Nowhere People (19 page)

In place of the fabrics, Donato used natural-coloured beach mats made from the filaments and fibres of flexible reeds. He cut them to size, he connected the pieces using gauze, wood glue, cobblers’ glue, he made the trousers and then a jacket that closed in front with sticky tape. His hands and feet were left uncovered. Only after he has put on the fibre clothing (he doesn’t know how painful it will be) will he put on the wooden mask. Almost every morning he looks at the Polaroid photograph. Luisa keeps calling, every day, and he doesn’t answer. He only replied to one of the emails, a reply that said ‘
I’m alive and well
’. He thinks about identifying which tree Maína hanged herself from; according to his research, it is the place where her soul entered the earth. Thinking about this is hard. He looks at the photo, the masks made of paper and card, the paints whose colours he tries to make out under the sepia of the image’s natural chemical decay; it’s almost impossible to make out anything black or brown, the frames around the eyes of the masks, the eyes. Today would not be easy, because soon he has to make a decision about which chants he is going to use (the secret of what he’s planning is in the chants, in the songs, even those that have been lost for generations can return in dreams; he doesn’t need to be asleep to dream, any shaman knows that, any Indian, even a half-caste Indian, can be a shaman if he is alone). He sees no harm in being one of those Indians who prefer to think they are at war with the non-Indians, because the non-Indians all seem to want them kept at a distance. He has discovered that walking alone helps him to find the chant. If it does not come in a dream, an Indian can invent his own song. Donato is angry; when he’s angry like this he shouldn’t leave the house. Today Donato needs to leave the house. The chants help you to find someone who is far away and someone who is dead. He will get Maína’s name right in the chant, he will stretch out the letter
i
in the middle of the name, the
i
is the most vertical of the letters. He was absolutely certain when he saw the owl flying over the water-tower of the DMAE, the municipal department responsible for water and sewage, in the neighbourhood called Moinhos de Ventos, on one of his walks. DMAE … Moinhos …
mãe
… Maína. For years the voice of the wooden owl has been in thought. Someone who dies does not speak, but invents his hearing. Maína will hear him. The spirit must know that it is still loved. Donato is confused, he is making things up. It’s necessary to sing for a certain number of days. He still doesn’t know how many. He’s making things up. Even lost songs can come back. Donato looks at the Polaroid photograph. It is nearly two in the afternoon. He will sing to find the way back. The mask will connect their two souls. Donato puts on the straw clothes and then the mask. He opens the front door. It’s one of those seemingly perfect days. It will take him almost an hour to get where he means to
go.

