Henning Mankell - Chronicler Of The Winds

'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.