Nowhere People (8 page)

It’s day. The work is done. The two of them gather up the materials, pack everything away in plastic refuse sacks. They know that if they don’t deal with the tidying up while they are still warm they won’t do it. She opens the zip of the igloo tent, walks over to Paulo and then, having said hello to Passo Fundo, says that she’s going to change her clothes and will bring her mother and sisters back earlier than they had agreed so that they can meet his friend. You never know, he might even play his clarinet for them. It would be the perfect way to inaugurate the new home. Paulo likes the idea. As soon as Maína has left the encampment, Passo Fundo suggests that they finish the job by dividing up what’s left of the vodka. It’s a Thursday without a cloud in the sky, there are more cars passing than there were the previous days. Two hours earlier than planned, Passo Fundo’s cousin arrives, he’s got a crazy expression on his face, like someone who hasn’t slept. They position the stepladder the carpenters had left them on top of the Monza’s roof rack (Paulo has promised to return it to them by the end of the day). The drink relaxes them, the smell of paint takes on a thermal presence when the sun’s rays strike the wooden room, a feature that perhaps only exists in Paulo’s exhausted brain. He has already informed Passo Fundo that he is going to have to play his instrument for Maína’s sisters, so Passo Fundo is already warming up, going over the first part of the study he will perform (Paulo thinks it’s funny remembering that Passo Fundo got interested in the instrument in eighth grade when, as a punishment, he was obliged to attend ten rehearsals of the school orchestra, rehearsals taken by the school principal himself, it was either that or immediate expulsion; he thinks it’s funny and comments that he never imagined he’d ever see him warming up for a gig like this). Passo Fundo’s cousin asks Paulo if he wants a hand taking down the igloo tent, Paulo says he’s going to stay another week, and that’s when he notices that the boy is more agitated than usual. Passo Fundo’s cousin asks if they don’t want to have a bit of a kick-around, Paulo can’t stop himself saying maybe, the boy goes to the car, gets a rather worn five-a-side football, laughing to himself, scratching his nose, and with his right hand throws it at Paulo’s chest. The lack of sleep and the drink make Paulo give a start, and purely out of reflex he deflects the ball without trying to control it and then runs off after it, wondering what else he could do that would make the situation even odder. Passo Fundo puts away his clarinet, they start up a game of piggy in the middle, in which one of them tries to take the ball off the other two, then some shots at goal and knees and headers. There’s no more vodka and it’s nearly half past nine. A particularly enthusiastic kick by Passo Fundo’s cousin sends the ball spinning quickly with perfect accuracy towards the highway, and the three of them, just kids, run after it, scared it’ll get onto the road and cause some kind of accident. That is the exact moment when a highway police patrol van pulls over in front of Passo Fundo’s cousin’s Monza, and the ball lodges underneath it. Two policemen in Ray-Bans (they couldn’t be more of a cliché) get out ostentatiously, wanting to know what’s going on, where are the people who live in the tent and what’s with that painted house at the back. Passo Fundo’s cousin, not realising how much this will expose him, excuses himself and bends over to retrieve the ball. At once the stockier of the policemen draws his gun and tells him to stand up, to put his hands behind his head and step back beside the other two. The other policeman, the skinny one, also pulls his revolver, with an order that nobody move. For a moment Paulo doesn’t know what to think. He was getting ready for a verbal confrontation, but not to have two guns pointed at him at the very moment when he stopped paying attention. His almost pathological difficulty in submitting to authority, unfurling itself in the shock of that situation, is such that he cannot pull himself together in the midst of the rage that is poisoning him and, for a moment (which lasts for the duration and the immediate consequences of a slap on the face), the words that ought to be heard are shut away in a paralysis. ‘We’re not delinquents, officer,’ says Passo Fundo’s cousin. Paulo still does not react, trying to understand what’s going on. The skinny policeman ignores what Passo Fundo’s cousin has said and repeats his question about what they are doing there. Passo Fundo and Paulo look at each other. ‘Four Indian women, friends of mine, live here,’ says Paulo. ‘Friends of yours? And where are they?’ It’s only the skinny policeman who speaks. It isn’t hard to tell that his partner, holding the cocked revolver, is a hair’s breadth away from losing it. ‘In another encampment,’ Paulo says, pointing towards the south. ‘Lower that arm, kid.’ It isn’t easy being friendly. Cars begin to stop on both sides of the road: curious passers-by who have spotted something out of the ordinary going on. ‘I’m going to ask one last time: what are the three of you doing here?’ The people who stopped have begun to get out of their cars. ‘I built a house for the four of them.’ Paulo looks over behind the Indian women’s tent. ‘I can show you … ’ His expression becomes even more serious. ‘So they have better living conditions.’ The skinny one steps closer. ‘And what about the National Indian Foundation, does FUNAI know about this? Do you have a construction license?’ he asks, not lowering his gun. ‘No,’ Paulo looks straight at him, ‘it was my idea, the two of them just came over to help me … Look, I can show you my papers. I’m a student at the state university, I’m studying law … ’ he tries to point out. ‘Ok, all of you over there,’ says the skinny one, now probably playing up to his audience on the roadside. ‘Keep an eye on them, Régis.’ He goes into Maína’s tent; once he’s inspected it he moves on to the small igloo tent, takes out the backpacks, opens the refuse sacks, looks at the empty cans and the painting gear inside, only then does he go over to the wooden room. The three of them wait under the gaze of the stockier one. Someone calls out offering to phone for reinforcements if the police want them (Paulo is bewildered by the offer; it’s human nature to root for the underdog, he remembers his father always used to say that). The skinny one returns. ‘Where are the Indian women? I want to know their precise whereabouts.’ Passo Fundo drops his arms, strikes a casual pose. ‘You guys have seen we aren’t armed. The Indians are going to be back soon. Any chance you can stop pointing those guns at us?’ The stocky one takes a step back. ‘You stop right there, scum, or … ’ Passo Fundo moves forward. Paulo steps in between them; the stocky one takes aim at his legs, fires.

The VW camper van used by FUNAI and the state government to take Maína to the medical centre at Barra do Ribeiro is running late. White and hollow, the construction behind her has never been occupied. Maína forbade her sisters from going into
that place
. Five months and the ingrained dirt growing in the pre-fab building. Five months since that morning when she arrived and found nobody there but the military policeman (and his 250cc motorcycle with the engine running) scribbling in a notepad, standing in front of their tent. A tall, impatient man with red hair, overburdening them with questions, refusing them the information they needed. It was only afterwards, when he was talking about what had happened, that he took a step back and turned, pointing down at an angle so that they would see the puddles of blood less than two metres away. (Amniotic, consumed in their land.) It’s all done now (although the image of all that blood remains confused). Five months to reach this moment when she is wearing the leotard, the dirty one that could have been washed but hadn’t been. She likes the way the pink matches the creamy colour of the ice cream that dripped onto the top of her chest and spread down over her stomach. When was that, actually? And when exactly had those things happened that made her think she had the power to say and act as she wanted? Madness. She will never have it. There was an exchange: the change is in her body; the successful natural selection of her yolk (no need even for a doctor), reproduction, birth, Jupiter protecting the earth with its perfect gravity, attracting towards it all the attacks from stray heavenly bodies, in spite of the colonial and foreign massacres, this spectacular immunity, the building of her youth against the clinical prescriptions around the sensation, that recurring sensation that the bladder, the hips, the base of the spine and everything else will collapse (cartilage already becoming bone, the seed already sucks up the liquid around it, swallows, hiccups, the liver and kidneys are already functioning, the seed already has a sex and already urinates). Nobody dares tell her that pregnancy is a good thing. What she finds bewildering are the cramps, unpleasant and tight, at night-time, in her calves. She needs to know.
Go away
when she remembers that she supported him.
