Nowhere People

It was good because they ate and came straight back. It was hard for her to feel at ease under the disapproving gaze of Paulo’s friend; he’s no different from other people she’s come across before, she shouldn’t be surprised, but it’s so incompatible with everything she has felt since she woke up this morning. She holds the kite that bothers her as much because of its colour as because of its being up in the air, noisy, getting in the way of their visit to the unruly sea, the sea that ought to be blue and luminous, like the ones in the magazines. When she asked to buy it she was determined to break it, to get shot of it the first chance she had, but she waited and understood what she really felt (and what had really changed). Paulo would be coming up soon, he is talking to his friend. Maína would have given ten years of her life to have their language. Fortunately there is the exercise book, she presumes there will be another soon, the assumption comes with the sudden impulse to put away the kite and give its deep red colour a rest. She takes off her clothes, picks up the bucket of Lego Creative Building pieces she’d discovered when she glanced under the bed that afternoon looking for the sheets and, while she waits, she assembles two figurines (she will play with them until Paulo comes into the room, maybe influenced by his friend and unsure of what to say to the girl distracted by the plastic bricks on the bed). In her hands, the figurines live their tiny lives. The girl-figurine can fly, the boy-figurine can’t, but he sings to her (in Maína’s voice) as they live out their Lego story on the mattress that still has no sheet on it. The minutes pass and the two of them grow calm, the girl-figurine comes down to land, she invites him to sit beside her on the foam, he rests his plastic head on her plastic lap, asks for her hand in marriage, and cries.

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Roman drawings

According to Paulo’s instructions, when they pass the last of the three bridges that come after the Casa das Cucas, they will be exactly six kilometres from the encampment. Passo Fundo wonders how many times his friend took the same route before he knew for sure that there were six kilometres between the bridge and the Indian girls’ tent (that’s just one of the questions that goes through his head as the Monza speeds along the BR-116; questions to which there might be no answer). Then they see the two-person blue igloo-style tent belonging to Paulo, half of the Indian girls’ tent and, as they get higher than the tops of the trees that block their view of the building work, two men doing the roof. Passo Fundo’s cousin slows the Monza, pulls over onto the right-hand side of the road, switches off the engine, unlocks the boot. They get out of the car. Passo Fundo puts another guaraná seed in his mouth, looks around at the place. He couldn’t say no when asked for help by the one friend who supported him when his father, a retired police chief, kicked him out of the house when he found a bag of more than a hundred grams of cocaine under the mattress slats. (Father and son had reached a kind of truce. In an attempt at reconciliation, they’d even attended half a dozen sessions with the therapist at a clinic near the Moinhos Hospital, one of those specialists in family problems related to substance dependency; as a result the ex-policeman felt betrayed when, even though he knew he was breaking the bond of trust suggested by the therapist, he searched Passo Fundo’s room and discovered cocaine in sufficient quantity to be sure that it was for dealing.) Paulo doesn’t care what other people say since he’s already been branded a cokehead, a loose cannon, messed up and every bit as irresponsible as Passo Fundo (or more), just for being his friend and taking him in on the two occasions he tried to get clean; Passo Fundo tries to reciprocate adequately whenever the chance arises. They unload the eleven tins of paint, the two buckets, the brushes, sponges for the retouching, rags, solvents, a sports bag holding his fleece sweater, a pair of shorts, a sleeping bag, two packets of cream crackers, a bottle of water, a half-full Smirnoff and his clarinet in its wooden case. They carry the things over to the other side of the road. The girl who can only be Maína is the first person to appear. Showing no surprise at seeing them there, she says that Paulo is round the back and then goes into her tent.