Chronicler Of The Winds (15 page)

Deolinda opened her bag and took out a little glass jar.

'Piri-piri,'
she said.

The group had cautiously approached. Nelio divided the two chickens among them. At first Nascimento refused to take his share, but finally he snatched a piece and sat down a short distance away. From that moment on, Deolinda was one of them. Nelio remembered Cosmos asking him who he belonged to, and then from that moment on he was one of them. Now they had taken in Deolinda, and Nelio knew that the group was complete. No other new members would join unless one of them disappeared.

When the chickens had been eaten, Nelio told Nascimento to come closer.

'From now on Deolinda will be one of us. This means that no one can hit her without first asking my permission. Since she's new, she'll get only a half-share of our money. When we think that she deserves it, she'll get the same as everybody else. And no one calls her a
xidjana
unless she agrees to it. At the same time, Deolinda can't take advantage of the fact that she's a girl. She has to act exactly like the rest of us.'

Nelio thought about whether he had forgotten anything. After a moment's hesitation he added one thing.

'If Deolinda wants to be alone when she pees, she can. And she can also have a blanket if it's cold at night. But she has to get the blanket herself

Nelio looked around to see if anyone wanted to say anything.

'What do we need her for?' Nascimento said. 'She's neither black nor white, and she'll bring bad luck.'

To everyone's surprise, it was Tristeza who spoke up. 'Maybe that's a good thing. When she's with us, she's a
xidjana.
When she's with the whites, she's white. She can be both them and us.'

A good answer,' Nelio said. 'Soon you will earn your trainers.'

It didn't take long before Nelio saw that he had been right about taking Deolinda into the group. She was clever at begging, and she was quick to see possibilities in various situations that cropped up on the street. And besides, she could fight and defend herself. Soon nobody dared to accost her without risking that she would demonstrate her superior strength. Only Nascimento openly continued to show his dissatisfaction. Nelio began to suspect that one day Nascimento might leave them to join another band of street kids. He took Nascimento behind the petrol station and asked him straight out if he was thinking of leaving.

'No,' Nascimento said.

Nelio could hear that he was lying. But there was nothing he could do if Nascimento decided to leave.

It took a long time before Nelio began to understand what had driven Deolinda to the streets. Whenever he asked her about it, she would only snarl that it was nobody's business. It wasn't until Nelio opened her raffia bag while she was asleep and found inside a photograph of a man and a woman that he began to have some inkling of what some of the reasons might be. The man's face had been obliterated. The facial features had been scraped away with a nail or a stone. Nelio put the photograph back, ashamed that he had looked in her bag. No one should ever be forced to reveal a secret; and no one had the right to obtain information by stealth to satisfy his curiosity.

Nelio recalled something his mother had once said: No one is allowed to break his way into another's person's heart like a thief in the night.

Nelio soon noticed that Deolinda and Mandioca had become friends. They often squatted on the street, whispering to each other until they burst into laughter. If Nascimento was nearby he would angrily prowl around them without daring to interrupt their camaraderie. But they didn't seem to pay any attention to him.

One evening when Nelio was on his way home to his statue, he noticed that Deolinda was following him. His first thought was to stop and tell her to go back to the others. Then he realised that he might have a chance to find out what had driven her on to the streets. When he reached the small plaza, which was now deserted except for the sleeping nightwatchmen and the man who sold chicken thighs from his coal-fired drum, Nelio sat down at the foot of the statue. Deolinda had stopped at the street corner and was trying to hide in the shadows. But he called out that he had seen her. He thought she might be embarrassed at being caught.

'Who gave you permission to follow me?'

'I wanted to see where you live,' she replied, looking him straight in the eye.

'You can follow me for the rest of your life, but you'll never find out where I live.'

'Why not?'

'Because I just disappear.'

'I'd like to see that.'

Nelio nodded. 'If I manage to disappear without you noticing, what will you give me in return?'

