Henning Mankell - Chronicler Of The Winds

That's the way the world is, Nelio thought as Manuel Oliveira greeted the morning, waking him with his demented laughter outside the horse. People no longer build houses, they build hiding places.

Deolinda was gone. Violent storms swept in over the city. It rained steadily for eleven days and nights, and the poorly erected shacks perched along the slopes above the estuary were washed away, and the sharks tugged and tore at the dead bodies all the way to the beach. No one had ever seen anything like it, not even people who were so old it was questionable whether they were alive at all. It was a time of omens. The bandits had now come so close to the city that they sometimes broke into houses and burned and killed in the nearest suburbs. Nelio sometimes thought that if he died inside the horse's belly, his life would have been incomprehensible. How could he explain to his ancestors, when he met them, that he who had been born of good people in a village that was not a hiding place but a home where people lived, had in the end stopped breathing inside the belly of an equestrian statue hidden away in a forgotten plaza in the big city? They would think he was lying, that he was trying to deceive them, and they would chase him away; they would chase him back to life again, and there would be the bandits, waiting for him with their knives and their rifles and their unquenchable lust for killing anything alive and laying waste to the earth.

Often he looked at his hands, or looked at his reflection in the piece of a mirror that Pecado used to start fires. He searched for signs that he had already started to age. It was plain to him that a ten-year-old who had so many thoughts would grow old very quickly. He searched for wrinkles in his face, the first grey hairs, a sudden weakness or trembling in his legs. He was often struck by great fear that one morning he would wake up as a dazed old man with no teeth, who couldn't remember his own name, no matter how hard he tried. His thoughts were like a terrible illness he carried within him, which might break out when he was least expecting it.

All this time it was the group that kept him alive. In their daily struggle to survive, he could find moments when his thoughts stopped pursuing him.

But the whole time he had a premonition that something was about to come to an end. Each morning he woke up with a feeling that something was going to happen and he should already be afraid of it.

The storms passed. The rain stopped, and the muddy streets began to dry out. The weather turned hot again. Each day they would seek out the shady plazas to take a siesta.

That was when Nelio discovered that something was wrong with Alfredo Bomba. When the siesta was over he always wanted to keep on sleeping. Nelio asked him if he was feeling all right. He complained that he was always tired, as if sleep were draining him of all his strength.

'Are you in pain?'

'A little,' replied Alfredo Bomba.

'Where?'

Alfredo pointed to one side of his belly.

'Stomach ache,' Nelio reassured him. 'It'll pass.'

Alfredo Bomba nodded. 'It only hurts a little.'

After a few days Nelio knew that Alfredo Bomba did not have a stomach ache. He was running a fever, he didn't want to eat and he was very pale.

'We have to get a pushchair or a wheelbarrow,' Nelio told the others. Alfredo Bomba is sick. We have to take him to the hospital.'

'We can borrow a xuva shita duma outside the marketplace,' said Pecado. 'But they'll want to be paid.'

'They'll get their money,' Nelio said. 'Give me whatever you have.'

A heap of crumpled thousand-escudo notes accumulated at his feet.

'That should be enough,' Nelio decided. 'Mandioca and Pecado will go and get the cart. But don't stand around talking to everybody you know.'

They took Alfredo Bomba to the hospital in a ragged procession. Many who saw them thought the pale boy in the cart was already dead. They would kneel down, make the sign of the cross, or turn away. When the boys reached the hospital, they carried Alfredo to the emergency room, which was full of sick and injured people.

'You'd better wait outside and watch the cart,' Nelio told Nascimento. 'Otherwise somebody might steal it.'

'It smells bad in here,' Nascimento said.

'Sick people never smell good. Now go! And don't fall asleep!'

Pale and in pain, Alfredo Bomba sat in a corner. An irritable nurse came over and asked him what was wrong.

'He's sick,' Nelio said. 'You're the ones who have to tell us what's wrong with him.'

Several hours passed before anyone else took an interest in Alfredo Bomba. Nelio had kept Pecado with him to help and then sent the others off in search of food.

It was evening when two nurses wheeled in a stretcher and lifted Alfredo Bomba on to it.

'Does he have any family?' one of the nurses asked.

'He has me,' Nelio said. 'He doesn't need anyone else.'

'Are you his brother?'

'I'm his brother and his father and his uncle and his cousin.'

'What's his name?'

Alfredo Bomba.'

'Bomba isn't a real name, is it?'

'Then he has a name that isn't real. But he has pain in his stomach. And the pain is real.'

They wheeled the stretcher into an examining room that was full to overflowing with people whimpering and moaning. The smell of sweat and filth was overpowering. Nelio swatted away a cockroach that was groping its feelers over Alfredo Bomba's sweaty face.

A doctor who was tall and fat came into the room. He stopped at the stretcher and looked down at Alfredo. 'You're having stomach pains?' he asked brusquely.

'He's very sick,' Nelio said.

The doctor muttered something inaudible and then pulled up Alfredo Bomba's filthy shirt and began pressing on his stomach. Another doctor passing by stopped at the stretcher. They talked to each other, but Nelio didn't understand what they said. The other doctor began pressing on Alfredo Bomba's stomach too.

'Why are they pressing so hard?' groaned Alfredo Bomba.

'Doctors press hard so that their fingers can speak to the sickness inside.'

'We should have gone to a curandeiro,' Alfredo Bomba said. 'It hurts so much.'

The two doctors stopped pressing.

'He'll have to stay here,' said the fat doctor. His voice was now much less brusque.

'What's wrong with him?' asked Nelio.

'That's what we have to find out,' replied the doctor.

'Maybe he has worms,' suggested Nelio.

'I'm sure he does,' the doctor said. 'But this is something else.'

That night Alfredo Bomba slept in a hospital bed that he shared with another patient. Nelio sent the others off with the cart and then lay down under Alfredo's bed. The next day they took blood samples from Alfredo Bomba. His arms were so thin that the person drawing the blood could hardly find a vein. The following day they took more blood.

Then nothing happened. After three days had passed Nelio started to think that the doctors had forgotten about Alfredo Bomba, but the next morning a nurse came to get Nelio. He followed her through the corridors, which were so crowded with sick people lying on the floor everywhere that they could hardly make their way through. She showed Nelio to a room where a piece of cardboard was tacked up over a broken window. Behind a desk sat the fat doctor who was the first to press on Alfredo Bomba's stomach.

'Doesn't this boy have any parents?' he asked, and Nelio noticed that he sounded terribly tired.

'He only has me. He lives on the street.'

The doctor nodded slowly. 'Then you're the one I have to talk to,' he said. He stretched out his hand and said that his name was Anselmo.

'Alfredo Bomba is very sick,' Anselmo said. 'He's going to die soon.'

'I don't want that to happen,' Nelio said. 'I can get money for all the medicine he needs.'