Chronicler Of The Winds

The Fifth Night

The rain had moved off and the night, which was fresh and clear, had settled in over the city. I had slept for several hours next to the chimney on a pile of old newspapers since the roof was still damp from the heavy downpour. It was almost midnight, and I was about to go down the winding stairs to the heat of the bakery to check on the slovenly baker's work when Nelio broke the silence and said that he needed to use the toilet. Since he had eaten so little during the days and nights he had lain on the mattress, I had forgotten to make any arrangements. I went downstairs and out to the backyard where one of the enticing girls from the bread counter had retired with one of the bakers from the day shift. I caught them in a situation that was not at all easy to ignore, and I could feel myself blushing, but I hastily grabbed one of the buckets that was used for emptying the rubbish and went back to the roof. Behind me I heard the baker's fury at being disturbed and the girl's embarrassed giggles. I tore pieces of newspaper and put them next to the bucket. Then I helped Nelio up and left him in peace. When I returned, he was lying on the mattress again. I saw that he was sweating from the effort, and I blamed myself for not making better arrangements for him.

'Your work is waiting for you,' he said.

'I'll be back soon,' I told him. 'The dough mixer doesn't know how much flour or how little salt to mix for the bread to meet Dona Esmeralda's standards.'

With the bucket in hand, I left. It took me two hours to get the night's work in order. The dough mixer's eyes were glazed. When I realised that he had been smoking soruma and was off in a land far away, I could no longer control myself, and I punched him right in the face. I yelled at him that I had had enough and that Dona Esmeralda would fire him the moment I told her how unreliable he was. After that, everything took even longer. The dough mixer could scarcely stay on his feet, and I had to haul up the heavy flour sacks myself, since I didn't dare to let him go to the storeroom alone. On top of that, the wood in the ovens was bad that night. It took a long time before I got them hot enough so I could shove in the first baking pans. I rolled out the dough and baked the bread as fast as I could. But it was the small hours of the morning before I could kick the dough mixer out and go back to the roof. Nelio was awake when I got there. To my joy, he had eaten the fruit and the slice of bread with the thick layer of butter, which I had left for him next to his mattress. He had also put on the shirt I had washed for him earlier in the day. I thought that a miracle might be in the making. The fact that he had needed to use the toilet was a sign that his stomach was not seriously damaged. The fact that he was eating meant that life was trying to return inside him. Maybe Senhora Muwulene's herbs were healing his wounds.

But when I changed his bandage, I felt disheartened again. The wounds had grown darker; they were festering and smelled very bad. I knew I had to tell him how things stood – that he would die if he wasn't taken to a hospital where doctors could cut out the bullets that were poisoning his body. But he only smiled and shook his head.

'I'll tell you when it's time,' he said.

I cleaned the wounds as thoroughly as I could, without causing him too much pain. I could see that he made the utmost effort not to show me how much it hurt. Afterwards I put on the clean strips of cloth and gave him some water to drink. He sank back on to the mattress. In the glow of the kerosene lamp I could see how haggard his face had become during the four days I had spent with him. His black skin was stretched taut over his cheekbones, his eyes seemed to have sunk into their sockets, his lips were cracked, and his curly hair had begun to fall out. I thought that he should rest instead of devoting his nights to telling his story. I couldn't deny my curiosity – I wanted to hear his words, every one of them, since I sensed that his story was in some way also about me. I realised that I had to be patient. In the silences, when he allowed the story to rest, he would have a greater chance of regaining his strength.

But when he asked me to sit down on his mattress and then continued his story, I was never able to tell him to stop, to think about himself and how important it was not to exert himself. As he had on the previous nights, he continued his wandering through the city and through his life. A little before dawn a few scattered raindrops fell. But that was all. Otherwise we were surrounded by silence, now and then broken by dogs growling and barking at each other somewhere in the dark.

Nelio had often pondered the power that chance has over human beings. Those little words 'if' and 'if not' were more important than all other words. No one could ignore them, no one could deny that they were always close at hand, like symbols of the unpredictability that shapes our lives.

One morning he had been out on one of his aimless meanderings through the city – which often brought him the most significant experiences – when quite close to the theatre and bakery he caught sight of several policemen who had grabbed a street boy and were furiously beating him with their black batons. Nelio had noticed the boy before; he was the leader of a band of street kids, and his name was Cosmos. Like most of the others who led bands of children and guarded their territories, Cosmos was somewhat older than the others, maybe thirteen or fourteen. Nelio had noticed him because he seldom hit the smaller boys, rarely even yelled at them or ordered them to run errands for him unnecessarily.

