Nelio was asleep.
I stood up and stretched my back, which ached. Then I left him alone with the dreams I knew nothing about.
The Third Night
That night I thought Nelio was going to die, and I would never find out why he had been shot. For long periods he was submerged in the high fever raging through his body. He raved deliriously and thrashed about on the mattress, and it was like watching someone in the last stage of fatal malaria; there was nothing more that either I or anyone else could do for him. He was going to slip away from life without ending his story.
But he fought his way through that crisis too; he was still stronger than the fever caused by his wounds, and when dawn came, his forehead felt cool and he was sleeping peacefully. He had even asked for a little bread before he went to sleep. During the day I fell asleep too. I rolled out a reed mat that I had borrowed from Senhora Muwulene when I went to get more of her herbs. I told her how things stood since I believed I could rely on her. But I didn't tell her the whole truth: either that it was Nelio, a street boy, who lay on the roof of the theatre, or that he was the one who had been shot. I simply said that someone had been wounded, someone who needed my help. She made no comment, she just mixed a new batch of herbs, crushing some tiny leaves that glowed a bright red, leaves I had never seen before. But I didn't ask her what they were. She wouldn't have told me anyway. She would have treated me with the same lofty contempt she had once shown the young police inspector when he tried to take her snakes away from her.
It was late that night when Nelio took up his story again. By this time I had told my dough mixer to go home, and everything was set for a lonely shift in the bakery; no one seemed to have any idea that my thoughts were far away from the ovens, up on the roof, where Nelio lay.
But there was one thing that had happened during the day which I realised had something to do with Nelio's gunshot wounds. Rosa, one of the enticing girls who sold the bread we baked, pointed out that a group of street kids who usually hung around the theatre and the bakery had disappeared. I went out to the street, and saw at once that it was Nelio's group that had gone. I asked one of the other boys, who for some reason was called Nose, whether he knew where they were.
'They're gone,' was all he said.
Gone. Maybe they had found a better street. With more expensive cars that would pay better if they made them dirty and then washed them clean.
I can't honestly say whether it was my curiosity or my concern for Nelio that was stronger. But as my ancestors are my witness, I hope it was my concern. That night I couldn't help asking him about what had happened. Nelio didn't seem surprised by my question. His answer was firm yet evasive.
'I haven't got as far as that yet,' he said. 'I haven't even arrived in the city yet.'
Then he looked me right in the eye, and he spoke as if he were a wise old man, not the pale and emaciated ten-year-old who was lying before me on the filthy mattress I had found one day next to a rubbish bin.
'I'm telling you my story to stay alive,' he said. 'Just as it was my life itself that was running when I fled from the bandits, now my life is contained in the words that describe everything that happened.'
I realised then that Nelio knew he was going to die. He had known it all along. He wasn't telling the story of his life to me. He was telling it to himself and to the spirits – the spirits of his ancestors, which were hovering invisibly all around him as he lay there on the roof, waiting for him to return to them and to the life that exists before and after all our lives.
I asked him nothing more. I knew he would live long enough to answer all my questions when at last, at the end of his long journey, he would come to the night when he was shot.
That night I also changed the bandage around his chest. I had bought some strips of cloth from Senhora Muwulene. To my surprise, I saw that they were pieces of a torn flag, although I couldn't say from what country. They might also have come from one of the old leftover colonial banners, maybe hidden away in some dark garret because no one knew what to do with it. She had soaked the strips of cloth in a bath of herbs and told me to wait until the breeze from the sea made the air cooler before I changed the bandage. In the flickering light of the kerosene lamp I could see that the two holes from the bullets were beginning to darken. The bullets had not gone straight through his body; there was no exit wound on his back. And there were powder burns on his shirt. Nelio must have been shot point-blank in the chest.
Nelio knew who had shot him. But that didn't necessarily mean he knew why.
Or did he? During those nights when he lay on the roof and waited for the spirits to come for him, I never once saw him upset by what had occurred. Had he been expecting it? I was burning to know the answer. But I only asked him once. Then I understood that he was telling his story the way a person lives his life. The events were not scattered about, they were happening all over again, in the same order, through his words.
One day comes before the next.
I tried to be gentle, but Nelio was in pain when I changed the sticky, stiff bandage for the strips of flag that Senhora Muwulene had dipped in the bath of red leaves. I saw the way he clenched his teeth, and once he even fainted for a few seconds when I was forced to tug on a scrap of bandage that was stuck to one of the gunshot wounds. Afterwards he lay for a long time saying nothing. The woman who reminded him of his mother stood in the darkness below the roof and pounded her pole on the corn in her mortar. I shivered at the memory of what Nelio had told me the night before. I kept asking myself: Where does the evil in human beings come from? Why does barbarism always wear a human face? That's what makes barbarism so inhuman.
That night I had a lot to do downstairs in the bakery. A religious sect that was active in the city had placed an order with Dona Esmeralda for a particular type of bread which had to be baked longer than normal. I had made it many times before, so I knew that you had to be more vigilant than usual. But at last I finished the bread for the sect. When I went back up to the roof, Nelio was awake. I gave him water. The night was exceptionally clear, the stars seemed very close. We heard the sound of drums from somewhere in the night. The woman with the corn had fallen silent. Another woman laughed loudly and passionately. Then she too was silent. Dogs howled and mated in the dark; a lorry with a coughing engine passed by on the street below.
That was when Nelio returned to the river bank, where he had sunk down to rest after his long flight from the bandits. When he continued his story his voice was different from the night before. Then it had been meditative, at times sorrowful and hard. Now there was joy in his voice because the bandits were no longer right behind him.
Across the river he caught sight of someone. At first he had thought it was an animal, maybe one of the rare white lions he had heard the old people in the village talk about, the lions that heralded great events, although no one could foretell whether the events would be good or bad. Then he saw that it wasn't an animal but a person, a person who was both small and white, a xidjana. Nelio crouched down, because he wasn't sure whether bandits could also be small and white. But the dwarf on the opposite bank had seen him and called to him in a language that was almost the same as the one he spoke.
'What's a child doing all alone by the river?' His voice was squeaky and shrill. 'What's a child doing all alone by the river when there's no village nearby? Have you lost your way?'