B007P4V3G4 EBOK (25 page)

He shivers and smiles. The car has been fitted with armoured
glass. Circumspectly, the man in off-white drives the jolting car
along the edge of the rubbish-tip tillage and stops. Only with a
tank or some such, on caterpillar tracks, might you be able to go
any further, or on tow or pushed by something similar. The strong
beam from the searchlight, operated from inside, on the roof of the
car, sweeps in all directions across the immense plain of filth. This
excites the man. It's a form of malicious pleasure, one that strikes
him as erotic: one he is entitled to. Malicious pleasure is quality
pleasure and he works hard enough for it in South America: has
been doing so for years now. It's made him grow up - and made
him important. This, too, is again a beautiful South American
country, but hard, gruesomely hard and cruel. However, one has to
adapt if one wishes to survive and amuse oneself a little. Malicious
pleasure indeed. Why not? If they're too lazy to work, they're
good enough to be used.

The man in off-white has taken good care not to come to a halt
in a pothole. Not on the edge of that rubbish tip either. No police
come here. They are powerless, for the people do not mind being
shot dead. People live so close to death here, continually ... And a
revolver and an automatic pistol make for excellent sources of
income to desperados. A comfortable old age. A kingdom. Were
he to get stranded here, no one would ever hear of him again.
'Anarchist rabble.' But then, they belong on a rubbish tip. Garbage.

It's the same as with all those other garbage tips where,
particularly at night, he has spent so much time. Dumping grounds
as far as the light - and, so he presumes, the horizon - will reach:
filth, garbage. Exciting. It continues to enchant him. Here, too, it's
busy again. Day and night, thousands are at it there. The man in
white switches off the searchlight. For a moment it is pitch black. Then his eyes have got used to the rather light night. Like a
leering cayman, the car stands on the shore's edge of the immense
sea of garbage.

The man winds up the windows tight shut against the asphyxiating stench and the dangerous gasses that develop spontaneously
deep down in that garbage and are forced up to the surface by the
pressure. But still the car slowly fills with that stench, that gas and
that heat. On the car's bodywork rattle the index-finger long,
fat, armour-plated cucarachas, the cockroaches. The tough, excretasucking, bacteria-carrying spreaders of disease that also can fly.
They wrench their way in through the holes in the bottom of the
car, next to the pedals.

The man - carefully, with an eye to the crease in his trousers -
draws up his legs on to the seat. He has brought along a hammer
for those creeps, to protect his white, bespoke, fine-meshed tropical
shoes. A hammer with a fist-size head. Such an instrument can
always come in handy in these regions, for that matter. The
creatures' wing-cases snap, hard, like mica, when he smashes them
beneath a hammer blow. The man resolves not to forget to have
the girl or the gardener clean the car on the inside as well,
tomorrow. They've been lucky with staff, as it happens. But then,
they're well looked after. At times, to everyone's satisfaction, they
are paid in kind, the gardener in jeans the man in white can no
longer wear and T-shirts with, to the gardener, foreign-language
inscriptions which he walks around in, peacock-proud. The girl
receives all kinds of garments from the woman: garden robes,
slacks, and the girl is especially pleased with the European underwear which only needs to be taken in a bit for the little, fifteenyear-old Cholo girl the man regularly relaxes with. The man thinks
it rather exciting and piquant, actually, to have the little one in his
bed in the reduced underwear of his spouse.

All of a sudden, he shivers. Like a child belonging to him, a
cucaracha has attached itself to his upper leg. With the hammer, he
shoves the creature from his leg on to the floor where he bashes it
to death. The heat and the stench are almost unbearable and the
rattling of the cucarachas on the paintwork, the floor and the
leather upholstery of the car's seats make him itch everywhere. He
takes a deodorant spray from the glove compartment. The spraying
does not help much. Many in Peru, the man knows, believe that
the enormous clouds of poison gas that form deep down in the
dumping grounds probably constitute the greatest disaster threaten ing the inhabited areas. The cities in particular, of course. Lima
most of all, the capital with a population numbering eight million,
the one to which all paupers, bereft, swarm as a last resort, the
serranos in particular, the farmers from the mountains, to pauperise
in an even shabbier fashion after having served as voting fodder.
On, towards an even quicker death, for it is said that the serranos
are not resistant to Lima's damp climate which, moreover, is
poisonous in the places where they dwell. The man in off-white
shrugs his shoulders. Stupid to come here, in that case.

