Nowhere People

The people who are not on the pavement directly outside the building have positioned themselves across the road on the paved central area of Trafalgar Square. The young black man wearing a white shirt buttoned up to his neck and holding a microphone turns towards the embassy, he says: ‘Nelson Mandela is still in prison, but he won’t be for long.’ The people clap. Paulo is with them now, already feeling the effects of the wine he drank hurriedly at the Pelican. He finds it surreal how explicit they are, these manifestations of belief in the possibility of Mandela being released without bargaining before he dies. It isn’t, for him, a question of witnessing what could perhaps be part of a significant historical process; he is there out of curiosity. As it happens, he lied when he was questioned at the immigration counter, saying he was here as a tourist and that he wouldn’t stay longer than twenty days in the United Kingdom; he did that out of curiosity. He drinks with people he doesn’t know, some of them even younger than him, people from all over the world, he does this out of curiosity. He drinks until things get dangerous, out of curiosity. He hangs out with people who are rich and spoiled, with Turks playing football in Hyde Park on the weekend, people who live it up because they’re in London and then become the domesticated little wives of other people who make a point of complaining nastily and telling their friends that their domesticated little wives can’t cook properly and don’t swallow their sperm when they suck their huge cocks, with couples from Madeira with their totally incomprehensible Portuguese, he does all this out of curiosity. He walks alone, in the early hours, from the centre to the north of the city, to Willesden Green, having dropped home the waitresses from Ireland, or Poland, or Jamaica, whom he has been trying to hook up with, even if it’s only for a week, spending every night at their place, he does it out of curiosity. He goes into Stanford’s, the best map shop in the world, some people say, and looks at the huge maps they have framed on the walls, especially the one that shows the southern hemisphere in the upper part of the mappa mundi, out of curiosity. Curiosity, just curiosity, curiosity is what’s new now nothing matters man and everyone can go to hell cause now I don’t give a fuck and I want to see if this shit catches fire once and for all. Amid excuse mes and sorrys he makes his way over towards the speaker, undoubtedly more emphatic and positive than the middle-aged gentleman who had come before him. He watches him, comparing. It’s as if it were decades ago, as if he had himself never spoken in public, never needed to be charismatic and to convince a group of students, at times in gatherings of more than twenty thousand people, to hate their university vice-chancellors, and members of the Ministry of Education, and foundations run by private universities whose accounts and tax exemptions are never made quite clear enough. He feels odd, not only the dizziness of the wine, it’s the dreams and the hope that he can’t bear. Such haste, his own haste. So much that it made him stagnate. He hasn’t been interested in trying to think. It’s the first time he has stopped and paid attention to something important since arriving in London. He doesn’t know which struggle is worth it. Where, after all, is this nineteen eighty-nine happening if not in London, New York, Tokyo? Life is moving on. He’s in his early twenties and feels like an old man, though not old enough (feeling like an old man isn’t usually the same as nothing matters any more, though it has been). And the wine having its effect, there isn’t a drug that takes you apart in quite the same way. He thinks. She sent him away. Maína’s fragility was never weakness. This inability to feel real passion, the way some people seem to feel it without making the least effort. Now he realises (as he is overtaken by a feeling of nausea, a nausea that will force him to get out of there) or he assumes: however much he does, he won’t be able to get involved again.