Nowhere People E-Book

Paulo Scott

• Herausgeber: And Other Stories
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014

Seitenzahl: 383

Beschreibung

Driving home, law student Paulo passes a figure at the side of the road. The indigenous girl stands in the heavy rain, as if waiting for something. Paulo gives her a lift to her family's roadside camp.With sudden shifts in the characters' lives, this novel takes in the whole story: telling of love, loss and family, it spans the worlds of São Paulo's rich kids and dispossessed Guarani Indians along Brazil's highways. One man escapes into an immigrant squatter's life in London, while another's performance activism leads to unexpected fame on Youtube. Written from the gut, it is a raw and passionate classic in the making, about our need for a home.

Leseprobe

First published in English translation in 2014 by And Other Stories London – New York

www.andotherstories.org

Copyright © Paulo Scott, 2011 By agreement with Pontas Literary & Film Agency.

First published as Habitante Irreal in 2011 by Editora Objetiva, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

English language translation copyright © Daniel Hahn 2014

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transported in any form by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher of this book.

The right of Paulo Scott to be identified as Author of Nowhere People (original title Habitante Irreal) has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organisations, places and events are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

ISBN 9781908276384 eBook ISBN 9781908276391

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Supported by the National Lottery through Arts Council England.

Obra publicada com o apoio do Ministério da Cultura do Brasil / Fundação Biblioteca Nacional. This work was published with the support of the Brazilian Ministry of Culture / National Library Foundation.

For Simone da Costa Carvalho

contents

whatever happens there’s always something left over to happen againnobody reads the unexpectedspringwhat’s to be done with the usual?