Catarina emphasises what she has already said at the start of the interview. ‘What matters is that I got together with my two best friends and set up this Foundation to bring music and dance to the busiest public spaces in Porto Alegre,’ she says, looking across at the newspaper reporter from
Jornal Zero Hora
. ‘We are giving people the chance to take possession of a ludic moment,’ and she takes another sip of her orange juice. The journalist asks something else. She replies. ‘It’s a complex game that deeply touches the population who move around public spaces and touches those of us who carry out the project … I found myself facing more fear than willingness to get involved … I’ve also had to face my own reflection, and I think I have been a mirror to a lot of people.’ She breathes in, straightens her posture, breathes out. ‘Sometimes I get the impression that we’re fated to a morbid narcissism and we aren’t able to relate to the openness that we need, without making judgments, without prejudice … ’ The two of them look at each other with the kind of complicity possible in interviews. ‘Anything else, Catarina?’ he asks with a smile. She has another sip of juice. ‘You know something, Daniel? In the intervention in Praça XV, which is what those photos were that I was showing you, the street pedlars were aggressive. It was a natural sort of reaction to the sudden invasion of their space … We started slowly because we could sense that the atmosphere was tense … Things were actually going well … With each minute that passed I could feel their acceptance of us growing, their tolerance, their interest … then I noticed a black boy, strong, handsome, a bit crazy … The boy came over … He stood right in front of me, wanting to take part … I touched him, we began a choreography, he took control, he moved aggressively towards me, wanting to be in charge, he wanted to speak,’ she says, and gestures quote marks in the air with her index and middle fingers. ‘He wanted to express himself … and if I’d tried to speak, too, to speak just as forcefully, there might have been a confrontation … ’ She stops for a moment, breathes. ‘It wasn’t an easy experience. As I said, there was a lot of aggression in the air … But that’s the way it is; it’s the price you have to pay … The poetic mustn’t be a privilege, a hermetically sealed container, it has to be out on the streets, in everyday life, even if it isn’t reflecting what is beautiful, what is pleasant … It’s a part of it … ’ She takes her glass of juice, puts it down in the centre of the table. ‘Anything else?’ the reporter asks again. ‘I’ve already talked too much. I have to tell you, today hasn’t been an easy day for me. I almost phoned to tell you I wasn’t coming … It was better to come, to speak.’ He confides to her that it has been a wonderful conversation and that he’s going to fight to get a full page in the paper. He tells her a second time how much he admires her, she thanks him and gets up, he offers to take care of the bill. She thanks him with a nod. They walk over to the entrance of the Café do Porto and say goodbye. She leaves, distracted, down Padre Chagas (she’s in the part of town where she was born, the part where things work, where it’s possible just to wander at random), then turns left onto Fernando Gomes and walks as far as Rua 24 de Outubro. She is intending to go a few metres further down the pavement in front of the DMAE gardens and then take Miguel Tostes, then after that Vasco da Gama till she reaches the bookshop just before the corner with Fernandes Vieira, and there to check whether the book about popular dances from the twenties has arrived from the distributors yet. But a surprising figure, the figure standing outside the gate to the DMAE garden, catches her eye. It doesn’t look like anything she has ever seen before. Someone is wearing a kind of wooden mask-cum-body armour that goes down as far as the pelvis, covering most of the torso, the neck, the face. A single piece attached to the shoulders and round the neck by leather straps and opaque, light gold buckles in the same shade as the wood. Underneath he is wearing a piece of clothing made of straw that must be hellish in this heat. The back of the head is visible, where it isn’t crossed by the leather straps, you can see the brown hair in the gaps. Judging by the bearing, she has no doubt it’s a man. He is holding himself very straight. It’s quite clear he is not comfortable wearing that gear: his hands are still, close to his hips, holding the lower part of the mask-cum-body armour from which two wooden sticks the size of motorcycle handlebars are poking out, as though he were pushing a shopping trolley. Catarina wonders how strange it would be to see him in motion. She takes the phone out of her pocket, films for two, three minutes. Zooming in, zooming out. She walks closer to him. She stops less than two metres away, films a little more, she’s careful not to stand within his field of vision, she just watches. People walk past not hiding their disgust at what they’re seeing; there are not many who smile, even fewer who remain impassive. She tries to understand this. And she registers the chant, the low, almost inaudible sound that emerges muffled from behind the mask. It is a sad song, sung in a language she does not recognise. The funereal tone of it overwhelms her, breaks her, pulls her away from the errand she had given herself. Catarina closes her eyes, just stands where she is, listening. The two of them: the strangest couple. A few minutes go by before he stops singing. It takes her a little time to react, to open her eyes and see him (with a huge shock) standing right in front of her, face to face. ‘I didn’t mean to bother you,’ she says. He doesn’t reply, he just turns to the side, walks a few metres away (her suspicion is confirmed: the way he moves is startling). She is embarrassed, yet she still walks over to him, turns till they are face to face. ‘Hi, I’m Catarina … The music you were singing … it’s sad, and … and it’s very beautiful,’ and then she moves closer to the face of the mask to see whether she can see his eyes. ‘Do we know each other?’ The wrong question, Catarina. ‘It can’t be easy, being here … ’ Another wrong question, Catarina. He takes half a step back. From close up, the mask is not so odd, even though the upper part of the chest is smudged with whitewash, sawdust and a yellow powder. ‘Look,’ she surprises herself at the liberty she is taking, ‘I’ve just had this idea that you’re going to find a bit nuts … but it’s just that your silence is making me nervous … I do performances in public spaces … it’s a piece of experimental work … and I really was interested in that … in your … ’ this was not what she had meant to say. ‘So … so that we can talk one day when you’re free, I’ll write my phone number very faintly here on the wood … ’ She takes a pen from her bag. ‘I’ll do it in tiny little writing … ’ She shows him the pen. ‘May I?’ He does not react. She reaches her right hand out to the body of the mask (her fingers are stained with something that looks like powdered baby milk; she thinks about asking him what that is, but doesn’t). ‘I’ll jot it down here, where it isn’t stained.’ She starts to scribble. ‘I’ll write it very faint so you only need to sand it over to make it disappear again.’ This takes more than a minute. ‘It’s come out very well. If you want … ’ and she stops talking, she lets a few more minutes pass. ‘Do you need any help?’ she asks, her tone now less effusive. ‘To be honest there is something else I want to write … ’ He starts up his singing again (so quietly that she is not sure) and turns his back. She’s awkward now. ‘Well, I guess that’s my cue to leave.’ She walks around and faces him one final time. ‘I won’t bother you any more. I’ll see you. You can find me easily if you look on the internet.’ She goes off towards Praça Júlio de Castilhos. This guy is doing something worthwhile, people might not stop to look at him in the way they stop to watch her dance, but she is sure: everyone who walks past and glances at him, singing like that, even those who are scared, are not left indifferent. And she puts the pen back in her bag
telling herself not to look
back.

