B007P4V3G4 EBOK (26 page)

Again, an interesting country, is the man-in-off-white's opinion.
Fine climate, too, in every respect. Intently he regards the ragged
crap-creepers. Some are professionally equipped with gloves or
have bars to turn over the filth, again others wield pitch-forks,
rakes, children, shovels, and plastic bags and newspapers to wrap
something up in, and here and there people are even busy with a
wheelbarrow. 'Small businessmen,' the man mutters, smiling again.
He shivers, and he grabs and rummages, flirtatious, at his crotch.

The Indians and Creoles and whatever else there might be of
bastardised races that make the man puke, vary in all ages; often
entire families scuttle about, touched by the soft wind which,
shroud-like, wraps them slowly but surely in the clouds of smoke
and gas from the spontaneously combusted fires and smouldering
spots. Regularly, enormously tall fires flare up: fed by nourishing
waste or waste gas, yellowy-orange flames wheel up high to
heaven. And taken by surprise, the silhouettes then stumble off,
away. Occasionally, such an explosion will come about in a place
where they are busy: hands, sticks or bars providing oxygen to
something below the tip; then their rags, too, catch fire, which they
attempt to quench by rolling themselves in the filth, thus frequently
causing fresh fires from which they then must take to their heels
again. It's exciting, according to the man in off-white and, fascinated, he follows it all. Regularly the fist of the hammer bangs in
the car on the wing-case of one of the smaller excrement-creepers.

In the dim light of a suddenly flaring fire, the man discovers an
almost naked Cholo girl, still Indian, primarily. She is sitting, legs
wide, in the filth and stares motionless at the thousands of people
busy around her, most of them searching resignedly in the night in
the garbage. From a velvet case the man takes out a pair of opera
glasses on an extendible handle. The girl is little more than
thirteen, fourteen years of age. She has small breasts and a
wondrously fine figure. Splendid legs, too, he thinks. He takes the
handle of the opera glasses in his left hand and, having undone his
trousers, he allows his right hand to disappear inside these. He
hears shuffling round the car. Furtively, he looks around him.
Nothing. Probably the mild wind is playing tag with the garbage.
He grasps himself with his right hand and begins to give himself
relief, now staring through the glasses at the girl, then at the
rooting paupers and quickly back to the girl again, postponing the climax each time. He pants and pushes his trousers down further.
Ah, so what: nobody can see him anyway. Like a small, pale fish
the colour of his suit, his member sticks out at the steering wheel.
Cucarachas are now crawling into his trousers, attaching themselves
to his jerking, bare legs, but he doesn't notice.

Not far from the car, a young negro approaches. He is pushing a
laden, sturdy, two-wheeled handcart. He is a large, agile and
strong negro. He would have to be. Otherwise he wouldn't have
been able to steal a handcart. The negro feels himself to be the
king of the tip and he takes fire along with him: wherever he goes,
small fires erupt in the stinking tip, oddly enough. The man, offwhite in part, is irked: something of his hardness disappears, from
fear, and he stares quickly at the innumerable rooters and then at
the Cholo girl, and moving rapidly with his hand, he makes
himself rise again towards the gleaming steering wheel. The game
of wind and filth around the car, coming to him like a kind of
whispering and shuffling, banging softly against the bumpers and
the wings, excites him; he sees the waste before him, raised up by
the wind, half a metre off the ground, bumping softly, caressingly
against his car, against him. His shirt and jacket become soaked
with perspiration. For a moment, he lets go of himself and the
glasses, tears his jacket off, his waistcoat, undoes his tie and
quickly unbuttons his shirt, panting. Then he lets the back of his
seat go back, grabs the opera glasses, aims, and then he grabs hold
of himself again, firmly. Now he rises in front of the wheel, like a
big compass-needle of firm, throbbing flesh. 'Garbage,' he mutters,
and he smiles. Sweat runs down his face and body in rivulets. He
slips about in all the sweat on the leather of his seat. He looks at
the negro. The man senses danger in the air about him, danger,
revulsion and garbage; he growls and groans softly, his mouth
half-open, and he moves, rhythmically and more rapidly.

