Nowhere People (21 page)

Catarina does not give up on Donato; in the space of two weeks she has made the masked man an internet hit, his public appearances attract more and more people, radio and tv programmes have already included him in their news broadcasts, a young musician from the city has recorded his chants and
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using a backing track (and videos edited by Catarina)
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is planning a performance accompanied by the Teatro São Pedro Chamber Orchestra for the end of the year, a performance which, he has promised, will be broadcast online. Donato’s intentions remain unclear, however, to Catarina and everyone else. She needs to make him adopt a position (this is undoubtedly the next step), she tells herself as she drinks an Old Engine Oil beer at the Etiquetaria, looking at those walls covered with dark wood panelling and made even gloomier by the very weak light coming from the lamps and the chandeliers that give the bar a hazy texture. An oppressive place, but she likes it. They still have the spaceships, trains, racing cars, crazy buggies and assorted wind-up toys from the sixties and seventies, all of them incredibly well preserved, scattered in every corner and on the dusty surface of the coffee table in front of her. She always discovers some new toy when her drunkenness hits a certain point. She finishes her beer. She has given up waiting for the friend who was coming to meet her to hand over the items that were in the house of a mutual friend, a friend Catarina doesn’t want to speak to any more. She gets up, pays for what she had and walks out of that darkness. It would have been good, actually, to have met the friend who didn’t show up, to have a chat, but it’s no use, there are some things she can’t share with anyone. She walks down Protásio Alves. It’s a lovely day. She comes to the little amusement park outside Santa Teresinha Church, buys twelve tickets, heads straight for the big wheel. She hands the bundle of tickets to the man operating it, telling him not to disturb her because she isn’t getting off the ride till she feels like it. She gets into pod number six. The wheel starts to rotate; after a while she loses track of how many circuits she has done and it’s then that she starts paying attention to the landscape. She looks at the crowds below her, recognising the lad in the blue cap she walked past earlier today on the street where her building is, then at the Bordini supermarket, and she gets the impression that he has been standing there watching her now for some time. He seems to have realised that she’s spotted him (though she still cannot see his eyes), he turns, he walks away. There is nothing Catarina can do. There is no way of escaping from the pod without throwing herself out; it will be several minutes before she puts her feet on solid ground. Let him go. Poor thing (the best of them
all).

Days later. Today Catarina has understood the reason for his fixation with the Sheraton. His target is actually the Sheraton restaurant: the president of the National Indian Foundation has lunch there when he comes to Porto Alegre to visit his girlfriend.

When he received the medical diagnosis the day before yesterday confirming that the youngest of his three daughters, the one aged a little over one and a half, has hearing problems
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‘She suffers from severe auditory deficiency,’ the doctor reported
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what the employee who looks after the swimming pool at the Nautical Union Guild club felt was self-hatred, a hatred at having no way of meeting the costs of the surgery and the other hugely expensive treatments they had ahead of them. He tried in vain to sleep, and in the morning he couldn’t look at his wife, he couldn’t eat his breakfast. He needs a loan because he has no more time to lose; he went to his parish church to speak to the priest, but it was too early, he knew it was too early, the priest only arrives around ten. He wasn’t able to wait, the bus took longer than usual. He lives a long way from the club. He arrived at the Nautical Union Guild to explain his absence from work the previous night and attempt to get his manager to excuse it. He had to wait for the meeting that the manager was attending to come to an end. His colleagues told him about a madman who was causing absolute mayhem outside the Moinhos shopping mall, which is the one at the Sheraton Hotel. At the time he attached no particular significance to this, but when he left the club, dazed, even with his manager having signed off his absence, the club employee thought it would not be a bad idea to go up to Quintino Bocaiuva towards 24 de Outubro, turn onto Tobias da Silva and walk on as far as Félix da Cunha.

The next thing he knows, the club employee is standing outside the Sheraton Hotel in the middle of a crowd of teenagers and curious bystanders, watching the guy wearing a carved wooden board that looks like nothing else on earth. Two cameramen, and two others who appear to be assisting them, are filming as though there were something important happening. The club employee can’t see very well (the young people are all too tall). The man in the mask is talking into the microphone attached to the stand in front of him; his voice is not being amplified, it’s only there to capture audio for what is being filmed. The club employee feels comfortable in the midst of all that pandemonium, he isn’t alone. He wants to touch the guy somehow, to listen to him. He approaches. ‘I’m not trying to make enemies, I’m not trying to destabilise anyone but, for all the reasons I’ve explained, I’m not going to leave the government alone, still less the president of FUNAI, this gentleman who spends more time travelling around Europe than signing papers in his office or visiting the indigenous lands occupied by farmers, by employees of the mining firms and all sorts of modern-day prospectors.’ He stops for a moment. ‘I’m not going to leave this gentleman alone, just as I’m not going to leave the National Health Foundation alone, nor the section of the police and the judiciary that are in hock to the colonels of the North, the Northeast, the Centre-West, dangerous people who at this very moment are with absolute impunity designing a plan to criminalise indigenous leaders using falsified evidence … accusations with no legal basis … protecting the slaughter of whole tribes … ’ A very beautiful girl approaches the masked man to tell him that the FUNAI president’s girlfriend is arriving in a taxi. The masked man speaks (the club employee is close and can hear): ‘I challenge the Ministry of Justice and the President of the Republic to launch a complete review of the processes in which the leaders of the indigenous communities in these three regions have been condemned … As of today, I will give the government thirty days to dismiss the president of FUNAI … I … ’, and he pauses. He walks the short distance to where the club employee is standing. ‘You ok?’ … The club employee is startled. ‘What?’ The masked man goes on. ‘You helped me in the pool the other night. I could have drowned … ’ The club employee is confused. ‘You’re that kid? Why’re you doing this?’ he asks. One of the cameramen positions himself beside the club employee so as to better frame his face. The surrounding crowd begins to shout (they cannot know why exactly). ‘Isn’t it dangerous for you, to be talking about the government like that?’ he says, bewildered. ‘The people who occupy indigenous lands, they’re the dangerous ones.’ The club employee tries to speak but cannot. ‘All ok with you?’ asks Donato. ‘Me? I, um … I found out … ’
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he feels worn out
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‘that my youngest daughter is deaf.’ The masked man tries to comfort him. ‘I’m so very sorry for you.’ It seems to be an effort for the club employee to speak. ‘I’m sorry, but there isn’t anything you can do for her, is there?’ Donato stammers (when Donato is wearing the mask he never stammers), ‘M-m-me? Bu-but what could I do?’ The club employee closes his eyes. ‘I know you can’t … I just thought … I had to ask … because once you’ve missed your chance … I, I … don’t know … We could do a swap … I … I can’t seem to … ’ The club employee leans on the mask, and even Donato letting go of the handles to try and hold him is not enough to prevent him from fainting and his body hitting the ground.

