Nowhere People (7 page)

Maína knows she hasn’t welcomed them as she ought to, but what could she do? What else could she say? That the builders had arrived at six in the morning and, that same moment, had set about unloading the material round the back of the encampment? That she hadn’t come out of the tent and had made her sisters stay lying there where they were and asked her mother not to leave either? That she’s been hearing Paulo’s voice telling the workers how careful they were to be, where the room was to be built and, again and again, that they should be quick and un-intrusive? The worst kind of invasion, one which could have been avoided and hadn’t been. That (around nine in the morning, when her younger sister escaped from the tent and ran over to Paulo, making the others run out after her) Paulo talked about the men being finished with the whole thing in two days, assuring them that they’ll be surprised when the job is all done? That she tried as best she could to be attentive to the four nasty, hulking carpenters who might under other circumstances have intimidated
her?

Passo Fundo and his cousin don’t make it further in. Following on the heels of the Indian girl, Paulo emerges from behind the tent and greets them, declaring in a tone that is solemn and, as such, out of place, that there is nothing more invigorating than getting involved in the assembly of a prefabricated house. Not wasting a second, he tells them just to wait right there. He follows the girl into the tent. Passo Fundo tells his cousin to leave things with him now, he thanks him for the lift and asks him again not to be late when he comes back to fetch him tomorrow. The lad says goodbye, returns to the car without looking back (Passo Fundo would have given his right arm to know what he was thinking, what he made of all this weirdness), switches on the engine, waves, then gives a quick honk of the horn and pulls out. Paulo comes out of the tent apologising for not having paid him proper attention till now, saying that unfortunately Maína’s mother and sisters are not there at the moment, they won’t be back till tomorrow afternoon (the girls’ excited activity was hindering the progress of the work too much). Passo Fundo asks what needs to be done. Paulo says that the carpenters will be finished in an hour at the most and then it’s just the painting left to do. ‘We should make the most of what’s left of the daylight then, and get the paints ready,’ Passo Fundo says before picking out a board nearly two metres long, improvising trestles and positioning seven tins of paint on it. The brightness of the day is almost gone. The one who seems to be the biggest loudmouth of the four workmen announces: job done. Immediately the one acting as an assistant to the others starts collecting up the material into the rented van, which has already been waiting for them for fifteen minutes. Maína comes out of the tent, walks around the works inspecting them. The man approaches Paulo and gives him a series of instructions; Paulo listens to him not finding any of it very important. Night falls completely, there is a crescent moon. Paulo accompanies the four carpenters to the van; Maína and Paulo’s friend are left standing opposite one another. ‘Do you like it?’ Passo Fundo ventures. ‘Grey,’ she says, directly. ‘What?’ He is no longer able to see the girl’s expression properly. ‘I don’t like the colour.’ And he realises that Paulo never consulted her. ‘White is pretty cool,’ is all he’s able to say. ‘She wants grey, because when it rains the room … the house … won’t look … it’s the shaman side of this girl here,’ Paulo says behind him, turning on the torch, shining the beam of light on the building. ‘Between you and me … ’ he says, provocatively, ‘Maína doesn’t want the house. Isn’t that right, Maína?’ At that moment Passo Fundo understands why her behaviour was so withdrawn. She leaves. ‘Headstrong and proud … Could you ever have imagined such a thing if you hadn’t seen it with your own eyes?’ Passo Fundo bends down to pick up one of the open tins of paint. ‘Point the light over here for me, Paulo … ’ He knows he shouldn’t get involved in whatever might be going on between the two of them, ‘I don’t know whether it’ll work out if we put a coat on it without sanding it first.’ Paulo is still looking towards where Maína had gone. ‘They said it wasn’t a problem. Just give it one coat and then the other, four hours later,’ says Paulo, positioning the torch on a box to light up the wall of the room that was to be painted first. ‘Thank you for coming, Passo Fundo. I don’t know if I could have done all this on my own.’ Passo Fundo paints a large star on the door. ‘It’ll be a doddle. We’ll paint this whole white elephant of yours in one go. I’ll take the ladder; I’ll do the top part, you do the bottom. Sound good to you?’ Paulo nods. Within less than half an hour, Passo Fundo’s arms and legs are beginning to itch (he hasn’t told his friend that he is allergic to the smell of oil paint, to the solvents), he tries to get himself upwind. It’s dark, his friend won’t notice the blotches, the lumps that will start to show up on his skin in a few minutes.