‌whatever happens there’s always something left over to happen again

‌

nineteen eighty-nine

If he’d had to summarise his days as a political militant, Paulo would have said that he went from total idealism to unparalleled cynicism, then finally to the melancholy escapism of these last months. That’s not how it should have been, just when the Workers’ Party won the Town Hall elections in Porto Alegre and he became known up and down the country as a student leader, a key figure with a good chance to try for a seat on the City Council three years from now, and only twenty-one years old, about to graduate in law at the end of the year from the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul, and for whom it took the whole of last year to realise this fact: that despite his great potential, he is no more than a minor foot-soldier, a pawn among the other pieces on the board, not greedy enough to challenge, equal to equal, the schemings of the gang on the second echelon, many of them creeps he had already hated even before he joined, back in eighty-four. His current difficulty in getting more deeply involved in political life, in making a career of it and fighting for it, would only end up in physical dependency, and its price already seems to him to be too high; and he knows that if he does not push himself forward and just allows himself to be carried along by the party’s almost inevitable ascent he runs the risk of one day having to cling shamefully to the coat-tails of one of the creeps he so despises in order to get himself a place in the administrative machine and support himself financially. Just as hundreds of his fellow activists are doing, throwing themselves into the contest in the pursuit of positions in the state administrative departments, in the mayor’s office, the deputy mayor’s office, in foundations, public institutions and joint public-private enterprise; people who until recently, especially over a beer, would insist on beating their chests and declaring they were only there to rescue Brazil from exploitation by capital. In a way, he can understand: he is asking too much of himself and is unable to face up to the days that have finally arrived with any sense of calm, these days towards which his physical, mental and emotional energies have been channelled over the past four years. What is certain is that since the beginning, when he took part in that first local party meeting in Glória in eighty-three, he had promised himself he would not allow his theoretical unpreparedness and almost complete innocence in relation to politics to be transformed into mediocrity. Already he can’t help seeing most of the leadership as members of a Machiavellian and tightly-knit little fraternity of opportunists carrying forward their own plans in order to attain power and, consequently, some money as quickly as possible. He has lost his capacity to assimilate contradictions. He has stopped believing. Which is why his focus on what needed to be done and the resulting calm of belief have disappeared. This anxiety remains. Less than a month ago at a consultation with Doctor Geraldo, who has been looking after his family for three generations, he heard: ‘Paulo, this stress of yours is manifesting too severely in physical symptoms; it’s all going to your stomach. It’s not normal for a big lad of your age to have chronic gastritis as advanced as yours.’ The doctor spoke with his measured border accent and looked at Paulo until he said yes, I know, doctor, I’ll try and take care of myself. He left the surgery with a prescription for an acid blocker even stronger than the Cimetidina he was already taking and an absolute ban on consuming any kind of alcoholic drink or spicy food for a fortnight, at least. He doesn’t feel comfortable. And even having decided to cut himself off from the party completely, Paulo still has not cancelled his membership and remains bound to the Trotskyite-based organisation with which he has been involved for three years, and last Saturday (despite being deliberately late and missing the ten-thirty bus that had left Porto Alegre the previous night for the city of Rio Grande, carrying another fifteen militants who were taking part in the year’s first clandestine meeting of his organisation), he woke up before six, washed his face, packed his law-trainee rucksack with three changes of clothes and left the house in his Durepox-grey Beetle, an eighty-three model, to pull in half an hour later at pump number four at the Ipiranga petrol station on the corner of Santo Antônio and Voluntários da Pátria and ask the attendant to put in thirty litres of petrol which he would split with his two acquaintances from São Lourenço do Sul, Eduardo ‘Blondie’ Vanusa and ‘Handlebar ’Tache’ Nico, dressed up as the Beagle Boys, slumped in the passenger seat and the back seat respectively (and still drunk from the rounds of beer with Steinhäger they’d consumed at Bar Lola while they waited for a certain Neide from the Porto de Elis Cocktail Bar – who was going to show up dressed as Dr Frank-N-Furter, the cross-dressing Transylvanian from The Rocky Horror Show– to get them into the invitation-only fancy dress party taking place in the Bar Ocidente; Neide, as it turned out, never showed up), and at quarter to seven cross the Guaíba drawbridge and head towards the south of the state for what might be his last meeting as a member of the organisation, driving without worrying about his passengers, who had already given up and were drooling into the upholstery of the seats; driving without having to put up with three hundred kilometres’ worth of feeble talk about revolution and the Fourth International, about which of the Workers’ Party girls they’d had and, with the help of the most preposterous Reichian arguments, about the ones who might have started off stubborn but were now desperate to give up their pussies. Saturday passed slowly. He struggled to stay awake during the debates; he couldn’t bear to look at those people any longer. It was not a coincidence that at night, as soon as the last panel discussion came to an end, he slipped away, got his car, went to Cassino Beach. There he came across the birthday party in the ballroom of the Hotel Atlântico where he happened to run into Manoela, a producer two years older than him, with whom he had fallen in love at the end of a summer on the Ilha do Mel three years back. She was the one who spotted him and came over delightedly and after the requisite where have you been what have you been up to how have we left it so long, and as soon as he said he’d driven down from Porto Alegre, told him she was working as a theatre producer and was currently touring with a group who were due to be on stage at the Sete de Abril Theatre in Pelotas on Sunday and she needed someone reliable to take the costumes for the play back to Novo Hamburgo, where they were based, bemoaning the fact that the original budget was inadequate and that no delivery company would do it quickly enough without charging an arm and a leg and, not letting him respond, said she would give him seven thousand cruzados if he would drop the clothes off at her assistant’s house to be washed and mended in time for Friday’s performance at the University of Vale do Rio dos Sinos; she said that she and the actors would be staying in Pelotas till Thursday night to see to certain commitments they were obliged to honour for the local town hall, and no sooner had she asked would you help me out on this one? than he accepted. It was then that, skilfully, she adjusted the details: the clothes would actually only be ready for him on Tuesday, late in the morning on Tuesday, as there was a workshop, and he knows what they’re like, these things to do with didactic stimulation and learning strategies and all that. Paulo felt like he’d been duped. On Monday afternoon he had to be at the law firm where he was doing an internship. He considered for a few moments – there’s nothing that needs doing that can’t wait till Wednesday (he’ll phone to let them know that he’ll only come in to work on Wednesday). He let Manoela keep talking until he interrupted. ‘I don’t have anywhere to stay Sunday night or Monday night.’ She smiled (smiling is part of the process by which she senses an opportunity appearing). ‘We’re in the best hotel in Pelotas,’ she said snobbishly. ‘Space won’t be a problem. The lighting guy’s room was vacated yesterday, the nights have already been paid for, it’s all settled. You needn’t worry, you can take his place … and I’ve got to say, you’re in luck: the son of a bitch bagged himself the best room of all.’ The truth was, he loved watching her in action, doing whatever she wanted to make her plans happen right away, even when he was the victim. They exchanged small talk, they joined the people shaking frantically on the dance floor. He considered making a move on her, putting his arms round her waist, pushing things a bit just to see where it might go, but there was no point. Manoela had always been out of his league, she always would be. And as a song came to an end, in a blasé tone of voice that made him feel confusingly mature, rather like Manoela herself, he said I’m going to go for that walk now, Manu, she stroked his face affectionately, and each went their own way. He got a beer from the pantry, struck up a conversation with a girl who looked just like the actress Malu Mader and who seemed to have had too much to drink. This pretend Malu, who was really Ana Cristina something-or-other, said some nonsense that really annoyed him; all the same they walked together to a party that was happening two blocks from the hotel and where to his misfortune they were only serving a sweet red wine. He lied about having already graduated and said that he was travelling to Cuba in a few weeks and then to Spain and Portugal to do a master’s in comparative law at Coimbra. Lying, lying out of spite, was what the situation called for, it was the only way to be affectionate, responsive. Even though she was pretty out of it, she said that she so loved his dynamism, and he kissed her unenthusiastically (her resemblance to the goddess Malu Mader was not close enough). Then he listened to her country-girl inanities until he was convinced that it would be better to get back to his accommodation once and for all and make sure he was in a suitable physical condition for the following morning’s debates. Contrary to his expectations, the Sunday debates were worse than Saturday’s. He didn’t stay for the end. He had no qualms about slipping away early, his fuck-it switch was activated; in his mess of a life nothing would go back to the way it used to be. He wanted madness, impetuosity – like he found in all those French writers he read, in the English bands from the sixties, Spanish comic books, the rhythmic ferocity of rap, the words and attitudes that should be current and brilliant, endless and impossible. He rushed to reach Pelotas before it got dark. The hotel and the room were indeed very nice, and on Monday – after finally managing to park his car in the guest car park which had, according to the manager, been full all weekend because of the National Festival of Desserts – spent his day wandering the city’s streets and squares and around half past six in the evening went into Aquários, the café-diner on the corner of Quinze de Novembro and Sete de Setembro, for an espresso. The counter, the tables, all occupied. He thought about turning around, yet instinct made him walk over to the table by the side door, where a teenage girl with short black hair wearing glasses with funny white frames was busy reading an issue of DUNDUM magazine (what girl from the interior would be sitting blithely reading DUNDUM in this place, the absolute domain of middle-aged men?). He approached, asked if he might sit down, she threw him a suspicious glance, said nothing, he assured her he wouldn’t take up more than a few inches of the table, explained that he had been walking all day and wouldn’t be able to enjoy his coffee if he had to drink it standing up. She nodded, making no effort to hide her surprise at the sheer nerve of this guy, he thanked her and seeing that her cup was empty asked whether he could buy her a drink, she said she’d have a tea. It was easy enough for them to start up a conversation that would reveal her name, Angélica, and her odd, ironic, rude, dry sense of humour. They talked mainly about poetry (she was much more comfortable on this subject than he was). At a certain point in the conversation she took a spiral-bound exercise book from her bag, the kind that schoolchildren use. She didn’t make any fuss, just opened it at a page near the middle and (after giving him a meaningful stare) began to draw him. Paulo didn’t want to ask, didn’t want to interfere, he kept talking. She finished the drawing, closed the exercise book, put it down on the table. Even after other tables had become free and the activity in the café had thinned out, they remained sitting there together till the place closed, at which point they paid the bill and left. The moment they set foot on the pavement, Angélica handed him the exercise book, said that he would be part of a new game which one of her school friends had made up and that she’d thought was really cool. ‘You get an ordinary exercise book, like this one, you find someone you like a lot, you draw that person as best you can, then you give it to them, on condition that they’ll write something on the following page and, without waiting too long, a week at most, they then pass it on to someone else, who passes it on to someone else and so on. I’m not sure I’ve explained it clearly. Have I?’ He said it was a bit like a promissory note to the bearer, a promissory note that would never be paid and, as soon as she was done smiling, he asked whether he was allowed to believe that she liked him a lot. She took a cigarette out of her bag and shrugged just the way someone old and weary of life would shrug after revealing their affection for someone who wasn’t expecting it (or who didn’t deserve it, but it happened anyway). She changed the subject. ‘There are some poems I wrote in the first dozen pages.’ He didn’t wait, he tried to give her the kind of hug a friend would give her but she moved away saying, frowning, that she was really late for a family engagement, before turning her back on him sharply and walking off towards Praça Coronel Osório. He went back to the hotel, opened a few cans of beer, and spent the rest of the night reading and re-reading what was written in the exercise book. Then on Tuesday morning (as soon as the actors had released the costumes) he took all the various bags they handed him, folded down the back seat of the Beetle, arranged the luggage, covered it with a dark grey cloth that Manoela had insisted on giving him, stressing how useful it would be in stopping all that gear from attracting the attention of the highway police, and, just minutes before it started raining, he, Paulo, turned right onto the BR-116 towards Porto Alegre. And at Cerro Grande, even with the limited visibility due to the rain that had now become a storm, he saw a shape, a person crouching by the side of the left-hand lane. He braked without stopping completely. It was a little Indian girl holding a pile of newspapers and magazines to her chest. Beside her, two white plastic bags on the ground. He lowered the car window and let his gaze rest on her, wondering, struck by the sight of her, how far she’d have to walk to find somewhere dry where she could take shelter (the closest indigenous villages were kilometres away). He looked in his rear-view mirror. Behind him: the deserted road. And, now looking back at her over his shoulder (the car moving at less than ten kilometres an hour), he thought about stopping, but he did not.

