Nowhere People (14 page)

End of the third week. São Francisco de Paulo is one of the chilliest places in the state, particularly at night. Maína had quickly become friends with the interns. They went out to eat at the snack bar that the locals have told them is the most popular in town, to try the burger dubbed by the owner the ‘Aro Fenemê’ (after the brand of lorry wheels), a pressed sandwich (as is the custom in the region) with three kinds of sausage and five kinds of cheese served without lettuce or onion, just with one large slice of southern tomato and a lot of mayonnaise. Luisa and Henrique have stayed at the hotel with Donato. Henrique is completely attached to the boy. Luisa gets up from the bed, takes a sparkling water from the minibar. Donato is playing on the single bed that is beside the double. Henrique is watching the news. The national news is showing footage of bundles and more bundles of
cruzeiro
banknotes being packed up on conveyor belts on their way to the incinerator in the Central Bank, while an analyst is remarking that Brazil is the country with the third highest inflation in the world, after Zaire and Russia. Luisa asks him to turn the television off, she can’t bear it any more with this headache she’s got. In the last few days nothing has been able to lessen her migraine. Henrique says she needs to find a specialist and stop self-medicating. She changes the subject, saying how surprised she is at the Indian girl’s liveliness and that she’s thinking of a way to help her, perhaps taking her to Rio for the first term of her doctoral studies next year. Luisa knows Henrique is planning to stay in São Paulo for a bit, but vehemently rejects the idea of living in the Paulista capital herself. This has been the cause of the slight friction between the two of them. Henrique barely hears her, just lowers the volume of the set slightly so he can still catch a young, smiling economist announcing that a leading firm in the calculator sector has over the last year been investing in the production of fourteen-digit calculators where the normal would be ten, that they have been doing this purely as a response to Brazil’s current reality. Luisa sits on the bed where Donato is playing, she says that tomorrow she will do a filming session with Maína alone and, gently squeezing the boy’s toes, she tells Henrique, without making him take his eyes off the television for a single second, that the Indian girl had suggested being filmed naked when they first
met.

Nine in the morning. Maína is reluctant to be filmed, says that things have changed too much these past weeks, she is no longer keen on the idea of exposing herself. Luisa suggests recording just a few minutes with Donato on her lap. Maína says that if it’s going to be with her son then she absolutely definitely won’t. Luisa says she doesn’t understand her and, laughing, turns off the camera. At noon as Maína is tidying papers and folders, Luisa films her from a distance. When she realises what is going on, Maína folds her arms, yells in Guarani, but seeing that Luisa is not going to give up, says in Portuguese (her Portuguese that is getting better and better) that it’s ok; she sets aside what she is doing and gets up and moves, half-inclined to run, to imagine something from the cinema (or what she remembers from the cinema), or possibly even to dance.

The morning shower is the most dangerous moment in his day, the water beating down on his head, the relaxation in those bright surrounds of the cubicle, the waterproof white paint, the acrylic of the sliding door, positive thoughts gathering, what the doctors call a flight of ideas. Paulo is not on any medication, nor will he take any. Psychiatric treatment requires a link to the city’s health system and to the city itself that he has never wanted to establish, there is no one to take responsibility for him, a more pessimistic diagnosis might see him caught in a trap from which he might never escape. The cocker spaniel follows him around the rooms in the house. Sometimes the lady shows up and makes a comment on what he might do in order to better fulfil his role as head employee in that cheap seven-room hotel on Fitzroy Street, a two-star establishment less than a hundred and fifty metres from Euston Road and three hundred from Tottenham Court Road. He only leaves the hotel to deposit his salary in the bank, to buy toiletries; if it were up to him he would absolutely never set foot on the pavement. His job is to receive the guests who have been sent by the booking service that goes directly through the owner, an Italian who turns up there once a week; to set the tables for breakfast, served between seven-thirty and ten; and to supervise the cleaning service. Three floors and a basement, where the office and the pantry are to be found. He still cannot look directly at the sky, he can’t imagine getting into a car, going into Warren Street station, the feelings of vertigo are unbearable. In the hotel, he spends most of his time in his bedroom listening to the cassettes that the other employee, a Welsh guy, copies from the CDs he buys and passes on to him, he translates the lyrics to the songs, he gradually becomes able to read some comic books (English comics are very violent) that his colleague lends him. Sometimes Fabio, who is now manager at Café Pelican, shows up for a visit, and the