Damnificados Read online

  Hans and Dieter get into the truck and Hans drives it away. He will keep driving until he reaches the outskirts of the city, where the woods are deep and rain-soaked, where a wolf can hide and run and live and die.

  CHAPTER 2

  Daylight at the tower—Entrance—Don Felipe the priest—Tasks for creating a home—Headquarters—Lookouts—The burning of mutant rats—Lalloo fixes electrics—Maria—The education of damnificados

  THE NIGHT FIRES ARE NOW EMBERS. THE FIRST RAYS OF SUN BURN AN ELLIPSE INTO THE horizon, and the gathering light is blurred with the smoke and fog of the city. As the sun shines on the shantytowns of Slomljena Ruka, Fellahin, Dieux Morts, Sanguinosa, an explosion of light turns the hills into a mosaic of glistening mirrors. The crowing of cocks and the curdled yelps of dogs puncture the quiet. Somewhere a truck growls.

  The damnificados are stirring. They have waited all night, seen hounds from hell that turned out to be wolves, warmed themselves by fires, eaten the food they carried—raw potatoes, a little bread—and now it’s time to take the tower.

  “The wolves are gone,” says Nacho to a family huddling together. “We can go in.”

  He walks among them, his crutches leaving a trail of dots on the ground.

  “The tower is ours,” he says.

  No one moves.

  “It’s cursed,” says a woman. She stands up. Grimy forehead, riven by lines, her face a street map of Sanguinosa. She may be sixty-five, may be thirty. No one knows the age of a damnificado. Their faces are a collection of creases, valleys, craters, unexpected bursts of ugliness. “That animal is a sign from God. We can’t go in.”

  Nacho stops, ruffles his hair, faces her.

  “I understand you,” he says.

  “No you don’t,” she says. “There’s worldly things and not-worldly things. Things we don’t expect to see on this Earth. God sends them to warn us.”

  “Then what should we do?” asks Nacho. “Do we go back to our homes? Take our families back to our hovels, to our cardboard shacks under the bridges? Or do we pray to God to let us enter this damned place? Look. The sun’s rising. That’s also an act of God. Another day dawning.”

  Nacho stands in front of her as the light begins to cast her face in yellow, a mask of lines and hollows. “God brought us here too. Maybe for a reason.”

  Hans, newly returned from the woods, walks toward Nacho. Says, “Du musst hineingehen. Nacho, why don’t you go first? Take the Chinaman with you.”

  And Nacho does. The giant and the cripple move together, one with the gait of a wrestler, the other a-hobble on worm-worn sticks.

  “It’s cursed,” says the woman to herself. “We can’t go in.”

  The Chinaman kicks again at the remains of the door he smashed, the splinters coming off in showers of dust. He and Nacho enter the atrium, where they’d picked up the sleeping wolves. In the sunlight they see all that was hidden at night: the floor dense with trash, bones, crumbling stone. The space a small cavern. On both sides a stairwell. At the back, a disused elevator shaft standing open. Rotting stacks of paper, mold climbing the walls.

  Nacho and the Chinaman take the two different stairwells. The stairs are shallow, worn. Nacho heaves himself up to the floor above. A corridor. The Chinaman appears from the other side of the building. Small apartments. Ten on each floor. Already Nacho is counting, figuring the numbers of damnificados, who will go to the top floors and who to the bottom. How to house someone fifty floors in the sky in a building with a broken elevator. How to solve the conundrum: the elderly need the lower floors but it is the lower floors that will need the warriors because that is where the tower will be attacked.

  How to use his contacts to get the water flowing once again through the rusted pipes. How to build a community in this upright tomb.

  He maneuvers his way back down to the atrium and is about to call the damnificados when he sees them pouring slowly through the doors, like zombies. Families with sleeping children draped over their shoulders. Dreadlocked men as old as Methuselah. Hunched shoulders, people lost in coats and bags and beanie hats incongruous in the morning heat.

  And he thinks, ‘This is it. This is the beginning.’

  “Never doubt what a hundred souls can do, given the time and the need.” Don Felipe Holguin stands before Nacho. A priest in sandals. Unshaven, gray. He is tall and stooped but with the nose of the boxer that he once was before he heard the call from Jesus.