She took a step back. 'I won't do
xogo-xogo.
'

Nelio was embarrassed. He knew what
xogo-xogo
was, but he had never done it. He knew that he wasn't old enough yet even to want to do it. 'I just want to know where you're from. Nothing else.'

'Why do you want to know that?'

'You can't go on being part of the group if I don't know where you're from. What did you do on the day before you sat down in my place in the shade of the tree? Why did you sit there? I have lots of questions.'

She was thinking about this. Then she nodded. 'You won't be able to disappear without me noticing. So I agree to answer your questions.'

'Turn round and close your eyes. Cover your ears. Count to ten. Can you count?'

'I can do everything. I can count and read and write.'

'Where did you learn all that?'

She didn't answer.

'Turn round,' he repeated. 'Close your eyes and count out loud to ten. And cover your ears too. If you cheat, you'll be struck blind.'

Nelio saw that she shuddered. She had heard about his supernatural powers.

She turned, shut her eyes and started counting. Nelio opened the hatch and quickly crawled inside the horse. He could see her through a hole next to the horse's mane. She finished counting and turned round. The plaza was deserted, there was no place he could have hidden, and he wouldn't have had time to run to the corner and disappear.

Nelio tried to decipher Deolinda's thoughts from her expression. She was confronted with something she hadn't expected.

Then she walked away. Nelio waited until he was sure that she had left the plaza. Then he crept out of the hatch and dashed through the night-empty streets, taking the shortest route he knew, until he was back at the Ministry of Justice building where the rest of the group was already asleep. He sat near his tree and waited. When he saw Deolinda coming, Nelio stood up and walked towards her. She gave a start when she caught sight of him.

'I disappeared and I came back,' he said. Then he stretched out his hand to her. 'Touch my hand. It's warm. I'm not a shadow or a phantom standing here.'

She touched his hand with her fingertips.

'People sleep too much,' Nelio said. 'Let's use the night to talk.'

He took her to the botanical gardens, up on the hill near the hospital. The gates were locked with heavy chains and padlocks, but Nelio knew of a hole in the fence. That's where they crawled through, and he led Deolinda over to a bench that was still sturdy enough to sit on. Next to the botanical gardens was a hotel, and its sign lit up the area around the bench.

Deolinda's face was stark white.

Nelio looked at her ragged dress and thought that soon they would have to get some money together so that she could buy a new one.

He didn't have to ask a single question. She started talking about her life of her own accord. He sensed that it was a relief for her, and he listened attentively.

She was born in one of the poorest suburbs of the city; a collection of shacks and hovels surrounding the city's swamplike rubbish dump. She was born and she was albino. Her father refused to look at her. He accused her mother of conceiving the child with a dead man that she had secretly met in a cemetery at night. Then he had chased her out of his house. Deolinda later learned that this was the time of her mothers greatest despair. But she would never have killed her daughter, she would never have strangled her and buried her in the rubbish so that she could return to her husband. She took her daughter to a town that was many days' walk from the city. There she had a sister, and there they would be able to live. Her three other children remained with their father, and she grieved for them so fiercely that for long periods of time she was close to death. One day, many months later, a message arrived from her husband, telling her that she didn't need to come back; he had found a new woman who would never give birth to an albino. The children would stay with him, and he cursed the dishonour she had brought upon him by being unfaithful to him with a ghost in a cemetery.

'I was born with a ghost for a father,' Deolinda said, and it sounded as if she were spitting out the words. 'Today, now that I'm grown up and smart, I realise that it's true. My father is a ghost, even if he's alive.'

'How old are you?'

She shrugged. 'Eleven. Or fifteen. Or ninety.'

'I think you're twelve,' Nelio said.

'If I'm twelve, then I'll stay twelve for the rest of my life,' she said. 'Why do we always have to exchange one age for another?'

'I've had the same thought,' Nelio said. 'I think I'll go on being ten until I get tired of it. Then I'll be ninety-three.'

Frogs were croaking in the pond of the botanical gardens. Deolinda had several half-rotten bananas in her woven bag which they shared.

