Nowhere People (17 page)

Luisa’s decision to adopt renewed the feeling of complicity between the two of them. The series of appearances before the judge, the Public Ministry, the Children’s and Youth Supervisory Council, meant that they behaved perfectly to show off the solid structure of their new family. Assessments are awkward, they encourage those being assessed not to take them seriously. They are standing, now, outside the civil registry office. They have come to the city centre specially to get the certificate on which, from here on in, will appear the names Luisa Vasconcelos Lange and Donato Henrique Lange Becker (his name has four names now). It takes just a few minutes, as it is the end of the working day and there are no longer queues at the windows. Minutes from now he will sit down with her at the table of a popular restaurant in Higienópolis and they will order a bottle of Pol Roger Brut Reserve. The real extravagance will begin, however, when she orders a second bottle of the same champagne and challenges him to join her; he is after all just about to graduate with honours, very possibly with the highest average in his year, to première a play, as both playwright and director, and to move away with her far from São Paulo. He doesn’t hesitate, he allows the waiter to fill his glass. The head waiter is going from table to table holding out a bag of round, numbered chips in imitation mother-of-pearl, one for each customer, referring to the establishment’s week-long twenty-sixth birthday celebrations by way of justifying the interruption. There are two draws per evening for the chance to win one night in a luxury suite at the Paulista Plaza on Alameda Santos. Once he is sure everybody has been given one, the waiter randomly draws exactly the number that is in Luisa’s hand. She asks Donato to make himself known, to shout something: he is the man of the house, after all. The head waiter approaches and hands them an envelope which explains that the night at the hotel can be used at any time and includes consumption of up to a hundred
reais
of food and drink. She asks whether it would be valid for that very night. He straightens himself up and immediately assures her that it would. She asks him to fill their glasses and she proposes a toast, another one. They finished eating the lobster in
pitanga
sauce and she ordered a tiramisu for dessert accompanied by two glasses of Kir Royale, and then he suggested that the two of them go straight from there to the Paulista Plaza. She smiled with tense lips and let out a why not? As they drove down Avenida Paulista, looking at the buildings from the back seat of the taxi, she said that the two of them would never be coming back here, that a few weeks from now there would be no more São Paulo ever again. In the hotel they were given a suite on the penultimate floor. They had no luggage, which didn’t stop the bellboy from accompanying them to their room with the twin single beds they had requested, and showing them how all the gadgets worked. The hotel employee withdraws. The two of them are sat on the sofa, the lights turned out, sharing their exhaustion. The brightness of the buildings thickens in the polluted air and is enough to light them up, leaving room for doubt about where their boundaries are. Then the accident. Coming closer. Donato moves his first kiss against Luisa’s mouth. She witnesses his awkwardness, his determination to discover, and is left wordless, confused, distressed.

