Captains of the Sands (5 page)

Legless came over to work out a detail of the hat business and since he’d seen him praying had a wisecrack all ready, a wisecrack that made him laugh just thinking about it and which would upset Lollipop completely, but when he got close and saw Lollipop praying, his hands uplifted, his eyes fixed nobody knew where, his face open in ecstasy (it was as if he were clothed in happiness), he stopped, the mocking laugh disappeared from his lips, and he stood looking at him half with fear, possessed by a feeling that had a touch of envy and a touch of despair in it.

Legless was stock still, looking. Lollipop didn’t move. Only his lips showed a slow movement. Legless was in the habit of making fun of him, as of all the others in the group, even Professor, whom he liked, even Pedro Bala, whom he respected. As soon as anyone joined the Captains of the Sands he formed a bad opinion of Legless. Because he would immediately give him a nickname, laugh at some gesture of the newcomer, some phrase. He ridiculed everything, he was one of those who brawled the most. He even had a reputation for being mean. Once he did some terribly cruel things to a cat that had come into the warehouse. And one day he’d cut a waiter in a restaurant with a switchblade just to steal a roast chicken. One day, when he had an abscess on his leg, he coldly scraped it with a knife and in view of everybody squeezed it, laughing. Many in the gang didn’t like him but those who looked the other way and became his friends said he was “a good egg.” Deep down in his heart he was sorry for the bad luck they all had. And laughing and ridiculing was the way he ran away from his own bad luck. He was like a remedy. He stood still, watching
Lollipop as he concentrated on his prayers. On the face of the praying boy an exaltation could be seen, something that Legless thought was joy or happiness at first. But he looked closely at the other’s face and saw that it was an expression he couldn’t define. And he thought, contracting his little face, that maybe that’s why he’d never thought about praying, turning toward the heaven that Father José Pedro spoke about so much when he came to see them. What he wanted was happiness, joy, fleeing from all the misery that surrounded and smothered them. There was, it’s true, the wide freedom of the streets. But there was also the loss of all love, the lack of any kind words. Lollipop was seeking that in heaven, in the pictures of saints, in the withered flowers he brought for Our Lady of the Seven Sorrows the way a romantic lover in chic neighborhoods brings a proposal of marriage to the one he loves. But Legless didn’t see how that could be enough. He wanted something immediate, something that would make his face smiling and gay, that would free him from the need to laugh at everybody and everything. That would also free him from the anguish, that urge to weep that came over him on winter nights. He didn’t want what Lollipop had: a face full of exaltation. He wanted joy, a hand that would caress him lovingly, someone, who with a lot of love, could make him forget his physical defect and the many years (maybe they’d only been months or weeks, but for him they would always be long years) he had lived alone on the streets of the city, antagonized by the men who passed, shoved by guards, beaten up by older urchins. He’d never had a family. He’d lived in the house of a baker whom he called “my godfather” and who beat him. He ran away as soon as he was able to understand that running away would set him free. He went hungry, one day he was arrested. He wants loving, a hand that will pass over his eyes and make him be able to forget that night in jail when drunken policemen made him run around a holding room on his lame leg. In each corner there was one with a long piece of rubber hose. The marks left on his back had disappeared. But inside him the pain of that hour had never gone. He’d run around the room like an animal pursued by other stronger ones. His lame leg refused to help him.
And the rubber hose slapped on his back when fatigue made him stop. At first he wept a lot, then, he doesn’t know why, the tears dried up. After a time he couldn’t take any more, fell to the floor. He was bleeding and even today he can still hear the policemen laughing and how that fat man in a gray vest and smoking a cigar laughed. Then he found the Captains of the Sands (it was the Professor who brought him, they’d made friends on a park bench) and he stayed with them. It didn’t take him long to make his mark because he, better than anyone, knew how to put on great pain and in that way trick ladies whose houses would be visited later by the gang, who already knew all the places where there were objects of value and all the habits of the house. And Legless had great satisfaction when he thought about how those ladies who had taken him for a poor orphan were cursing him. That was how he got his revenge, because his heart was full of hate. In a confused way he wanted to have a bomb (like one of those in a certain story the Professor told) that would wipe out the whole city and blow everybody into the air. In that way he would be happy. Maybe he would be too if he saw someone, possibly a woman with gray hair and soft hands, who would hug him against her breast, would stroke his face and make him sleep a good sleep, a sleep that wouldn’t be full of dreams of that night in jail. He would be happy that way, there wouldn’t be any more hate in his heart. And he wouldn’t have any more disdain, envy, or hatred for Lollipop, who with his hands raised and his eyes staring, flees his world of suffering for a world he learned about talking to Father José Pedro.

