelio said. 'He doesn't need anyone else.'
'Are you his brother?'
'I'm his brother and his father and his uncle and his cousin.'
'What's his name?'
Alfredo Bomba.'
'Bomba isn't a real name, is it?'
'Then he has a name that isn't real. But he has pain in his stomach. And the pain is real.'
They wheeled the stretcher into an examining room that was full to overflowing with people whimpering and moaning. The smell of sweat and filth was overpowering. Nelio swatted away a cockroach that was groping its feelers over Alfredo Bomba's sweaty face.
A doctor who was tall and fat came into the room. He stopped at the stretcher and looked down at Alfredo. 'You're having stomach pains?' he asked brusquely.
'He's very sick,' Nelio said.
The doctor muttered something inaudible and then pulled up Alfredo Bomba's filthy shirt and began pressing on his stomach. Another doctor passing by stopped at the stretcher. They talked to each other, but Nelio didn't understand what they said. The other doctor began pressing on Alfredo Bomba's stomach too.
'Why are they pressing so hard?' groaned Alfredo Bomba.
'Doctors press hard so that their fingers can speak to the sickness inside.'
'We should have gone to a curandeiro,' Alfredo Bomba said. 'It hurts so much.'
The two doctors stopped pressing.
'He'll have to stay here,' said the fat doctor. His voice was now much less brusque.
'What's wrong with him?' asked Nelio.
'That's what we have to find out,' replied the doctor.
'Maybe he has worms,' suggested Nelio.
'I'm sure he does,' the doctor said. 'But this is something else.'
That night Alfredo Bomba slept in a hospital bed that he shared with another patient. Nelio sent the others off with the cart and then lay down under Alfredo's bed. The next day they took blood samples from Alfredo Bomba. His arms were so thin that the person drawing the blood could hardly find a vein. The following day they took more blood.
Then nothing happened. After three days had passed Nelio started to think that the doctors had forgotten about Alfredo Bomba, but the next morning a nurse came to get Nelio. He followed her through the corridors, which were so crowded with sick people lying on the floor everywhere that they could hardly make their way through. She showed Nelio to a room where a piece of cardboard was tacked up over a broken window. Behind a desk sat the fat doctor who was the first to press on Alfredo Bomba's stomach.
'Doesn't this boy have any parents?' he asked, and Nelio noticed that he sounded terribly tired.
'He only has me. He lives on the street.'
The doctor nodded slowly. 'Then you're the one I have to talk to,' he said. He stretched out his hand and said that his name was Anselmo.
'Alfredo Bomba is very sick,' Anselmo said. 'He's going to die soon.'
'I don't want that to happen,' Nelio said. 'I can get money for all the medicine he needs.'
'It's not a matter of money or medicine. Alfredo Bomba has an incurable disease. He has a tumour in his liver. Since neither you nor he knows what a liver is, I won't try to explain. The tumour has already spread through his body. There's nothing we can do to save his life. We can ease his pain, but that's all.'
Nelio sat in silence.
He felt as if the doctor's words had transferred some of Alfredo Bomba's pain to his own stomach. He refused to think that Alfredo Bomba was going to die. And yet he knew that it was true.
'He really doesn't have any parents?' Anselmo asked again. 'Doesn't he have any tia, any avô?'
'He has me and the others,' Nelio said. 'How long does he have to stay in the hospital?'
'He can stay here until he dies. Or he can leave with you now. With the medicine, his pain will almost disappear.'
Nelio stood up. He realised that the man on the other side of the desk thought he was talking to a ten-year-old. But Nelio himself felt as if he were a hundred.
'He'll come with us,' Nelio said. 'His last days will be the best ones he's ever had.'
They left the hospital. Nelio had been given a paper cone with pills that he was supposed to give to Alfredo Bomba when he was in pain. Nelio asked him whether he wanted to ride in the cart back to their street, but Alfredo Bomba said no. They walked along the shady side of the street, down the steep slopes.