Maína looks at her watch. Nearly ten o’clock at night. She has left the tent open so that they know she will be staying awake for as long as they’re painting. That thing that Paulo said earlier (just before his friend arrived) is stuck in her head: about camping out there for a few weeks teaching her sisters to speak and read Portuguese, as well as some other children who might be in nearby encampments. She said it wouldn’t work: he doesn’t know a word of Guarani, the routine on an encampment is entirely different to anything he can imagine. She can’t handle his being available like this, his dedication, with those surprises coming ever more frequently while his gestures and attitude
–
electric, sure of himself
–
move him too quickly away from the day and time when she adored him most. Paulo is moving further away because he’s unable to be in the present. The present is a burden, it cannot function as a useful tool. ‘Hello.’ She hears the voice from somewhere out in the darkness. ‘Could you get me a glass of water?’ She notices the shine of the twisted metal, the buttons and keys of the visitor’s wind instrument. ‘Yes,’ she answers and gets a cup to give him some water. ‘Sorry to trouble you. I brought a bottle with me but it’s finished.’ Maína was afraid that, being a friend of Paulo’s, he would be like Leonardo (it took her days to realise just how rude Leonardo had been). ‘Don’t tell Paulo,’ panting again and again as though about to cough, ‘but I have trouble breathing in the smell of paint for too long … The way he is, always doing everything just right, and the way he’s so concerned about other people, he wouldn’t have let me come and help … You do understand what I’m saying, don’t you?’ She nods her head. He drinks. ‘Do you like music, Maína?’ he asks. ‘I like it a lot,’ she says. He drinks the last gulp, hands back the cup. ‘I’ll play something for you, then, it’ll help me get some new air into my lungs.’ He brings his right hand to his forehead; ‘Just give me a minute.’ She watches him run over towards Paulo’s igloo tent and return with a bottle. ‘Vodka. To warm my throat up,’ and he takes a swig directly from the bottle, then puts it down at his feet. He plays. The music is like nothing else: earthy, weighty the way the sound of a flute can never be, it spreads. He takes his time, barely adding any variations to the melodic arc and the turns it takes. A few cars go by, sporadically, but in no way affecting her hearing. Maína approaches Passo Fundo, picks up the vodka at his feet, pours a little into the cup he has used moments ago. She tastes it. Drinks the lot. Pours herself some more. She walks over to the edge of the road, she feels herself capable of softening it (and when the next headlamps come she wonders
–
from the old habit she has of just wondering
–
about covering them over completely even if it’s just a momentary collision, blinding them, forging a new being against the wooden room that will be there for ever). She doesn’t want to understand how everything ended up like this, she lets him play, thinking this will help to master the bad feelings. It’s only when the music stops that she forgets about the road, the hypnotic trance, and turns back towards the tent. Noticing that he is packing the instrument up to go back to his painting, she asks Passo Fundo to tell Paulo to come and speak to her as soon as he can, and thanks
him.

The day before yesterday, as they were walking over towards the tiles and wooden slats, Maína asked about the car. Paulo changed the subject, saying to himself that he was not going to tell her about how the money he’d received from the firm hadn’t been enough to cover the cost of the building works (the lawyers didn’t accept the sum he had calculated; he was only an intern), which was why he’d had to sell the Beetle. He comes down the three steps of the ladder, puts the empty paint tin down beside the other empty ones, the brush in the glass jar of solvent, his back is aching, his right arm is throbbing. He’s not sure they are going to finish before it gets light. Putting another
guaraná
seed in his mouth, running the first brushstrokes along the top of the doorframe they had left for last, Passo Fundo says with certainty, yes, they will finish it. The two of them look at each other through the four-paned window whose two frames were lowered, with the opening at the top. It’s an hour and a half since Passo Fundo told him that Maína was waiting for him. Here is this somewhat hopeless guy, perhaps the one guy Paulo likes most of all. The two of them look at each other like characters who have grown old, or who are trying to grow old more quickly than anyone else (there’s no war, no disaster) and the end of a decade is looming. ‘I’m going in, Passo Fundo.’ He looks at his watch. ‘We can start again in two hours, ok?’ The friend waves his paintbrush in a gesture of blessing and then, immediately, with the same hand sweeping the air, gestures to him to go on, to go, get out of here. Maína is awake, she seems to have washed, she’s in the dungaree dress he brought her in the very early days (and which she still hadn’t worn for him to see). Hair combed and held to one side in her barrette. Paulo tries to make conversation, but Maína immediately invites him to lie with her in the igloo tent, and when she kisses him so enthusiastically he realises that she’s been drinking. He asks for a couple of minutes to fill the basin and splash some water on his face, his arms, his hair, takes advantage of the moment to brush his teeth and change his t-shirt (he knows the girl won’t care about this, it just seems a good time to do it, now that she’s being all friendly, which she has made a point of not being these past seventy-two hours). In the tent he unrolls the extra camping mattress. Maína doesn’t wait, she throws herself in clumsily, unbalancing him. She laughs. He laughs. He tries to find her face, with the tips of his fingers he finds one of her breasts. He kisses her. He takes off her clothes. Like a young husband, he assumes the cautiousness she didn’t ask for, he brushes his lips over her legs, drawing them out. She is holding handfuls of earth (he guessed at this because of her closed fists, it was confirmed a minute later) and now, in a journey of her own, she scratches granules, clumps, pigments, dried mud, strands, scrapings against his arms, bringing the extra dust to his hair. They have come to a point where nobody can reach them. Nothing matters. It doesn’t matter that the Minister of the Army had stated categorically right there in the Chamber of Deputies itself that indigenous culture is not respectable; that Paul McCartney said Madonna and Michael Jackson lack musical depth; that a terrorist bomb brought down the monument to William and Walmir and Carlos, murdered in November last year, in a confrontation with the army in the Volta Redonda Factory; that the English writer Anthony Burgess, eager to regain the attention lavished on his
A Clockwork Orange
, accused Pope John XXIII of having being the most dangerous man of the century; that a fight is being stirred up between Brazil’s General Workers’ Union and the Unified Workers Central; that Asteroid 1989FC with its alarming eight hundred and fifteen-metre diameter has come too close to the earth thereby causing justifiable concern the likes of which we hadn’t seen for decades; that two hundred and sixty kilometres of electric fencing along the border between Hungary and Austria has been taken down resulting in the first significant break in the so-called Communist Iron Curtain; that cold fusion has been announced to much boasting and then subsequently denied again with much embarrassment; that the ascent of Fernando Collor de Mello’s candidacy to the presidency has been so vertiginous; that Colonel Oliver North was condemned for the clandestine sale of arms to the Iran of the Ayatollahs by officials in Ronald Reagan’s government in the Iran-Contra scandal; that the Argentines elected the Peronist Carlos Saúl Menem as their president; that Ruy Guerra’s feature film
Kuarup
was booed in Cannes; that Brazil was placed by the White House on the list of trading partners disloyal to the United States. Nothing. Nothing matters. And turning her body she moves into a sixty-nine that doesn’t work out (it’s just over-excitement), her mouth grasping for his skin, his hair, taking his cock in her mouth, hurting him with her teeth. He holds her and moves her body into a position in which he can embrace her but she gets up onto his thighs, gets him to enter her, moving, shuddering. Passo Fundo had said to him just minutes earlier: fifteen isn’t as young as all that, you get girls of thirteen starting families in Dublin’s Northside, girls of fourteen who run away from their homes on the Santa Catarina coast, eloping to marry the eighteen-year-old boys they’ve fallen in love with, it’s tradition; twelve-year-old mulatta girls get pregnant by their first boyfriends in Rio de Janeiro’s North Zone, gypsy girls marry at thirteen. It’s tradition. Fifteen years old. It’s not a problem. Passo Fundo is sure of it. Crazy. Nothing matters. Maína shudders. He comes hard after the weeks of waiting. Maína wraps herself round him. Paulo feels her heart beating strongly against his chest. (The world is turning at just the speed Paulo wants it to turn.) They have never been so uninhibited with each other before. She says she feels great. He says it’s the drink. She says it isn’t correct to be complicated. It isn’t right, he corrects her. Maína lets go of him, slides off to the side, swears she’ll do whatever he wants: if he is planning to live with them for a time, she will do everything she can to help him adapt, she will accept his agitation (that’s what he hears her say) and whatever good he can do them here on the side of the road. Who knows, what she wants might really be too complicated for him (he is bigger than her world, and if he weren’t lost in his ideas and feelings he wouldn’t be here). She says that if he wants they could improvise a school and show that there can be an escape from living in this ridiculous way. He asks Maína to rub his back a little, the pain has increased all of a sudden, and he says that then she should sleep.