effort that Paulo makes to demonstrate that he is leading a normal life is enormous. He has told no one what is going on. Sometimes his discomfort is visible, especially when Fabio, trying to cheer him up, tells him his jokes and stories of his escapades with women, where laughter is the compulsory response. The debt to the Lebanese men has been settled, Paulo never cried in front of them, never showed weakness. (Paulo does not take any medication.) One novelty is this compulsion he has to write whatever comes into his head. He thought it could be the disturbance known as hypergraphia, but he has asked the medical student who has taken up residence for a fortnight in room eleven about it, and it’s unlikely, people with that particular kind of mania can’t stop writing, he can. Writing is merely comforting. It’s not like drafting pamphlets inspired by the increase in monthly wages, student demands, the end of censorship or in favour of some trade union demand. No. It is a way of putting the day into some kind of order, of having something to do when his jobs are all done, when he cannot imagine what to do without getting anxious. He lines up his duties as though they were a chain, a row of boxes on which he places his hand on each number in sequence, he thinks about what to do, carries that out, then thinks about the next task, carries that out, in this way assuring the tranquillity of his days and saving money to return, defeated, to Brazil.

Henrique turns up at the encampment. He is alone. As soon as Donato sees him he runs over towards him. Maína finds it funny, this little three-year-old doll who is so receptive to the presence of a guy who just four months ago was a stranger. Henrique is downcast, he says he stopped by because he was missing the boy so much he couldn’t bear it. He has brought some little books, the kind you give children under four, he brought a box of tabletop games for Maína’s sisters. He asks if he can stay for lunch and hands her a bag with a roast chicken and polenta. Maína hugs him and says thank you. It is a while before she asks about Luisa, and he replies that they have decided to separate. Luisa has gone back to Rio, she will do her doctorate there, because from one moment to the next she had decided that she had been far away from her parents for too long and, yes, just because she is wilful and impulsive. Maína leaves him playing with Donato and prepares a pot of rice; her sisters entertain themselves with the Chinese chess, whose rules he tries to explain while Donato uses him as a human climbing frame. Maína’s mother says she is going to prepare a sweetcorn porridge for Henrique to have for dessert and to take away in a jar for later, it will help to perk you up, she assures him. While the rice is cooking, Maína hands Henrique a package, says that there are two envelopes inside, one with his name on and the other with Luisa’s, they’re a couple of things she would like them to have as gifts. She only asks that his not be opened until after they have eaten the porridge and that hers is only delivered to her when the two of them have made their peace. Henrique takes the package, saying he isn’t sure he will be talking to Luisa again all that soon. Maína says she’s sure they will get back together before long, she says Luisa loves him too much, that she has never seen anyone love somebody so much. Henrique leaves the package next to the bench where he is sitting, goes back to playing with Donato. It’s a lovely day, with a breeze that couldn’t be more pleasant. Maína asks her mother to help her take the table from inside the tent to under the tree on the northern side of the encampment. She tells Henrique (who tries to get up when he sees the women carrying the table) not to move, today he’s the guest of honour. They fix the legs of the table so that they aren’t wonky and cover it with a flannel tablecloth with a Christmas pattern that her mother has kept for years, something they use only on special occasions. The lunch has taken on a festive atmosphere. Henrique has left the van radio on loud, the girls asked him to, they are as noisy as ever. Maína proposes a toast, saying she never learned so much in so little time from anyone and that she will miss them. They clink glasses. Her sisters don’t really understand why they do it. Henrique jokes that Maína really did learn: she learned the dramatic touch that Luisa used to bring to even the simplest occasion. They laugh. Maína says she is going out to fetch some leaves and herbs and make some tea while they wait for her mother’s porridge. Henrique says he has plenty of time. Maína takes the basket (which is a bit large for someone who is going to gather leaves and herbs but nobody notices). It’s a lovely day. She goes into that small bit of forest that grows on the north side of the tent, walks maybe thirty metres, climbs the tree, reaches the branch she selected years earlier, ties four good, strong knots, waits for a series of lorries that always scream past to add to the loud sounds from Henrique’s van. (She thinks of the time she talked to Luisa about God, and perhaps because of all that studying, Luisa said proudly that she would rather not believe in the possibility of there being a God. She asks Him for Paulo’s disappearance, his total disappearance, for many years.) She puts the rope around her neck and jumps.

