Nowhere People

Rener asks him to be quiet, the woman who lives in the next-door apartment has a sick daughter. She puts the jug of water and the glass on the small tin tray on the edge of the bedside table, turns on the little lamp, opens the wardrobe, takes out a Marks & Spencer carrier bag, throws it over to his side of the bed, he opens it (it’s full of every brand and style of condom), she turns off the ceiling light and immediately tosses a tube of lubricant onto his chest, she says that they are going to do what two uninhibited men should do when they feel there’s the chance of a great friendship between them.

Coincidences.

Paulo said he had to be at the restaurant before ten in the morning and it’s already eleven thirty-five (straight after the alarm clock had gone off, at nine, Rener had opened the bedroom curtains; she didn’t say anything, just made a cup of coffee, left it beside the bed and went back to sleep). From the moment he opened his eyes he was immersed in this stony silence. He must have said what he hadn’t told anyone since leaving Brazil. It was a good night in any case. She will introduce him to some guys who will get him to choose an empty building in Elephant and Castle. Arrive when it is getting dark (there’s no reason to hide from the building’s other residents; greet everyone, be polite, try not to give any impression that you’re going to be a bad neighbour), break the sealed padlock put there by the government and remove the metal bar blocking access to the door, break down the door, change the lock as quickly as you can, check that the new keys work, lock the door and only then tell yourself that the place is yours (at least until the squatter eviction proceedings, which can take years to progress, come to an end). It isn’t a question of good faith but of sorting out your life, yours and other people’s along the way, too. Sorting it out the way she, Rener, has been doing. She remembers having said that any mistakes must not be because of cowardice. Perhaps this was what made him agree like that, but it’s hard for her to know, it could have been so many other things. The worst mistake would be to try and guess, now that it’s nearly midday and she has to say that in a week’s time they will be entering a property valued at more than nine million and she’s counting on him, she needs there to be seven people besides herself and she has only managed to get six, there aren’t many people who will risk an occupation like this. If things work out, twenty people will get a new home; if they go wrong it’s every man for himself. Rener will figure out some way of getting back to Paris and, assuming there are no further coincidences, she and the Brazilian will not see each other again.

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palindromes

Rener ties the piece of rubber tight around her arm, runs the alcohol-dampened cotton wool over the bend of her elbow where she is going to make the puncture, takes the syringe, uncovers the needle, examines where the veins are, taps the surface, draws the blood, shows the filled syringe to Paulo. ‘Ten millilitres, no more, no less.’ Undoes the tourniquet, injects the blood into her own buttock. ‘There’s nothing like it, I promise you. It’s the secret of my vitality … It’ll reinvigorate you, too, you’ll see,’ she says, putting the empty syringe to one side and taking another from the packet. She takes the syringe from the sealed packaging. ‘Shall we?’ she asks, excitedly. Paulo had never heard of auto-haemotherapy, but Rener did not have to say much to convince him and for him to ask her to apply the practice to him. She said that she always plans to draw and re-inject her own blood on the day before an appropriation (that is the convenient word she uses to describe the break-in), because it gives her physical courage. He wasn’t sure whether she had meant to say physical courage precisely, but that was how he understood it and it seemed more than appropriate. The blood in the muscle acts as though it were a foreign body, activating the immunological system controlled by the bone marrow, that was all she gave as her explanation. ‘I haven’t needed a doctor since,’ she assured him. Paulo doesn’t have a problem with the sight of his own blood, getting shot like that stirred something up in him that is not visible, something he is still trying to understand. One second, under exceptional psychological pressure, and a whole life in all its particularities changes forever, accelerates towards something that has not yet happened. He did not even know what day it was when he woke up having spent the early hours tossing and turning in Rener’s bed unable to sleep, unwilling to wake her. The needle pierces his skin, it’s the second time, the blood warms his body as it enters. Rener has been his guide during these days in which he hasn’t left her apartment, even if being guided was not what he needed right now.