If it's all actually true, that is, and not propaganda from one
group or another. You never could tell, over here. The drier,
healthily inhabitable parts of Lima, situated closely against the
surrounding mountains, are lived in by the rich. Lucratively operating gringos, extranjeros, foreigners, in the main. But, in the man's
opinion, they had tasty garbage, in any case. And were one to
make the tips disappear, something politically unwise, for the
people have a vote in Penh, then one would be 'taking the bread
from the mouths' of innumerable people, wouldn't

Like a dispersed people, thousands on the tip are busily at it,
spread in among the dirt. Silently. And seriously, as is the case
with heavy, complicated handicraft that demands attention. Here
and there stand the roofless reed huts of families who have
established themselves on the only viable bread-source: the garbage
dump. All are in search of something. Of something edible, of bits
of wood, tin or cardboard which might be employed, if not in
reinforcement, then in any case as an adornment for their hovels
on or near the tip. Here too, the man knows, no difference reigns
between race, faith, culture, man, beast, large or small. Between
male and female only just, perhaps.

Upon the approach of a number of filthy, ragged Indians or
some such, the man locks the door in a reflex, absentmindedly
pulls the handbrake on and firms up his grip around the handle of
the heavy hammer. What have we here now? He wants to watch
safely, quietly: the world belongs to us all. He smiles again and
pours himself another one. He comes across a German language
station on the radio. The Vienna Boys' Choir sings through the
stench in the darkened car and through the vapour forcing its way
in, but it does not drown out the rattle of the cucarachas. The
silent, barefoot and almost undressed Indians or whatever, lean in
their rags against the car and press their broad, mongoloid faces
against the windows. They look like grey, blind eyes, blocked up with dust, trying to discern something. The man in off-white,
inside, has moved away a bit from the door. Outside he now also
hears the squeaking of the cat-sized rats, innumerable ones which
scuttle about here. The Boys' Choir sings of skies so high, of
peace, of Walder and the hunter pacing along cheerfully, and about
the birds, so free, so free.

The rag-wearers try the doors. 'Locked,' the man says softly. He
laughs nervously and shivers. They are too frightened or too weak
or too lonely to break open the car or to smash such an armoured
glass window with the great force of iron bars. 'Not a heroic
people, no.' The men press themselves up against the windows
again. A primitive life-form, the man thinks. A barely viable variant
of shit, dung and garbage creepers and gorgers, of dumpgroundshuffling rustlers, that has raised itself up on its hind legs. The only
solution, even so, would be, never mind the politics: wire netting
round the plain and set the flame throwers on them.

The narrow, grey mouths of the life-form in the sand and dustcovered faces form the words 'limosna, patron; propina': 'alms,
please, boss; a tip'. With a heart beating more rapidly with the
excitement that has something so enchanting about it, the man
winds down the window a touch. That hurts: he has strained a
muscle 'at golf'. A narrow slit appears, no wider than that of those
tight-pinched collection boxes designed for cosily folded banknotes
the man recalls from the churches of the latitudinarian protestants
in the country of his birth; boxes with a pinched stripe of a slit
with which latitudinarian little boys also would try to indicate
something situated down there in the wife of the preacher or the
deacon.

The man in off-white forces his loose change through the slit.
Outside the car it drops into the garbage: a stream of ever
devaluing coins, greedily picked up from the filth, for the total
value of which, the man thinks to himself, one might be able,
somewhere on the opposite side of one of the oceans, to buy half a
bar of chocolate of an unknown brand, second-hand. 'And without
a wrapper,' the man mutters, smiling. 'Loose, in a strip of newspaper, should one ask for it politely.'

He has gone and sat a little closer to the window again. His
forehead rests against the glass while he watches how the soiled
life-form outside bends down laboriously in the dust, with probably
arthritic limbs, and languidly tries to push one another away from
the coins that have dropped into the waste, coins the man in off white slips into the slit above his head. 'Just like an action slotmachine,' the man says, and he shivers for a moment. 'But then in
slow-motion.' It reminds him of the train between Cuzno and
Puno. There he - and tourists too - always holds out bananas
from the window when the train stops somewhere, or biscuits,
sweets or a little coin. Men, women, children and the elderly will
then jump up high against the train together, at the goodies or the
coin. His wife has taken highly amusing photos of this.