‌

two

A few kilometres further down the road and refusing to admit that, for a moment, his nerve had failed him and that the sight of the girl had struck him like almost nothing else in his life, Paulo imagines that some lorry (even though not a single vehicle has passed him going in the opposite direction) must have stopped already and offered her a lift. He goes on for a few hundred metres, pulls over, turns off the engine. Takes a deep breath, twists round towards the back seat of the Beetle, pulls off the dark grey cloth covering the various bags holding the clothes from the theatre company, opens one, takes out a white face towel that looks unused, a sweater and a pair of tracksuit bottoms, size S. He also finds a little retractable umbrella in the worst sort of green, a luminous lime colour. He looks ahead, then again into the rearview mirror, starts the engine, switches the indicator left and gets back onto the southbound lane, keeping his speed slow because of the storm that is getting ever stronger and the worn-out tyres which threaten to send the vehicle skidding on the water. He feels put out, a feeling that gets worse as the number of kilometres increases: three hundred and sixty, three hundred and sixty-one, three hundred and sixty-two, sixty-three, four, five, six, three hundred and sixty-seven. (He hadn’t realised he had driven so far.)

She is in the same place, in the same position. He tells himself to take care, not to startle her. She looks up and gets to her feet, picks up her plastic bags, taking a few steps back as she realises that the car is going to pull over. He stops beside her, lowers the window halfway while trying to appear as unthreatening as possible, asks her to get in (as though addressing a foreigner with an incomplete grasp of Portuguese), says he’ll give her a lift, perhaps up to the nearest petrol station or the highway police watch-post. She doesn’t answer, looking him straight in the eye. He insists, but she remains fearful. ‘It’s not going to work, these types of good intentions just do not work … ’ he mutters quietly before picking up the umbrella and getting out of the car. As soon as she sees him opening the door, she crosses the road. Once on the other side she begins to walk hurriedly south. For a moment he stops where he is, there in front of the Volkswagen, watching her move away (the rain and its weight cover him with deafness and mineral obliteration). He returns to the Beetle, takes the towel and the items of clothing and, cursing uninterruptedly, without any clue what he might lose or gain by doing this, he leaves the car and goes after her.