A sound of conversation draws closer. A group of four is coming into the silence that now reigns in the warehouse night. Legless shakes himself, laughs behind the back of Lollipop who goes on praying. He shrugs his shoulders, decides to leave the working out of details of the theft of the hats for tomorrow morning. And since he’s afraid of sleep, he goes over to greet the group coming in, asking for a cigarette, joking about the adventures with women the four are telling about:

“A bunch of squirts like you? Who’s going to believe that you’re
capable of mounting a woman? It must have been some faggot dressed up as a girl.”

The others are annoyed:

“You like to mess around too. If you want to, all you’ve got to do is come with us tomorrow. That way you can get to know the broad, she’s stacked.”

Legless laughs sardonically:

“I don’t like fairies.”

And he goes off walking through the warehouse.

Cat still hasn’t gone to sleep. He always goes out after eleven o’clock. He’s the dandy of the group. When he arrived, pale and pink, Good-Life tried to get him. But way back then Cat already had an unbelievable agility and hadn’t come as Good-Life had thought from a family home. He came from the midst of the Street Indians, children who live under the bridges in Aracaju. He’d made the trip on the tail-end of a train. He was quite familiar with the life of abandoned children. And he was over thirteen already. So he knew right off the motives of Good-Life, a stocky, ugly mulatto, why he treated him so nicely. He offered him cigarettes and gave him part of his dinner and ran through the city with him. After they’d snatched a pair of new shoes displayed by the door of a shop on the Baixa dos Sapateiros together, Good-Life had said:

“Let me have them, I know where we can sell them.”

Cat looked at his own dusty shoes:

“I was thinking of using them myself. I need a pair…”

“You with such a good pair on you…?” Good-Life was surprised. He rarely wore shoes and was barefoot at the time.

“I’ll pay you your share. How much do you think it is?”

Good-Life looked at him. Cat was wearing a necktie, a patched jacket, and amazingly was wearing socks:

“You really are a dude, aren’t you?” He smiled.

“I wasn’t born for this life. I was born for the big world,” Cat said, repeating a phrase he’d heard from a traveling salesman once in a bar in Aracaju.

Good-Life found him decidedly handsome. Cat had a petulant air and yet there wasn’t any effeminate beauty, he was
pleasing to Good-Life, who, besides everything else, hadn’t had much luck with women, because he looked much younger than the thirteen years he was, short and squat. Cat was tall and on his fourteen-year-old lips the fuzz of a mustache he was cultivating was beginning to appear. Good-Life loved him at the start, because he said with certainty:

“You keep them…I’ll give you my share.”

“O.K. I owe you.”

Good-Life tried to take advantage of the other’s thanks in order to begin his conquest. And he ran his hand down Cat’s back, who slipped away with just a body movement. Cat laughed to himself and didn’t say anything. Good-Life thought he shouldn’t insist because he might scare the boy. He knew nothing about Cat and couldn’t imagine that the latter was on to his game. They walked together for part of the night, looking at the city lights (Cat was amazed), and around eleven o’clock they went to the warehouse. Good-Life showed Cat to Pedro and then took him to the place where he slept:

“I’ve got a sheet here. It’s big enough for two.”

Cat lay down. Good-Life stretched out next to him. When he thought the other one was asleep he embraced him with his hand and with the other began to pull down his pants slowly. In a minute Cat was on his feet:

“You’re fooling yourself, mulatto. I’m a man.”