When Nelio saw Cosmos being beaten by the police, he knew that he had to help, even though he didn't know what had happened. Quickly he tried to work out what he could do. Once again chance came to his aid. He was standing on a street corner where there were traffic lights and an extremely busy intersection. One day a few weeks before, he had watched the light being repaired. Two men in overalls had opened a rusty iron box that stood next to the traffic light, and they controlled the light by flipping several circuit breakers off and on. Ever since, the lock had been broken, but no one would suspect this unless they knew about it. Nelio didn't stop to think any further. He knelt down next to the metal box, as if, like any other street kid, he was just sitting down or stretching out right there on the pavement to sleep because he felt tired. He prised open the metal door, stuck his skinny arm inside, found the circuit breakers and began wiggling them as he pretended to sleep. The traffic instantly erupted into chaos. The red and green lights seemed to be engaged in some sort of contest, and cars came to a halt in a complicated tangle in the middle of the wide intersection. Everyone was honking; the cars backed up farther and farther. The people who were sitting in the cars and couldn't see what was going on, got out and started yelling at bystanders. The police noticed that something was happening; they saw the violent turmoil that had developed at the intersection, released Cosmos, and plunged into the fray. By then Nelio had slipped away from the metal box, the lights were functioning as they should, and no one could later explain what had happened. Cosmos, who was swollen-faced and red-eyed and furious, was sitting on the curb when Nelio went over and sat down beside him. He told him what he had done. Nelio did not doubt that he would be believed and he was not disappointed. Cosmos began to laugh, and when the other boys in the ragged group had gathered around, he told them what had happened.

'Who do you belong to? he asked Nelio.

'I don't belong to anyone.'

'Now you belong to us.'

From that moment, Nelio left his great loneliness behind. He began a life with Cosmos, Tristeza, Mandioca, Pecado, Nascimento and Alfredo Bomba. With them he shared almost everything. The only thing he kept for himself was his statue. At first Cosmos wondered why Nelio didn't sleep with the others on the cardboard boxes in the stairwell of the Ministry of Justice. Nelio told him that he had a sickness that required him to sleep in a different place every night. He said it so convincingly that Cosmos believed him. He even suggested that they should try to collect enough money to visit a curandeiro who might be able to cure this strange illness. Without hesitation, since he knew that they would never manage to find the money, Nelio replied that he had no greater wish.

Nelio took his place in the group without encroaching on anyone else. Everyone had his position to guard, and it could be weakened or elevated, although it was always Cosmos who decided, sometimes on a whim, sometimes wisely and with good judgement. But from the very beginning Nelio went his own way. First Cosmos, then the others – even, at last, Tristeza, who was slow-witted – understood that Nelio was not like anyone else. As a person, he was his own breed. He acted like the others, learning their language and their customs quickly, but he was still an outsider, though in such a manner that no one even thought to ask him why this was so.

One night Cosmos had a dream which he told to Nelio much later on, but never to the others. He dreamed that Nelio was a sun-dried person, like a fruit or a fish, that tasted better than anything else and that lasted for as long as anyone was hungry. Cosmos asked Nelio whether he could explain this dream. He asked him about it when they happened to be alone, since it wouldn't look good for him, as the leader of the group, to be asking questions. He was supposed to have all the answers. Nelio said the dream was surely a divine revelation that only Cosmos could interpret. Nelio himself did not have the power to do so; he came from the remote regions where people very seldom received divine revelations in their dreams. Cosmos was so moved by Nelio's answer that on the following Sunday he ordered the whole group to get cleaned up and accompany him to the big cathedral to attend evening prayers. But when Tristeza could no longer hold back his laughter and when Alfredo Bomba fell asleep on the stone floor of the church, they were all thrown out, and they never went back.

'God exists even in the rubbish bins,' Cosmos had shouted derisively at the church officials who had angrily expelled them. They ran as fast as they could, scattering in all directions to avoid arrest, and later they regrouped outside the theatre. Cosmos was so mad that he even forgot to give Mandioca a thrashing. And he forgave him for losing during their hasty retreat the liturgical book which Cosmos had swiped from the wide pocket of one of the dark-clad padres and then passed swiftly over to Mandioca, who had the biggest trouser pockets. For a long time afterwards Cosmos mulled over the idea of starting his own religious movement, which would be devoted exclusively to the street children. Through him the ragged bands' god, who must exist somewhere, would be reborn. But since they were heading into the hottest time of the year, he decided that the whole thing was far too strenuous, and he let the matter drop.

