TE19 Iberian Adventure

Three Stories

the poison back on his clothes. It was also his job to collect up the dead rats afterwards. He found his boss, who was knownas the Rat King, at least as repulsiveas thosecorpses. When he talked about him, his face would twitch as if he had caught a waft of some unbearable smell. Everything was different during the power cuts. The staircasewould be filledwithwavering lights, shuffling and stifled voices. The adult residents would gather together around their candles on the fifth floor and even those who, in the daylight, held a grudge against each other would draw close. They whispered nervously, and you could hear the sound of wine glugging out of the demijohns on the groundfloor. Iwouldgotothecellarwiththeotherchildren. As we crept along the narrow corridors on tiptoe and our trembling shadows loomed along the walls, it looked as if the dreaded Bau Bau, the man in black, was following us, and in his sack the bad children were struggling to get free. We had set up our gang’s headquarters at the end of the cellar, where thebarrelsof pickledcabbagewerekept. Itwas awigwamcobbled together fromski polesandold blankets. Jocó was the boss, because he was already in eighth grade and claimed not to be afraid of the dark. I was appointed to be the ’secret’-ary. I kept the gang’s funds in a lockable cashbox along with our constitution and the stamp. I was prouder of the stamp than of anything else, because I had thought of the design myself and made it from an eraser. If outsiderswere to look at it, theywould seeonly the number eight, but really, it was the infinity symbol. At the meeting I noted down who spoke, what they talked about and for how long. One of the rules stated that gang members were 241