If, to make matters worse, the National Highway Police were to pull over wanting to know what all this was about, Paulo would say he had no very clear reason. He would confide to them that, these last three years, almost everything he’d done had been done out of a contagious inertia, a blind freedom that needed to be exercised urgently not only for himself, but for all the Brazilians who, having lived through the height of the military regime, now need to promise themselves that they can be just and emancipated and happy, and so much so that they will accept the most obvious determinism by which enemies can be easily recognised and by which the truth is a discovery that is on your side, comfortable, destined to hold out against all things. A line of argument that, if uprooted, placed into the context of a tv comedy show, would be just as useless and pathetic as silence, or as finding that, at such a moment, upon realising that the headlights were still on and the Beetle’s engine running, the sensible thing to do might be to walk the hundred, hundred-and-something metres back to the car and turn off the lights, shut off the engine, find a suitable plastic bag in which to wrap the pieces of clothing and the towel, lock the doors, put the key away in his trouser pocket, and only then, with the reassurance of the police authorities (and the applause of the studio audience) resume his chasing after the Indian girl. He stands transfixed in this anguish of speculation and, when he refocuses, he looks south and is surprised at how far she has already got (he’ll really have to make an effort if he is to catch up with her). He looks back at the car. Now, holding the umbrella with the same hand that has the clothes, sets off at a faster pace until, once he has come very close to her, he spots how the Indian girl is looking discreetly over her shoulder and slowing down, and a few metres before he reaches her she turns abruptly towards him. He waits a moment, catching his breath, holding out the umbrella and bits of material for her to take. ‘I’m just trying to help.’ He points his index finger at the things he is holding in his other hand and then points at her. ‘It’s dry clothes … Dry clothes … ’ She takes them, and the umbrella, too. ‘I can take you to some shelter, but if you don’t want to, that’s fine, I’ll leave you here. I’m going back to the car,’ he gestures with his thumb. ‘If you want a lift, if you want me to take you,’ he emphasises this, ‘just come with me’ – and he uses his fingers to mime a person walking towards the car. The Indian girl looks right at him. In the middle of all that rain, he feels – just glancingly – that they won’t come to any solution. And he tries for the last time. ‘My name’s Paulo … What’s yours?’ She doesn’t reply. He imagines that perhaps she can’t hear him properly, because there’s this distance between the two of them and the noise of the rain on the nylon surface of the umbrella. He realises there is nothing left for him to do, turns back towards the car. He walks twenty metres or so before looking back: she is following him. When he reaches the vehicle he gets in, leaving the passenger door open. She stops beside the car and gets in a muddle trying to close the umbrella. He wonders whether or not he ought to help her and just waits. Then she sits down beside him, her breathing hurried, her eyes fixed ahead of her. A few moments later she closes the door, he starts up the engine and pulls out slowly towards the north. In the eight-kilometre stretch to the restaurant they sit in silence. He keeps his window lowered (because he himself needs to be unthreatening) and the inside of the car gets wet from the rain.

