Page 14 - I Live in the Slums: Stories (The Margellos World Republic of Letters)

inside with him. The man and his wife had disappeared, and the house was quiet.
I started sneezing again. The midget said, “The master always sprays
disinfectant because he’s so afraid of dying.” Then the midget suddenly made a

weird sound and fell face upward on the floor. I bent down to look at him and
discovered that his ankles were padlocked to the feet of the table. Who had done
this? Under the table was the wooden box containing the several hundred keys
that the man had made. I shifted the box to a spot in front of the midget. He sat
up and tried to unlock the padlock with the keys. This room was making me very
jittery. If it weren’t for the black goat outside bleating twice, I would almost
have thought that he was the one playing tricks. The midget stepped up his pace,
growing more and more impatient. He had already thrown dozens of keys on the
floor. I became vaguely aware of something. I had to get out of here right away.
I ran outside, and bumped into the old man. The old man was just the same—
one foot bandaged with dirty rags and a cane in his hand. The difference was that
quite a lot of blood was spattered on the pant leg of his good leg. He pointed at
the house and told me to go inside and take a look. I pushed the door open

carefully. I had barely looked inside when I became so frightened that I shot out.
What was I afraid of? Nothing was inside—only an empty room. Even the
furniture had been moved out. The old man came over and said, “The key. It’s
here.” What key? I didn’t get it. He went on, “The key you’re looking for.
Ayuan has it.” I peered in again. I didn’t see his grandson. Leaning on his cane,
he crossed the street. Was he going to see the midget?
I walked on—walked a long way. In the slums, the sun always came out
suddenly and withdrew suddenly. Everything was dreary here—I mean outside
the houses. The houses were generally dark inside. That was okay when one got
used to the darkness. A child was lying sound asleep beside the road. He was a
little like Ayuan, but he wasn’t Ayuan. Then who was he? I especially noticed
his bare ankles where he was scarred from having been scraped by something.
Wasn’t it a rope? I pushed his head, and he spat out a string of names of flowers.
Then he laughed. A piglet ran up—the spotted pig that the old man was raising.
The piglet smelled the boy and ran off. The boy laughed even louder. Was it a
laugh? Gagagaga—it didn’t sound much like a laugh. Did he belong to the

nearby home? The door to this home was open. I went in.
All of a sudden, I felt sleepy and climbed up on the stove to sleep. Before
long, the man came in and lit the fire. He was a butcher with a long beard. He
pulled fiery red tongs out from the fire and waved them in front of me. The tongs
brushed against the hair on my chest, and I smelled the charred odor. Just as I
was wondering whether he would burn me to death, he tossed aside the tongs
and sat down on the floor. In the room in front, his children were singing. A
children’s chorus suddenly rose from that room. It was as if doomsday were