Cosmos recognised early on that Nelio had not come to the group in order to challenge his leadership or to seize power at some advantageous moment. At first it made him uneasy, since he had never experienced this before or even heard of such a thing. In the beginning he suspected that Nelio was deceiving him, and in secret he told Pecado and Mandioca to ask sly questions and to try to work out whether Nelio was other than the modest and reserved person he appeared to be. But at last Cosmos was convinced that Nelio was exactly the strange person he seemed to be. Nelio was nothing other than what he was. Cosmos had never met such a person before. How could someone be exactly what he was? Apart from his peculiar sickness, Nelio did not seem to have any unexpected secrets. Cosmos told Nelio about all these thoughts much later on, when he was planning, in great secrecy, to leave the group and start off on his long journey to another world. Nelio was surprised by what he heard. He had never imagined that his presence in the group could have aroused so many emotions in Cosmos. On the other hand, he had felt for a long time that the others in the group, especially Nascimento and Pecado – and later Deolinda, after she had forced her way in among them – had great difficulty accepting his presence. That was when the rumour was born that he had an unmatched ability to avoid being beaten.

Nascimento was the one who challenged him most, the aggressive Nascimento who could barely speak, who instead used his clenched fists and leaps and kicks as the language with which he described and commented upon the world he was forced to live in. He bore the name of his own origins. Everyone in the group had his own story; everyone, in spite of his youth, was a full-grown personality. And they were regarded as the most filthy but also the most respected group of street kids in the whole city. Much later Nelio came to understand that it was this respect, clothed in filthy and threadbare rags, which had so provoked the police that they decided to pound some fear into Cosmos, a fear that he would then spread to the others of the group. But the police had never succeeded, and Nelio felt as if he were living inside a roaming, jumping, dancing, laughing fortress under whose protection he and the others were invulnerable. Gradually he came to know them all, one by one, and he discovered that they were grown up even though they were kids, that they were old men even though they had scarcely reached puberty. Their stories stretched over infinite spaces of experiences, and each was a hero, a scoundrel and a victim in his own drama. Their names and their black bodies were as if celebrated in song.

Mandioca, the tall boy with the big feet and the crooked little finger on his left hand, had the biggest trouser pockets, and he had onions and tomatoes growing in them. The earth which he poured into his pockets and watered each morning was constantly dribbling out around him. And it was his vow, his yearning, to return some day to the village he could not remember, but which existed in the depths of his consciousness – the village his family had fled from when the warning came that the bandits were on their way. They had travelled by bus, they were many in number, but when they thought they had reached safety, the attack had come suddenly. The bus was set on fire, and Mandioca was flung into a thicket where later, half dead and dehydrated, he was found by several foreign nuns who rattled off a litany of prayers and then took him along to an orphanage in the city. When he had learned to walk – and it was his opinion that the only reason he wanted to walk properly was to be able to run away – he set off for his home in the countryside. But he never got farther than to the centre of the city and he had been living on the streets since he was four. Different charitable organisations based in all parts of the world and people of good will would often take him to orphanages, but he always ran away, back to the streets, since he knew that it was from there that he would one day start his journey home. He did not want to bathe or sleep in a bed or wear clean clothes. He wanted big trouser pockets to hold the earth that was just as important to him as his own blood. In every person he met on the streets he looked for some reminder of his father or mother, without remembering what they actually looked like. He searched for his siblings, his brothers and sisters, his uncles and aunts, his cousins and his neighbours, and for those he had never seen and didn't even know whether they existed at all. Often he would sink into a furious grief. But just as often he would balance on the stone walls adorned with lions outside the Ministry of Justice and dance to the music that only he could hear.

If Mandioca was tall and carried earth around in his pockets, then Nascimento was his complete opposite: short and stocky, with stones and sharp iron-points stuck in his hair and in the frayed edges of his tattered clothing. Nascimento woke up screaming every night; he saw contorted monsters coming towards him out of the dark. The others who slept around him on the cardboard boxes under ragged blankets had grown used to being woken each night. They took turns telling Nascimento that there were no monsters, there were no bandits, there was only the deserted city and the cardboard boxes and the ragged blankets. In the daytime, when it was light, Nascimento continued to chase his monsters. Then they became his fear of the night that would inevitably come, the endless series of nights and monsters that he would continue to battle as long as he lived.