That the negro is proud can be seen by his bearing, and he
makes the two-wheeled cart with garbage bob rhythmically up and
down with his relaxed, dancing gait. He grins, baring some snowwhite teeth in the night, but primarily black gaps, though. He is
only wearing a pair of dirty shorts, very off-white. Near the
beautiful, almost naked girl, still sitting wide-legged in the garbage,
the negro stops. Their dark skin is lit by a bright-orange kind of
Easter fire nearby, sicking up black soot like a kind of grim
redemption. The negro tips up his cart and begins to dump his
garbage, slowly. Over the girl. She laughs, abandonedly, all of a sudden a toothless old woman, and she puts up her hands to the
stream of garbage.

The man in the car groans and has to contain himself severely.
It throbs and thuds and tenses and trembles against the smooth
steering wheel. The girl catches a bottle in her hands, one that got
overlooked. She wipes the dirt from it and clasps the smooth
bottle between her breasts: suddenly she is fearful and grim-faced.
A few pennies deposit. The cheerful, muscular negro tosses his cart
aside and upside down with force, lets himself drop onto his belly
and digs up arms full of waste which he tries to pile on top of the
head and shoulders of the girl. After a cautious look at the negro,
the girl sets the bottle down beside her and, now effusive again,
clasps her arms round the negro. All of a sudden, the negro gets
himself upright again and stretches. The girl pulls the last few
remaining rags off her body and tugs down the negro's trousers.
Proud, his sword rises up above the garbage; pointing in the
stench and the flickering night the negro stands above the girl
sitting on her knees. She takes the Creole into her mouth and the
negro looks down on her, laughing. Then he lets himself drop on
top of her and together they gambol about, round and round, like
the squeaking, still turning wheels of the handcart lying upside
down. 'It's the wind,' says the man in the cream-coloured shirt that
hangs open, 'or me.' Dirt or whatever surges against the car which
shakes gently and seems to rise up at times. 'It's starting to blow.'

Suddenly he lets go of himself and the glasses again, takes the
hammer and bangs away at random on the floor of the car which
seems to be moving in itself because of the innumerable cucarachas
scuttling over and across one another thus forming a kind of
brownish blanket underneath which there is wild movement going
on. He sees the creatures on his legs, on his thighs, his underbelly,
but this only gets through to him obliquely. The sight of the
creatures seems to intensify his excitement. He becomes very
excited indeed and grasps hold of himself again. The opera glasses
are trained on the negro and the Cholo girl. All of a sudden, he
tears away his trousers and underpants from his ankles, over his
shoes. The cayman no longer sleeps but moves, or is being moved,
jerkily. The wind wails softly together with the men and women
and children, writhing and singing in the filth. The Huaylas of the
rubble, the waste, the stench, the gas, the heat, the threat, the
excrement, of flight and despair.

Flames, shooting up high, suddenly light up two silhouettes also nearby, ones the man in white had held to be bent and battered oil
drums. They turn out to be two men in innumerable torn rags
being worn one over the other. They are sitting not far from each
other, their under-rags down, on their haunches in the dirt, relieving
themselves. 'Where on earth did they get that idea from?' mutters
the man in the cream-coloured shirt that hangs open. There is a
sound of indignation in his voice. He allows the hand around his
member to rest a moment. He directs the opera glasses and peers.
Nothing doing with one of them. Or he has done it already and
lingers a little longer in the aftermath, unhurried. But he is grabbing
wildly around him, up to his elbows in the filth. The other man
produces but a child's-finger-thick but uncommonly long, ochrecoloured trail. Some time is involved in this. The leering, almost
naked man, covered only by the shirt hanging open and those
numerous creatures, scuttling about or attaching themselves, pants
and he moves his hand again, ever more wildly. When the trail has
been completed, the man half gets up and languidly wipes his
lower torso with some dirt. He straightens out further, slowly pulls
up the rags and disappears, shaking in a sudden bout of coughing,
into the dark across the tip.