It’s terrible when you discover yourself to be meticulous and methodical in the extreme and you discover, too, belatedly, that the person at the top of your list of the school’s greatest stage talents suffers from terrible insecurity about his actual capacity to get up on stage, make it count, face the terror, just put it all out there and perform as he has done so well in rehearsals. First it was the cold that rendered him voiceless, then he discovered it was flu, then it developed into mild sinusitis and then severe sinusitis, then acid reflux, then those palpitations in the left side of his chest, which are clearly baseless given that he, Vicente Fino, is evidently thin, healthy and has no history of heart attacks or anything of the sort in the family. You go all in, you take a risk, because after all he, the play’s male lead, Little Vicente Fino, again, is an anxious little Jewish fag, and charismatic, with a big fucking face like a startled donkey able to rearrange itself into any expression, just as representative of a minority as you are, Adopted Trapped Donato, you who are an Indian, just like the most Indian of Indians, with that unmissable Indian face, like you find in the documentaries by those brothers, the Vilas-Boas, and who had the wretched fortune of being brought up by a white man, a pale little deceased white man, full of ideas that ultimately, tragically, ended up unrealised, like this play which has created so many expectations and that at this moment looks set not to happen. You haven’t stuttered this much in months, because everything happened without your being the centre of attention, and now you’ve spent the last fortnight in the midst of a tempest, the true Prospero with a tempest shoved up his ass, and you’re stuttering like a lunatic. Now it’s five-twenty in the afternoon, the auditorium doors open at seven and, apparently, the play is to start at seven-thirty tonight on the dot, because after the performance come the party and the drinking. The problem is that the Great Vicente Fino is at the ear, nose and throat doctor, he has no voice and, according to his mother (who at the moment, as one would expect, is with him), has a thirty-nine degree fever. The prognosis (you’ve just hung up): Vicente will not go on. And there’s not a blessed soul alive who knows all the lines, only you know all the lines, no one will be such a sucker as to expose himself and become the scapegoat if everything goes wrong. The worst thing is knowing that most of the audience will be there because of Vicente. They are his friends, including some from outside school, who actually appreciate theatrical lunacies. You, take his place? No, you’ll stammer, you won’t manage any fluency at all, you’ll slow down the pace of the dialogue, which is the play’s trump card. And Kika comes into the room without knocking. ‘Sorry to barge in like this, but I have to say something … Can I?’ Kika’s face is very close to yours. The breath that comes out of her mouth is the best that anyone could ever produce. Fuck, Kika really knows how to come on to you. ‘Go ahead.’ Kika has lovely eyes. ‘I know you’re the director.’ Kika has quite some breasts. ‘And you,’ he replies, ‘do the lighting and the sound.’ Kika has a fringe like Regina Duarte from when Regina Duarte was young and hot and was called Brazil’s sweetheart. ‘The thing is, you’re going to have to take Vicentinho’s part,’ Kika says. Focus, Donato, this is not the time. ‘I’m not an actor,’ he argues. ‘But it’s the only way … Wear a mask … It won’t make any difference. What matters are the lines.’ Kika is so very good at moving those lips. ‘You’re forgetting how they’re done,’ he ventures. Kika might put out for him one day. ‘How they’re done?’ says Kika raising her sexy arms. ‘How the lines are said … I’ll ruin everything’ (and ladies and gentleman, the person who has just spoken is the Director, Adopted Donato, who still has the nerve to fantasise about Kika sucking his cock at a time like this). ‘Forget about how they’re said,’ says Kika. ‘Why did I have to invent this damn play?’ says the director. ‘We can do a dramatic reading,’ says Kika. ‘Kika, give me two minutes to think, here, alone.’ Kika opens the door. Would you believe it, this pert ass of Kika’s? ‘The whole cast is outside … ’ Turn round further, Kika. ‘What an utter cock-up … ’ Just turn around now, Kika. ‘You haven’t got two minutes, you have to perform … Wear a mask, it’ll work, I’ll ask Alessandra to track down one that covers everything from your top lip upwards.’ Like, so that it, that lip, can help me go down on you, Kika? ‘What difference would that make?’ the director asks. ‘Oh, no idea, it’s just something you use … You adopt a persona … ’ Kika, Kika, Kika. ‘Don’t talk to me about personas.’ The director gets annoyed. ‘But Jung … ’ Kika provokes him. ‘Oh, Kika, please … now is not the time for Jung.’ ‘Well, then?’ and she gives a smile, the deadliest of Kika’s weapons. ‘Tell them to find the mask.’ Donato gives in. Donato wasn’t even smitten with Kika like this, but today Kika is too much. Kika leaves, Donato sits down at the table on which the pages of dialogue are scattered, the scenes, the acts, with technical cues, the play’s key moments, he opens the elastics round his folder, puts all that paper inside, puts it in his bag. He goes out to talk to the group of actors, he stutters almost the whole time, but his words link together into a strong lecture about the text he wrote and about the critical contribution of everyone there towards making the result so much better than he had imagined. Bit by bit he realises that he is managing to calm everyone down, to ensure at least a minimal degree of unity. Alessandra appears with two masks made by a friend of hers called Guilherme Pilla, they are plastic masks that leave the lips and jaw completely exposed, likewise the eyes. Donato tries on the first and feels so comfortable that he doesn’t even bother with the second.

And now, on the stage and in the mask, in the important role of male lead, Donato imagines being Henrique, and this doesn’t frighten him as much as it should.

At the Rolling Stones’ concert on Copacabana Beach, Luisa hugged Donato and said, her mouth right up to his ear: ‘Have you got any idea what it’ll be like in Recife?’ He turned his face towards her, taking advantage of the deafening noise, and, under the effects of the five cans of Itaipava beer he’d drunk, he laughed cockily, in the way he thinks he would have laughed at Rener
–
had Rener been there, obviously, and had he not persuaded her he was never again going to write letters to her or send messages and that he was going to try and forget her forever. His feet in the sand (and more distant than he has ever before felt from the French girl; he used to think he existed only for the French girl) he pulls Luisa towards him and, surrounded by a mass of one million three hundred thousand euphoric people, brings his mouth to hers and bites her lips, his hands slide round her waist and stop firmly on her ass, she puts her own hands on his and encourages him to squeeze her as hard as would be expected of a man who knew women. Donato could never have imagined what it would be like, this detachment from every other gaze. As soon as Keith Richards finished singing ‘This Place Is Empty’ Luisa invited him to leave and they walked to the apartment on Joaquim Nabuco where they were staying. He wanted to wait at least till ‘You Can’t Always Get What You Want’, but the Stones and all the cultural memorabilia he had been able to accumulate in thirteen years can’t compare to what he’s feeling now; any information right now is useless. Luisa and her muscular body and her sharp sense of humour that many twenty-year-old women would envy, confidently leading him by the hand through the maze of crazy people that Avenida Atlântica has become, leave no room for doubt: she is the final thing of his stepfather’s that remains for him to
take.

