Page 35 - I Live in the Slums: Stories (The Margellos World Republic of Letters)

the cave. He saw me and walked over. He took me in his hands and lifted me up

in the air three times. Then he patted me on the head and set me down, saying,
“Rat! Rat! Rat! I’ve missed you!” His clothes were filthy and full of holes. He
stank. What kind of life was this little kid leading now? When he saw me staring
at the dark cave, he began laughing. “This is a prison.” As he said prison, I
remembered my ancestors’ cages—rows of them on the grasslands, each with a
front door. If someone entered, the door automatically closed and locked. At first
the buddies were excited when they went in. They collided and bumped around
inside irritably, making the iron cages rock back and forth. At night, they calmed
down. You can’t imagine the power of the clear, cold night air of the grasslands!
But they had to stay there a long time before they would die: they knew this.
When their parents walked past the cages, the children inside had already fallen
into meditation. As I was thinking of this, Woody pushed me playfully and
asked, “Do you want to go in? Do you?” I felt I hadn’t thought it through and so
I kept retreating. Woody guffawed and told me this was a phony cave: you went
in from the front and exited from the rear. “Look at me. Aren’t I all right?” Since
I didn’t want to go in, he said we might as well forget it and just move around

outside. We circled to the back of the house. I looked and looked again—I didn’t
see any exits, that’s for sure. Woody told me, “You can’t see that kind of exit
with your eyes.”
After running into Woody, I forgot why I had come out here; I was hell-bent
on following him. I didn’t know why I had no willpower. Thinking of my
ancestors, not one of them minded parting from mankind, as I did. My ancestors
were warriors who dared to come and go on their own. Not one was afraid of
dying. Woody walked and walked, and then stopped again and petted me. What
did he mean by this? I grew nervous as I recalled that he had shattered the old
man’s frame with a slingshot. He was actually really violent. I noticed some
people standing on the roadside looking at us. Even after we walked far away,
they were still watching. What was Woody plotting? We walked past row after
row of houses. I never knew the slum was so big. I had only stood in the

doorway of Woody’s home and had only seen places that were just a little farther
away. Sometimes I saw a woman come out. When she caught a glimpse of me, it
was as if she’d seen a ghost: she immediately ran back into the house to hide. So
then I knew that the slum was large, but just how large I didn’t know. In my
memory, the grasslands were the largest thing under the sky.
I didn’t know how long we had walked when I realized that I had once more
reached the front of that solid house. Woody said, “Hey, Rat, we’re here.” It was
dark, and the two caves looked at me threateningly. Saying he needed to rest,
Woody entered the cave on the right. I stood there terrified, not knowing what to
do. Under the streetlight ahead of me, that person appeared again. He squatted