Chronicler Of The Winds Read Online Free PDF Page B

city up to the old fortress where Dom Joaquim's equestrian statues stood abandoned. And I became especially good friends with the street kids who lived in cardboard boxes and rusting cars, surviving on whatever they could find in the rubbish bins, whatever they could manage to steal and then sell, or sell and then steal back.
    That was also the first time I heard about Nelio.
    I can no longer remember who first mentioned his name. Maybe it was Sebastião, the old soldier missing one leg who lived in the stairwell of the studio belonging to the invariably mournful Indian photographer Abu Cassamo. The café next door was owned by the perpetually drunk Senhor Leopoldo – one of the whites who did not take part in the great exodus to return to his homeland on the other side of the sea. He entertained the few customers who sought out his dingy café with incessant curses about the way everything had gone to the dogs since the young revolutionaries had entered the city and seized power.
    'Everyone's laughing,' he used to say. 'But what are they laughing at? At everything going to hell? The blacks should be crying instead. Things were different in the old days, before . . .'
    It might have been one of them. But it might also have been someone else, maybe some chance customer in the shop buying bread. But what I do remember quite clearly are the words that were spoken, the words that made me aware for the first time of the existence of a strange street kid named Nelio.
    'The President ought to make him his adviser. He's the smartest person in the whole country.'
    Several days later one of the girls who sold bread pointed him out to me; I think it was the thin little girl called Dinoka, who was always swinging her hips so seductively whenever a man came by. She pointed at a group of street kids who had their headquarters right outside the theatre. The boy she identified as Nelio was the smallest of all. He might have been nine at the time.
    'He's never been beaten up,' said Dinoka with awe. 'Just think, a street kid who's never been beaten up.'
    The life of the street kids was hard. Once they ended up on the streets, there was most often no turning back. They lived in filth, sleeping in cardboard boxes and rusty cars, scavenging food wherever they could find it, drinking water from the cracked fountains that still remained from Dom Joaquim's day. When it rained they would kick mud on to the cars that were parked outside the banks and then innocently set about washing them down when the owners came out to drink their afternoon coffee at the Scala or the Continental. They stole when they had the chance, they carried sacks of flour for Dona Esmeralda in exchange for old bread, and they knew that life would never get any easier.
    Each group of street kids had its own territory, and they organised their lives into small dictatorships in which the leader had unlimited power to judge and to mete our punishment. They often got into fights with each other, or with other groups that intruded on their territory, or with the police, who were always suspecting them of having stolen whatever couldn't be found. They chased the wild dogs. They caught rats in ingeniously designed traps, and then they doused them with petrol siphoned off from cars, and they cheered as the rats were incinerated.
    They came from all sorts of places, and they all had their own stories. Some had lost their parents during the long war, others had no memory of ever having had parents. Many had fled from step-parents; others had been literally thrown out of the house when there was not enough room or food for them any more.
    But they were always laughing. Sometimes when the heat of the bakery was too strong and the bread wasn't yet ready to be taken out of the ovens, I would stand outside and watch them. They were always laughing even when they were hungry, tired or sick. They laughed non-stop, especially at the fury of the drunken Leopoldo. Occasionally he would come tearing