He never uttered an unnecessary word. He wore a pink swimming cap pulled all the way down to his eyes, and he always expected that whoever he met meant him harm. That's why he defended himself by going on the offensive. He fought with everyone and everything: with the rusting and broken-down cars, with the rubbish bins, with rats and dogs and cats, and with the others in the group. Sometimes he would even lose control and go after Cosmos, who of course was much stronger and who would be forced to dip Nascimento's head into the broken sewer pipe behind the garage where the thieves from the suburbs ordered the new licence plates they needed for the cars they stole during the night.

Nascimento had a secret that no one knew anything about; he was hardly aware of it himself. One time when he found a half-full bottle of wine and drank it down in one gulp, he was overcome by an intoxication that seemed to make him reveal at least part of the truth. And Nelio, who was the one he confided in, gradually understood from his stuttered, incoherent and poorly formulated sentences that Nascimento had once been forced to do what Nelio had managed to escape: he had killed someone in order to save his own life. Nelio understood that Nascimento had been forced to kill his own father with a cudgel or an axe, and that he had then become one of the feared child-soldiers that the bandits always sent in advance whenever they were going to attack a village or a bus or people working in their fields. How he had ended up in the city, nobody knew. But he had not arrived alone; from the very beginning he had brought along his swimming cap and his invisible companions, the monsters who never ceased to torment him.

Pecado did not have imaginary monsters; he had real-life monsters, out in one of the suburbs. His father had disappeared without a trace. Pecado seemed only able to remember that his father had laughed when he left the hovel where they lived, never to return. His father was a faceless laughter. There were seven children. His mother sold vegetables at the marketplace. She would get up at four in the morning and walk over to the decrepit old bullring where she could buy produce cheaply. Then she would carry her baskets to the marketplace, and she wouldn't come back home until it was dark. Pecado never saw her laugh. But he didn't remember her being sad either, only worn out, exhausted and dejected. If his father was a faceless laughter, his mother was a face in which all contours had been worn away; her nose had crumbled, along with her eyes, her teeth and the smile which once must have existed.

One day a new man entered their house. Everything was supposed to be fine: a new husband, a father who would sit in the shade and shout for food. Pecado began hating the man the minute he saw him step across the threshold; he didn't want any padrasto. And the man seemed to have read his thoughts, because he announced his presence by knocking Pecado to the ground and twisting one of his shoulders out of its socket. Then he hit each of Pecado's siblings in turn. He devoted his days to beating them while their mother was out on her endless wandering with the baskets of vegetables, which kept them alive. Finally Pecado had had enough. He decided to live up to his name, and he heaved a roof tile at the head of the man who had moved into his mother's bed. He threw it with all the strength of his siblings gathered in his fists; he was six years old at the time. Then he fled to the streets, because nothing could be worse than being at home. During those first years he hoped that his mother would try to find him. But she never came. He saw her only from a distance, when she stood at her stall selling alface and sometimes tomatoes. Pecado never went back home, and in the end his mother had become as vague and remote a memory as his father with the faceless laughter.

Then there was Alfredo Bomba, the youngest, who had only one arm. He had been born a pariah with a stunted shoulder in another town, and he came with an older brother to the big city to seek, if not happiness, then at least less misery. He was the one who constantly hid behind an unwavering good humour except when he begged – then he would cry, and he knew all the tricks. He was missing an arm, but he could make those who saw him believe that he was missing everything. They saw only his hand stretched out, and they gave him money for their own salvation. He was the one who each day could give Cosmos the greatest amount of money; it was his mission in life. He bore with joy and pride the fact that he was always the one who could contribute the most.

At his side almost always was Tristeza, the slow-witted boy. He was the hopeless stepchild of poverty; his brain had never been given the nutrition it needed as much as it needed oxygen. He had never learned to think except very slowly. For his mother, he was the twelfth painful reminder that she was still alive, and after naming the eleventh child Miseria, she had had only one name left; Tristeza. And she died the same day that he was born after having whispered to an exhausted and starving nurse that she wanted his name to be Tristeza, the only thing that she had left.