After Recife. (Recife as a place of transit.)

The first thing that upset Luisa was the trip to Goiânia in eight days’ time being brought forward. The news arrived mid-morning, carried by the electronic sound vibration in her phone reproducing, at thousandths of a second’s difference, the serious voice of the Deputy Vice Chancellor for Research at the University of Goiás; and what really knocks her off her feet once and for all is this call made to her landline, notifying her that the removal van which left Recife fourteen days ago with her things (and other people’s, too, in keeping with the common practice of transporting two or three removals at once to reduce the freight costs to the client) had overturned less than four hours ago in Santa Catarina, on one of the widened stretches of the 101, fifteen kilometres from the entrance to Tubarão, and had, unfortunately, caught fire and destroyed all the furniture, carpets, mirrors, dishes, porcelain, silverware, household appliances, ‘all of it, madam, regrettably, all of it … ’ says the employee of the Pernambuco company, impassive, distressing her so much that she loses her balance, stumbles, knocks over the luxury hundred-litre silver-model Samsonite she has just rolled in from the bedroom to the living room. The weight of the clothes set aside for several days and the nearly two dozen essential books she needed to take mean that the plastic structure crashes hard onto the laminated wooden floor with a noise that can, no doubt, be heard even outside the house, even considering that the house is on Avenida Cristovão Colombo, one of the busiest roads in Porto Alegre. At that moment, as is to be expected, Donato comes running down the stairs. Barely moving her lips Luisa says that she’s ok, starkly belied by the hate radiating from her eyes. He nods, folds his arms, waits. And what could have been a brief conversation lasted more than half an hour; she had to speak to the employee, the manager and the owner of the removal firm, and it only didn’t take even longer still because, in her argument with the owner of the firm, Luisa yells all the insults she possibly can and hangs up on him. ‘Bad news?’ Donato asks. ‘The removal van … There was nothing left. Can you believe it? … The dressing table that belonged to my grandmother … ’ she says sadly, ‘God, there’s no way that can be replaced.’ He is silent. A few minutes pass before she says, ‘And what about your things? They’ve gone, too.’ Without looking at her, he says: ‘We’ve lost so many things already, Luisa … ’ and looks over towards the kitchen, probably considering that this would be a good time to fetch a glass of water with sugar, a kindness that Luisa would refuse. ‘You did insure everything, didn’t you?’ She doesn’t answer. ‘We will be able to buy more furniture, won’t we?’ he asks. ‘It isn’t going to be that simple,’ she says. ‘Then you’re going to have to postpone your trip to Goiânia.’ He used just the argument she was most afraid of hearing. ‘Don’t even think about suggesting that again, understand? They want me there tomorrow afternoon, and tomorrow afternoon is when I’ll be there. Our money’s run out. There’s no way I can ask my parents for more.’ She is firm. ‘I can’t afford the luxury of chucking away another research grant.’ She hadn’t noticed how low the living room ceiling was. ‘And the insurance payment for the removals they didn’t deliver?’ he says. ‘I’ll sort it out from there,’ she replies, determined. ‘What about the idea of my going out there to visit you?’ And here, in this thought process of his, begins what she might call the second phase of the game of death. ‘That’s the millionth time you’ve asked me that today,’ and she walks away. ‘And it might not be the last.’ He follows her and touches her shoulder. She turns to face him. ‘You know that we’ve fallen into a hole, and I’m not referring to our little financial disaster. You know we need a break from each other.’ He sinks down, his hand slides down her arm, he sits on the floor; he remains silent (which is his answer).
Luisa, Luisa
, and a series of things run through her head that she will have to sort out with the greatest possible amount of emotional stress, negotiations that will lead to legal wrangling and years of waiting for a final result. Some of her emotions are rushing out of control, their boundaries are no longer clear, they are the normal behaviour of someone in a dangerous gear, because not long ago she was young and adaptable.
Damn.
