Nowhere People (9 page)

Although he is recovering well, his leg still hurts, a
lot.

‘Ah,
mon cher monsieur
! Per’aps
monsieur
will ’ave anozzer leetle glass of our verrry expensif wine?’ Fabio kids around with him, catching Paulo at just the moment when he is watching Tom Waits and the journalist out the corner of his eye. ‘What’s up, Fabinho? Weren’t you heading out?’ asks Paulo. ‘So the thing is, man, Etienne, that anorexic fag, asked me to stay till it’s time to cash up,’ and, taking the nearly empty glass from Paulo’s hand, Fabio wipes the cloth over the granite surface of the bar. ‘You’re going to have to stay? Well then, take it easy.’ Paulo shifts position on his stool, which is tall and doesn’t have footrests. ‘Yeah. Another hour and a half. Bastard manager. Well, I suppose it’s just tough shit, this is my job. I’ll give you some more wine,’ Fabio mutters. ‘Don’t bother. I’ll make the most of the fact that I’m at a loose end and you’re doing this overtime, I’ll go by the anti-apartheid vigil outside the South African embassy. Apparently there are these two big-shot militants who’re going to talk about the negotiations to end Nelson Mandela’s imprisonment.’ He gets down from the stool with no footrests. ‘Son-of-a-bitch South African government, this whole segregation thing, I just don’t get it,’ says Fabio without ever losing his elegant, Italian movie-star pose (an absolute prerequisite for getting a job at the Pelican). ‘You get segregation everywhere, Fabinho, theirs is just more brazen than the others,’ he muses, ‘or rather, it’s the first one I’d like to see brought to an end. So look, keep your very expensive wine for some other day. Today our business is with some Mexican beer courtesy of Drake, right?’ Picking Fabio up at work was to have been part of the arrangement for going together to the exclusive party for friends of the staff at Bar Sol, the restaurant everyone wants to work at because, besides being a fun place to serve, it’s far and away the bar where the customers, most of them American tourists, leave the best tips. Fabio was invited to work there by Drake, who has a Brazilian mother and an English father and has worked at the restaurant ever since it first opened and always manages to get himself back in work there when he decides to come over from Brazil and spend a few months in the city. ‘We’ll talk at Bar Sol, Paulo … And watch out for any trouble, those gatherings outside the South African embassy sometimes end up in confrontations with the police.’ Paulo puts on his jacket. ‘So I just ask for Drake, right?’ and he gives one last glance at Thomas Alan Waits, one of the few idols in his life right now. ‘Yeah, he’ll be expecting you.’ Paulo turns, heads off towards the door. On the street, he turns left down St Martin’s Lane, which will take him straight to the South African embassy.