Go
she says without being completely aware of it. Sometimes she repeats it
–
and makes herself ashamed
–
albeit repeating it to herself, not really even to herself. Her belly is her sisters’ plaything, the guest when they play make-believe, sharing out the food that is no more than mud, leaves, twigs, gravel, little crumbled pebbles. The leotard is her belly’s favourite piece of clothing. The belly is the life that Maína has to live. And she realises: she has been on her feet there for a long time. She walks over to the other side of the road, sits in the shade of the trees, stretches out her legs, looks up at the Durepox-grey of the sky, runs her hands over her ankles. Her feet are swollen in a way they haven’t been before, she feels broad, overloaded. Looking up at the sky, just staying still looking up at the sky, used to be the best way of not needing anything else. She listens to the noise of the camper van’s 1800cc engine, the deceleration and the downshift before the brakes kick in. The driver, an old man puffed up and proud, doesn’t get out to open the door. ‘Hey you, girl, get a move on, we’re running late.’ Maína looks at her hands, the way the colouring of her skin has changed a bit, she takes hold of the door handle, turns it. ‘What the hell are you playing at?’ the driver admonishes her. ‘What kind of beggar’s clothes are those you’re in? You look like some circus girl … ’ he says, making a point of behaving like an unreconstructed gaucho from another decade. ‘That doctor, you know she isn’t going to like that at all. If we weren’t late I’d make you change your clothes right away.’ Maína opens the door of the van. There are two small Indians sitting right at the back and an old Indian lady in the middle row, the same row she sits in as the van continues through the other encampments. And during the journey Maína remembers for the first time the moment when, still in a state of shock, she moistened her index finger in one of the pools of blood, then walked over to the white room and, without her feet touching the front steps, wiped her finger against the door, cursing it, damning it once again. The camper van enters the bounds of the city. Maína’s attention gets caught up by the roads in the city that she knew when she was six years old, where she watched her first tv and heard her first radio, when she began to register all the objects that the grown-ups handled, when she realised there was a whole world made specially for her not to be able to get into. The driver demands some complicity when he explains the time for their return, when he will be waiting with the camper van parked round the back of the health centre. The building is different, it’s been painted. Emerald green, that’s the colour. The nine Indians go into the waiting room, there is plenty of space, and there is the enormous poster hanging on the wall opposite the windows with the face of an entreating Christ, exaggeratedly blond, even his beard, his eyes very blue, under which is written ‘
Love your neighbour as yourself.
’ To love (a verb that’s always trying to switch direction). Everybody must love their neighbour. The doctor who will see her, the assistant who speaks Guarani and Portuguese, the permanently nasty driver, the hospital employees, the whole of Barra do Ribeiro, everybody. She is the second person to be seen. They take her blood pressure, measure her height, her weight, ask questions, ask her to go behind the metal screen, take off the leotard, cover herself up in the smock that’s almost the same shade of green as they used for the front wall of the health centre, they say to come into the doctor’s surgery. She sits in one of the two chairs that are at the only table in the room. The doctor arrives the next minute, she’s young, and she doesn’t hide her unease at the sight of the adolescent girl she is going to have to examine. Politely (and availing herself of the simultaneous interpretation from the assistant), after introducing herself, she asks whether Maína has been feeling any pain, any discomfort. Maína tells her about the cramps. The doctor jots something down in the notes resting on the blotter on the table, says she’ll show her some stretching exercises that will help her with the muscle contractions. As soon as the assistant translates it, Maína shakes her head. There are other questions, some of them identical to those which came before, and they are answered only with nods and shakes of the head until the doctor, changing her tone of voice, asks whether Maína is in touch with the child’s father. Maína doesn’t wait for the assistant to translate, she replies in Portuguese that she doesn’t know who the father is. The doctor puts down her pen, rests her hands on the blotter, looks at the assistant, asks her to leave the room for a few minutes. She gets up out of her chair, walks around the table, sits down beside Maína. Using even simpler words, she wants to know whether everything is all right. Maína remains silent, squeezing the