A child aged five barefoot in the sand, standing in front of the sea for the first time and directly under the noonday sun of a baking summer day like this one, needs a good while to understand what his eyes, unable to see clearly at distance, can make out. Which is why as Henrique bodysurfs the waves of Siriú beach, Donato remains petrified at the vastness of the turquoise horizon which outweighs any other image or object that gets in front of it, subtracting any image or figure to enter its enormity, just as he subtracts Henrique, on this their first trip outside São Paulo. The nanny has come along, too, sitting next to him on the back seat of the five-door Ipanema, making up stories while Henrique drives cautiously alone up front. Donato does whatever he can to be adorable during their playtime, and again when they colour in pieces of paper with a felt-tip pen, constructing Brazilian Air Force jets out of them, which right now are crammed into the wicker bag beside the blue bucket and the green rake on the strange solidity of the sand. Playing along with her games was, he found, a way of not being in the way; it was how he cooperated with Henrique, being cooperative, accepting the possibility of freeing himself from the blurred memories
–
indiscriminately shot through with lapses
–
that will soon cease to exist, of finding happiness in their cohabitation and accepting it as the counterpoint to something that is the palpable part of solitude (of a solitude that has also been his), yes, a thousand times yes, cooperating, being cooperative, inventing a kind of succinct order in this, a recreation that will be useful in every future, near or far, feeding the desire that one day, in one such future, he would be able to ignore it, since, like any other child, what Donato really wants is sheer normality and the normality of fear that comes with the destruction
–
the unrealisable destruction
–
of the televisual images in his head (the insignificant thing in the midst of which he recognises a foolproof code to bring him happiness, every day), pocket-sized monsters that become bigger monsters, spheres with the entire future of humankind and the universe depending on them, blows, fleeting in indescribable clothes, stimuli oscillating between the initial yellow and the most tragic red, and, then, all of a sudden, someone, someone he can’t make out, takes hold of him under his armpits and lifts him more than a metre in the air, and now he’s no longer looking at the sea (there is only the impenetrability of the sky) and he feels a reverse electricity running through him absurdly slowly as though gravity were propagating itself within another person, planted, uprooted and replanted in another person, and it isn’t a good match, it doesn’t fit, with the vertiginously fast and strange situation that is really a weight filling his chest, a cartoon at that precise moment when the guy’s plane has run out of fuel and is falling, under the potent emphasis of a Japanese soundscape; now, the culmination of the sky gives him the impression of being frozen in blue before his eyes, it’s distressing, a lack of completeness carrying the shock that he was not able to conceive and that (with another, a worse electricity) happens again when, as part of the same action, his feet sweep up to the height of his head, and he tries to scream, but his voice does not come out (and if it did come out, it would surely be someone else’s, the person he needs to be and whose speech is decisive, it’s the command from the pocket-sized monsters turning into bigger monsters), it is trapped in his stomach and surrounded by ways of giving up, and there’s no way to go any higher which is why now his body moves in a different way, and in the trajectory between all these moments, and still with difficulty, he, Donato, understands what it is to fall. ‘But Nato, you weigh a ton … ’ he hears a woman’s voice and, before thinking that his feet are about to touch the ground, he realises that he’s going up