The people who are not on the pavement directly outside the building have positioned themselves across the road on the paved central area of Trafalgar Square. The young black man wearing a white shirt buttoned up to his neck and holding a microphone turns towards the embassy, he says: ‘Nelson Mandela is still in prison, but he won’t be for long.’ The people clap. Paulo is with them now, already feeling the effects of the wine he drank hurriedly at the Pelican. He finds it surreal how explicit they are, these manifestations of belief in the possibility of Mandela being released without bargaining before he dies. It isn’t, for him, a question of witnessing what could perhaps be part of a significant historical process; he is there out of curiosity. As it happens, he lied when he was questioned at the immigration counter, saying he was here as a tourist and that he wouldn’t stay longer than twenty days in the United Kingdom; he did that out of curiosity. He drinks with people he doesn’t know, some of them even younger than him, people from all over the world, he does this out of curiosity. He drinks until things get dangerous, out of curiosity. He hangs out with people who are rich and spoiled, with Turks playing football in Hyde Park on the weekend, people who live it up because they’re in London and then become the domesticated little wives of other people who make a point of complaining nastily and telling their friends that their
domesticated little wives
can’t cook properly and don’t swallow their sperm when they suck their huge cocks, with couples from Madeira with their totally incomprehensible Portuguese, he does all this out of curiosity. He walks alone, in the early hours, from the centre to the north of the city, to Willesden Green, having dropped home the waitresses from Ireland, or Poland, or Jamaica, whom he has been trying to hook up with, even if it’s only for a week, spending every night at their place, he does it out of curiosity. He goes into Stanford’s, the best map shop in the world, some people say, and looks at the huge maps they have framed on the walls, especially the one that shows the southern hemisphere in the upper part of the
mappa mundi
, out of curiosity. Curiosity, just curiosity, curiosity is what’s new now nothing matters man and everyone can go to hell cause now I don’t give a fuck and I want to see if this shit catches fire once and for all. Amid
excuse me
s
and
sorry
s he makes his way over towards the speaker, undoubtedly more emphatic and positive than the middle-aged gentleman who had come before him. He watches him, comparing. It’s as if it were decades ago, as if he had himself never spoken in public, never needed to be charismatic and to convince a group of students, at times in gatherings of more than twenty thousand people, to hate their university vice-chancellors, and members of the Ministry of Education, and foundations run by private universities whose accounts and tax exemptions are never made quite clear enough. He feels odd, not only the dizziness of the wine, it’s the dreams and the hope that he can’t bear. Such haste, his own haste. So much that it made him stagnate. He hasn’t been interested in trying to think. It’s the first time he has stopped and paid attention to something important since arriving in London. He doesn’t know which struggle is worth it. Where, after all, is this nineteen eighty-nine happening if not in London, New York, Tokyo? Life is moving on. He’s in his early twenties and feels like an old man, though not old enough (feeling like an old man isn’t usually the same as
nothing matters any more
, though it has been). And the wine having its effect, there isn’t a drug that takes you apart in quite the same way. He thinks. She sent him away. Maína’s fragility was never weakness. This inability to feel real
passion
, the way some people seem to feel it without making the least effort. Now he realises (as he is overtaken by a feeling of nausea, a nausea that will force him to get out of there) or he assumes: however much he does, he won’t be able to get involved again.

‘Shall we go to the bathroom?’ says the little Portuguese girl who has been clinging to Paulo since he arrived at Sol (she gets all tangled up wanting to talk like the Brazilians, it’s embarrassing after a while). ‘I’ll stick round here,’ Paulo replies without any warmth at all, fascinated by the tall black girl with the big glasses who has been watching him for several minutes and who is standing at the entrance to the corridor that leads to the other bar. Perhaps he would have been intimidated by her determination if he were sober, but that isn’t the case, he has already drunk all the beer he meant to drink, his superego is suitably caged in, he puts the empty glass down on the window ledge, walks over to the girl. ‘Hi,’ he says. ‘Hi,’ she replies, stepping closer, because the noise is really loud in that part of the bar. ‘I saw you today’
–
taking Paulo by surprise
–
‘I was outside the South African embassy two hours ago,’ she explains. ‘Are you involved with the South African cause?’ he asks (he thinks he hasn’t used quite the right term). ‘We all are, aren’t we?’ she replies. And suddenly he feels as though he has seen her before. ‘By the way, my name’s Paulo … What’s yours?’ She holds out her hand. ‘Rener.’ They shake. ‘Tell me, Rener, where are you from?’ he asks. ‘I’m from Paris. You know the one? The city that’s in Paris, you know?’ letting herself smile for the first time. ‘The way London’s in London?’ He tries to go along with it. ‘No, in London it’s completely different,’ and she takes a sip of her soft drink. ‘Typical Parisienne,’ he said. ‘I do like the geography, but I’m not a typical Parisienne, I don’t share the city’s mood, I’m not proud of having been born there … I mean, it doesn’t make any difference that that’s where I was born.’ She pulls him over towards the wall, their conversation is obstructing other people’s passage. ‘You’re not a committed neighbourhood-ist, a nationalist. Is that what you mean?’ he says (there’s always some room for error when two people who speak different languages are using a third language to communicate). ‘I don’t believe in nationalities … Just like I don’t believe in victims … My presence at the pro-Mandela action was just to see how far the speeches by those two guys would go and if they’d resort to the old trick of victimising, in the sense of victimising people and cultures,’ she said, firmly. ‘That’s the kind of answer I need a whole night to understand, and another whole night to come up with an adequate retort’
–
he is even more convinced that he’s seen her before. ‘Ok, so I’m giving you a hard time, aren’t I?’ she takes hold of his arm, ‘but I can assure you, I’m a pretty cool person.’ She takes the last sip of her soft drink. ‘I like it when people give me a hard time … ’ says Paulo, flexing his arms and puffing up his chest in an attempt to recreate Popeye the sailor’s pose without, however, remembering quite what Popeye the sailor’s pose was. The joke didn’t work. ‘How about we get out of here, Paulo?’ she suggests, ‘Paulo who caught
my
eye out there and who, as it happened, showed up here at
my
party and caught
my
eye again.’ He looks at her. ‘Coincidences, Rener. Though it’s hard for me to admit, life is made up of them.’ And someone taps his shoulder. ‘You’d better be careful with that black girl, she’s extremely dangerous,’ Drake says loudly, Fabio is with him. ‘Since you’re the type of guy who’ll even read the instructions on a medicine packet
–
didn’t you read last week’s
TNT
? There was a photo of that beauty there that took up nearly half a page of the magazine.’ And Paulo realises where he’s seen her before. ‘That’s right, comrade, my ex-colleague from Sol is an important woman, she was named the boldest of the three leaders of this squatting movement robbing the owners of large south London properties of their peace of mind,’ he goes on. ‘We only occupy properties that are empty,’ she says, ‘and of course homes belonging to the government.’ Drake kisses her on the forehead. ‘I love you.’ And then speaking in Portuguese, ‘I always wanted to fuck her, never managed to do it.’ Then switching back to English, ‘So Paulo, has she told you she’s a huge fan of Nietzsche?’ Paulo shakes his head. ‘Nietzsche,’ Drake continues, ‘the Coca-Cola of intellectualism for the under twenties.’ Rener leans over towards Paulo and whispers: ‘I do like the book
Ecce Homo
, that’s all.’ Fabio tugs on Drake’s arm. ‘Hey, genius, use all that philosophical stuff you know and score some more beer for your compatriots.’ Drake gestures let’s go on, and they leave. ‘I love you too, Drake,’ she says and, turning to Paulo (and before saying that her problem isn’t that she’s twenty-six and still likes Nietzsche), Rener puts her hands on his face and kisses him on the mouth.