Ten to eleven at night. Donato wakes up. The experience has drained
him.

The straw has chafed his skin and, in some places, rubbed it raw. Right, so now he is an ailing kind of superhero. Fine. He turns on his computer, still unsure whether he found what the girl wrote on the mask funny.
PROPERTY OF CIRCUS CATARINA
. He types what she wrote into Google, follows the link to a blog, but not hers, hers is a different one that’s called just Catarina; he finds this only after he has typed the same search terms into Google using the Images category. A lot of photos of her. The girl is a local celebrity, the youngest in a family that created and
exported
ballerinas all over the world. There is a recent post on the blog under the title
FRIEND
with the word ‘watch’ linking to a page on YouTube:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1EYmwfoa1mE.
She had filmed him on the pavement at DMAE. At the end of the video there is a telephone number. He gets his phone, then pauses, wondering whether he really ought to
call.

Catarina gets onto the social networks, the chat functions of her email providers, the instant audio and video message programs to see which of her contacts are online, hoping to find one in particular, one whose status has shown ‘offline’ for a while. She has created the world around her with no great difficulty, she has been doing this for years, but right now, on this really strange day, she doesn’t know what to do. Eleven-thirty at night. She gets up from her desk, takes off her clothes, goes to the bathroom, puts on the shower cap, she takes care to cover her ears, steps into the cubicle, turns on the shower, closes her eyes, lets the water splash onto her forehead. She hears her phone ringing. She finishes showering. Five to midnight. Phone in her hand. A missed call from an unfamiliar number. She calls back. ‘Hello? Someone called my phone from this number,’ she says. There is no answer. ‘Look, I’m not in the mood. Tell me who this is, or I’m hanging up,’ irritated. ‘You are almost weirder than I am,’ comes the voice from the other end. Catarina hangs up, throws her phone onto the bed. She puts on her nightie. She thinks a moment. She picks up her phone. Calls again. ‘Hello,’ the voice replies. ‘You got one extra chance, asshole, this is your last shot, are you going to tell me who you are or aren’t you?’ ‘I’m the guy in the wooden mask you wrote your little funnies on.’ ‘I never expected you to call so quickly, I didn’t even expect you to look me up at all.’ She’s all set to explain herself. ‘Look, I wanted … ’ He interrupts her. ‘To say you’re sorry for your joke?’ She goes on. ‘I was going to write down the phone number and then … well, ok, I admit it: it was just me wanting to be annoying. Today wasn’t one of my best days, I got some news yesterday that unsettled me. But I don’t know why I’m telling this to a complete stranger.’ Another silence. ‘I’m not usually a joker … ’ and she feels the conversation is about to go off the rails. ‘I called to say that tomorrow I’m going to be outside the Sheraton Hotel. At three in the afternoon,’ he says. ‘Anything else?’ she asks. ‘I wanted to thank you for your attention this afternoon. You were generous. Today was the first time I’ve worn the mask. I thought it would be easier.’ Catarina is disarmed. ‘What you’re doing is very brave … ’ He interrupts her. ‘The mask scared me just as much as it scares everyone else … You arrived in time for me to understand that I shouldn’t give up.’ She had meant to conclude her question about what that was all about, then, about what he meant by
generous
, where he got that chant from that had reached right into her soul and petrified her, but she stayed silent for a moment, and he hung
up.