She watches him, she doesn’t know what exactly the plan is, all she decided was that she needed to nudge her life forward, which is why she forced herself to move to Porto Alegre, to this house that isn’t even hers, the only possession remaining from Henrique’s inheritance (he was able, fortunately, to make a legal arrangement, keeping the house in Donato’s name and far from the reach of the creditors who seem to have increased following his death; she was his business partner, she is answerable for a part of the debts). The house is the monument to the ruins of a dream, with its two storeys and its southern precariousness. And Porto Alegre, even after everything she’s lived through in the city, is scarcely better than the end of the world, where, now that Donato is so surprisingly capable, she can abandon him and forget about him for a time. And then, by chance, he looks up and his gaze meets hers, making her stop thinking, making her go up to the bathroom where she forgot her washbag, fetch it, bring it down with the intention of going into the kitchen to get some filtered water, but the moment she walks through the living room, finding him there prostrate, she decides not to take the medication in secret; on the contrary, she will pour herself a glass, come back to the living room and crouch down beside him. And at that moment there they are, the two of them, side by side, in the living room of the house where their removals are no longer going to arrive, it is a sub-phase within the second phase of the game of death. Luisa puts the washbag and the full glass down on the floorboards, lies on her back. ‘Let’s make a deal,’ she says, her green eyes looking up at the ceiling, aggressive. ‘Let’s spend those forty days … ’ she’s cautious. ‘And forty nights,’ he interrupts her. ‘Right … ’ Interrupting the conflict that is already emerging. ‘Let’s spend that time a long way from each other and then we’ll do that therapy we agreed on … ’ The living room ceiling seems even lower now. ‘And then we’ll decide together.’
Don’t do it, Luisa.
‘Together … ’ he ventures.
Don’t.
‘Of course. Together … ’ she interrupts him (her rejoinder) and, not getting up, she takes the washbag, unzips it, pulls out the strips of Valium and Rivotril, pops out two pills of the former and one of the latter, then she pauses (leaving him ample time to react), then puts the pills in her mouth, and after feeling around next to her as though she were blind, takes the cup, lifts her head, drinks. She raises her back off the floor, sits up.
Do it Luisa.
‘All I know is I’m going to bed, my flight leaves at eight,’ she says, and settles her hands between her outstretched legs with the strips held between her fingertips. And before Luisa realises what’s happening, he takes the strips from her hands, puts down the Rivotril, pops out a pill from the strip of Valium, puts it in his mouth, swallows. ‘What are you doing, Donato?’ she asks, grabbing the packaging out of his hand. ‘Me? Nothing. It’s going to be no problem … No problem … Isn’t that right? All of it no problem at all and rent a DVD. A no-problem DVD, no problem at all in this no-problem life,’ he retorts. ‘We don’t have a DVD player.’ She won’t allow him to make a scene. ‘Oh, that’s right, Luisa … and we don’t have a table and we don’t have chairs … Or an oven, or a fridge, or beds … all we have are the mattresses … the mattresses you bought no problem with your no-problem money, the money that’s going to come from the research grant from your new university and, of course, my computer, oh, and my clothes, and my owl, and … let me see what else … yes, nothing.’ She knows this is not the moment to lose it. ‘I’ll transfer money for you to buy a fridge and a microwave … And you also have that new credit card … I’m sure this handsome boy won’t get himself into any trouble.’
Do it Luisa.
‘I’ll use it to book a few days in the most expensive hotel in Goiânia … ’ he gets up with a threat, ‘you just wait.’ Already on his way to the staircase, he starts singing: ‘
I’m not saying it was your fault … Although you could have done more …
’ ‘You wouldn’t dare,’ she says. ‘
Oh you’re so naive, yet so …
’ ‘Come back here,’ Luisa shouts. ‘You’re such a smiling sweetheart.’ It’s no use. ‘You’re just pretending you can’t hear me.’ It’s really no use. ‘
That every time I look inside I know she knows I’m not fond of asking … True or false it may be …
’ and he stops on one of the last steps, turns to her and says: ‘I’m going to the club to swim.’ Luisa brings a hand up to her mouth. ‘You can’t. The Valium you just took … ’ And this is only the beginning. ‘
True or false it may be
… ’ he goes on, ‘
she’s still out to get me
… ’ She hears the bedroom door closing upstairs, tells herself that she has done what she was supposed to do. Soon she will write a note, a note containing a set of instructions, that she imagines leaving in the middle of the living room when she goes to get into the orange taxi, flaming orange typical of Porto Alegre, that will take her to Salgado Filho airport, where she will check in her huge suitcase and go up to the cafés (yes, that’s what she has planned) and ask for a green tea or a fennel tea and drink it with half of one of her tranquillisers, she’ll take a couple of deep breaths, look at the other people, oblivious at their tables, and only then will she feel relief.