He stops in the space furthest to the left, a few metres from the toilets. The Indian girl gets out of the car. She seems surer of herself; she seems to have understood when he said that it would be better if she put on the dry clothes. She goes off to change. And from the back seat of the car he takes his law-trainee rucksack, pulls out the only t-shirt that’s fit to wear, a pair of shorts, a pair of sandals, too, and heads straight for the toilets. He takes longer than he meant to. When he comes out, he looks around in every direction trying to spot the girl. He sees no indication that she’s already come out. He goes into the restaurant. To the right there’s a snack counter. Savoury snacks from the oven, ham and cheese rolls, slices of cake, all displayed under glass covers. He chooses a seat near the window, far from the other customers, he asks for a cup of coffee with milk. His order is served. He tells the guy behind the counter that he’ll be back in a moment, he goes outside. She’s standing beside the CRT payphone wearing the clothes he gave her. He gestures for her to come in, she stays just where she is, out of place. He approaches, takes the carrier bags and the umbrella from her left hand and, when he tries to take the stack of newspapers and magazines that she is holding squeezed against her chest, she resists. Then he gently takes hold of her wrist and leads her in with him to where he’d been sitting. ‘Do you want a coffee?’ She declines with a shake of her head. It doesn’t seem unreasonable to insist, ‘A Coca-Cola?’ ‘Yes,’ she says (speaking to him for the first time). He orders the soft drink and a serving of buttered toast from the waitress who has taken the man’s place, an affected woman who has planted herself in front of them as though she were the manager of the place or even the owner. She doesn’t seem up for any friendly chitchat. ‘Name’ says the Indian girl, ‘Maína.’ Christ, he thinks, she doesn’t even speak Portuguese properly. When the waitress returns with the order, she dumps the plate with the toast down on the tablecloth. Paulo makes a point of saying thank you. Maína remains immobile, holding on to the stack of papers. After a few moments, in which she takes no initiative, he pours the drink into the glass just recently put there and pushes the plate towards her. ‘It’s for you. You must be hungry, right?’ She puts the newspapers and magazines down on the chair next to her, picks up the half-slice of toast, takes her first bite. ‘What’s all that for?’ Paulo asks, pointing his index finger towards the pile of newspapers and magazines. ‘On the road … was throw away,’ she replies as soon as she has swallowed. ‘You like reading?’ he asks. ‘Got them … ’ she hesitates as she speaks, ‘keep … learned at school. Speaking Portuguese … little … read little. No much practice.’ He sees how beautiful the girl is, how graceful her face, even when she is uneasy. ‘And how old are you?’ he goes on. She replies with a shy smile, says nothing. ‘Your age?’ he insists. ‘I’m twenty-one … ’ holding all his fingers stretched out, twice, plus his index finger on its own. ‘And you?’ he points at her. ‘How old?’ He isn’t coming across as threatening. ‘Fourteen,’ she replies. What am I doing? he thinks, aware that the waitress-manager has brought about a small revolt in their surroundings and now the fourteen customers, all of whom look like Italian immigrants, are staring in his direction, judging him, having already made a note of the Beetle’s license plate, ready to report him should news break of the misfortune to befall that Indian girl, any Indian girl, in the coming days. God, talk about naivety, Paulo. ‘Too bad,’ he says to himself, as he watches her eat and recalls the seminar on the fortieth anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights that he took part in last year (he was very interested in the young woman who organised it, a Uruguayan militant from Amnesty International) and the panel on which a tribal chief described the terrible living conditions of the indigenous ethnic groups in the southern part of the country. The chief used the expression ‘the Calvary of the indigenous ethnic groups’ before talking about the ludicrous number of families living alongside the highways because of conflicts within the villages, because of a shortage of land, because of a lack of space. Paulo hadn’t the faintest idea that this was precisely the case of the Indian girl sitting in front of him now.

Living by the side of the BR-116, without her older sister, who vanished from her life more than a year ago, trying to keep her spirits up, weaving baskets out of cipó vines, playing as best she could with her two younger sisters, allowing each day to be overtaken by the next, going unnoticed (even since becoming the target of her mother’s increased attention, for having twice attempted suicide: the first time, a little over two years ago, the week after a friend who lived in a neighbouring encampment had died for reasons as yet unexplained on a Sunday night when he had apparently gone off for a football match between the local teams; and the second, less than six months ago, when she was sure that she could not bear their difference from the non-Indians, that she would become a melancholy adult just like her mother). Now and again she hears of her forebears and of the indigenous people’s resistance in the lands to the south. She even heard this from three non-Indian, Guarani-speaking students who used to show up from time to time at the village (in the days when her family still lived in the village). She looks around her, she sees no resistance at all. Her little sister is playing in the soot, in the dust from the rubber tyres. She goes as far as contemplating how she might kill her before the girl is able to understand her own misfortune. She would have no remorse because she knows – and Maína does everything she can to believe it – that she would be going to a better life. Maína believes in the soul, even though she herself cannot imagine what the abstraction that reveals the soul must be like. Every night she dreams of someplace different, where there are no grown-ups or, at least, no adults like her father who took off when she was nine years old. Without him, things got complicated for her mother and the four children; they had to leave the village. Maína doesn’t know quite what to do: she has never been in a restaurant like this restaurant; she has never been in a restaurant at all. A few weeks earlier Maína had started to feel afraid, that’s why she ran away. Once Maína dreamed the image of God, he had a fragile body and came out of his hiding place to be with her. For a moment Maína thought this guy might be God or a spirit. What non-Indian would stop on the road and treat her this well? She finishes the snack that he’s ordered for her. Now she just needs to use a few words to make him understand that she wishes to get back into the raincloud-coloured car and accompany him wherever he would like to take her, even if it takes hours, the whole day, until she has invented a language that will work for them both, a language from the place of God and the spirits that like to pass themselves off as non-Indians, until she manages to close her eyes tight and (perhaps repeating the choice made by her older sister) disappear.

