Henning Mankell - Chronicler Of The Winds

'A little boy is going to die soon,' Nelio said. 'His soul could protect you.'

'My house is full of all the dead souls that people who have asked me for money have given to me as guarantees which I can redeem when they die. But what good have they done me?'

Nelio left Suleiman's house. The paths he had taken during the past few days had not led him any closer to his goal.

That evening Nelio gathered the group. He waited until Alfredo Bomba was asleep before he began to speak.

'Abu Cassamo couldn't find the place that Alfredo Bomba's mother talked about. Since Abu Cassamo never has customers who want to be photographed, he has been able to devote all his time to studying the maps. So it won't do any good to ask anyone else. And we don't have time to go searching for Alfredo Bomba's mother; no one even knows if she's still alive. We haven't managed to get hold of any money, either.'

He looked around. They all avoided meeting his gaze since they had nothing to say.

It was Tristeza who broke the silence. 'Maybe it would be better if we gave him my trainers after all. Now that he's so sick, maybe his feet have grown bigger.'

'Why would that happen?' asked Nelio.

'Sick people swell up,' muttered Tristeza. 'The blood hides from death in their feet.'

Nelio pondered Tristeza's strange remark for a while. He had learned that Tristeza, even though he thought slowly, sometimes could say things that were worth considering.

'Alfredo Bomba doesn't want trainers,' he said. 'He wants to visit the island where people lose their fear. Our first problem is to find out where it is. Our second problem is that even if we find it, we have no money to pay for the journey.'

'There's no such island,' Nascimento said.

'Maybe not,' said Nelio thoughtfully. 'But that's a only minor problem.'

They were looking at him with surprise. What did he mean? Nelio raised his hand dismissively. Right now he didn't want to hear any more questions. Somewhere inside his head a plan was being hatched. He had discovered an unknown path in his mind which he was now following, and it would give him the answer to how they were going to grant Alfredo Bomba's wish. Nelio stood up and walked past the petrol station out to the street, and crossed to the other side where Abu Cassamo's photographic shop stood, next to the bakery and the theatre. One of Dona Esmeralda's performances had just finished. The audience was pouring out and heading off in the dark in various directions. The watchmen were starting to lock the doors, and the lights outside the entrance were extinguished, one by one. Nelio stood and watched all this at the same time as he followed a winding path between dense brambles in his head. He was seeing with his gaze turned inward, and he now knew how they would make the journey to the island in an unknown part of the world, or maybe in a world that didn't actually exist.

He went back to the waiting boys. Alfredo Bomba was asleep.

'I've found the island,' he said. 'It's not on the maps that Abu Cassamo tried in vain to read. And it's so close that we don't need any money to make the journey.'

'Where?' asked Nascimento.

'Right across the street,' Nelio said. 'It's right where Dona Esmeralda has her theatre. At night the theatre is empty. The stage is deserted, because the actors are asleep. What doesn't exist you have to create yourself. Even an island that no one can find can be created. Even a dream can be plucked out of your head and shaped for a purpose. Tonight when the watchmen outside the theatre are asleep, we'll climb in through one of the broken windows in the back, where Dona Esmeralda has her wardrobe room. Then we'll turn on the lights on the stage and start rehearsing a play about Alfredo Bomba's visit to the island that his mother told him about.'

'None of us knows how to do that,' Mandioca said.

'Then we'll have to learn,' Nelio told him.

'Some of the watchmen outside the theatre have guns,' said Nascimento.

'We'll be quiet,' Nelio said.

That same night, just after midnight, when the watchmen had fallen asleep outside the theatres entrance, they sneaked round to the back and climbed in through the broken window of the wardrobe room. They had assigned Tristeza to stay with Alfredo Bomba, since he would never be able to learn to say lines or to move in a disciplined way onstage. They found their way by striking matches, and then turned on the glaring spotlights that hung above the stage.

The stage was deserted.

They stood below in the house. At that moment Nelio thought that the stage looked like a mouth, an open mouth waiting for the food they would give it.

Then they began creating the island.

Nelio smiled his weary smile in the dawn light. In the distance, on the other side of the river, a thunderstorm was brewing. I realised that we were now approaching the end, both of his story and of his life,

I said nothing. I just looked at him and smiled. What was there to say, after all?

Then I got up and went down the stairs to the bakery.

On the last day of Nelio's life the sun was quite close to my spirit. When I emptied my lungs the air would flare up and fall like black-singed ashes to the cobblestones in the street. I have never – either before or afterwards – experienced heat as I did on that day. There was no relief anywhere; even the wind which crept in over the city from the sea seemed to be panting with exhaustion. I wandered restlessly through the streets, squeezed into the parched shadows where people were vainly seeking respite, and fought off a growing dizziness that was constantly threatening to topple me to the ground. I felt as if I no longer knew who I was, as if everything that had happened to me was a mistake that no one was responsible for or even cared about. For the first time I saw the world as it was, the world that Nelio could see through even before he was grown up.

What was it I thought I saw? The rusted engine in a burned-out tractor spoke to me like a scornful poem about a world that was on the verge of collapsing before my eyes. I saw a boy, a street kid, who was furiously lashing at the sand as if punishing the earth for his own misery. A solitary vulture sailed soundlessly overhead. It floated on the whirling updraughts, oblivious to the rays of the sun that were boring into its plumage. The bird's shadow passed over my head like an iron weight that was pressing me down to the ground. I saw an old black man standing naked at a water pump, washing himself. In spite of the heat he was rubbing his body vigorously, as if he were tearing off an old, worn-out skin. On that day, beneath the unrelenting sun, I discovered the true face of the city. I saw how the poor were forced to eat their lives raw. There was never any time for them to prepare their days – not those who were constantly forced to fight on the outermost bastions of survival. I looked at this temple of the absurd, which was the city and maybe also the world, and it resembled what I saw all around me. I was standing in the centre of the dark cathedral of powerlessness. The walls were slowly toppling to the ground, stirring up heavy layers of dust; the stained-glass windows had vanished long ago. I looked around and every single person was poor. The others, the rich people, stayed away from the streets, hiding in their walled bunkers, where the air was always kept cool by whining machines. The world was no longer round; it had gone back to being flat, and the city lay at the edge. Some day, when the torrential rains tore the houses from the slopes once again, the buildings would not merely slide down into the river – they would be tossed over the outermost edge, where no bottom awaited.

On that day the city seemed to have succumbed to an invasion, not of grasshoppers but of revivalists. Everywhere, perched on walls, boxes, pallets and rubbish bins, they were luring people over with their sobbing and plaintive voices, their sweaty faces and their pleading hands. Crowds gathered around them, swaying their bodies, shutting their eyes and thinking that everything would be different when they opened their eyes again. I saw people fall to the ground in convulsions, others crawl away like beaten dogs, and some who rejoiced – although the rest of us did not know why. I, who had always pictured the end of the world being played out against a backdrop of rain, racing black clouds, earthquakes and thousands of lightning bolts, started to believe that I might have been mistaken. The world was going to end in scorching sunlight. It seemed to me that all of our ancestors had gathered – there must have been millions of them – and that they had had enough of all the torments that the living were inflicting on each other. In the general apocalypse we would be united in the next world. The streets along which I was now walking would finally be only a memory in the minds of those who never quite learned to forget.