Henning Mankell - Chronicler Of The Winds

'I don't know,' Nelio said. 'Maybe like other whites who live in our world, he'll say that Africa and the blacks are inscrutable.'

'Are we?' asked Alfredo Bomba. Are we inscrutable?'

'No, we're not,' Nelio said. 'But the world we live in can sometimes be hard to understand.'

They went out on to the street, knowing that they shared a great secret. Nelio could see that they started rummaging through the rubbish bins and begging to guard cars with greater energy than usual so early in the morning.

He thought that what they had done was a good thing. That's why they would never do it again.

That morning Nelio was very tired. He said that he was going to sit in the shade of his tree and that he didn't want to be disturbed. They should also do their best not to fight or make a lot of noise around him.

But when he reached his tree he gave a start and stopped. Someone was sitting there. Someone he had never seen before. He was annoyed that his place beside the tree had not been respected. No one else was allowed to sit there.

He went over to the tree. It was a girl sitting there. And she was just as white, just as much an albino, as Yabu Bata.

I waited for more, but it never came. Nelio had cut short his story and slipped into his own thoughts. Then he looked up at me.

'I remember that I thought it had to mean something important,' he said. His voice was quite faint now, and I thought about the wounds that smelled bad and were growing darker under the bandage.

'First Yabu Bata showed me the way to the city,' he went on. 'And now a girl in ragged clothing was sitting in the shade under my tree. I thought it had to mean something. And it did.'

I thought about my own woman. The new dough mixer whom no one had escorted home in the night. I felt already a tense anticipation about seeing her again that evening.

'I see that you're thinking about something that makes you happy,' Nelio said. 'If I wasn't so tired, I would like to hear you talk about it.'

'You must rest,' I said. 'Then I will take you to the hospital.'

Nelio did not reply. He had already closed his eyes.

I stood up and left the roof.

The sixth night was over.

Can you hear from a man's footsteps that he's in love? If that's true, and I think it is, then Maria must have known that my heart was already burning for her when I entered the bakery on the second night that we were going to bake Dona Esmeralda's bread together. It was very hot, and she was wearing a thin dress through which the contours of her body were quite evident. She had started work by the time I came down from the roof, and she smiled when she caught sight of me.

Now, more than a year later, I can imagine that if everything had been different – if Nelio hadn't died and I hadn't left my job at Dona Esmeralda's and later reappeared as the Chronicler of the Winds – then maybe Maria and I would have become a couple. But we never did, and today it's no longer possible since she is bound to another man. I have seen her in the city, and she had a man quite close by her side. I think he was selling birds at one of the city's marketplaces, and her stomach was enormous. Even though our time together was so brief and even though I never found out whether my feelings for Maria were reciprocated, I hold on to my memory of her as the greatest joy of my life. A joy which also contained within it the seed of the greatest sorrow.

Something in my life seemed to come to an end during those days when Nelio lay on the roof of the theatre, slowly languishing from the black wounds that poisoned him and finally took the life from him. I think that's the way it has to be expressed: that his life was taken from him. Death always comes uninvited; it disrupts and causes disorder. But in Nelio's case, death arrived with a crowbar and broke its way into his body and stole his spirit.

Afterwards, when I had taken off my white cap, hung up my apron and left Dona Esmeralda's bakery behind, it was a different life that I began. I could not have taken Maria into that life, even if I had wanted to. How could I have asked her to follow me out into the world as the wife of a man who had chosen to be a beggar? How could I have made her understand that, for me, this was a necessity?

But I did see her in the streets of the city. And she was still extremely beautiful. I will never forget her. One day when I know that my time has come, when the spirits are calling me too, I will close my eyes and in my soul I will see her again, and with the image of her I will leave this world. It will make death easier for me. At least I hope so. Because as an ordinary, simple man, I feel the same fear of the unknown that everyone feels. I don't think my fear comes from the fact that life is short. The trembling and darkness that seize hold of me tell me that I will be dead for such an extremely long time.

I hope my spirit will have wings. I can't sit motionless in the shade of a tree during all the time I will have to spend in the unknown landscape of eternity.

I think you can hear from a man's footsteps that he's in love. His feet barely touch the ground, all fear is conquered, and time is dissolved like the fog in the first light of dawn.

Maria was the best dough mixer I ever had. I asked her where she had worked before and how Dona Esmeralda had found her. But she merely laughed at me, and never did give me an answer.

To watch her work was like listening to someone sing.

When you see someone working the way she did, you start to sing yourself.

I baked the best bread of my life during those nights when Maria mixed the dough and I followed her out to the street after midnight to watch her disappear into the dark. I was already longing for the next night when she would come back. In a childish and perhaps naive way I would worry that she had vanished into the darkness, never to return. But she did come back, her dresses were always thin, and she would smile her beautiful smile when I came down from the roof.

I wish that I could have told her about Nelio. She would have changed his bandage better than I did, and maybe she also would have persuaded him that the time was right to be carried down from the roof and taken to the hospital if he wanted to live.

But I never told her anything. And I never mentioned her name to Nelio either.

Up there, beneath the stars, only he and I existed.

When I went up to him on the roof after shoving the first baking pans into the hot oven, I felt that he was lying there waiting for me. Was it still true that he was trying to get better? His wounds had darkened more, and I held my breath as I unwrapped the bandage because the stench was so awful. But could a healing process be under way that was not apparent to me? I felt his forehead. It was hot again. I diluted some of Senhora Muwulene's herbs with water, and he drank the solution but with greater effort. It occurred to me that he had never asked me what kind of herbs I was giving him. From the moment I carried him up to the roof, he never once questioned my ability to take care of him.

Or was it because he already knew, from the moment the shots were fired, that there was no saving him?

I might have wished that I had not been alone with the responsibility. It was too great for me to bear alone, and yet I had no one to share it with. It was quite simply too late.

I helped him on with a clean shirt after I had changed his bandage. Since it was so warm, I took away the blanket and folded it beneath his head as an extra pillow. He was very tired, but his eyes were strangely clear. Again I had the feeling that he could see right through me.

At those moments when he looked at me, he was a ten-year-old boy lying there, with two bullets in his body. But when the fever returned, he was transformed once more into a very old man. I thought that it was not only his consciousness that seemed able to switch unhindered between what had been and what was to come, between the spirit world and the world that we lived in together. His body could also switch between ages, between the child that he was and the old man he would never be.