The Demon of Dakar - Kjell Eriksson [38]
He very much liked the grass in this foreign country. It smelled good, was soft against his skin and reminded him of a special kind of grass that they sometimes found in the mountains above his village. Otherwise the grass there was mostly stiff and sharp.
He was lying on his back with his hands under his head, staring up at the sky. Time and again his thoughts turned to Armas, how he had staggered only to collapse in front of Manuel’s feet, his hands pressed against his throat. There was something mesmerizing about the way the blood pumped out between his fingers, in fine red ribbons that were strangely free but also condemned outside their path of circulation and the heart that propelled them.
As he thought about Armas, an image of Miguel came to him. Miguel, his neighbor and childhood friend, who almost always laughed, conceived children like a hamster, and burned for the village, for the Zapotecs and autonomy.
When Miguel was shot to death outside his home there was no beauty. His death was ugly and tattered. Seven bullets tore apart an already dirty and broken body, marked by harsh circumstances and hard work.
Miguel’s blood was dark, almost black, and his limbs were desperately tensed, as if all of him was screaming. One hand rested against the house wall. In the window above his hand, whose fingers appeared to be fumbling for something, one could see his three children.
The villagers stood in a semicircle around the dead man and found that there was no justice in his death, no beauty. Who would have been able to say that Miguel was an attractive corpse? His dead body was as repellant as the life he had been forced to lead.
Miguel’s death was expected. The extinguishing of his life was fated. One who lives in a mountain village in Oaxaca, is campesino and Zapotec, and does not settle for what this means is put on the list. Behind the roar of life and Miguel’s laughter, there was always Death peeking out with his grinning mask. It was as if the flies were drawn to Miguel. The flies of death.
Armas’s end was different. He was a fine corpse. Manuel had at first not realized that the strong body with its smooth skin and well-manicured hands were without life. It was only when the first fly landed on Amras that Manuel fully grasped that the man was in fact dead.
Armas had attacked him, had wanted to kill him. Manuel should have understood the full extent of Patricio’s words that a man like Armas never had good thoughts. For him there was no dilemma, nor any difficulties, in killing another person. It was only a question of opportunity and purpose. The purpose of Manuel dying now appeared self-evident in hindsight. Manuel despised his own ignorance. He was the oldest of the brothers but not an ounce smarter.
Armas spoke Spanish with an element of haughtiness in his voice and Manuel had wanted to ask if he spoke his own language with the same carelessness. But now he understood that Armas was careless with life itself. He neither feared God nor any living man.
Now he was dead by Manuel’s hand. But he still felt the threat that Armas’s physical presence had radiated. What amazed Manuel in hindsight was the doubleness in Armas: one second his hands were clenched and his movements were like a vigilant animal, the next moment he could speak in carefree terms about women.
Manuel wondered if there had been a woman in Armas’s life. He tried to imagine her sorrow but he could only visualize a laughing woman. So it was, he said to himself, that relief followed Armas’s death. It was an act that pleased God, if one interpreted God’s will in terms of wishing for peoples’ happiness. Armas had been a misfortune.
His gaze had been cold, with small lifeless eyes and pupils as dark as soot. He looked like a reptile, but his body spoke another language and that had at first confused Manuel. Armas moved in a supple way, not to say elegant, although he was so large. As long as they had still been in the city he had been reserved, holding Manuel at arm’s