hem of the gown, she can’t blame other people, it’s her, only her; she is the pivot who struggles with the normality that is so costly to find, and to maintain, for her mother and sisters, doomed to put up with the hormonal see-sawing of her own body for a few months longer. The doctor remains in silence for a few moments and then starts speaking again, about the risk of possible venereal disease, she starts a subtle bit of preaching (though now using friendly words that Maína does not understand) on the many types of sexual coercion and violence. Maína interrupts her saying she just wants the baby to be alive, and healthy. The doctor says that’s what she’s there to ensure. If there had been a script for this meeting, and if there were also an alternative script, both would have now ceased to make any sense. Maína sits closer to the edge of the chair and asks from what age the child will start having memories that would last for the rest of its life. The doctor says she hasn’t quite understood the question. Then, speaking more directly, Maína asks until what age the child can stay with its mother without
–
once it’s big, say about fifteen
–
being able to remember what she looks like, her voice, her smell. The doctor wants to know why she is asking. Maína says she has a lot of reasons, and also a lot of questions. The doctor says she is allowed to ask them. And then Maína asks about the likelihood of dying during childbirth, asks about what could go wrong and make her die during childbirth: the child living, her dying. The doctor stares, says awkwardly that everything is going to be fine, listing the tests she is going to have to do (she will no longer look at her). Maína can’t help but let out a sigh that should only have happened once she had left that place, left that room, finished having that conversation; she will give this doctor she has just met the collaboration she has denied Paulo, to whom, on the first and only chance they got to meet after the imprisonment (however much Paulo tried to explain, it was with this that she associated his disappearance), she told him not to get out of the car, not even to turn off the engine, and deliberately using words as rudimentary as the first time they had met, she asked him to find himself some other distraction and get out of her
life.

London.

The well-articulated intervention from Passo Fundo’s father confirming the esteem in which he was still held by his colleagues in the police, added to the condition that Paulo should never mention being hit by the bullet that went into and out of his right thigh without touching the bone (this in order for everyone to arrive at what he, excitedly, called a very excellent agreement), prevented the incident from ending up in administrative and criminal proceedings; the highway policeman who fired the gun, actually the son of a great friend of his from when he was in middle school at Ignácio Montanha at the end of the fifties and long before he ever imagined he’d end up a police chief, as he made a point of confiding to Paulo, had for weeks been using a gun of his own, a nickel-plated Colt thirty-eight in much better condition than those issued by the National Department of Roads and Highways
–
a twenty-two with a hammer spring and a cylinder breech in a dreadful state. Which was why he would not have to account for the projectile fired, there would be no mention of his outburst on the official record. In the public hospital it was no different: Paulo, the victim who might have been taken for the aggressor, was seen to as a matter of priority and with no record kept. It’s alarming how some things get resolved. What could not be remedied, however, was the discord created by his having given in so easily and gone into shock while he sought out the pain that didn’t appear even though the seconds were ticking past. As he struggled to stay on his feet, because this would allow him to react (and he was not reacting). And then came the shivering, the fearfulness. And other people talking and shouting instead of him. The dashing around, and the adjustment of tempers. And the pain. Passo Fundo says it was a mistake calling his father and, again and again, how fucked up it all is (his cousin had little paper sachets of cocaine in his trouser pocket). Paulo thought about the Indian girl, and especially about his parents (that his parents should not find out), since he’d left work and college, sold the car, and then there were all those days when he hadn’t shown up at home. He would hear his mother, in one of those conversations that were becoming more and more frequent, warning him that she was not prepared to support a son who was a dilettante, a poet, a grown man who didn’t work, didn’t study. He accepted the ex-police chief’s suggestion, feeling a bit turned-inside-out; he also really did want to avoid any mention of the incident (Maína was a subject belonging to him alone), though it is hard to hide a bullet wound, impossible not to limp, impossible not