Nelio listened in amazement to their stories, and he realised that he was one of them; they had the same origins and the same experiences. In their stories he recognised himself, in the way that they all carried the burned village inside them. Often, as he lay in the horse's belly waiting for sleep, he would think that they all seemed to have been born of the same mother. A woman who was young and full of energy, but who had been broken by bandits, by monsters and by poverty to become a toothless, shrunken shadow. He knew that this was what they actually had in common: possessing nothing, having been born into a world against their will, and having been flung out into a misery created by bandits and monsters.

They had only one mission in life: to survive.

In the daytime he would see the rich climbing in and out of their shiny cars on the wide avenues in the centre of the city: white men, black men, Indians. From Cosmos he had learned what one of those cars cost. It was such a dizzying sum that it was as if Cosmos were talking about the distance to a star rather than the price of a car. By looking at the rich, Nelio also discovered his own poverty. Between the rich, who always seemed to be setting off to conduct some urgent business, and the group of street kids there was a chasm which Nelio saw widening every day. The kids would cross it whenever they popped up and offered to watch over a car or to wash it while the black or white or Indian man who stepped out with his briefcase was conducting his important business.

Nelio once asked Cosmos who these men were, what they had in their briefcases, and why they were always in such a hurry. Cosmos didn't have any answers, but admitted that it might be worthwhile to find out. At an advantageous moment a short time later, he instructed Mandioca and Tristeza to break into a car and steal the briefcase that was inside. Afterwards they took cover behind the petrol station and opened the bag. Mandioca had imagined it full of money. But when he opened the lock and lifted the flap he found only the shrivelled remains of a lizard. That was a magic moment, since they would never have imagined that a dead lizard could be the secret of great riches.

'They carry around boxes with dead animals,' Cosmos mused. 'Maybe there are special lizards that ward off evil spirits.'

'It's an ordinary lizard,' said Mandioca after he pulled it out, studied it carefully and then sniffed it.

'But it must mean something,' Cosmos said.

'Anyway, let's make it perfectly clear that we know what's in their bags,' said Nelio.

Where he got the idea from, he didn't know, no more than he could explain so many other things he brooded about. He imagined that he had a secret space in his head where the unexpected thoughts waited for the proper moment to slip free.

'How can we do that without getting caught?' Cosmos said.

Nelio thought about it, and suddenly he knew.

'We catch a live lizard and put it in the bag,' said Nelio. 'Mandioca and Tristeza open the car door without being seen. Then we put the briefcase back in the car. The man will have something to wonder about for as long as he lives. We've seized power over him. We know how it was done. But he doesn't.'

Cosmos nodded. Then he called to Alfredo Bomba and told him to catch one of the lizards that were skittering up and down the tree trunks or hiding in the cracks of the buildings. Alfredo Bomba stood motionless next to a tree, put his hand on the trunk and waited for a lizard to come near. Then he flicked his wrist and the lizard was caught between his thumb and forefinger.

Nelio wondered where he had learned this skill. Alfredo Bomba was surprised by the question.

'I learned it by watching the way lizards catch insects,' he said.

Since Tristeza was the one watching over the car, he and Mandioca had no trouble opening the door again and putting the briefcase back inside. When the man who owned the car returned, he gave Tristeza banknotes for all of 5,000 because he had looked after the car so well.

From then on, Cosmos and Nelio were obsessed by the discovery they had made. They could control the world by invisibly slipping inside wherever they wanted and leaving their mysterious signs, which would seem inexplicable and sometimes even frightening to those who found them. They looked around the city. The lizard in the briefcase had given them the upper hand, and they decided to challenge their poverty. Cosmos made all the decisions, but it was Nelio who whispered in his ear. Then they parcelled out tasks to the others, and afterwards they would all admire the trophies.

One night they made their way through winding sewer pipes, beneath the feet of armed guards, into the city's largest department store. Cosmos had to give both Nascimento and Alfredo a thrashing to stop them from filling their pockets with valuables from the store. They weren't there to steal but to leave their sign and take back a trophy. Taking instructions from Cosmos and Nelio, they moved everything in the store around; they put radios inside the big freezers, filled the empty bread baskets with shoes, and hooked frozen chickens on to hangers in the women's clothing department. The last thing they did was to unscrew the brass plaque hanging near the main entrance commemorating the occasion when the President dedicated the big department store. Then Pecado pinned up a dead lizard he had from Alfredo Bomba, and they left the night-time store as soundlessly as they had come. The next day Cosmos and Nelio stood outside the entrance when the store opened. They saw the disbelief in the guards' eyes, then the astonishment of the bosses who came hurrying up when they realised that nothing apart from the brass plaque had been stolen. When the police eventually arrived, Alfredo's dead lizard was lying on a silver tray, and no one dared to touch it.