Lucinho Constante, president of FUNAI, needs another two years to finish creating the plan that he has been presenting at government seminars as ‘the brand new, rationalised synthesis of the most successful programmes for the inclusion of indigenous peoples in the western world’. From Canada to New Zealand, he is testing the results (and he is sure he is headed in the right direction). He hates bureaucracy, he hates civil servants, those who have passed the public examinations and those with tenure, he hates the idiocy of the
sertanistas
who claim to be protectors of the forest and are really nothing but loudmouths with no ability to listen to, and support, their own families, who make endless claims about their love for the tribes that continue to hold out against the white man, but who lack the serenity to remain alert to the more fundamental demands of the day-to-day. He hates the alienation of academics, that breed that should be helping to discuss solutions, those fat peacocks; he hates those who don’t mind killing and those who don’t mind when others kill. He can’t bear to hear any more about the Raposa Serra do Sol reserve; he can’t bear to hear yet again that in nineteen such-and-such governor so-and-so liberated whatever lands in order to plant rice, soya, to extract timber; he can’t bear to hear any more about the Federation of Indigenous Organisations of the Brazilian Amazon, about the Central Coordinating Organisation of Isolated Indians. His trips to Porto Alegre are his way of hanging on to what sanity he has left. Dealing with Indians, defending them while encouraging some willingness to compromise, is a fool’s errand. A waste of time, sometimes it’s just a waste of time. He didn’t want to stop outside the hotel, he thought all the commotion looked unusual. He spotted the man, he was higher up than the others, wearing a kind of wooden armour. He asked the taxi driver to keep going. He called Antônia. They agree to meet in a more discreet restaurant in Menino
Deus.

When Antônia leaves the Sheraton she realises at once that someone there knew, probably all of them knew, that she and her boyfriend had arranged to meet in that restaurant. The one in charge (she knows who it is: that brainless Catarina) approaches and tells her it’s no use changing restaurant, they’ll find out, they’ll follow them. At the restaurant in Menino Deus, Antônia describes what happened. The president of FUNAI wants to know whether they were really filming, if it was one of those demonstrations with slogans, because when he’d gone past and been suspicious he hadn’t seen anything like that. She tells him it was a group of people standing around a guy wearing a kind of armour made of straw and wood, and that he tried to approach her but hotel security came and she quickly got into a
cab.

Lucinho Constante means well, but he is cornered (he can’t quite articulate his research and networking strategy to the global authorities making advances in the field of solving indigenous problems). From that day on, he has tried to be more cautious. It is all going well, yet tomorrow, at this same late hour, a foreign journalist will track him down and, right at the beginning of the interview, will ask him why it was that about six months back he’d stated that the Indians in Brazil own too much
land.

Before dawn. The phone rings just once. ‘Hello … ’ says Donato. ‘Were you asleep?’ Luisa asks. ‘I slept a bit, but I’d woken up.’ ‘Are you the guy in the costume?’ ‘I am.’ ‘I don’t know what to say … What’s going on?’ She hears him yawning down the line. ‘I’ll start with the latest news. I’ve received a summons to attend a Minor Offences Court.’ ‘What do they want from you?’ ‘I’m not really sure. There are a few articles from the Penal Code they refer to in the summons, but I don’t know what they mean.’ ‘I’m going to have to stay another month here in Goiânia. Which is why I want you to come here. I’ll buy your ticket as soon as I get off the phone, and after this hearing we’ll stay here together until the day I go back to Porto Alegre.’ ‘If you buy a ticket you’ll just be wasting your time, Luisa, your time and your money, because I’m not leaving Porto Alegre.’ ‘You’re going mad,’ Luisa lets slip. ‘Maybe I am. Let’s just check, on the fingers of my hand. One, the only woman I’ve ever had in my life is my stepmother; two, to prove the thesis of free will of the father who raised me I became the most un-Indian Indian you’ve ever seen; three, I grew up satisfied with the false story that my biological mother abandoned me; four, I have a biological father out there somewhere, someone I’m absolutely terrified of meeting; five, I can’t stop thinking about Maína, about the road where she lived … I don’t even know what right I have to have survived this long … ’ Luisa will hear the rest of this without saying a word (she will just listen). Tomorrow she has to wake up early because she is on a thesis defence panel and she hasn’t even finished reading the thesis, which, by the by, is not very good. Things really are turned upside down. Time is running out, but she’s happy in Goiânia and she has absolutely no desire to see him again (she feels free), she has absolutely no desire to come
back.