Donato walks through the turnstile of the Nautical Union Guild, ignores the surprised expression on the face of the employee working on the door, walks towards the Olympic-sized swimming pool. He changes in the changing room. He does his warm-ups and stretches under the awning over the staircase you take to get to the swimming pool from the changing rooms. There are other members swimming in lanes one, four and six. He greets the employee who looks after the pools, acting as lifeguard to the members. It’s his first time here. He puts on the silver silicone swimming cap, goggles, dives into the end of lane three, he forces himself into a front crawl for the first two hundred metres and then onto his back kicking his legs, he forces himself to swim until he stops in the middle of the pool, attaches himself to one of the buoys, coughing, he’s swallowed some water. The employee who looks after the swimming pools gets up (it must be four metres deep where he is
–
not a place to let someone play at being ill), takes off his flip-flops, his t-shirt with the Nautical Union Guild logo on it and dives into the pool, straight into lane two. Donato is still clinging to the buoy. ‘Everything ok, kid?’ asks the club employee. ‘I’m fine … I just felt dizzy’ (he is no longer coughing, just breathing anxiously). ‘Have you been drinking, by any chance?’ he asks. ‘No. I got a bit dizzy … It was strange … I lost concentration, I felt a kind of vertigo … I started sinking as if … ’ he coughs and stops, ‘as if suddenly I didn’t know how to swim any more.’ It had been a long time since he’d gone swimming and since he had taken any risks (Donato took a risk). ‘Come on, get those goggles and that cap off so the blood can flow more easily in your head. I’ll come with you to the side,’ says the club employee. And, hanging on to the floats separating the lanes, they make their way to the side of the pool. ‘Better?’ he asks. ‘I’m a bit drowsy.’ He was stupid. ‘Can we get you over to First Aid?’ he suggests. ‘No, I just want to get out, get my clothes on and go back home.’ They go down to the changing room. The employee who looks after the swimming pool asks the employee on the door to call a taxi. They don’t have to wait long. The boy gets himself ready. The two of them walk to the entrance of the club, the employee who looks after the swimming pool asks if he has money and if he really is ok. Donato gets into the taxi, the club employee gives him a goodbye wave. Donato feels a sense of calm, a peacefulness he has never experienced before. There’s no doubt about it, he’s high on medication. The car pulls away, and he thinks that being high makes it easier to accept and understand what it’s like to be alone.

Luisa comes into the bedroom without turning on the light, she walks over to him, lies down in what little space is free on the mattress and puts her arms around him from behind. He doesn’t wake up. She notices the strong smell of chlorine in his hair. She squeezes him tighter without getting any reaction. She partially uncovers him and kisses his sweaty back (sweaty because he’s covered himself in an eiderdown on this baking hot night). She shouldn’t have come to the bedroom, being there goes against everything she had planned, but nothing matters now, she slides the palm of her hand over his body, letting the minutes pass. She wants his temperature to stick to her hands and she wants there to be no past between them; that is when she lets go of him and moves away, but at the moment she rests her hand on the floor in order to get up he pulls her back and kisses her on the mouth. She turns her back on him, but doesn’t leave the bed, her clothes and the cover are preventing their two bodies from touching. He hugs her, she doesn’t move, tears roll down her face, smear her makeup, she feels his hard-on pressing against the top of her left thigh and she lets it be. ‘I’m going with you to the airport,’ he says. ‘Please, this madness has already gone too far.’ Luisa has never been so sad. ‘But … ’ he tries to argue with her. ‘Shhh … ’ she cuts him off. ‘Mum … ’ And she insists: ‘Shhh
…’

Two in the afternoon. Donato wakes up, goes down to the kitchen, fills a glass with water, drinks it and immediately spots the brown envelope in the middle of the living room. He walks over to it, picks it up off the floor. On the side that had been face down were the words: ‘
TIME TO GROW UP
.’ He opens it: inside there’s a two-page letter. There is an apology first. Then a set of instructions. He is to go up to her bedroom, get the suitcase that is still closed with the airline company tag attached, open it. She says in one of the lines that follow that perhaps he should start with the exercise book and then move on to the DVD, since there’s no television or Betamax video-player on which to watch the tapes that are there, nor a tape-deck to play the cassettes. There are also the two letters, one of which had been addressed to her and the other to Henrique. Everything about his biological mother and about the three-year-old
him.