Nowhere People

They are in NATO, the bar that Passo Fundo has made his favourite. Paulo wants to go home. In the state he’s in, however, it would be a real mistake. His parents are travelling early this morning to Montevideo with friends, that’s less than two hours from now. When that happens (they usually go to Montevideo by car) his mother doesn’t do her packing till shortly before they go, which means that right now she will be awake with almost every light in the house on, chasing after all the accessories and items of clothing that she cannot possibly leave behind under any circumstances. A conversation between the two of them would be a disaster. Paulo is afraid of what he might say, of acting out the scene that reveals the truth of the universe to someone you love, or of being assailed by an attack of paranoia that will make him want to wish he were dead as soon as it all passes. (Paulo does not like losing control.) No, better to stay here and wait for the dawn. Passo Fundo gets up every fifteen minutes to go to the bathroom to snort some of the coke he got earlier from the Colonel. He and Paulo are at Igor and Luciano’s table, two guys who share the same girlfriend, Márcia Boo. She kisses one, then she kisses the other. Cristiane and Magali are there, too, they don’t stop talking. Paulo knows he can have either one of them, but whenever he tries to look closely at them in that dark bluish haze he sees Maína’s face. The cognac he brought in his rucksack is nearly finished, he fills his glass under the table so the manager of the bar doesn’t see him, the waiters aren’t paying any attention at all: each time he does this, the two girls sitting beside him laugh like hyenas. He contemplated inviting the two of them for a threesome, he even started imagining he was fucking them under the table and then while the two of them were sucking his cock he would be going down on Márcia Boo while she kissed Igor and Luciano, Luciano who’s also known as Posh-boy Luciano. This daydream lasted just a few minutes. It passed. He heard someone at the table more than once mention the name David Cooper and the title of the book The Grammar of Living, and (as if he were in a tunnel of psychosis in which the possibilities of reaction are delayed) he gets up, theatrically, saying: ‘Language was invented in order to destroy communication, which in turn has been used to destroy communion. The final strategy ought to be to use what destroys us to destroy the very thing that is destroying us, in such a way as to allow for areas of hope and the conclusive death of cretins.’ He looks around at everyone sitting at the table. ‘Many thanks for your attention,’ he shouts, as if he were being strangled, and sits. At the other tables there are musicians from the blues band who were on earlier in the evening, a company whose play is on the bill at midnight from Thursdays to Saturdays at the Arena Theatre, two people from the group who will be coordinating Luiz Inácio da Silva’s presidential campaign. A few couples in clinches. There is, in short, that kind of harmony in the air (the sharing of a fleeting victory). And at that moment Paulo is a man of steel, he’s proud of his bearing, of his courage and his health, he has no doubt that if he had money in his pocket for a taxi he’d go off to find Maína. He’d spend several days there trying to work out the secret of getting used to having so little. And at that moment, Paulo discovers what he is going to do with the money from the office. Tomorrow afternoon he’s going to seek out one of those companies that specialise in pre-fab homes, he will get costings, then he will tell Maína. Paulo is at NATO, he has his arms stretched out across the top of the table, his hands with fingers laced together, his eyes lost in an unseemly gladness, and everyone around him knows that he is not his usual self.

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on the way