Nowhere People

Originally unpaid, the internship at the law firm had ended up in an informal agreement to share in the profits, and today the payment Paulo receives is higher than a salary at other similar firms. He’s been getting along fine for almost two years now (what he needed to feel comfortable as an intern there was that the partners not object to his being a student leader). ‘I like genuine people, people with ideas’ — that’s what the senior partner, a civil lawyer pushing seventy, said when he interviewed him. When he was accepted he was given two ‘recommendations’: never to disclose the firm’s name in his speeches and statements, and never to take part in any kind of activity that could be labelled subversive. In their day-to-day interactions it’s common for Paulo to hear the nine lawyers who work there remarking that democracy isn’t as solid as people say, commenting on the possibility that the days of military rule could come back, that he should take care — advice that might have made sense in eighty-three or earlier, but not nowadays. At first, Paulo would reply affectionately, call them paranoid, always on his guard so as not to reveal his daily involvement in leftist activism. What would they have said about the time he was in Mariu’s, the old-school bar where students drink after classes and student union meetings, when a classmate of his, the son of a high-ranking officer in the military police, revealed to him something his father had mentioned? That his father had handled Paulo’s file at a meeting of the so-called PM2, the Military Division’s intelligence services that used photographs and daily reports to track and document the political activities of students, unionists, peasant groups, religious groups and anyone else whom the state considered leftist. His mother, strict as she is, would have a coronary, Paulo sometimes thinks, if she knew about anything like this; it wouldn’t be all that different with some of the lawyers at the firm.