again, going up as though he were attached to springs, and he keeps moving, launching up in an acrobatic take off, like characters on tv, free, asking himself whether this is what life is like, whether these will be his powers and this his heroic initiation, twisting a hundred and eighty degrees before returning to the firm hands that catch him before he tumbles and keep him at the height of the woman’s face, the kind of woman from the television, but whom he cannot identify, just as he could not identify her voice. ‘Heavy and huge, my little Indian … ’ The woman looks right at him. ‘You don’t recognise Luisa,’ she says and finally brings him back to the ground. ‘I’ve brought you a present,’ and takes from the bag she has across her chest a carved wooden owl, some fifteen centimetres high. Donato says nothing, but he recognises the object that was once his toy. He holds out his little arms, almost jumps onto her, holding her tight with an aggression that is not his own (as though everything around him were diminishing in significance), and turns back towards the dunes and stays like that, immobile, intoxicated by the scent of wood, of vine-extract paint, of the earth and the fat that are still encrusted in it, and an anxiety comes to him that is mixed in with a televisual certainty of inhabiting the solid shape of the owl, flying within it just like the flying animations that he watches every morning on the tv in the living room of his father’s house, he wants to fly, to wind his way along the fibres of carved white cedar. The woman runs one of her hands over his head, with the other she waves to Henrique, who has already seen her, and asks: ‘Is Henrique giving you a lot of trouble, Juruna boy?’ The child is still dazed, trying in his own way to remember what the voice of the owl was like, the feminine voice that was inside the owl (or surrounding it), but the owl is mute and every moment more diminished in familiarity. ‘You don’t remember Luisa any more, do you? … Shame. Fourteen months is an eternity, I know … But you haven’t forgotten the owl. That’s good … ’ The woman looks back towards Henrique, he’s walking out of the sea now. ‘A new life … ’ She touches the tip of Donato’s nose and, without another word, walks over towards the edge of the water. Donato looks at the owl, then at the people who are nearby (there aren’t many, most of them sitting under their parasols), his gaze stops on the nanny, she’s about five metres away and wearing sunglasses, it’s impossible to know which direction she’s looking in, whether she has seen him or not. And he freezes, he can’t manipulate the details or draw them out, he cannot even retain them. Somewhere not too far from that seaside, very probably in Garopaba, there are tv sets turned on (Donato doesn’t know this) and on them a paediatrician is being interviewed on the midday news. Obligingly, she is explaining that a child’s motor functions, whether through movement or through touch, are what he uses to reinforce his visual attention, allowing him to explore and provoke his surroundings. Donato does not manipulate his surroundings, he doesn’t provoke his surroundings. Donato merely reflects upon being at the wonderful height of those dunes further off to his right, just like drawings, sandy giants, monsters offering up their breastplates, which might be where the bulk of the memories are to be found that he is not finding in the wooden owl. Henrique and the woman are keeping themselves occupied twenty-something metres from where Donato is standing. They are talking about him, even if he doesn’t realise it, because he has his back to them (and also because he’s no more than a child), articulating his thought as he has never before articulated it, spending the minutes as he has never spent them, before walking towards the vulnerability of that quite new landscape, before keeping his eyes fixed on the dunes, trying out a few steps, looking at the oblivious nanny, dropping the owl in the sand, and running, really running.