  “We have six hundred souls,” says Nacho.

  Damnificados. The lowest of the low, rising to the heights of the third-tallest building in the city. Sicarios. Knifemen. Assassins. Bandidos. Quick-handed, cold-eyed. The unholy, the unhoused, led by the lame. Nacho divides the damnificados into groups of six, keeping families together. He knows a quarter of them by name.

  “Only small groups will accomplish anything,” the priest says to him. “More than eight and you will get factions and everything will go to hell. I’ve seen it happen.”

  At first Nacho writes the tasks in three languages on large boards. Sweep rubble, remove trash, wash floors, plug leaks, rebuild walls, kill vermin. He sees incomprehension and remembers that most damnificados cannot read. He talks to them, learns who can do what. Finds among them a soldier, an engineer, a mechanic. He assigns task leaders among the groups. Calls the leaders together. Tells them what they must do and the tools they will need to do it. They return to their groups and lead. The physically stronger go higher up the building.

  He sends a delegation to find brooms, brushes, wheelbarrows, hammers and nails wherever they can. They trawl the garbage dumps, beg and borrow. A group of the older women sets up grills outside the building, where they cook corn and plantain and the discarded parts of chickens and pigs. Another group he sends on reconnaissance, to find land in the vicinity where they can grow food. Small plots.

  “We’ll become farmers,” he says. “Carrots, potatoes, whatever will grow. And trees, too. There’s no shade. We need trees for the old to sit under. And to attract birds.”

  “Why do we want birds? They’ll steal our food,” says Raincoat.

  “Because birds sing. There’s no music here.”

  “Then we’ll start a choir,” says the priest.

  The engineer sets up a system of ropes and pulleys to get tools, water and food to the higher floors. But there are no ropes long enough to reach beyond the tenth floor. Nacho procures a moped. Then he gets the twins to lay wooden planks on the outer stairs leading to every floor, rising in long diagonals. An ex-army grease monkey rigs up the moped with reinforced tires, and now it roars up the planks day and night, loaded with goods.

  The rooms of the monolith are littered with rubble and trash. Dried-out corpses of beetles and cockroaches freckle the floors. Nacho enters a room one story up, looking for his base, and comes across the remnants of tenants long gone: a chair falling to pieces, a moldy blanket covered with wolves’ fur, six toppled wine bottles gently rolling and clinking in the breeze that blows through the windowless gap in the wall. He looks out of the hole. Thinks, ‘One floor up, I can see the entrance, and the road that people will cross to get here.’ But something nags him about the sight lines. He cannot see the bigger picture. I need to be higher, he says to himself. But then I’ll need to climb stairs on my crutches. He wills himself up another floor, enters a room where a family is sweeping. They nod at him and make to leave.

  “No, stay,” he says.

  He hobbles to the blown out window and again looks out to the street. Now the angle is better. He can see above the bodegas and the street vendors. But still he is not happy.

  “What’s on your mind?” asks the priest.

  “Which room I should stay in.”

  “Why?”

  “I need to see the surroundings.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I like to know who’s coming. When they hear we’ve taken the building, they’ll come for us. Sooner or later.”

  “Who’s they?”

  “I
don’t know. The gangs. The police. The army. The politicos. I don’t know, but someone will come for us.”

  “Nacho,” says the priest, “what will you do? Stay awake all night every night watching for enemies? You have six hundred pairs of eyes here. They can keep watch for you. The world doesn’t have to be on your shoulders. Frankly, you don’t have the shoulders for it.”

  And so Nacho takes a room on the first floor and asks the ex-soldier to organize guards, a twenty-four-hour watch from three levels on all four sides: the sixtieth floor where a watcher can see for miles, spot a convoy or a tank coming half an hour before it makes its way through the traffic. Four pairs of eyes at all times, north, south, east, and west. The thirtieth floor, too, will have four watchers. And the first floor also, from where, without the need for binoculars, the watchers can see the expression on a man’s face as he approaches the entrance, whether he’s carrying a knife or a bomb or a basket of fruit. And of course there are the guards to the entrances on the ground floor, all four of them armed and each with a child’s walkie-talkie retrieved from a dump.

