Nelio listened in amazement to their stories, and he realised that he was one of them; they had the same origins and the same experiences. In their stories he recognised himself, in the way that they all carried the burned village inside them. Often, as he lay in the horse's belly waiting for sleep, he would think that they all seemed to have been born of the same mother. A woman who was young and full of energy, but who had been broken by bandits, by monsters and by poverty to become a toothless, shrunken shadow. He knew that this was what they actually had in common: possessing nothing, having been born into a world against their will, and having been flung out into a misery created by bandits and monsters.
They had only one mission in life: to survive.
In the daytime he would see the rich climbing in and out of their shiny cars on the wide avenues in the centre of the city: white men, black men, Indians. From Cosmos he had learned what one of those cars cost. It was such a dizzying sum that it was as if Cosmos were talking about the distance to a star rather than the price of a car. By looking at the rich, Nelio also discovered his own poverty. Between the rich, who always seemed to be setting off to conduct some urgent business, and the group of street kids there was a chasm which Nelio saw widening every day. The kids would cross it whenever they popped up and offered to watch over a car or to wash it while the black or white or Indian man who stepped out with his briefcase was conducting his important business.
Nelio once asked Cosmos who these men were, what they had in their briefcases, and why they were always in such a hurry. Cosmos didn't have any answers, but admitted that it might be worthwhile to find out. At an advantageous moment a short time later, he instructed Mandioca and Tristeza to break into a car and steal the briefcase that was inside. Afterwards they took cover behind the petrol station and opened the bag. Mandioca had imagined it full of money. But when he opened the lock and lifted the flap he found only the shrivelled remains of a lizard. That was a magic moment, since they would never have imagined that a dead lizard could be the secret of great riches.
'They carry around boxes with dead animals,' Cosmos mused. 'Maybe there are special lizards that ward off evil spirits.'
'It's an ordinary lizard,' said Mandioca after he pulled it out, studied it carefully and then sniffed it.
'But it must mean something,' Cosmos said.
'Anyway, let's make it perfectly clear that we know what's in their bags,' said Nelio.
Where he got the idea from, he didn't know, no more than he could explain so many other things he brooded about. He imagined that he had a secret space in his head where the unexpected thoughts waited for the proper moment to slip free.
'How can we do that without getting caught?' Cosmos said.
Nelio thought about it, and suddenly he knew.
'We catch a live lizard and put it in the bag,' said Nelio. 'Mandioca and Tristeza open the car door without being seen. Then we put the briefcase back in the car. The man will have something to wonder about for as long as he lives. We've seized power over him. We know how it was done. But he doesn't.'
Cosmos nodded. Then he called to Alfredo Bomba and told him to catch one of the lizards that were skittering up and down the tree trunks or hiding in the cracks of the buildings. Alfredo Bomba stood motionless next to a tree, put his hand on the trunk and waited for a lizard to come near. Then he flicked his wrist and the lizard was caught between his thumb and forefinger.
Nelio wondered where he had learned this skill. Alfredo Bomba was surprised by the question.
'I learned it by watching the way lizards catch insects,' he said.
Since Tristeza was the one watching over the car, he and Mandioca had no trouble opening the door again and putting the briefcase back inside. When the man who owned the car returned, he gave Tristeza banknotes for all of 5,000 because he had looked after the car so well.
From then on, Cosmos and Nelio were obsessed by the discovery they had made. They could control the world by invisibly slipping inside wherever they wanted and leaving their mysterious signs, which would seem inexplicable and sometimes even frightening to those who found them. They looked around the city. The lizard in the briefcase had given them the upper hand, and they decided to challenge their poverty. Cosmos made all the decisions, but it was Nelio who whispered in his ear. Then they parcelled out tasks to the others, and afterwards they would all admire the trophies.
One night they made their way through winding sewer pipes, beneath the feet of armed guards, into the city's largest department store. Cosmos had to give both Nascimento and Alfredo a thrashing to stop them from filling their pockets with valuables from the store. They weren't there to steal but to leave their sign and take back a trophy. Taking instructions from Cosmos and Nelio, they moved everything in the store around; they put radios inside the big freezers, filled the empty bread baskets with shoes, and hooked frozen chickens on to hangers in the women's clothing department. The last thing they did was to unscrew the brass plaque hanging near the main entrance commemorating the occasion when the President dedicated the big department store. Then Pecado pinned up a dead lizard he had from Alfredo Bomba, and they left the night-time store as soundlessly as they had come. The next day Cosmos and Nelio stood outside the entrance when the store opened. They saw the disbelief in the guards' eyes, then the astonishment of the bosses who came hurrying up when they realised that nothing apart from the brass plaque had been stolen. When the police eventually arrived, Alfredo's dead lizard was lying on a silver tray, and no one dared to touch it.
On another night they visited the big white hotel which stood on a cliff above the sea. They sneaked in through a ventilation shaft which had its intake in the slope facing the sea. By climbing like monkeys on to each others shoulders they were able to reach it, and at last they found themselves inside the vast halls with marble floors and metre-high urns for flowers. They moved with great caution because the clerks at the front desk, the guards and sleepless guests were keeping vigil in the dimly lit halls. In the café with the soft easy chairs they gobbled up the pastries that were still in the gold-framed cooler counter. Here too they stole a shiny plaque posted between two columns in the great lobby to commemorate the day many years before when Dom Joaquim had dedicated the newly built hotel. Alfredo Bomba stuffed his dead lizard into the hollow where the plaque had been. Nelio carefully placed a pastry next to the lizard's mouth before they slipped back through the ventilation shaft.
What happened the next day they never found out because they wouldn't have made it past the guards stationed at the hotel's swinging doors. But they thought they could imagine what had gone on.
Nelio and Cosmos grew bolder. They slipped inside the parliament building, unscrewed the handle of the Speaker's gavel and poked a dead lizard inside in its place. They challenged each other by starting to show their superiority to others. They challenged the overblown self-righteousness of the wealthy by toppling two escort motorcycle police outside the theatre when a minister's cortege passed by. Nelio and Cosmos had noticed that the lead motorcycles in every cortege always took a short cut across the wide avenue's centre lane just before the big intersection. When the wail of the sirens was heard in the distance and all the drivers had pulled over, Tristeza and Nascimento poured splinters of black-coloured glass over the centre lane and then hid behind a parked car. Afterwards, when the motorcycles had fallen and the cortege was forced to stop, a dead lizard was found among the shards of glass.