The revulsion and confusion Katulo had felt returned to him. He had run away. He had hidden in the forest, wept alone, and then returned home before nightfall. He did not mention what he had seen. When he saw his father again, he hugged him and pretended he had not been there. He had never mentioned that day. He had decided never to let that memory control him but now he had to let it. It suffused him. But the memory was not enough. Katulo had never killed so the land could not Wake unless…
His fingers tensed against the machete’s hilt and with an abrupt swipe he brought the blade down against Eyo’s neck. He saw shock in Eyo’s eyes for a split-second and then the blade crushed his apprentice’s throat. Blood sprayed and dripped down the blade onto his clenched fingers.
All around Katulo, people gasped. Suddenly, smoky figures had appeared in their midst. Most Wakings called a few. Forty or fifty spirits was the most Katulo had seen at a Waking. But the streets of Bujumbura were deeply scarred. Wounds that had been closed and ignored for seven decades ripped open. Screams deafened Katulo and all around, echoes of viciousness were reanimated. Hundreds of spectral men appeared in the streets strangling each other, lashing bare backs with vine whips, stabbing, shooting and rejoicing. Near one wall, a vague figure lifted a baby and smashed its head against the wall. On the floor in front of some Azamé villagers, a man in a soldier’s uniform raped a woman with the sharp end of a kitchen knife. The living watched with horror.
The Waking was not restricted to the streets. Throughout Bujumbura men and women saw monstrosities. In a bar, laughing patrons were choked into silence when six figures materialised in front of them. Five of them stood around a single man and were beating him mercilessly. In one house, a couple’s conversation was interrupted by the appearance of a man kneeling on the floor with his face in a mound of dung. Behind him, another man was laughing and pressing a gun against his temple. There was a loud bang and the kneeling man died.
There was blood, so much blood. The living could smell it so strongly they could taste it. They felt the rage and desperate lust for revenge consuming the awakened spirits. Some of the living ran to escape the horrors they were witnessing, but in every street they ran into there was more. Old pain and old death celebrated at being rekindled. Forgotten cruelty ran rampant.
Katulo stood looking, not at the spirits around him, but at the broken body of Eyo. The corpse lay in front of him, eyes and mouth still open. His neck bone was exposed. Somewhere in Bujumbura, a group of terrified people watched an echo of Katulo’s father murder fifteen schoolchildren. Katulo did not care about that memory any more. What he had done was the only thing in his mind. His body quaked and his voice cracked. He howled like an infant, hating every person in Bujumbura, but none as much as he loathed himself. The rampage of the spirits continued for an hour. Katulo was blind to them. When they finally disappeared, he, too, was gone.
10
The murderers of Chama were never punished. There was no trial, but there was also no slaughter. The Azamé villagers returned home.
Katulo was never seen again. Some said he had died but no body was found. At marriages, harvests and initiations there was no longer a Waking ceremony. Waking was now a part of legend like rainmaking and giants.
If Katulo had lived on, it cannot have been for long. There were occasional rumours that he had been seen walking alone in the streets or by a river in ragged clothes. One of his ex-apprentices said that he had seen Katulo one morning, bent over the place where Eyo had died. He could not be sure. The old man he had seen rushed off. Where the old man had been, between gravel and weeds, a slender white sapling had been planted.
The First Peruvian in Space
Daniel Salvo
Translated by Jose B. Adolph
Anatolio Pomahuanca had reason enough to hate whites. Hundreds of years ago they had invaded and conquered his world and reduced his forebears to the sad condition of serfs or second-class citizens. There were historic changes like independence wars, rebellions and revolutions. But, be it as it may, whites were still those who ruled and decided everything in Peru and throughout the rest of the world. “Now we live in a democracy, we have made great progress in human rights and integration,” they proclaimed. Anatolio smiled crookedly every time he heard such used-up and false sayings. Weren’t the president, the military and the priests white? Had anyone ever seen a native holding a decisive post? If he could, he would have spat on the floor. All whites were shit.
He couldn’t spit because of where he was: a metallic, softly illuminated cubicle full of controls and screens. It was the command post of an orbiting spaceship. Like all spaceships, it belonged to the United Nations. Its mission was routine—to measure solar winds—but this time it had an additional element: Anatolio Pomahuanca, the first Peruvian in space.
Everybody considered his appointment to the ship’s crew an honour; although he had no illusions. His tasks as maintenance engineer were like those of an attendant at a gas station. The ship, built with the best of the white’s technology, was an enormous automatic mechanism destined to follow a precisely sequenced program of instructions. In truth, he and the rest of the crew were mere passengers. The navigation and registry instruments would do it all.
He yawned. His brief turn at the command bridge would soon be over. He had completed his assigned tasks. To check a screen, to verify a measurement, report some co-ordinates…all activities that led nowhere. They have to keep me busy somehow, he thought bitterly.
The captain of the ship and chief of the mission entered the cabin. He smiled winningly at Anatolio, who nodded. An indifferent expression on his face, he rose.
“Everything okay, Pomahuanca?” asked the captain in perfect Spanish.
Anatolio hated whites in general, but more so those who tried to win his confidence or his friendship. It was always easy to notice their intentions, the false mask of respect hiding the contempt whites felt or, even worse, their pity for Anatolio’s race.
“Everything in order, captain.”
“Up to now, you’ve done very well. It’s a great opportunity for a young engineer to be a part of this mission. A lot of Peruvians would like to be in your place.”
“Oh, yeah?” Anatolio knew the whites were incapable of catching the contempt in his words. He knew the whites really considered them an inferior race, a sort of animal that, in the past, was exploited without pity but now had to be better treated. But they would never accept them as equals.
“Of course, Pomahuanca. You have shown the ability of the true Peruvian man to take part in the exploration of space, to go upwards and always upwards, as Jorge Chávez, your aviation pioneer, said.”