  The main entrance belongs to the Chinaman. There he will sit motionless for hours on end, arms folded. A Blutig carpenter makes a chair for him from objects found in the building: great hunks of wood from a broken dresser and the reclaimable springs of a mattress. The Chinaman has the gift of stillness. A visitor might think he’s asleep because his chin touches his chest and under the broad peak of the baseball cap he sometimes wears, you cannot see his eyes. But, like Nacho, he is always watching.

  The garbage piles outside the building are the toughest of all. They are inhabited by colonies of giant rats that shoot through the darkness of the trash tunnels. Some of the second and all of the third-generation vermin have mutated. They can now adapt to the color of the trash, like chameleons. Nacho calls a meeting with his leaders. They try a hunting mission, but the rats are too quick. They try poison but the rats adapt and eat it like bread. They concrete over a section of the trash pile to see if it will work, but the rats gnaw through the concrete and scamper the walkways at night, laughing.

  “We must burn them out,” says Nacho. “Even rats cannot survive fire.”

  He has seen controlled burns before, but never in the middle of a city. He understands it’s the wind that matters, and natural breaks where a fire will stop. He walks the perimeter of the tower, calculating angles and the length of gullies.

  One calm day shortly after, he tells the damnificados to stay inside and cover the window openings with boards, blankets, or cardboard, whatever they can find to keep the smoke out. He gets the mechanic to mix a canister of diesel and gasoline, molds a driptorch from an old coffee can, and rigs it up to the moped. One of the twins ignites the wick and rides around the perimeter, dropping fire on the largest of the garbage piles. A thousand rats scamper and the piles are leveled.

  As the trash chars and turns to cinders, toxic fumes rise, black veils twisting up the sky. They curl toward the window openings of the monolith, but as these are covered, the fumes barely enter. Instead, they dissipate, swallowed up in the expanse of sunlit fog that blankets the city.

  The twins’ father’s truck pulls up, orange embers crackling all around. Hans gets out of the cab and with two other men begins to unload huge sacks from the bed of the truck. The Chinaman unties the sacks and fifty wild cats bound out, teeth like knives. They follow the scent trails of the escaping rats, down holes, up drains, into all the dark spaces where a rat might hide. And when they are done with their massacre, the cats melt back into the alleyways and slinkholes of the city.

  “Where did you get those cats?” asks the priest.

  Dieter looks at him. He has never spoken to a priest before.

  “From the cat-catcher in Estrellas Negras. We paid her with a table and chairs. They say she’s a witch.”

  “La bruja de Estrellas Negras. She’s real?” says the priest.

  “She stank of cat piss and skunks. Hans nearly threw up.”

  They send for Lalloo. He knows how to steal electricity from the pylons and generators. But when he arrives he is drunk. Singing to himself, eyes blood-red. The twins support him on either side and leave him to sleep it off in the atrium.

  He wakes up. Nacho welcomes him. He falls asleep again.

  He wakes up an hour later. Nacho gives him a plate of food and a cup of wine. He ignores the food.

  “We need electricity for this building,” says Nacho.

  That afternoon Lalloo is up a ladder, boltcutters and pliers hooked onto his belt. He puts the monolith on the grid, lamps buzzing bright, drawing mosquitoes at dusk as the call to prayer rises from a nearby mosque. Later he tries and fails to fix the elevator, tells Nacho the thing is busted for good.

  The Chinaman raises Nacho onto his shoulders and walks up sixty flights of stairs. He is panting by the time he reaches the top. With the Chinaman, the priest, the twins and Raincoat by his side, Nacho looks out. He sees half the city, the skyline punctured with other towers—hotels and office blocks—and dozens of billboards half-obscured. The roads are jammed with taxis and a million cars, bicycle rickshaws, yellow buses blasting salsa, exhaust fumes pluming upward, people dawdling or scurrying.

  He looks down at the land surrounding the tower, irregular, uneven, gullied like wounds, black patches still smoldering from the burn that drove out the rats.

  “This was a wasteland,” he says. “There are mountains of trash buried under the ground. Whatever happens, we must never see another trash pile. Not here. This tower has to be clean inside and out.”