The road sign read ‘START OF ROADSIDE INDIGENOUS CAMP (NEXT 28 KM)’, and Paulo has already asked her three times where she would like to get out. She limits her replies to the same gesture with her hand to keep on going. So this time, which would be the fourth time, Paulo indicates right, pulling the car over in front of one of the huts. ‘Sorry, you’re going to have to get out.’ He articulates the words carefully and deliberately. She doesn’t reply. ‘I can’t take you any further,’ he says. She doesn’t budge. ‘Come on, Maína. You know it isn’t safe to be going around, just … ’ he can’t find the words, ‘just around like this, with a stranger. It’s dangerous.’ He gets out, walks around the car, opens her door. ‘You can keep the clothes. I just … ’ And she interrupts him. ‘Give lift to the city. Then I comes back alone. I come back, you let me.’ Well, Paulo, you begged her and now you’ve got what you asked for. ‘It’s just I can’t … ’ Without getting up, she says a choked please. Paulo looks around them, doesn’t see anyone, the hut they had stopped alongside gives every indication of being empty, no sign of activity. The girl is at a breaking point, weakened into an absolute conviction that she must run away and that if she fails at this moment she will end up in some other car or headed for some worse destiny. The moments pass; they are part of a test that intoxicates him. This morning when he turned on the hotel radio tuned to a local FM station they were playing a hit by Legião Urbana: every day when I wake up, I no longer have the time that’s gone. The same line that for much of the journey he’d had in his head and which is now the imaginary soundtrack getting in the way of his making a decision. His clothes dampening, the rain propels him on. But I have so much time, we have all the time in the world. There can’t be many things worse than her spending the rest of her adolescence and her life stuck on the verge of that filthy road. His house in Porto Alegre is empty, his parents are away, his sister is spending the whole year on an exchange in the United States. He closes the passenger door, resolved to bring her back tomorrow morning at the latest (that’s when the imaginary voice of Renato Russo starts belting out the chorus).

In Novo Hamburgo the rain is easing a bit and that should make things easier, but the coordinates Manoela has given him are not exact (the assistant’s house isn’t where she marked it on the map she drew on a piece of paper with the Pelotas hotel logo on it; nobody knows the alley she marked, swearing it couldn’t be easier to find). Beaten-earth roads, the wrong directions taking Paulo down increasingly steep and pot-holed slopes, getting further and further away from the built-up part of town. He has a phone number for Manoela’s assistant, but he hasn’t seen a payphone to call from in several minutes. Things are only no worse because the little Indian girl smiles peacefully each time he turns to her, as though the whole mess were completely normal, and because they are in a car whose rear wheel traction stops them from skidding on that muddy track. They might already have fallen into one of the ditches if they were in, say, a VW Passat or a Chevy Opala. He gives up and goes back to the convenience store where he asked for directions the first time. He calls the assistant. He wasn’t far, as it turned out, his mistake had been taking one turning too early. On the other end of the line the girl makes a point of telling him that the place he’d ended up in wasn’t the best place to get lost, it’s definitely the most dangerous part of the city, the so-called ‘Valmerão Pass’. He goes back to the main road, takes the correct turning. The assistant is waiting for them outside the house with a huge yellow umbrella, she notices that the Indian girl is wearing items of clothing belonging to the group and says only that she can return them any time she wants. Paulo returns the back seat of the car to its normal position. He tells Maína to sit there because the upholstery is dry. She shakes her head to indicate that she isn’t going to move.