to show his grim mood in front of his parents who are living in the same house and lavishing all their attention on him, just as it was impossible to prevent Leonardo, who was in Porto Alegre taking his exams for a place in the Public Ministry, from showing up to visit and, finding he didn’t receive the welcome he had expected from Paulo, talking to his father about that difficult moment that he, the Paulo he so admired, was going through, and about the risk of a brilliant future going down the drain thanks to a delusional compulsion for anarchism, which doesn’t sit too well with a move towards maturity. Leonardo’s visit had its intended effect. Paulo’s mother went so far as to threaten her son with an injunction and called him a ‘two-bit little nihilist’ and said that he had disappointed her. Paulo simply took the opportunity to inform them that he was going to be spending a few months in Europe, washing dishes in restaurant kitchens, delivering food to offices, cleaning, delivering newspapers or whatever he had to do to save money and make his way around the world. On hearing his son’s announcement, his father didn’t say anything further (Paulo could see that to his father the idea was far from ridiculous, at least it was some kind of direction, a bit of direction for a while), he simply got up and left, his mother did the same. This was a few months ago. He left politics behind,
the fatuousness of politics
, left it to those who like playing at politics. And it almost didn’t matter that he was changing cities, going to live in London, to share a two-room flat with five people he didn’t know, friends of friends, but who gave him the warmest possible welcome nevertheless, turning over the living-room sofa to him; and it almost didn’t matter that he has made good use of this afternoon, the afternoon off from the Italian restaurant where he works preparing desserts, and has done his laundry for the week, and done his exercises in Gladstone Park and the stretching that was prescribed for him by the physiotherapist and, back home, after half an hour soaking in the tub, that he has put on a cool long-sleeved Dudalina shirt, from the time when he used to go around Porto Alegre in a suit, and a pair of jeans he’s just bought in Brixton; and it almost didn’t matter that he has taken the Tube into town, got out at Charing Cross station right by Trafalgar Square, walked to St Martin’s Lane, gone into Café Pelican, run right into Tom Waits at one of the smart tables in one of the most expensive establishments in Covent Garden, almost nothing mattered: the memory of Maína and his feeling of having messed up with her travel with him wherever he goes. There is no place to hide, there are no more fears about what the strips of LSD, the waxy pellets of hashish, the tubes of poppers being passed from hand to hand on Thursday nights at Heaven, the London nightclub, can do to his brain, the
golden
brain that needs to be quicker and more agile than that of any of his acquaintances, his competitors. There’s no more Porto Alegre, news from the unforgiveable provincialism of Porto Alegre, and there’s no longer the task of getting everything done by yesterday, nor the crappy proletarian revolution in Brazil. All it takes is a public transport pass, a one-month pass on the
metrô
, as the Brazilians call it, with the little wallet where they glue your three-by-four photo in the top right-hand corner to allow you to move around the central parts of town, and a few coins to buy a Twix and a Coke (Maína’s taste for Coke got him addicted) and that was that. He allowed everything he had once learned to be transformed into a great ignorance. And there, that’s where the urgency was. He sleeps, wakes, takes the Tube, works, fifteen-minute break, works, takes the Tube back, eats the sandwiches he’s usually made at the end of the shift, drinks a few shots of the spirits purloined from the bars where the others in the house
–
almost all of them bartenders
–
work, chats to whoever is awake (making conversation is the social responsibility of anyone who sleeps in the living room), does the washing up when it’s his turn to do the washing up, takes a shower in the adapted cubicle in the kitchen that takes fifty-pence coins and is much cheaper than the shower in the room with the bathtub which, besides being more expensive, is also for the collective use of everyone living on all four floors of the house, reads the newspapers that he picks up for free at the Tube stations, waits till he is absolutely sure that everyone has retired for the night, moves the coffee-table off the rug in the middle of the room, lays out the mattress, sleeps. Fabio, his Brazilian friend who works at Café Pelican, says that Tom Waits was only there to do an interview with a journalist from
Time Out
magazine. Tom Waits, tall and tanned, waving his arms about like an athlete, doesn’t look to him anything like the image that appears on the cover of his records that sell in their thousands in Brazil.