  The families move in. Those with the elderly take the lower floors. They bring in furniture, lanterns, candles, everything reclaimed from the dumps. Some have stoves, and even refrigerators. They make beds from pallets and recycled planks. Old sofas come in from the dumpster at Minhas. A hotel burns down at Puertarota and the damnificados head out at 3:00 a.m. to salvage beds and wardrobes, loading them onto the twins’ father’s truck and hanging off the sides as it winds its way back to the tower.

  They stalk the rich areas for abandoned TVs and pull them off the sidewalk. Lalloo fixes everything electrical after Nacho lets him stay in a room on the sixth floor. His hands shake but he can find his way around electrics in his sleep and for weeks he goes from floor to floor fixing everything in exchange for food and wine.

  A riot breaks out south of Agua Suja and in the chaos six brothers somehow bring a baking oven home to the tower, marching it like a coffin in a cortege. It takes them all night to haul it to the tower and when they arrive their hands and shoulders are bleeding. They set it up the next day on the third floor and open a bakery.

  On the sixth floor Maria Benedetti, an ex-beauty queen from Sanguinosa, sets up a salon. She uses pilfered combs and brushes, shampoo made from soap and goat’s milk, and a hair dryer that was her mother’s. A string of damnificadas, pouting preening girls, crowd into the salon, and soon women from Favelada and Fellahin begin coming to get their hair done and Maria puts up a street sign, ‘Marias Beautty & Hare Salon.’ Nacho gets wary when he realizes the visiting women arrive in the afternoon and don’t leave till morning. He says to the priest, “They’re prostitutes. They go to the salon, spend their earnings on their hair, and make the money back without even leaving the tower.”

  The priest says, “But who can pay them here? This tower is full of damnificados. Which of them has money for women?”

  What the priest doesn’t know is that the tower is home to working people. Many find jobs in factories, as guards, caretakers, sweepers and cleaners. Nacho does nothing about the hookers, reasoning that liberty is all, liberty to make a living, to have a home, to sleep with whores.

  He opens three schools, one each on the fifth, the fifteenth and the twenty-fifth floors. He finds old desks and boards in a junkpile, and buys a supply of chalk. Behind the offices of an insurance firm in Amado he leads a raid on a dumpster and finds half a ton of used paper. He puts it in eight-foot cans from an abandoned f
actory, douses it with soapy water, and spreads the slurry on huge rollers. The sheets are hung up on the balconies of the first to the tenth floor and when they are dry, Nacho cuts them into rectangles with his good arm. Now they have paper. Meanwhile, the twins steal pens and pencils from every bank, business, post office, and library in a fifteen-mile radius.

  At first no one attends. The children are all out making money. They clean car windows, pick up glass to recycle, sell candy or umbrellas in the rainy season, beg, juggle at traffic lights, do magic tricks. So Nacho starts with the parents in one hour sessions. He draws objects on the board and has the students do the same. They draw everything that is important to them and they name it. Then they write it together on the board, sounding out the letters. Children. C. H. I. L. D. R. E. N. They say what they want for their children. M. O. N. E. Y. O. P. P. O. R. T. U. N. I. T. Y. H. A. P. P.I. N. E. S. S. And Nacho asks, where are your children now? On the street. Cleaning cars. Begging. And Nacho asks, how will they get money, opportunity, happiness? And eventually the parents find their way to the word E. D. U. C. A. T. I. O. N.

  Nacho takes them for walks and they make out the words on signs, begin to read the word and the world. They write communal stories on the boards, Nacho acting as scribe. Their family histories. Myths and legends from their towns. Half-heard tales. And when they are done, Nacho puts them into pairs and they ‘read’ the stories together, puzzling out the words.

  Nacho brings in comic books: superheroes, men in tights saving cities, girls with twenty-foot rubber arms and supersight, clairvoyants and villains. They piece together the stories. They retell them and find meaning and write words from the tales.

  Where did the tower come from? Who built it? What was it called? Why? Why was it empty? They write their answers on paper. Where did the desks they were sitting at come from? But before the carpenter took his saw to the wood, where did the wood come from? Who brought it to the city? How? Why?