But Good-Life no longer saw anything, he only saw his desire, the urge he had for Cat’s white body, of rolling his head in Cat’s dark hair, of feeling the firm flesh of Cat’s thighs. And he leaped onto him with the intention of knocking him down and raping him. But Cat moved his body out of the way, stuck out his leg, Good-Life fell on his face. A group had already formed around them. Cat said:

“He thought I was queer. Do your dirty things to yourself.”

He took off with Good-Life’s sheet for another corner and went to sleep. They were enemies for a long time but finally became friends again and now when Cat is tired of a little chippy he gives her to Good-Life.

One night Cat was going through the red-light district, his hair all shiny with cheap grease, a necktie on, whistling as if
he were one of those city hoodlums. The women looked at him and laughed:

“Look at that spring chicken…I wonder what he wants around here?”

Cat answered with smiles and kept on his way. He was waiting for one of them to call him and make love to him. But he didn’t want to pay for it, not just because the coins he had wouldn’t add up to fifteen hundred
milreis
, but because the Captains of the Sands didn’t like to pay women. They had little black girls of sixteen to fall down with on the sand.

The women were doubtless looking at his boyish figure. They found him handsome in his vice-ridden boyhood and would have liked to have made love to him. But they didn’t call to him because it was time for waiting for the men who paid and they had to think about their rent and their next day’s meal. They contented themselves with laughing and making jokes. They knew that out of that would come one of those swindlers who take over a woman’s life, take her money, beat her, but give her a lot of loving too. A lot of them would have liked to be the first woman for such a young hoodlum. But it was ten o’clock, time for the paying customers. And Cat went uselessly back and forth. That was when he saw Dalva, who was coming down the street wrapped up in a fur coat in spite of the summer night. She went by him almost without looking. She was a woman of some thirty-five years, strong body, a face full of sensuality. Cat wanted her at once. He was after her. He watched when she went into a house and didn’t come out. He stayed on the corner waiting. Minutes later she would appear at the window. Cat went up and down the street but she didn’t even look at him. Then an old man went by, heard her call, went in. Cat kept waiting, but even after the old man had come out in a great hurry, trying not to be seen, she didn’t come back to the window.

Night after night Cat went back to the same corner, just to watch her. Everything he got in the way of money now went to buying used clothes and to looking elegant. He had a touch of low-life elegance that was more in his way of walking, of wearing his hat, and making a casual knot in his tie rather than in
the clothing itself. Cat had a desire for Dalva in the same way that he desired food when he was hungry, that he desired sleep when he was sleepy. He no longer paid any attention to the calls of the other women when after midnight they’d already taken care of the next day’s expenses and wanted some juvenile love from the little hoodlum. Once he went with one of them only to find out about Dalva’s life. That was how he found out that she had a lover, a flute player in a café who took the money she made and always had wild drinking bouts in her place, upsetting the lives of all the whores in the building.

Cat came back every night. Dalva never even looked at him. That made him love her all the more. He would remain painfully waiting until a half hour after midnight when the flutist would arrive and, after kissing her through the window, would go in through the dimly-lighted door. Then Cat would go to the warehouse, his head full of thoughts: If the flutist didn’t come one day…If the flutist should die…He was weak, maybe he couldn’t even stand up to the weight of Cat’s fourteen years. And he squeezed the switchblade he carried in his shirt.

And one night the flutist didn’t come. On that night Dalva had walked through the streets like a madwoman, she’d come home late, she hadn’t taken any man in and now she was there, posted at her window in spite of the fact that twelve o’clock had struck a long time ago. After a while the street was becoming deserted. The only ones left were Cat on the corner and Dalva, who was still waiting at her window. Cat knew that this was his night and he was happy. Dalva was desperate. Cat began to stroll from one side of the street to the other until the woman noticed him and made a signal. He came right over, smiling.

“Aren’t you the kid who hangs out on the corner all night?”

“I’m the one who hangs out on the corner. As for the kid business…”

She smiled sadly:

“Will you do me a favor? I’ll give you something,” but then she thought and made a gesture. “No. You must be waiting for your little nibble and you haven’t got any time to waste.”