Months have passed since that time on the beach, the woman has a name, but the name is not spoken by him very often (it’s a name that still does not fit in the apartment where he lives with Henrique and the new nanny, a name he still does not want). She, the woman, can’t decide whether to come and live with them in São Paulo, she’s asked for a bit of time to think about it, whether she is really going to leave Rio de Janeiro, the kind of life it is possible to have only there. Donato knows how to listen to her, he learns a lot from listening to her talk, she is quick and unpredictable, Henrique is not as unpredictable. Which is why it is Cássia, the personal assistant Henrique employed when they rented the Sumaré apartment, who takes him in today for his first day at pre-school. Sending him to a bilingual institution is perhaps the better and cheaper option, but by enrolling him in this one, where English is the main language and seventy per cent of the places are given to the children of foreigners living in Brazil, Henrique believes he is making sure the child will suffer less. Donato will learn English and improve his Portuguese at the same time, he will have to cope alongside other children who are also having to adapt. Henrique, his father, is not sure about this decision, but he wants the best opportunities for the son he has chosen. It wasn’t easy getting the letter of enrolment, Donato will know that one day. If Henrique had not been advising a group of north American industries with an interest in the improvement of Brazil’s patent law, a group whose spokesperson is the vice-president of the school’s parent-teacher association, it is unlikely that the headmistress would have made an exception. Of course, there are requirements, a number of requirements that are far from simple. As the admissions coordinator emphasised, the school management’s greatest fear is that Donato should end up holding back his fellow students’ progress. So they agreed that he should receive intensive coaching outside classes to compensate for his linguistic deficiencies, and at the end of May he would undergo an assessment. The word
change
is one of the words Donato understands best. Hardly taking into account his young age (as an Olympic gymnastics trainer would, for example, with his kids, or the teacher of a prodigy just out of nappies in search of possible musical genius), Henrique told him that a full life demands big changes, he said that everything is ready, but that the change will require commitment from them both. Donato feels his love and really tries hard to follow him. And when the taxi stops outside the school, Cássia asks the driver to wait for her, she will pay afterwards, she knows they’re late, she walks with Donato to the reception desk where there is a young woman who speaks to them in English, the welcome greeting makes Cássia uncomfortable (she is quite clever, able, but her English isn’t that good) and makes her say merely, unsure whether her Portuguese is being understood, that Donato is a new pupil. The young woman immediately starts speaking Portuguese with quite a heavy, strange foreign accent, excusing herself saying that the children there, on the whole, have a good grasp of English and it was only force of habit that stopped her from welcoming them in Portuguese. Cássia cups Donato’s cheeks with her two hands and wishes him good luck. Donato briefly smiles back at her. The girl from the school takes him by the shoulder and leads him towards the classroom. They walk along corridors. They stop outside the room where his lesson is taking place, his chaperone knocks on the door. It’s not long before there is an opening, and he sees his future classmates sitting in groups around hexagonal tables. The teacher looks at him and smiles. The young woman from reception goes in with him, the teacher has already been briefed about the particularities of this new student and, at least this time, she addresses him in Portuguese. After announcing his name to the rest of the pupils, she shows him where he is going to sit. The table she is pointing to has three children at it (it is the only table in the room that isn’t full), he doesn’t look at their faces, the one who is next to him, a girl with black skin, touches his arm and says in a French accent that her name Rener, but her nickname is Brown Sugar, he looks at her with a smile and, in Guarani, says it is good to be there, the girl also smiles and says his hair is a lovely colour. The teacher walks round handing out blank paper and crayons, the one he gets is dark grey. It is his first assignment, and he completes it easily because all he has to do is do the same as the other three at the table. The minutes fly by. Half the morning had passed and it was break time and all the children went to an enclosed playground, where there were toys that needed to be played with in twos or threes, team against team. Most of them behaved as though this was all theirs, it was their property, as though they had practised the night before or were using some kind of telepathy, because they were so exact and integrated as they coordinated their activities on the seesaws, on the slide, on the monkey bars, on the rocking beam, on the swings, on the jungle gym, and on the wireframe rockets, the same pieces of equipment that appear in the background of the photo of the whole class taken at the end of that same morning after the teacher handed them small jigsaws to assemble and stick onto a piece of card as homework (in the photo, Rener is looking straight at him, she’s beautiful, slender, completely unembarrassed; she insists that it was that day she gave him the nickname Curumim, from the Tupi-Guarani word meaning a boy, but that is not true). That morning was the closest it was possible to get to the phrase ‘group bonding’ in the whole of that year of nineteen ninety-five. It was only the following day, when the teacher handed out more complex activities to do, that he understood that it wouldn’t work simply to watch what was happening and copy it. As the weeks passed, language quickly stopped being a rarely used tool. And on the day of the assessment, overloaded with unknown words, with gaps that had no tactile equivalents, Donato understood that he needed to be exactly as his father wanted.