The coins have gone and the man again slides away from the
window a little. Then the man in off-white in the posh car makes
the slit close. Slowly. In order not to anger or frighten the men.
Maybe these life-forms enjoy solidarity among one another, all of
them, there on the tip. And yonder, life-forms with more developed
muscles are crawling about, too. Ah well, it's a case of starting the
engine, accelerating and off we go. The thought of danger, whether
imagined or not, from the putrefaction of the dumping ground,
flickeringly lit by fires, stimulates him in a pleasing manner: things
are getting light in his underbelly. They stand there, impotent,
after all. 'Impotent and indolent,' the man says quietly. 'He who
does not work, neither shall he eat. Thus spake the Almighty. As
revealed to us by a reliable Spokesman.'

The life-form outside the car presses itself up against the
windows again. 'Limosna, patron, propina.' The man laughs while he
pants slightly. This makes a curious, squeaking sound. Then, in the
dark, slowly and emphatically, he gravely shakes his head at the
men. Likewise, too, he wags the raised index-finger, slowly and in
a contrary direction to the head. 'Party's over.' He is reminded of
his father for a moment, dead immediately after he had moved
with Mother into the house in the suburbs Mother had lived her
whole life towards achieving. Fifty-eight: still young. Worn-out,
the doctor had said, and he had muttered something that he ought
not to have moved, not from his house on a canal. But had he
lived, he would have been the age of these men outside. A strange
jump in his thinking suddenly. Father would have been proud.
Proud of his son. Waste

The man in off-white shakes his head. The men retreat, warily it
seems, and their silhouettes dissolve in the darkness of the plain of
filth. Now and then they are lit up a moment when something
explodes spontaneously in the rubbish and, just like New Year's
Eve and its fireworks, is slung up high into the air: thousands of
sparks falling back in a languid arch to earth's reality: the dumping ground, the tip. Dogs bolt, howling, or are those people there, on
all fours? Spread across the entire plain, a province, fires bum,
giving off greasy smoke.

The people busy here on the tip, the man knows, are not the
first in the chain of filth-sifters. The domestic waste daily filling the
streets in open boxes, tins, bags and oil drums, first gets sifted by
the ones operating the streets, before the waste is collected by the
'City Cleansing Department', frequently in open trucks which the
waste is then dumped into, loose, thus forming little mobile
garbage tips in which shaking people scrabble about. The garbage
trucks, in the end, dump the waste of the metropolis, having been
sorted by staff, on to ever fresh dumping grounds around which
new shanty towns then arise, for Lima continues to grow explosively. Lima, with paupers on the one side and wealthy entrepreneurs on the other. With precious waste,' the man in off-white
mumbles. 'And that way everyone is happy and satisfied as long as
the life-form casts its vote for the right man. How could it ever be
capable of casting its vote independently? The vote must be
prescribed, firmly.'

Intently, he peers at the silhouettes on the tip. Curious people,
he thinks. But they make beautiful music. The Serranos in particular,
the mountain Indians. So beautifully tragic. He is in regular contact
with relatives and friends on the other side of the Atlantic, where
- in cassette cases in the cassette caddy with the tuner and the
tapedeck on top - the professionally performed music of the South
American underworld piles up relentlessly; mountains like spermiform, nourishing-skincream-packaged cries of despair of the Criollos
and the Serranos, the Cholos, the Indians. Of the Indians, especially
the Huanas and the Huaylas, whose cries in primal form once
resounded in the thin air between the slopes and precipitous rock
faces of the high Andes and which now, distorted in deepest
despair, are being absorbed into the rubble and the reeking garbage
of the dumping ground, with the shrill, high-wailing, shouted
singing of the women. At times, many will sing along, with broken
voices, in those unbelievably high voices of the women who once
lived in the healthy air of the Cordilleros de los Andes - a distressed,
screeching a-cappella choir of lost, dying garbage grubbers, rooting
in the poison gas, the heat: at their wits' end and capable of
anything. 'Beast-man', as all are called in the healthily inhabitable
parts of Lima, all who do not live up against the mountains where
breathing is done freely; and they keep themselves firmly apart and fear, one day, a 'unification in attack' by beast-man. One
knows the army to be on one's side, however.