After she learned to walk and already had four rainy seasons behind her, Deolinda became aware that she was different. Then, at the very time when she must have needed her more than ever, Deolinda's mother was struck by madness, which not even the renowned
curandeiro,
sent for from another village, was able to cure. She stopped eating altogether, she refused to braid her hair, and she started wandering around the village with no clothes on. Finally her sister locked her up in a hut and nailed the door shut. They gave her water through the slits in the wall. That was also where she died one night, after having poked out her eyes with a splinter from one of the bamboo poles supporting the roof. The last memory Deolinda had of her mother was of her hands sticking out of the slits in the wall of the hut. As if that was all that was left of her – two empty hands, ceaselessly wringing.

After Deolinda's mother died, her aunt changed. She blamed Deolinda for her sister's death, she frequently beat her, and sometimes she even refused to give her food. Deolinda tried to find out why she had changed, but no one could give her an answer. And so she started to believe that she actually deserved all the blame people placed on her. In her the ancestors had gathered all their misdeeds; they had chosen her to bear them. Deolinda realised that she couldn't stay in the village, and the only person she could think of who might help her was her father. She left the village one night when everyone was asleep, and she never went back. When she arrived in the city and found her father's house near the stinking rubbish dump, he chased her off with a stick and warned her never to come back. After that, the streets of the city were all that remained for her. Many times the nuns took her to an orphanage. But she never stayed more than a few Jays. On the city streets there were others who were as white as she was. Some of them even had cars. They had jobs, and they lived in proper houses. She had discovered, above all, that they also had black children. On the streets of the city she was not alone in being different.

'I'm going to stay alive so that I can have children,' she said. I'm going to have thousands of children, and they're all going to be black. Then, when I can't have any more children, I'm going to kill my father.'

'That's probably not a good idea,' Nelio said. 'If you absolutely have to have him dead, it would be wiser if you asked someone else to do it. I don't think it's good to sit in jail.'

'I want you to teach me how to disappear,' Deolinda said.

'I can't do that,' he said. 'I don't know how I do it myself. Tell me instead why you want to stay with us.'

For a long time she sat in silence. Nelio closed his eyes and dozed on the bench while he waited.

He woke up with a start when Deolinda touched his shoulder.

'You're asleep,' she said.

'I don't like waiting for anything,' Nelio said. 'Instead of waiting, I do something else. Just now I was sleeping.'

'Cosmos is my brother.'

He was astounded. He thought about what she had told him for a while. Could it really be truer?

'He saw the way my father chased me off with a stick. He was still living at home then. Our father started beating him too. He came to the city. He became the leader of the kids sleeping over there on the steps. We would sometimes meet in secret. He said that I could come here after he had set off on his journey. He was the one who taught me to read and write and count.'

'But how could he know that I would take you in?'

'He thought that you would.'

Nelio kept thinking about this strange piece of news.

'Was that why Cosmos set off on his journey?' he asked. 'So that you could come to us?'.

'Maybe.'

'Cosmos ought to be hung on the wall of a church,' Nelio said. 'Not Cosmos himself but his picture. His face carved out of wood, like a saint.'

They left the botanical gardens and crept out through the same hole they had used to get in.

'When I grow up, I'm going to sing for the whole world,' Deolinda said as they made their way through the empty streets.

'Can you sing?'

'Yes,' said Deolinda, 'I can sing. And my voice is very black.'

'Everybody's tongue is red,' Nelio said. 'Just like everybody's blood. There's so much to think about. So much that is strange.'

Deolinda wrapped herself in her blanket next to Mandioca. Tristeza and Mandioca lay on either side of Nascimento, who had crawled into his cardboard box and pulled down the lid. They lay there like two guards, ready if Nascimento should be attacked by the monsters that were always lurking in his dreams. Nelio stared thoughtfully at the ragged band. Then he went to his statue, thinking about what Deolinda had told him. On the way he passed a big hotel where festively dressed people were getting into their cars. He stopped for a moment and stared at all that wealth. Then he continued on his way.