The end of the year. Lada Niva is the make and model he most likes to say, followed by the Fiat Uno, the Saab Scania, Toyota Bandeirantes and a long and varied list of other names almost all of which are compound nouns connected to the inexhaustible world of the automobile. Besides these, he likes words like fireman, pilot, lifeguard
–
this latter, as it happens, printed in yellow on the back of the red t-shirt he is currently wearing as he and Henrique are on their way to Guarulhos airport to meet the woman. They are on the Tietê riverfront road, one of the few places that make him less impressed by the things shown on television, it’s almost his favourite place in São Paulo. Countless vehicles with endless differences that make him demand from Henrique the proper names and the proper updates to the models (about five minutes ago it was the Maserati, seen for the first time), all taken in as fast as the quick-fire answers given to the questions that he himself takes on the task of asking. This is the greatest proof that he has integrated perfectly into his new life. Comfortable being Version
boy: upper-middle class, são paulo
devoted body and soul to his collection of Matchbox and Hot Wheels miniatures. Today is the first day of his summer holidays. He feels proud because Henrique, as though speaking to an adult, told him at breakfast that all his expectations as regarded his school performance had been achieved and so, next year, he would be staying on in the same school. This is good, because that girl is there, Rener, who of all his classmates inspires him with the greatest confidence about what to say, how to speak. Because he has merited it by his own efforts (this was the expression Henrique used), they would spend the rest of the morning at that bookshop, Paulista, for him to choose two books. Henrique was not explicit as to the language, but Donato knew what his father expected of him. He chose one in Portuguese, one in English. Donato understands the enormous dedication shown by Henrique, his father Henrique, to making the two of them a family. At school the older teachers talk quite a lot about family and about God (the word God troubles him less than the word family). In the drawings he does, it is only him and Henrique. Donato likes to draw someone holding his left hand. Starting from today he knows that he can draw the woman, she will be the one holding his left hand. Donato hopes he will be able to draw her a lot, to draw her forever, he hopes that she makes an effort (as much as the two of them) to get a
very good
or an
excellent
, just as he has managed to get in almost all his assignments at school. Donato understands the enormous dedication shown by Henrique. Donato understands Henrique and, most of the time, he tries to pre-empt his actions so as not to disappoint him. The first and only time he responded with aggression to a classmate, he was taken to the office of the headmistress, who told him, ‘You are lucky to have been taken in by someone as good as senhor Henrique’; she told him that undisciplined attitudes like Donato’s would only disappoint him. Disappointment is a word Donato does not like, but it helps him to understand the world all the same, even more than other words that are better to say. Disappointment justifies words like
careful
, a word he relates to Guarulhos (the name of the airport, which comes from the Guyanese tribes, that is what Henrique explained to him before they set off in the car today after the bookshop). Guarulhos is a word Donato likes, but he finds it a bit strange, a bit heavy in his mouth, like another word he found strange the other day, though not as heavy, the word
anaphylactic
, which he tried to say but could not. Henrique then insisted that he try again. He tried and couldn’t do it, and Henrique articulated the word with measured care. He tried again and couldn’t. This was not the first time he pressed him to get it right, to correct himself and say a word that was interrupted or not even begun. In situations like these Donato feels like he is playing pick-up sticks on his own, and in this game he is not allowed to be defeated, and yet he will never be allowed to win. Over the summer, when they are spending more time together (and because this time the woman will be there as a spectator, a spectator you can count on to be a spectator), Henrique will require of him, and with some rigour, the correct pronunciation of words in Portuguese and in English and, later, when March comes around, speaking with fluency and precision will be an absolute duty for Donato,
enough of this childishness
, he will say to himself in that way he has, and years later it will be like juggling. In Guarulhos they find a space in the car park easily. When they reach the arrivals area they learn that the flight is expected to land half an hour late. Donato takes his father’s hand, Henrique is his father, and squeezes it. And when he gets his attention, albeit only briefly, he says
–
as though they were exploding in his mouth
–
he says the words he had not been able to pronounce on the way, he pronounces them in sequence, one, two, three times, defeating an opponent who will never be in his imaginary game of pick-up sticks, offering his response to Henrique’s dedication that they should be a family, like the family the older teachers teach at school.