On another night they visited the big white hotel which stood on a cliff above the sea. They sneaked in through a ventilation shaft which had its intake in the slope facing the sea. By climbing like monkeys on to each others shoulders they were able to reach it, and at last they found themselves inside the vast halls with marble floors and metre-high urns for flowers. They moved with great caution because the clerks at the front desk, the guards and sleepless guests were keeping vigil in the dimly lit halls. In the café with the soft easy chairs they gobbled up the pastries that were still in the gold-framed cooler counter. Here too they stole a shiny plaque posted between two columns in the great lobby to commemorate the day many years before when Dom Joaquim had dedicated the newly built hotel. Alfredo Bomba stuffed his dead lizard into the hollow where the plaque had been. Nelio carefully placed a pastry next to the lizard's mouth before they slipped back through the ventilation shaft.

What happened the next day they never found out because they wouldn't have made it past the guards stationed at the hotel's swinging doors. But they thought they could imagine what had gone on.

Nelio and Cosmos grew bolder. They slipped inside the parliament building, unscrewed the handle of the Speaker's gavel and poked a dead lizard inside in its place. They challenged each other by starting to show their superiority to others. They challenged the overblown self-righteousness of the wealthy by toppling two escort motorcycle police outside the theatre when a minister's cortege passed by. Nelio and Cosmos had noticed that the lead motorcycles in every cortege always took a short cut across the wide avenue's centre lane just before the big intersection. When the wail of the sirens was heard in the distance and all the drivers had pulled over, Tristeza and Nascimento poured splinters of black-coloured glass over the centre lane and then hid behind a parked car. Afterwards, when the motorcycles had fallen and the cortege was forced to stop, a dead lizard was found among the shards of glass.

Cosmos and Nelio discussed at length what would be their greatest challenge. They weighed the possibility of releasing all the prisoners in the municipal jail, each one to have a dead lizard in his hand. For a long time they considered disrupting one night the transmissions of the city's radio station. But what they finally agreed on was that they would sneak inside the President's palace, into the very room where he slept, and put a lizard on his bedside table. That would be their last challenge. After that, the lizards would stop appearing. But no one could ever be sure that they wouldn't turn up again.

It took them a year to prepare for their visit to the President's bedroom. During that time they continued their restless, uneasy life on the streets. They fought with the other groups over territory; they waged a constant battle with the Indian shopkeepers, with the police, and with themselves. They washed and guarded cars, scavenged for food in the rubbish bins, and refined Alfredo Bomba's begging techniques. Once in a while they would be accosted by the outside world, most often in the shape of white people who spoke their language very badly. Apparently they wanted to take the group of kids with them to some place they described as a big house where there was food and bathtubs and a god. Cosmos used to assign Mandioca to go along and investigate what it was all about. But Mandioca would usually be back the next day, saying that it was just another institution where they wanted to change the kids and rob them of their right to live on the streets.

Sometimes people would arrive wearing visored caps, carrying big cameras and wanting them to pose. Cosmos would immediately demand payment, whereupon the men with the cameras and the skinny women with pens in their hands would usually leave with disgruntled looks. If the men with the cameras were prepared to pay, the kids would gladly pose. They would show off with expressions of hunger, pain, yearning, filth, vulgarity, larceny and innocent joy. Cosmos gave the instructions, and each of them had his assignment. They used the money to buy food, usually chicken, which they would grill down by the decaying wharf. The days with the cameramen and the skinny, pen-wielding women were sated days. Afterwards they would lie in the shade of the palm trees and talk. Cosmos let Nelio lie next to him while the others kept a respectful distance. Cosmos would look out over the ocean, gnawing on the last chicken leg, and talk of everything except himself. Cosmos's origins were something that Nelio often pondered. But he knew that Cosmos would never answer if he asked him any questions. Nelio sometimes thought that Cosmos had always been a ready-made person. He was born the way he was and he would never change. That could also be the reason why he never spoke of his past. He didn't talk about it because it didn't exist.