Rener asks him to be quiet, the woman who lives in the next-door apartment has a sick daughter. She puts the jug of water and the glass on the small tin tray on the edge of the bedside table, turns on the little lamp, opens the wardrobe, takes out a Marks & Spencer carrier bag, throws it over to his side of the bed, he opens it (it’s full of every brand and style of condom), she turns off the ceiling light and immediately tosses a tube of lubricant onto his chest, she says that they are going to do what two uninhibited men should do when they feel there’s the chance of a great friendship between
them.

Coincidences.

Paulo said he had to be at the restaurant before ten in the morning and it’s already eleven thirty-five (straight after the alarm clock had gone off, at nine, Rener had opened the bedroom curtains; she didn’t say anything, just made a cup of coffee, left it beside the bed and went back to sleep). From the moment he opened his eyes he was immersed in this stony silence. He must have said what he hadn’t told anyone since leaving Brazil. It was a good night in any case. She will introduce him to some guys who will get him to choose an empty building in Elephant and Castle. Arrive when it is getting dark (there’s no reason to hide from the building’s other residents; greet everyone, be polite, try not to give any impression that you’re going to be a bad neighbour), break the sealed padlock put there by the government and remove the metal bar blocking access to the door, break down the door, change the lock as quickly as you can, check that the new keys work, lock the door and only then tell yourself that the place is yours (at least until the squatter eviction proceedings, which can take years to progress, come to an end). It isn’t a question of good faith but of sorting out your life, yours and other people’s along the way, too. Sorting it out the way she, Rener, has been doing. She remembers having said that any mistakes must not be because of cowardice. Perhaps this was what made him agree like that, but it’s hard for her to know, it could have been so many other things. The worst mistake would be to try and guess, now that it’s nearly midday and she has to say that in a week’s time they will be entering a property valued at more than nine million and she’s counting on him, she needs there to be seven people besides herself and she has only managed to get six, there aren’t many people who will risk an occupation like this. If things work out, twenty people will get a new home; if they go wrong it’s every man for himself. Rener will figure out some way of getting back to Paris and, assuming there are no further coincidences, she and the Brazilian will not see each other again.