On the radio, the foreigner now rules with a polka; something
from the Danube or the Moldau or a probing tributary. The other
man sits motionless. He is eating something now which he holds
to his lips in both hands like a mouth organ. The negro and the
Indian girl have found one another satisfying. The man sees how
they move ever more slowly and how, slowly, the negro frees
himself from the girl. For a moment then they lie next to one
another, motionless, their gleaming faces turned up to the dark
sky, at one with the tip. Then the negro rises, agilely, and
disappears rapidly into the dark, into a multitude of more and
more shades moving about not far from the car.

There's constant singing now: soft, shrill and sad. Furthermore,
sounds are being formed by the wind, the crackle of spark-spitting
fires, dull rumblings, deep inside the dumping ground at times, and
by the explosions. And by the soft shuffling of humans and
animals around and among these, and around the car. And, of
course, by the rattling of the creatures with which the almost
naked man now appears to be merging. Countless numbers of such
creatures are now crawling over his perspiring body: in his armpits,
on his sweating belly and chest, in his pubic hair, his neck, on his
arms, on his hands, around his throbbing member. Through the glasses, the man keeps his gaze trained intently on the girl lying
asleep, legs wide, in the filth. The fires conjure up a moving sheen
on her body and then the man's body arches, jerkily. Off-white
drips down the wheel, covers the cucarachas on his thighs, his
right hand, and the heavily perspiring, sodden man leans back. In
the car that stinks like the immense garbage tip.

Slowly the car with the panting, somewhat dazed man begins to
move, half driving, sliding, occasionally borne by a multitude of
grey, dusty, scrubby shades: a barely viable life-form, but of a size
in which the car is barely noticeable. At first the man with the
cucarachas does not notice anything. Then he raises himself up
with a jolt and looks around him, wildly. Suddenly it gets through
to him that he is covered in those sticky waste and excrement
eaters. He screams and then he sees the compact mass of dusty,
soiled figures in front of all the windows.

That the car has already been pushed, dragged, hoisted a good
way up the tip, this he has not yet noticed. His view outside has
been taken from him. He steps on the brake but this makes no
difference. The heavy car moves from left to right like a sedan
chair, banging down on the waste at times and then being lifted up
again.

All of a sudden, the man relaxes. 'Calm down,' he mutters,
'we've been in worse pickles: He laughs for a moment and then he
draws himself further upright by the dripping steering wheel and
he starts the engine. He accelerates, but the car has been lifted up,
rear wheels and all, and the wheels spin in vain in the stinking gas
and fetid air.

After a few booming blows, a heavy steel bar forces its way in
through the shattered windscreen. The door is opened and a
muscular, black gleaming arm switches off the engine and pulls the
key from the ignition. The hammer is taken from him. Simultaneously, grabbing arms have pulled away the trousers and the
underpants, the waistcoat and the jacket, the bottle and the glass,
and in two tugs the shirt is ripped from his body.

The door is closed again and the car is pushed further along up
the dumping ground. People are no longer walking alongside the
doors so that the man with the cucarachas has something of a
view. He sees how progress is being made across the boundless
garbage plain; he now sees the fires at close quarters, sees those
dying in rags.

Ahead of him, when the mass shuffling the car forwards allows him an opportunity, the man sees how, in the rather bright night,
the plain of filth stretches out as far as the horizon will reach. The
stench, the heat grow thicker inside the car disappearing slowly
but surely ever further away from the barely inhabitable world
near the dumping ground.

The man screams. He switches on the lights, but without the
keys only the parking lights will work. In a panic, the man puts the
car into gear. The car stops. At the rear, people, or life-forms, bang
into it. The door is opened again and a blow to the temple almost
throws the man from his seat. A hand shifts the gears back in
neutral. The lights go out. The door closes again.

People are shuffling towards them from all sides now. Knives
are being drawn. Inside the car, the man screams, muffled and
futile. They let the car run down under its own steam, down one
of the sloping garbage-sides of a deep, black-scorched pit. In a
moment or two, the car is covered with a slow, insect-like layer of
crawling people. The four doors are pulled open. Almost simultaneously. The car fills up.