The sated days sometimes led Cosmos into a philosophical and dreamy reverie.

'If you ask Tristeza or Alfredo or any of the others what they want most in life, what do you think they will say?'

Nelio thought for a moment. 'Various things,' he said.

'I'm not so sure about that,' said Cosmos. 'Isn't there something that is greater than everything else? Greater than mothers and full stomachs and distant villages and clothes and cars and money?'

They lay there in silence while Nelio considered. An ID card,' he said at last. 'A document with a photo that says that you are who you are and nobody else.'

'I knew you would think of it,' said Cosmos. 'That's what we dream about. ID cards. But not so that we'll know who we are. We already know that. But so that we'll have a document proving that we have the right to be who we are.'

'I've never had an ID card,' Nelio said pensively.

'We should get ourselves some,' said Cosmos. 'After we've visited the President's bedroom we'll get some ID cards.'

'What happens if they catch us?' asked Nelio. 'What happens if the President wakes up?'

'He'll probably yell for help,' replied Cosmos. 'He'll be like Nascimento. He'll think he's dreaming about monsters.'

'If I was our President,' Nelio said, 'what would I do?'

'Eat your fill every day.'

'Eat my fill every day. And then what?'

'Rebuild the village that the bandits burned down. Go in search of your mother and father and your sisters and brothers. Try to find Yabu Bata. Throw the man with no teeth into jail. You'd have a lot to do.'

Cosmos yawned. 'If I was our President, I would resign,' he said, turning on to his side to go to sleep. 'How would the leader of a band of street kids have time to be President?'

Usually they finished off the sated days by paying a visit to the fairgrounds, which were in a fenced-off area between the harbour and the crowded alleys where the bars did not close until the sun came up. Even if the kids had had money, it was a repugnant thought to pay an entrance fee. They had their own entryway behind one of the smoky restaurant kitchens where the grease burned on stovetops that were never cleaned. They would crawl through a hole in the wall which they had made themselves and then covered up with clumps of earth. They knew the enormous Adelaida who stood there holding her spatula while the sweat ran down her face. She was a mulatto and weighed close to 150 kilos. When she started as cook in the restaurant ten years earlier, the owner had been forced to enlarge the kitchen to make enough room for her. She danced and sang while she cooked. The food she made was nothing extraordinary, but a rumour had spread that what she served had a magic effect on the desires and prowess of both men and women. This meant the restaurant was always full. Adelaida was paid a high salary, since she was aware of her value, and she was happy to keep watch on the secret entrance that the street kids used.

The fairgrounds were a labyrinth of restaurants and bars, cramped stalls where you could have your fortune told or get a tattoo from small, dark and mysterious men from the remote islands of the Indian Ocean. In the middle of an open plaza there was a Ferris wheel which no one had dared to ride for the past twenty years because the chains of the caged seats had rusted through. The owner, Senhor Rodrigues, who had imported the huge wheel more than sixty years before during the time of Dom Joaquim, was still to be found at his position each evening. As if it were a wishing well, people would buy tickets from him without taking a ride, and then wish for a long life. Senhor Rodrigues, who had a fierce smoker's cough and lived on raisins, sat in his little ticket booth and played chess with himself. During all the years he had spent at the fairgrounds, he had developed a great proficiency at losing to himself. He knew that he was a bad chess player, but inside him there was a secret genius who was an unbeatable master.

Next to the Ferris wheel were several lottery stands and a track for small electric racing cars. The big carousel, whose motor had stopped functioning several years before the young revolutionaries seized power, was now driven by hand. The owners had fled in terror, thinking that all whites would be decapitated by the new rulers. They had drained off all the motor oil and let the carousel break down. They did it one night when they were alone at the fairgrounds; they drank great quantities of wine and rode on their carousel until the motor ground to a halt. The next day they were gone. They had chopped the heads off the wooden horses, as vengeance against the new era which would not allow them to continue to lead their comfortable colonial lives. No one ever found the chopped-off heads, and no one ever replaced them with new ones either. That's why the carousel horses were still missing their heads. Cosmos ordered everyone except Alfredo to push. Alone in his kingdom of headless horses, Alfredo sat on the lead horse and rode around and around the world. For that moment of happiness he was prepared to beg on the others' behalf for as long as he lived. They roamed the fairgrounds and looked at everything that was going on. They were keen observers of the fights that erupted and just as quickly died out; they studied with interest the half-naked women looking for customers, and they discussed the women's physical attributes so loudly that they were usually chased off. The sated days were days when time stood still, when life was something more than mere survival.

