"Paul J. McAuley & Kim Newman - In Dreams" - читать интересную книгу автора (Mcauley Paul J)

¿Porque?

Because on this Black Sunday night Annunciato killed a Blood Wolf
with a glass guitar.

The sambadrome had been jumping. Word is up, compadres.
Tonight tonight tonight is the big Play-Off. Tonight the last two guitarristos
do battle to the beat of hip-slung drum and mixing desk for the glory glory
hallelujah of leading all Birimbao Hill on Fat Tuesday.

Yelping and blowing football whistles, his brother Lions’a’Judah had
carried him shoulder high down the precipitous paths of the favela, this boy
from nowhere who had swept the wing play-offs with his glass guitar. Have
you not heard? Tonight tonight tonight the red gold and green of Judah will
smash the pink and green of the Lobos.

As the rival guitarristos were borne into the sambadrome, the batteria
had struck up, those aristocrats of rhythm, drumming up an avalanche of
sound that seemed to sweep all Birimbao down before it into the valley.
And the remixados in their baseball caps with the correct corporate logos
and their hi-tops and cycle shorts had spun and scratched and sweated and
mixed and mastered. And the sambaderos in their Famous Names
sportswear, the sambaderas in their leos and body-paint had spilled onto
the floor, shaking it strut-ting it slapping it stuffing it shrieking it ai ai ai ai.

He had been good, the Blood Wolves’ guitarristo. Had he not been,
he might have lived. But as the guitars up on their speaker towers clashed
and tangled in fugues and counter-points, he had felt a spirit awaken in the
glass guitar, that same spirit that had called to him that morning when this
Annunciato, sixth son of a sixth son, glimpsed that gleam of glass in a
Birimbao trash heap, a spirit growing stronger, stronger than Annunciato
could hold, something that fed on the sweat and the stink and the shatter of
drums and one by one the dancers and the remixados and even the
batteria stopped to watch and the only sound beneath the sambadrome’s
corrugated iron roof was the unbearable feedback howl of the glass guitar
on and on and on and on and on and on and on like the scream of every
child that was ever born in the street and the scream of every soul that ever
fell to a blade in a cabaña alley and the scream of every sambadera in the
ear of her sambadero as she gave it away in the rear seat of a hot-wired
Nissan in the back rank of the drive-in and the music seized the Lobos’
guitarristo and burned his soul away to nothing and he toppled from the
speaker tower with smoke coming from his eyes and then they all
screamed with one voice and heart and soul.

One chord. That is all the difference there is between hero and
monster.

****