Mouthful of Birds(29)
“You must know someone . . . some kind of leader. Do you know whom I should talk to?”
“Talk?” said the woman in a dry, tired voice.
Gismondi didn’t answer; he was afraid of finding that she hadn’t uttered a word at all and that the noontime heat was affecting him. The woman seemed to lose interest, and she looked away from him.
Gismondi thought he could estimate the population and complete the record on his own, since no agent would ever bother to check the information in a place like this. But in any case, the car wouldn’t be back for him until the next day. He went over to the children, thinking he could at least make them talk. The dog, whose snout was resting on one boy’s leg, didn’t even move. Gismondi greeted them. Only one of the boys, slowly, looked him in the eyes and made a minimal gesture with his lips, almost a smile. His feet hung from the cot barefoot but clean, as if they had never touched the ground. Gismondi knelt down and brushed one of the feet with his hand. He didn’t know what led him to do this; maybe he just needed to know that the boy was capable of movement, that he was alive. The boy looked at him fearfully. Gismondi stood up. His eyes as he looked at the boy also held fear. But it wasn’t that face he was afraid of, or the silence, or the lethargy. Then he saw the dust, on the shelves and the empty countertops. He went over to the only container in sight, picked it up, and emptied its contents on the table. He stood there absorbed for some seconds. Then he traced a finger through the spilled powder without understanding what he was seeing. He went through the drawers and the shelves. Opened cans, boxes, bottles. There was nothing. Nothing to eat or to drink. No blankets, no tools, no clothes. Just some useless utensils. Vestiges of jars that had once held something. Without looking at the boys, as if he were talking only to himself, he asked them if they were hungry. No one answered.
“Thirsty?” A shiver made his voice tremble.
They listened to him, although they didn’t seem to understand. Gismondi left the room, returned to the street, ran to the bags, and carried them back. He stood in front of the boys, agitated. He emptied the goods onto the table. He picked up a bag at random, opened it with his teeth, and poured a handful of sugar into his palm. The boys watched as he knelt down beside them and offered them something from his hand. But neither of them seemed to understand. It was then that Gismondi felt a presence, and perceived, perhaps for the first time in the valley, the breeze of a movement. He stood up and looked to either side. A bit of sugar spilled to the ground. The younger woman was standing up now and watching him from the threshold. It wasn’t the same expression she’d had up to then—she wasn’t looking at a scene or the landscape, she was looking at him.
“What do you want?” she said.
It was, like all the others, a somnolent voice, but it was charged with an authority that surprised him. One of the boys had left the bed and was now looking at the hand overflowing with sugar. The woman looked at the packages spread out on the table and she turned toward him furiously. The dog stood up and restlessly circled the table. Men and women began to look in through the doors and windows, heads appearing behind heads, a growing crowd. Other dogs approached. Gismondi looked at the sugar in his hand. This time, finally, everyone focused their attention on him. He barely saw the boy, his little hand, the wet fingers caressing the sugar, the fascinated eyes, a certain movement of the lips that seemed to remember the sweet taste. When the boy brought his fingers to his mouth, everyone froze. Gismondi retracted his hand. He saw in those who were looking at him an expression that at first he couldn’t understand. Then he felt the sharp wound, deep in his stomach. He fell to his knees. He had let the sugar spill, and the memory of hunger spread over the valley with the rage of pestilence.
HEADS AGAINST CONCRETE
If you pound a person’s head against concrete—even if you’re doing it only so they’ll come to their senses—you will very likely end up hurting them. This is something my mother explained to me early on, the day I pounded Fredo’s head on the asphalt of the school playground.
I wasn’t a violent kid, I want to make that clear. I spoke only if it was strictly necessary, and I didn’t have friends or enemies to fight with. The only thing I did at recess was wait in the classroom, alone and far from the noise of the playground, until class started again. While I waited, I drew. It passed the time, and distanced me from the world. I drew locked boxes and fish shaped like puzzle pieces that fit together.
Fredo was the captain of the football team, and in our grade, things happened and were done the way he wanted. He did what he wanted with other people. Like that time Cecilia’s uncle died and he made her think he’d done it. That’s not good, but I don’t stick my nose in other people’s problems. One day during recess, Fredo came into the classroom, grabbed the drawing I was working on, and ran out. The drawing was of two puzzle-piece fish, each one in a box, and the two boxes inside another box. I got that thing about the boxes inside of more boxes from a painter Mom likes, and all the teachers loved it and said it was “a very poetic device.” On the playground, Fredo was tearing the drawing in half, and the halves in half, and so on, while his friends stood around him and laughed. When he couldn’t tear the pieces any smaller, he threw them all into the air. The first thing I felt was sadness. That’s not a figure of speech—I always think about how I feel in the moment that things are happening to me, and maybe that’s what makes me slower or more distracted than everyone else. Next, my body hardened, I closed my fists and felt my temperature rise. I lunged at Fredo, pulled him down to the ground with me, and grabbed him by the hair. And that was when I started to pound his head against the ground. Our teacher shouted, and another teacher from a different class came to separate us, and nothing else happens in this Fredo story. I’m telling it because I guess that was the start of everything, and when Mom wants to know something she always says, “From the beginning, from the beginning, please!”