But I will do that later.
Right now I'm going to talk about the remarkable Nelio. The boy who came to the city from nowhere. The boy who made himself a home inside an abandoned statue in one of the city's plazas.
And this is where I'm going to start my story.
Everything begins with the wind, the mysterious and enticing wind that sweeps in over our city from the eternally wandering Indian Ocean.
I, José Antonio Maria Vaz, a lonely man on a rooftop under the starry tropical sky, have a story to tell.
The First Night
When the shots were fired on that fateful night and I found Nelio soaked in his own blood, I had been working at the bakery of the confused and half-crazed Dona Esmeralda for several years. No one had lasted there as long as I had.
Dona Esmeralda was an amazing woman; everyone in the city – and they all knew who she was – either secretly admired her or wrote her off as insane. When Nelio, without her knowledge, lay on the roof of the bakery and died, she was more than ninety years old. Some claimed that she was a hundred, but no one could say for sure. With Dona Esmeralda, nothing was certain. It was as if she had existed for all time; she was one with the city and its founding.
No one could remember her ever being young. She had always been ninety or perhaps a hundred years old. She had always driven around in her ancient car at high speed with the top down, veering from one side of the street to the other. Her clothes had always been made of voluminous silk; her hats were fastened under her wrinkled chin with broad ribbons. It was explained to strangers – who barely managed to avoid being run over by her wild careering – that even though she had always been exceedingly old, she was the youngest daughter of the infamous municipal governor Dom Joaquim Leonardo dos Santos, who during his scandal-ridden life had filled the city with innumerable equestrian statues in the various central plazas.