Nowhere People

Maína is wearing the blue skirt he gave her last time. They sit on the sawn-off tree trunks that serve as stools. Paulo has the exercise book that Angélica gave him. He has written a series of common words and phrases, and scratched out some illustrations and little maps, leaving half of the pages unfilled. He asks Maína not to move, he’s trying to draw her. She doesn’t do as she’s told. She takes off the skirt and shirt, takes the little All-Star skulls off her feet, and steps into the river. He doesn’t say anything, just watches her with all the modesty he can manage. She goes in until the water is just above her knees, turns towards him and lies face-down, dips her head under, and re-emerges saying that he should come in, too. (Her spontaneity is shocking.) A thirty-foot wooden launch appears in the distance, towing a fit-looking man of about forty on a single ski; the sound of the racing motor disrupts the silence. Paulo focuses, he simplifies his lines, completes the picture. It hasn’t come out well. He considers tearing out the page, ripping it up, and yet he won’t do it. Maína comes out of the water, lies on the grass. Paulo gets up, puts the exercise book down beside her, spots the same launch going past at a leisurely pace, without the man in tow. The minutes pass. Maína has dressed and her head is now resting on his right thigh. She thinks it’s funny when he surprises her with the battery-powered radio cassette player that he has brought to lend her. He explains how it works and she’s killing herself laughing. Now they are sitting on the blanket that he brought to lay on the ground. She knows he’s watching her as she leafs through the exercise book. Soon he is going to teach her some new words and they will discuss subjects she’ll only partly understand. Maína will take the pencil he used and write ‘Paulo’ over the drawing of her face, and will hand the exercise book back to him and ask him to write down the story she’s just told him, but using the words he would use if he were writing for his university friends (she will get the word ‘university’ right, both the meaning and the pronunciation), writing on alternate lines so that she can then copy it, letter by letter. In the story she told him there was a colourless girl who very much liked being kissed. One day the colourless girl was by the side of the road when a squad of bikers passed her and one of them threw an apple at her back. She almost fell over, she was hurt. They stopped a few metres on, took off their helmets, laughed at her. The day, which had been lovely and sunny, clouded over. Hurt, the apple looked sad, sadder even than the girl, that’s how he wrote it down. And she will watch the leaves on the trees and she won’t know when his leg has gone to sleep and the time has come for them to go.