The car is in the parking space in front of the house. Paulo and Maína go in the side door. Paulo takes her straight to the bathroom, turns on the light, shows her where the towels are, says he’ll be back in a minute. He walks through the house wondering what he can offer her to wear, he raids his sister’s wardrobe (the two of them are nearly the same size), takes a pair of jeans, knickers, socks, the black All-Star trainers with little skulls like the ones you see on pirate flags – his sister said she was going to give them to a charity shop – and an AC/DC t-shirt. He goes back to the bathroom, hands over the clothes, switches on the electric shower, sets it to what he thinks is a pleasant temperature, shows her how to lock the bathroom door from the inside and says he’s going to make something for them to eat. In the fridge he finds the pan with the spaghetti he made on Friday. He heats it up on the stove. He opens a can of tuna, he mixes mayonnaise and ketchup and garlic paste in a shallow jar, opens a litre bottle of Coke. He lays out a tablecloth, plates, cutlery and all the rest. He waits for her to come out of the bathroom. They eat in silence. She finishes the food on the plate and then, unprompted, helps herself to more. He goes to his room, collects all the issues of Trip magazine he can find, six in total, and leaves them with her. He says to choose whichever ones she wants. He looks at his watch: nine-thirty. There’s still time for a quick shower. He goes up to his father’s study to check whether anyone has left a message on the answering machine, listens to Adrienne’s message inviting him to a party tonight at the flat she shares with Serginho and Carlos. He goes downstairs, has his shower. When he comes back into the pantry, Maína has the magazines open on the table and she is looking at the pictures of the Trip girls. Without a word he clears the plates, goes out into the yard, walks over to the garage, gets two sheets of clean plastic like camping groundsheets, covers the car seats, which smell of wet dog, comes back, tells Maína to leave the magazines there, but she prefers to hold on to them all. Paulo picks up a tote bag belonging to his sister, one of the many she has bought and never used, puts the magazines inside, closes up the house, gets into the car and only then begins to hurry so that they will arrive in time for the ten o’clock showing at the Baltimore.

They are going to see the remastered print of Fantasia, the Walt Disney animation. First he bought sweet popcorn from old Pestana, whose little cart is right at the door to the cinema; the old man loves telling the unwary that in the sixties he was an employee of the Piratini Steel Company and one of the sixty thousand activists from the so-called Group of Eleven set up in sixty-three by Brizola to bring about the socialist revolution in Brazil. He says he’s read every book by Tolstoy translated into Portuguese and, invariably, he ends the conversation with a mild rant on the evils of alcohol (the damage it does to the liver and the pancreas, the disarray it causes to a routine, to social composure) despite the fact that he is quite evidently an alcoholic himself. Naturally, as he has known Paulo for some time (and he can recognise when he’s unlikely to find an opening for his tired old digressions), the old man doesn’t even start his litany, though as he hands the bag of popcorn to Maína he does say that she is a true jewel of the Brazilian El Dorado.

Paulo tries to describe to her what the experience is going to be like. The images being projected, the moment when the mouse will command all the things and the sounds of the universe. Maína is barely listening. The film has caught her attention, the soundtrack, the colours, the introductions, the stories. He got lucky with the programming: only The Wizard of Oz might have topped it (he is sure that ‘Somewhere Over the Rainbow’, in Judy Garland’s devastating interpretation, would change that girl’s life); he’s lucky she didn’t get scared. The film ends. The two of them wait till the light from the projector and the music are switched off. They look at one another. He takes in the girl, all kitted out like a punk-goth with her seed necklace over the fabric of the AC/DC t-shirt and the smell of Phebo Rose soap, sat in the dirty red leather seat of the Baltimore with her canvas bag full of damp pages from newspapers and magazines, fresh from the experience of an invisibility hitherto unknown to her, allowing herself to look, and looking. Perhaps there’s some kind of answer there. Paulo knows there is, but he can’t do it, it’s hard to make out.

He explains that they’re going to a party. There will be some odd people there, the kind of people she probably hasn’t been around before. Maína nods her head, showing that she’s happy, that everything’s fine. She says she needs to go to the bathroom, he shows her where it is and waits under the awning in front of the building. And he catches sight of Titi Mafalda with her friends, the three Marias, in tow. ‘Hey, senhor Dickhead!’ she shouts from a distance in her unmistakable Ceará accent. ‘Still hanging out in that art-house cinema, then? Standing there with those panty-wetting legs of yours and all these girls going to waste … You men are all complete asses, you really are.’ Not long ago at all, Paulo had gone out with Maria Rita, the prettiest of the four. Although they’d only hung out a few times, which had been fun to begin with, things hadn’t ended well; on the first and only occasion they arranged to go to Fin de Siècle to dance and meet their friends, breaking with the movie-then-dinner-then-her-flat formula, it had been a disaster. It only took half an hour for them to end up standing outside the nightclub, Maria Rita – who without her doctor’s permission had stopped taking her antidepressants –