At the beginning of the second year in which Nelio lived with the group led by Cosmos, they made their night-time visit to the President. They slipped into the walled and heavily guarded palace by crawling into the big laundry baskets, which once a month were delivered to the palace from the government laundry. They waited in one of the cellar rooms until it was night, and then they made their furtive way through the silent building. Over a long period prior to that night, they had asked innocent questions of various people who worked in the presidential palace and found out how the building looked and where the stairs and the guards were located; they also knew in which room the President slept. Sometimes he visited his wife, who had her own bedroom, but he always returned to his own bed. As they were on their way up to the upper floor of the palace, they heard a door open and close somewhere overhead. They crouched in the darkness of the stairs. Then they saw the President approaching in the moonlight, and he was naked. Soundlessly he passed above them on his way back to his own bedroom. That was a moment none of them would forget. Cosmos threatened to give them a beating every day for three months if they ever revealed what they had seen. No one needed to know that their President had shown himself naked before some of his subjects.

They waited on the stairs until Cosmos thought the President must be asleep. Cautiously they approached and opened his door. In the light from the window they saw the shadow of the black man in his bed, and they heard his calm breathing. They stood around him, holding their breath. Then Alfredo Bomba placed the dead lizard on the bedside table, and they left the room.

What they never found out was that a moment later the President had woken up. He was dreaming that something smelled bad – it was the foul smell of poverty. When he opened his eyes in the dark, the smell was in the room, as if it had followed him out of his sleep. He lay there for a long time, wondering what the dream was trying to tell him. That he did too little to alleviate the poverty that seemed to be spreading like an epidemic through the country? Anxiously he looked for an answer without finding one until he fell into an uneasy slumber shortly before dawn.

But he did not see the lizard on his bedside table. In the morning, when the President had bathed and then dressed with bleary eyes, he still hadn't noticed it.

A horrified servant called for the man in charge of the President's security department, who in turn, and under the greatest secrecy, summoned the head of the security police. After a number of highly confidential meetings, it was decided not to inform the President. But they did, again in secrecy, increase threefold the guard on the Presidents palace.

A short time after this, his final triumph, Cosmos was struck by a melancholy that came as a great surprise to everyone, even to himself. One evening when Nelio was about to leave for his statue, Cosmos pulled him aside and told him that from the next day Nelio would be in charge of the group. Cosmos would be gone by then, and he was making Nelio responsible until he came back. There was a freighter in the harbour that would set sail for the East at sunrise. Cosmos was going to sneak on board and set off on a journey which he saw as the only way to regain his good spirits.

'They'll never accept me as their leader,' said Nelio. 'They'll say that I killed you.'

'They'll miss me,' said Cosmos. 'That's why you are the only possible leader, since you're the one who is closest to me.'

Nelio tried to object.

'Say no more,' replied Cosmos. 'I think it's important for people to go away once in a while. I'll be fine.'

Then he pulled a dead lizard from his pocket and smiled.

The next day he was gone. No one ever heard from him again. He had vanished with the ship that had sailed into the sunrise.

At the very moment that Nelio was telling me about the disappearance of Cosmos, the sun rose over the horizon. The African sun, red like silk, spread its rays across the city, which was starting to awaken. I could see from Nelio's face that he was tired. As I was about to leave him, he began to cough. When I turned, I saw blood running from his mouth. It occurred to me that it was over now. Nelio was going to die. Then he raised his hand and gave a dismissive wave.

'It looks worse than it is,' he said wearily. 'I'm not going to die without you knowing it.'

A moment later the bleeding stopped. I asked him whether he wanted anything.

'Just water,' he said. 'Then I will sleep.'

I stayed on the roof until he fell asleep. Then I went down to the bakery. Dona Esmeralda had already arrived, and I told her about the useless dough mixer I worked with during the night.

I listened to my own voice, to the words I uttered. They sounded alien and unreal, as if I were about to be devoured by the dying Nelio and his story, but Dona Esmeralda didn't seem to notice. She got up from her stool, tied the hat ribbons under her chin, and said that she would immediately replace the incompetent dough mixer with a better person.

Then I went into the city. Some distance away I turned and looked up at the roof of the theatre.

The evening and the night were still far off.